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Nov. 14th, 2006 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBrain hurts. Brain hurts lots.
It's legalized slavery. For Africa. No, really. See here.
Someone please tell me they're kidding. Please. Is this The Onion? Some kind of parody site? Domain hijackers! Hackers defacing the website?
Something is just terribly wrong, here. They can't be serious.
"This is what free trade's all about," said Schmidt. "It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."
No. No. People are not property. They used to be, but we are in the future now and people are not property here. We're better than that.
A system in which corporations own workers is the only free-market solution to African poverty, Schmidt said. "Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care."
No, you fucking idiot. Get sick (enough), get taken out back and shot like a horse that falls in the traces and cannot rise to work further. I expect you're going to have safeguards in place to be sure that cost-effective euthanasia for doesn't happen, but ... I dunno... I am sure glad I won't be the person trusting my life to your safeguards, that's all.
With each life valuable from start to finish... People aren't valulable 'from start to finish', not if their VALUE comes from the work that one may expect of them. Children have pretty decent future value, but the person who's seventy? Not a whole lot of future value, there, asshat, not unless we're going all Soylent Green. On purely financial grounds, it might be worth a company's time to cut and run by the time its faithful workers reach old age. GM and Ford would be immediately profitable if they could cut and run on the benefits promised to their retirees."... the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."
No. AIDS is pretty expensive to treat on an ongoing basis for employees whose labor is worth under a dollar a day. Educating children *might* happen, but only in very specific directions and for specific, market-valuable purposes. (Hey! If they're property, can you raise up the little ones for the sex trade? If they're property, can you force them to engage in selective breeding? Y'know, raise workers and, as a sideline, NBA centers...) The real problem, here, is that human life in Africa is cheap as dirt. For any job opening, you have like ten people queued up and willing to do the work for half a bowl of mush. That's why companies can AFFORD to treat their workers like ass -- they've got a line of fresh workers going around the block and clamoring to get in the door. In rather a lot of Africa, humans are disposable. Further, the work being done is dipdunk simple and trained monkeys could probably manage it if the companies could get them to stop masturbating and throwing shit. There isn't a lot of productivity lost by changing from worker A to worker B, something else that lowers the cost of throwing out worker A and replacing him or her with worker B.
I can't believe someone didn't ask about the problems of maintaining older workers. Ah, here it is: One conference attendee asked what incentive employers had to remain as stewards once their employees are too old to work or reproduce. Schmidt responded that a large new biotech market would answer that worry. I see. We're going to sell the lot of them for scientific experiments. Wotcha. Okay, WTO, you've got that angle covered. Gosh, you've thought of *everything*.
I note with interest the following statement in the article: There were no other questions from the audience that took issue with Schmidt's proposal. Wha-wha-what? Fo'shizzle? A man has just stood up, a man who is employed by the WTO to solve the world's problems, and he has just said "I think that companies should be allowed to own human beings." and people nodded and agreed and pretty much were OKAY with that? What the fuck is going on, here?
Also, what happens to these people? If they're property, you don't have to *pay* them, do you? I don't pay my pickup truck. I don't pay my horse. (I do feed my horse, shelter her, and provide her with medical care up to a point, but I don't pay her.) What if they don't want to work for you anymore? What then?
This can't be real. Can't.
Is the author trying to not-sell Free Market Theory in some bass-ackwards way? Is there something I am not getting? Ya'll can cue the Twilight Zone music any minute now...
Yep. There's Twilight Zone music. They're not serious... the url goes to gatt.org, which isn't the WTO. But... dang. They got me.
It's legalized slavery. For Africa. No, really. See here.
Someone please tell me they're kidding. Please. Is this The Onion? Some kind of parody site? Domain hijackers! Hackers defacing the website?
Something is just terribly wrong, here. They can't be serious.
"This is what free trade's all about," said Schmidt. "It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."
No. No. People are not property. They used to be, but we are in the future now and people are not property here. We're better than that.
A system in which corporations own workers is the only free-market solution to African poverty, Schmidt said. "Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care."
No, you fucking idiot. Get sick (enough), get taken out back and shot like a horse that falls in the traces and cannot rise to work further. I expect you're going to have safeguards in place to be sure that cost-effective euthanasia for doesn't happen, but ... I dunno... I am sure glad I won't be the person trusting my life to your safeguards, that's all.
With each life valuable from start to finish... People aren't valulable 'from start to finish', not if their VALUE comes from the work that one may expect of them. Children have pretty decent future value, but the person who's seventy? Not a whole lot of future value, there, asshat, not unless we're going all Soylent Green. On purely financial grounds, it might be worth a company's time to cut and run by the time its faithful workers reach old age. GM and Ford would be immediately profitable if they could cut and run on the benefits promised to their retirees."... the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."
No. AIDS is pretty expensive to treat on an ongoing basis for employees whose labor is worth under a dollar a day. Educating children *might* happen, but only in very specific directions and for specific, market-valuable purposes. (Hey! If they're property, can you raise up the little ones for the sex trade? If they're property, can you force them to engage in selective breeding? Y'know, raise workers and, as a sideline, NBA centers...) The real problem, here, is that human life in Africa is cheap as dirt. For any job opening, you have like ten people queued up and willing to do the work for half a bowl of mush. That's why companies can AFFORD to treat their workers like ass -- they've got a line of fresh workers going around the block and clamoring to get in the door. In rather a lot of Africa, humans are disposable. Further, the work being done is dipdunk simple and trained monkeys could probably manage it if the companies could get them to stop masturbating and throwing shit. There isn't a lot of productivity lost by changing from worker A to worker B, something else that lowers the cost of throwing out worker A and replacing him or her with worker B.
I can't believe someone didn't ask about the problems of maintaining older workers. Ah, here it is: One conference attendee asked what incentive employers had to remain as stewards once their employees are too old to work or reproduce. Schmidt responded that a large new biotech market would answer that worry. I see. We're going to sell the lot of them for scientific experiments. Wotcha. Okay, WTO, you've got that angle covered. Gosh, you've thought of *everything*.
I note with interest the following statement in the article: There were no other questions from the audience that took issue with Schmidt's proposal. Wha-wha-what? Fo'shizzle? A man has just stood up, a man who is employed by the WTO to solve the world's problems, and he has just said "I think that companies should be allowed to own human beings." and people nodded and agreed and pretty much were OKAY with that? What the fuck is going on, here?
Also, what happens to these people? If they're property, you don't have to *pay* them, do you? I don't pay my pickup truck. I don't pay my horse. (I do feed my horse, shelter her, and provide her with medical care up to a point, but I don't pay her.) What if they don't want to work for you anymore? What then?
This can't be real. Can't.
Is the author trying to not-sell Free Market Theory in some bass-ackwards way? Is there something I am not getting? Ya'll can cue the Twilight Zone music any minute now...
Yep. There's Twilight Zone music. They're not serious... the url goes to gatt.org, which isn't the WTO. But... dang. They got me.
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