Here, watch this: I'm the US government with the most powerful military and surveillance network on the planet with multiple deployed floating cities. You give me a list of every supplier you use and I will recursively go down that list and every employee they have and if you use slaves to harvest materials at any point, I shut down your entire business and burn every shippng crate of stock until you get a supplier that doesn't use slaves. If you lie, I ship the executives to one of numerous black sites under my control. If we're going to do it to innocent people, shipping them to God knows what death camp without due process, I'm not going to sit here and listen anymore about this "we can't do that" nonsense about our supply chain.
Woah, crazy, slavery solved.
At least have the balls to tell me you want cheap avocados and don't care if child slaves pick them. I'm so God damn tired of all the excuses and smoke and mirrors.
Let’s say you buy electrolytic capacitors, and you’re worried that they might have conflict tantalum in them. You call up the manufacturer (likely Samsung), and they tell you that they are unable to verify the origin of the metal. Even if they did tell you who sold them the metal, that’s just a refiner, and there is no way to verify whatever they tell you about the origin. Many conflict metals are laundered through other countries, and I am not sure how you’d detect that.
I understand your frustration, but how do you actually verify the origins of these commodities? The professional auditors just blindly trust documentation as far as I can tell.
Then why the fuck are you buying them from there? Get a different supplier. If they can't answer that question, it's because they do use slave labor or just don't care. Neither is acceptable.
I'm sorry, are you okay if you asked your boss "hey, we don't have actual slaves in the basement, right?" And they answer "I don't know?" I hope to God you would call the police. But suddenly it's acceptable because a CEO says "maybe, but it saves us 5¢ per unit and they're just brown people in another country"?
I'm not going to boohoo for poor little victim companies because they just need slave labor because they're too stupid or greedy to not buy from a company who can't say "no slavery is used in making my product".
"Oh no, I want to make shirts, but all the cotton I'm willing to pay for comes from slave plantations." Then don't make shirts. And if you do, that makes you a slaver too.
I love how this is where the conversation is these days. This is how far the Overton window has shifted. Slavery is totally acceptable as long as you pretend you don't know. Fix it? Stop slavery? That's just too hard and we may lose profits. "Oh no, poor little us, it's impossible for us to actually care about human rights."
So your solution is that purchasers just need to buy from someone who tells them that the commodity is clean? That is definitely what many do, and what the conflict minerals regulations have encouraged companies to do, but I don’t trust any unverifiable information.
My point is that these companies know that slavery is being used. Nestlé quite literally admitted to it!
If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?
The literal bare minimum someone can do is get a written affidavit from their supplier that the chain is clean. I'm a stupid individual man and somehow I can take the extra hours required for damn near every purchase to look up who I'm buying from and where it comes from. Sometimes I even go without! But companies worth quite literally tens of billions can't?
If all you have to do is get written affidavits, you’ll just create an industry of co-minglers and liars abroad, without changing anything. I don’t think this is a readily solveable problem.
Then you make it illegal to do business with countries that don't have an extradition treaty for slavery!
I cannot fathom this mindset. This is human slavery! This is worse than murder and rape and child endangerment, because it inherently includes all of them! It is the worst crime you can commit onto another human being for decades and decades as you drive them into the grave. I've seen a picture of a man looking at the severed hands of his daughter for bananas! But you're willing to handwaved it away like it's a minor inconvenience?
As if a country that is currently demanding OpenAI give them every chat they've ever had, including deleted, a country that has every phone call and text ever made, that has privileged access to emails and photo clouds and search engines for monitoring, that runs countless poisoned exit nodes and honey potted websites, which infiltrates domestic and foreign cults and rings and governments with spies regularly, that publishes papers on how to spy on citizens walking through their homes via wireless signals and hear audio through hard surfaces by using vibrations in leaves, that operates military cities and steers security standards and has quite literally unlimited money for their war machine, which can track individual human activity from space can't find out if millions to billions of pounds of materials going through their ports being inspected by their customs with manifest signed by domestic companies with paperwork uses slavery!?
Oh, come on. When it's about SpaceX taking humans to Mars we're all "we do these things because they are hard" but when it comes to ending the most abhorrent crimes against humanity of our times you throw up your hands and declare "the billionaires told me it was hard"!?
> If we're going to be a fascist dumpster, why does everyone pretend it's some inherent right that the corporate wigs get all this insulation and that there's simply nothing that can be done against quite literally the worst crimes against humanity that we could possible participate in?
I mean, historically, Fascists and Capitalists have been pretty hand-in-hand so that's far from even strange to me. Despite the Nazi party having Socialist in it's name, they literally coined the term "privatization" to describe their process of selling public-good utilities and services to private owners so they could profit off of them.
The only thing I would say is don't burn the shipping crates. That's just wasteful. Sell the products at 50% off retail to everyone in the US below the poverty line first, then everyone else, and use the funds to pay to improve the working conditions overseas. Our atmosphere doesn't need more waste in it.
Here, watch this: I'm the US government with the most powerful military and surveillance network on the planet with multiple deployed floating cities. You give me a list of every supplier you use and I will recursively go down that list and every employee they have and if you use slaves to harvest materials at any point, I shut down your entire business and burn every shippng crate of stock until you get a supplier that doesn't use slaves. If you lie, I ship the executives to one of numerous black sites under my control. If we're going to do it to innocent people, shipping them to God knows what death camp without due process, I'm not going to sit here and listen anymore about this "we can't do that" nonsense about our supply chain.
Woah, crazy, slavery solved.
At least have the balls to tell me you want cheap avocados and don't care if child slaves pick them. I'm so God damn tired of all the excuses and smoke and mirrors.