Weapons of mass destruction are nasty, and may have completely changed the way nations practice war and politics.
But *fortunately*, they haven't had that much of a visible effect on the day-to-day lives of people in the industrialized world. People that live in developed countries (which includes almost all of the people who read/., and certainly the members of the american association of engineering societies) don't live daily with the effects of nuclear radiation, sarin gas, or anthrax --- and even the vast majority of people living in "third-world" countries do not.
Compare this with the achievements which made it onto the list; every one of them (with the possible exception of imaging, which as an "achievement" strikes me as being imprecise) resulted in major changes not just in our technology, but in our day-to-day lives, and the way our society functions.
Most Americans under the age of 30 could not imagine living without electricity; the automobile made it possible to travel in two hours a distance which a century ago would have taken days; etc. For all that weapons of mass destruction are probably technology's biggest black mark in the twentieth century, they don't compare in impact to *any* of the items on the list.
This is *not* just an OSS problem; it's a problem with *all* software. Even stuff which is well-designed from the beginning, and reasonably well-written, degenerates over time; and with high engineer turnover, even stuff written four or five years ago becomes painful to maintain.
For the OSS community *in isolation* to seek to solve this problem would be unfortunate; the industry as a whole needs to find a way to address it.
Judges aren't about forgiveness, they're about ensuring that laws are enforced.
Wrong. The *police* are about ensuring the laws are enforced. Judges are about deciding *if the law was violated* and, if so *what the punishment should be*.
Sometimes circumstances make a technical violation acceptable --- "yes, sir, I brandished my gun at him, which I admit is illegal, but he was trying to kidnap my 3-year old child and the gun made him stop." That's what a judge (or jury) is there to determine....
Is anyone worried about the lack of flexibility implied in a system like this? How does software consider extenuating circumstances?
Right now, the law is sort of like a computer program for people: a set of explicit rules set in stone. The rules are interpreted by *individual humans* because there is a belief that the people establishing the rules can't possibly forsee every possible scenario, and circumstances may arise in which strict applications of the rules would be counterproductive or flat out harmful.
Turning the task of interpretation over to a machine is scary, because the designers of the machine can't forsee every posisble scenario, either; and rmeoving the element of human judgment means that either every scenario *must* be forseen, or people will be punished for things which are technically illegal but in fact understandable/reasonable.
I sincerely hope never to see these in use in my home country for any sort of criminal case...
I'm not claiming that VB is as robust as other languages ( perl, c++, java ) but _in my experience_ I have found that if VB isn't capable of performing a task, it will easily use a component written in to the COM specification. That's a strong features of VB. It can use any COM component, and you can write COM objects in many languages, including Delphi and C++.
Sure. It can *use* any automation object (the object does have to derive from IDispatch, not just IUnknown). *But* it has repeatedly done things which take a fairly loose reading of the COM spec, including:
* creating COM objects with interfaces that have gaps in their vtables * changing the meaning of the CAN_CREATE flag on the CoClass so that there is no way to distinguish between an object which should not be created and an object which can be created only with additional support structures * creating COM objects with interfaces whose methods are retrieved by GetFuncDesc() in non-vtable order
In addition, there are a fair number of flat out bugs involving the logic to determine what flags to set on a CoClass which makes the state of controls created in VB highly unreliable.
But of course, VB is the standard, so everyone else has to comply with it...
[These are the reasons I dislike using objects *created* in VB. I dislike programming in it for a different reason: no type safety].
The problem is that this is *very* difficult to do; by the time most people are in their mid-to-late twenties, they've already given up, and are unwilling to trust enough to lower their self-protection. How do you know that the random stranger you might let into your tribe isn't going to hurt you, or shares your need for a tribe, or considers you a member?
Self-selecting communities based on simialr interests and skills help some, but they have a couple of serious problems, including the fact that they tend towards being somewhat inbred (new ideas from other communities don't necessarily make it, and it's hard to challenge the established wisdom) and are risky; if you've never met the people, how can you justify the emotional energy in caring about them?
I don't know what the answer is. I know that I am an *intensely* tribal person, but that few people around me are (or admit to being); that online communities seem somehow hollow or less real than personal ones; and that the very existence of online communities is suggesting that there is a lack of *some* psychological need being filled in normal everyday life.
I got the distinct impression that Erasmus, for example, was aware of the history he was making (although, I suppose, he wasn't *italian*). And i'm sure people were aware that the printing press was somewhat revolutionary...
One of the things that i'm disappointed that none of the social analysts have discussed too much is the likelihood that the effects of the "internet revolution" and the "new economy" will be *substantially* different in the industrialized world than it will be in the developing world.
In the industrialized world, states appear to be getting *stronger*, at least in the short term, for example.
What's interesting here --- and this tends to be difficult for people who haven't studied history to be aware of --- is that there are moments in history when all of a sudden things *change* in a massive way which is different from the normal day-to-day change that is, essentially, background noise. Where the way members of the society concieve their relationship to each other and to the society as a whole undergoes a massive sudden shift; where the change is so momentous that *everything* is called into question and people believe, for a while, that nothing will ever be the same again.
A good example of this in modern times is Germany after WWII, and quite probably Russia *now*; it's not something I have any evidence of ever having happened in the US (maybe in the time after the American Revolution, but the written record from that time doesn't actually suggest that that was the case).
What Katz is arguing is that *for some people* right now is just such a time. I don't know if it's true; it's hard for me to tell, because I've spent a third of my life on the edge of, or immediately behind the edge of, the technology curve; I can't tell how the social change brought about by the internet are effecting society at large. But I think it's possible, and I wonder what the historians of fifty years from now will say about it.
That is: some of us are always living on the edge. Others aren't; surely you have some relatives that still don't believe in computers, for example, and there are still people who don't believe in cable teleivision.
It's constantly getting easier to spread information, and that constantly dismays the people in charge, for whom ignorance is bliss, as long as it's our ignorance.
It's also getting easier to spread *disinformation* or, more likely, *uninformed opinion* --- and there is so much "information" out there that it's becoming difficult for the average person to tell what information is trustworthy and what information isn't.
Although, I would imagine that we are not the first to think of ourselves as living "on the [insert name here] edge"...think what it must have been like living in Renaissance Italy, for example.
Or the late nineteenth century; that's one of the reasons for the popularity of steampunk novels in the science-fiction world....
Too much old code to fix? email it to me. I will fix it for you. It is not difficult, there is no excuse.
On the other hand, if you've got a number of old programs which you either bought as off-the-shelf solutions *or* have lost the source code for (in the real world, this happens more often than it should), a tool like this is a *wonderful* thing.
It's not a panacea --- the code in question should be rewritten anyway. But as a stopgap bandaid to plug the security hole during the six months that it takes to recreate some important program from scratch, it's a godsend.
"Comments are owned by the poset" is, and always has been, primarily a legal dodge --- it's the way slashdot avoids legal responsibility for monitoring posts and insisting that they conform to law.
The original article was published in the journal _Science_ (or will be in tomorrow's issue). This means that the abstract will be available for free at www.scienceonline.org, and the article itself for a small free (unless you are a member of IAAAS, that is).
sending out lots of cds to people *works* ---- i mean, you get free internet access in the mail, and you've heard about how cool the net is but never exoerienced it yourself, you're going to try it, right?
[The free cds are annoying, tho: i own a po box, and everytime they send me a cd it comes in as a package and I have to stand in line for 10-20 minutes to recieve... an AOL CD. I wonder if I could sue them?]
what about yahoo.co.jp? I found a page linking to a site hosting illegal CSS info and DVD linux drivers from Yahoo. (http://search.yahoo.co.jp/bin/search?p=d ecss) Does this mean that search engines are all illegal in Japan?
It means that some court just opened up a legal can of worms that it will take lawyers a decade to straighten out --- and until it's straightened out, nobody knows the answer.
There was a similar *effect* a few years ago in the US when the first cases involving suing ISPs for content came out --- there was a year or two where everyone was nervous about what the courts would decide, because you didn't know if, say, a company could be held liable for statements in posts to their corporate newsgroups.
Eventually the law settled down, and a set of rules were established and disseminated, and most companies stopped worrying.
In this case, the time to *start* worrying is now --- but there's no excuse for panic; no judge is going to rule search engines illegal, they're going to draw up some elaborately technical distinction between search engine links and normal links, and create a whole class of bizarrely detailed law about what sorts of sites fall on one side, and what sorts of sites fall on the other.
Note that the obnoxious actions TSR took with respect to D&D muds, etc, were undertaken *several years* before Wizards of the Coast bought them; as far as I can tell, WotC has been *significantly* more friendly than TSR was.
IMHO, any copyrights longer than 25 years are unconscionable.
I think this should probably depend on the medium - for software, 25 years is probably too long; for movies, it's probably not long enough (Lucas would lose the copyright to Star Wars *next year* under that scheme).
Certainly the current ever-extending provisions are absurd, but for anything creative, awarding copyright *for the life of the author* is reasonable --- because it would *suck* to expend a lot of time and energy creating something, and 25 years later someone else comes along, steals 75% of it, and makes it into something which is completely contrary to what you believed in or were attempting to create.
(Not that this doesn't happen --- witness the Blade Runner books that KW Jeter insists on inflicting on the science fiction reading community. But at least Philip K Dick is dead.)
Of course Jon Katz is exploiting us: that's what reporters do.
This is most common in reporters who cover foreign countries: they are outsiders there, foreigners, sent to watch what is going on, and report back to the people at home. They exploit the local people to tell stories to their compatriots, and sell newspapers/television ads/whatever.
That doesn't mean that they don't *sympathize*, or understand what the local people are going through --- and the alternative for the local people is to have no news go out.
Like it or not, computer geeks are newsworthy. We're newsworthy because we work for and found companies that dominate the economy; because we develop technology that nobody else understands; because we *are* distinct from the rest of society, even if we can't agree on how we are distinct.
So, as newsworthy people, we attract reporters who don't understand us, and are using us to make a living by trying to explain us to everyone else. Jon Katz is one such.
But he's also doing something that other reporters aren't doing: he's trying to explain to us *how the outside world sees us*. Sure, he does it in the guise of trying to explain to us how we see ourselves --- but it's still something no other reporter making a living covering us is trying to do, and he should get some respect for it.
One of the great promises of the internet that caused everyone to buy into it in the mid-90s was that information distribution on the net was comparatively cheap (next to television or print) and, as a result, anybody could put anything on the net; it meant that information could be widely distributed in a way that had never been possible before.
The risk involved in having a provider dominate the marketplace is that that won't necessarily be true. Not only could AOL choose to place 'filtering' software on its network, justify it on the grounds that it wants to protect its customers from evil things, and get away with it, but once it is large enough, it can put pressure on *other* providers to not host sites that AOL finds objectionable (by threatening to block the provider's entire IP range).
Eventually, someone would step in with an antitrust action --- but it would take a while, and an immense amount of damage would be done in the meantime.
I can't believe they have the nerve to call people at midnight.
More than likely it wasn't midnight where he was, and he didn't know where you were....
It's pretty common to base telemarketing (or phone support, for that matter) either in one place for the entire US, or in Ireland (from which you can get both Europe and the eastern US at reasonable times).
The question was about "socially responsible" computer companies. It was not about the rather more generic issue, "how do I find out about a company's ethics?"
This might be a linguistic problem. For me "socially responsible" = "ethical", so the question is akin to asking "how ethical are computer companies?"
So-called "social responsibility" is nothing but a loaded buzzphrase meaning "I denounce the cause of liberty; the government and other elites know better than the plebes of this country how plebe lives ought to be run."
Eh? How does "I would prefer to do business with companies which behave in a way I think is ethical?" equate to "I denounce the cause of liberty?"
Depends. I don't expect the company which makes products I buy to donate to charity, true. But I do expect them to behave in a socially responsible fashion --- not employ slave labor, for example, or allow environmental concerns to influence their decision about where to build their plants, or not opposing decisions by local government to make improvements in infrastructure, etc. I *absolutely* expect that the company will not lie to me.
The fact is that in general, we all live in the general vicinity of our workplace
Maybe where *you* live, but where I live, it's not unusual for people to travel 100 miles/day to get to work... in perspective: before 100 years ago, that distance would have taken the average person *several days*.
The most moral and ethical thing a person can do is work hard and get the most from your money.
Given a choice between buying a backpack for $20 that was made with the labor of people imprisoned for their political views in China, or buying a $60 backpack made with the labor of voluntary employees in Mexico who are paid a reasonable wage there which it would be impossible to live on here, or $200 for a backpack made by a local artisan, then, the 'moral' decision is to buy the $20 (according to your logic). Assuming I *knew* the details of the manufacture, I would buy the $60 one.
Slashdot Mirror
Weapons of mass destruction are nasty, and may have completely changed the way nations practice war and politics.
/., and certainly the members of the american association of engineering societies) don't live daily with the effects of nuclear radiation, sarin gas, or anthrax --- and even the vast majority of people living in "third-world" countries do not.
But *fortunately*, they haven't had that much of a visible effect on the day-to-day lives of people in the industrialized world. People that live in developed countries (which includes almost all of the people who read
Compare this with the achievements which made it onto the list; every one of them (with the possible exception of imaging, which as an "achievement" strikes me as being imprecise) resulted in major changes not just in our technology, but in our day-to-day lives, and the way our society functions.
Most Americans under the age of 30 could not imagine living without electricity; the automobile made it possible to travel in two hours a distance which a century ago would have taken days; etc. For all that weapons of mass destruction are probably technology's biggest black mark in the twentieth century, they don't compare in impact to *any* of the items on the list.
This is *not* just an OSS problem; it's a problem with *all* software. Even stuff which is well-designed from the beginning, and reasonably well-written, degenerates over time; and with high engineer turnover, even stuff written four or five years ago becomes painful to maintain.
For the OSS community *in isolation* to seek to solve this problem would be unfortunate; the industry as a whole needs to find a way to address it.
This leads to broken function prototypes that only work in VB, not in Delphi, PowerBuilder or C++.
....
You'd be amazed at how much special-casing Delphi has to have in order to handle this sort of problem
Judges aren't about forgiveness, they're about ensuring that laws are enforced.
....
Wrong. The *police* are about ensuring the laws are enforced. Judges are about deciding *if the law was violated* and, if so *what the punishment should be*.
Sometimes circumstances make a technical violation acceptable --- "yes, sir, I brandished my gun at him, which I admit is illegal, but he was trying to kidnap my 3-year old child and the gun made him stop." That's what a judge (or jury) is there to determine
Is anyone worried about the lack of flexibility implied in a system like this? How does software consider extenuating circumstances?
...
Right now, the law is sort of like a computer program for people: a set of explicit rules set in stone. The rules are interpreted by *individual humans* because there is a belief that the people establishing the rules can't possibly forsee every possible scenario, and circumstances may arise in which strict applications of the rules would be counterproductive or flat out harmful.
Turning the task of interpretation over to a machine is scary, because the designers of the machine can't forsee every posisble scenario, either; and rmeoving the element of human judgment means that either every scenario *must* be forseen, or people will be punished for things which are technically illegal but in fact understandable/reasonable.
I sincerely hope never to see these in use in my home country for any sort of criminal case
I'm not claiming that VB is as robust as other languages ( perl, c++, java ) but _in my experience_ I have found that if VB isn't capable of performing a task, it will easily use a component written in to the COM specification. That's a strong features of VB. It can use any COM component, and you can write COM objects in many languages, including Delphi and C++.
...
Sure. It can *use* any automation object (the object does have to derive from IDispatch, not just IUnknown). *But* it has repeatedly done things which take a fairly loose reading of the COM spec, including:
* creating COM objects with interfaces that have gaps in their vtables
* changing the meaning of the CAN_CREATE flag on the CoClass so that there is no way to distinguish between an object which should not be created and an object which can be created only with additional support structures
* creating COM objects with interfaces whose methods are retrieved by GetFuncDesc() in non-vtable order
In addition, there are a fair number of flat out bugs involving the logic to determine what flags to set on a CoClass which makes the state of controls created in VB highly unreliable.
But of course, VB is the standard, so everyone else has to comply with it
[These are the reasons I dislike using objects *created* in VB. I dislike programming in it for a different reason: no type safety].
restoration of community/society/tribe.
The problem is that this is *very* difficult to do; by the time most people are in their mid-to-late twenties, they've already given up, and are unwilling to trust enough to lower their self-protection. How do you know that the random stranger you might let into your tribe isn't going to hurt you, or shares your need for a tribe, or considers you a member?
Self-selecting communities based on simialr interests and skills help some, but they have a couple of serious problems, including the fact that they tend towards being somewhat inbred (new ideas from other communities don't necessarily make it, and it's hard to challenge the established wisdom) and are risky; if you've never met the people, how can you justify the emotional energy in caring about them?
I don't know what the answer is. I know that I am an *intensely* tribal person, but that few people around me are (or admit to being); that online communities seem somehow hollow or less real than personal ones; and that the very existence of online communities is suggesting that there is a lack of *some* psychological need being filled in normal everyday life.
I got the distinct impression that Erasmus, for example, was aware of the history he was making (although, I suppose, he wasn't *italian*). And i'm sure people were aware that the printing press was somewhat revolutionary ...
One of the things that i'm disappointed that none of the social analysts have discussed too much is the likelihood that the effects of the "internet revolution" and the "new economy" will be *substantially* different in the industrialized world than it will be in the developing world.
In the industrialized world, states appear to be getting *stronger*, at least in the short term, for example.
What's interesting here --- and this tends to be difficult for people who haven't studied history to be aware of --- is that there are moments in history when all of a sudden things *change* in a massive way which is different from the normal day-to-day change that is, essentially, background noise. Where the way members of the society concieve their relationship to each other and to the society as a whole undergoes a massive sudden shift; where the change is so momentous that *everything* is called into question and people believe, for a while, that nothing will ever be the same again.
A good example of this in modern times is Germany after WWII, and quite probably Russia *now*; it's not something I have any evidence of ever having happened in the US (maybe in the time after the American Revolution, but the written record from that time doesn't actually suggest that that was the case).
What Katz is arguing is that *for some people* right now is just such a time. I don't know if it's true; it's hard for me to tell, because I've spent a third of my life on the edge of, or immediately behind the edge of, the technology curve; I can't tell how the social change brought about by the internet are effecting society at large. But I think it's possible, and I wonder what the historians of fifty years from now will say about it.
We're always living on the edge.
That is: some of us are always living on the edge. Others aren't; surely you have some relatives that still don't believe in computers, for example, and there are still people who don't believe in cable teleivision.
It's constantly getting easier to spread information, and that constantly dismays the people in charge, for whom ignorance is bliss, as long as it's our ignorance.
It's also getting easier to spread *disinformation* or, more likely, *uninformed opinion* --- and there is so much "information" out there that it's becoming difficult for the average person to tell what information is trustworthy and what information isn't.
Although, I would imagine that we are not the first to think of ourselves as living "on the [insert name here] edge"...think what it must have been like living in Renaissance Italy, for example.
....
Or the late nineteenth century; that's one of the reasons for the popularity of steampunk novels in the science-fiction world
Too much old code to fix? email it to me. I will fix it for you. It is not difficult, there is no excuse.
On the other hand, if you've got a number of old programs which you either bought as off-the-shelf solutions *or* have lost the source code for (in the real world, this happens more often than it should), a tool like this is a *wonderful* thing.
It's not a panacea --- the code in question should be rewritten anyway. But as a stopgap bandaid to plug the security hole during the six months that it takes to recreate some important program from scratch, it's a godsend.
"Comments are owned by the poset" is, and always has been, primarily a legal dodge --- it's the way slashdot avoids legal responsibility for monitoring posts and insisting that they conform to law.
The original article was published in the journal _Science_ (or will be in tomorrow's issue). This means that the abstract will be available for free at www.scienceonline.org, and the article itself for a small free (unless you are a member of IAAAS, that is).
sending out lots of cds to people *works* ---- i mean, you get free internet access in the mail, and you've heard about how cool the net is but never exoerienced it yourself, you're going to try it, right?
... an AOL CD. I wonder if I could sue them?]
[The free cds are annoying, tho: i own a po box, and everytime they send me a cd it comes in as a package and I have to stand in line for 10-20 minutes to recieve
what about yahoo.co.jp? I found a page linking to a site hosting illegal CSS info and DVD linux drivers from Yahoo. (http://search.yahoo.co.jp/bin/search?p=d ecss) Does this mean that search engines are all illegal in Japan?
It means that some court just opened up a legal can of worms that it will take lawyers a decade to straighten out --- and until it's straightened out, nobody knows the answer.
There was a similar *effect* a few years ago in the US when the first cases involving suing ISPs for content came out --- there was a year or two where everyone was nervous about what the courts would decide, because you didn't know if, say, a company could be held liable for statements in posts to their corporate newsgroups.
Eventually the law settled down, and a set of rules were established and disseminated, and most companies stopped worrying.
In this case, the time to *start* worrying is now --- but there's no excuse for panic; no judge is going to rule search engines illegal, they're going to draw up some elaborately technical distinction between search engine links and normal links, and create a whole class of bizarrely detailed law about what sorts of sites fall on one side, and what sorts of sites fall on the other.
Note that the obnoxious actions TSR took with respect to D&D muds, etc, were undertaken *several years* before Wizards of the Coast bought them; as far as I can tell, WotC has been *significantly* more friendly than TSR was.
IMHO, any copyrights longer than 25 years are unconscionable.
I think this should probably depend on the medium - for software, 25 years is probably too long; for movies, it's probably not long enough (Lucas would lose the copyright to Star Wars *next year* under that scheme).
Certainly the current ever-extending provisions are absurd, but for anything creative, awarding copyright *for the life of the author* is reasonable --- because it would *suck* to expend a lot of time and energy creating something, and 25 years later someone else comes along, steals 75% of it, and makes it into something which is completely contrary to what you believed in or were attempting to create.
(Not that this doesn't happen --- witness the Blade Runner books that KW Jeter insists on inflicting on the science fiction reading community. But at least Philip K Dick is dead.)
Of course Jon Katz is exploiting us: that's what reporters do.
This is most common in reporters who cover foreign countries: they are outsiders there, foreigners, sent to watch what is going on, and report back to the people at home. They exploit the local people to tell stories to their compatriots, and sell newspapers/television ads/whatever.
That doesn't mean that they don't *sympathize*, or understand what the local people are going through --- and the alternative for the local people is to have no news go out.
Like it or not, computer geeks are newsworthy. We're newsworthy because we work for and found companies that dominate the economy; because we develop technology that nobody else understands; because we *are* distinct from the rest of society, even if we can't agree on how we are distinct.
So, as newsworthy people, we attract reporters who don't understand us, and are using us to make a living by trying to explain us to everyone else. Jon Katz is one such.
But he's also doing something that other reporters aren't doing: he's trying to explain to us *how the outside world sees us*. Sure, he does it in the guise of trying to explain to us how we see ourselves --- but it's still something no other reporter making a living covering us is trying to do, and he should get some respect for it.
Although not, I think, for the reasons stated.
One of the great promises of the internet that caused everyone to buy into it in the mid-90s was that information distribution on the net was comparatively cheap (next to television or print) and, as a result, anybody could put anything on the net; it meant that information could be widely distributed in a way that had never been possible before.
The risk involved in having a provider dominate the marketplace is that that won't necessarily be true. Not only could AOL choose to place 'filtering' software on its network, justify it on the grounds that it wants to protect its customers from evil things, and get away with it, but once it is large enough, it can put pressure on *other* providers to not host sites that AOL finds objectionable (by threatening to block the provider's entire IP range).
Eventually, someone would step in with an antitrust action --- but it would take a while, and an immense amount of damage would be done in the meantime.
I can't believe they have the nerve to call people at midnight.
....
More than likely it wasn't midnight where he was, and he didn't know where you were
It's pretty common to base telemarketing (or phone support, for that matter) either in one place for the entire US, or in Ireland (from which you can get both Europe and the eastern US at reasonable times).
The question was about "socially responsible" computer companies. It was not about the rather more generic issue, "how do I find out about a company's ethics?"
This might be a linguistic problem. For me "socially responsible" = "ethical", so the question is akin to asking "how ethical are computer companies?"
So-called "social responsibility" is nothing but a loaded buzzphrase meaning "I denounce the cause of liberty; the government and other elites know better than the plebes of this country how plebe lives ought to be run."
Eh? How does "I would prefer to do business with companies which behave in a way I think is ethical?" equate to "I denounce the cause of liberty?"
Social Responsibility is complete bullshit
... in perspective: before 100 years ago, that distance would have taken the average person *several days*.
Depends. I don't expect the company which makes products I buy to donate to charity, true. But I do expect them to behave in a socially responsible fashion --- not employ slave labor, for example, or allow environmental concerns to influence their decision about where to build their plants, or not opposing decisions by local government to make improvements in infrastructure, etc. I *absolutely* expect that the company will not lie to me.
The fact is that in general, we all live in the general vicinity of our workplace
Maybe where *you* live, but where I live, it's not unusual for people to travel 100 miles/day to get to work
The most moral and ethical thing a person can do is work hard and get the most from your money.
Given a choice between buying a backpack for $20 that was made with the labor of people imprisoned for their political views in China, or buying a $60 backpack made with the labor of voluntary employees in Mexico who are paid a reasonable wage there which it would be impossible to live on here, or $200 for a backpack made by a local artisan, then, the 'moral' decision is to buy the $20 (according to your logic). Assuming I *knew* the details of the manufacture, I would buy the $60 one.