Hi Everyone,
In Australia at the moment concerns have been raised by sections of the media about the existence of modern-day slavery and how so many of the products we use every day (mobile phones, clothing, coffee etc.) are in some way tainted by this scourge.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/
An explanation often given as to why this problem is so hard to tackle is to do with difficulty monitoring the supply chain involved with the components in the products.
My question is, how can blockchain, specifically Cardano, prevent the use of slavery in the production of consumables? Exactly how would the process work?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.
Cheers,
Dave
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Your link did not reference a specific address for an article, slavery is a constant fight around the world as it has taken a new face in our lifetime and generally is outright illegal in developed countries and is cause of much bloodshed as most political leaders in some 200+ countries are willing to fund anti slavery actions.
I hear all the time we are all slaveâs to the system.
When I was just 15 yrs old a good friend of mine stood up on the ordering counter of McDonalds in my home state and proclaimed âYour all slaveâs!â to all the people that were happy to be in line to pay for their food and pay the taxes that were set on the food they ordered, it was a crazy eye opening night for me, over the next many years I realized that slavery in developed countries developed a new face - and the free are enslaved to the system that has a foundation in the financial systems that developed many lifetimeâs ago.
Blockchain will not solve all the worldâs Slavery problems, but it will begin the fight to eradicate it as all records of it put on the blockchain will be immutable, there is no way to Whitewash records on blockchain.(well unless your on the ETH network 
)
So to answer your question I would say that the way blockchain can prevent the use of slavery is through immutable stamped date on payment, in a factory in say⌠mercury - they can claim to have paid their workers so much to do the work to make an iphone or whatever; if it is on the blockchain than it is a fact, up till this day certain factories around the world have made claims to have paid their workers such and such, but there is no real proof generally - on the Cardano blockchain if a payment is made its recorded forever.
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Slavery is an entirely ethical problem, kind of like piracy. Did DRM, HDCP or watermarking solve piracy/bootlegging issues? Exactly⌠The way you âsolveâ slavery is by empowering the slave to resist, to give them hope/purpose . One of the most powerful ways of resisting is âahimsaâ - resisting by disobedience without violence (âyou can kill me but you canât make me cooperateâ) that Mohandas Ghandi took to an extreme to drive the Brits out of India⌠It is carried out by non cooperation with those who are enslaving you. The âonlyâ requirement for passive resistance is a profound faith in God however⌠and if oneâs focus is on survvial rather than God, then resisting passively becomes almost impossible and the only alternative that seems plausible short of that is to rebel (violently) against your opressor. That too can sometimes work, albeit at a different cost than ahimsaâŚ
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Damn man, I am not even sure how I should approach this, I respect your position and how you operate from your belief, but you should know I operate from a humanist space - although I do not support common humanism - do my own thing.
Slaves in Germany under government control had no possible way of resisting effectively without the threat of death during WW2 , I am not saying the imprisoned did not assist in the war but that time period is the perfect example of where we are now concerning slavery etc. without an outside force opposing the Nazi Reich one could assume all concentration camp prisoners would have died as slaves to whatever end that government had in mind with their final solution, the idea you present of resisting in a holocaust camp would have certainly been certain death for many people - so I must debunk your idea of the slave resisting , not so much has changed in the last 70 years that would make me look at things differently, slaves are expendable assetâs to their owner, they have always been such to their owner.
I agree. The context is entirely different. Notice I did not dismiss violence as a possible option for resisting, I merely give preference because I believe non violent non cooperation to be more effective in some cases. Look at Jesus ChristâŚalthough He is God in the flesh, His method can be emulated elsewhere and in fact Gandhi took that from His book⌠Hunger strikes are a form of passive resistance and can be very effective when put forth toward a righteous cause. Something about watching people dying from hunger for a good cause evokes some profound disturbance even in the most oppressive of peopleâŚand has a way of changing their minds and hearts. Gandhi also used that to rid India of slavery. Now we can debate till no end if India is better off economically speaking without colonial ruleâŚbut slaves to the Brits they are no more.
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Their Government is one of the most ineffective Governments in the world!
If you compare their population against other Populationâs and where they should sit on the world stage based on per capita its sad but true they are failing generation after generation.
most Hindu folk I know will freely admit India is a s#ithole, no surprise. Best profession in India to make money isnât engineer, doctor, lawyer, professor⌠Itâs a cop. Iâll let u figure out why 
âŚ
go look at Vechain and what their blockchain is trying to accomplish for âmonitoring the supply chainâ so consumers can see it for themselves when they scan the QR code. I am not trying to sell Vechian but I believe it will help show him how blockchain will help.
when it came to conflict(blood) diamonds the âKimberly processâ was introduced https://www.kimberleyprocess.com/en/what-kp basically setting standards to show proof of where diamonds came from and with consumers demanding and only buying diamonds that have the Kimberly seal of approval it helped reduce conflict diamonds from being sold.
In short blockchain will give transparency to the supply chain and with that it will be up to the consumers on whether they want to buy something where they can actually verify where the product was made or not.
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Thanks everyone for your responses so far.
Sorry about the link. Hope this performs better:
I sympathise with your view that we are all slaves. I would say slaves to our own desires, hence our tendency to over consume and the associated slavery we feel with having to earn money. However, that is a different order of slavery to what I am talking about today. Many people, often children, in both developed and developing countries are coerced or outright forced into working for little to no money. Often this labour is used in the consumables we buy on a daily basis. Much like what happened in WW2 and other conflicts. We tend to overlook this and assume that because it is illegal where we live, it isnât allowed to happen.
Because I am a bit of noob to this scene Iâd like to know specifically (maybe an example might help me) how smart contracts and the immutability of blockchain might force corporations to adhere to appropriate regulations regarding workerâs rights and hence force us as consumers to pay what is the appropriate price for peoples labour and the worlds resources.
I guess the same methods could be used to guarantee environmental legitimacy too.
There seems to be so much promise for real change, or am I dreaming?
Cheers,
D
I think someone has to hear first about Cardano and one should be able to buy it easily , second someone has to use it for something instead moving around units from Daedalus->yoroi->exchange and back and last thing Cartdaino has to be unique in something so it will stick out, so far it is just another âme tooâ coin, future may look different but cardano present is mediocre.
All of this baloney like preventing slavery or going to mars with Cardano is for some next generations to think about.
The way things move in the world these dayâs going to Mars through Cardano programs could actually be a reality, and preventing slavery is not a far off idea either, if Cardano makes big moves and mass adoption of the protocol happens over the next 10 years then it is highly likely both of these things could be done supported by the protocol in my lifetime.
Cardano is not a âme tooâ coin, I do not understand how you look at it, the developers are working toward a product that will have a strong foundation that will allow otherâs to build and operate on with peace of mind that it is secured and proven to be so.
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All I can say is keeping hoping also dreaming, working, thinking and contributingâŚTake out the trash after making sure to sort it.
Elurevad,
I clicked on your link and then began listening to the radio discussion with Andrew West on the war on slavery. I paused the video at the 8:46 mark.
When the fellow began talking about British children forced into slavery to sell drugs by British gangs, and then about some Thai girl forced to sleep with x number of men per night, some caution warnings started going off in my mind. I do believe slavery exists today. What I doubt is the scale of it globally. But then this depends on how one defines their terms. In this case how one defines slavery.
I frequently read some Black-Americans online referring to multimillionaire NBA, NFL players as slaves.
Keynsian economics states that the free personâs labor is owned by his or her employer if working as an employee, and that the enslaved person has both their labor and their physical body owned by another.
Either way⌠all would tend to agree that slavery is a labor issue as well. As such⌠in modern times organized labor and political legislation on labor right can go far in each town and country in reducing the incidents of enslavement. I donât doubt the blockchain through supply chain tracking can even further assist in this.
But I learned a lesson from being suckered by Somaly Mam after reading her book. I was really taken in by her book. Turns out most of it was a lie. Even the girl missing one eye in a documentary about Somaly Mamâs work in Cambodia didnât lose her eye from sex traffickers enslaving her and punishing her. She lost her eye through medical issues that had totally nothing to do with that. The thing is I probably wanted to believe Cambodians were as parents, siblings, Buddhists so backwards than most Americans and that they enslaved their daughters and sisters.
I think modern people want to believe that gangs in the UK and in the USA enslave children and force them to sell drugs. We may want to believe in the USA slavery is as prevalent today as it was in the late 1700s in the South. While there real life incidents of this in both the modern day UK and USA I think they are rare and not the norms.
Of course, in modern day countries with very weak institutions slavery will be more prevalent. This is why slave auctions of black people occurred in Libya after the USA and France conspired to weaken the institutions of Libya and have Gaddafi lynched.
Any country that has a strong culture of organized labor has a natural foe of slavery. Absent of a strong organized labor culture then one has to argue why free willâif free will exists and is presentâconstitutes such a negative as to be defined or legislated as âenslavementâ if said person(s) performing the labor agrees to x exchange for their labor?
In other words if free will is present and not under duress from coercion then should I be the judge of whether a person performing y labor is receiving a benefit, or should the person of free will doing the actual job be the judge of that? Maybe toiling for $4 an hour does not benefit me but maybe it does the person in x location in y developing country?
Iâm persuaded most prostitution, most female prostitution, is freely entered into. Most. Just like women dancing on poles at strip clubs. Just like women performing in porn movies. Albeit, some women are enslaved by others in sex industry. Most teenage girls freely enter prostitution too. Most. Not all. But even some of those that freely enter become enslaved by violent and coercive people over them.
Iâm for legalizing prostitution which I think would reduce enslavement among sex workers more than the blockchain would.
[quote=âHaskell-plus, post:4, topic:25375, full:trueâ]
Damn man, I am not even sure how I should approach this, I respect your position and how you operate from your belief, but you should know I operate from a humanist space - although I do not support common humanism - do my own thing.
Slaves in Germany under government control had no possible way of resisting effectively without the threat of death during WW2 , I am not saying the imprisoned did not assist in the war but that time period is the perfect example of where we are now concerning slavery etc. without an outside force opposing the Nazi Reich one could assume all concentration camp prisoners would have died as slaves to whatever end that government had in mind with their final solution, the idea you present of resisting in a holocaust camp would have certainly been certain death for many people - so I must debunk your idea of the slave resisting , not so much has changed in the last 70 years that would make me look at things differently, slaves are expendable assetâs to their owner, they have always been such to their owner.[/quote]
It is historical evidence most men are far less supermen than they think they are. Slavery is still protected in the US Constitution for those convicted of felony crimes. If you are convicted of felony crime you can be legally enslaved in the United States while serving out your prison time. And the US South did this for years with convicting leasing.
Tough men like John Gotti and the violent men of the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafiaâeven hero-lords like El Chapo of Mexicoâwill walk into bondage like black African slaves boarding a slave ship rather than face off with a brutally determined superior force of men that will break their rib cages and crack their wide open. So, they freely walk into prison with chains on.
Some scholars have noted, at least what Iâm parroting from a book mentioning âscholars,â that the Europeans only colonized the interior of Africa and the Americas and ran the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with the cooperation of the slaves and Amerindians and of course black chiefs in Africa.
But that should give one more empathy for people weaker than they are or broken. But by the grace of God goes one.
Saladin the Great had all the Hospitalars and Templars after the Battle of Hattinâaccording to his own Muslim chronicler there with himâexecuted on spot for, as his Muslim writer wrote his great Kurdish leader stated, âthey will not bow to serve as slaves, their order will never ransom them, and they will never cease war on the Muslims.â I paraphrased there.
Most of us men are not Hospitalars nor Templars and nor were most secular knights back then. that is why Saladin took the secular knights captive because he knew they would serve as slaves and/or their wealthy families would eventually pay ransom to set them free.
Ghandi was a Hindu that believed in maintaining the cast system. Basically, Ghandi believed if a person was born a so-called âuntouchableâ their life should be spent carrying buckets of feces from higher castes.
Ghandi was clearly racistâat least when he was a lawyer in South Africa and had contempt for blacks. His outrage was that the whites in South Africa treated the East Indians like the blacks. But back in India Ghandi had no intention and opposed in fact âfreeingâ the lowest caste âuntouchables.â
Countless Christians died in non-violent resistance before Ghandi or MLK. All of the Apostles were martyred except for John. The Apostle Mark was beaten to death, dragged through the alleys of Alexandria, Egypt. The Apostle Thomas was killed by Hindus in Southern India. The Apostle Peter having presided over more than one location was finally martyred in Rome, with legend having it that he had fled knowing death coming and while in his sleep he visited by Jesus. In this dream Jesus was walking and he asked him, âWhere are you going my, Lord?â And Jesus replied, âI am going back to Rome to carry your cross.â
After Peter awoke from the dream he mounted his animal and headed back to Rome where he requested to be crucified upside down because as he is said to have stated, âI am not worthy to die like my Lord.â The Apostle Paul was put to death in Rome too I think but as a Roman citizen requested and was given the more honored death of a Roman: beheading.
Gandhi was not without his virtues but for various reasons his been idealized to an extent some of his more human shortcomings have been overlooked.
Also remember Jesus stated at the Last Supper that, âWhoever does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.â While one could debate a coded message âgood literatureâ âshowsâ rather than âtells.â In other words what characters in a story do, how they dress, or what they carry etc⌠communicates something not explicitly stated. And if we view certain scenes in the Bible like a theater stage play with opening curtains what we see is Jesus having traveled with at least one armed man (disciple) before his arrest. In another scene we see Jesus taking a whip to Jews making money in the wrong ways at the temple.
Jesus was not violent. Not mostly anyways.
Not soâŚ
Gandhi spoke out against untouchability early in his life⌠he called untouchability as a great evil in Hindu society⌠He called it intolerable. He stated this practice can be eradicated, Hinduism is flexible to allow this, and a concerted effort is needed to persuade it is wrong and by all to eradicate it
Rob,
I was drawing from the controversy supposedly between Gandhi and another national hero of India. An untouchable who converted to Buddhism. Honestly, I know very little about either and Iâm not going to pretend I do. I have seen a video where a woman from India (I think she was) gave a lecture siding with B.R. Ambedkar and she spoken not in good terms about Gandhi.
So, to be honest, given I know little about Gandhi I canât say if Wikipediaâs depiction or the critics of Gandhiâs depiction of him are more accurate. What does appear highly likely though is that he was racist towards blacks during his time in South Africa. If he later changed and if he actually did oppose the lower caste staying in a position subservient in jobs and incomes to the higher castes Iâll leave to those more informed on him and that period of India than myself.
By the way⌠Iâm enamored with India. I always found the country and its Hindu people intriguing but it was after I read the book âMaximum Cityâ that I really became enamored with Indiaâor at minimum Mumbai.
And some Bollywood movies rank among my favorite movies. âSlumdog Millionaireâ ranks among my favorite romance movies along side American classics like âAn Officer and a Gentleman.â
The public libraries of the USA are among the countryâs great treasures. And Iâm a grateful fan of the Milwaukee Public Library especially the downtown branch. Iâve checked out foreign movies from there with my library card. Padmaavat would have been one of them. Itâs a Bollywood film too. Great film. Draws on historical charactersâand some say legendsâof India. I can tell it was designed as propaganda for Hindu nationalist though against Indian Muslims. While I have no doubt the bisexual Muslim antagonist in the movie was a ruthless leader⌠the 2 Hindu antagonist come off as too angelic for me. For any characters that really lived. The Hindu protagonist, especially the male, would be the equivalent of Saladin in the Hollywood propaganda movie âKingdom of Heavenâ and the Muslim antagonist would the equivalent of any loyal Catholic in the âKingdom of Heaven.â I found the Kingdom of Heaven entertaining anyways. Padmaavat is even better than the Kingdom of Heaven.
B. R. Ambedkar
"Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 â 6 December 1956), popularly known as Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar , was an Indian jurist, economist, politician and social reformer who inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement and campaigned against social discrimination towards the untouchables ( Dalits ), while also supporting the rights of women and labour. He was independent Indiaâs first law and justice minister, the principal architect of the Constitution of India, and a founding father of the Republic of India. In India and elsewhere, he was often called Babasaheb , meaning ârespected fatherâ in Marathi and Hindi."
Supposedly, B.R. Ambedkar were foes over the issue of the âuntouchables.â I think there is some YouTube radio recording of B.R. speaking about Gandhi and why he is (was) critical of him. The 2 are dead of course.
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Paperback â September 27, 2005 by Suketu Mehta
"A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insiderâs view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuseâŚ"
Padmaavat | Official Trailer | Ranveer Singh | Shahid Kapoor | Deepika Padukone
Many years ago (I mean many) I bought and read the novel âA Death of Vishnu.â Great fiction book I enjoyed reading it. The book was a bit challenging for me as it interwove Hindu metaphysics and religious characters into the story. I could sense or pick up something where âshownâ and symbolic but coming from a Catholic background outside of India, I was not equipped to fully discern the intricate meanings. But it gave me a little more insight into Hindu India than I previously had. By no means am I a scholar on India or Hinduism.
While there are many things that I like or find intriguing about India I am not oblivious to the fact India has some of its own serious problems. And some things Iâm utterly opposed to in Indian culture today such as the treatment vulnerable girls and women often receive who do not come families or social status of protection.
But I would not diminish all of India as a terrible and worthless place. A very ancient civilization(s) and after reading that book Maximum City I really admire the grit and hustle of even the very poor in India. Iâm not ready to demonize Hindus either even though I canât say Iâm a fan of their caste system. And my girl Tulsi Gabbard is Hindu and I greatly admire her. The Hindus did something right with her. So did Hawaii and her family.
Addendum.
The Death of Vishnu (The Hindu Gods #1) by Manil Suri
â âVivid and engrossingâŚa work of fiction that seems not only universal but absolutely cosmic.â âFrancine Prose, Elleâ