4 ms·

I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants. 1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street

by RyanZAG 10y ago

I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants. 1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home. 2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present. 3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries. Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.

coldtea 10y ago
>1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work? Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Why not allow them to sell their organs? They wont live long enough to ever require a 2nd kidney.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  Not that easy I'm afraid. There's more of them every year. People living in conditions where they need to fight to survive don't have time to worry about the survival of others, which means those who can't survive on their own or provide some benefit to others generally don't get any help. So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here. But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive. My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality. EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change. They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
    - RyanZAG 10y ago
      I'm honestly sorry to tell you this: the experiment didn't work. Turns out when we took away the reason for private interests to be interested in these children, the lives of the children didn't improve. It just means now nobody cares if they die anymore. The situation is unfortunately getting steadily worse as before they had companies keeping them alive for profit, and now they have nothing. I agreed with your point of view years ago. I think everyone did. But the experiment failed. Pretty sad really. Yet another good anecdote on the infamous "don't fix what you don't understand".

by RyanZAG 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

>1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work? Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?

cmdrfred 10y ago
Why not allow them to sell their organs? They wont live long enough to ever require a 2nd kidney.
RyanZAG 10y ago
Not that easy I'm afraid. There's more of them every year. People living in conditions where they need to fight to survive don't have time to worry about the survival of others, which means those who can't survive on their own or provide some benefit to others generally don't get any help. So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here. But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive. My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality. EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change. They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
  - RyanZAG 10y ago
    I'm honestly sorry to tell you this: the experiment didn't work. Turns out when we took away the reason for private interests to be interested in these children, the lives of the children didn't improve. It just means now nobody cares if they die anymore. The situation is unfortunately getting steadily worse as before they had companies keeping them alive for profit, and now they have nothing. I agreed with your point of view years ago. I think everyone did. But the experiment failed. Pretty sad really. Yet another good anecdote on the infamous "don't fix what you don't understand".