The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.
Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
Our own countries could stop actively funding, supporting and even creating that corrupt elite, for a start. See e.g. the Françafrique system in Africa.
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
However most of the "slave" talk these days comes from highly politicized sources, so it's hard to cut through to the truth. For example, it's not likely that there's enough Uyghur slave labor to be involved with "most" of the polysilicon even from Xinjiang, much less the entire world's supply.
IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa, it's a very serious issue that gets trotted out more as a political football against the entire technology, rather than expressed as an earnest concern to solve the underlying problem.
> IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa
Not really an issue for solar battery systems as they typically use the cheaper LFP chemistry that has a much higher cycle count. The gravimetric density is a bit less, but that only really matters for high-performance mobility.
The post you're replying to didn't explain it well, but: LFP batteries don't use cobalt (or nickel).
LFP production is starting to pass NMC (lithium + nickel manganese cobalt oxide). Slightly lower density but a lot of advantages in lack of easily catching on fire, longer lifetime -- and lack of cobalt. LFP (LiFePo4) is the battery chemistry of choice today for solar installations, where the longer lifetime and increased safety are a big win and the slightly lower density doesn't matter, unlike mobile applications.
I suppose I could have been clearer, but I figure it was an easy connection tom make from talking about chemistry to the question of whether cobalt is even relevant.
> Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.
For anyone not familiar with the US Constitution, the 13th Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
Without that "except as a punishment for [a] crime" clause, being sentenced to N hours of community service would be forbidden by the Constitution, and the second-lowest penalty judges could impose (the lowest being a fine) would be prison time. So that clause was actually necessary to include in order to allow for more lenient sentences for crimes that deserve something more severe than a fine: lowest level of sentencing is a fine, after that comes being sentenced to community service (which most people agree is less severe than prison, even though it does count as involuntary servitude), and then after that come the more severe sentences like prison.
Most other countries seem to be able to have community service orders without labelling it “servitude”. Do you have a reference for why community service is defined as servitude in the US?
Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?
Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".
Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."
(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).
The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area is probably around profiting off such work?
> It [slavery] mostly wasn't [legal] in other countries [at the time the 13th Amendment was passed, i.e. the mid 1860's]...
The history of the 19th century and when slavery was abolished in each one is actually a fascinatingly complex subject, and there's tons of interesting history hiding behind your word "mostly", to the point where I can't actually tell whether "mostly" is a correct or incorrect description. Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... I would lean towards "definitely correct in Europe and the Americas, a lot murkier in Africa and Asia". Oddly enough, a lot of Spanish colonies in South America abolished slavery before the United States did, yet Spain itself didn't pass its law ending slavery until a year after the US's 13th Amendment came into effect.
If you're at all interested in the history of that era, the film Amazing Grace, though it takes a few liberties with the historical facts, is a mostly-accurate depiction of what it took to get slavery abolished in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the part of Prime Minister William Pitt was played by a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch (Amazing Grace came out in 2006, and most people first discovered Cumberbatch when Sherlock came out in 2010). I recommend the film if you enjoy historical films; it's quite fun. (I love the "I would have been bored by botany" line).
fascinating reading here on HN every now again someone taking a moral high ground on some random shit while actively using products and services of some of the most evil corporations in the history of mankind
Talking about degrees of slavery is decidedly not cool. If you have documentation of iPhone supply chain using forced labor like I linked to, please do share rather than trying to be morally ambiguous.
Sportsmen compete in imaginary competitions with equally physially gifted people just to win a prize. And yet, many are fulfilled by it. For some people, competing is what drives them.
Yes, but then you know it's a game, so there's no self-deception that you're actually doing something meaningful. This realization thus gives the whole sportsmanship concept.
Can be argued that there is intuitive satisfaction/pleasure/utility that spectators gain from watching sports competitions. The payoff is a lot more obvious/instant. Whereas with a lot of tech these days, what needle are we really moving? Are people truly happier scrolling for two hours, compared with watching an edge-of-seat soccer game?
Some probably do-- McEnroe for example could go rather crazy, but for example, Stefan Edberg and some other people were able to behave very reasonably despite playing for large prizes and despite having presumably participated in tournaments from an early age, knowing that they if they lose a match have to go home and don't get to play any more.
I don’t get the sense that the participants in a game actually know it’s a meaningless game. We have several domains beyond professional sports in which people have utterly persuaded themselves of their success simply due to external factors, like fans of celebrities and pop musicians who are essentially living in a delusional feedback loop fed by their fanatics. In tech and business in general it is more often how people have convinced themselves of their success based on “successful exists” or revenue growth in an economy that is solely a function of money printing and deficit spending/debt, not some objective measure of improvement. It’s the same kind of thing that on a geopolitical stage has resulted in America with its $1T+ military budget being effectively checkmated by hypersonic missiles, etc.; the delusion that $ = success and superiority and dominance, when all it really did was blind us in all the ways possible.
But if you are truly smart, just telling people the truth, effectively explaining that their disfigured baby is ugly is so jarring to their coping mechanisms that they are browbeat to maintain the fiction of the beauty of the baby. This is also where power and abuse comes in. The ones who will destroy even the smartest people, often specifically because their intelligence threatens those on power and who are abusing humanity. Truly smart people simply have a hard time with lying to themselves though. That’s why they’re less happy in a world of lies, manipulation, and delusion. Truely smart people see the world dominated by the worst kind of narcissistic psychopaths, but they cannot actually let on to that fact or all the narcissistic psychopaths immediately turn on them in the most aggressive and intense way. It’s the nature of dealing with narcissistic psychopaths, and it leads to quite a bit of unhappiness if you are not also a narcissistic psychopath but have to live in the world you see for what it is. It’s probably the origin of the phrase “ignorance is bliss”; the cattle on the ranch are the happiest, until the day they are not at all.
I was thinking the same. Immediately, the "Enchiridion" of Epictetus came to mind. It's also called "The Manual", which is basically a guide to living life from a Stoic perspective. As others have wrote, there are lots of manuals. Maybe too many.
> if you finally just accept yourself for who you are (because that's basically what love means)
That's not a good definition of love. Counterexample: most parents love their children, and yet don't just accept them for who they are (at the moment), but try to change them for the better, by raising them. You can love yourself in the same way.
The fundamental relationship of capitalism, i.e. capital owner employing people to work for him and make him money, is quite toxic. No wonder it seeps into the workplace relationships.
Capitalism is based largely on coercion. The overwhelming majority of people would not be doing what they do most of the time if their needs were already met.
The important question is where you draw the boundary line for the conflict. These groups are fighting together against the environment, whereas we are both fighting the environment and against each other (in capitalist system, everyone is competing with everyone else all the time). Hunter-gatherer tribes basically implement some form of socialism, with little to no private property and cooperation instead of competition.
All true, however those groups cannot survive because colonialists will just genocide them and capitalists will raze their territory in order to build a mine or other infrastructure for capitalist consumption
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