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Comment by lazyeye | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of these kinds of issues that we are told are "complex" and "multi-faceted", "no easy solution" etc could be significantly reduced if there was actual political will to do so.

I think a lot.

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There seems to be political will to ignore it

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-treasury-department-says...

If we had political will we could just kill everyone who disagrees.

Hypotheticals where any resources is unlimited are pointless because resources are fungible sometimes if you're ok with conversion inefficiency.

The political will has to be globally coordinated and needs to mandate a basic standard of living for all.

Much like ending the human rights abuses perpetuated abroad by western companies requires political will to exist in multiple countries.

When there is money to be made, people will look the other way. And dehumanizing people on the other side of the world is too easy. We are all complicit in supporting companies that are responsible for child slavery and death, to make our consumer products. To pretend that "other people" are the truly heartless ones for running different kinds of exploitative rackets that happen to affect people we see ourselves as closer to, in ways we see as more likely to affect us, is myopic.

Until Westerners confront these inevitabilities, the odd person being scammed by people in poorer countries is just the price we will continue to pay for economic supremacy.

Groan.....

The politicians and the police get their cut of the money, and the victims are in other countries. There's a reason the scam industry operates out of poor places with dysfunctional government, like Myanmar and Cambodia.

Yep, the gambling / casino industry is largely responsible. And they have their roots deep in the political system.

Agreed. It seems like billionaires are buying more and more of our means of communication. Makes it easier to control the narrative.

Its harder today than it was. It used to be you had most of america watching Walter Cronkite or otherwise on three channels and a smattering of radio. You control those few levers you have the country. And indeed the country was remarkably well controlled without even being aware of its tight leash up until we saw counter culture emerge, through production of their own media and materials and grassroots distribution outside this existing national system in the 1960s.

Many people are captured today by mass media but there are many more people in this space trying to cultivate their own cash crop of passive content cows. Makes it less efficient to break trough with more players to pay off for a unified narrative.

At least mass media isn't a clown show like the Rogans and twitters.

You can pretend that journalistic integrity doesn't exist (or didn't exist) with professional journalists.

But it's obvious you're pushing a narrative. So have fun with your algorithmically designed opinions.

What narrative am I pushing if it is so obvious? If anything it is mere media literacy I am espousing. Is that so controversial a position these days? Scary times if so.

Like I said, have fun with your algorithmically designed opinions. I'm going to stick with evidence based reporting and fact checking.

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