751–760 of 820 posts
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These reviews are not necessarily independent. If they don't yield any results the organisations lose their funding. So they have the incentive to be as dishonest as Apple and China are.
> not necessarily Do you have any serious evidence? Otherwise we are raising random possible problems. Maybe it's a false flag! Maybe it's the CIA or FSB or Martians! Maybe! Not necessarily!
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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…
Again, I don’t think people understand the difference here and are trying to derail the argument in favour of Apple. Being “forced to seek employment out of poverty” is different than being forced to labor due to your ethnic background. Necessity vs. discrimination. Ex: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global-devel... It is a very simple and clear difference, yet it is a common tactic for a debater to…
Here
https://www.freetheslaves.net/where-we-work/congo/
and here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Democ...
Both talk about people being forced to mine. Not they're poor and need to eat. Debt bondage, bogus criminal charges then sent to the mines to work as prisoners, or just straight up forced to at gun point by militias/gangs. You know, actual forced labour.
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You usually cannot "topple" a rogue regime, unlike a civil government. Dictators almost always have secret police, and domestic espionage agencies in every corner. This is why I do not subscribe to notion that Western spies are trying to stage revolutions in repressive regimes for a simple reason that they can not.
They failed in Venezuela recently but that didn't stop them from trying. There was a democratic Senator who ascribed the failure to Trump's incompetence. Most of Latin America had had a US backed coup at some point in its history. Many very successful. Pinochet, etc.
US only ever managed to use staged coups to unseat civil governments, and failed miserably with tougher targets like real totalitarian regimes.
The only notable exception I think was Noriega, who was a joke of a dictator, and possibly even put in power with American help in the first place.
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You seem to want to kill flies with nuclear weapons. The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces. Protectionism sentences people far poorer than you to far worse economic lives. Taking away Apple assembly jobs doesn’t increase third world wages or worker protections, it makes them worse. Those workers are consigned to work back in brutal rural jobs that not…
> The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces. Source? Especially for the second statement. They don't benefit from free trade, free trade is the reason why they are exploited and their countries kept in poverty. And how can you say that they freely choose their jobs if the only alternative they have to ridicolous wages and low safety jobs is to starve?
Too lazy to Google but India used protectionism because it wanted to do its own thing after independence and keep the evil western corporation away. By the end of 1980's India was almost bankrupt and had to get loans from IMF one of the condition was to open up the economy. India's poverty rate started to fall down after the economy opened up.
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Again, I don’t think people understand the difference here and are trying to derail the argument in favour of Apple. Being “forced to seek employment out of poverty” is different than being forced to labor due to your ethnic background. Necessity vs. discrimination. Ex: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/global-devel... It is a very simple and clear difference, yet it is a common tactic for a debater to…
Weird that you make up your own source and counter it as if the person you were replying to had used it, then go on about how they use sleazy debating tactics. I think there's a proverb about a kettle that might apply. Here https://www.freetheslaves.net/where-we-work/congo/ and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Democ... Both talk about people being forced to mine. Not they're poor and need t…
The issue here is that Apple is employing tactics with lobbying, PR, marketing (sort of brainwashing) to make you "try not to think about it too much", so yeah it is "no wonder people pick door number 3". The hypocrisy that fuels the hype and demand for its brand is what consumers should be aware of.
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https://www.fairphone.com/en/ probably, https://www.pine64.org/ maybe. Knowing something exists is the biggest step towards finding it.
These phones can't do much to address a glass supplier that is mean to their workers. These are just more environmentally sustainable phones. I'm all in on putting pressure on Apple and others to clean up their supply chain, but it can't just be Apple that's held to this standard. Right now it is.
Why did you say they “can't”?
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> The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un... This doesn't say “prison labor is slavery”; it says that prison labor is allowed to be slavery. You should've provided some reference to e.g. a news article to back up your claim. It's legal to pai…
Forced labor is slavery, full stop. This was recognized by the men who wrote the 13th amendment. It is not "definitely different". And no, paying a slave does not make it 'not slavery.' Slaves have been paid paltry sums some of the time throughout history. It's still slavery.
I happen to know a little bit about what goes on in US prisons, so it's confusing me why you're not providing any of the mountains of evidence to support your point.
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"Due process" did probably happen, at least the Chinese version of it. Even dictatorial regimes usually have to maintain some appearance of legitimacy for the things they do. That legitimacy might not be apparent or even visible for outsiders, because it is targeted to keep a sufficient majority of citizens at bay. And before you say "but 'due process' is well-defined anywhere", I've got a star chamber in Guantanamo…
Well, if this due process means some opaque process that government employs to put people in those "camps" then by literal meaning there is a process, and it's done through that process. Yet I'd say that's very different from due process that we'd like to call it. In the very least the process itself should be well-documented and published, even if specific cases files are not available online for everyone. That's th…
Of course there is some "due process" in that a judge needs to agree. But I guess some judge can always be found to agree to that vague stuff.
So even in western rule-of-law societies, I think the Chinese situation could be justified in existing laws.
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> 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 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. That's potential…
> 'American workers should not have to compete with slave labor!' That's a powerful point! This is a big issue that will affect our lives & the lives of generations to come. Not to mention National Security issues & living in safe/strong neighborhoods. There are many reasons to promote ethical behavior & transparency with suppliers, on par with US standards. Ensuring that suppliers are ethical also disincentives indu…
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.
It's a shame that a country as rich as Switzerland is unwilling to do that first step. I think that would have been a good way to start making corporations take responsibility.