701–710 of 820 posts
IMO this article launders slavery by referring to it as "forced labor".
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I’d really be curious to see how far we could push this. Cobalt is an essential part of lithium-ion batteries. 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, much of it in forced conditions. So I guess we have three options: go without lithium-ion batteries, enforce a minimum standard of labor conditions in the DRC by any means necessary, or just try not to think about it too much. Is it…
Not to discount your point, but wouldn't a fourth option be to buy from the 30% of suppliers not in the DRC?
And that’s just one example of one mineral. There is the notion of the “resource curse” —countries rich in natural resources often stay poor because why develop a modern economy when you can just become a warlord and force children to mine diamonds or cobalt for you? The flip side of this is the part where we in the developed world don’t like to think too much about where these basic resources come from.
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If they just made their computers in the US like they used to they could have both, but that would mean giving up the lucrative arrangement of only paying Chinese wages but charging US prices.
They can't have both. Production in the US is less efficient (not only for labor reasons), which deprives the entire economy of the wasted resources.
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The shoe IS on the other foot, and the US DID hide the facts. Their administration purposefully suppressed CDC information and pursued a herd immunity strategy without expressing it. You can't say "beyond trumps own incompetence and personality" without also saying "without Xi's incompetence and personality"... I don't think that is intellectually fair. I'm happy to criticise china for the things it could do better:…
Every single China thread on HN turns into a false equivalence 'no the US has far worse history / false whataboutism' A couple Trump political appointees attempted to do that. The system worked and the US didn't jail the NYTimes and the press for reporting the facts. Their stupidly half assed political crap didn't work and they lost the election. I wouldn't call Xi incompetent but instead scarily so. The power of Tru…
No mention of the bombings, the mass killing events, the huge domestic terrorism issue it has caused China for the last 20 years. Instead we just get reports of China "randomly" persecuting these people for seemingly no reason.
When you have people showing up at one of the largest train stations[0] in the country openly representing an ethnic minority and randomly stabbing men, woman and children of Han decent... what is the correct government response?
This isn't even the debate that we have. We don't ask this question at all, we instead publish photos of prisons, and reeducation camps, but no one ever seems to ask "Why is china doing this?" because the assumption that Western Media would like you to make is "Because they are just evil communists".
It would be like reporting on Guantanamo as an "off shore prison where America kidnaps people from foreign countries and keeps them there for no reason, most have never even been the the US" --- There would be uproar if news was reported that way. But when it's China, everyone is happy to have their blinders on, and not understand or explore the full context of a difficult issue.
[0] https://time.com/88941/not-again-knife-attack-at-train-stati...
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> the punishment is just I think it's reasonable to hold the belief that the punishment, especially in today's prison system, is not just.
Whether or not it’s just, it’s a separate discussion.
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I am surprised by today's lack of ethics discernment - there is big a difference. Prison labor is compensating for crimes committed against society and other people, while uyghur labor is direct discrimination against an entire minority without probable cause. If they happen to commit terrorism, then yes, those specific individuals' forced labor is justified as debt, but right now they are just labeled as "enemies of…
Prison slave labor was instituted in the US as a substitute for chattel slavery, and criminalization of Black lives immediately matured around it. It’s certainly a lot less visibly oriented around race relations and a lot more couched in a legalistic framework that fits our system and culture, but there’s a direct line from antebellum slavery to the modern prison system.
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Apple is one of the better ones in a sea of really bad. It's a low bar and certainly doesn't mean Apple is perfect. There might be some boutique phone makers who claim to be better like Librem or Fairphone, but because they have fewer resources than the big players it's much harder for them to really know. And if you dig into the mining side of the rare earths, worker conditions drop quickly.
This is the big problem. Few of these companies have the resources to verify their supply chain is free of abuse. The smaller companies likely have even less control over their supply chain.
Traditionally slavery was an alternative to death for the conquered. I'm morbidly curious what the effects of all Western corporations banning slave labor would be. I doubt it would result in liberation. Would working conditions for the slaves worsen when they worked for local, lower-margin factories instead? I can't imagine them improving. I have little faith in legal remedies to liberate slaves. Arming them seems t…
What, specifically, do you mean by this?
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Bottom line: China has forced a million Muslims into slave labor camps simply because they are Muslim... But you want to focus on how the US doesn't pay enough for voluntary prison labor. Am I missing something here?
I suppose the Chinese response would be "America has forced hundreds of thousand of black people into prison slave labor just because they're black".
As long as companies Apple are not legally responsible for their supply chain in front of developed countries’ courts nothing will change. In Switzerland a law that would have changed this was recently rejected. Hopefully another country makes the first step.
A downstream issue with importing the product of forced labor into the US is that US manufacturing markets, business (small & medium in particular), labor, & markets affected by finance are distorted. The argument that an influx of cheap foreign goods & cheap labor costs are good for the economy does not properly consider the long term & strategic costs of hollowing out large markets where the USA once lead the world…