MLK might have said that "a riot is the language of the unheard" but he was also very apprehensive about them and believed they can cause more problems than they solve.

I'm not even sure if he is entirely right. There have been plenty of riots where the powerful and the heard rioted against the powerless and the silent. Tulsa and Wilmington in the United States, the recent Hindu riots against Muslims in India, and all the pogroms against Jews across the world.

Amazon offers reasonable benefits to _actual_ employees....who work in the hellish nightmare that is their company.

However, from what I have understood, a lot of employees at Amazon fulfillment centers are not employees of Amazon, but rather of the warehouses...somehow. In addition to their delivery drivers, I guess.

But perhaps they've stopped that specific way of ripping employees off? Or maybe that was just a few places.

I honestly don't know, and really don't care, because the point 'There is enough money to treat the workers' better', still apply anyway.

I mean...even if they ahve insurance, you know what they don't have? Any sort of Covid-19 protection, and Amazon is firing people who complain about that, or who complain about being forced to work, without sterilization, in fulfillment centers where workers actually had it.

This something Amazon, again, really could easily afford for employee...hell, they literally _sell that_.

Amazon is what happens with a company when it just goes full straight-up sociopath. They've gotten sued over and over and over and over for all sorts of crap. Like lack of air conditioning that caused workers to constantly pass out. Right now, there are people suing them because Amazon makes them go through the security screening for their lunch...leaving them not enough time to actually eat lunch.

Actually, in trying to find this, I discovered something disturbing...a court decision I thought had gone one way had actually gone another. Amazon is still, as far as I can tell, making workers deal with anti-theft screening _off the clock_. I.e., they finish their shift, punch out, and then have to go through a security screening that they say can take up to 25 minutes. Now, I'm sure 25 minutes is the absolute longest...but the idea you can make workers do _anything_ after their shift is over, without getting paid for it, is...insane, legally. (The Supreme Court appears to think, inexplicably, it's legal as long as it's not the company's core business. So...Amazon can't make workers ship packages after they clock out, but...can make them...wash manager's cars? Iron uniforms? What's the logic there?) And this is Amazon which...could very, very, very easiest afford another 10 minutes (Or whatever the average is.) on the clock a shift per workers.

This is all in addition to _normal_ shitty corporate behavior, like union busting. Amazon manages abnormal even for a bad company. Like...at least when Walmart steals wages by having employees work off the clock, they do it at the _store_ level, and _hide_ it, and don't try to defend it in court. And...they try not to have workers pass out.

Oh, here's a fun one: Amazon is making _warehouse workers_ sign non-competes and NDA. Even seasonal workers have to sign non-competes, insanely. (I wonder if they get health insurance?)

So I don't know. Maybe Amazon actually are providing the health insurance requires by law to the majority of their workers. It's be nice to think that. Kinda odd they're quibbling about their delivery workers, though. Why? I suspect they have a lot of people like that, it's just the Flex drivers have made themselves known via lawsuit.

Amazon is one of the most profitable companies in the world and can afford not screw their employees over. But it does anyway. Apple doesn't do that. Google doesn't do that. ExxonMobile doesn't do that. JPMorgan doesn't do that. Bank of American doesn't do that. (Some of those may screw over _customers_, but that's different.)

Yup. A precinct on fire, lots of wild allegations, more riots. Not seeing any of the pols with the ability to chill things. Every bit of this is going to be used to stoke fear in the cop lovers. Coulter is already at it. The NG might actually be a good move since the cops don't seem to capable.

FFS 2020 is managing to suck and blow in every way possible. The tin pot authoritarian bs from on high can't even crack a medal position this week.

Oh, oh, I think I figured it out. The prosecutor said there was evidence exonerating the cop. This is it. He was friends with Floyd, so he wouldn't have, couldn't have, done anything improper to him. Chauvin is just as devastated by Floyd's death as everyone else. CASE CLOSED.

And apparently the two knew each other:

#BREAKING: George Floyd & Police Officer Allegedly Responsible For His Death Knew Each Other & Worked Together, Report Says - https://t.co/9tIOBPw8Gb pic.twitter.com/BHsDE8pbRG

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 29, 2020

This is weird. Weirder and weirder.

It's nuts. You'd think that something as simple as a "of course we'll do *EVERYTHING* in our power to make sure that justice is served!"

Then put him in front of a grand jury and bring out every parking ticket the dead guy has ever received in front of them and explain "Qualified Immunity" to them and see what happens.

But he's not even willing to play the charade.

You have to read between the lines of his statement.

"You think the rioting and outrage is bad now? Well hold my beer!"

Is keeping a knee on a helpless person's neck till they're brain dead at least negligent homicide? Apparently not. So those holding out hope for "failure to perform legal duty", involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, or homicide can go riot in the streets.

This demonstrates how structural injustice is always perpetuated by individuals making choices.

This prosecutor has the power to prosecute, or not. He isn't constrained by capitalism, or union rules, or government bureaucracy or any of the other mechanisms that people offer up.

There isn't some One Weird Trick or legal procedure that would compel him to prosecute, without seriously warping the entire system and creating even more injustice.

But this person and his choices ARE the result of a culture that produced his biases, and reinforce them. He circulates among family and friends and a community that agree with him and inculcated his values.

History IS anecdotes.

Seriously, talk to any historian or social scientist and they will tell you that any history is partly statistical analysis, combined with personal reminiscences, diaries, letters, and stories that people tell of their experiences.

And no historian will accept a variance between data and stories without a valid explanation.

Because stories ARE data, every bit as valid as measurements.

There is actually a term for the phenomenon, but I can’t think of it right now. When something is commonplace it is often ignored as it is taken for granted. But as something becomes extremely rare, it becomes news and it is highlighted 24/7 by a hundred media outlets. The net effect is that many things become seen as bigger problems by the average person when they are rare than when they were common, after all, nowadays it is on the news, and it never was before.

There is no surplus of black deaths by cops relative to white deaths, and no anecdotes to the contrary will make it so. Police killings are proportional to violent crime stats by race and according to violent interactions with the cops.

But an unarmed black kid getting killed by a cop is really, really big news. Turn on the news today if you disagree. It will sell millions of views, and is thus fodder for the above effect.

Racist cops and guys in pointy white sheets and kids getting sick from CV19 and cute girls being kidnapped makes for great news. But the mistake you and Phillip are making is you are trying to judge the likelihood of something based upon its prominence on TV.

One issue with tying this to a racial angle, rightly or wrongly, is that racism has become a red/blue polarized issue. And while I might think this is a racial motivated action, others might think of Jussie Smollet and other racial hoaxes. And then we are right down that rabbit hole.

It is much better to find an area that hasn't been so polarized, so we can start to make some headway on issues like this. Get people on board through the idea of cops abusing their powers, violating rights and so on, and it might just have a greater effect. But if you start making it an "our team/your team" thing, it is dead in the water.

Seems like a good study to me. Police unions are a problem. What seems lost in all these discussions is all the other things that are also a problem that will need to be fixed. Cause PU's are only one issue that will have marginal affect if there areen't changes with: DA's, giving citizens more direct and powerful oversight of cops, re training cops, more reformist police chiefs and changing the views of the super duper cop supporters.

How we fix PU's is a good question. The closest real world example i've seen is the Scott Walker treatment in Wisc. It started as going after public employee unions but quickly got down to just teachers and janitors and thanking the cops for their service.

That was an interesting thread/discussion. My favorite part was when Chip said he hasn't seen any evidence that cop unions cause are correlated with corruption and so on, and when I posted this:

– We then analyze the impact of collective bargaining rights, using police departments, which were unaffected by Williams, as a control group for sheriffs’ offices. Our results imply that collective bargaining rights led to about a 45% increase in violent incidents. We also find some evidence suggesting that collective bargaining rights led to decreased racial and ethnic diversity among new officer hires.

he said he couldn't comment until he evaluated the study's methodology.

It sounds like you've given up on convincing Elena Balan, the lone hypothetical adult on the Internet who would respond with "Oh? You say race might place a factor in something? I've never heard this, so please tell me more!" Of course Elena just moved here from a small Romanian farming village, but as she's the only possible target audience for most of these racial arguments, she must feel pretty special. :)

*** Hit's Elena's Facebook page and drops:

"This "Uncle George" passed a bad $20, so of course the police are justified in acting like the Mexican army apprehending El Chapo Guzman while taking automatic weapons fire from three sides. That's how we do it here."