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China Alleged To Use Prisoners In Lucrative Internet Gaming
SoyQueSoy pointed out an article that reveals it's not all fun, but forced games for some Chinese prisoners. It is alleged that after a day of hard labor some inmates are forced to work through the night as gold farmers. "Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labor," [prisoner] Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."
I guess you missed the part about them being forced to gold mine all night after a long day of hard labor. Are people skipping the summary now too?
In a country where you can be jailed for bitching to the government, do you really think that the bosses of the prisons are at all independent of the power structure?
And the fact that exploitation of human desperation is common does not make it right, in or out of prison. China's brand of socialism is bullshit. It's plain fascism, where workers are cattle and the government gets all the value they add.
Is going to know the master character's password, dig a tunnel through the sewage, and get the warden arrested!
I am in the wrong business! If this is exploitation, chain me to the PC!
On second thoughts though, that number is probably not a "per prisoner earning".
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08.shtml
"There are presently 80,000 inmates in the US employed in commercial activity, some earning as little as 21 cents an hour."
"In addition, during the last 20 years more than 30 states have passed laws permitting the use of convict labor by commercial enterprises. These programs now exist in 36 states."
"Prisoners who refuse to work under these conditions are labeled “uncooperative” and risk losing time off for “good behavior,” as well as privileges such as library access and recreation."
So that former prison guard is in jail for being a whistleblower, and now he is whistleblowing again. Tsk tsk.
lucm, indeed.
I suppose this is at least a step up from organ harvesting. If the prison bosses give kickbacks to the party, which seems likely, its not a huge leap in logic to think that the state may begin to arrest "undesirables" for the sole purpose of earning an income, unless of course the operating costs outweigh the income (IANAPB).
I guess you missed the part about them being forced to gold mine all night after a long day of hard labor. Are people skipping the summary now too?
No, just ignoring the parts that make no sense whatsoever.
If I have you as a slave, and you can make me $100/12hrs doing manual labor or $500/12hrs goldfarming... Do you seriously think I'd waste half your income-generating day having you fill potholes?
The "after" makes no sense when they could farm gold for both shifts and make their jailers 66% ($600 vs $1000) more per day.
They still have to answer to their superiors when China's projects are not being completed with slave labor.
Since they never tipped, the bartenders hated them. Whenever they saw the bus pull up, they'd place drinks at the slots to reserve the spots.
Anyway, wherever there is money you will find corruption. Rule of law (applied equably), transparency, and cultural values are all that mitigate this. The only reason this doesn't happen in American for-profit prisons is that the money isn't good enough, yet. But the dollar continue to drop. Your kids might gold-farm for the Chinese.
Any minute now we'll get the BitCoin tie-in for this article.
Any minute now...
I'm waiting for it.
Just clicking away seems like a breeze compared to that.
Lets see what the article says...
"If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,"
Yea, sounds super easy.
It's plain fascism, where workers are cattle...
Well, you wouldn't have 'Everyday Low Prices' without it..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Really? Where do you live? Just about every grown up I know is working hard, sometimes 2 or 3 jobs. People with graduate degrees are busing tables, college graduates are working retail, people who used to make easy money are taking what they can get.
We have a mall with a lottery ticket booth. On occasion we get a whole crew of people (old, immigrants, hobo-looking) playing large volumes of scratch tickets. The mob boss (big fat guy in a cowboy hat) sits nearby, keeping an eye on his people.
It's a money laundering operation. It doesn't have to pay back 100 cents on the dollar. It just has to be competitive with other methods of converting 'dirty' cash into clean.
One thing that makes the entire operation pretty obvious: There's a food court, Starbucks and whatnot there. In any other setting, that would be a magnet for the local cops. But not here. If they've got business in the mall, they go in quickly, take care of it and get out. Fast. Evidently, there's an agreement for them to stay out.
Have gnu, will travel.
They were made to do it at night AFTER a day of hard labor.
Oh, come on. Making iPads isn't that hard.
Trolling is a art,
What makes you think the guards are sharing anything with the state? The guards could just be keeping the gold money for themselves,which would go a long way towards explaining why they are doing both hard labor AND gold farming, the labor is what is required by the state, the gold farming profits all go to the guards. If the state was really making more money off of farming they would probably have more people skip the labor and just do farming, esp. ones that were good at it.
Monstar L
Well, endgame in certain MMOs (read: WOW) is highly competitive as well as extremely time and material consuming. And the time consuming part isn't the competitive part either. In order to get the gear and all the items one needs to raid or PVP competitively and be able to buy all the stuff they want/need, it takes hours upon hours upon hours of farming the in-game currency or the materials from the limited amount of in game zones that contain them. Either way, it takes time and can be quite life consuming. Not to mention there's always lots of competition for the materials, so you could spend hours farming them with very little result.
The alternative: Pay $5 for 10k gold and save yourself 3 days straight worth of farming and get on to the 'fun' parts of the game.
Not that I condone it, but I can certainly see the appeal. It saves a lot of time and frustration...
But frankly, I'm there to play the game to consume some time and take out my frustration. So spending a few hours chatting away with friends while picking herbs after work never bores me. Though judging by the money the gold farmers are pulling in, I seem to be the exception and not the rule.
They can answer with hard cash, half-assed finished work, cute prostitutes or a combination of the three. It's China.
I'm guessing that NOBODY makes 5000 RMB a day gold mining. That's almost $1000 US! Or 1 month's salary for a skilled professional, or a semi-skilled worker in a dangerous job.
5000 a day may have been for a large team. 60 prisoners making 85 a day? And the boss gets 5000. It could have been a lucky day when some guy found a +100 sword of ass-kicking. No idea, really.
But if you could make 5000 a day gold farming, I'd do it, and I hate those soul-sucking games. Cruel and unusual punishment, indeed.
You must be living in a different universe to the rest of us, because in this one there's a massive - and massively profitable - slave labour industry in US prisons.
an idea a philosophy major with no real world experience with human nature dreams up is not a valid basis for society
not that that fact will stop you. nothing ever stops the regular low drumbeat of utopianists and their half-baked ideas from appearing and flaming out over the centuries. but have fun wasting years of your life and years of the lives of the well-meaning but gullible fools that listen to you for some reason
enthusiastic dreaming and good intentions are no replacement for a solid understanding of the inescapable bad qualities of human nature. you have to learn to work with those bad qualities, because you can't avoid them, they are part of all of us. don't try to imagine a society that somehow exists in spite of those bad qualities, it can't
any idea of organizing society that depends upon people just behaving in a way that people never have behaved is a loser, son
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't consider busing tables or working retail to be "working hard". Where are the people going into the jobs that Mike Rowe shows around on Dirty Jobs? There is a vast need for welders, miners, industrial painters, etc that immigrants are filling because Americans want to work in a cube, a restaurant, or a store. Hard work don't have air conditioning.
When I were a lad I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down t'mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it