Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the ethical implications of competing in a market that relies on exploitation.
Norbert Wiener's quote highlights the moral and economic considerations of engaging in labor practices that are juxtaposed against inhumane conditions such as slave labor. It suggests that any legitimate employment that tries to compete with such exploitative practices must inevitably lower its standards to match the conditions imposed by the existence of slave labor, raising critical questions about ethics in economics and labor rights.
In practice
In a discussion about fair trade practices at a business conference.
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. _x000D_ A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.
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