A relative of mine has managed building sites in the UK for decades. Nobody has ever died or had a life-changing injury. The site in the story has had multiple incidents just this year.
What's the difference?
The fines for safety failures leading to deaths in the UK are frequently six figures and sometimes seven. So management takes safety seriously and accident rates are very low.
The fatality rate in the UK is 2.4 per 100k workers. [1] In the US it's exactly 4x at 9.6 per 100k workers. [2] That's a large difference, but obviously it's not like a something vs nothing type scenario.
And the difference is probably caused by worker quality than anything else. In the US a significant chunk of construction workers are in the country illegally, and tend to be relatively unskilled but willing to work hard, rarely/never complain, and work for very low wages. The article mentions that 475 workers were detained by ICE for this company in a single raid.
Obviously companies should be held liable for hiring people in the country illegally, but it comes down to plausible deniability. The applicant puts forth some fake documentation, including experience/qualifications alongside citizenship proof, and even if the employer knows it's most likely fake, they now have plausible deniability of the 'gosh I just had no idea' type.
Though I have to acknowledge I am ostensibly contradicting myself here as this is easy to see as a profit > cost type thing, but it's also not easy to overcome if one wants to take a politically correct approach to things. I can all but guarantee that the machinery operator in this case produced certifications and proof of competence, and was being managed by somebody comparably qualified, according to their papers. So it's a somewhat more nuanced situation than it might seem.
British construction workers are like construction workers everywhere. They like to ignore safety measures and cut corners so they can get the job done as quickly as possible and make more money. They constantly need management to tell them no. This costs everyone money so management won't do it without fairly strong incentives.
That is not how construction works. In construction you're generally paid hourly, and workers can often be aware of issues that may not be readily apparent to management. Construction workers play a very active role in the process and are largely responsible for overall outcomes, not only for the building but for themselves as well. Good, skilled, experienced construction workers and you're generally going to have a pretty good outcome. Poor quality workers and you're going to have a poor quality outcome far more than otherwise necessary.
It's generally management that has the desire to rush the project forward and may be looking to cut corners. Good workers help create a favorable balance between economic concerns and practical outcomes. But needless to say when you get a bunch of workers who are just the cheapest possible, may have fabricated experience, and who will generally be willing to do anything to not risk losing their job, it's going to create a very dangerous situation for both themselves and the job at hand.
> Good workers help create a favorable balance between economic concerns and practical outcomes.
Workers soon become inured to their daily risks and will adopt unsafe working practices if it increases their efficiency. Sure, they'll complain about other people's working practices if they pose a danger to them, but they will not self-regulate. If you doubt this look at the builders working on small jobs like domestic roofs and extensions where there is no management. They will not be following the rules.
I'm talking about my experience of the UK. I guess you're talking about America. The incentives are different. Not least because many British workers are self-employed and working "on a price". The big construction firms directly employ approximately nobody.
I'm not sure very small scale construction is relevant in this case. I've worked in this exact sort of job before and like you said it's mostly self employed or very near it. And, at least in my case, we literally didn't know a single rule or regulation. It's not like you go grab the hundreds of pages of ever-shifting regulations and memorize them before you start working. And the chances of getting any sort of governmental audit is very near zero.
But in this case you tend to get involved in the work because you enjoy construction and you want to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. It's like programming. If there weren't external forces, it's not like programmers want to do a haphazard job - but they end up getting pulled in a dozen different directions and, at the end, making code that won't even be formally attributed to them. I suppose one huge difference is also in construction if you do a poor job, you can end up getting sued for everything you own - whereas in code when code crashes, people just shrug.
Sunrise and sunset aren't in phase (or exactly out of phase). The latest sunrise and the earliest sunset don't happen on the same day and neither happens on the solstice. Not at this northern latitude anyway.
I'd argue that the invasion of Iraq benefited plenty of neoconservative aims:
1) eliminating a military threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel
2) placing hundreds of military outposts on Iran's doorstep
3) destabilizing Iran and Syria by empowering militant groups dormant under Saddam to re-arm and try to establish a Caliphate in Syria.
4) awarding trillions in no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a slew of arms manufacturers and private military contractors who could operate free of the burdensome rules of the Geneva Conventions. Halliburton received so much business that they moved their HQ to Dubai.
> There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production
There's a lot more evidence and reason to believe that the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush Administration realized that, despite their initial inclinations, they couldn't sell a war on Iraq as a response to 9/11 without first making a visible effort that was more tangibly connected to the organization that actually carried out the attacks.
Indeed. I believe it is retribution for the Opium Wars. Sure the US isn't the UK, but it's the successor Anglo empire and is obstructing China's return to their rightful place as global hegemon.
I think Xi Jinping and his CPC wish to inflict a Century of Humiliation on the West, or at least on the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Russia and Hungary, beware.
Unfortunately this game only takes one willing participant. We'd better get our heads in the game and begin to play. And we need to prepare for a proper hot war, too, although that's already well understood and those preparations are already well underway.
I was into the whole research chemical thing from maybe 2005 to 2011. People on message boards were doing like $30k+ group buys to get Chinese labs to synthesize new stuff. It was a really interesting time with a lot of money to be made and new chemicals to experience. I started hearing horror stories about people ODing on fentanyl and fentanyl analogues in 2011ish from middle men mixing up orders and mislabeling chemicals. That sketched me out enough that I didn't want anything to do with it anymore. It was very easy to buy fentanyl straight from Chinese labs until at least 2013 but maybe even as late as 2015 or 16. Fentanyl was legal in China until US pressure to ban it and that's when they started sending precursors to Mexico.
You said: “There's considerable evidence and reason to believe Washington invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to supercharge opium production”, yet you provide nothing to back up your claim. It is not trolling to point that out.
Your link to some stats on levels of poppy production does not support your conspiracy theory.
“Orange santa” in Chinese would be pretty unwieldy as a nickname. “橙黄圣诞老人” is 6 syllables.
But there has been a meme in China for ages that Trump is secretly a Chinese guy named “Chuan Jianguo” (Jianguo means “building the nation”) who was sent by China to destroy America from within.
There was a good tweet after election day where someone wrote that a Chinese classmate was talking about their religious father in Beijing, who thought that Trump was chosen by God to win the election -- but only as part of a larger divine plan to destroy America. Pretty funny, to be honest.
Agent Krasnov, now this, there seems to be competition for whom that guy is fucking up US more.
Although answer is probably simplest - for himself and his ego.
I cant imagine the mental gymnastic any half decent republican must be going through daily to keep avoiding utter debiliating shame for voting him when doing the proverbial look in the mirror.
Hope doesn't come into it. It's just a fact. And if you accept it as a fact, then hoping they have a silly name for him isn't the same as hoping Trump's been good for China. Like I say, it's not a question, of course he has been.
Stick it, because? Always ask why. Perhaps the orange man is shitting in gardens far and wide abroad? Personally I do not want America to fail at all, to flourish even, and for it to remain a democracy at that. It helps. The orange man seems to have differently opinion.
Habeas corpus is an order to bring a body before a court. The body being a live one, the detainee. Thus proving that the detainee hasn't been exiled/tortured/murdered/whatever and providing an opportunity to challenge the detention.
The comment I responded to offered no such qualifiers.
To answer in general, aging of accounts is common as is synthetic credibility-building activity. There are marketplaces where you can buy sets of years old accounts with activity for every major platform. Anything you could come up with would either be so stringent it would exclude most users or be easy enough to become a target for account sellers.
To be honest this is why I got out of the space, it's sisyphean.
But 'it's hard' is not an excuse. If it is not possible to honor the contract that you create with the user because of fraudsters, then the user should not have to abide by it either.
I find it very strange that so many people are more exercised by the small crime of Snowden releasing this information than by the large crime of the federal government spying on us all.
It's not strange, it's purposeful. It's the same logic as "well George Floyd had a counterfeit 20!"
It's an extremely effective propaganda technique whereby you discredit the person(s) who were affected by injustice, while simultaneously shifting the narrative away from said injustice. It preys on the human minds simple morality reasoning skills - bad people don't do good things, and good people don't do bad things.
Of course, that's not how it works, and it's both. George Floyd maybe did counterfeit a twenty, and that's illegal. But is the punishment for that public execution? What motivation do people have to bring that up? No good motivations, in my mind.
George Floyd ingested quite a lot of fentanyl, enough to die though it was inconclusive - it's a biological and medical reality that characterized the situation in a very real way.
Snowden released a lot of information that had nothing to do with 'whistle blowing' and enormously benefited very bad actors such such as China and Russia - it was a windfall for them, and destroyed years of work by Western intelligence agencies.
This was right after China had discovered and executed a handful of CIA personnel, whereupon it was very, very clear the possible repercussions of such a release.
His actions were inconsistent with those of someone interested only in whistle-blowing and or 'showing hypocrisy' on espionage; there are any number of ways to whistle-blow in a manner that does not result in the negative outcomes. Since he's smart enough to know better, it's rational to conclude the possibility of ulterior motives.
Russia's espionage and influence campaigns are having a severely negative effect on the political situation in the US and West in general, where they have deeply penetrated many nations security and political apparatus, especially Germany.
Snowden's documents revealed that the federal government wasn't "spying on us all," as had been feared but was in fact paring down domestic data collection and had only one illegal program left (phone metadata collection, which wasn't used for "spying") that was pared down and then shut down soon after. They did reveal a lot of Chinese targets, which Snowden unsuccessful used to try to parlay into Hong Kong asylum.
What's the difference?
The fines for safety failures leading to deaths in the UK are frequently six figures and sometimes seven. So management takes safety seriously and accident rates are very low.
It is about the money.
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