New documentary reveals that 21,000 laborers have died working Saudi Vision 2030
archpaper.com
archpaper.com
That is way more than the number of Chinese deaths building Canada's railway, which I always thought was a poster child for immigrant abuse: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-p....
Turns out that 30% of the population in Saudi Arabia is foreign workers, so 10M or so, thus 21,000 is roughly one dead per 500 foreign workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_workers_in_Saudi_Arabi...
This 21,000 deaths, is it including natural deaths or something other than dying as a result of the job?
If it is true, then we need intervention as the death toll is approaching what one would expect in war zone.
Enormous numbers of people die very frequently without coverage from mainstream corporate media. Your surprise is mostly from the fact that whatever outlets you would expect to be the watchdogs for this sort of thing, haven't been barking.
There have been guerilla documentaries on slave labor in the gulf for years. I believe the one I saw was Vice. They had people working 12 hour days in the sun with no breaks and sleeping in metal shacks with no A/C in the desert.
I think something like 5,000 civilians have been killed in Myanmar with very little western coverage. Not sure how many have been killed in Sudan in the last year but it is in the tens of thousands. Both of these cases have millions of displaced people as well.
I get that those are wars and this is just slavery, but I'm just trying to make the point that unless you go out of your way to consume media outside the mainstream you'll probably miss a lot of this stuff. It is incredibly shocking when you first hear about it.
What the OP is saying about 21000 laborers dying in Saudi Arabian is that huge number would have been noticed by lots of people - and a lot of these people would have had huge incentive to get the word out, and then the "mainstream media" would have had huge incentive to get the word out as well. E.g. wouldn't this have been gigantic news in places like the Philippines and India where many of these laborers come from?
As OP points out, I think the bigger problem is separating out on-the-job deaths from "natural" deaths. I.e. how many deaths would you normally expect from 10M people over 7 years?
My guess is that it's some combination of (a) truly awful slave-like conditions, (b) just general "lack of safety culture" conditions (e.g. ~100 people died building the Hoover Dam - I don't think people considered them slaves but they definitely weren't following OSHA rules), (c) accidental deaths that happen in any large project over this amount of time, and (d) natural deaths. The journalistic challenge is that it's difficult to tease out these different causes.
Well, it's more complicated than that. Take Bangladesh. Most of the people dying are extremely poor young men from the gram (village), whose families are not going to have the power to get their stories in the newspapers, which are owned by ruling class families. Some of these papers even have sibling businesses in their parent conglomerates that actively recruit workers to go to SA, UAE, etc. [0] Also, the political system is desperate for Saudi investment [1][2], so they aren't necessarily going to make a huge public fuss about it. It's certainly in the news though [3][4].
That's all to say that families absolutely know about this, talk about it on social media groups, and nothing happens.
[0] https://bashundhara-bd.com/, which is owned by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashundhara_Group, which owns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Pratidin .
[1] https://en.bd-pratidin.com/national/2024/10/28/21535
[2] https://en.bd-pratidin.com/national/2024/10/27/21480
Saudi Arabia population is ~35M with ~120K deaths per year.
10M immigrants is ~32K deaths per year.
One might argue that your analysis is driven by the need to justify the atrocities you witness-- an emotional reaction.
> usually leads to bad outcomes
Citation needed.
See my comment above in the same thread, the data suggests that OP's view is not unreasonable. Your comment uses charged language like "asshole", "literal slaves", "justify/intellectualize the deaths", etc and you are not providing data to support your claims (only an appeal to emotions).
The data uses a relative comparison of migrant deaths to overall death rate for Saudi Arabia. You are looking for something to console you that "actually the slaves aren't dying at high rates". I'd like to see this death rate for the subset of the SA population that matches migrant demographics, ex: age and gender. Then we can see what the comparable death rates are for healthy young men.
> Your comment uses charged language like "asshole"
I said I wasnt an asshole to preface that I genuinely meant what I said.
> "literal slaves"
They are literally slaves this is factual.
> "justify/intellectualize the deaths"
Again, factual. You yourself claim that you are trying to be unemotional and analyze the situation as I described, "academically".
1. all workers involved in this project are slaves, i.e. trafficked and sold into slavery and are owned as property.
2. OP justifies the deaths and not merely tries to add context and find a reasonable explanation for some of the deaths (which does not exclude possible human rights violations).
1. I don't need to prove "all workers" are slaves, that is an arbitrary burden established by you. I can provide links for you to educate yourself about the Kafala[0] system however. Here is an excerpt from the section on Saudi Arabia:
"an employer assumes responsibility for a hired migrant worker and must grant explicit permission before the worker can enter Saudi Arabia, transfer employment, or leave the country. The kafala system gives the employer immense control over the worker."
Sounds like ownership to me. You can dispute that if you want but I don't think it is a meaningful distinction to make, personally.
2. > My guess is that it's some combination of (a) truly awful slave-like conditions, (b) just general "lack of safety culture" conditions (e.g. ~100 people died building the Hoover Dam - I don't think people considered them slaves but they definitely weren't following OSHA rules)
OP is trying to contextualize the deaths in a way that makes them "cleaner" or "more acceptable" instead of just reading the damn articles that actual investigative journalists have written which would prove to them that YES this is slavery and YES these are human beings that are being worked to death.
If all your objective, rational analysis has wrought is a shitty half-assed statistical comparison in an attempt to justify slavery, on an internet forum, what good was it to begin with?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system#:~:text=The%20ka....
I don't disagree with your first point. Yes, I would like to see these breakdowns. However, OP's point was that other factors like natural death can account for some of these numbers. This point is reasonable and data seems to suggest that it is statistically probable.
> educate yourself about the Kafala[0] system
Is this an abusive system? Yes. Does it create opportunities for slavery? Yes. Can 21K deaths be attributed so slavery? No evidence. This is not splitting hairs, this is a reasonable approach to digging into details when dealing with complex issues.
You found a random datapoint to compare to without accounting for confounding variables. That is an unserious analysis.
> Yes. Can 21K deaths be attributed so slavery? No evidence. This is not splitting hairs, this is a reasonable approach to digging into details when dealing with complex issues.
The issue is not complex. You are just using this air of objectivity as cover for your intellectual incuriosity. You could literally stop arguing with me and go read articles that have been documenting the high mortality rate and human rights abuses, that have been coming out since around the time that the Qatar World Cup was announced, but you wont. People have done the legwork to bring this journalism to you, but you wont bother to go and read it, because you'd rather pull some stats out of your ass and call it a day, and then lecture others about emotionally-driven arguments.
The fundamental problem here is that you are being intellectually incurious, but don't want to admit it, and you are trying to stave off the cognitive dissonance that happens when you read about something bad happening, so you can contextualize it and go about your day without feeling sad. If that's the case, just say "I don't live in Saudi Arabia why the fuck do I care", at least it's honest.
You obviously have never done things from a non-privileged situation.
It is extremely difficult to disseminate ideas that lie outside the overton window.
Exhibit A: you. You just "don't believe it" and that's usually the end of the conversation.
These people have everything against them. It is of no surprise, to me, that their anguish and problems go completely unnoticed by Western society.
its just that all of methods above are useless if the organisation has close ties to all of these pathways of resolution.
So 3k per year is for 10M workers is twice as deadly for a less dangerous profession, but with worse safety standards, poor treatment, and inherent risks from extreme heat it doesn’t actually sound unrealistic.
Now I don't think 10M is the correct denominator. It's unlikely all those workers are in construction where a lot of the deaths are presumably concentrated. According to this[2], there were around 4.4M foreign construction workers in 2016. 3k/5M (assuming numbers have increased) is 60/100k, so around as dangerous as the most dangerous professions in the US.
But this also doesn't account for the alleged missing.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/140/1/0...
https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/
> Fishing and Hunting Workers
> Fatal injury rate: 132.1 per 100,000 workers.
Luckily, not that many people work as hunters/fisherman
It isn't? Maybe the issue is coming into the light now in the US because Saudi Arabia and US historically been close pals, regardless of the human rights abuses, so maybe there hasn't been a push to "expose" them to the general public in the US until know?
I remember reading about Indonesia being pissed off at Saudi Arabia because many of the Indonesian workers died after going there, and Saudi government didn't seem to really give a crap about the workers. I think I read about this back in 2010 the earliest or something, in Swedish media.
It been known by the western world for a long time already.
https://www.kayfabenews.com/due-to-the-countrys-long-history...
It's obviously worse in some places than others, but world governments are generally complicit and see it as a fair price to pay for continued economic partnership and/or military alliance.
Here's a semi-outdated map that I'd argue Afghanistan has earned a place on, and also doesn't shout out The Holy See, which is also a theocratic monarchy: https://i0.wp.com/mattdallisson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/... The list is basically Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Holy See, and uhhhh that's kinda it. The UAE is a republic of monarchies, which is a fun/sad corner case.
When the laws are made at the whim of the sovereign, chattel slavery isn't so unimaginable.
At the very least you can do what India did and stay in the Commonwealth for economic/geopolitical signaling reasons, but declare sovereignty from the crown itself.
EDIT: and tbh you still got em lurking. AFAICT the monarch has the power to dissolve parliament at any time and start new elections, and could exercise the power of veto?
The Constitution Act 1986 is the principal formal statement. The Act first recognises that the Queen - the Sovereign in right of New Zealand - is the Head of State of New Zealand and that the Governor-General appointed by her is her representative in New Zealand. Each can in general exercise all the powers of the other…
The Governor-General has the power to summon, prorogue and dissolve parliament… a Bill passed by the House becomes law when the Sovereign or Governor-General assents to it.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991009163331/http://www.dpmc.g...
And way lower than the rate of about 1 in 25 indicated by the article you linked on the Canada railway.
It would be very surprising if it were anything close to half of foreign workers; it's just one (very big) project.
I had written a longer comment but deleted it and I am posting this instead.
It's about value of life. And no, not all lives are worth the same at all!
You still need hint? Here's something from this article:
> more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017
Adding to that - it's common knowledge here. Such news came out in International magazines/news as well (and keeps coming out) - you must have missed them, or it didn't register.
For example, 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Treatment_of_Sout...
Referencing a 2013 article: https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/18/south-asia-protect-migra...
you are forgetting it's a moving target i.e. the dead worker gets replaced with a new worker without the number of foreign workers increasing
but it either is well in the range of expected death tool if you ever looked into the working conditions and other aspects
so it's not really "coming out now", it's more like nearly no one cared when it was bad in the past and got slowly but increasingly worse over the years
Could it be that [social] media is too biased? It seems obvious to me that if you look at countries around the world, you’ll be astonished by our “global ignorance". It would be a great exercise if we had new tools to measure things at a macro, worldwide level and not just issue-oriented perspectives.
There’s a Peter Griffin meme with a color chart explaining that.
It isn't China/Iran else 21 deaths would have been news. Media/Citizens also align themselves with the foreign policy.
So, on that basis, we would conclude that not only is it not "approaching what one would expect in war zone", it's one third of the death rate for young men in one of the world's richest countries, one which has virtually no slavery problem. That is, it's three times safer to be a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia than to be an average young dude in Springfield. So, yes, the death [toll] really can be that high. In fact, it could be many times higher without any job-related deaths at all.
However, your number of "10M or so" is all foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, not just the ones working on Saudi Vision 2030. So, on that basis, it's entirely possible that the number of workers working on Saudi Vision 2030 is much smaller than this 10 million. Maybe we're talking about 3000 deaths per year out of only 1 million workers, or 0.1 million, which would be really alarming!
The death rate for those foreign workers turned out to less than the death rate for 15-34 year old males in the US. I compared to 15-34 year old males because I figured that foreign workers in Qatar, especially those working on World Cup construction, would tend to be male and younger.
I'm going to take the number of foreign worked in Saudi Arabia as 6 million. That's lower than the number you cited from Wikipedia, but that number is a few year old and has been going down. 6 million seems closer to the current number. I'd rather be low than high because being low on the population size gives a higher death rate. Too high is better than too low when you are trying to check if a death rate is worrisome.
If that 3000 per year turns out to be among all foreign workers and for all causes, like the Qatar numbers, that would give a death rate of 50 per 100k per year.
That would be pretty low. For comparison US death rates for males 15-24 and 25-34 are 127 and 251 respectively, and for females in those age groups they are 49 and 109.
That's low enough to be hard to believe, so a more detailed look into the data is called for. I haven't found any more easily Googled data, so what just follows is speculation.
One possibility is that unlike the Qatar numbers the Saudi numbers actually are only for workers actually working on Saudi Vision 3030 and/or only includes work related deaths. That would lower the denominator and raise the calculated death rate.
Another possibility is that the numbers are like the Qatar numbers and workers there really do die at a lower rate than do young people in the US. Offhand I can think of a couple things that might contribute to this:
1. Many of the jobs for migrants are known to be physically hard. Maybe it is mostly only people who are in very good health who take those jobs.
2. Saudi Arabia greatly restricts alcohol and enforces this with very harsh penalties. Same with drugs. A significant chuck of the US young person deaths are alcohol or drug related and those kind of deaths should be almost entirely absent among the foreign workers in Saudi Arabia.
It seems to me orders of magnitude higher.
edit: hm I guess not
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...
edit2: more clarity on the Qatar numbers
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-how-many-people-have-died-f...
it's 15.000 foreigners dying in 5 years, counting all foreigner deaths in Qatar. I .... have no idea if that is high or not.
Damn, the gulf state's abuse of foreign workers is right up there with US and Canada's treatment of foreign workers 100 years ago.
US taxmoney was used to finance the massacre of 40000+ Gazans in the span of 1 year. No interventions happened there.
The people you are pleeding to to do the "intervention" clearly don't care about human lives, so I'm not sure what you are hoping to accomplish.
I mean, it's not. There have been estimated death tolls available for years, but people don't ever care. You can safely assume that once this documentary is released, people still won't care.
Can you share?
Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever.
This is not the case at NEOM. It's just bad treatment of these workers.
Not in the US, but this is a place that does public beheadings.
> Also were two external factors in particular: Malaria and yellow fever.
Here the external factor is desert heat.
The only question is if there's a will do actually try and mitigate it.
In the West, it's only relevant if it is claimed that Jews were involved, whether or not the number is realistic.
I don't know why you consider this an incredibly high number. Active war zone such as the Ukrainian battlefields kill way more people.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
I can already show up at a US embassy or consulate anywhere in the world and provide them my passport serial number to have a new one cut in an hour if I've lost mine, the gap to close is not big policy wise. Otherwise, we're relying on "magic government credential" which can be held hostage to hold a human hostage. Silliness.
(India maintains the largest biometrics ID system in the world, Aadhaar, containing the records of 1.3B people: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2022/0425...)
Yes, there are other factors such as bonded labor, indemnities and local laws taking precedence. But this is such an obvious abuse factor, it makes sense to remove it. Of all the ways to do it, whether it's paid lockers and so on – what the parent comment said is still a cheap way.
Sure, but the local government wants it that way.
They won't be the ones to change it!
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
> A valid passport is required for U.S. citizens to enter or exit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I think it would be better to legally force all these migrants back into their countries every couple of months just to make sure they're not being kept by force. Fighting abuse costs money, it's expensive, I know but Saudis can afford it.
And even now if you are working in the middle of the desert can you even go to the airport without your employer help ?
If countries sending folks to these places are complacent, certainly, the problem scope and level of effort required expands rapidly.
"We can solve this today; if you're asserting we can't, be prepared to prove it before the audience expands to encourage accountability." Whether that audience is higher up the leadership ladder, adversarial peer stakeholders more motivated to succeed, the general public, regulators/legislators, or journalists is situation specific.
When there's a will, there's a way.
Unfortunately, in this situation, there's no will.
Do you have any sources to confirm this?
My father worked in Kuwait as an engineer and his passport was locked in a file cabinet at the office, which was unfortunate because he had to fetch it while avoiding gunfire when Saddam Hussein's forces attacked in 1990.
It was worth it though, as the document saved his life when Iraqis mistook him for an American and wanted to execute him on that basis.
Underneath the veneer of mid-east progress, there are bodies buried underneath skyscrapers.
The most frustrating part -- I am south asian and my family thinks that Dubai is admirable. when I show them docs that say otherwise, they collapse into a state of denial.
Also, I'm not from the US.
But alas, I know how these conversations play out so rest assured that I shall no longer correct you.
Simply living passively requires fossil fuels for most people. Actively patronizing these countries is an intentional act.
(1) Filing up at the tank so you can get to your shitty job and feed your family -- i.e. an activity that is essentially non-optional; and
(2) Going on a vacation more than halfway around the world -- an activity which is definitely quite optional
?
Yet still, even ignoring this, I consciously make an effort to not support these countries because of the reasons I listed. The same way, I make a conscious effort to not support companies that use business practices that I don't condone.
Does this work 100% of the time? No. But that doesn't make me a hypocrite either. Everyone should do "whatever they can" to express their moral ideals.
You won't believe (you probably will, actually) how quickly Western people there adapt to "the way things are" in those countries. They promptly get a maid for themselves, do the passport thing "just in case", abuse them physically and sexually, etc.
Funny thing is how most of these people would identify as liberal back in their home countries. They casually talk about women rights and abortion and whatnot on their living rooms while their maid is sleeping in a dark basement with no ventilation a few meters from them. It's nauseating.
I lived in Saudi for four years and have experienced this first hand. Contrary to what you'd expect, Saudi nationals are generally more measured with regards to these things. Anglos and Europeans, "first-world" people in general ... they just lose it, it's like a fetishistic thing. It probably is an actual fetish for them as many of them do rape their maids and/or ask for sexual favors from them.
inb4: "Oh, those are bold accusations where is your hard evidence, show me statistics and high-definition videos of all those maids that you claim are being raped daily. I just did a Google search and found nothing, you must be lying. Blah, blah, blah."
And in the article they refer to hindustan times article that 100K disappeared. At the same time they say that
> He has invested trillions in his ‘Saudi vision 2030 project
Which does not convey confidence in their handling of numbers given who know thay the aim for the project at most to get 500B investment from government ans external investment (which unlikely to happen). So back to the question, what does dissappear here means? Are they killed or dead like the Journalist killed by MBS. That seem unlikely and something is missing here.
I know that many people have ideological reasons to down vote and consider every question about numbers a defense towards MBS. Which is a toxic behavior because we shouldn't just take anything the supports our ideology or previous opinions at face value if it is not supported by evidence or if there is questions about that.
The death rate is so high that there is basically no acceptable reason why it would be that way. Even if deaths are not on-the-job, the living conditions, pay, healthcare etc are controlled by the project anyway so the blame is the same. Given this all the minutiae would probably only bring the "reasonable to blame the Saudi" death toll down to, say, an equally shocking 20500. So it does look like bringing up minutiae is really just a distraction.
Now if there was some reason to suggest the 21000 was fabricated or off by enormous margins, sure, that would be worth discussing. But nobody has brought up something like that.
Now to construct rate you will need to say even if this number is correct (which we don't know) against what denominator especially if people want to compare it against death rate in different countries like some people did with US.
The report here raises many real questions that people would need to think about.
I don't defend Saudi Arabia and I hate their working system for obvious reasons.
We were told that 6500 guest workers had died in workplace accidents building the stadiums, and everyone got very upset.
But that was very misleading. 6500 was the number of deaths for any reason among ~1M guest workers. That is a perfectly normal death rate in a population that size.
The official Qatari statistics was that 37 world cup construction workers died, and only 3 of those were work-related accidents. This info was of course reported far less.
That is a mortality rate of 650 per 100k.
That is not normal.
That is horrific.
That is irrefutable, unquestionable, evidence of systemic abuse and/or neglect.
That is double the mortality rate in US federal prisons more than double the mortality rate of the US state prison population.
That is roughly double the typical mortality rate of US adults aged 25-64. (~340 per 100k) and due to a variety of reasons (e.g. obesity, lack of access to healthcare) the US's working-age mortality rate is among the worst in the industrialized world.
"Roughly double" of "among the worst" is not "perfectly normal".
Please do not make excuses for the Qataris.
High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on National Statistics; Committee on Population; Committee on Rising Midlife Mortality Rates and Socioeconomic Disparities; Becker T, Majmundar MK, Harris KM, editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2021 Mar 2.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK571942/#:~:text=Betwee...).
Mortality in State and Federal Prisons, 2001–2019 – Statistical Tables. E. Ann Carson, Ph.D., BJS Statistician, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2021, NCJ 300953
As I said in another comment, migrant workers are generally young men, and their average death rate in the US is closer to 200 deaths per year per 100k population. Higher, as Retric pointed out, among construction workers.
It's from February 2021, and counts deaths since December 2010, which is just above 10 years.
That makes the yearly death number about 650.
Sometimes it all just feels like some big formal exercise to mix different terrible aspects into new configurations, to see what might emerge. Just kind of feels like a Frankenstein's monster world.
An expose by ITV is not how I want to get authentic figures for death rate on a long term engineering project.
The guardian analysis of deaths constructing the Qatar World cup venues was based on returns from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. So, if 30,000 migrant workers have died doing Neom, Surely the same sources can confirm this?
This same narrative was told about the Qatar World Cup, only for the “World Cup deaths” to actually be total cumulative foreign labor deaths. It took the wind out of the movement to get the Gulf countries to reform their treatment of foreign workers.
>Vision 2030 creates a thriving economy where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.
Kek aside, Saudi has limited time/window to pivot away from fossil economy. Sometimes you have to trade bodies for time, and it's much easier to trade bodies of non citizens. Vision 2030 is MBS' 2015 pet project, with 15-20 years to deliver for domestic politics. Even if you think this is vanity project, there's a lot of politics behind it, and dead foreigners for domestic politics is... well fair game. Consolation prize is we might get some cool monuments out of this instead of a war torn country.
That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset, rather being few centuries behind. Think about it next time you buy any product from there (and good luck with oil obviously, so this crap falls on most of us in tiny pieces).
But I guess military bases there trump some pesky human rights, as long as they are not westerners.
Saudis have oil, but they have also bought significant share of US economy. They are minority owners in Twitter and many other businesses.
Employee* Jamal Kashoggi.
There is a good movie called Dissident on it.
Thousands died over the course of the construction of the entire infrastructure for the World Cup. Every country that participated in the World Cup played on the graves of the dead.
Is it "western morals" to patronise death by physical abuse, to play on the graves of the dead?
By the way, many countries and peoples are still waiting for the "western morals" to bear forth apologies and compensation for the African/Atlantic slave trade.
Or something about forest and trees, your pick.
Perfect is the enemy of good, etc.
Using less is better than using more. Buying as ethically as you are reasonably able to do is better than not trying to buy ethically at all.
I'm not suggesting at all to do the latter - merely pointing out that the GP comment seemed to be under the impression that purchasing an EV vehicle was avoiding saudi oil. Many people are under similar impressions about their consumption choices. Being aware of the consequences of your choices is just as important.
Its avoiding a lot of Saudi oil. A 25mpg car over 150,000mi will go through 6,000gal of gasoline. That's ~308 barrels of oil just for the energy of moving the car.
A car will have ~400lbs of plastic parts. You'd need like 3.9 barrels of oil to make that plastic. Both a gas car and an EV will need this plastic.
You're going to use almost 100x as much oil driving the car around than the plastics in the car. A 100x reduction in oil use is significant. Quit pushing lies about how EVs still use a significant amount of oil, as if they're pretty much the same. Either you should be aware of the falsehoods you're suggesting or you need to be informed.
And no, the energy generation for an EV isn't anywhere near as significant as the oil use for burning in an ICE. In most modern grids a lot of that energy is going to come from locally produced natural gas, maybe still coal, some nuclear, and a decent chunk of renewables. Burning oil isn't that massive of an overall electricity source.
You'd have to really look deep to find oil for the electricity generated in my area. Practically have to talk about the insulation on the wires in my home or the lubricants on the turbines. It's practically all natural gas, wind, and solar powering my EV.
Avoid buying would be to avoid making new debt obligations. But there are already a ton of debt obligations. When the US pays interest on the debt owed, would you consider that buying? Do you think the US should default on the debt owed?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-16/saudi-ara...
That's why we support them militarily and send them F-16s /s.
There are no "western morals" there is only power and money. The actions of our politicians and corporate overlords show that they support everything Saudi Arabia does.
Fentanyl is used to poison nearly 100k Americans annually, most who don’t even know they are being poisoned by it.
Most Americans don’t know this level of destruction is happening and it’s right here, why would we be expected to notice slave labor deaths far off?
Like when they corrupted international committee for football cups and co...
"Why do you hate billionaires so much?"
This might be the most misunderstood aspect of what a free market means. It does not mean that you're free to violate freedom of others. It means that everyone is free to buy and sell any product or service while consenting to do so under full information symmetry. You're not allowed to violate others right to do so; using violence, lying or any form of dishonesty, which happens in this case.
I'm not saying that free markets solve everything. For example, a worker might accidentally sign a contract which turns out to be exploitative. Which means that the laws about exploiting or harming anyone must override any free market contracts.
People who defend capitalism will point out that "well there is some market inefficiency (government interference, authoritarianism, subsidies) that actually makes this not real capitalism". In this example Saudi Arabia is a monarchist petrostate spending government money on stupid projects, so that's actually "not capitalism".
This is the same as the meme of people saying "not real communism" when someone asks how they feel about Lenin murdering a bunch of people.
Instead we should understand that capitalism is about private ownership of property, NOT a fictitious "Free Market" as Milton Friedman tried to re-center the conversation around. Understanding that capitalism is about ownership, and not markets, makes it clear that authoriatrianism and capitalism go hand-in-hand, as a strong and violent government exists to enforce the property rights of the owning class. The power structure of Saudi Arabia is fully compatible with capitalism as it exists throughout the "west" or the "free world".
> The private sector can’t legally force me to pay for their projects, whereas the “public” sector can.
What's stopping them from hiring a private military and enslaving you? Who will stop them? The government which they control in this scenario?
Power is power, whether it is private or public.
The main reason I argue with people on here and come across as annoying is that the reflexive defence of capitalism by people living under it is conditioned into them by society. I would like for people to recognize that "our guys" do a just as much harm as "the bad guys over there" instead of rushing to justify some atrocity because well, it's our atrocity.
The private sector does not control the government in this scenario. That is the difference. The private sector only controls its own property. Now if there is public ownership of property, then yes the capital owning class will resort to controlling the state to control the property, and thereby controlling the military to enforce the rules the capital owning class wants.
If Tesla wants to increase car ownership, they just need to control a few key politicians to dismantle alternative forms of transporation.
In an ideal world, liberal democratic governments would keep corporations under control while ensuring our individual rights, and corporations would provide goods and services at the lowest, most efficient rate. This is not the case in reality unfortunately.
You don't pick anything. Our rulers pick the system and we bend over backwards to justify it so we don't lose our minds.
Are we just fighting each other over Red vs Blue to distract the masses from the real issues around the world?
I look at the campaign finance process in the US and I see a vetting process for compatibility with the interests of the wealthy. There are still a few small donors in there and every once in a blue moon a candidate can mount something approaching a grassroots campaign, so the US is one drop of poison short of a plutocracy, but only one drop short.