Is that last bit an established theory, or your own speculation?

I'm sorry for not wanting to die.

I understand how dangerous a precedent this would be when applied to any of the many terrible political reasons people do things for, but frankly, the way climate change is going, I think we're at the point where if people don't start exceeding their authority very fast the legal system is going to become a suicide pact.

Frankly, if the law says that it's not okay to try to prevent your extermination, the law can get fucked, and anybody in a position to prevent the law from getting us killed has an obligation to do so. In the majority of cases, I would probably agree with the principle, but even then seven weeks is ridiculous.

I mean, somebody did already shoot the guy.

I see Scott Moe is joining in the proud Canadian conservative tradition of deliberately crippling public education. Doug Ford's doing similar things in Ontario.

> It's the division of Samsung that sells life insurance, not the division that handles life insurance for its employees.

Ah, okay, I did misunderstand that, yes.

I was getting the idea that a significant number of the suicides were Samsung employees based on the fact that Samsung Life Insurance, which I thought was life insurance for Samsung employees, was paying to put up these signs, presumably with the aim of paying out less life insurance to Samsung employees who committed suicide.

It's still statistically speaking probably true that a significant number of these suicides are Samsung employees, though, given that the bridge is located in South Korea and Samsung is by far the largest company in South Korea.

Let's connect some dots. Samsung's life insurance division put these photos on the bridge. This means Samsung's life insurance division was paying out to a lot of these suicides. This means that a lot of the suicides were Samsung employees. I don't know whether the suicides were disproportionately Samsung employees or whether they happened an average amount and Samsung is just a big company, but I do know that people's suicide risk is not disconnected from their socioeconomic status. If your job is shitty and soul-crushing or your pay is just barely making you scrape by with no improvement in sight, your mental health is going to end up in the gutter.

And Samsung has the responsibility, both because every single corporation has that responsibility and because Samsung is by far the largest corporation in South Korea and has massive influence over its society in general, to provide its employees with good working conditions and a wage sufficient to live a decent life on. I don't expect Samsung to solve the entire problem of suicide. I do expect (though this is hardly unexpected) them to do more to address the role they do undoubtably have in that problem than plaster a bridge with some feel-good photos.

A corporation choosing to do a cheap publicity stunt rather than anything that affects the material conditions on those dependent on income from it to survive is not all that much better than nothing and demonstrates that they are working their workers to suicide knowingly and by choice.

They ended up doing less than the bare minimum, though. This didn't work and it didn't address the underlying conditions that made people suicidal. I don't care whether Samsung loves people deep down in their hearts. I care whether people will live good lives, and right now, far too many of them won't, and there's no incentive for Samsung or any other megacorp to change that and a lot of incentive for them to make it worse. If this is the response the system produces to mass suicides, the system is failing.

Not the worst idea. One of the reasons it's so hard to quit drugs is that having a shitty life makes you more dependent on drugs to find any happiness but having a drug addiction makes your life go to shit. Very few people are strong enough to break that cycle by sheer force of will alone, stepping in and giving them money to improve their quality of life sure helps.