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I once met a very bright young lawyer from London, UK. She had worked on human trafficking cases in the UK. And she was so shocked with what was happening in th
by _448 4y ago
I once met a very bright young lawyer from London, UK. She had worked on human trafficking cases in the UK. And she was so shocked with what was happening in the UK and the apathy of governments across the world that she decided to do a startup to tackle this problem. It requires a lot of money and connections to get a project of this nature off the ground. She was hoping to get into YC. Was rejected. After few months of trying to raise funds she gave up. She once said to me that there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans!
- chinathrow 4y agoThat's actually a shame she got rejected from YC. After war and hunger, human trafficking is one of the worst problems society still have to this day.
- hef19898 4y agoBut it cannot be solved by sending helium balloons woth sulfut into the stratosphere, or by getting saudi money through softbank. So the idea is not the best match for VC funding.
- jacquesm 4y agoInvesting in it might even alienate those investors to the point that they would no longer invest in other startups. Politics at every level.
- treeman79 4y agoSecure borders can stop a lot of it.
- Dawnyhf2 4y ago[dead]
- LatteLazy 4y agoHow was she planning to make money from solving this issue?
- ceejayoz 4y agoYC has a non-profit arm now. https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/ https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/
- O__________O 4y agoOnly 16 of the 3958 YC companies listed in its directory have the “nonprofit” tag: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?tags=Nonprofit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?tags=Nonprofit Given odds of for profit application getting YC funding are already in the low single digits, odds of a nonprofit getting funding are basically nonexistent.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoThis makes no sense. Why would non-profit applicants be competing with for-profit ones? Surely they'll be separate pools.
- O__________O 4y agoUnderstand your point, though to my knowledge YC doesn’t release numbers related to counts of nonprofit applicants. Might easily be even more competitive than the for profit applicants since would only take 60 nonprofits per batch to be at least as competitive as the for profit applicant pool. More importantly: Are there partners focused on nonprofits? Do the batches have enough nonprofits to cluster like nonprofits? Is there training that’s specific to nonprofits? Do they have a demo day specifically for nonprofits? Is there a nonprofit alumni network with 10,000+ members? Does YC have a significant brand within the nonprofit funding community? How many significant nonprofits have been a part of YC? Etc.
- bitcharmer 4y ago
- greenyoda 4y agoThere has also been slavery going on in the U.S. Here's a story about a NY couple who was convicted in 2008 of keeping two maids as slaves: https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/ https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/ [Edit: Fixed broken URL.]
- astura 4y agoGives me a 404.
- lotsofpulp 4y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/nyregion/23slave.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/nyregion/23slave.html “Muttontown slave trial” will bring up lots of search results. https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2008/2008jun26.html https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2008/2008jun26.h... https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/case-law-doc/traffickingpersonscrimetype/usa/2010/united_states_v._mahender_murlidhar_sabhnani_and_varsha_mahender_sabhnani_.html?tmpl=old https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/case-law-doc/traffickingperson...
- nkurz 4y agoSurprisingly, the link requires a final '/'. Usually this is optional, but not this time: https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/ https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/
- rubyfan 4y agoThat’s because it’s an index.html file https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/index.html
- nkurz 4y agoYes. I say surprising, because traditionally web servers redirect from the bare name of a directory to the equivalent with a slash at the end. This then either redirects to the index.html or just serves it directly. In Apache, these are both handled by mod_dir: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_dir.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_dir.html. They are using Varnish in front of the web server, and I don't know if they want this behavior or not.
- hnhamdani 4y agowonder if she could re-pitch that again to Ashton Kutcher non-profit arm. Best case, she could get a backup from him.
- bbbbb5 4y ago> there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans! This should be easy to prove. Closest I can think of is some Telegram groups you might find in places like Syria, but that hardly warrants the Amazon comparison.
- AzzieElbab 4y agoSyria? What about cartels run groups in the US?
- bbbbb5 4y agoMaybe? Never seen it, curious if you have links to share.
- ramraj07 4y agoYou know the dark web exists right?
- bbbbb5 4y agoGo on then, link this "dark web" website where they sell people. What do you even mean by "dark web"? Stuff like this definitely doesn't exist on the onionland.
- xwdv 4y agoDo you really want to visit this site? A good blog post would be a detailed tour of this site and going through the process of buying a slave and then interviewing them about their experience, afterward I guess you could let the slave go off and do whatever they wish or perhaps resell them to get your money back since you are unable to take care of them anyway.
- newsclues 4y ago"site"? Not sites? One thing I know about the internet, is that there isn't just one of anything, even if it's illegal.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- Frost1x 4y agoVarious aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor. Some of the very obvious differences between pure historic slavery and what we have now is that human rights are significantly better across the board and individuals have some degree of autonomy to decide what aspects of their self and time to sell and whom to vs previous time periods where those things were just taken from individuals. So long as we're able to give labor that degree of autonomy (e.g. autonomy enabled by the ability to provide necessities for themselves and their family like basic food, housing, and so on) then I think we have a reasonable compromise. Vast wealth disparity (leading to monopolistic behavior on the employment side), lack of competing opportunities to sell your time/skills, and markets trending and stabilizing to states that are not labor-friendly undermine this. This continuously peels away the abstractions we have to create autonomy for individuals and moves the needle back towards owning people like slaves, holding them on a leash indirectly through monetary mediums of exchange (i.e. currency) and so on. If I need money and food and shelter and the only real viable route to attain this reasonably is to sell myself or allow myself to be sold on abusive markets that may want more than say just my maid services (perhaps 'maids with benefits' situations, i.e. disguised prostitution) then that's what's ultimately going to happen. We may claim the people have autonomy but we've just created complex systems around their autonomy that give the appearance of choice. People need viable and reasonable choices, not just a set of options where only one is reasonable for a stable and happy life unless we want to slowly erode back to systems like indentured servitude and beyond. The article explicitly calls out Filipino maids as the highest selling and having been to the Philippines and now being part of Filipino family, I understand why. The country is very poor overall and the culture exports labor to import wealth due to the lack of local opportunity. Sure they can study anything and go anywhere in the world but it turns out, many go to certain middle eastern countries and pursue maid careers because it's their only real viable option. Some of the more lucky Filipinos study in school and are able to get degrees in healthcare or hotel services and work abroad in countries with better protections. Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn and lack mobility to transition positions readily to negotiate competitive wages, so they lose rights to employers and work in undesirable locations, under market rates, and often the under the worst sort of contract situations. It's not like this story of maids in Saudi Arabia where conditions are even worse but it shows how we need to maintain autonomy for everyone. Aside from the being most humane thing to do, out of sheer self-interest, if you sell your labor for time in any fashion, these infringements on rights slowly peel away your rights as well. You may not see it in your lifetime but we should push for better labor rights across the globe to prevent stepping back to past atrocities we've seen in slavery systems.
- newsclues 4y agohttps://deliverfund.org https://deliverfund.org Some of the staff have been on podcasts to discuss... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoHHwRjPASc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoHHwRjPASc
- derangedHorse 4y agoI would be interested in a crowd-sourced approach where she hosts open-source tools she runs periodically to generate reports to give to the right people in government. I don't know how international matters should be handled but I imagine initiative can be taken to remove the problem in our own backyards.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoThe "right people in government" are the ones doing it in the first place, alternately pictures exist of them doing naughty things, and a dead hooker can always be "found" in their trunk. Epsteinyay idn'tday illkay imselfhay .
- fakedang 4y agoHey, I'm bored and I can try to build it. Any way I could get connected with this lawyer? My contact information is in my bio.