I'd love to know how much that percentage fluctuates with seasons, but on a global scale. Does summer in Australia compensate for winter in America, and vice versa, so that the sum is still 40% throughout the year?
I appreciate your critique but I've got to be honest and say that I'm not going to spend any more time in my life trying to justify late stage capitalism. It will eventually be replaced and pass into history like every other economic system, if it doesn't kill us first. 💣
The UN sponsored report uses a pretty liberal definition of slavery to include things like wage theft (which forces workers to stay at a job until they're fully compensated), sex trafficking, and domestic servitude where the servant's documents are confiscated so that they can't flee.
However, there's still a hell of a lot whips and chains slavery in Africa and South East Asia. Those slaves serve the excavation and manufacturing industries.
I think one of the main problems with Smith's conception of capitalism is that he didn't account for how huge and pervasive and intrusive advertising would become. He naively assumed that the best product would dominate the market when actually people will buy whatever is thrust in front of the their eyes a thousand times a day.
And of course corporate lobbying wasn't such an issue in his time.
I just heard an NPR story about US Steel Corp using chattel slavery less than a hundred years ago. They worked people to death and buried them in unmarked graves.
We need a few more heroes and a lot more peas to solve some of these other problems:
Horizontal Gene Transfer upsets the conceptual "tree of life", i.e. if genetics are not exclusively hereditary then it is impossible to determine a last universal common ancestor (LUCA).
Lack of a viable mechanism for producing the complex and specific information required to render the genetic code functional.
Failure of the fossil record to find support for Darwinian evolution (punctuated equilibrium, Cambrian explosion, etc).
Rampant examples of convergent evolution indicate extreme improbability.
Abiogenesis.
Biogeographical distribution irregularities.
Epigenetics cannot be reduced to a mechanism, certainly not natural selection.
"Phenotypic Plasticity" - the correlation between genotypes and phenotypes are no longer 1:1.
Beneficial mutations are impossibly rare. In almost all cases, mutations are degenerative, as demonstrated by Richard Lenski's bacteria experiment and Molly Burke's fruit fly experiment - both published in Nature.
I hate to break it to you, my friend, but there are many, many wonderful people even in the terrible places of the world. I'm sorry that you haven't met enough of them to have any optimism about humanity.
It's very easy to be outraged on the internet. It's very difficult to enact real world changes in a positive direction.
Although I'm American I know real Saudis who are trying to make positive changes in the country and in the region. This is a small example of the their success.
Didn't they have a surplus a few years ago? What the hell happened? Is the decrease in tax revenue because of the exodus?