Sad to see the viewpoints of so many people framing this as "helping Kenya" or "They took the job, so it's worth it to them". I can assure you OpenAI did not have a charity meeting and say, "what poor, impoverished country can we lift up today?" It was "What country has limited labor laws, no unions, no red tape, and the cheapest labor we can find?" 99.99% of corporations put profit above people. That's why we still "benefit" from child labor and sweatshops, because we prefer cheap crap and money over the betterment of humanity. The same arguments given here were also given by coal miners in 1840's Europe[1],[2] when employing women and children, along the lines of "oh the children love it, they even get to see horses!" (and indeed, the children did show up to work every day, so why make a fuss?)
It's awful but who sends these kids to work? What will a mother of 3 children do if she can't feed herself?
It's a terrible cycle but it takes ages to fix. No foreign company is benefitting from Bangladeshi kids making low-quality bricks for their village. What is the solution today? If you tell them they can't work, who will feed them today?
Are you personally going to donate your money to not only feed all these people, build schools and infrastructure, but also $20/hour to everyone involved in the process?
Cool points for child labor yo. So because people are in terrible situations, I should actively seek that out to exploit it? Man, these kids have no other choice, better get my cheap labor while I can! Why not even free labor if possible?[1]
Same arguments were used for slave labor. How are they going to take care of themselves? Might as well just keep them as slaves. What are we going to do, pay them?
Child labor has been used by just about every major fashion brand in the world, not just to "make bricks for their village"... If that's the extent of what you think child labor is, might want to check out some books or do some googling. Here's just one to get you started: [2].
Africa would be much more profitable for America if they developed like Japan and China have. Before colonialism they were a prehistoric continent in many places. It was in many cases evil. But I’d didn’t make them poor or backward
At the margin employing these people is net positive.
You see poor people and are so disgusted by them and their poverty, you blame the people who do pay them rather than those who don't. How many people could employ a Kenyan today, but don't?
How backwards is this thinking?
Imagine if every American company outsourced 5% of its back office work to Kenya for $2. That would be an enormous benefit, think of the millions of lives improved. Every extra foreign dollar paid to Africans working remote service jobs has 100x the impact of paying it to an American.
Do you really think it's more moral to increase the pay of American office workers from $22 to $24, rather than adding another Kenyan for $2?
You would pay the Americans because they have unions? labor laws? red tape? WHO GIVES A SHIT. "Sorry Kenyans, come back when you pass a minimum wage of $15 USD, then we'll employ you. Oh you can't meet a $15/hr productivity? Stay poor then".
My whole point is that it's really hard to ever classify exploitation as "good". I guess you can spin taking advantage of those in worse situations as good, but profiting (handsomely) off of people with good options doesn't seem morally great. Certainly good for business. But good for humans? This also isn't lifting Kenya out of poverty, this was a short term contract for a few dozen workers. If this signals to other businesses that Kenya is a great place for cheap labor and little regulation, it could very easily be turn bad for many Kenyans.
Are all the sweatshop and slave labor[1] jobs created by Zara good for those children and slaves? You get cheap clothes out of it after all. But is it really helping anyone other than Zara, and their CEO who is worth ..checks notes... 50+ billion dollars?
Companies could help a lot more by increasing labor standards, helping those in need, paying above a living day to day wage, etc. The would still have a few billion left in the bank I believe...
>Agents, the most junior data labelers who made up the majority of the three teams, were paid a basic salary of 21,000 Kenyan shillings ($170) per month
Based on my quick and dirty googling, it looks like this is an above average salary for Nairobi.
>Are all the sweatshop and slave labor[1] jobs created by Zara good for those children and slaves? You get cheap clothes out of it after all. But is it really helping anyone other than Zara, and their CEO who is worth ..checks notes... 50+ billion dollars?
You haven't established a connection between OpenAI and slave labour. So this is irrelevant and detracts from your point by costing you credibility.
> If this signals to other businesses that Kenya is a great place for cheap labor and little regulation, it could very easily be turn bad for many Kenyans.
Yeah, like if you removed chatgpt from the equation what would change? A couple hundred-thousand moderators would not have an above-average hourly wage and would instead need to find another international company or a domestic company to hire them who are all abusing the lack of unions and low wages.
I would suspect that's only approximately true. OpenAI hired them because Kenya has hundreds of thousands of people who are fluent in English, but without the level of basic education or employability needed to earn more than $2/day.
For simple outsourcing tasks like this one, outsourcing to Kenya is a win-win. You can drastically reduce costs, while significantly improving people's lives.
That'd be true regardless of labor laws, unions, or otherwise. The legal system in Kenya isn't quiet as wonderful for business as you describe; it inherits British colonial bureaucracy, has some corruption, isn't all that laissez-faire, and can be a minor pain in the butt. Unions, likewise, would increase income, but not by enough to make this a bad deal.
Kenya is competing with India and the Philippians here, not with low-cost US labor.
1. Older cars have a lockout on steering after 10 seconds baked into the EPS firmware.
2. While newer cars don't have this lockout, adaptive cruise control (ACC) is only on high trims. Therefore low trims lack radar and (possibly) continuous duty brake controllers.
It should be better in a year or two when ACC is standard on Ford. ACC is standard on Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Subaru, hence that's where the effort goes.
Yes I believe you want the "Ford Co-Pilot360 Assist 2.0", not to be confused with the "Ford Co-Pilot 360™" or "Ford Co-Pilot 360™ 2.0" that won't work. The "Ford CoPilot 360 Assist+" is probably also okay, but might have the steering lockout. The "Ford Co-Pilot360™ Active 2.0 Prep Package" is good also, but it uses a different CAN message for steering after the update has been applied so YMMV.
Oh, had that happen in Canada! Drive was supposed to take 10 minutes, 12 minutes in it doesn't look like we're close, "where are we going?", "Oh, didn't you say you wanted the scenic route?" Of course I never said that, ride ended up almost triple what it should have been :/
I've actually used name heap for years and really liked them. But last year they locked my account for "security" and it took three months to unlock it! It was scary stuff, and their excuse was that because I kept replying to support, it put my ticket at the bottom of their queue... So I jumped on putting some of my domains in Cloudflare, but that looks like a mistake now too. Anyone got any other decent suggestions they like?
I've never had a problem with them, even when doing some relatively complex things. And their support has always been very responsive. I don't know what happened in your situation, obviously, but did you try calling? Or chatting? I assume you did not, so while I sympathize with your painful experience, it sounds like user error.
Yeah, I never had a problem with them for years, until I did... I've never seen phone support, and still don't see a number anywhere on there website. If you have to be logged in to see it... Also, the chat is how you create a ticket. I chatted multiple times and they kept saying it was an escalated issue and only a "higher up" team could handle it and I'd just have to wait for a response. Glad you've never had any issues, good luck with that!
I was very excited about CF Images, but after doing some basic napkin math the pricing was way more than expected. That, coupled with some of the other limitations you mentioned, had me abandon CF images pretty quick!
Solid point. Uber has raised 26 billion, still don't make a profit and probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Just kind of drives me crazy the amount of money dumped into ideas that could start with very little money and become profitable on their own, or they'd just die out because it's not working.
[1]https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?Page...
[2]https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1842/jun/...