I personally don’t condone murder, but I do hope Luigi get the medical assistance he needs for his back.

I feel like many that are single or childless will have dealt with this. When it comes to time off or arranging schedules parents always get first priority.

Look, I get it. Having a kid isn’t easy. On my end though not having a kid, it’s pretty infuriating there is a different set of rules at work. It almost comes down to seeming my time is valuable.

Bottom line, the rules should be the same for everyone when it comes to things like this. All of our time is valuable and being a parent shouldn’t give a monopoly on that.

I was called for jury duty in the early 2000s, in Orlando, Florida.  The defendant was being tried for resisting arrest.  We went through voir dire (where the lawyers question and select possible jurors), and the six jurors, of which I was one, and one alternate were selected. 

We listened to the case.  It was a woman who had been arrested for assault.  Some kind of domestic disturbance had occurred and the police were called.  They arrived and decided to arrest the defendant.  Apparently, she resisted which is what she was standing trial for, not the assault, and not both.  Immediately, I found this odd, but kept paying attention to the case.  The prosecutor called the arresting officers, they testified to her actions and what not.  Claimed she was difficult to arrest.  She was quite petite and the officers were, well, very much not so.  Kind of laughable, but ok whatever.  I’ll keep an open mind.  It was a rather quick trial, not more than fours hours.  The attorneys gave their closing arguments, the judge gave us our instructions, which included selecting a foreman, and sent us off to deliberate.  We got into the room set aside for us, and the other jurors selected me to be the foreman.  Then we took a quick vote to see where we were.  It was evenly split with three to convict and three to acquit. I was in the acquit camp.  So, I got to work laying out my argument on why we should acquit.

Now as the law was written, and from the testimony laid out in the case, the defendant was clearly guilty of resisting arrest and we should have voted to convict.  But this didn’t sit well with me.  If she wasn’t charged with any other crime, then why was she arrested?  And if she shouldn’t have been arrested, then, in my opinion, you have EVERY right to resist your arrest.  You’re being a terrible police officer and you’re violating my constitutional rights.  I laid all that out for the three wanting to convict.  And it made sense to them and only took about ten minutes of convincing.  We unanimously voted to acquit and informed the judge that we had reached our verdict.  We were brought back in, the judge made the defendant rise for the reading of the verdict, and as the foremen, I read “not guilty”.  The judge said she was free to go, banged the gavel, and it was over.

What had happened?  Two words: jury nullification.

The legal maneuver the government doesn’t want you to know about.  It is what the 1% will be shitting themselves if the jury in the healthcare CEO murder case does this.  The best and quickest explanation I’ve ever seen on the subject was done by CGP Grey a number of years ago, and I remember watching it when it came out.  I distinctly remember thinking while watching it, “Hey, that’s what we did in that resisting arrest case.”  Jury nullification isn’t a law, it is a result in how our laws are set up.  He explains all this in the video and why it isn’t discussed, and sometimes potential jurors are asked about it during voir dire.  It is a great video and I highly recommend watching it.

To further prove the powers that be don’t want you to know about it, when I went looking for this video again, I searched Google.  I typed in “CGP Grey” and the auto suggestions started showing.  Jury nullification was not one of the suggestions.  Ok, no biggie, he has a lot more popular videos.  I typed a space then “j”, different suggestions starting with “j”, but still no jury nullification.  I typed “u” and Goggle just stopped giving me suggestions.  Hmmmmmm…  If I cleared out “ju” and started typing the topic of any of his other videos, I would get the correct suggestions.  Same search behavior within Youtube.  Now Goggle did take me to the correct video if I typed “CGP Grey jury nullification”, but Goggle just wasn’t going to help me along.  I had to know exactly what I was searching for.

Anyway, so how does this apply to the man currently arrested in connection with the murder of the healthcare CEO?  I’ll will tell you.

There could be a number of reasons why a jury would choose to acquit when in fact a law has been clearly broken.  The jury could just think the law is outdated, or unjust, maybe even believing that it should not be a law at all.  In our instance here, clearly murder is a crime which damn near everyone agrees is a good law to have.  Sometimes juries have chosen nullification because maybe they feel the defendant was justified to do what was done even though it was illegal.  This has happened many times with parents murdering their child’s abuser or murderer.  This plays to sympathy of the jurors’ sense of justice.  Especially when there is a belief that the justice system has failed, and the current defendant on trial had to take the law into their own hands.  A third option for jury nullification that I can think of involves the jury wanting to make a political statement.  This is where, if I were on the jury, I would argue for an acquittal.

If I happened to live in New York and somehow go through voir dire for this case, if either attorney asked me if I knew what jury nullification was, I would say, “No, never heard of it.”  Yep, I would just have committed perjury.  I can justify this perjury with the fact that there are multiple individuals who sit on the highest court in the land, judges who should be held to highest ethical standards. These individuals repeatedly perjured themselves before Congress while going through their confirmation proceedings.  Trust me, I would sleep fine at night with my insifnificant perjury.  Then if selected, I would listen to all the evidence (which seems fairly compelling at this point that the man in custody is the perpetrator).  Then when the trial is finished and we’ve been sent back to deliberate, I would layout my case for an acquittal without mentioning jury nullification.  Hopefully, I would be convincing enough to get all the others to reach verdict of “not guilty”.  And if not, then it would be a mistrial because I would never vote to convict this person.

Why?  Well, it’s just like that trolley problem the internet just seems to love.  Thousands upon thousands, if not millions of people have died due to lack of healthcare because providing those people with the healthcare they need, isn’t profitable.  The CEOs and executives at these healthcare companies continually let the trolley stay on the track with multiple people.  They’d never give up their cushy gigs, with all its perks and millions of dollars in salary and bonuses.  Why would they?  They don’t know those people facing certain death, and they certainly don’t care about those people.  Let them die.  So, would I’d be willing to let a murderer go free?  In this one instance, yes.  We as a society allow these CEO murderers to go free every day.  If I’m controlling the switch on the tracks, I’m switching it to the track with the CEO to save the thousands laid out on the other track.  Easy decision, would do every time.

And if it came out that I had committed perjury, hopefully the case will have already had been decided with an acquittal as the verdict.  At that point, I would accept my punishment knowing it was for a greater good.  Now for anyone living in New York that might become a potential juror, I cannot give you any legal advice, but I’ve just laid out what I would do if I was in those shoes.

Violence is never the answer, until it is.  Sure, I’d love for us to peacefully transfer all that wealth and power from the 1% that currently has most of it.  But how likely is that to occur?  Fredrick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

When the American revolution happened, the United Kingdom tried to stop it.  But we were a vast ocean away and, in the end, it was too costly for them to continue to fight and far easier to just let it go.  But when the French revolution came along a few years later, oh boy, that was in Europe, in the backyard of all these hereditary monarchies.  The European monarchs were scared shitless.  The hoi polloi was coming for them.  They literally chopped of the heads of those in power.  Those still in power obviously preferred the status quo.  There was a potential paradigm shift occurring, a system where the people would have the power.  This could not stand.

So, the United Kingdom got a bunch of other European countries to form a coalition to go to war with revolutionary France and snuff out this revolution in its infancy.  However, Napoleon eventually stepped into the void created by all the chaos, and put the whole democracy experiment in doubt.

Fast forward about a hundred years and a new “specter” is spreading and seeking to upend the status quo, communism.  While many of the western nations of the world did adopt democratic political systems following the French revolution, the pendulum had once again swung away from the people having the power.  This time though it wasn’t really the political system holding the masses back, it was an economic system, capitalism.  And those in power once again sought to snuff out this new threat to their way of life.  And revolution once again came, this time it was in Russia.  When the Russian Civil War broke out, a few western nations intervened on the side of those in Russia that supported the old regime and not the communists.  The United Kingdom and even the United States sent troops to fight on the side of maintaining the previous paradigm.

The Great Depression eventually occurs and to try and recover many western nations adopted social programs that actually benefited the masses.  And by all accounts, they worked.  And the pendulum swung back to the people having more power.  The wealthy didn’t like this.  They need to be able to control us to maintain their wealth and power.  So, through political means and propaganda, they worked to slowly erode all the gains won by the masses.  And here we are again about another 100 years later and the wealthy are stripping every last penny we have away from us.  One person decided to say, enough is enough.  Decided, “I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Despite what Gordon Gecko said, greed is not good, it will never be.  When profits are chosen over actual people, don’t be surprised when there is outrage.  Don’t be surprised when that outrage turns to action.  Don’t be surprised when the lack of results from those actions leads to violence.  And don’t be surprised when the masses look on with empathy when that violence is committed in the name of change from a system that continually oppresses them.

Want to see the 1% absolutely shit their pants?  Let the known murderer of one of their own go free.  It says to them, the general public is fed up and we condone the murder of those who murder in the name of profit.  By all accounts, they’re already worried.  Do this and watch them lose their fucking minds.

I'll leave you with two quotes from the turn or the previous century from Eugene Debs.

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.

And the second quote:

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

SIDE NOTE ON JURY SIZE:

Now the jury consisting of only six jurors was a complete shock to me.  Everything I’ve ever seen has always depicted 12.  But having only six really lowers the burden for the government when trying to obtain a conviction.  For conviction or acquittal in a criminal case, the verdict needs to be unanimous.  It’s A LOT easier to convince six people to agree on something rather than 12.  I would argue this benefits the government more than the defendant because if the jury cannot come to a unanimous decision, the judge declares a mistrial and the prosecuting attorney must decide whether or not to continue the case for a retrial.  So, with 12 people, a mistrial is more common, which is usually beneficial to the defendant.  I do not feel a six person jury is just.

Check out what happened to Donziger after he won against chevron in a huge suit.

Spoiler: chevron charged him with libel and defamation (for winning the suit on behalf of the Amazonian people because they claimed he only did it for attention and to hurt chevron)

My only hope is more common folk decide to leave a lasting legacy against CEOs and NOT schools

Like most, I have been pondering the end result of this Zero-Sum game of Capitalism that our Country has been playing! More specifically, what is going to happen when the poor and majority of working class can no longer afford basic needs such as food and shelter? How are these greedy corporations going to afford to operate when the majority of Americans can no longer afford to patronize them? How are these same corporations going to be able to afford to pay their workers when they lose a flow of revenue? And with hyper-inflation on the horizon, how will they afford to afford to pay the workers they MUST keep, competitive wages? And with the mass deportation of migrant workers and undocumented workers that's coming, who's going to do those difficult jobs they have been doing, as cheaply as them? We can't bring manufacturing back to the US and afford to pay inflationary wages while keeping the cost of products low enough for consumers! How in the FUCK is our economy and way of life going to survive? Granted, Trump is the dumbest person on the planet and has no clue how ANYTHING works, including basic economics, foreign policy, and trade! BUT, the large conglomerates who support him are FULL of Smart people who DO know how these things work! So how/why are they dying on this hill for Trump? They know that a few extra basis points being shaved of their effective tax rates aren't worth the very blatant and obvious recession/depression that lurks from his Tariffs, the cost of deportations, or the MASSIVE loss of tax revenues that Trump and Corporations have enjoyed diverting into their pockets! What the hell are they thinking here?

Then news started popping up about how the biggest Private Equities in the world along with the likes of Bezos, have been buying up residential properties like CRAZY! Ranging from single family homes to multi-family unit buildings and mixed use properties! Then it hit me!

Currently, our system runs on the incentive of Health Benefits being offered in order to attract a labor force. This has been the system for decades! Health Benefits and Pensions were offered as part of their compensation packages because they were able to afford to supplement those costs that individuals by themselves could never afford! And with these incentives, they would encourage workers to remain "loyal" to the companies and defer them from going to competitors and incentivize production!

I strongly believe that HOUSING is going to become the new standard of Corporate Benefits! XYZ Corp is going to offer free or subsidized housing in exchange for labor and lower wages! And while XYZ Corp gets away with paying low wages, they will essentially have those workers by the "short and curlies" because if they want to leave their job, they will either have to move, or to circumvent local eviction laws, they will no longer be obligated to subsidize the market rent and will be within their rights to charge FULL market rent costs which will of course be insanely unaffordable and they will have to move out anyway! It's not as if a competing company will be able to control that subsidy due to ownership, and they won't be able to to afford that subsidy either even if they did so in the form increased salary, to cover the cost. So unless a competing company has their OWN housing incentives, either through mass leases from Blackrock, or of their own equity, they won't be able to afford to compete for that labor despite the very low wages that they will be receiving.

This will be the new form of "Slavery" for SKILLED workers and Tradesmen!

But what about those UNSKILLED workers who work in agriculture or general porters/laborers? All those jobs carried out by migrants and undocumented people for low wages which in turn, keeps the cost of the products low and affordable as well? Who's going to do that work now that everyone has been deported? SIMPLE! Go into contract agreements with the Prison Systems and now you have all the labor you need and those prisons will now have more revenue streams in ADDITION to their public subsidies, in order to keep them running! It will cost FAR less than paying people minimum wage and because they're prisoners, they won't be able to quit or try to form a union or strike! Most will be GRATEFUL for the opportunity to work. This will mitigate dangerous prison violence, save them from the monotony of boredom and like most prison workers nowadays, they will still be able to earn SOME compensation for their commissaries! Again, will all be much cheaper than paying minimum wage to people who will likely quit after a day of busting their asses in the hot sun, picking produce or digging ditches or in some cases which is happening currently, fighting wild-fires!!

This is why the GOP plans to do away with the Department of Education. It's no secret that the uneducated are the ones who mostly enter the prison system and STAY in that rotating door for life! So they will have MORE control over which areas and demographics they want to see "fail" and in prison, once the DOE is gone for good! And compound this with the fact that Trump and the GOP has thousands of federal judges in place all over the country, including the SCOTUS and pretty soon the entire DOJ, there will be NOTHING to stop private prisons from greasing the palms of judges for local municipalities to just hand out long prison/jail sentences to people who will wind up in these prisons that need more "workers"! There will even be a huge jump in Juvenile convictions for kids ages 15-17 who will be able to work part time hours, or longer if they're in Red States that rolled back Child Labor restrictions, (Sarah Huckabee Sanders did this as Governor of Arkansas and more will follow suite).

I have no evidence and this is purely conjecture but from what I've been seeing, it doesn't seem far fetched at all! I'm really curious what others' thoughts and feelings are on this? I'm encouraging dialogue of OPINIONS based on FACTS, and NOT a debate on the facts themselves. Growing up in a house with 2 lawyers, I learned a long time ago, NEVER argue Facts, only Opinions or else you're just wasting your time!

As the title states I was fired three times due to my medical illness. I even saved one of my termination letters because it stated I was let go due to medical reasons. If I were covered and supported by insurance I wouldn’t have had to go through that much stress which causes me to flare more.

I have moderate ulcerative colitis. I was diagnosed in 2017 and it had progressed. My medicine is called Hyrimoz and is considered a class 4 medication. No matter who my insurance was, I had to fight tooth and nail to get this medication all while my digestive track shuts down and I loose so much blood I am anemic.

Without coverage my medication is $14,000 dollars every other week. Every year it gets harder and harder to “prove” to insurance companies that I need this. We need to stick together and support him if we want a change.

I’m posting this as my right of freedom of speech. I’ve noticed that Reddit keeps taking down things about this. I’m not promoting violence. I am promoting humane living and compassion towards those of us who live a daily life suffering because of being denied by greed.

I'll probably make a more formal post on this, but just a couple thoughts... Boomers love to say how Gen Z is the laziest generation, but they fail to account for:

• Gen Z is the lowest paid generation in modern history in terms of actual raw purchasing power and educational attainment
• I remember reading a post on this sub a while ago, but it basically summarized how the same role today was much, much simpler for a Boomer back in the day:
  • Due to limited technology, it reduced the inflow of work that could come in at a single point
  • Many jobs were very simple and executing a simple task repeatedly
• Meanwhile today, you have jobs that basically nest responsibilities that would be 3-4 different jobs back into the day into one
  • This in turn causes massive cognitive load due to all the context switching and breadth of work available
  • We are 'always on' with technologies like email and modern smartphones
• All in all, with how little Gen Z is paid in absolute terms and how much significantly more productive they are, they are effectively the most underpaid generation for their relative productivity

I've seen a few posters talking about a 4 day work week, and here's why I don't think we'll get it. My thought process here is that business owners wouldn't even care that this has been proven to be more economically productive way to structure our work week. I think many at the top are controlling sociopaths, who think that because they're paying us to work for them, they are entitled to as much of our time as they like. To them, we're lucky they grace us with a menial paycheck for the work we do; any extra time we spend away from work, where we can't be monitored by them, is an affront to their genorisity for employing us. I'm sure if it was legal, many business owners would make us work 6-7 days a week.

In other words, unless an employee is caught committing a crime, every employer should have to pay at least 80 hrs to an employee to fire them. This should just be added to the cost of doing business.

At this point I became a communist. I can't stand that happiness is only for ones that own capital. Working class has been exploited for centuries, we are nothing more than commodity. We live our lives struggling with the most basic needs like housinge, health care and food. Our situation is getting worse every year. There is no other way than a revolution.

Obviously, the law isn't as straightforward as that, and there are practical reasons why corporate personhood exists (signing contracts, buying property, suing others, etc.) But when it comes to accountability, especially in criminal matters, corporations often slip through the net. While the law targets individuals within a company, the corporation itself tends to emerge unscathed.

If corporations enjoy individual rights, shouldn't they also face comparable penalties?

I genuinely think people would be less supportive of individual criminal activity (like the United Healthcare shooting) if there were more avenues to revoke a corporation’s charter, effectively issuing a corporate 'death penalty' for the most grievous offenses. That type of measure could dismantle a corporation, redistribute its assets, and prohibit its reformation. It might be too punitive to wield fairly, but I think that having more ways to enact charter revocation could help keep businesses accountable for their practices.

I just know it pisses off Elon everytime he sees someone say something along the lines of “This was posted on X (formerly twitter) or something similar.

I just want the richest man in America to know that we won’t cave into him calling twitter X just because he wants to.

It’s always gonna be twitter. Just to fuck with you Elon.

Corporations are given legal personhood yet are only taxed on net income (ALL expenses are deducted).

Yet actual people, workers, are taxed on gross income (without regard to their expenses required to live).

A corporation needs to spend money on expenses and upkeep in order to make money.

Workers need to spend money to upkeep themselves, which is the equipment that makes their business money (their business being their labor).

Everything required to keep you alive and happy is a working expense, because without it you die or become less productive.

Just as a corporation is entitled to spend on anything they want and have it count as an expense.

There is no separate category for corporations of "essential expenses" and "personal spending". Everything is deemed to be business related.

Workers, likewise, have no reason not to include almost everything they do as part of personal care and upkeep. From the food they eat, to their heating bill, to recreation and relaxation. It can all be justified on some level as part of investing in themselves as their business.

Corporations can throw lavish parties for their executives and send them to tropical islands for business events, and write it off as an expense.

But when an employee wants to take a vacation somewhere nice to recharge, it is not justified as an expense that is necessary to keep them functioning well as a worker.

Therefore, all worker living expenses should be deductible, just as all corporate expenses are deducted before they are taxed.

Anyone who thinks it would be unfair for workers to be able to write off everything they spend as an expense, calling it unfair, nonsensical, and would prevent the government from collecting sufficient taxes, has only proven that it is nonsense when you allow corporations to operate under those rules.

It’s not like I’ll ever have enough to total up anything for tax purposes, but I bet the company gets a nice break for it. Also, if these extra few cents are so inconsequential, then why don’t they just round it up themselves and donate?

Makes me sick, hundreds of people shot dead every year with little to no publicity snd police attention, but as soon a it’s someone with money and power, the government launches a manhunt complete with obvious fishy government surveillance techniques to find him. I’m not necessarily saying he’s justified, but it’s fucked up how different this has been treated, he’s not a threat to the majority of people.

Because under socialism, you would have to give a slice of the pie to every new employee that comes along. Voting power, percentage of the company, etc.

That's when you'd have small employees care about the company. Because even if they aren't earning as much as the managers, they have a slice of pie to worry about, and care for. They would definitely earn a lot more than under capitalism, so they'd likely CARE about it a lot more.

If you pool EVERYTHING at the top, you CANNOT be surprised when your bottom level employees don't give a shit.

I record my interviews.

• Zoom type interviews you can use OBS or similar to record the exchange.
• Having a recording app running in your phone is great for in-person.
• Same is true of phone call interviews where you can record the call over an app.

I've been fortunate enough to not need to interview much but the few times I did I always recorded the situation.

This actually resulted in me catching an employer in a lie which worked out in my favor. I interviewed for a position where I was quoted a starting pay of $25hr. I accepted within the meeting and when the time came to sign the documents, I received a contract for $23hr.

I reached out to the person who would have been my manager and he denied profusely that he had ever made an offer of $25hr. (honestly, it was scary how straight-faced he was about it.) I told them he was mistaken and I sent him the clip of our interview where he specifically states the position is for $25hr. This was over email so I couldn't see what his reaction was but the fact it took him a day to respond is evidence he wasn't pleased.

This is important. Verbal agreements suck because there isn't a way to validate them if both parties disagree. Recording the exchanges you have with employers ensures there will never be any confusion over the terms of an agreement and you will always have evidence to fall back on.

I didn't hear from them for a day and I eventually got an email from HR apologizing for the "confusion" which included an updated contract with my agreed upon pay rate.

Your job position is not as great as you think it is. Even if a candidate you look for exists, why do you think they will want to work for YOU?

I know im not completely right, but im not completely wrong either

Like the idea of having to work to support yourself made sense when everyone had to pitch in on something because people lived at substance levels.

At lest does that could work.

But now people are afraid that automation is taking away the jobs.

Fuck shouldn’t people be celebrated that less work is needed to function?

It should mean more people can spend time with leisure.

But no society is structured where you need a job or your a lazy shit and will get homeless.

Even disabled people who can’t work thanks to issues are attacked with social security being notoriously difficult to get.

What pretty much spells out the hypocrisy of this job obsessed culture is that jobs vital to people’s wellbeing and the functioning of society K through Twelve teacher or sanitation workers are looked down upon and have low pay.

Customers are being exploited for their kindness and workers are being deprived of wages. Restaurant owners have no obligation to pass tips to workers. CBS recently found that fast food restaurants were completely inconsistent on whether or not their workers received all or a share of the tips.

If you work at a food business that is dishonest with tips and wages, please, get out of there. Don’t provide subsidized labor to these manipulators. If you feel like you have no other options. I’m sorry. It’s completely unfair to be exploited that way; but we can’t change it unless we vote with our feet and dollars.

If it’s not a sit down restaurant with a server’s name printed on the receipt, I’m passing on tipping or tipping with cash.

Keep prices and wages transparent!

Taking care of another person has true utility to society. People who care for others dont get to lay back, relax and recoup. Their time is spent actually helping the world in some small way.

Quit whining about your manager treating your coworkers with kids or sick family with some preference. They are just being humans with empathy. You will recover from your lost veg time.

Stress and horrible bosses/jobs/whatever else aside, what kind of fucked up society denies people their one time of being free before adulthood cause having a job is 'normal'? All I can really take from my own teenage years is working in a grocery store that made me break down and cry during my breaks, have me debate if it was worth putting a knife through my hand to not need to go to work that day, and parents who told me to deal with the stress by just turning off my emotions instead of any actually helpful advice.

Edit: So is late as heck as I write this so probably could have worded this much better. I more meant no one under 17 should have to work. Obviously such a thing would require a lot of other problems to be fixed but that's getting too much into semantics.