Nyet comrade, we have exactly as much humor as our dear leader has ordered us to have.

Putins stupid war accomplishes something positive for a change. He deserves a crown.

Give Putin a crown for exposing that its nothing but Russian bots

Monkey Putin deserves a crown for solving the Russian bot problem

So many members have contacted me to warn that LocalAreaMan is in fact a Russian shill.

Are you mad that your internet got disrupted this week?

So you feel like Vladimir Putin? The stupidest “man” in the history of the world.

Nevermind that it’s punishment this is used for and not rehabilitation.

Lots of time work programs for prisoners are used for rehabilitation.

No, slavery generally is considered forcing someone to work for free and the person is generally enslaved as a matter of prejudice: sometimes because their considered inferior by race, sometimes because they’ve been captured in war, sometimes because they are considered inferior for some other reason like belonging to a different tribe. Some slaves are born into slavery, but the prejudice that enslaved their parents tends to be why they themselves are considered slaves as well.

The key here is it’s forced upon them and they aren’t usually paid for it.

Prison labor doesn’t fit that description. For one thing they’re almost always paid, granted at a reduced rate but this is typically because a portion of their earnings are used to offset their costs (prisons aren’t free to operate.) A prisoner might be forced to work but many prison labor programs are voluntary, at least the better jobs require some amount of cooperation by the prisoner.

Finally, a prisoner has been imprisoned because they violated a law, a jury of their peers found them guilty of that crime and the judge believed a fair and equal punishment was to incarcerate the individual. Though not always perfect in the USA criminal court is designed to favor allowing a guilty person to go free if the evidence is lacking verse punishing a potentially innocent person-the so called 99% certainty rule. This is much different than how slaves were generally come by.

I’m aware of indexing bots (spiders) and yeah some of them were just doing that but there are also malicious crawlers that actively make things worse for all of us online. And the proportion of these bad bots is growing every year. https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2026-bad-bot-report/

And it’s not just AI, which is a more recent trend, as the annual Imperva reports have chronicled the rise in bad bot traffic for the past decade.

Russia has been botting up the internet for decades. I remember seeing how much traffic came from Russia back in the mid 2010’s when I was maintaining a bunch of websites for local businesses.

Send them back to the stone age. And I’d encourage more aggressive use of firewalls to keep other bad actors from gaining access to targets online. Way too many scammers from India and African nations are still getting through and causing plenty of unnecessary problems.

To be fair requiring people who have been convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers through a fair and just legal system to do labor isn’t itself a form of slavery. Also worth noting that in some cases prisoners work these jobs to generate income for themselves (usually so they can buy snacks and things from the prison commissary.)

For-profit jails are the exception since such an arrangement encourages false imprisonment but this is more a matter of making sure our legal system operates justly and fairly. Have some places used bogus charges to imprison people to use as labor? Sure, but again we need to make sure that we don’t conflate that with all prisoners doing labor when it’s only some of them. The citizens ensuring that their justice system is working properly and free of corruption is the solution to this.

And we have historical examples of it working to remove corruption. There was a for-profit juvenile detention center that got caught trumping up charges in order to lock up kids which generated more fee’s and money for the jail and they found out the judge who had sentenced the kids was corrupt and working for the company than ran the jail. The individuals who engaged in this were caught, tried and imprisoned and fined millions of dollars for their crimes.

Of course the kids shouldn’t have been scammed like that to begin with. However, I’d remind you that our justice system punishes people who have committed crimes when we can prove it to a jury of our peers. A justice system isn’t designed to prevent crimes, we can try to deter them but thats merely our hope, the actual purpose is to remedy an injustice. While we’d like to not have had kids overly punished for minor crimes (most of the kids had done stuff like getting caught smoking weed and other misdemeanors) whats more important here is that the people who abused our justice system for personal gain were eventually punished for their abuse.

But at the heart of it the majority of prison labor isn’t really slavery. Heck, lots of prisoners enjoy such jobs, not only because it gives them a few bucks but it also gets them out of the monotony of being in prison all day. When done properly it can actually help to rehabilitate some of these prisoners.

Maybe the solution is to enforce the immigration regs and penalize employers who hire undocumented people.

That would be the most effective way, which is why they don’t do it. They need that exploitation to make record profits for themselves and the shareholders.

Supreme court needs to overturn Ford v Dodge Brothers, the case that established that companies are only accountable to their shareholders, since a century later its clear that companies have an obligation to multiple parties and not just the shareholders. A company needs to comply with safety regulations to protect its employees to reduce the risk of having to pay for medical treatment as a result of an injury, paying employees better ensures a higher level of productivity in most cases which itself could be a benefit to the shareholders, companies need to make sure their costumers are happy so they need to offer a quality product that won’t poison them, etc. Plenty of examples of a company having responsibilities to others, in some cases we can argue this practice itself benefits the shareholders and yet we still see corporations believing this antiquated idea that was decided by an ancient court case from an entirely different era.

Then providing some protections for all workers, even the illegal ones, while also passing legislation that prohibits and punishes out-sourcing. Prior to Reagan most undocumented workers were just Mexicans who crossed the border to do seasonal work or a daily routine (maids) for localities near the border, then they’d go home at the end of the day or season. These jobs aren’t really competitive so let them do these things so long as they aren’t hurting people. H1B’s definitely steal good paying jobs, thats why we hear about Indian’s scamming their way into them with fake degrees and certifications. Highly competitive jobs shouldn’t be up for grabs like that.

All these call centers shipped to India that access are personal info is going to bite us in the ass sooner or later. Make it illegal for companies to do that and we’ll see jobs pour back into the USA. No reason not to, a large and stable middle class fuels economic growth.

It’s all trash. They should’ve just charged us to continue to maintain win 7. I’d have bought another license for an additional 10 years of regular updates.

Ah yes don’t fix the problem just let it continue to get worse and worse.

This is about as realistic as Americans doing their own farming after kicking out all the Mexicans.

Few differences here between tech jobs and farming. Tech jobs are the pinnacle of earners. Harvesting/Farming is one of the lowest form of income generation. Much easier to return those high skill jobs to Americans. Higher wages only hurt the CEO and upper management, wonder why they hired cheap slave labor to begin with.

Honestly the visa holders might be in better shape.

Most of these H1B jobs were coming from India, national notorious for fraud. In fact, lying and buying credentials is so ingrained in Indian culture when tech workers were tested on their skills something like 95% were found unsuitable for IT work. So I’m not super worried about losing that “talent” to India, we’ve got plenty of actual talent in the USA still. For years the younger generations were told to learning programming and get a CS degree. I bet we would find more than 5% of them are capable.

Also, talk to any American tech worker who has experienced out-sourcing to India or bringing in “talent” from India via H1B and you’ll hear some fun horror stories. Usually goes like this; manager wanted a bonus so he fires the team and sources Indians, usually because some consultant company contacted him with “they will work for $2 a day” promises. The replacements will either be totally incompetent from day one, sometimes they start off well until the workload is moved to new people (the people who start are actually skilled and over the course of weeks they move on to the next project and their replacements are totally incompetent.) After destroying the companies mainframe, database, software, website, etc the manager ends up firing them and begging the original team members to return to fix things.

I’ve heard and read dozens of such accounts. I experienced it myself. H1B’s tend to suck. At best they’re skilled but often suffer a noticeable language barrier and culture barrier.

There was no scheme to replace the American worker, that’s just how capitalism works.

There was, in fact, a scheme to replace the American worker with H1B. In fact, tech companies lobbied for H1B in the 1990’s then expanded it. In order to say they couldn’t find American workers they’d use all kinds of schemes; demanding levels of experience for insultingly low wages, running the ad in obscure news papers in the middle of bumfuck USA so no one would see them, etc. Oh, and then recruiting companies from India got involved.

If it’s literally cheaper to import labor, it’s not objectively the companies fault

I could literally replace every single American right now regardless of their age with someone for India. That replacement will cost less money. Why aren’t we replacing all Americans with Indians? Indian retiree’s get like $3 a month for social security, verse $1500 for Americans. Why don’t we replace all the American’s drawing SS with Indian elderly people and pocket the difference?

We have to find a practical balance between our society thriving and corporate greed.

Probably helps that everything post Windows 7 has sucked.

I favor incarceration with no bail.

When Epstein died I didn’t think much of it. What surprised me was lots of non-conspiracy theory friends were diving head first into the conspiracy. As the years have went by and more info leaked, yeah, there was definitely something big going on. We know Elon Musk lied numerous times about knowing Epstein and Maxwell, only to be proven by others testimony he did in fact know them, stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, probably meet with Maxwell for “kung fu” practice, etc.

I even believe that the whole “pedo guy” incident with Musk was actually a coy attempt to keyword search flood “Elon Musk Pedo” with search results for that nonsense. We’ve seen other famous people do stuff like that to keyword bury topics, I’m sure Musk was aware of the technique. And he won the lawsuit because he was rich enough to fight a freedom of speech claim.

Lies.

This isn’t even the first time they’ve done corrupt shit like this. They got caught colluding with Apple and I think IBM to keep programmers salaries deflated by not hiring them when they left one of the other companies.

Thankfully they got in trouble for that, but not enough trouble. Bill Gates is a sick, sadistic creep (read up on his affair, connections to Epstein and how he tried to drug his wive with medications to treat an STI he gave her.)