With choices of two major political parties, US voters have do not have granularity to approve or disapprove long term/chronic/fringe issues or issues that disproportionately affect a small minority of the population.
I'm not sure it's a deeper structural issue. The issue is actually pretty simple; first-past-the-post voting. This automatically leads to a two-party system.
Canada currently has 338 MPs and over 80% (!) of those (278) belong to one of two majority parties.
So yes, in theory Canada has a multi party system. In practice this multi party system is severely damaged by the effects of the FPTP voting system.
There are mathematical reasons for FPTP to result in two party systems. [0] explains it pretty well. There don't have to be deeper underlying stuctural reasons for the dichotomy.
So to combat two party systems, replacing FPTP with an alternative voting system seems a pretty reasonable step.
Which is also true of Australia which has had instant runoff voting for nearly a century.
I would suggest you look at the actual examples in the wild, and see if they have FPTP (or party proportional representation, which is essentially FPTP with all the same spoiler effects), and which don't, and see if they match your expectations to any degree better than random chance.
You can prove just about anything in "math" in a vacuum. The recent push for FPTP really strikes me as the kind of wonk stuff that people bend themselves around as a huge fix, when the reality is it empirically doesn't do what people thinks it should do, and comes with it's own problems. It's a lot of wasted political capital for very little if no benefit.
No, not really. If you look at Australia's parliament, you'll see that even though Labor and Liberal are the biggest party, they 'only' make up 60% of the seats. That's not really good, but it's a far cry from Canada's 82% (or the US's 99%)
> I would suggest you look at the actual examples in the wild
That's a very good suggestion. I actually already did that and I can assure you not using FPTP results in much more and smaller parties.
Examples:
- Ireland (STV)
- Northern Ireland Assembly (STV)
- Papua New Guinea (IRV)
> The recent push for FPTP
Do you mean 'against FPTP'? Because I can assure you that I'm not pushing for FPTP at all.
> No, not really. If you look at Australia's parliament, you'll see that even though Labor and Liberal are the biggest party, they 'only' make up 60% of the seats. That's not really good, but it's a far cry from Canada's 82% (or the US's 99%)
I'm not sure how you came to that. Australia has 151 MPs, 68 in the liberal party, and 61 in labor, or 86% in the two major parties. Their senate has 76 members, 31 liberal, 26 labor, or exactly 75% in the two major parties.
> Do you mean 'against FPTP'? Because I can assure you that I'm not pushing for FPTP at all.
Yes, I misspoke there, as is clear from the rest of my argument.
This is a problem. That being said, several major states have a good amount of direct democracy, including allowing for state constitutional changes, and there are often more than two viable candidates regardless of the letter after their name. I think this is a plausible way out of the two-party two-ideology stronghold that incites further polarization. Where I vote, between these two factors I don't usually think about a party because there may be 4-6 different candidates with relatively different platforms listed under two parties, and 10-20 referenda listed under that with no party.
There is difference between voters choosing forced prison labor and voters given the choice between two parties and being intentionally misled and misinformed about what the parties are actually doing.
These issues are not separate and treating them as so lacks nuance. This conversation is not about whether genocide and forced labor is bad (which I hope we can all agree that it is), it is about The ethics of Apples business practices. The company in question (Apple) is already based in a country which performs its own version of state mandated forced labor along with a myriad of other human rights abuses. How is this not relevant? Knowing this, why should we expect Apple (or other US companies) to treat business in China any differently? What makes one okay and the other not?
Ignoring this connection diverts attention away from other, systemic issues in our global market system which incentivize companies to operate in this way.
One injustice does not correct another. The US has a big challenge with internal inequity compounded by a massive supply chain leveraging others inequity.
It's unlikely we'll see complete resolution to one without the other being corrected.
Whataboutism is just Whataboutism in disguise. Wonder why this is acceptable behaviour. Injustice is for sure not exclusive to China. Practice what you preach. That would be pivotal for changing the world to the better.
Ehh I actually think this is very relevant to the conversation here. There are many others in this thread who are criticizing US companies for operating in China when they are already based in a country that allows its own form of forced labor, sponsors coups abroad, starts wars, etc. Knowing this, you’d think people might understand why US companies look the other way when they profit off of forced Chinese labor.
This may seem like whataboutism but I am not trying to justify China’s behavior here—it is truly horrendous. I just think the general conversation on Hacker News around the ethics of US companies operating in China lacks this nuance. These issues are deeply interconnected and, by trying to force a separation, we all miss out on a balanced and critical analysis of the situation
It's slavery...modern day slavery. Why are we mincing words? We stand on our soap boxes and preach about historical injustices and how we need to repair them. Well here is your chance to prevent a future historical injustice, and all it takes is for you to take a stand, instead of quietly consuming the products and leaving it for future generations to atone for methods by which those products were produced.
> Apple spokesman Josh Rosenstock said the company has confirmed that Lens Technology has not received any labor transfers of Uighur workers from Xinjiang. He said Apple earlier this year ensured that none of its other suppliers are using Uighur labor transferred from Xinjiang.
>“Apple has zero tolerance for forced labor,” Rosenstock said. “Looking for the presence of forced labor is part of every supplier assessment we conduct, including surprise audits. These protections apply across the supply chain, regardless of a person’s job or location. Any violation of our policies has immediate consequences, including possible business termination. As always, our focus is on making sure everyone is treated with dignity and respect, and we will continue doing all we can to protect workers in our supply chain.”
Zero tolerance apparently does not extend beyond the facilities Apple needs to make its goods. As in, they seem to turn a blind eye towards the country's behavior they are in as long as they can keep their own hands clean.
Simply put, Apple should be held accountable for simply doing manufacturing in a country which allows such abuse regardless if they or their suppliers actively use such labor.
Apple isn't alone in this behavior but they are beyond most when it comes to virtue signalling.
Now post the next 3 paragraphs after those quotes.
Apple is actively doing business in a location where slavery is frequently occurring, while pretending that their audits are thorough and comprehensive so that their hands appear clean. But the fact that they are playing whack-a-mole with constant slavery reports should be evidence enough that they know exactly what they're doing: they're trying to turn a profit while turning a blind eye to abuses, so long as they don't happen too publicly, and don't directly implicate them. This is wrong.
It looks like it may well be going that way, sure, but making this about Apple is headline bait. It's about China.
The fact is you can't buy a single thing made in China and be sure it isn't implicated in this in some way. Think of the last few things you bought that were manufactured or sourced some parts in China. Can you honestly say the manufacturer audits their supply chain with the same rigour? At least Apple is trying to keep their supply chain clean, but ultimately that may prove to be impossible.
If that's the case vilifying Apple for it won't fix it, the only way to fix it will be to shun Chinese products completely, but that's going to be a very painful and difficult process for more people than just Apple. Take Fairphone for example, those guys work really hard to do the right thing as much as possible, but they have dozens and dozens of suppliers in China some of them indirect. In their own literature they point out they can't answer for every single supplier. This is a really tough problem.
So we shouldnt shame the richest company on earth for using slave labor because its about "china"?
If anyone has leverage, its Apple, so actually yes its a way to start fixing the problem.
There's a simple way to keep slave labor out of your supply chain, stop doing business with people who are fine with that, not "performing audits to find out they are using slave labor again so we switched!"
How do you know which supplier is "fine with that", and how do you anticipate a supplier before they decide to change over to using illegitimate labour?
Auditing suppliers, verifying supply chains and switching away from cheaters is one way to address the issue. Another is to not do business in China at all.
>So we shouldnt shame the richest company on earth for using slave labor because its about "china"?
No, that’s a convenient misdirection to avoid real change. By making it “Apple is evil”, people just switch to another phone manufactured in China and pat themselves on the back for doing absolutely nothing.
It would be easier to just not do any business with any company in Xinjiang, but is that actually punishing the Uighur community who aren’t part of the forced labor? It might be better to focus the pressure on China as a whole, and at the international level. Or it might be more effective to punish companies in Beijing because they have the ear of the government.
They have a zero tolerance in their particular factories, but is China just shuffling workers around to make sure they don't send the slaves to Apple factories?
Apple is still making products in Hitler's Germany because the prices are too good to say no. Just because they aren't using the concentration camp labor doesn't mean they aren't complicit in the crimes. They're in the same boat as Fanta from my perspective. Doing business with murderers because money is more important than human lives.
Don’t trivialize nazi concentration camps by comparing them to some re-education camps. I highly doubt the number of deaths that occurred in these camps is anywhere close to the deaths that Apple‘s home country caused in its own war on terror, including torture and war crimes. With police brutality and the highest incarceration rate in the world, how can a company that values human lives do business in the US?
"Re-education camps" aren't they? They can call them "happy unicorn camps" and they will be still concentration camps. They use them as slave labor and human organ farms.
How on Earth, can you even try to gaslight us saying China concentration camps are "nicer" than the Nazis?
Wow the desperation it takes to try to misdirect the conversation camps to the “war on terror”. Right out of a whataboutism propaganda playbook.
A citizen of any regime, from the best to the most brutal, can criticize China and it does not detract from the argument at all. It’s not hypocritical because citizens are not the government; and, even if it was directly from the government and was hypocritical, the substance of the argument does not change. Calling someone a hypocrite is just an ad hominem.
I don't believe that quoting a PR spokesperson is a meaningful response, Apple is obviously a biased party in this investigation. Moreover, Apple has opposed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which would penalize companies with forced labor in their supply chains[1]. It also has a history of similar accusations with regards to their LCD screens [2] and their uniforms [3]. All of this is completely ignoring their history with foxconn and other suppliers that routinely abuse their employees without compelling their labor through outright force. Apple might say that they care about this issue, but its clear that their supply chain is setup to take advantage of poor workers from 3rd world countries at a minimum.
"Modern day slavery" is mincing words, slavery in the modern day is just slavery. Typically slavery refers to the slave being considered property, and ownership transferring to offspring. You can compare it to forced labor.
I agree, though chattel slavery typically implies the slavery of offspring. You can still have institutionalized slavery without that, like the Romans and a lot of other cultures throughout history. Slaves could be set free, could have semi-decent standards of living, while still being dehumanized. Or they could be treated brutally and enslaved for generations. The term seems to fit here in the broadest sense of the word.
"Slavery" etymology takes its roots with the "Slavs" people, who were, well, enslaved in medieval times. The term has been commonly accepted to describe various similar patterns before and after those times.
I agree that yesterday or today slavery is just slavery, whatever subtile differences there might be.
Equating slavery with forced labour belittles the gravity and awfulness of what actual slavery is (or was).
Forced labour takes different forms, which includes forced paid work and by some definitions penal work.
Slavery is when a person is treated as a property of another person. Being a slave may or may not involve forced labour.
In addition, calling Uyghur work “slavery” in fact undermines the cause, allowing CCP defenders to legitimately call out “fake news”. Precision matters.
A person held against their will and forced to do labor is a slave whether they're called that or not, especially if they have committed no legitimate offense for which such a punishment could be justified.
As near as I can tell the Uighurs' "offense" is being of a different ethnicity and being majority Muslim. What the Chinese are doing here is very close to what the USA did in its first century with African slaves.
You are right in your last paragraph. The situation in Xinjang is such that for an Uyghur it is in fact impossible to decline to do what the state says. Any work done with involvement of Uyghur population by default is a situation of forced labour. That’s what the article says.
However, using the term “slavery” gives CCP ammunition to fight back. They can point out that Uyghurs are paid. They can claim they are free to refuse (we know they will not out of fear of retribution, but I suspect the need for such nuance only hurts the case).
You are obviously eliding the distinction between a state where officials can arbitrarily order you to do anything and a state bound by the rule of law and a constitution enforced by independent courts that limits what the executive and legislature can order you to do.
Yes, because that's a separate/orthogonal (and much more controversial point).
I just don't want anarchists to be fooled into supporting the warmongering US propaganda.
i.e. do you agree that the state should have the power to do what's described above?
I was leaning to say more "no". I basically used to be more of an anarchist. That was probably (also) because I was disappointed in our cronyist, capitalist, disfunctional governments...
I'm now finding myself as more of a statist, after realizing how much good is being accomplished in China, and how arbitrary and ridiculous are the falsehoods that the US propaganda is pushing.
That comparison could just as easily be said to belittle what actual forced labor is.
I don’t think it’s helpful to compare which atrocity is worse.
There are many societies that have had lots of norms or laws protecting slaves from various forms of harm. That’s of course not to say slavery was acceptable in those societies on any level, but many slaves lived more comfortable lives than those who eventually died of malnutrition at Auchwitz-II.
Forced labour in prisons is legal in the US right now. Equating forced labour as a whole with slavery, which is frequently used to refer to chattel slavery that existed in the US (HN audience is to large degree US-based) before 1865, may seem inconsiderate to those whose ancestors had to endure the latter.
What is reported to be happening to Muslims now in Xinjang, with reeducation camps and all, is not the same as treating a human as another piece of personal property. It is both not as bad, and yet at the same time somehow even worse, as this time a whole culture is being systematically eliminated.
> Forced labour in prisons is legal in the US right now.
The Constitution refers to it directly as slavery. The 13th says "except as punishment for a crime." Folks may want to mince words about it because prisoners are technically paid (pennies per hour), if they are even getting paid in the first place. It was major news that prisoners were sent to fight fires in California for little to no pay. Plus, prisoners are on the hook financially for a lot of their sentence, so that money is basically spent before they even get it.
I'm guessing you've never been incarcerated? There's all sorts of volunteering: such as fixing the TV or coffee maker, teaching other inmates to read, helping another inmate file a frivolous appeal, and so on.
I find Jeremiah Pate in the milking barn, attaching milking machines to the goats' udders.
"This job, how do you feel about it?" I ask him. "A bad thing? Good thing?"
"It's a great thing," Pate tells me. "It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here."
Every man I meet echoes that thought. They aren't thinking about what was fair on the outside. They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good.
> They aren't thinking about what was fair on the outside. They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good.
You're making the case that it is involuntary. "Do this or we shall do to you something worse against your will" is textbook coercion.
But it's the thing that would already be done to them if the work program was not available. We put criminals in prison because of the crimes they commit, not because of the jobs they refuse once they are there.
The previous poster made a very obvious point that work is not voluntary when the alternative is punishment, which your post very helpfully illustrates as “sitting in [a] tiny little cell.” This doesn’t seem like a point that should require so much explanation for thinking people.
You and the previous poster seem to ignore that the punishment is just (to the extent that the criminal justice system is capable of justice).
It's not like they're forced to work; and if they take the option, they're still under punishment doled by the justice system. So it's not immoral forced labor as long as neither the work or the jail cell constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment".
Well, I would say, the lines get blurry.
And when you have private prisons, where the owners have a incentive to exploit prison labour, while also keeping their costs low - you end up in something, too close to slavery for my taste.
You asserted it was just. I just don't think that's axiomatic. I'm not here to argue whether it's true, just to say that you shouldn't take it as necessarily factual.
>You and the previous poster seem to ignore that the punishment is just (to the extent that the criminal justice system is capable of justice).
By your logic, the Uighurs are experiencing "just" punishment under the laws of the People's Republic of China.
Since the Uighurs have committed "crimes" (as defined by the government under which they live) against the state, they are subject to whatever punishment is prescribed by the law.
This is, of course, ridiculous on its face. And is just as ridiculous anywhere else.
There are valid reasons to separate some folks from the rest of society (think John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc.), as they've shown themselves to be unable/unwilling to respect the rights of others within that society.
Incarceration as a tool of punishment, while widely used, often poses more risk of harming society than any benefit from "punishing" offenders.
It's a complex issue, and simplifying it to "Law and order! Lock 'em up!" is reductive and often detrimental to the societies it's supposed to improve.
>No, I'm talking about incarceration in the USA. There's a huge difference between that and what's happening in China.
I was aware of that when responding. In fact, when I said:
"There are valid reasons to separate some folks from the rest of society (think John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc.), as they've shown themselves to be unable/unwilling to respect the rights of others within that society.
Incarceration as a tool of punishment, while widely used, often poses more risk of harming society than any benefit from "punishing" offenders.
It's a complex issue, and simplifying it to "Law and order! Lock 'em up!" is reductive and often detrimental to the societies it's supposed to improve."
The question is not whether it’s immoral. The question is whether it’s “voluntary” when the alternative is punishment. If pretending that this kind of work is voluntary is the only way you can make it morally palatable to you, then maybe you have a deeper issue that you’re blinding yourself to. It’s better to be realistic about what’s happening, and then decide whether you can live with the reality.
'sli stated, "It was major news that prisoners were sent to fight fires in California for little to no pay." This makes it sound as if they were forced to do a dangerous job against their will. As 'stickfigure pointed out, they could have chosen to sit in a cell instead. The fact that nobody goes to prison voluntarily is beside the point.
>> "It's a great thing," Pate tells me. "It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here."
>> They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good.
You're making the point of OP. When the only other option is "sitting in your tiny little cell", there's not much choice in it. It's less volunteering, and more escaping a psychologically untenable situation.
Given other options, I doubt many inmates would be willing to 'volunteer' or work for peanuts.
Yeah, it's like the rest of the US justice system "you can plead guilty and with the time we kept you in jail waiting for trial you can go home tomorrow, or you can go to trial at some unspecified point in the future and risk going to prison for 20 years - which one do you want?"
There is no free choice in that question. Just an illusion of one.
What are those other options? Take away the volunteer opportunity? Stop punishing people?
Just FYI, most of the non-prisoner firefighters in California are also volunteers. In my district (north Solano county), 90% of firefighters are volunteers. We don't get paid.
Just to make sure no one is confused by this, jobs in prison are a privilege you have to earn through good behavior.
Firefighting jobs are the most coveted because you get to leave prison grounds, and as of 2020, can now be employed as a firefighter upon release (in CA).
Prisoner firefighters in California are volunteers that opt in and receive significantly reduced sentences for their service and often end up working for Calfire upon release.
I think you're thinking of "slavery" as a term applying exclusively to chattel slavery, but it's far from exclusive to that form. Bonded labour and forced labour are commonly recognized forms of slavery, as people are obligated to serve another under threat of violence.
As others have mentioned, the 13th Amendment explicitly carves out forced labor as a legal form of slavery under a course of punishment. Referring to it as slavery does nothing to diminish the atrocities of chattel slavery.
> Equating forced labour as a whole with slavery, which is frequently used to refer to what existed in the US (HN audience is to large degree US-based) before 1865, may seem inconsiderate to those whose ancestors had to endure the latter.
I don't see this as a reason to cut off the discussion. Trying to distance forced labor from slavery may seem incosiderate to those who had to endure the former.
There's no escaping the inconsideration considerations, so I prefer to discuss the topic at hand without that baggage.
- there was a concerted effort after the end of slavery to put former slaves and their descendants into things that were almost like slavery, including mass incarceration
Knowing the details of the current situation and differentiating it from previous forms of slavery does matter, but, as you say, it's by no means the most important thing we should be focusing on and discussing in the comments.
That's not what your source says at all. One person who works for a anti-communist organization thinks that it meets the UN definition of genocide. This sort of malicious misinterpretation of China is why people think it's 100x more evil and absurd than it actually is. Another example is China's banning a few Winnie the Pooh memes got warped into China banning Winnie the Pooh altogether. Anyone who stepped foot into China would know that's ridiculous.
They are kept in camps, monitored constantly, have no privacy, are searched constantly and on top of that, they are forced to work or go to detention. That is slavery. There's also the problem with them getting gutted for the organ transplants that China's own doctors have reported to be 4 times higher than they should be for the population size. So it is work, or go to detention and possibly get gutted.
Probably because it’s received quite a bit of attention. If you’ve been reading HN for a while, particularly articles about the recent injustices in China, you’ve likely already encountered such claims.
I often hear that uyghurs organs are sold as pure/halal organs to muslims from Saudi Arabia (and other rich muslims countries). If it is true -- and I think it is -- that is indeed absolutly abominable.
> But when Tohti arrived at the destination, he was shocked to find at least 10 prisoners had been shot in a field by a firing squad.
> Armed police waved the surgeon and his medical team over and directed them to a man lying unconscious on blood-soaked ground.
> Tohti said: “He’d been shot in the right-hand side of the chest but was still alive.
> “I told my chief surgeon he wasn’t dead but he ordered me to remove the man’s liver and kidneys there and then – and to be quick about it. I was ordered not to give the man any anaesthetic.”
> They are kept in camps, monitored constantly, have no privacy, are searched constantly and on top of that, they are forced to work or go to detention
This also seems to describe prison labor that occurs in the US, which, putting problems and criticisms aside, is definitely different from slavery. I don't think the imprecision in language is helpful, it hurts the cause in the same way people constantly referring to modern political leaders as literal Nazis hurts their credibility.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Run tell dang. Maybe he'll wake up and do something about the blatant CCP shills
(I doubt it) after giving me a scolding for telling him (and you) to fuck off.
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 paint yourself blue and write obscenities on your face and walk into a library, but that isn't evidence that anyone does it. (Likewise, it's legal to make people pay you fifty times the inflation-adjusted value of a loan you gave them – things being legal isn't evidence that they don't happen, which would be absurd.)
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.
But you haven't showed it occurs; only that it's legal. Plenty of things are legal that nobody does, and plenty of things are illegal that people do all the time.
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.
Because it isn't. It's distinct from chattel slavery, which is not the only form of slavery. Bonded labor is the most common form of slavery today, and is also not chattel slavery.
"They are kept in camps, monitored constantly, have no privacy, are searched constantly and on top of that, they are forced to work or go to detention..."
An Amazon warehouse is already 90% there then.
That's why we have the definition of "modern slavery".
It could be interesting would journalists on the Gruniad have to give up using macs then.
"We rely on our suppliers sharing our values and complying with all laws at all times. We expect our business partners to treat people with dignity and respect and not to engage in practices associated with forced labor, even if not illegal in their location"
"Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by the threat of violence or some other method of abuse. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner."
>Equating slavery with forced labour belittles the gravity and awfulness of what actual slavery is (or was).
Doesn't matter. That's a crap argument.
First, because enlarging some things (which necessitates belittling others) can help put an end to them.
Second, because forced labor and slavery are not that far off anyway. Both are depriving a person of their agency and steal their time and effort.
Third, because slavery itself was historically a spectrum. There were "domestic slaves" (sorta like Stephen in Django), cooks, nannys, teachers and "butler" types in charge of estate work in ancient Rome and Greece, etc.) that were treated and worked more or less like modern employees (except from the forced labor), even slaves in management of other slaves, and slaves that were chained, worked to the bone, beaten, raped, etc.
"Forced" is the word the article uses. We don't know if that's accurate or hyperbolic. I think issues like these are worth scrutiny and intense investigation, but I'm not going to pull my pitch fork out just yet.
It's so easy to sit in my desk chair, read an article like this and have an armchair outrage moment.
pulling out your wallet without thinking is as bad as pulling out a pitchfork. Perhaps worse, since you are holding the global poor to a higher burden of proof than the billionaire elites.
That's fine, but tell me where I can buy an ethically sourced phone? I develop for iOS, Android and Desktop systems. Each of these devices have thousands of components from different vendors that I have to support. The parent article is talking about some glass.
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.
My point is that there are too many components to have complete control over the whole supply chain, so these types of issues will come up and hopefully responded to accordingly. I really appreciate that these sustainable devices exist, and I think they are a huge step forward.
Getting back to the initial comment I made... I think it's important to keep a company like Apple/Google/Samsung honest regarding their attention to their supplier's ethics. A company like Apple is going to be pretty responsive to concerns of worker mistreatment, if presented in an honest way. If we are too quick to incriminate Apple whenever a story like this comes up, it comes off more like we have an agenda against them, especially if we are not vetting the story before expressing outrage.
You're right, and that's why governments must step in. Markets are not configured or incentivized to address ills like this, nor are corporations. Asking a corporation to right large scale social wrongs is like asking the DMV to operate your military or walking into a restaurant and asking them to come fix your roof. It's just the wrong socioeconomic tool for the job. If you try to really pressure or force them to do it, they'll do something half-assed much as you describe.
Boycotts can work a little, but a boycott large enough to be effective and overcome other market forces is very hard to organize and sustain.
I'm not totally letting Apple off the hook, just pointing out that without the government doing something here any measures Apple or anyone else takes will be ineffective. Even if Apple starts pushing back on this, other manufacturers will fill the void and take advantage of that cheap labor instead. Apple might even find it tough to police this since Chinese companies may lie about where work is being performed or who is doing it. They're likely to demand that Apple pay more for different labor and then pocket the money and use forced labor instead.
Boycott is a fine tool if we're talking about influencing the corner grocery store in a town of 100 people. You might actually put a dent in their business and cause them to change whatever you're boycotting about. On the other hand, boycotts are totally pointless vs GlobalUltraMegaCorps. If everyone on HN stopped buying from these massive companies, it wouldn't even be noticed. Apple sells roughly 200 million iPhones yearly. Do you think it's possible to get even 1% of those customers to act on a boycott?
Exactly. No one is ditching their iPhone. It’s all about the blue text bubbles. If Americans would just switch to WhatsApp or something else like the rest of the world we could get past the Android stigma.
Is the labor used to make an iPhone and different than any other phone? Or any other electronics for that matter?
As far as I know, unless you stop consuming electronics completely, you’re not avoiding the labor abuses mining the necessary metals in Central Africa or the labor to manufacture it in Asia.
About the only 'safe' phone would be a Samsung phone, but the likelihood that some parts are still sourced from un-vetted Chinese parts supplier is high.
Apple is far from perfect, but they do more than 99% of manufacturers. Even the most 'woke' fashion brands are now having to deal with the fact that much of their cotton is coming from Uyghur forced labor.
I applaud this kind of reporting, to expose the practices of the Nazi-like Chinese/Industrial exploitation machine, but I'm leery of the tendency to apply 'Apple' to every such article, like Greenpeace was doing for a long while to drum up publicity.
Samsung is one of Lens Technology's biggest customers, according to the New York Times[1]. This is the company in today's report , so I'm not sure why you think Samsung is safe.
So you're making my point for me? Even the most vertically integrated manufacturer, who tries to avoid Chinese dependencies for strategic reasons, can't avoid it.
I'm no necessarily disagreeing with you, as far as saying "it would be weird to refer to the people in Auschwitz-II as slaves", but may I ask why? I can't come up with a reason, really. They were dehumanized, worked to death, treated as property and less. Would calling them slaves be giving the Nazis too much credit, at that point?
Because Auschwitz-II took dehumanisation to a whole extra level of depravity, far beyond slavery.
While you could logically argue that people there were also slaves, it would be an injustice to leave it at that. Generally speaking, slaves had some kinds of rights that were far better than those in Auschwitz-II.
It's one thing to be treated as someone's property and forced labour, as a slave.
It's another thing to be subject to awful medical experimentation (often to death), torture of kinds that are barely imaginable, and mass killing with on-site factories literally built to murder the occupants and other occupants forced to dispose of the body parts of their friends afterwards. All of this in large numbers.
There's a reason Auschwitz-II had sections called "Crematoria I-IV".
Auschwitz-II makes almost every evil in the world look mild in comparison. It's that bad.
I'm just trying to get the comparison of terms down. While, yes, as an American, English is my first and primary language, I'm afraid some of its phraseology still confuses me. I think it has to do with parts of society that I don't understand, granted. The visceral reaction to the word "slavery" seems much more than to the more sanitized phrase "forced labor", or even "labor camp". Those are what we are what we're discussing here, like it or not. Uighurs are being sterilized and used as forced labor, but the phraseology is so sanitary as to not disturb our modern pallet of consumerism, we dare not draw a comparison to Nazis. While there are no crematoria, there are certainly shallow graves and executions, and parallels to be drawn. The word slave and forced labor is, at best, an argument of semantics of note only to those on the sidelines I'm sure, while those in bondage don't care what they're called.
> It would be weird to refer to the people in Auchwitz-II as slaves.
People in Auchwitz-II were enslaved, thus they were slaves, subjects of economic exploitation in their life, and death.
It's just we never, and for a wrong reason, talk about the original motive behind NSDAPs attack on Jews, and other minorities.
That motive is the same as for whatever else form of forced labour — class warfare, as was the case for many other pretexts for genocide in history.
The type of hatred NSDAP managed to peddle the most was not for hatred of Jewish people for being Jewish as such, but for Jewish people being rich.
NSDAPs first attacks on Jewish people were spun around the message of class warfare. NSDAPs biggest sell for Kristallnacht was the opportunity for poor angry underclasses to get from rags to riches in one night by robbing homes, and businesses of rich Jewish families with impunity after all.
Oh fuck off. A quick web search reveals that Auschwitz.org refers to slave labor as slave labor in numerous places.
> On July 4, 1942 at the latest, regular selection was introduced for the Jews arriving on RSHA transports. As a result, an average of only 20% of them were kept alive and placed in the camp as prisoners capable of performing slave labor. They were employed mostly in constructing new parts of the camp, or at German companies involved in maintaining and developing the military potential of the Third Reich. They were transferred on a mass scale from Auschwitz to sub-camps set up nearby or in Upper Silesia, or to concentration camps in the depths of the Third Reich.
being sold at a slave market in the middle east, is quite different from being forced to work or being put in a detainment camp. a slave in this context has no human value. its owning a human being, not simply forcing them to work. it can even be hereditary. its practiced daily since a certain religious figure did it and granted his followers the same "right". (to own another human being)
id argue there is a difference. i know im wrong though and there are many types of slavery. the reason i choose to make a difference between them is because ive seen both and i cannot to this day process what i saw, and the attitude of people. a slave from my experience is seen as subhuman. and when religion is used to justify it, its to me different from china. but i mean chinese citizens cannot leave their country and start a new life somewere else. so i think in the context of china you might be even further correct.
- US President-elect Joe Biden affirms his anti-China position. On Monday, he slammed China once again for “abuses” on trade, technology and human rights and said America can best pursue its goals relative to Beijing, when it is “flanked” by like-minded partners and allies. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/biden-slams-chines.... This should help confirm multinational COO's decisions to leave China faster.
- China keeps attacking other countries, and further isolating itself. From stopping coal trade with Australia, and causing blackouts for its own cities https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/australia/china-coa..., to engaging in border war with india, to antagonizing US, Canada and UK.
- Chinese suppliers engaging in more and more thievery and sabotage against its own global partners, as reported at chinalawblog. Western companies are reporting Chinese suppliers are brazenly not delivering on goods paid for.
This trend is not what you think it is. The factories are moving to other countries, but still owned by Chinese firms and still using the same, if not more brutal tactics.
Multinational factories are owned by multinationals. Yes, some factories are owned by Chinese firms, but even that's misleading. Alot of the "Chinese" firms have Hong Kong owners, who usually operates more ethically, and hates China, than "CCP state" firms that engages in modern day slavery.
Eh, nobody, including yourself, maybe except the Jainists, are willing to do without the creature comforts of their lifestyle, not just Apple users. Look at all the things you own and use, some of them built in the same Foxconn factory no doubt.
We can look the squalor of factory-farmed animals right in the eye while biting into our ham sandwich and say "damn, someone should really do something about that." Or, perhaps more commonly, "I'm entitled to this, actually."
So why would we budge over a little forced labor on the other side of the world? Or pollution? Or anything else?
We care about things right up to the point where we have to lift a finger. Though, aside, for this reason I think legislation is one of the only solutions short of waiting for a cultural awakening that probably won't ever come.
Emphasis on the word "fans". Analogy: I hate Google's business model, but I still have to use their products for lack of better alternatives.
The difference is that I won't go around evangelizing (i.e. marketing) their products as a consumer, pumping up demand if I knew the negative costs associated with it. On the corporate side is Apple's hypocrisy PR- i.e. don't drink their koolaid.
>The obvious one, the search engine... due to its accuracy and speed. No wonder their monopoly lawsuit.
As a general rule, I don't use the search engine. And not just because of Google's market power. It's also because the quality of search results have dropped enormously.
At this point, other search engines are at least as good, IMHO.
>Though, aside, for this reason I think legislation is one of the only solutions short of waiting for a cultural awakening that probably won't ever come.
I don't think it'll ever come because we've allowed ourselves to create an atmosphere where there's entities doing their utmost to ensure it never happens via the tolerance of behaviour economics and psychology being used in marketing, the tolerance of big corporate lobbyists, the corruption of science via corporate backed "studies" whose results align with the initial desires, etc.
The only consolation being that our unmitigated greed will likely destroy us long before we have the chance to infest the stars with it, and that life will go on without us.
This is an old documentary and a bit different demographic, but it is still pertinent. If people didn't care back then, I doubt they will this time though...
I'm not an Apple fan, probably more of an Apple hater, but why is Apple the bad guy for seeking cheaper labor? Why is it the consumers problem that China allows it's citizens to be treated like shit? Why is this ethical responsibility somehow always offloaded to the consumer?
> Why is this ethical responsibility somehow always offloaded to the consumer?
Because NO ONE else seems to be up to the task.
I think folks here are getting lost in the weeds about precise definitions which don't really matter that much and what they think are laws that can be applied across national boundaries (generally, that's not feasible).
There has been an effort to ban "conflict minerals" from modern supply chains. It's partially successful (in that you effectively get "a sticker" that you can show-off if your supply chain doesn't use children as miners). It would be nice if, AT LEAST, a similar half-measure could be done for "forced labor" (or whatever you want to call what they're doing to the Uighurs).
> Why is this ethical responsibility somehow always offloaded to the consumer?
Because without consumer, there would be no incentive for either China and Apple to behave amorally.
China is a totalitarian dictatorship. As long as it's citizens don't rebel, they have no incentive to change their behavior. Apple is a publicly traded company. They need good publicity.
So, as a humanist, I say it's up to the consumers to force Apple to stop contributing to human rights abuses.
If I have the opportunity to buy something not made in China, I will take it. Unfortunately, it's essentially impossible to buy any consumer electronics not made there.
The set of things you can buy these days that isn't made in China is essentially restricted to luxury goods and safety-critical equipment (cars, guns, scuba gear, etc.); despite what they tend to say out loud, companies know that it's prohibitively expensive to get safety-critical reliability out of Chinese manufacturing. But if it's just your camera or power drill or whatever, they know you're not going to sue them when it breaks. Apple actually does a really good job on QC for Chinese manufacturing, but then you have all these accusations of forced labor to contend with.
This isn’t even concern trolling virtue signalling, this is you using human slavery to score internet tech superiority points by ... making up some fantasy strawman to sneer at.
And then try to claim you are different for using Google because you hate yourself at the same time.
The problem is the propertied capitalist class, not the working class.
The capitalist class has the power. I appreciate your intention, yet it's super important to be clear that the problem is the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system, as the means of production are monopolized in their hands. The most advanced form through which the bourgeoisie (in this case Apple) expropriates, creates enclosures and exploits/oppresses, is 1) through the use of trade secret laws [1], which steals away new inventions from the commons and stifles learning and innovation, as well as 2) through the means-of-exchange money system that obscures relationships between people and places [2].
"Zak Cope makes the case that capitalism is empirically inseparable from imperialism, historically and today. Using a rigorous political economic framework, he lays bare the vast ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries through the mechanisms of monopoly rent, unequal exchange, and colonial tribute. The result is a polarized international class structure with a relatively rich Global North and an impoverished, exploited Global South.
Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions, and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised. The only way forward, Cope argues is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labor internationalism." [3]
As an anti-capitalist, does it give you pause for thought that the Campaign for Accountability, which is behind this report, was co-founded by Louis Mayberg, the principal in a large investment management company.
If everyone's accountable, the world's a better place for everyone (except perhaps the people committing flagrantly unethical crimes). You don't need to be a staunch anti-capitalist to see that. And hey, if you've got money, maybe you can do something about it.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
There’s an active attempt in congress to amend the constitution to abolish slavery in the US:
Apple clearly does have a responsibility here, they acknowledge that themselves in their supplier policies. They have also taken steps previously to drop suppliers that have been found to use forced labour, so they're aware of the problem and willing to take action.
So the question here is what is the evidence, what does it show, and if Apple's inspections have missed anything how can they improve their policies and enforcement actions to ensure it doesn't happen again.
They can rely on the consumers to just shut their eyes and go "lalala". It's been working so far and as long Apple doesn't get 'old', none of the influencers will try to call Apple out.
Capitalism working at its best; collect all the surplus and make somebody else pay for it.
I'm amazed the world isn't taking more action on China. Its quite sad really, 20 years ago, any one of the headlines from this year would have prompted sanctions and denunciations...
There's sadly a pretty long history of the international community ignoring atrocities as long as they're contained within a country. The answer to "why won't we recognize <genocide>?" is usually "because the victims were from the same country as the perpetrators".
We let China get too big without modernizing/democratizing. Massive foreign policy failure by the western world. Now they appear too big to reign in and everyone (except maybe the US) is scared of them and just wants to play nice.
We "let" them get too big? They are an ancient society who have had millions of inhabitants for centuries. They were already big, huge in fact. In the wake of Mao, however, they have a one party communist system that exterminated it's intellectual and critical class decades ago. Hard to see what could've been done during the Cold War, we tried the domino theory which was a colossal failure in Korea and Vietnam and Laos.
We let them get too big economically. We let them into the western world trading economy under the hope that they would normalize into a western-like democracy with liberal ideals. That has obviously failed.
As an Asian, this is a reason that I start to become disillusioned with "the world community". Their missionary zeal has not diminished. It just transformed from religion into political ideology.
There are alternatives outside of so called "western-like democracy with liberal ideals".
It becomes really inconvenient when you have outsourced so much of your manufacturing there. Who is going to make your stuff then? (Maybe something we should have thought of before this, but then China took a turn towards more authoritarian under the current CCP chairman.)
China is now itself outsourcing to cheaper countries, because Chinese labor has become expensive. Supply chains become flexible when the incentives are there. I think the Trump tariffs were on the right track, but for the wrong reasons.
There is genocide going on against Muslims, and the US would typically denounce religious genocide. The current president seems more concerned with watching Fox and pardoning his friends than handling Muslim rights issues.
> I'm amazed the world isn't taking more action on China. Its quite sad really, 20 years ago, any one of the headlines from this year would have prompted sanctions and denunciations...
Why would world politicians take any actions against China when so many of them do have a finger in the honeypot themselves?
Invalidate stock shares* of all companies who made untold billions on China, and you will see that a huge double digit of Western politicians will go broke overnight.
The one sole reason the West was so eager to jump on the China train unlike any other broke harebrained communist country was because China went from the start to openly bribing Western elites.
Yeah, but what does it mean?
To revoke ownership of the company from its owners? Who then gets to own the company and why?
Or does it mean the company should cease to exist, and all employees should be fired immediately? We should deny honest people from getting their salaries?
But owning shares mean owning a part of a company? Does that mean that when a company’s shares are invalidated, then the company is now worth zero, and anybody can buy it for a penny? Are the owners forced to sell everything for a penny, or they are allowed to choose, when to sell and at what price?
Why would the price be different from current stock price?
> But owning shares mean owning a part of a company? Does that mean that when a company’s shares are invalidated, then the company is now worth zero, and anybody can buy it for a penny? Are the owners forced to sell everything for a penny, or they are allowed to choose, when to sell and at what price?
In real life, bankruptcy usually ends up essentially invalidating the shares of a company. Depending on the method of bankruptcy, the company continues to exist, but the owners of the existing shares loose any claim to anything. If "invalidate stock shares" of a public company became some kind of sanction for improper behavior, it would probably be coupled with some kind of process to transfer ownership?
Invalidating all shares in a company without further process to reallocate ownership is an interesting hypothetical. I suppose the organization would become something like abandoned property and escheat to the government.
> The one sole reason the West was so eager to jump on the China train unlike any other broke harebrained communist country was because China went from the start to openly bribing Western elites.
This is very accurate. Recent example is the implied Biden family in CCP's pocket [1][2].
Against the largest consumer/retail market in world? Not going to happen at the country level and risk reciprocal economic restrictions.
Only way to get china to change is have people vote with their wallets and refuse to buy Chinese made stuff but at the end of the day people just don't care and just want cheap stuff.
If you gave someone a choice between $100 IPhone made by slave child labor and $1000 IPhone that was made humane conditions at fair wages, i am willing to bet more than 75% of people take the $100 IPhone.
I will buy the phone made by slave child labour because the only reason they exist is because economy, if they make money, at least their next generation can live a better life. It is not likely that without a factory they will study and go to college like you would think. The alternative to a bad choice may be a worse choice, not a better choice.
I have to state a fact that there is no child labour in China. Were their child labour before? Maybe some. My uncle left home when he was 14 to work in a factory. 40-50 years ago. Nowadays, the earliest age you can find real jobs is probably 16. So no, you don't find a child labour made iPhone. But if there is child labour somewhere, you either find a not-worst-case solution or you get him out of there. And you have to think from his point of view, understand his circumstances.
The problem is that Europe has no appetite for any sort of confrontation. Their leadership in peace and climate initiatives mask how little they're willing to do to address issues which have a potential body-bag cost. They have poured hundreds of billions of dollars every year into a dictatorship with no accountability and its military. And shifting all that industrial capacity out of Europe certainly made it look greener, with all the smoke out of sight.
If China becomes militarily stronger and Xi's domestic position weakens, war will be his first resort. If Taiwan had to be defended, there will be very little help coming from Europe.
I've been pleased with how the EU has made progress with Iran. Maybe that plus brexit, Russia and refugees has been too much for them. We'll see I guess.
> I'm amazed the world isn't taking more action on China. Its quite sad really, 20 years ago, any one of the headlines from this year would have prompted sanctions and denunciations...
I don't think so. Nothing happened with Tibet, or after the Tiananmen Square event AFAIK.
20 years ago, the people that signed all the trade deals with countries such as China claimed it would lead to improving democracy and human rights there, obviously, it didn't, People's Republic of China has never been more autocratic. Ethical and moral concerns should have been addressed when China joined the WTO in 2001, irregardless China's political structure. China got a very good deal, western industrials as well, but at what human cost?
I wasn't interested in economy at the time, but I still remember clearly debates on talkshows between human rights advocates and people pushing trade deals and their arguments, it was a time where you could still publicly talk about the situation in Tibet. Today? Nobody would even dare.
Tiananmen was at least met with lasting arms embargo, both from the EU and US...
I think the expectation for many (myself included) was that as living standards rose, the Chinese people would demand democratic reform (rule of law, justice for all, some say in decisions and leadership). China (or rather the ccp) has successfully avoided that so far.
Now its flexing that power and people like me, who expected natural change, are forced to re-evaluate.
> the republic of China has never been more autocratic
This is a more nuanced issue than it might seem in some ways though. I have some first hand experience since many of my coworkers are native Chinese living in different parts of China.
Trade has enabled the growth of a previously non-existent middle class in China and they have started to assert political power in ways not immediately apparent to Westerners.
One example is the "Beijing smog" that everyone knows about. The Chinese middle class are becoming unwilling to tolerate the total environmental devastation that was the norm two decades ago. They have put a lot of pressure on the CCP to keep the air cleaner and as a result many dirty industries like iron casting have had a huge number of restrictions put on them in the last 5 years. I would consider this a direct result of the political willpower of the Chinese people.
In my experience though, the reason things like the treatment of the Uyghurs or Tibetans have not changed is simply because the average Chinese person does not care or wish to rock the boat.
Before you finger wag about that, consider the American treatment of South American migrants that has come into the spotlight in the last 4 years. I would say that the reason it has not changed has the same root cause. The average American does not care, or silently approves and thus there is not enough pressure on the ruling party to produce change.
> Before you finger wag about that, consider the American treatment of South American migrants that has come into the spotlight in the last 4 years.
South American migrants are treat fine, just not those who break in illegally (we can agree to differ if that's fair or not). I'm sorry but this is just not comparable to a possible genocide of the Uyghurs.
What's with illegal migrants and US? You're from Europe like me do you even realize we dump them to remote islands to live in shitty camps and illegal immigration is not tolerated anywhere in Europe? Are you clueless or intellectually dishonest? Either way it doesn't look good.
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>The greatest explosion of personal freedoms that the Chinese people have experienced in the past 4,000 years has taken place in the last 40 years
There's some slide back in some categories from Hu Jintao era, but overall things are progressing. The west fixates on the 1% of extra bad when it's been mostly great.
>what human cost?
800m uplifted from poverty, a few million minorities gets shafted, to be crass: the cost was/is negligible all things considered. Post 90s China bad, but mostly good. Overwhelming good compared to others with similar starting positions and much better development conditions, i.e. China had some of the most onerous WTO accession protocols and sanctions that held back her development.
I worked in China under Chinese rule, there's frustrations, but it was mostly fine. Know / related to many Chinese nationals, spectrum from FLG practitioners to purged officials. From rich coastal provinces to poor inland ones. China's a stressful place, everyone bitches about how things are, the loudest from their multi million dollar tier1 condos. But almost no one wants to go back to Mao days, except the FLG practitioner because they missed ideological purity of the old party. People can sing whatever, and if you believe the recent Harvard surveys, they sing mostly good things. The fact that they're singing in the first place is unparalleled freedom compared to Mao times where private speech got you fucked, i.e. what the Uyghurs are going through now, which is to say 99% of the country has moved past that. It's an unambiguous improvement. First ever civil code just passed this year as well.
It's only been 30 years, about how long it took Taiwan/Korea to liberalize, except things take longer when you have 1.4B people and antagonism from global superpower. Taiwan/Korean dictatorship got unambiguous and sustained US support. Under Xi, it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Realistically it's is 5 steps forward and 1 step back, but west likes to paint that 1 step as a chasm.
> a few million minorities gets shafted, to be crass: the cost was/is negligible
That is the difference between a society of freedom and human rights, and mob rule. Someone else's benefits have nothing to do with the horrors suffered by people in Tibet and Xinjiang. Each one of those people is as important as you or me.
>Each one of those people is as important as you or me.
Yeah they are.
The reality is also that frontier territories have been historically spared the harsh repressions rest of country / populus went through postwar like cultural revolution, great leap forward, strict family planning etc, simply by virtue of being too far. Enter infrastructure and billions in spent on connectivity. Secessionism had to be reign in eventually, and current systems has as much carrots as sticks. Also carrots that was not available to a much poorer China. There's a reason why disproportionate resources are diverted to Tibet and XJ for development. Carrots that freedom + human rights countries typically do not extend to their own repressed minorities. Indigenous camps in Canada still don't have clean water, because voters in democracies do not want to give carrots when virtue signalling is sufficient. CCP doesn't have to listen to majority Han reee about spending money on minorities. Last time I calculated enough money poured into XJ to cut every Uygure a 200K RMB / 30K USD check.
The fundamental issue is carrots are not enough, you cannot pay people to secularize/sinicize/integrate. You have to indoctrinate, not just future generations, but also current. This is not endorsement of the policies. Merely it is predictable next step with new Chinese capabilities, further made inevitable by salafist terrorism fermented by blowback of foreign policy decisions of USSR/West/ME and other geopolitical factors. Things would be very different in a world without mujahideens inspiring drama in XJ or CIA fucking around with Tibet or general US pivot to Asia or current great powers competition. This is why CCP is obsessed with with foreign meddling. Nevermind that Tibet/XJ is 2/3 of Chinese land and contain vast security benefits. More relevant to "as important as you or me", these minorities are _more_ important than the average Han. Security is paramount state responsibility, more so in an authoritarian one because there is no one else to shift blame. And even then blame is no replacement for overwhelmingly excessive counter-terrorism response where possible. Incidentally why XJ is getting the full measure while Tibet gets half. That's baseline populist expectation, CCP is adding the carrots when the people scream for sticks. A democratic China would just lockup the Uyghurs and Tibetans in perennial prison industrial complexes like US or sequester them away in generation ghettos like France. An imperial China would actually genocide them. Trivially. That's the dynamic of in a capitalist ethnostate with "problematic" minorities. What currently exists is not the best timeline, but it's also not remotely the worst for security logic, which again, trumps all other considerations. Incidentally, this applied to HK, and will apply to Taiwan.
What a depressing world you must live in. In reality, the news is pretty good: Freedom has expanded dramatically. Freedom was expanding in China until Xi took over, with many working and planning for democracy. A local downturn isn't at all 'inevitable'; we can easily turn it around.
Freedom has expanded dramatically in the U.S. too. Minorities such as Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Irish, Italians, Germans (once reviled!) and more are now unquestioned members of society. Women went from an oppressed majority to full members of the workplace, expanding participation in government, etc. Few would dream now of suggesting women shouldn't work - something that was a norm a couple of generations ago. LGTBQ+ people's rights have expanded: They can marry, they don't lose their jobs over it, they can serve openly in the military and in government.
African-Americans enjoy far more rights: Obama was elected, as was Kamala Harris. Education has expanded; discrimination is socially unacceptable - no politician would survive using certain language. Law enforcement abuse of African-Americans is widely seen as a problem. Even Republicans voted to remove Confederate names from military bases.
We still have a long way to go, including for African-Americans, women in the workplace, LGBTQ+, Muslims, and more. But to suggest oppression is inevitable is just ignorant; it denies the facts. One wonders why some people seem to want it to be true?
No. Trump has done basically nothing and hasn't managed to run a mini holocaust, crush democracy in one corner of his realm, launch a preventable global pandemic and engage another nuclear power in direct military conflict.
For all his evil, he's not effective. Xi Jinping is what Trump dreamed of being...
A lot of what Trump and Pompeo had to overcome was the treaty abandonment that peaked under Obama. Asia is arming itself to the teeth because Obama allowed China (Xi was actually personally involved) to steal the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.
If you're referring to NATO members underpaying their contributions to their own defence, that's on them. Of course they're whining about an increase from 1.5% of GDP to 2.0 - 3.0%.
It's sad that I have to explain this to HN readers on a monthly basis. You literally don't know what you're talking about on this forum.
because investigations performed by the companies or governments themselves tend to portray themselves as not culpable for any actions (often omitting pertinent details). Independent review is the only way to be honest.
but - not being able to conduct its investigation doesn't automatically cause China to be in the wrong. More evidence is needed here. (Independent review being disallowed nationally is a bigger concern I will admit)
In cases like there were actually investigating can land the people doing the investigating in prison, I think proceed according to the cautionary principle.
So, if a tyrannical dictatorship like China is accused of abusing human rights and said tyrannical dictatorship is not willing to let people investigate the claims, we can accept the accusations as true until aforementioned tyrannical dictatorship is willing to let people investigate.
About the dictatorship we don't need to have a discussion, do we?
The "tyrannic" part: A tyrant is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law. This pretty much describes the Chinese Communist Party. Critics are silenced, dissidents are disappeared, non-han-chinese are robbed of their heritage. (See the Uigurs or the Mongols.) Even if you don't violate the law, you'll get punished through it[0]. There's massive corruption and people's rights are violated in routine and international agreements are ignored (see Hong Kong).
Yeah, well... I think the U.S. has some massive problems, but that's on another page and although I'd love to talk about these problems, let's stick with China for now. That a big enough pig.
Yes, my house is on fire, and that's a big issue that should be addressed, but check out the big fire across the road. Let's focus on that one.
(As someone who does not live in the US, it's hard to take the consistent negativity on China and the wilful ignorance on US domestic issues seriously, without just seeing it as propaganda...)
Since I don't live in the U.S. either, I don't see why we should include the U.S. in this discussion. I'll happily comment about the prison-industrial-complex or legalized corruption or about the dangers of militarized police... if it is the topic at hand.
The issue at hand is how China and Apple are profiting from slave labor, how much this is by design or by neglect and what to do about it.
Sure if you want to derail it. But the Actual post is about an American company taking advantage of essentially Chinese prison labour.
You think drawing a parallel to American companies taking advantage of American prison labour is unrelated to this discussion preferring to focus on the race of the 'prison labour' rather than the nature of the labour.
Two wrongs don’t make a right—hold every last one of them accountable, don’t excuse human rights abuses by anyone just because someone else has also committed abuses.
I think that there's an issue in how industrial nations abuse the lack of protection for workers in developing nations and how this usually results in profit extraction and massive human rights violations.
It would be nice to be able to force companies to take responsibility for crimes happening in their supply chain. I think this is the only way to prevent willful blindness. Otherwise the profit motive of the whole will always override the morality of the individual.
We should also improve whistleblower protections so that instead of just relying on hearsay and vague accusations we can actually have solid proofs of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, especially in tyrannical dictatorships like China this is very unlikely, given that even a 'democracy' like the US is struggling with those.
That said; I don't that China as a whole is a developing nation anymore. There are big chunks of the country that might still be 'developing', but as a whole China is very much an industrial superpower.
China Per person GDP: $9,770.85 USD
US Per Person GDP: $62,794.59 USD
China isn't a developing nation? So they should just be happy with 1/6 of the wealth US Residents get and stop now?
What Crime is happening in their supply chain? Prison Labour is not illegal in the US or China. US constitution specifically allows it... How do we force Apple to take responsibility for this?
There is solid proof of Labour camps, Prison Camps, Reeducation Camps, and persecution of the Uighurs, even the Chinese "tyrannical dictatorship" don't dispute it. It is fairly common knowledge among Chinese citizens as well. What will probably surprise you, is it has much wider support from the Chinese people than you'd expect. Now this could be that the context of "why" they are persecuted is not well known outside of china. It could also be that Chinese citizens are not comfortable objecting to it from fear of speaking out against their government. But it's not as clear cut of "wrongdoing" that this article nor this discussion makes out.
The US peoples voted into power a President who pardons war criminals. And the next incoming President supports (or has supported in the past) wars and bombings which cost the lives of countless non-combatants. Which places has China bombed? If the claim is China has lots its moral standing, then The US is not on any firmer moral ground either.
Well, those countries are not global powers, yet. Quite a bit of the China bashing comes from the US, and that's why I brought it up. If we judge the US and a lot of the other so called world leaders by the same standard as we judge China, things don't look so rosy anymore.
I'm quite willing to bash the U.S. too, believe me. The massive corruption in their political system, the systemic militarization of their police, the wasteful social inequality are just the tip of the iceberg of internal issues. Problematic is also their pursuit of dominance by military force, their financing and arming of groups opposing legitimate democratic governments. And that's just the beginning of my issues with the U.S.
In general I'm very skeptical that prison operators should be able to "rent out" their prisoners and that companies should be able to make profit of prisoner's work. The potential for abuse is just too high. (Maybe in a country like Finland that has some reasonable ideas about reintegration of criminals, but even there I see the dangers of corruption.)
The global production chains have put workers in jeopardy of exploitation. As long as there are no legal means to force companies to take responsibility, they will not take responsibility. It doesn't matter if a company is from the U.S. from Denmark or Finland; if there's no accountability, the profit motive will overrule any ethical concerns. Because that's what these companies were created for in the first place; to turn a profit.
Here we have just one more 'externality' that companies 'socialize' in their quest to squeeze out ever more profit. In this case it's not clean water or clean air, it's the mental and physical health of fellow humans that for one reason or another have deemed disposable.
That countries and the governments - whose job it is to server all their citizens - are such willing participants in these atrocities small and large is just the bitter icing on this putrid cake.
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.
China and Apple have their reputation to protect, so they have a very high stake in the game.
The Tech Transparency Project's goal is to uncover misconduct and malfeasance in public life. They don't have to 'prove' any wrongdoing with regards to Apple or China. If their research with regards to Apple or Chine doesn't pan out, they have many, many more potential targets without danger of losing any funding at all.
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!
Other reports funded by those aligned with US foreign interests. If it conforms to Chinese government behaviour then these are extremely public and predominantly well compensated rural labour transfer programs occuring in other provinces that alleviates poverty for 10s of millions every year. If it's anything like Chinese tech (it's not) then they would be extremely well compensated and overworked relative to rest of society. In Mike Pompeo's words: We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole. That should be the default assumption when treating these analysis, especially when they contradict each other i.e. Zenz estimates of millions detained is based off fanciful estimate of 1,200 camps... GIS analysis found only ~300, but the same analysis that essentially debunks Zenz will still blindly reaffirm his claims.
It's manufactured consent. The implication is reality is worse than CCP purports but better than US funded analysis alleges, especially considering ongoing geopolitical tensions. Per leaked XJ internal documents, these are indoctorination and vocational training camps designed to secularize and alleviate poverty. Abuse will happen when operating at large scales, but CCP "political work" and demographic engineering has always operated on carrot and stick. It's more or less a proven model that works more often than it doesn't. There's a reason why the current narrative tries to insinuate it's only stick, and has to operate on fabrications, cherry picked data, repeated testimonies from the same handful of people. It's Pompeo / state department's prerogative to lie, cheat, steal for US interests. People should understand this, except those for whose interest depends upon them not to.
If you don't believe them would you believe the US government, State Department, EU government, and the world's best free and independent press?
What about leaked primary sources from CCP [leaks]?
Huge volume of facts and research from all kinds of sources on the systemic genocide and forced labor of Uighurs and other ethnic
/ geographic minorities (Tibet, now scarily Hong Kong jailing and threatening the previously free press).
Because the bill says "you can't use slave labor" but also "you can't audit your supply chain to determine if slave labor is being used because audits are unreliable" so the only way to comply with a bill like that would be to completely pull out of China. Apple is desperately trying to do this with Vietnam and India plants but it doesn't happen overnight.
What is your answer? How do you evaluate claims and sources, and this claim and source? You seem to imply that you can't see any difference, and if that's the case (which I doubt), nobody can help you.
> Honest question.
Are other questions are dishonest? Why should we trust you?
it's not that simple, if it was that simple to build assembly plant operating corporations, everyone would do it, but it's hard business with very low margins. There are a few big companies capable of providing apple with enough manpower/production capabilities. And even though it's a low skill work, workers still has to be trained, and more importantly have to have high work discipline(which could be considered a part of a skill set) Most countries don't have that at least in large enough numbers for companies like apple(and its contractors) to use.
But when you wield Apple's power, you control those margins. They're also different because they've been able to make privacy and recycled materials marketing points in their industry worth paying for. Why not fair labor?
I'm very envious of the Chinese for having a government that unapologetically puts the interests of their people over foreigners.
Part of why this is so shocking to us Westerners is that it's such alien behaviour. We have become conditioned to expect foreigners are treated with extreme preference.
Uyghurs, Tibetans and Inner Mongolians are living under the yoke of the historically brutal Han empire. Made more brutal by Maoism.
Tibet isn’t China.
Inner Mongolia isn’t China
-stans aren’t China.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao are China. Free China. The China we should recognize and treat the CCP regime as a mere de facto ruler.
Instead of smuggling weapons into Tibet and Chinese occupied stans (just like the CCP did in its near abroad and not so near) the West gave China the means to become the world’s eminent hegemon.
Thanks Bill and Newt! The gifts of 90s political bankruptcy keeps giving.
Is anyone saying that they are? All coverage refers to them similarly to this article - they are a Muslim ethnoreligious minority.
The parallels to Muslim minority integration in the West is probably why it is so interesting to Westerners. The disparate treatment by governments is what makes it so striking - in China they are second class citizens; in the West they are favoured over the indigenous population.
It's the issue with using China manufacturing at all, although, even if Apple moved production to the US, chances are they'd still be facing forced labor allegations since they'd still need to get shipments from China for parts that can't be made in the US.
I don't think so. Even if you just get shipments for the rare earth materials that aren't present in first-world American countries, Apple would need to do the same supply chain audits all the way from shipment to mining, and they'd still be accused of using slave labor since apparently these audits don't work and using China at all introduces slave labor into your supply chain.
For now it still makes sense to do last-leg manufacturing in China since moving to the US has no benefits from a PR standpoint (due to the reasons above) and has huge negatives with needing to import the raw materials instead of just shipping the final product from China -> Alaska -> Continental US customers.
Maybe not in your circles, but Americans are sick of everything being made in China and Apple could afford to do it here if there were public pressure for them to do so.
I hate how American (and European) companies will virtue signal with commercials and campaigns (Apple and Nike come to mind) toting their ESG credentials but then will be doing stuff like this. People fall for it and it really pisses me off. Welcome to marketing.
It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs. It’s reprehensible and disgusting.
I am a proponent of ESG but (to me at least) it doesn’t appear there is a standardized method of calculation for metrics and things like forced labor (Nike, Apple) or pandering to a govt by censoring (NBA, Google) aren’t being captured. I could be off as I haven’t studied it that much. Everyone can agree what GAAP net income is but calculating ESG metrics is much more subjective.
The uyghurs thing was mostly a us media thing that plaid into trumps hands. There was barely if any media interest here in europe. Personally i have no opinion but from here it looked more like a obvious us political tactic than an actual huge issue. I could be totally wrong tho, but this sentiment may explains why there was no real reaction ot was basically the wrong person talking about it.
Uyghurs is a bipartisan issue not just a Trump thing (although it does play to his hand). Biden mentioned it a few times and I think even once in a debate.
>I hate how American (and European) companies will virtue signal with commercials and campaigns (Apple and Nike come to mind) toting their ESG credentials but then will be doing stuff like this
The absolute most egregious example of this (imo) is Colin Kaepernick.
He is literally paid by slavers. He is a multi-millionaire off of the profits of slave labor. It's disgusting that Nike is somehow putting forth a "woke" face while literally using slaves to build their products.
Slavery is not woke. And Colin Kaepernick is a particular sort of disgusting that he is happy to accept millions of dollars from slavers, while also shaming people who don't adhere to some hypocritical fight for racial justice, which he himself does not adhere to, and is in fact in on the profits of.
I was going to mention Kaepernick but decided not to to avoid the knee jerk downvotes. I agree but wouldn’t have used such strong language. It’s such a ridiculous double standard and I have friends that eat up the Kaerpernick marketing without thinking about it. I agree with Kaepernick’s message but the fact that Nike is backing him with that message is such a joke.
The President's casual tweeting really got to some people too. Weird. Perhaps it's a common and reasonable response to be concerned when an imprecise arrogant messenger amplifies tribalism and grievance politics.
Rather than people falling for it, they have pretty much the same incentives as the corporations. They like virtue signaling, when its costs are negligible and the externalities fall on others, but they don’t sacrifice cheap goods for some pretty lies.
What exactly did Apple do? The hired a contractor, and they just found out that contractor is using slave labor, so now they are investigating. The last time they found out a contractor was using slave labor, they severed the relationship.
I'm not sure what else you'd expect them to do exactly.
I would expect one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world that is always virtue signaling to have their supply chain 100% slave free. That is not a big ask.
It's a pretty big ask actually. They have 1000s of suppliers. I'm sure their vetting process is pretty thorough already, and then they act swiftly when they find out something was missed. Feel reasonable to me.
Instead of rambling about social justice better start vet your suppliers. People think Facebook should be responsible and vet what billions of people write online but somehow Apple the wealthiest company can't vet their damn supply chain? It has really come to this that these affluent privileged Silicon Valley tech bros rather have some 90 year old arrested for not wearing a mask while rambling about it on Twitter than have Apple vet their God damn suppliers.
The relationship between Apple and its suppliers is, ultimately, antagonistic. Apple wants to maximise units of work per dollar, their suppliers want to maximise dollars per unit of work. This creates an incentive for suppliers to cheat.
This makes the situation way, way more complex than “Apple needs to audit its supply chain”. While true, any such audit is going to be actively sabotaged by the suppliers. This will include actions like hiding workers, forcing them to lie, or moving them strategically between production lines to hide the truth.
I don’t mean to defend Apple here. I’m not sure what stops them creating their own businesses in China and Vietnam and elsewhere, where they directly hire the workers. Why does Apple outsource this stuff in the first place? Perhaps that’s the standard we should be holding them to.
It's amazing how Apple is able to maintain and enforce such strict quality and secrecy amongst their suppliers, yet they seem to fail often when it comes to labor and human rights violations.
I don't think it's a coincidence. There's a clear lack of effort here, or at least not on par with their other ones.
>It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs.
Yeah, welcome to marketing indeed.
China is not treating Uyghurs any worse than the US is treating black people or Mexicans. In fact, China is doing exactly what the U.S. is doing to minorities: jailing them and making inmates more productive with prison labor.
I’ve decided to leave the Apple ecosystem in 2021. But the problem is not isolated to Apple. In fact, I’d be surprised if other, cheaper products aren’t quite a bit worse.
Is there an electronics company that does a better job? (That’s not a rhetorical question.)
Fairphone have dozens of suppliers in China, some of them indirect, and they say in their own literature they can't directly vouch for every company in their supply chain.
They're in exactly the same boat as Apple. IMHO this is about China, not any one company.
Oh absolutely, they work very hard on this and deserver a lot of credit for it, but then so do Apple. They have some of the strictest policies and most thorough inspections in the industry and this still keeps happening to them.
I don't think it's comparable no. The effort put by Fairphone to build an ethical tech company is not comparable with what apple have been doing.
There's a lot of information on their website and it's worth to have a look: https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact
Repair is only a factor because it contributes to device longevity, but iPhones have the longest average device lifetimes in the industry by a long way. In theory they could make it even longer but it's a relatively marginal issue in environmental terms. I agree there are other reasons that make it desirable as well and every little helps, but the fact remains iPhones have industry leading overall environmental impact.
“..researchers found that brand, an intangible property, is more important than repairability or memory size in extending the life of a product.”[0]
The article found that Apple phones last on average a year longer than Samsung’s.
The average for all smartphones is estimated as from 2 to 3 years, but bear in mind that includes many Apple devices, so non Apple devices must average the low end of that.[2]
> but iPhones have the longest average device lifetimes in the industry by a long way
After iPhones are not supported anymore they turn into bricks. This typically happens in 5 years, which is not too bad, but it's far from being perfect. Why should a smartphone be supported for much shorter than laptops? Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle, in this order.
Librem 5 GNU/Linux phone has a lifetime support with updates.
> After iPhones are not supported anymore they turn into bricks.
Where on Earth do you get that from? My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years. My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
I see comments like this all the time. Apple devices have built in redundancy, yet in fact they have industry leading device support and lifetimes. Apple is an arch polluter, yet over here in reality they have the highest environmental rating from Greenpeace of any major smartphone vendor. Where do people like you get this stuff, and why? What is it that’s motivating you to say these things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
You simply should not use a smartphone without security updates. It's as good as a brick in this case. (Or maybe never use Internet and Bluetooth on it).
So which OS or phone are you going to go with? Google only guarantees 3 years of support. Fairphone 2’s last OS update was 14 months ago, there’s no way that’s up to date with security issues so their track record is looking pretty dicey. After all they’re dependent on Google as well. Even if they do eventually get another update there’s no way a 14 month gap between security patches is acceptable. Fairphone only actually guarantee 2 years of support anyway.
So what phone do you use that can beat the iPhone 6 with 6 years of regular patches?
> My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years.
Connection to App Store does not mean it's actually supported with patches or secure to use. I would call it "a brick".
> My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
But the new OS is not going to be installed anymore (according to the link above). Any technical reasons for that, apart from the planned obsolescence?
> Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
Thank you, I am also assuming good faith and so could you please provide evidence for your claims? For how long do security updates typically come and for how long the OS is updated to new versions? Anecdotes are not enough on HN.
> industry leading device support and lifetimes
In the industry of planned obsolescence 5 years support becomes a gold standard praised by fanboys. But in reality it is very short and leads to nature pollution. I see no reason not to support devices forever or let the community support them when they are too old. Apple does neither of those.
> things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
Your words are very strong yet you give no (reliable) disprove.
Apple has official repair locations all over the planet and they stock parts long after products are discontinued. Yes it kinda sucks that they killed third party repair but having an official location with official parts is actually more useful than being able to do it yourself but not being able to get parts.
For my pixel 2, while there were no technical restrictions preventing me from replacing the broken camera, the screen was glued in in a way making it very difficult to open without smashing. There were also no places to buy the camera other than what seemed to be cameras stripped out of broken/stolen pixel 2s.
> while there were no technical restrictions preventing me from replacing the broken camera, the screen was glued in in a way making it very difficult to open without smashing.
You just presented a technical restriction, didn't you?
> but having an official location with official parts is actually more useful than being able to do it yourself but not being able to get parts.
I disagree. This is not so much about DIY-repairs, but about a free market for third-party repairs, without which Apple can force people to pay as much as they want.
Did you read the link? It's manufactured in the US. The other version of Librem 5 which is made in China and assembled in US costs $800: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.
Honestly i never felt the ecosystem to be that great, its just the same shit others are doing in a walled garden way. I am sure you will be fine finding your own stack
Sadly true. Years ago, I watched a brutal documentary on a mine where the life expectancy of the workers was insanely short. Their primary industrial clients were electronics manufacturers. I don’t know what I can do, though, as programming is my living.
I like the suggestion of always buying used goods. But obviously, a secondary market still encourages the primary market. It’s not a perfect solution.
Would you consider only buying a used/refurbished phone/computer? Obviously it’s not scalable to the masses, but not putting any money in Apple’s pocket directly
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.
And supply chains aren’t necessarily constants. They can flip overnight when some distant vendor lights the contract on fire after the audit is complete by switching to a cheaper source, pocketing the difference. The most newsworthy instances often involve steel and catastrophic failure. People in this comment section saying that Apple executives should be held criminally liable have a very naive understanding of how long the tentacles of the supply chain go for anything made with more than a few raw materials.
I fault companies like Apple for doing business with companies who do these things.
But I'm not sure if anything changes if local governments aren't interested in stopping it (or actually support it) either.
Markets don't care about human rights... and if the local government supports this (in this case China, but other places too). I don't see how this ever changes.
It changes by holding companies like Apple accountable. They are the largest company in the world for goodness sake. Their audits when so little as a picture of a manual gets leaked are incredibly thorough, yet when it comes to literal slavery they're unable to reign it in? If we were to hold executives liable for acting as slavers then it would be miraculous how quickly corporate leadership would suddenly be interested in the well being of their fellow man.
> We talk about slavery, that ended with state actions. I'm not sure China cares, and accordingly the practice will continue.
You're correct, but there's another angle to this than ending the practice: moral complicity.
An individual in the antebellum south couldn't reasonably end the institution of slavery in the US, but he could have taken actions that affected the degree he was personally complicit. If he owned and profited from slavery, he was clearly complicit. If he did but had a change of heart and manumitted them, he's far less so. If he became an abolitionist and did his best to avoid supporting slaveholders or the products of slavery, he's hardly complicit at all.
If Apple chooses to deal with companies that use forced labor (or chooses to look the other way), it's complicit, and that means it's customers are too (to a lesser degree).
The issue is arising from China potentially forcing Uighur people to find jobs 'on their own' lest they be held indefinitely in concentration camps. You can't audit that. You ask every worker and see if they say 'yes' or 'no' to the question "are you working here of your own free will" and see which ones say no with this threat looming over them.
But even if that's true, there's no law of nature that compels Apple to buy from suppliers located in China or locate its operations there. It could cut ties and pull out (and Apple's one of the few companies with the resources to build up new supply chains elsewhere), or it could direct its suppliers to setup new factories outside of China to supply its needs in an easily auditable way.
It may even be easier than that. As far as I can tell, this "Lens Technology" company makes phone cover glass, and Apple already deals with Corning to make other glass components, and I'm sure they'd like the business. It looks like none of their Gorilla Glass factories are inside China.
Right, I'm not disputing that there will always be someone horrible willing to do that. What I'm saying is that large American companies and their executives should be held legally responsible if that gets into their supply chain.
If a Sword of Damocles is hovering continuously above their head in the form of criminal punishment then they would have no choice but to think twice about off shoring to a region where it is "conveniently" difficult to enforce basic labor rights. My point is that purposeful ignorance as a defense is unacceptable.
If it were in the US you'd certainly see it in the news.
In China and other places just getting close to a factory can at times be difficult and crappy working conditions are sadly just assumed to be a fact :(
Trump's criticism of China I don't think intersects anywhere close to caring about the treatment of Chinese citizens... or anyone really.
Just a random anecdote, I'm American and work in the US. Trump personally approved the acquisition of a company I worked for and appeared with the CEO and talked about how all the great jobs that would come of it ... before the acquisition was official they laid most everyone off.
Part of it is that I think people generally understand that Apple doesn't go into a supplier contract negotiation and say, "Ok, how many slaves do we get in this deal?"
While they ultimately bear responsibility for their supply chain, it's easy to see how this stuff can happen without direct knowledge. What we need to do is pay attention to Apple's response and then act accordingly.
> What I don’t understand is why companies want to be associated with these suppliers. Honestly the cost difference can’t be that big.
because ultimately the great majority of their customers do not care, as simple as that. They might care about local issues, wedge issues, but ethical and moral concerns in another country? not so much. Big luxury brands such as Apple pour billions in PR and marketing because they live or die by the reputation. The day their customers start caring more about it, things might change.
I just want to add, that I'm no way trying to diminish Apple's achievements when it comes to technology, product integration and creating remarkable ecosystems. I cannot think of another manufacturer that nailed that much in so little time. I think that Apple Silicon is game changer. But yes, they are a luxury brand.
I think even more than that they simply do not have a choice. Yes, it sucks that Apple's suppliers are unethical, but what am I supposed to do if I want to Snapchat my girlfriend or talk to my friends, or have a phone that is compatible with itunes/apple music? If my choice is between Apple and Google, how do I know that Google's ethics are any better? Am I supposed to spend hours and hours of my life investigating whether one is marginally more ethical than the other?
We simply have to stop making consumers responsible and accountable for every unethical thing a company does. Why is the status quo that every company is evil and that's ok? You'll see AMEX commercials imploring you to "shop local" during the pandemic but where is their relief for small business? Why is it my responsibility to save them but business as usual for those that want to exploit me?
> because ultimately the great majority of their customers do not care, as simple as that. They might care about local issues, wedge issues, but ethical and moral concerns in another country? not so much. Big luxury brands such as Apple pour billions in PR and marketing because they live or die by the reputation. The day their customers start caring more about it, things might change.
It's worth noting that one of the main reasons consumers "don't care" is the market is structured in a way to literally numb them to these issues. It makes it difficult to even learn about these issues (in relation to particular products), have that knowledge when making a purchasing decision, and take action against it (all competitors may be doing the same thing). The PR you mentioned also plays a part.
To give an slightly different example: Xinjiang produces a lot of cotton, and, IIRC, some of it is produced through forced labor. How am I supposed to show I care by avoiding that cotton? I can't, because it's pretty much impossible for me to know if a particular shirt I'm buying is made from that cotton or not, and it might actually be impossible for anyone to know without a very expensive and time consuming investigation.
If Apple put up big signs in it's stores saying "iPhones are made with forced labor," with compelling product storytelling about the forced labor practices involved, I think you'd Apple's sales drop as consumers show they do care. But that's not going to happen, all the market incentives are to obscure that kind of information.
Cost is part of it, but the other big piece is logistics. As we learned early in the year, Apple is moving manufacturing outside of China, but it takes time. Something like the iPhone is made in an industrial area where many of the part manufacturers are next to each other. This lets various parts be easily sourced and delivered. So when Apple wants to move to a new country, the end goal has to be to move the entire complex, and not just a piece. That takes time.
> While I question his motives, it’s kinda weird that Trump of all people seems to be the only one who is openly critical of China.
You fell into Trumps distortion field. Many are critical of China, but the difference is what to do about it. Trumps idea was to go it alone with tariffs, rhetoric, and go after things like TikTok. IMO, that's not a plan or a real policy.
It's cheap and makes them money, Apple will plaster few rainbow flags with blm somewhere and the issue is the past because for professional consumer Silicon Valley tech bros fall with every simple marketing campaign as long as they agree with.
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.
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I can only speculate, but I'll try. I haven't downvoted anyone in this thread BTW because I've been posting comments. When I post comments I prefer for them to stand as my input on the matter.
Most of the comments I'm seeing down voted seem to me to be somewhat extreme invective lacking in significant useful or interesting content. The bottom line is HN is about high signal low noise. Most of the downvotes are probably just on that criterion.
Another issue is that most of the people reading HN, including those vilifying Apple, probably own several dozen items manufactured in China. It seems somewhat unlikely that they can account for their supply chains in any meaningful way. There's also the mob rule aspect to all of this, it wouldn't be the first time 'evidence' had been found of Apple or their suppliers playing foul that turned out to be fake. Look up Mike Daisey some time. So lets all take some deep breaths and look at what's actually going on here.
> Most of the comments I'm seeing down voted seem to me to be somewhat extreme invective lacking in significant useful or interesting content.
Yeah, that's what's been confusing me. Some of the comments being downvoted I found to be quite precise critiques of the problems and honest attempts to provide information to an interesting discussion.
> So lets all take some deep breaths and look at what's actually going on here.
I use up and downvoting to improve the reading experience for others. I try hard to vote according to the hn guidelines e.g. “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.”. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Personally, I silently downvote because good community members will self-reflect upon their comment (for even a single downvote), and I believe the process of questioning one’s writing is good; while bad community members are often not worth responding to (edit: I sometimes engage as i am an idealist and I think someone can be influenced for the better, however I really don’t feel I have much luck against the tide!)
I don’t think I am infallible, and usually others will upvote if a mistake is made. That said, I am usually careful to only downvote for what I think are very good reasons. I sometimes upvote something downvoted incorrectly IMHO. I have showdead switched on, but I can’t say I have felt the urgent need to vouch for anything yet.
IMHO this thread contains a lot of noise and thoughtless blather, which is a shame, because the topic is really important.
Edit: the hn guidelines say “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.” True. But sometimes I think it is worthwhile, and it is obviously polite to answer an honest question like yours which is so far down-thread in a low signal environment that I think that my transgression is otherwise harmless.
The crazy thing to me is Apple's defense that they have instructed their suppliers not to hire any Uighurs from Xinjiang, i.e. openly engaging in ethnic discrimination of job candidates.
I guess they looked at the cost of improving the working conditions in their factories and decided that it was cheaper to simply not use any workers whose fate people might care about. I'm sure the government was happy to assist them in procuring some Han Chinese workers instead...
For people discussing the difference between forced labor and slavery, this document from the UN's office of the high commisioner on human rights, tracing the history of such terms in international law, may be helpful.
It is ridiculous that it's being argued, but grouping different kinds of human suffering together does seem like it could be a sensitive topic for those that very much see one kind of suffering worse than the other. 'daenz' made the mistake of attempting to group all acts of 'slavery' into equally heinous acts that should be prioritized on all fronts in an effort to rally sentiment towards the cause.
While I agree that this issue should be brought to the forefront of the 1st world public, grouping/comparing these types of things always lead to a misdirection of discussion to semantics in my opinion and comments for stories like these should be focused on educating people more on the problem and brainstorming feasible ways the community can fight against it.
I am sad to say this does not shock, or even surprise me. What is also failing to shock me is how much the world absolves Apple of their responsibility, and near-total government inaction against China. Has any major western nation penalized China for it's barbarism?
1) Is there a shortage of labour in China?
2) Why do you setup a factory in areas far away from other factory and transport the components far away to Shenzhen assemble and export?
3) Were these workers paid? And were they paid fairly?
I can understand the situation. The Chinese government is trying to improve the economy in Xinjiang and encouraged companies to setup factories there. Ruled by a communist government, these companies had to comply and provide jobs to those areas, which is far from port and industry, whose workers are less trained and educated. China is hoping that by improving the economy, people can forget about independence maybe?
Please re-write your comment in the same vein, except this time about Pre World War 2 Germany and Hitler, and let me know if you have the balls to hit the submit button.
I am not in Germany and you are not Hitler, well, I hope. Why do I need to do that? Journalists can publish things without evidence to backup their claims, and I cannot describe what I think?
No, I don't believe there are forced labour. I put it this way. In another BBC report regarding the cotton workers a few weeks ago, the source (newspaper scan copies) has shown that in the past, companies import workers from neighboring provinces, and this year, to help the local economy, they make sure jobs will be provided to locals instead. You can still see those on BBC websites. It is not translated into English of course.
When I say independence, I probably mean extremism
I have yet to see any actual evidence of forced labor in China. Only claims, nothing more. Americans have been fed false propaganda against communist USSR for decades, and I have a gut feeling the same is happening against communist China. Maybe it has to do with China's plan to collapse the US petrodollar global monetary system [0] and the US is trying to rouse a new Red Scare and push us into a second Cold War.
EDIT: Okay I've found 1 source of evidence from the comments in this thread [1]. I wish clickbait headlines would point to these claims instead of claims from other journalist making claims based on other journalists claims.
While there probably is an element of that, hard evidence that might paint the Chinese government negatively in general is much more difficult to obtain because of information and communications controls.
Agreed, I am just wary of journalist referencing other journalists as "evidence". But I have since found some very damning evidence here: https://shahit.biz/eng/ This is very sad to read and understand. I hope this site gets more attention than these articles
Some level coerced labour is inevitable, the entire "vocational" training is part of broader labour/rural transfer programs across many provinces affecting millions of individuals every year, with associate recruitment pressures and quotas. The question has always been scale and severity and every piece of solid data (i.e. GIS analysis) is demonstrating the scale and severity is much smaller than previous claims by western analysis funded by parties subservient to foreign policy. Which is exactly why database like shahbits won't get any attention when they "only" catalogue 12,000 victims, it was 6,000 at the beginning of the year. Granted this is just a subset of total interned - the real number is greater than China will admit and less than western manufactured consent is trying to sell, but 10s of thousands is not a remotely actionable amount of victims for geopolitics. Hence fabricated narratives by interest funded NGOs of millions of victim to rationalize sanctions, cherry picked data points and uncorroborated atrocity propaganda. XJ is horrible, but not horrible enough.
Not sure why you find that piece of "evidence" particularly damning. Do you know anything about the author? Do you know his methodology? His sources? What makes him credible?
From the database author himself [0]:
> "we have over 10000+ documented people" was the initial comment. Neither boasting nor saying 100% are credible.
I honestly find it both hilarious and disappointing that HN users are skeptical and contrarian about absolutely everything, except when it comes to what the US government and its proxies have to say about China.
I looked into the Uighur detention story a couple weeks ago and found very little in terms of substance. Most sources either traced back to the US State Department, which obviously shouldn't be trusted, or Adrian Zenz, a weirdo with a religious (literally) obsession with destroying China. It comes across very much like propaganda to decrease China's world standing and justify increased aggression economically and politically.
818 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadIt's very upsetting to see companies such as Apple, H&M, etc using forced labor.
Maybe we should also talk about the prison labor complex in the US as well then and the 13th Amendment:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-11/californ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/us/california-wildfires-p...
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/forced-prison-labor-in-ca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/01/alameda-sa...
https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-kee...
And how blacks were/are targeted for prison labor following the abolishment of slavery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
It the case of the U.S., nobody is to blame but the U.S. voters.
As you say, there's no law mandating it, but here we are.
Canada currently has 338 MPs and over 80% (!) of those (278) belong to one of two majority parties.
So yes, in theory Canada has a multi party system. In practice this multi party system is severely damaged by the effects of the FPTP voting system.
There are mathematical reasons for FPTP to result in two party systems. [0] explains it pretty well. There don't have to be deeper underlying stuctural reasons for the dichotomy.
So to combat two party systems, replacing FPTP with an alternative voting system seems a pretty reasonable step.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
I would suggest you look at the actual examples in the wild, and see if they have FPTP (or party proportional representation, which is essentially FPTP with all the same spoiler effects), and which don't, and see if they match your expectations to any degree better than random chance.
You can prove just about anything in "math" in a vacuum. The recent push for FPTP really strikes me as the kind of wonk stuff that people bend themselves around as a huge fix, when the reality is it empirically doesn't do what people thinks it should do, and comes with it's own problems. It's a lot of wasted political capital for very little if no benefit.
No, not really. If you look at Australia's parliament, you'll see that even though Labor and Liberal are the biggest party, they 'only' make up 60% of the seats. That's not really good, but it's a far cry from Canada's 82% (or the US's 99%)
> I would suggest you look at the actual examples in the wild
That's a very good suggestion. I actually already did that and I can assure you not using FPTP results in much more and smaller parties.
Examples:
- Ireland (STV)
- Northern Ireland Assembly (STV)
- Papua New Guinea (IRV)
> The recent push for FPTP
Do you mean 'against FPTP'? Because I can assure you that I'm not pushing for FPTP at all.
I'm not sure how you came to that. Australia has 151 MPs, 68 in the liberal party, and 61 in labor, or 86% in the two major parties. Their senate has 76 members, 31 liberal, 26 labor, or exactly 75% in the two major parties.
> Do you mean 'against FPTP'? Because I can assure you that I'm not pushing for FPTP at all.
Yes, I misspoke there, as is clear from the rest of my argument.
Ignoring this connection diverts attention away from other, systemic issues in our global market system which incentivize companies to operate in this way.
It's unlikely we'll see complete resolution to one without the other being corrected.
Whataboutism.
By bringing those other topics to the discussion any effect is diluted. Feel free to bring it on its own merits, separately.
This may seem like whataboutism but I am not trying to justify China’s behavior here—it is truly horrendous. I just think the general conversation on Hacker News around the ethics of US companies operating in China lacks this nuance. These issues are deeply interconnected and, by trying to force a separation, we all miss out on a balanced and critical analysis of the situation
It's slavery...modern day slavery. Why are we mincing words? We stand on our soap boxes and preach about historical injustices and how we need to repair them. Well here is your chance to prevent a future historical injustice, and all it takes is for you to take a stand, instead of quietly consuming the products and leaving it for future generations to atone for methods by which those products were produced.
>“Apple has zero tolerance for forced labor,” Rosenstock said. “Looking for the presence of forced labor is part of every supplier assessment we conduct, including surprise audits. These protections apply across the supply chain, regardless of a person’s job or location. Any violation of our policies has immediate consequences, including possible business termination. As always, our focus is on making sure everyone is treated with dignity and respect, and we will continue doing all we can to protect workers in our supply chain.”
Simply put, Apple should be held accountable for simply doing manufacturing in a country which allows such abuse regardless if they or their suppliers actively use such labor.
Apple isn't alone in this behavior but they are beyond most when it comes to virtue signalling.
Apple is actively doing business in a location where slavery is frequently occurring, while pretending that their audits are thorough and comprehensive so that their hands appear clean. But the fact that they are playing whack-a-mole with constant slavery reports should be evidence enough that they know exactly what they're doing: they're trying to turn a profit while turning a blind eye to abuses, so long as they don't happen too publicly, and don't directly implicate them. This is wrong.
The fact is you can't buy a single thing made in China and be sure it isn't implicated in this in some way. Think of the last few things you bought that were manufactured or sourced some parts in China. Can you honestly say the manufacturer audits their supply chain with the same rigour? At least Apple is trying to keep their supply chain clean, but ultimately that may prove to be impossible.
If that's the case vilifying Apple for it won't fix it, the only way to fix it will be to shun Chinese products completely, but that's going to be a very painful and difficult process for more people than just Apple. Take Fairphone for example, those guys work really hard to do the right thing as much as possible, but they have dozens and dozens of suppliers in China some of them indirect. In their own literature they point out they can't answer for every single supplier. This is a really tough problem.
If anyone has leverage, its Apple, so actually yes its a way to start fixing the problem.
There's a simple way to keep slave labor out of your supply chain, stop doing business with people who are fine with that, not "performing audits to find out they are using slave labor again so we switched!"
Auditing suppliers, verifying supply chains and switching away from cheaters is one way to address the issue. Another is to not do business in China at all.
Maximising downward pressure on wages - as an economist might label this - is the natural, predictable, desired outcome of globalisation.
No, that’s a convenient misdirection to avoid real change. By making it “Apple is evil”, people just switch to another phone manufactured in China and pat themselves on the back for doing absolutely nothing.
Apple is still making products in Hitler's Germany because the prices are too good to say no. Just because they aren't using the concentration camp labor doesn't mean they aren't complicit in the crimes. They're in the same boat as Fanta from my perspective. Doing business with murderers because money is more important than human lives.
I don't get the downvotes here. Has anyone missed news about the concentration camps build for Uigurs[0]?
[0] https://freebeacon.com/national-security/satellite-images-re...
However we also shouldn't trivialize Chinese atrocities:
A number of the things that happens there will hopefully get into the history wall of shame as soon as we dare challenge it.
We are however in a rough place right now IMO:
- US is weak and has little (but still significant) moral edge.
- US has a military edge but a full scale conflict will >70% become really messy (think nuclear)
- China has a number of other countries (and influential persons) around the world by the b*lls.
- China has an advantage on manufacturing and logistics
Anyone who wants to fix this
- either needs a brilliant idea and probably lots of luck
- or some serious skills in politics (to get local support for taking correct actions with the necessary firmness)
How on Earth, can you even try to gaslight us saying China concentration camps are "nicer" than the Nazis?
A citizen of any regime, from the best to the most brutal, can criticize China and it does not detract from the argument at all. It’s not hypocritical because citizens are not the government; and, even if it was directly from the government and was hypocritical, the substance of the argument does not change. Calling someone a hypocrite is just an ad hominem.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/23/anti-forced-labour-bill-apple... [2] https://9to5mac.com/2020/03/02/apple-suppliers-implicated-in... [3] https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/10/apple-store-staff-t-shirts/
This is a masterpiece of weasel-wording.
like in India?
I agree that yesterday or today slavery is just slavery, whatever subtile differences there might be.
Forced labour takes different forms, which includes forced paid work and by some definitions penal work.
Slavery is when a person is treated as a property of another person. Being a slave may or may not involve forced labour.
In addition, calling Uyghur work “slavery” in fact undermines the cause, allowing CCP defenders to legitimately call out “fake news”. Precision matters.
As near as I can tell the Uighurs' "offense" is being of a different ethnicity and being majority Muslim. What the Chinese are doing here is very close to what the USA did in its first century with African slaves.
However, using the term “slavery” gives CCP ammunition to fight back. They can point out that Uyghurs are paid. They can claim they are free to refuse (we know they will not out of fear of retribution, but I suspect the need for such nuance only hurts the case).
...
> The situation anywhere is such that for anyone it is in fact impossible to decline to do what the state says
FTFY
As long as you have a police force and prisons, you'll never be able to NOT do what the state says.
Now, it's a matter of:
- do you disagree with what the state does?
- do you agree with what the state does?
And all the positions between these 2 extremes.
On one end, you have anarchists (and what the state would call terrorists)
On the other end, you have statists (and what the anarchists would call authoritarians/fascists/wumao)
I just don't want anarchists to be fooled into supporting the warmongering US propaganda.
i.e. do you agree that the state should have the power to do what's described above?
I was leaning to say more "no". I basically used to be more of an anarchist. That was probably (also) because I was disappointed in our cronyist, capitalist, disfunctional governments...
I'm now finding myself as more of a statist, after realizing how much good is being accomplished in China, and how arbitrary and ridiculous are the falsehoods that the US propaganda is pushing.
By refusing to criticize them, you are just doing their work for them and giving them a free pass.
I don’t think it’s helpful to compare which atrocity is worse.
There are many societies that have had lots of norms or laws protecting slaves from various forms of harm. That’s of course not to say slavery was acceptable in those societies on any level, but many slaves lived more comfortable lives than those who eventually died of malnutrition at Auchwitz-II.
What is reported to be happening to Muslims now in Xinjang, with reeducation camps and all, is not the same as treating a human as another piece of personal property. It is both not as bad, and yet at the same time somehow even worse, as this time a whole culture is being systematically eliminated.
The Constitution refers to it directly as slavery. The 13th says "except as punishment for a crime." Folks may want to mince words about it because prisoners are technically paid (pennies per hour), if they are even getting paid in the first place. It was major news that prisoners were sent to fight fires in California for little to no pay. Plus, prisoners are on the hook financially for a lot of their sentence, so that money is basically spent before they even get it.
Just to make sure nobody is confused by this, because the subject comes up a lot - prisoner firefighers are volunteers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/20/538062911/wh... [What's It Really Like To Work In A Prison Goat Milk Farm? We Asked Inmates]
But what do the workers themselves think?
I find Jeremiah Pate in the milking barn, attaching milking machines to the goats' udders.
"This job, how do you feel about it?" I ask him. "A bad thing? Good thing?"
"It's a great thing," Pate tells me. "It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here."
Every man I meet echoes that thought. They aren't thinking about what was fair on the outside. They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good.
You're making the case that it is involuntary. "Do this or we shall do to you something worse against your will" is textbook coercion.
It's not like they're forced to work; and if they take the option, they're still under punishment doled by the justice system. So it's not immoral forced labor as long as neither the work or the jail cell constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment".
Well, I would say, the lines get blurry. And when you have private prisons, where the owners have a incentive to exploit prison labour, while also keeping their costs low - you end up in something, too close to slavery for my taste.
I think it's reasonable to hold the belief that the punishment, especially in today's prison system, is not just.
By your logic, the Uighurs are experiencing "just" punishment under the laws of the People's Republic of China.
Since the Uighurs have committed "crimes" (as defined by the government under which they live) against the state, they are subject to whatever punishment is prescribed by the law.
This is, of course, ridiculous on its face. And is just as ridiculous anywhere else.
There are valid reasons to separate some folks from the rest of society (think John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc.), as they've shown themselves to be unable/unwilling to respect the rights of others within that society.
Incarceration as a tool of punishment, while widely used, often poses more risk of harming society than any benefit from "punishing" offenders.
It's a complex issue, and simplifying it to "Law and order! Lock 'em up!" is reductive and often detrimental to the societies it's supposed to improve.
I was aware of that when responding. In fact, when I said:
"There are valid reasons to separate some folks from the rest of society (think John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc.), as they've shown themselves to be unable/unwilling to respect the rights of others within that society.
Incarceration as a tool of punishment, while widely used, often poses more risk of harming society than any benefit from "punishing" offenders.
It's a complex issue, and simplifying it to "Law and order! Lock 'em up!" is reductive and often detrimental to the societies it's supposed to improve."
I was specifically referring to my home, the USA.
>> "It's a great thing," Pate tells me. "It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here."
>> They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good.
You're making the point of OP. When the only other option is "sitting in your tiny little cell", there's not much choice in it. It's less volunteering, and more escaping a psychologically untenable situation.
Given other options, I doubt many inmates would be willing to 'volunteer' or work for peanuts.
There is no free choice in that question. Just an illusion of one.
Just FYI, most of the non-prisoner firefighters in California are also volunteers. In my district (north Solano county), 90% of firefighters are volunteers. We don't get paid.
Firefighting jobs are the most coveted because you get to leave prison grounds, and as of 2020, can now be employed as a firefighter upon release (in CA).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/20/california...
This distinction seems like us trying to protect our own interests in regards to keeping slavery legal in the United States too.
As others have mentioned, the 13th Amendment explicitly carves out forced labor as a legal form of slavery under a course of punishment. Referring to it as slavery does nothing to diminish the atrocities of chattel slavery.
I don't see this as a reason to cut off the discussion. Trying to distance forced labor from slavery may seem incosiderate to those who had to endure the former.
There's no escaping the inconsideration considerations, so I prefer to discuss the topic at hand without that baggage.
- slavery is allowed explicitly for prison labor,
- there was a concerted effort after the end of slavery to put former slaves and their descendants into things that were almost like slavery, including mass incarceration
It makes no difference, both are the same in being the most exemplary form of class warfare, and are equally terrible.
Trying to draw a line in between them is a very petty attempt to claim that one is somehow less worse, or even somehow more legitimate than other.
1. https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/
I actually think the CCP treats them worse than many in the usa and Europe treated their slaves back in the day.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-o...
Adrian Zenz doesn't speak for the UN.
Extrapolation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
https://www.saveuighur.org/the-economics-of-chinas-organ-har...
https://theircc.org/organharvesting/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/surgeon-cla...
> But when Tohti arrived at the destination, he was shocked to find at least 10 prisoners had been shot in a field by a firing squad.
> Armed police waved the surgeon and his medical team over and directed them to a man lying unconscious on blood-soaked ground.
> Tohti said: “He’d been shot in the right-hand side of the chest but was still alive.
> “I told my chief surgeon he wasn’t dead but he ordered me to remove the man’s liver and kidneys there and then – and to be quick about it. I was ordered not to give the man any anaesthetic.”
This also seems to describe prison labor that occurs in the US, which, putting problems and criticisms aside, is definitely different from slavery. I don't think the imprecision in language is helpful, it hurts the cause in the same way people constantly referring to modern political leaders as literal Nazis hurts their credibility.
Did you sleep though civics class? Go read the thirteenth amendment.
> Don't be snarky.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And that is also against the rules:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
If you despise the rules so much why do you even keep coming here?
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 paint yourself blue and write obscenities on your face and walk into a library, but that isn't evidence that anyone does it. (Likewise, it's legal to make people pay you fifty times the inflation-adjusted value of a loan you gave them – things being legal isn't evidence that they don't happen, which would be absurd.)
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.
Some members from both houses of Congress have recently proposed a constitutional amendment to change this:
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Abolition...
It could be interesting would journalists on the Gruniad have to give up using macs then.
"We rely on our suppliers sharing our values and complying with all laws at all times. We expect our business partners to treat people with dignity and respect and not to engage in practices associated with forced labor, even if not illegal in their location"
Humans are disappointing, though I am encouraged by the abundance of others calling this out the same.
‘CCP defenders’ and other apologists will make bad-faith arguments no matter how precise you are.
That's called chattel slavery. Just because something isn't chattel slavery doesn't mean it isn't still slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
"Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by the threat of violence or some other method of abuse. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner."
Doesn't matter. That's a crap argument.
First, because enlarging some things (which necessitates belittling others) can help put an end to them.
Second, because forced labor and slavery are not that far off anyway. Both are depriving a person of their agency and steal their time and effort.
Third, because slavery itself was historically a spectrum. There were "domestic slaves" (sorta like Stephen in Django), cooks, nannys, teachers and "butler" types in charge of estate work in ancient Rome and Greece, etc.) that were treated and worked more or less like modern employees (except from the forced labor), even slaves in management of other slaves, and slaves that were chained, worked to the bone, beaten, raped, etc.
It's so easy to sit in my desk chair, read an article like this and have an armchair outrage moment.
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”?
Getting back to the initial comment I made... I think it's important to keep a company like Apple/Google/Samsung honest regarding their attention to their supplier's ethics. A company like Apple is going to be pretty responsive to concerns of worker mistreatment, if presented in an honest way. If we are too quick to incriminate Apple whenever a story like this comes up, it comes off more like we have an agenda against them, especially if we are not vetting the story before expressing outrage.
Nobody who matters is going to boycott Apple.
Apple will counter with a plausible narrative, "we didn't know, we cancelled contracts, ..." and everything will be fine again.
Oh, and a new woke diversity ad to show how much they care about muslims. And everybody will share and clap and feel good.
Boycotts can work a little, but a boycott large enough to be effective and overcome other market forces is very hard to organize and sustain.
I'm not totally letting Apple off the hook, just pointing out that without the government doing something here any measures Apple or anyone else takes will be ineffective. Even if Apple starts pushing back on this, other manufacturers will fill the void and take advantage of that cheap labor instead. Apple might even find it tough to police this since Chinese companies may lie about where work is being performed or who is doing it. They're likely to demand that Apple pay more for different labor and then pocket the money and use forced labor instead.
As far as I know, unless you stop consuming electronics completely, you’re not avoiding the labor abuses mining the necessary metals in Central Africa or the labor to manufacture it in Asia.
I mean we do have plenty of choice, many actually caring about security and their users.
Arguments for a productive discussion would be better though I don't seem to get any of these...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
About the only 'safe' phone would be a Samsung phone, but the likelihood that some parts are still sourced from un-vetted Chinese parts supplier is high.
Apple is far from perfect, but they do more than 99% of manufacturers. Even the most 'woke' fashion brands are now having to deal with the fact that much of their cotton is coming from Uyghur forced labor.
I applaud this kind of reporting, to expose the practices of the Nazi-like Chinese/Industrial exploitation machine, but I'm leery of the tendency to apply 'Apple' to every such article, like Greenpeace was doing for a long while to drum up publicity.
Source?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/business/international/ho...
Make a lot of noise about it. Use an iPhone and be very vocal about human rights abuses.
While you could logically argue that people there were also slaves, it would be an injustice to leave it at that. Generally speaking, slaves had some kinds of rights that were far better than those in Auschwitz-II.
It's one thing to be treated as someone's property and forced labour, as a slave.
It's another thing to be subject to awful medical experimentation (often to death), torture of kinds that are barely imaginable, and mass killing with on-site factories literally built to murder the occupants and other occupants forced to dispose of the body parts of their friends afterwards. All of this in large numbers.
There's a reason Auschwitz-II had sections called "Crematoria I-IV".
Auschwitz-II makes almost every evil in the world look mild in comparison. It's that bad.
> It would be weird to refer to the people in Auchwitz-II as slaves.
People in Auchwitz-II were enslaved, thus they were slaves, subjects of economic exploitation in their life, and death.
It's just we never, and for a wrong reason, talk about the original motive behind NSDAPs attack on Jews, and other minorities.
That motive is the same as for whatever else form of forced labour — class warfare, as was the case for many other pretexts for genocide in history.
The type of hatred NSDAP managed to peddle the most was not for hatred of Jewish people for being Jewish as such, but for Jewish people being rich.
NSDAPs first attacks on Jewish people were spun around the message of class warfare. NSDAPs biggest sell for Kristallnacht was the opportunity for poor angry underclasses to get from rags to riches in one night by robbing homes, and businesses of rich Jewish families with impunity after all.
> On July 4, 1942 at the latest, regular selection was introduced for the Jews arriving on RSHA transports. As a result, an average of only 20% of them were kept alive and placed in the camp as prisoners capable of performing slave labor. They were employed mostly in constructing new parts of the camp, or at German companies involved in maintaining and developing the military potential of the Third Reich. They were transferred on a mass scale from Auschwitz to sub-camps set up nearby or in Upper Silesia, or to concentration camps in the depths of the Third Reich.
http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/jews...
- Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries in 2020 https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi.... Consciously or subconsciously, consumers will favor goods made not in China
- US President-elect Joe Biden affirms his anti-China position. On Monday, he slammed China once again for “abuses” on trade, technology and human rights and said America can best pursue its goals relative to Beijing, when it is “flanked” by like-minded partners and allies. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/biden-slams-chines.... This should help confirm multinational COO's decisions to leave China faster.
- China keeps attacking other countries, and further isolating itself. From stopping coal trade with Australia, and causing blackouts for its own cities https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/australia/china-coa..., to engaging in border war with india, to antagonizing US, Canada and UK.
- Chinese suppliers engaging in more and more thievery and sabotage against its own global partners, as reported at chinalawblog. Western companies are reporting Chinese suppliers are brazenly not delivering on goods paid for.
They are just moving the chips around the board.
We can look the squalor of factory-farmed animals right in the eye while biting into our ham sandwich and say "damn, someone should really do something about that." Or, perhaps more commonly, "I'm entitled to this, actually."
So why would we budge over a little forced labor on the other side of the world? Or pollution? Or anything else?
We care about things right up to the point where we have to lift a finger. Though, aside, for this reason I think legislation is one of the only solutions short of waiting for a cultural awakening that probably won't ever come.
The difference is that I won't go around evangelizing (i.e. marketing) their products as a consumer, pumping up demand if I knew the negative costs associated with it. On the corporate side is Apple's hypocrisy PR- i.e. don't drink their koolaid.
I'm curious, which Google product must you use that has no reasonable analog from a different vendor?
I'm not being snarky here just a little confused.
I suppose Android could fall into that definition, although LineageOS[0]+MicroG[1] do provide a reasonable alternative.
My question isn't rhetorical. I'm genuinely not familiar with any Google product without a reasonable alternative.
[0] https://lineageos.org
[1] https://microg.org
Edit: Fixed nonsensical sentence.
As a general rule, I don't use the search engine. And not just because of Google's market power. It's also because the quality of search results have dropped enormously.
At this point, other search engines are at least as good, IMHO.
I don't think it'll ever come because we've allowed ourselves to create an atmosphere where there's entities doing their utmost to ensure it never happens via the tolerance of behaviour economics and psychology being used in marketing, the tolerance of big corporate lobbyists, the corruption of science via corporate backed "studies" whose results align with the initial desires, etc.
The only consolation being that our unmitigated greed will likely destroy us long before we have the chance to infest the stars with it, and that life will go on without us.
The fact is - Apple fans aren't unique. Not many people care about this issue, unfortunately.
This is an old documentary and a bit different demographic, but it is still pertinent. If people didn't care back then, I doubt they will this time though...
https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/complicit
Because NO ONE else seems to be up to the task.
I think folks here are getting lost in the weeds about precise definitions which don't really matter that much and what they think are laws that can be applied across national boundaries (generally, that's not feasible).
There has been an effort to ban "conflict minerals" from modern supply chains. It's partially successful (in that you effectively get "a sticker" that you can show-off if your supply chain doesn't use children as miners). It would be nice if, AT LEAST, a similar half-measure could be done for "forced labor" (or whatever you want to call what they're doing to the Uighurs).
Because without consumer, there would be no incentive for either China and Apple to behave amorally.
China is a totalitarian dictatorship. As long as it's citizens don't rebel, they have no incentive to change their behavior. Apple is a publicly traded company. They need good publicity.
So, as a humanist, I say it's up to the consumers to force Apple to stop contributing to human rights abuses.
The set of things you can buy these days that isn't made in China is essentially restricted to luxury goods and safety-critical equipment (cars, guns, scuba gear, etc.); despite what they tend to say out loud, companies know that it's prohibitively expensive to get safety-critical reliability out of Chinese manufacturing. But if it's just your camera or power drill or whatever, they know you're not going to sue them when it breaks. Apple actually does a really good job on QC for Chinese manufacturing, but then you have all these accusations of forced labor to contend with.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...
And then try to claim you are different for using Google because you hate yourself at the same time.
The problem is the propertied capitalist class, not the working class.
The capitalist class has the power. I appreciate your intention, yet it's super important to be clear that the problem is the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system, as the means of production are monopolized in their hands. The most advanced form through which the bourgeoisie (in this case Apple) expropriates, creates enclosures and exploits/oppresses, is 1) through the use of trade secret laws [1], which steals away new inventions from the commons and stifles learning and innovation, as well as 2) through the means-of-exchange money system that obscures relationships between people and places [2].
"Zak Cope makes the case that capitalism is empirically inseparable from imperialism, historically and today. Using a rigorous political economic framework, he lays bare the vast ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries through the mechanisms of monopoly rent, unequal exchange, and colonial tribute. The result is a polarized international class structure with a relatively rich Global North and an impoverished, exploited Global South.
Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions, and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised. The only way forward, Cope argues is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labor internationalism." [3]
[1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
[2] http://mikorizal.org/Fromprivateownershipaccountingtocommons...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43015121-the-wealth-of-s...
If Apple is a willing participant, I would imagine they could be dragged in front of the Hague.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
There’s an active attempt in congress to amend the constitution to abolish slavery in the US:
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942413221/democrats-push-abol...
Legal, domestic forced labor is over a $2 billion dollar industry. People that refuse to work are retaliated against:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prison...
Think globally, act locally.
So the question here is what is the evidence, what does it show, and if Apple's inspections have missed anything how can they improve their policies and enforcement actions to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Capitalism working at its best; collect all the surplus and make somebody else pay for it.
Do you really expect a typical Apple user to actually care?
There are alternatives outside of so called "western-like democracy with liberal ideals".
It seems unlikely that the US or the EU will want to pay the cost in the short term.
Why would world politicians take any actions against China when so many of them do have a finger in the honeypot themselves?
Invalidate stock shares* of all companies who made untold billions on China, and you will see that a huge double digit of Western politicians will go broke overnight.
The one sole reason the West was so eager to jump on the China train unlike any other broke harebrained communist country was because China went from the start to openly bribing Western elites.
The reason why China is not Iraq now is that.
Or does it mean the company should cease to exist, and all employees should be fired immediately? We should deny honest people from getting their salaries?
Why would the price be different from current stock price?
They will think twice before bidding on something this underhanded again.
In real life, bankruptcy usually ends up essentially invalidating the shares of a company. Depending on the method of bankruptcy, the company continues to exist, but the owners of the existing shares loose any claim to anything. If "invalidate stock shares" of a public company became some kind of sanction for improper behavior, it would probably be coupled with some kind of process to transfer ownership?
Invalidating all shares in a company without further process to reallocate ownership is an interesting hypothetical. I suppose the organization would become something like abandoned property and escheat to the government.
No change in company ownership.
Business carries on in country A. People can get new jobs.
And nuclear weapons. Don't forget the elephant in the room. China has nukes, which severely limits the pressure the West can put on it.
This is very accurate. Recent example is the implied Biden family in CCP's pocket [1][2].
[1] Prof. Di Dongsheng's national televised speech that has since been taken down: https://youtu.be/aeegrkPx0xE [2] https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/6/16084...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj_mEiMvPMI
China uses threats and censorship to get its way, post Covid or as Trump puts it China virus.
No investigation or inspections have happened the whole year.
Only way to get china to change is have people vote with their wallets and refuse to buy Chinese made stuff but at the end of the day people just don't care and just want cheap stuff.
If you gave someone a choice between $100 IPhone made by slave child labor and $1000 IPhone that was made humane conditions at fair wages, i am willing to bet more than 75% of people take the $100 IPhone.
If China becomes militarily stronger and Xi's domestic position weakens, war will be his first resort. If Taiwan had to be defended, there will be very little help coming from Europe.
I don't think so. Nothing happened with Tibet, or after the Tiananmen Square event AFAIK.
20 years ago, the people that signed all the trade deals with countries such as China claimed it would lead to improving democracy and human rights there, obviously, it didn't, People's Republic of China has never been more autocratic. Ethical and moral concerns should have been addressed when China joined the WTO in 2001, irregardless China's political structure. China got a very good deal, western industrials as well, but at what human cost?
I wasn't interested in economy at the time, but I still remember clearly debates on talkshows between human rights advocates and people pushing trade deals and their arguments, it was a time where you could still publicly talk about the situation in Tibet. Today? Nobody would even dare.
I think the expectation for many (myself included) was that as living standards rose, the Chinese people would demand democratic reform (rule of law, justice for all, some say in decisions and leadership). China (or rather the ccp) has successfully avoided that so far.
Now its flexing that power and people like me, who expected natural change, are forced to re-evaluate.
mea culpa
This is a more nuanced issue than it might seem in some ways though. I have some first hand experience since many of my coworkers are native Chinese living in different parts of China.
Trade has enabled the growth of a previously non-existent middle class in China and they have started to assert political power in ways not immediately apparent to Westerners.
One example is the "Beijing smog" that everyone knows about. The Chinese middle class are becoming unwilling to tolerate the total environmental devastation that was the norm two decades ago. They have put a lot of pressure on the CCP to keep the air cleaner and as a result many dirty industries like iron casting have had a huge number of restrictions put on them in the last 5 years. I would consider this a direct result of the political willpower of the Chinese people.
In my experience though, the reason things like the treatment of the Uyghurs or Tibetans have not changed is simply because the average Chinese person does not care or wish to rock the boat.
Before you finger wag about that, consider the American treatment of South American migrants that has come into the spotlight in the last 4 years. I would say that the reason it has not changed has the same root cause. The average American does not care, or silently approves and thus there is not enough pressure on the ruling party to produce change.
South American migrants are treat fine, just not those who break in illegally (we can agree to differ if that's fair or not). I'm sorry but this is just not comparable to a possible genocide of the Uyghurs.
Migrants, or illegal immigrants?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That would include using the site for intellectual curiosity rather than flamewar or political battle, avoiding personal attacks, and everything else that's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Of course it did, in Kishore Mahbuani's words:
>The greatest explosion of personal freedoms that the Chinese people have experienced in the past 4,000 years has taken place in the last 40 years
There's some slide back in some categories from Hu Jintao era, but overall things are progressing. The west fixates on the 1% of extra bad when it's been mostly great.
>what human cost?
800m uplifted from poverty, a few million minorities gets shafted, to be crass: the cost was/is negligible all things considered. Post 90s China bad, but mostly good. Overwhelming good compared to others with similar starting positions and much better development conditions, i.e. China had some of the most onerous WTO accession protocols and sanctions that held back her development.
You would be singing a different tune if you were to come under Chinese rule.
It's only been 30 years, about how long it took Taiwan/Korea to liberalize, except things take longer when you have 1.4B people and antagonism from global superpower. Taiwan/Korean dictatorship got unambiguous and sustained US support. Under Xi, it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Realistically it's is 5 steps forward and 1 step back, but west likes to paint that 1 step as a chasm.
That is the difference between a society of freedom and human rights, and mob rule. Someone else's benefits have nothing to do with the horrors suffered by people in Tibet and Xinjiang. Each one of those people is as important as you or me.
Yeah they are.
The reality is also that frontier territories have been historically spared the harsh repressions rest of country / populus went through postwar like cultural revolution, great leap forward, strict family planning etc, simply by virtue of being too far. Enter infrastructure and billions in spent on connectivity. Secessionism had to be reign in eventually, and current systems has as much carrots as sticks. Also carrots that was not available to a much poorer China. There's a reason why disproportionate resources are diverted to Tibet and XJ for development. Carrots that freedom + human rights countries typically do not extend to their own repressed minorities. Indigenous camps in Canada still don't have clean water, because voters in democracies do not want to give carrots when virtue signalling is sufficient. CCP doesn't have to listen to majority Han reee about spending money on minorities. Last time I calculated enough money poured into XJ to cut every Uygure a 200K RMB / 30K USD check.
The fundamental issue is carrots are not enough, you cannot pay people to secularize/sinicize/integrate. You have to indoctrinate, not just future generations, but also current. This is not endorsement of the policies. Merely it is predictable next step with new Chinese capabilities, further made inevitable by salafist terrorism fermented by blowback of foreign policy decisions of USSR/West/ME and other geopolitical factors. Things would be very different in a world without mujahideens inspiring drama in XJ or CIA fucking around with Tibet or general US pivot to Asia or current great powers competition. This is why CCP is obsessed with with foreign meddling. Nevermind that Tibet/XJ is 2/3 of Chinese land and contain vast security benefits. More relevant to "as important as you or me", these minorities are _more_ important than the average Han. Security is paramount state responsibility, more so in an authoritarian one because there is no one else to shift blame. And even then blame is no replacement for overwhelmingly excessive counter-terrorism response where possible. Incidentally why XJ is getting the full measure while Tibet gets half. That's baseline populist expectation, CCP is adding the carrots when the people scream for sticks. A democratic China would just lockup the Uyghurs and Tibetans in perennial prison industrial complexes like US or sequester them away in generation ghettos like France. An imperial China would actually genocide them. Trivially. That's the dynamic of in a capitalist ethnostate with "problematic" minorities. What currently exists is not the best timeline, but it's also not remotely the worst for security logic, which again, trumps all other considerations. Incidentally, this applied to HK, and will apply to Taiwan.
Freedom has expanded dramatically in the U.S. too. Minorities such as Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Irish, Italians, Germans (once reviled!) and more are now unquestioned members of society. Women went from an oppressed majority to full members of the workplace, expanding participation in government, etc. Few would dream now of suggesting women shouldn't work - something that was a norm a couple of generations ago. LGTBQ+ people's rights have expanded: They can marry, they don't lose their jobs over it, they can serve openly in the military and in government.
African-Americans enjoy far more rights: Obama was elected, as was Kamala Harris. Education has expanded; discrimination is socially unacceptable - no politician would survive using certain language. Law enforcement abuse of African-Americans is widely seen as a problem. Even Republicans voted to remove Confederate names from military bases.
We still have a long way to go, including for African-Americans, women in the workplace, LGBTQ+, Muslims, and more. But to suggest oppression is inevitable is just ignorant; it denies the facts. One wonders why some people seem to want it to be true?
or a time where you would see Winnie the Pooh movies being made.
little by little...
For all his evil, he's not effective. Xi Jinping is what Trump dreamed of being...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
A lot of what Trump and Pompeo had to overcome was the treaty abandonment that peaked under Obama. Asia is arming itself to the teeth because Obama allowed China (Xi was actually personally involved) to steal the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Shoal
If you're referring to NATO members underpaying their contributions to their own defence, that's on them. Of course they're whining about an increase from 1.5% of GDP to 2.0 - 3.0%.
It's sad that I have to explain this to HN readers on a monthly basis. You literally don't know what you're talking about on this forum.
So, if a tyrannical dictatorship like China is accused of abusing human rights and said tyrannical dictatorship is not willing to let people investigate the claims, we can accept the accusations as true until aforementioned tyrannical dictatorship is willing to let people investigate.
No need for 'in dubio pro reo' in such cases.
I honestly think that's a bit too far.
About the dictatorship we don't need to have a discussion, do we?
The "tyrannic" part: A tyrant is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law. This pretty much describes the Chinese Communist Party. Critics are silenced, dissidents are disappeared, non-han-chinese are robbed of their heritage. (See the Uigurs or the Mongols.) Even if you don't violate the law, you'll get punished through it[0]. There's massive corruption and people's rights are violated in routine and international agreements are ignored (see Hong Kong).
Yeah, I think the shoe fits.
[0] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-12-04/chi...
- Native peoples destruction (robbed of heritage)
- Spying on allies (breaks international agreements)
- Lobbyists and presidential pardons (massive corruption)
(As someone who does not live in the US, it's hard to take the consistent negativity on China and the wilful ignorance on US domestic issues seriously, without just seeing it as propaganda...)
The issue at hand is how China and Apple are profiting from slave labor, how much this is by design or by neglect and what to do about it.
Let's keep the discussion limited to that.
How is the US not part of this discussion???
Apple is a U.S. Company
Lots of U.S. companies take advantage of (domestic) prison labour.
Domestic prison labour is responsible for mental health problems.
Mental health problems are treated by psychiatrists.
How are psychiatrists not part of this discussion???
You think drawing a parallel to American companies taking advantage of American prison labour is unrelated to this discussion preferring to focus on the race of the 'prison labour' rather than the nature of the labour.
What ever helps you sleep at night ;)
See my response to ksk below with regards to the topic of American prison labor. In short; it's inexcusable.
It would be nice to be able to force companies to take responsibility for crimes happening in their supply chain. I think this is the only way to prevent willful blindness. Otherwise the profit motive of the whole will always override the morality of the individual.
We should also improve whistleblower protections so that instead of just relying on hearsay and vague accusations we can actually have solid proofs of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, especially in tyrannical dictatorships like China this is very unlikely, given that even a 'democracy' like the US is struggling with those.
That said; I don't that China as a whole is a developing nation anymore. There are big chunks of the country that might still be 'developing', but as a whole China is very much an industrial superpower.
China isn't a developing nation? So they should just be happy with 1/6 of the wealth US Residents get and stop now?
What Crime is happening in their supply chain? Prison Labour is not illegal in the US or China. US constitution specifically allows it... How do we force Apple to take responsibility for this? There is solid proof of Labour camps, Prison Camps, Reeducation Camps, and persecution of the Uighurs, even the Chinese "tyrannical dictatorship" don't dispute it. It is fairly common knowledge among Chinese citizens as well. What will probably surprise you, is it has much wider support from the Chinese people than you'd expect. Now this could be that the context of "why" they are persecuted is not well known outside of china. It could also be that Chinese citizens are not comfortable objecting to it from fear of speaking out against their government. But it's not as clear cut of "wrongdoing" that this article nor this discussion makes out.
By the way, why the U.S.? Why not Lichtenstein or Denmark?
In general I'm very skeptical that prison operators should be able to "rent out" their prisoners and that companies should be able to make profit of prisoner's work. The potential for abuse is just too high. (Maybe in a country like Finland that has some reasonable ideas about reintegration of criminals, but even there I see the dangers of corruption.)
The global production chains have put workers in jeopardy of exploitation. As long as there are no legal means to force companies to take responsibility, they will not take responsibility. It doesn't matter if a company is from the U.S. from Denmark or Finland; if there's no accountability, the profit motive will overrule any ethical concerns. Because that's what these companies were created for in the first place; to turn a profit.
Here we have just one more 'externality' that companies 'socialize' in their quest to squeeze out ever more profit. In this case it's not clean water or clean air, it's the mental and physical health of fellow humans that for one reason or another have deemed disposable.
That countries and the governments - whose job it is to server all their citizens - are such willing participants in these atrocities small and large is just the bitter icing on this putrid cake.
> I honestly think that's a bit too far.
Tyrannical oligarchy moving towards dictatorship, then. Better?
It is a de-facto dictatorship and it is tyrannical by many definitions.
China and Apple have their reputation to protect, so they have a very high stake in the game.
The Tech Transparency Project's goal is to uncover misconduct and malfeasance in public life. They don't have to 'prove' any wrongdoing with regards to Apple or China. If their research with regards to Apple or Chine doesn't pan out, they have many, many more potential targets without danger of losing any funding at all.
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!
Anyone super political?
The claims seem to be roughly in line with many other reports about the Xinjiang region, China's government and worker conditions in the tech sector.
Is there something you are implying?
It's manufactured consent. The implication is reality is worse than CCP purports but better than US funded analysis alleges, especially considering ongoing geopolitical tensions. Per leaked XJ internal documents, these are indoctorination and vocational training camps designed to secularize and alleviate poverty. Abuse will happen when operating at large scales, but CCP "political work" and demographic engineering has always operated on carrot and stick. It's more or less a proven model that works more often than it doesn't. There's a reason why the current narrative tries to insinuate it's only stick, and has to operate on fabrications, cherry picked data, repeated testimonies from the same handful of people. It's Pompeo / state department's prerogative to lie, cheat, steal for US interests. People should understand this, except those for whose interest depends upon them not to.
What about leaked primary sources from CCP [leaks]?
Huge volume of facts and research from all kinds of sources on the systemic genocide and forced labor of Uighurs and other ethnic / geographic minorities (Tibet, now scarily Hong Kong jailing and threatening the previously free press).
You can even see it on Google Maps.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang... https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/what-forced-labor-in-xinjian... https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/resolution-121920191... https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191212IP... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/world/asia/china-muslims-... https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-report-on-international-r...
[leaks] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...
[maps] https://nationalawakening.org/coordinates/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/satellit... https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/ch... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.courthousenews.com/evidence...
The only news here is that they are using slaves for higher tech work than cotton.
> Honest question.
Are other questions are dishonest? Why should we trust you?
Part of why this is so shocking to us Westerners is that it's such alien behaviour. We have become conditioned to expect foreigners are treated with extreme preference.
Uyghurs, Tibetans and Inner Mongolians are living under the yoke of the historically brutal Han empire. Made more brutal by Maoism.
Tibet isn’t China. Inner Mongolia isn’t China -stans aren’t China.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao are China. Free China. The China we should recognize and treat the CCP regime as a mere de facto ruler.
Instead of smuggling weapons into Tibet and Chinese occupied stans (just like the CCP did in its near abroad and not so near) the West gave China the means to become the world’s eminent hegemon.
Thanks Bill and Newt! The gifts of 90s political bankruptcy keeps giving.
The parallels to Muslim minority integration in the West is probably why it is so interesting to Westerners. The disparate treatment by governments is what makes it so striking - in China they are second class citizens; in the West they are favoured over the indigenous population.
For now it still makes sense to do last-leg manufacturing in China since moving to the US has no benefits from a PR standpoint (due to the reasons above) and has huge negatives with needing to import the raw materials instead of just shipping the final product from China -> Alaska -> Continental US customers.
Maybe not in your circles, but Americans are sick of everything being made in China and Apple could afford to do it here if there were public pressure for them to do so.
It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs. It’s reprehensible and disgusting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_co...
Hitting ESG metrics / recieving ESG credentials is a way for companies to benefit from doing the right thing.
My favorite https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/034/229/Bethe...
Companies don't care though but consumers also have to realize they are not your friends either
He is literally paid by slavers. He is a multi-millionaire off of the profits of slave labor. It's disgusting that Nike is somehow putting forth a "woke" face while literally using slaves to build their products.
Slavery is not woke. And Colin Kaepernick is a particular sort of disgusting that he is happy to accept millions of dollars from slavers, while also shaming people who don't adhere to some hypocritical fight for racial justice, which he himself does not adhere to, and is in fact in on the profits of.
Nike doesn't buy and sell slaves. Critics don't need to be perfect - if they do, there can be no critics.
I'm not sure what else you'd expect them to do exactly.
This makes the situation way, way more complex than “Apple needs to audit its supply chain”. While true, any such audit is going to be actively sabotaged by the suppliers. This will include actions like hiding workers, forcing them to lie, or moving them strategically between production lines to hide the truth.
I don’t mean to defend Apple here. I’m not sure what stops them creating their own businesses in China and Vietnam and elsewhere, where they directly hire the workers. Why does Apple outsource this stuff in the first place? Perhaps that’s the standard we should be holding them to.
I don't think it's a coincidence. There's a clear lack of effort here, or at least not on par with their other ones.
>It’s also crazy to me that China isn’t facing more severe backlash for the treatment of the Uyghurs.
Yeah, welcome to marketing indeed.
China is not treating Uyghurs any worse than the US is treating black people or Mexicans. In fact, China is doing exactly what the U.S. is doing to minorities: jailing them and making inmates more productive with prison labor.
Is there an electronics company that does a better job? (That’s not a rhetorical question.)
They're in exactly the same boat as Apple. IMHO this is about China, not any one company.
They also have annual reports for the past few years just about this.
http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-airpods-repair-recycling-imposs...
https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/apple-sues-canadian-recyc...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18144489
“..researchers found that brand, an intangible property, is more important than repairability or memory size in extending the life of a product.”[0]
The article found that Apple phones last on average a year longer than Samsung’s.
[0]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181016142434.h...
Another estimate puts Apple device lifespans at 4 years 3 months.[1]
[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-ipad-mac-heres-how-long...
The average for all smartphones is estimated as from 2 to 3 years, but bear in mind that includes many Apple devices, so non Apple devices must average the low end of that.[2]
[2]https://www.coolblue.nl/en/advice/lifespan-smartphone.html
After iPhones are not supported anymore they turn into bricks. This typically happens in 5 years, which is not too bad, but it's far from being perfect. Why should a smartphone be supported for much shorter than laptops? Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle, in this order.
Librem 5 GNU/Linux phone has a lifetime support with updates.
Where on Earth do you get that from? My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years. My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
I see comments like this all the time. Apple devices have built in redundancy, yet in fact they have industry leading device support and lifetimes. Apple is an arch polluter, yet over here in reality they have the highest environmental rating from Greenpeace of any major smartphone vendor. Where do people like you get this stuff, and why? What is it that’s motivating you to say these things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
You simply should not use a smartphone without security updates. It's as good as a brick in this case. (Or maybe never use Internet and Bluetooth on it).
So what phone do you use that can beat the iPhone 6 with 6 years of regular patches?
Librem 5 GNU/Linux phone has a lifetime support with updates.
The operating system is PureOS (Debian derivative). All necessary patches are upstreamed.
First link in DDG: https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
> My iPhone 3GS could still connect to the App Store after 7 years.
Connection to App Store does not mean it's actually supported with patches or secure to use. I would call it "a brick".
> My wife’s iPhone 6 from 2014 just got a patch in November.
But the new OS is not going to be installed anymore (according to the link above). Any technical reasons for that, apart from the planned obsolescence?
> Look, I’m not going to assume bad faith, maybe you really believe this or thought it seemed true to you. When your preconceptions turn out to be this dramatically contrary to the actual facts, I seriously suggest you take a look at what it is about those preconceptions that is leading you so far away from reality.
Thank you, I am also assuming good faith and so could you please provide evidence for your claims? For how long do security updates typically come and for how long the OS is updated to new versions? Anecdotes are not enough on HN.
> industry leading device support and lifetimes
In the industry of planned obsolescence 5 years support becomes a gold standard praised by fanboys. But in reality it is very short and leads to nature pollution. I see no reason not to support devices forever or let the community support them when they are too old. Apple does neither of those.
> things that are so clearly wrong and we easily disproved?
Your words are very strong yet you give no (reliable) disprove.
For my pixel 2, while there were no technical restrictions preventing me from replacing the broken camera, the screen was glued in in a way making it very difficult to open without smashing. There were also no places to buy the camera other than what seemed to be cameras stripped out of broken/stolen pixel 2s.
You just presented a technical restriction, didn't you?
> but having an official location with official parts is actually more useful than being able to do it yourself but not being able to get parts.
I disagree. This is not so much about DIY-repairs, but about a free market for third-party repairs, without which Apple can force people to pay as much as they want.
Just had the screen on a 2018 iPad replaced by a third party. Worked out fine.
Is 3rd-party repair “killed” only for the latest Apple devices by virtue of some new hardware attestation stuff?
https://www.fairphone.com/en/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
I like the suggestion of always buying used goods. But obviously, a secondary market still encourages the primary market. It’s not a perfect solution.
And if you dig into the mining side of the rare earths, worker conditions drop quickly.
The CCP calls the shots and if you own the company you have to go along or become one of the prisoners.
The CCP even has the forced laborers in a parade. They have their hands on it from start to finish.
You'll have to choose to get off the constant upgrade carousel.
But I'm not sure if anything changes if local governments aren't interested in stopping it (or actually support it) either.
Markets don't care about human rights... and if the local government supports this (in this case China, but other places too). I don't see how this ever changes.
We talk about slavery, that ended with state actions. I'm not sure China cares, and accordingly the practice will continue.
You're correct, but there's another angle to this than ending the practice: moral complicity.
An individual in the antebellum south couldn't reasonably end the institution of slavery in the US, but he could have taken actions that affected the degree he was personally complicit. If he owned and profited from slavery, he was clearly complicit. If he did but had a change of heart and manumitted them, he's far less so. If he became an abolitionist and did his best to avoid supporting slaveholders or the products of slavery, he's hardly complicit at all.
If Apple chooses to deal with companies that use forced labor (or chooses to look the other way), it's complicit, and that means it's customers are too (to a lesser degree).
It may even be easier than that. As far as I can tell, this "Lens Technology" company makes phone cover glass, and Apple already deals with Corning to make other glass components, and I'm sure they'd like the business. It looks like none of their Gorilla Glass factories are inside China.
If a Sword of Damocles is hovering continuously above their head in the form of criminal punishment then they would have no choice but to think twice about off shoring to a region where it is "conveniently" difficult to enforce basic labor rights. My point is that purposeful ignorance as a defense is unacceptable.
Also why isn’t it news? It feels like something that should have journalists camping outside Tim Cooks office.
While I question his motives, it’s kinda weird that Trump of all people seems to be the only one who is openly critical of China.
In China and other places just getting close to a factory can at times be difficult and crappy working conditions are sadly just assumed to be a fact :(
Trump's criticism of China I don't think intersects anywhere close to caring about the treatment of Chinese citizens... or anyone really.
Just a random anecdote, I'm American and work in the US. Trump personally approved the acquisition of a company I worked for and appeared with the CEO and talked about how all the great jobs that would come of it ... before the acquisition was official they laid most everyone off.
Sorry about the acquisition, if it had been a movie it would have been almost funny: This is great for job, btw you’re fired.
While they ultimately bear responsibility for their supply chain, it's easy to see how this stuff can happen without direct knowledge. What we need to do is pay attention to Apple's response and then act accordingly.
because ultimately the great majority of their customers do not care, as simple as that. They might care about local issues, wedge issues, but ethical and moral concerns in another country? not so much. Big luxury brands such as Apple pour billions in PR and marketing because they live or die by the reputation. The day their customers start caring more about it, things might change.
I just want to add, that I'm no way trying to diminish Apple's achievements when it comes to technology, product integration and creating remarkable ecosystems. I cannot think of another manufacturer that nailed that much in so little time. I think that Apple Silicon is game changer. But yes, they are a luxury brand.
We simply have to stop making consumers responsible and accountable for every unethical thing a company does. Why is the status quo that every company is evil and that's ok? You'll see AMEX commercials imploring you to "shop local" during the pandemic but where is their relief for small business? Why is it my responsibility to save them but business as usual for those that want to exploit me?
It's worth noting that one of the main reasons consumers "don't care" is the market is structured in a way to literally numb them to these issues. It makes it difficult to even learn about these issues (in relation to particular products), have that knowledge when making a purchasing decision, and take action against it (all competitors may be doing the same thing). The PR you mentioned also plays a part.
To give an slightly different example: Xinjiang produces a lot of cotton, and, IIRC, some of it is produced through forced labor. How am I supposed to show I care by avoiding that cotton? I can't, because it's pretty much impossible for me to know if a particular shirt I'm buying is made from that cotton or not, and it might actually be impossible for anyone to know without a very expensive and time consuming investigation.
If Apple put up big signs in it's stores saying "iPhones are made with forced labor," with compelling product storytelling about the forced labor practices involved, I think you'd Apple's sales drop as consumers show they do care. But that's not going to happen, all the market incentives are to obscure that kind of information.
> While I question his motives, it’s kinda weird that Trump of all people seems to be the only one who is openly critical of China.
You fell into Trumps distortion field. Many are critical of China, but the difference is what to do about it. Trumps idea was to go it alone with tariffs, rhetoric, and go after things like TikTok. IMO, that's not a plan or a real policy.
Investigators trying to dig up evidence usually end up in jail.
Does anyone care to explain it to me?
Most of the comments I'm seeing down voted seem to me to be somewhat extreme invective lacking in significant useful or interesting content. The bottom line is HN is about high signal low noise. Most of the downvotes are probably just on that criterion.
Another issue is that most of the people reading HN, including those vilifying Apple, probably own several dozen items manufactured in China. It seems somewhat unlikely that they can account for their supply chains in any meaningful way. There's also the mob rule aspect to all of this, it wouldn't be the first time 'evidence' had been found of Apple or their suppliers playing foul that turned out to be fake. Look up Mike Daisey some time. So lets all take some deep breaths and look at what's actually going on here.
> Most of the comments I'm seeing down voted seem to me to be somewhat extreme invective lacking in significant useful or interesting content.
Yeah, that's what's been confusing me. Some of the comments being downvoted I found to be quite precise critiques of the problems and honest attempts to provide information to an interesting discussion.
> So lets all take some deep breaths and look at what's actually going on here.
That sounds like the way to do it.
Personally, I silently downvote because good community members will self-reflect upon their comment (for even a single downvote), and I believe the process of questioning one’s writing is good; while bad community members are often not worth responding to (edit: I sometimes engage as i am an idealist and I think someone can be influenced for the better, however I really don’t feel I have much luck against the tide!)
I don’t think I am infallible, and usually others will upvote if a mistake is made. That said, I am usually careful to only downvote for what I think are very good reasons. I sometimes upvote something downvoted incorrectly IMHO. I have showdead switched on, but I can’t say I have felt the urgent need to vouch for anything yet.
IMHO this thread contains a lot of noise and thoughtless blather, which is a shame, because the topic is really important.
Edit: the hn guidelines say “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.” True. But sometimes I think it is worthwhile, and it is obviously polite to answer an honest question like yours which is so far down-thread in a low signal environment that I think that my transgression is otherwise harmless.
I guess they looked at the cost of improving the working conditions in their factories and decided that it was cheaper to simply not use any workers whose fate people might care about. I'm sure the government was happy to assist them in procuring some Han Chinese workers instead...
https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/slaveryen.pdf
While I agree that this issue should be brought to the forefront of the 1st world public, grouping/comparing these types of things always lead to a misdirection of discussion to semantics in my opinion and comments for stories like these should be focused on educating people more on the problem and brainstorming feasible ways the community can fight against it.
Apple lobbies against Uighur forced labour bill https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...
I can understand the situation. The Chinese government is trying to improve the economy in Xinjiang and encouraged companies to setup factories there. Ruled by a communist government, these companies had to comply and provide jobs to those areas, which is far from port and industry, whose workers are less trained and educated. China is hoping that by improving the economy, people can forget about independence maybe?
Evil? Kind of. Very practical plan though.
Edit: Distance from Xinjiang to Shenzhen: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi,+Xinjiang,+...
4k+ kms, 6+hr flight
One of the reason south China is more developed to northern China is that the south has most factories, it is close to port.
No, I don't believe there are forced labour. I put it this way. In another BBC report regarding the cotton workers a few weeks ago, the source (newspaper scan copies) has shown that in the past, companies import workers from neighboring provinces, and this year, to help the local economy, they make sure jobs will be provided to locals instead. You can still see those on BBC websites. It is not translated into English of course.
When I say independence, I probably mean extremism
EDIT: Okay I've found 1 source of evidence from the comments in this thread [1]. I wish clickbait headlines would point to these claims instead of claims from other journalist making claims based on other journalists claims.
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570485
From the database author himself [0]:
> "we have over 10000+ documented people" was the initial comment. Neither boasting nor saying 100% are credible.
I honestly find it both hilarious and disappointing that HN users are skeptical and contrarian about absolutely everything, except when it comes to what the US government and its proxies have to say about China.
[0] https://twitter.com/shahitbiz/status/1306554296088096769?s=2...
[1] https://twitter.com/DanielDumbrill/status/130801041951298764...