Live data from Hacker News

Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

slaveryfootprint.org

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

#32
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lived next to a diamond mine, you probably wouldn't buy diamond rings. I say this because I assume you are a compassionate/empathetic person to some degree, and I think it would be very difficult for you to separate out your feelings towards the terrible conditions/bloodshed involved in diamond mining and the shining ring that you just bought from the smiling slave-driver. The only reason that you could ever b…

It's pretty obvious that if you stop drinking CC, no one else will stop because you did. Meaning the events are conditionally independent. In my opinion, rallying large groups of people is the only way to make a difference. So really day to day choices you make on what to purchase have no effect on the system. I would argue that the only real way to change is attempting to effect group think. Individual purchase deci…

Isn't this the exact point of the App posted? To rally people together?

You claim that "rallying large groups of people is the only way to make a difference," but a large group of people is made up of individuals, and those individuals will participate in that group by altering their day to day purchases.

So to say that it is all about groups and not about any individual decision is a bit of a paradox since without any individual decision, there is no group.

Re: Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

#34
When I clicked on this link I thought it was going to be about the wage slaves that work for me down at the local mall.

Day in and day out they shuffle into their meaningless jobs, selling shoes or flipping burgers. 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 40 years. They rack up a life time of debt in the first few years of adulthood and struggle to stay on top of it for the rest of their lives.

I'd much rather live within my means and enjoy life instead. I want to build interesting stuff, fun games, follow my dreams...

Re: Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

#35
There are real methodological issues here. Even so, I'd prefer reducing the number of people forced into slavery. Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this most efficiently?

Some numbers:

- consume less: my consumption seems to require about one "slave" (in the site's sense) per EUR 1000/USD 1500. (Being a fairly frugal vegetarian may help here. Or not.)

- Fair Trade: http://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ suggests that 100g of cocoa (say one good bar of chocolate) requires about one child-slave-day;

- no diamonds: this is surprisingly hard to pin down. Searching the internet suggests that the cost in lives lost in wars is much greater than the cost in lives lost in slavery.

Re: Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

#36
post #24

Crappy job slave. Yeah, anything nice we have or use is thanks to people with crappy jobs... but there are people lining up out the door for those jobs, as they offer a better life than subsistence farming or scavenging garbage and living in a favela. And the places where those jobs don't exist are even worse off. Not to excuse the creation of inhuman living and working conditions. But better to work for appropriate…

Debt Bondage is real. People are not lining up out the door to replace people in debt-bondage slavery. ( http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/inde... )

fair enough.

I don't want to minimize the issue, but there is room for some realistic perspective, somewhere between indifference and equating consumers with slaveowners.

The link says there are at least 12.3m forced laborers.

If every American had 10 'slaves' that would be 3.1b slaves.

This was a pretty eye-opening story about an unfortunate Chinese deliveryman a few months ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/nyregion/22victim.html?pag...

Re: Estimate how many slaves work for you based on your possessions and lifestyle.

#40

Great design; Does anyone know if that was from scratch, or if there's a visual/back-end framework behind it?

looks like they're using backbone.js as a framework. also, raphaël which I haven't heard of before; it's a vector graphics library apparently. so, I think the answer to your questions are yes, and yes :)

very nice work from them btw.

Post reply on HN