If you're running a business and Alex's tactics give you even a 10% edge - take them.
1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable
2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen)
3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly
Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
I'm not sure where you had this experience. In the US and Europe, when child labor (and children prostitutes) was abolished, circa late 19th - early 20th century, the lives of children improved greatly.
In countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America where it's still either allowed or authorities turn a blind eye, not so much.
Moreover, the very idea of "let the kids be raped for money, lest they starve to death, it's the least we can do" is sick.
It's not by any means the "least" we can do.
There were no aliens who forced that child labor abolition on the US and Europe.
We have 3 choices:
1) Provide opportunity for street children to survive, and then ban exploitation of those children.
2) Ban exploitation of children, and ignore them as they die.
3) Leave it alone.
I'm saying we must choose 1 or 3. We must not pick 2. It is criminal. However, in developing countries in Africa, we have picked 2! Picking 2 is the "worst" we can do out of all possible options. It's sickening, and far too many people are still advocating for it.
Authorities in Africa and Asia no longer turn a blind eye because of grant money linked to abolishing child labour. People like you have forced that on them. And the children are now suffering far worse than before. You've made yourself feel better at the expense of those you wanted to help.
1 year out, maybe. 10 years out after the children have had the benefit of education? Dead wrong. Remember also that the local economy scales with prevailing wages. They would experience a period of deflation but that's fine as they have virtually no assets to speak of.
> Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
In sub $10/day situations mechanization is a tiny factor at best. That machine has to be built in a factory in Germany by highly skilled and expensive engineers it's going to have to be amazing efficient to pay for itself. Then you need skilled labor to work on and maintain it.
Adults are more productive than children, and consumer demand would likely go up if you did not use them to produce your goods.
The western nations didn't get rid of child labor for altruistic reasons. It's a fools errand.
If you go deep in the supply chain if you will find all the above.
I am not condoning his advice, nor do I practice these. But reality is not that pretty.
In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
Running a business in a residential area. Shipping electrical products that were not UL tested for fire hazard. Paying owners in stock rather than taxable income. No diversity in hiring practices. Lead in products without a product recycling program in place.
The gist is that you generally have to cut corners somewhere to start up any business unless you already have lots of money.
This is ignoring the fact that effectiveness is not the only metric for a company. In Tim Cook's words, "if you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock".
Tim Cook was all about ROI when he implemented Apple's global supply chain.
Was it not meant to be satirical? Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I guess from the tone I thought he was trying to poke fun at the POV he was espousing? But the only thing I know about him was that he went around evangelizing DirectX at Microsoft Developer conference a long time ago so I could've completely misread.
> Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside?
I don't see this in the presentation at all. Do you mean where he says to churn through employees until you find the ones which fit? Seems like what all companies do, they just don't word it like that. Why else do we have trial periods? He's saying that you get in some employees, give them too much work, get rid of the ones that don't cope and reward the ones that do. Sounds like standard practice in every company I've ever been at.
I guess that should be obvious at this point. I thought there might still be a discussion until you pointed it out. That does pretty much settle it. Thanks.
As far as the rest, maybe I didn't read closely enough; it's just one of the impressions I walked away with with the "wage slave" language.
If this is how he actually does treat employees in a serious fashion then I take back everything nice I said about him. You can create a high performance culture while not being inhuman. I still stand by harsh tactics being important in business, but harsh tactics end where someone's health and well-being begin.
[0] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/17/wage-slaves/#comment... [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
I mean, come on. Mr. Burns couldn't send that email seriously.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rCVIzSi...
tarage> This is the type of person you are. Just so everyone is aware.
TheSaint> Yes it is, and Selle is an amazing guy. That’s EXACTLY who I am.
In reality Alex does not really work all the time (for example he spent quite some time on his blog) and he does not require his employees to work all the time too.
Not just the easterners, methinks.
Come on, you're free to hate him, but putting DirectX together - which is the foundation for so much - is just holding a grudge against someone who says things you don't like.
And he didn't "make" DirectX or "put it together". He just advertised it. He's an "evangelist" not a "designer" or "developer" or "programmer". That's marketing, not engineering. And it was successful marketing because it was dishonest, heavy handed, well funded marketing, with no hint of self awareness or irony, which he kicked off by throwing a party that cast Microsoft as the Empire, and developers as slaves to be auctioned off and fed to the lions. The early version of DirectX he was evangelizing was a piece of crap. Look up "Direct3D Retained Mode" some time. [1]
[1] Direct3D Retained Mode removed from Windows Vista: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969150
The alternative to "Retained Mode", "Execute Buffers", were just as bad if not worse in their own way [2]:
>Direct3D initially implemented "retained mode" and "immediate mode" 3D APIs. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders, were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode after DirectX 3.0.
>For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were extremely awkward to program, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0