

How many slaves work for me? - Kliment
http://slaveryfootprint.org

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marknutter
I'd really like to know if they're equating low wage jobs to slavery or if
they are actually talking about true slavery in which the workers are paid
nothing and not allowed to leave. Because there's a big difference there.

edit: they clear it up here: <http://slaveryfootprint.org/about/#methodology>

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wtvanhest
_Note: Forced Labor, also known as involuntary servitude, may result when
unscrupulous employers exploit workers made more vulnerable by high rates of
unemployment, poverty, crime, discrimination, corruption, political conflict,
or cultural acceptance of the practice._

Wait, so people who live in areas of high unemployment with jobs are slaves?
How do they define corruption? What about political conflict?

Further, if I own a laptop, and I buy 1 every 5 years, do I have all those
people working for me, or do I have an average of 1 slave per 5 years etc.

While I get that they are trying to do something good, this type of "tool" is
more about making people feel bad than actually doing any good.

\--I will say the interface is pretty cool though.

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jhrobert
The results are useless. It tells you that xxx slaves work for you, with xxx
beeing something between 20 and 100.

This great exageration makes no sense.

What would have been usefull is the amount of slaves working for me... full
time (versus "involved" as described in their methodology).

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RaviSParikh
Yeah...not sure I buy it. I put pretty conservative responses and probably had
a footprint smaller than the average middle-class American and still got over
20 slaves. Which doesn't really extrapolate well to the country as a whole.

What does it mean that 20 slaves work for you? Does it mean there are 20
slaves who at some point or another use products that you consume, or does it
mean that there are an equivalent of 20 slaves working full-time for you (in
terms of man-hours or something)? The former metric is rather meaningless
since it's unclear what proportion of the labor of those 20 slaves benefits
you. Is 1/1000th of their labor output? 50%? This makes a huge difference. The
latter metric is meaningful, in that it would mean that you "employ" around 20
slaves. However the mathematics don't really work out in that case, since 20
slaves per person for hundreds of millions of Americans obviously doesn't make
sense.

The way it's written as you point out seems to indicate that they're using the
former metric, that is, the number of slaves involved in stuff you use,
regardless of what proportion of their labor goes toward your lifestyle.

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andrewmu
I think it's good to bring to light problems of slavery and unfair labour
practices, but it doesn't seem at all accurate. I probably share an overall
level of consumption with between 500M to 1B people.

If _all_ of the others are our slaves, then that means an average of 6 - 13
slaves per person. But this website says I have 38. And I still have to hang
up my own washing.

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wtvanhest
Here is how I know this is a vast over exaggeration!

I can’t get less than 20 slaves as an American so far:

Roughly 300,000,000 people in America

20 slaves each

=

6 Billion People.

That means that after accounting for americans, only 700 million people on
earth aren’t slaves.

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WalterSear
It wod explain all the freedom giving anerica spends its time and military on.

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pja
I get a "permission denied" dialog opening this page in Safari & clicking on
the 'how many slave work for you' button.

Is there something weird on that page?

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monkeyfacebag
They're attempting to use geolocation to identify your location. Safari must
be blocking it automatically (er... automagically?). FWIW, I couldn't get past
that screen either, even after allowing location tracking.

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bwooceli
content aside, loved the presentation and interactivity. the intro page's use
of scroll-based animation was great. Gave me some ideas, thanks for posting.

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vilepickle
Amazing presentation (well done there). Terrible idea.

