Everyone Wants Slaves But Whose?
Introducing Turkey's and Vietnam's Preferred Slave Index (PSI), Supply Chain Apps, and Anti-Corruption Satellites
Some time ago, never mind how long ago particular, I had a particularly striking vision which hasn’t left me. I call these things the muggings of the muse and she gets particularly rough in the small hours of the night when good citizens are fast asleep and I’m pacing my apartment. This is why you will always find with me at least one pen and a notebook at hand.
I have a rather autistic way of looking at the things in my home. My cousin runs a furniture store and I’ve noticed in recent years that seemingly more and more furniture is produced in Vietnam.
I imagine a world in which I could point my phone at an object and know everything about how it got to my door. If you’re working on such a wondrous app please let me invest. In my view the state should help facilitate this sort of thing and maybe even have a preferred app where everyone lists the images of their products and swears that they were produced in a positive way.
Such an app would make it so that you could change your own consumption based upon what was going on globally. I don’t mind paying more money for products made in NATO countries or from governments that were more American-aligned. Whenever there’s a tragedy or international incident sparking global aid, I go out out my way to dine at the restaurants of citizens of those countries under the assumption that many of these immigrant-owned businesses send money home.
We speak often about wanting democracy but it’s not really true. What we really want is stability, predictability even. So we put up with some really disturbing stuff in the far-flung corners of the world.
We have lab rats in Puerto Rico — they gave us the birth control pill after all — or Africa — don’t look too closely at Pfizer’s activity there! — and indeed the lack of concern for the environment in China is a major reason the silicon chip industry moved there and brought attendant human suffering. Bloomberg had the story in 2017: “Twenty-five years ago, U.S. tech companies pledged to stop using chemicals that caused miscarriages and birth defects. They failed to ensure that their Asian suppliers did the same.”
Democratic societies don’t like to see slaves or even extractive industries lest they harm the water supply or “the environment.” They’d prefer the slaves be far, far away doing the dirty jobs that Americans won’t do.
Part of the benefit of being the world’s reserve currency, secured as it is by the world’s Navy and now satellite fleet, is not having to mine or extract your own resources first. You can tap other countries’ resources. You can drink their milk shakes — or employ their slaves.
Were I Turkey I would pursue the following strategies:
I would use my intelligence services to helpfully inform American or European journalists about all the atrocious labor practices in China. Given that the Uighurs are a Turkic people merely interviewing and translating and amplifying on social media those statements could do well. The U.S. security state is already inclined to dislike the Chinese so play to their instincts.
As these countries accumulate U.S. dollars there are a number of things that they could do with that foreign reserve. In Turkey’s case I suspect that they’ll do all they can to be increasingly energy independent. This’ll require better construction of buildings and a lot more solar and wind. Turkey is doing just that by investing heavily. A friend recently raised a very interesting question. Why are the pipelines that carry Russian oil into Germany destroyed but not pipelines which carry oil into Turkey?
Turkey, with the second largest army in NATO, could also invest heavily in satellite technology to help patrol its borders and keep its construction mobs in check. When you understand how satellite infrastructure makes the kind of construction looting impossible with synthetic aperture radar you get how dangerous it is to the people who brought you Turkey buildings and the Surfside condo collapse. It is all too common and all too deadly. The reason a lot of infrastructure projects in the world suck is that construction looting is very common. But what if you could use satellites to predict which buildings were going to collapse before they collapsed?
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When it comes to slaves we don’t like to talk about them too loudly but we definitely have them in the United States too. Naturally I’ve come to think that Uber and Lyft were ops of a sort that made Americans accustomed to private cars rather than rely on public transport, which has increasingly come under stress amid budget constraints and union demands.
You’re not going to convince countries with large supplies of wage slaves to liberate them but you can strongly encourage that they treat their slaves well by making that a condition of employment.
One way would be to photograph and genetically sequence them and provide them with routine health exams. But the slave masters know that a healthier population is ultimately a freer one. They must be made to do such things.