The dark side of life…wage theft…nuclear proliferation

Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com
Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

Yet one more illustration of why regulatory agencies need to be fully staffed – employers who rip off their employees…

A person who owns 15 hotels in North Dakota agreed to settle a federal lawsuit claiming he cheated at least 192 employees out of overtime pay and didn’t pay some of them a minimum wage. He apparently is not hurting for money since he paid up $122,871 in back wages and $61,436 in penalties a mere four days after the judgment was issued.

Article points out he has been cheating employees since 2012. Owner denies any knowledge of any staff not getting overtime. At the same time one quoted person says he was threatened by the owner with a defamation lawsuit if the employee ever talked to labor law regulators.

More info, and a name, in the Dickinson Press article on September 5:  Hotel workers still waiting for back wages, damages after settlement with Fargo businessman.

I’ll make an extremely safe bet there is a huge volume of labor law, wage & hour, and safety violations in North Dakota that haven’t been corrected. It is my impression that regulators don’t have a fraction of enough staff to even deal with all the complaints that have been filed, let alone the massive number of cases that haven’t been reported.

In case you didn’t have enough to worry about in terms of the downside of technology, consider this…

8/27 – Washington Post – Report: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could become the world’s third-biggest – Guesses in unclassified sources suggest Pakistan may be building 20 nuke warheads a year. They could have 350 in another decade.

Now that is a bit unsettling.

Other quoted people think those estimates are far too high.

Here is a recap of the count of nuclear weapons by country, as guessed in the article:

  • 120 – Pakistan
  • 100 – India
  • 250 – China
  • 300 – France
  • 215 – England
  • Thousands – Russia
  • Thousands – US

We won’t even start to guess how many nukes Iran will have in a decade.

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