There were two reasons the Court of Appeal hearing held that the complaint could be heard in UK courts:
1. They relate to alleged harm caused by decisions and policies made centrally by Dyson UK companies and personnel
2. There was substantial risk that they would not be able to access justice in the Malaysian courts
Both seem reasonable. The UK personnel may have engaged in an activity they knew were illegal. Foreign citizen can generally sue in another country, if they must establish that the court has jurisdiction over the matter -- which they seem to have done.
If anything, it should make the anti-slavery mandates of manufacturers, particularly fashion, sit up straight.
The fashion industry does feel like such a big, endless duality of incredibly wealthy people doing little difficult work and having loads of awards and shows and fun events, and factories full of people in faraway countries barely subsisting.
Is it? Can we be a just society if we allow any company to close their eyes to bad things in their supply chain? Should we not just call this "failure of due diligence"?
Otherwise none of our environmental and worker protection laws make any sense. Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here. Do our values not apply to any human? Including to those that happen to live outside our rough geographical area?
Why not push it all the way to the consumer? Why shouldn't you be liable if you buy a wrench, but actually the worker who made it was mistreated? That would make people think twice before buying products of unknown provenance and supporting slavery.
The customer is sometimes liable for a purchases. If a person go and buy a known stolen item, pay money to known criminal activity/terrorists, then they may end up being punished for it.
The relevant question is what knowledge the buyer had, which the Court of Appeal did consider. Dyson UK companies and personnel was aware of the crime being done by the supplier.
The general legal question is not if a customer can be held liable for purchases. They can. It is how much due diligence is expected before someone should be held liable.
In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.
I considered this too, but I think it's unreasonable in the end, since there seems to be a fundamental difference/motive between an individual consumer and an entity trying to generate profit. A consumer should be able to trust that the product they're buying was manufactured in an ethical manner.
> Anyone can just do the unethical thing and move everything to a country that does not care about the rights we have set over here
Well, instead of using North Sea oil in the UK we buy it from Norway, who got it from the North Sea. We have hilariously high energy prices because of green energy policies, so we import more and more things from other countries that have workable energy policies.
The law is an expression of our desire that our industry doesn't exploit forced labour. The fact that this mostly only counts when the forced labour takes place in our own country is a weird historical detail, long outdated by globalisation.
Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre, or you think it's not OK in which case we need a way for the law to discourage forced labour in Malaysia. The only way it can do that is through the supply chain.
I think revealed preferences are more useful than a poll would be.
"Do you think forced labour in Malaysia is OK" - nobody answers yes to this.
"Are you willing to make sacrifices, such as imposing liability on local business, in order to discourage forced labour in Malaysia?" - this is the question.
This pattern applies to a lot of stuff. All politicians claim to have a solution to the housing crisis. But most "solutions" are suspiciously absent of downsides. If nothing you propose involves sacrificing anything or creating any losers I conclude you don't actually care about the housing crisis.
You can use this on your managers too. "What are we gonna do about the tech debt?" If the answer doesn't involve delaying features then you should interpret it as "nothing".
Did you mean to reply to someone else? I agreed with Disney paying more. My issue is with small time authors being unable to afford the fee and people wanting to license the content just waiting out each 14 year term out to see if the author will renew instead of simply licensing it. The example I gave is the Lord of the Rings.
The proposed system doesn’t affect Disney that much, but it will negatively affect small timers.
The worst part of this so-called “feature” is when very diligent creators from non-English-speaking countries already present in English language. But YouTube just assumes it's in their native language, so you have this horrible AI voiceover by default instead of their voice or VO artist that they use.
If you look at the Steam hardware survey you’ll find the majority of gamers are still rocking 1080p/1440p displays.
What gamers look for is more framerate not particularly resolution. Most new gaming monitors are focusing on high refresh rates.
8K feels like a waste of compute for a very diminished return compared to 4K. I think 8K only makes sense when dealing with huge displays, I’m talking beyond 83 inches, we are still far from that.
Gaming aside, 4K is desirable even on <30" displays, and honestly I wouldn't mind a little bit more pixel density there to get it to true "retina" resolution. 6K might be a sweet spot?
Which would then imply that you don't need a display as big as 83" to see the benefits from 8K. Still, we're talking about very large panels here, of the kind that wouldn't even fit many computer desks, so yeah...
Comcast and $VPN_PROVIDER have a vested interest in staying in business, so they will gladly hand over the data to the friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency when requested.
Agree, personally though $agency isn’t part of my threat model while my ISP most certainly is. I would even pay a premium if they offered similar privacy controls as a VPN, but they’d be publicly admitting to shenanigans that most of their customers are blissfully ignorant of!
I recently had my smart meter installed, the actual meters (and the display) themselves connect over a Home Area Network (HAN) and a separate module attached to the electricity meter connects to the mobile network to push readings.
Speaking to the installer, he said that it's common in the north of England for meters to use radio comms instead of mobile network due to the poor reception, I imagine these are unaffected.
It might be more due to the weird way that the government divided responsibility for the metering connectivity. Arqiva have the northern segment and O2 the southern, so they use the method that best suits their existing infrastructure.
Similar to why Google's latest image generator refuses to produce a correct image of a 'Realistic, historically accurate, Medieval English King'. They have guard rails and system prompts set up to force the output of the generator with the company's values, or else someone would produce Nazi propaganda or worse. It (for some reason) would be attributed to Google and their AI, rather than the user who found the magic prompt words.
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