Mirioron

Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.

But that's also where some of the poorest people live! You know, the people who would benefit the most from having jobs like this.

The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.

It is! In the 90s senator Tom Harkin proposed the Child Labor Deterrence Act:

According to Harkin's website, "This bill would prohibit the importation of products that have been produced by child labor, and included civil and criminal penalties for violators."

This was a bill that never got anywhere, but simply talking about it had this impact:

In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act.

UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act

Things might be different nowadays, but people from poor countries don't have as many opportunities. Taking some away, might be taking all they have.

To add: there are over 4 million nurses in the US.

But then you're talking to people who got caught. Of course PayPal makes it easier to handle money, but it also leaves a big paper trail.

But the rest of the (developed) world largely reacted in the same way to covid. You'd expect the impacts to be largely similar too.

Of course there are ditch diggers. You can't dig everything with a machine.

And the ditch digger requires the engineer to tell him where to dig. Digging a hole for no reason isn't very beneficial.

Even if you take away this public infrastructure you would get private infrastructure in its stead.

I see this being downvoted, but images are copyrighted. Using an image for illustrative purposes is not fair use, is it? Therefore the articles can't just share the same images.

For the same reason they were thinking about the "iPad" and then "iPhone" (tablet consideration actually came first internally even though in 2004 it was redirected toward the phone first) long, long before it "viable as a consumer product" duh. You don't get out ahead of things by waiting until after your competitors do it to get started, you make it happen early with your own R&D.

But that's exactly what happened with the iPad though. Apple's competitors had already released tablet-type devices for years, they just weren't really ready as consumer products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC

This is how you get more nukes in the world. If NATO wouldn't help protect the Baltics, Poland etc then it's pretty clear their only option for long-term sovereignty would be banding together to create their own nuclear deterrence. No amount of training would stop a country like Russia (or the US) from trying their luck at some point.

Russia attacking its neighbors goes back centuries. And for that matter, so does western Europe and the US. If there's no formal alliance, then the western powers would be a threat too.

It makes no difference. Apple's past behavior has alienated enough people from their brand that they must provide such a large 'eco-system' themselves. For Windows, Linux and Android it's the users that provide those tools instead.

Revenue, operating income, and cash flow metrics undersell how Apple is performing in the marketplace from a new user perspective.

If anything, then the financials oversell their position in the market. Apple is not in the lead in (almost?) any category in the number of users. They are the premium product, but a premium product that many users want to avoid, rather than can't afford.

But ultimately being second has been very smart by Apple. It has allowed them to not be punished by regulators for their (previous) bad behavior.

Something to think about before banning the pill.

Regardless whether the strategies are bad or not, banning contraceptives should never be on the table.

As a parent I find the environment extremely child-hostile.

It might be child-hostile, but is how child-hostile the environment is actually a consideration? The situation for having children has never been better, but birthrates are some of the lowest they have ever been.

As a species on the planet? No, there's nothing bad about it. But it's going to be bad politically. It will shake up the power of countries when population numbers change and no country wants to give to power.

I have a difficult time understanding this. I was a kid that was rebellious, but in a way that didn't get me in trouble. When I read stories like this I get an intense feeling of fighting back, or at the very least, hold everyone that participated in contempt for the rest of my life. I am certain that if my parents had done something like this I would never have forgiven them. Nor would I have forgiven anyone that works in a place like this.

The other strategies are clearly not working though. Birth rates have at best stayed steady or declined.

This is a good effect for the economy though. The customers are benefiting from it. Not so great for Uber though.

Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.

In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.

On that note we should ban everything recreational, inefficient, and made for comfort, except the things I like.

People would benefit from living in smaller houses when it comes to heating too. Should we legally mandate small rooms with claustrophobia-inducing celling heights?

People like different things. Some people like their pickups. Maybe they find their size more convenient and comfortable. We don't know that. We do know that people made that choice out of their free will.

You're not wrong there. The US is definitely on the list of countries that I don't want to visit. Albeit for other reasons.

That's true. I guess it would be difficult to avoid places where this obligation exists without knowing about it beforehand.

I genuinely rather avoid any establishment that expects tips than feel obligated to pay tips. It does mean that I will never go to a restaurant or similar establishment, but the feeling of being obligated to pay some unsaid price just disgusts me. Either you say it upfront of there's no deal.

Putin isn't the one pressing the button to shoot a missile that hits a kindergarten. He's not the one that's threatening you with a rifle. It's an average Russian guy that does it.

It has been an average Russian guy that does it for centuries.

Virtually every country bordering Russia has suffered from this in the past few hundred years. I don't mean to say that it's right, but it should be easily understandable why any country that had portions of their population deported to Siberia and sent to gulag campus would have tensions that were reignited with this conflict.

If Russia manages to occupy Ukraine through repressions then wouldn't this invite Chechnya 2.0, but with 30x the people? Can the Russian state even survive something like that?

But over the last decade journalists, as a group, have taught me not to trust them.

Is this why the US has focused so much on the ability to shoot down ICBMs? Because if they can shoot down even just a few tit-for-tat doesn't really work against them anymore.

I think even if Ukraine had done nothing they still would've been targeted by Russia. Look at Estonia[0] and Georgia[1]. You could think of them as preludes to what happened in Crimea. It's the same excuse - "we are here to protect Russians". Estonia didn't work out, but Georgia worked out well for Russia. They got away with Crimea too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

One of the scenarios I keep thinking about is what if either side uses just one nuke. They let the other side know that they're going to use just one and do it. Do you respond to that with your full arsenal? Do you go tit-for-tat? Do you just let them get away with it?

I'm surprised by how little small (civilian) drones are used in general. Simply having the ability to see much further than your troops are at seems like it would be very useful. Perhaps batteries are a problem?

You mean "historical Russian territory" that the Russian Empire took with conquest? Maybe France should retake historical French territory from the Napoleonic era too?

It's also possible that in a creative industry like that you can't be as controlling when it comes to employee behavior. The people coming up with crazy new ideas are probably more eccentric than average. It might not be as easy to walk the line of separating the good eccentric behavior from the bad. An incident here, an incident there can pile up over the years. My impression is that it's not a very uncommon problem in the entertainment industry.

You might not trust them, but the quote is taken out of context by the media and whenever it gets regurgitated on the internet. It's used as some kind of a "See, I knew I was correct in disliking them!" idea.