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Comment by Dah00n | Hacker News Reader

It sounds good in theory but in reality it is a pipe dream. All the places Apple could move production to are all using what is essentially slave labour. Unless you want to pay like three to five times the price and get a product built in, say, Scandinavia. The US is also better of course but not anywhere near perfect so if you really want a "clean" product The US wont do either.

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> Unless you want to pay like three to five times the price and get a product built in, say, Scandinavia.

Sure, if that what it takes to solve the issue then I guess that's what it takes.

Or are we seriously going to say slavery isn't a problem as long as as it isn't in our own backyard? So slavery in the 1800's was a problem but we can live with the fruits of modern day forced labor since we want our cheap iPhone?

Ethics are flexible. e.g. Westwards expansion and killing off the natives wasn't a problem in the 1800s but is only a problem now.

Isn’t that what progress is all about though? We are maturing as a society, or are at least trying to.

However when a side uses such methods, and then retains its advantages while now vilifying other countries for trying to do the same while catching up it just seems a touch hypocritical / "pulling the ladder up".

What are you arguing? That side genocided in the past so other side please go ahead and do so now? Do you realize how absurdly callous that sounds? This isn't a board game we're playing with wooden figures for pieces. These are human lives. We have a chance to do something about these people who are suffering today, now.

Yes. I am not here to impress you with my morality. I'm just saying that it's awfully convenient for the side who did so in the past and reaped all its advantages without meaningful reparation to suddenly care about some strangers in some faraway land now.

And this is without going into what the Western powers directly did to China back in the day.

I care about these people. I don't have a time machine to go back and save the Native Americans or Greenlandic Inuits or Jews from the predations of world powers. It's not awfully convenient for me to care about the genocide of a million people. If I was alive during World War 2 and I received multiple, independent reports that a genocide was being committed by a foreign power, I would be agitating for that foreign power to be held accountable just as I am today.

I dearly hope we've moved past barbaric eye for an eye justice.

>are we seriously going to say slavery isn't a problem

We're not going to say that, but we're going to go along with it. Maybe even while we're saying the opposite.

> Or are we seriously going to say slavery isn't a problem as long as as it isn't in our own backyard? So slavery in the 1800's was a problem but we can live with the fruits of modern day forced labor since we want our cheap iPhone?

Modern day forced labor is still allowed and utilised in the United Stated - it's mandatory for all able-bodied inmates in federal and most state prisons. For an additional kicker, US is also leading the world in both absolute and percentage of population measures of people incarcerated and has for decades.

The difference with what is happening in China is how targeted it is, what the conditions of labor are and how eager various US corporations are to directly use fruits of said labor - but it is just as immoral.

This is false. Work programs in US prisons are almost always voluntary. Only a few states have some limited Penal labor if it is added as part of the sentence by the court, but they are uncommon, and does not happen at the federal level at all.

Learning to work at a job, if done correctly, can be part of a constructive rehabilitation program. ...though I'm skeptical the degree to which that occurs.

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