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Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

Modals are frustrating, but what I find truly appalling is the Uyghur slave labor that companies like Amazon profit from.

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At the risk of the perception that I'm making a false equivalence or reducing the importance of being mindful of the types of suffering you point out (I don't intend that, and I'm as outraged by the problem you mentioned), but it's ok to tend to your own garden. In fact, that's where we can sometimes make the impacts that occasionally tip the system over. The more we try, the luckier we get.

I don’t disagree, but I find myself wondering is it morally better to develop the modal and to not use Amazon instead?

Both are morally deficit. It's a difference of degrees, not kind, and both are reprehensible.

Agreed

I find it very weird to blame Amazon for the crimes of the Chinese government.

Actually it's customers like us who benefit from it. Amazons are just the facilitators. The comfort, the low cost, the ease….

> Amazons are just the facilitators.

The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/see-worthy-first-look-jeff-bez...

>The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.

Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".

> Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".

There’s plenty of sources documenting Amazon’s profits from Uyghur slave labor. Here’s one:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/apple-amazon-sony-samsung...

The article claims "Amazon [...] benefiting from the forced labor of Uighur Muslims in China", but that really just translates into "amazon buys goods made from factories in reeducation camps in Xinjiang". That doesn't really contradict or refute what the parent poster said, which is that consumers are the ultimate benefactors (presumably from lower prices).

I suppose your claim that "profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht" is technically true, but that's more due to weasel wording than anything else. The sentence gives an impression that one of the reasons why bezos could buy the yacht was because of Uighur labor, but strictly speaking the "profit" could be anywhere between one cent to half a billion dollars.

It’s not even “amazon buys goods from labor camps in Xinjiang” rather it is “amazon allows sellers on their platform from China who could be reselling goods from labor camps in Xinjiang.” Or it could just be a normal furniture factory in Changji (a city near Urumqi).

Factories in Guangzhou (where a lot of electronics have been made) have been using Uighur labor for a few decades now, though supposedly they are migrant workers and it’s all non-forced (which I would tend to believe, in the way that government arranged labor migrations are sort of dubious). If your trade school sets up an internship at a factory in another province, is it forced labor or not? This applies to Hans as much as it does to Uighurs, so the claims in the article come off as a bit strange.

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