Hacker News Reader

Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

i don't understand. why would people want to own an artifact of human misery?

Weren't some rich Russians willing to pay for the privilege of a pirate-hunting vacation off the coast of Somalia? You're assuming everyone has a conscience, which is an unrealistic assumption.

sometimes I forget I live in a chimpanzee insane asylum.

> Weren't some rich Russians willing to pay for the privilege of a pirate-hunting vacation off the coast of Somalia?

No, that was a hoax:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/piratecruise.asp

Please note that I stated that some people were willing to pay for the privilege of blowing up Somali pirates with heavy weapons. You found evidence that the Russian company selling pirate-hunting vacations was a hoax. I am talking about demand for a gory form of entertainment, you're talking about supply. Hence, you have not defeated my argument.

I personally know people who would pay to shoot pirates with 50-cal machine guns. You'd be amazed at how bored executives at big companies can get...

1) People in USA/Canada/Other western world are _addicted_ to products made in misery (in China, for example). Less miserable of course, but still far from good conditions. 2) If there are reasons to think that it can improve their condition, than it os a good idea.

Very good point. China is only the tip of the iceberg. For example, about 10 years ago, there was a scandal that Nike used slave child labor in Pakistan to manufacture soccer balls.

http://www1.american.edu/TED/nike.htm

The problem, that USA is _not_ much better in the ways how blue collar workers are treated there. There is a good book "the great squeeze", which talks about misery workers go through working on American industrial facilities. Google Books should have it.

Ridiculous. They are addicted to inexpensive products, nothing else. Few people ever check a label to see where clothes are made.

Inexpensive (or more correctly - cheap) are almost always made in misery. So by simple logic, people who prefer cheap products prefer products made in misery.

Does not compute.

High-level languages are almost always slower. So by simple logic, people who prefer high-level languages prefer slow languages.

However, people wouldn't want anything to do with a slow language that's low-level. And in the same way for a shirt made in a poor country that's not cheap.

I am not talking about their intentions - that is not a domain of "simple logic" anyway. What I am saying is factual statement: the set [made cheaply] is a subset of [made in misery]. So you cannot escape purchasing stuff [made in misery] if you buy suff [made cheaply].

That's some seriously bad logic. The fact that cheap implies misery does not mean that misery implies cheap. People aren't buying the product for the misery, they're buying it for the price. Adding misery without affecting the price will not make people any more likely to buy your product.

Yes, you sound like Nazi's on Nuremberg process - "we just executed orders". And that is true: the did not care about people whom the tortured. In fact the would in other circumstances be friendly and polite to them. Yet they really-really needed their salaries or premiums or move up on their military ladder or other stuff.

So if people didn't buy stuff from these miserable countries the people there would be better off? Absolutely wrong. Typically their other choices are subsistence farming, prostitution, or selling children into same.

Also, I'm amazed that you tried to equate economic decisions to the acts of torture and mass murder committed by the Nazis. There ought to be a law about that sort of thing. ;-)

What utter drivel. I made no comment on the rights or wrongs of the situation: I simply pointed out that your logic was horribly flawed. Which it remains, and no attempts to compare me to a nazi are going to change that.

Americans aren't as ignorant as you think, everyone has now seen images of sweat shops and knows if you ask them that manufacturing conditions for the things they buy at Wal Mart are awful. However, they continue to buy them, just like an alcoholic continues to drink even though he knows that it's killing him. That's textbook addiction right there.

Not really, it's just damn near impossible to buy anything that isn't made in China or some other crappy dictatorship.

Difficult but not impossible. Amazingly enough, not everything affordable made in misery. LEGO kits for example are mostly made in Europe. Every once in a while you can see inexpensive toys made in Sweden, shirts made in Egypt, platic containers made in Germany, furniture made in Canada, hammers made in Russia, just look at the stickers.

The problem is in my view is not that countries are dictatorships, the problems are: 1. Outsourcing everything to one country creates unhealthy dependence of recipient economy on manufacturer. Well you may say - China depends on USA as much as USA on China - and that will be false - you forgot about a big economy - European Union/Canada. Asymmetry is obvious. 2. Nothing bad in outsourcing some amount of production to poor countries - good way to help them in fact. But if you overstretch then will destroy wellbeing of the citizens of your country, forcing them out of job, and, because poor countries has poor environmental regulations, poison environment of the producer.

The problem is... say you don't want to buy something made in China. The alternative is to do without, as everything is made in China.

(I would love to buy a laptop that's not made in China. Link me to one.)

> 1) People in USA/Canada/Other western world are _addicted_ to products made in misery (in China, for example)

The act of buying something made in a third world country greatly reduces the misery (by providing a job and an income to a person).

Btw, people in China have a pretty good lifestyle when compared to other people in third world countries - all thanks to Americans buying their stuff.

South Korea and Taiwan are today 1st world nations whereas even a generation ago they were not. They didn't get there by wallowing in their perfect virginal misery, untouched by foreign trade. Quite the opposite, they got there by providing goods and services to the rest of the world, bootstraping their economy and their industrial base in the process.

Oh yeah? tell it to ones who immigrate from China to Kazakhstan for example: Kazakhstan has very limited trade with USA, but quality of live is much, much higher than Chinese.

Of course. Kazakhstan is not a third-world country. It's a former Soviet republic, an oiled country, and basically a Russian satellite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com