Many workers’ pay is effectively frozen in an unforgiving labor market that hasn’t seen any meaningful increases in wages in decades. Meanwhile, the cost of living — not to mention the price of gas — continues to rise, making it difficult for low-income households to squeeze by.
One strategy we wouldn’t recommend is to set a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse filled to the brim with toilet paper and other highly flammable paper products on fire — which is exactly what a disgruntled employee at a paper products facility in Ontario, California did earlier this week, as the LA Times reports.
The resulting fire, which started just after midnight local time on Tuesday, was enormous, requiring 175 firefighters and 15 fire trucks to put it out.
And if you really, really can’t keep yourself from watching the world burn, we do not, under any circumstances, advise you to film yourself while doing it — which is also what 29-year-old Highland resident Chamel Abdulkarim has now been accused of doing.
The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video.
“There goes your inventory,” the same voice says in a followup clip.
“We have had reports that he did give some information on social media,” Ontario Police Cpl. Emily Williams told LA-based broadcaster KTLA. “We can’t go into specifics as to what that information is.”
Alex Montero, who claims to have met Abdulkarim at the warehouse, said he had obtained screen recordings of the videos through a mutual friend.
“It was him that posted himself doing it,” Montero told the LA Times. “If not, I wouldn’t have put it out there like that.”
Abdulkarim will be appearing in court sometime today after being charged with arson.
The incident struck clearly close to home for some netizens.
“This shit is it,” one user wrote in the r/antiwork subreddit. “People are hitting their breaking points. When people see no way out of debt, no way forward to retirement or a life lived for themselves, when they have nothing to lose what else are they supposed to do?”
“I think companies sometimes forget that a strike is the peaceful option but not the only one…” another user added.
Others predicted that toilet paper could soon become difficult to come by as a result of the enormous blaze.
“Guess I’ll move that bidet in my Amazon saves back into my cart,” one user wrote.
More on the cost of living: Sam Altman Says AI Will Cause Massive Deflation, Making Money Worth Vastly More
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