Slashdot Mirror

Did you know that 1% of the static you see and hear on empty channels is actually radiation from the Big Bang?
Really.

See for example:

"WAL-MART'S DIRTY SECRET
Millions of young Chinese men can find neither money nor love because many of the relatively few available single women are being beaten and raped while producing products for the USA, Canada and other world markets in death camps called laogai.

chinese sweat shops

Or they "voluntarily" work backbreaking hours in what amount to slave labor camps, where the National Labor Committee for Human Rights has documented 98-hour workweeks in factories over 100F, a ban on talking during work hours, 24-hour surveillance, and compulsory unpaid overtime.

Top wages are 10 cents an hour.

Average pay in China's "Special Economic Zones" is three cents an hour.

Other workers are paid just 36 cents for more than a month's work--making just 8/100th of a cent an hour.

At the Qin Shi factory, thousands of women work 98 hours a week making Kathie Lee handbags that retail for $8.76 at Wal-Mart. They are paid less than $22 a week. In air thick with dust and chemical solvents, workers handle toxic glues without gloves alongside machines that roar like express trains. The whole production line must often remain at work unpaid for an extra three to four hours, until the inhuman daily quotas are met."

http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/China .htm

See also:

"Free and Endless Supply of Workers

China's booming economy continues to increase through its use of slave labor or Laogai camps. Laogai means "reform through labor." It's a system of prison factories and detention centers set up by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong during the 1950's as a means to re-educate through labor and increase economic gain for the People's Republic of China. As of 1979, there were apparently only several thousand people being forced to work in the Laogai system. Today it has become an enormous source of free labor and financial profit for the Chinese government. According to estimates from the Laogai Research Foundation, there are 6.8 million people incarcerated in China's 1,100 labor institutions.

For those incarcerated in these facilities, the reality they face is long hours of brutal treatment with little sleep or food to sustain themselves. Reports of 20-hour work days and violent oppression force some detainees to choose suicide instead of being beaten, starved, or worked to death according to a paper by Stephen D. Marshall, "Chinese Laogai: a hidden role in 'Developing Tibet." Others mutilate or injure themselves in an effort to avoid the work. Inmates who fall behind or refuse to work are shocked with electric batons, beaten, sexually assaulted, or thrown into solitary confinement. Among those that make up the population in these labor camps are criminals, political prisoners, and practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, who reportedly now make up to half of those detained in the Laogai labor system.

Who Uses Slave Labor?

Forced labor has become both a form a torture and a source of great profit for China. With the enormous amount of free labor that comes from Laogai, China has lured many overseas businesses into its profit-through-slave-labor system. With ridiculously cheap wholesale labor costs many cannot resist the bait and unknowingly come to support this illegal practice.

Common everyday products ranging from artificial Christmas trees, Christmas tree lights, bracelets, tools and foodstuffs, et cetera are among some of the products manufactured and exported from these facilities. According to a 1998 House Committee on International Relations report, companies who reportedly have or had products made in China's Laogai are Midas, Staples, Chrysler, and Nestle. A recent report from one detainee in the Changji Labor Camp in Xinjiang states the Tianshan Wooltex Stock Corporation Ltd., a contractor to Changji Labor Camp, makes products for overseas companies such as Banana Republic, Neiman Marcus, Bon Genie, Holt

You somehow left out that Wal-Mart is a major portal for Chinese goods. I think that China will be a great country eventually, but most of these goods are being produced by what is essentially slave labor.

Here's one article about it..
and another..

I don't shop at Wal-mart anymore because saving a buck is not more important to me than encouraging slave labor.

Aero

"The greatest mass extinction in Earth's history may have resulted from a release of carbonated seawater"

And this site kindly points out the following:

"But when dissolved in frothy, carbonated seawater, all this CO2 becomes a corrosive gas."

Not to mention the environmental effect of millions of farting & belching sea creatures. I think we should keep a close eye on this man :)

Wait .. does this mean the "harmless" active denial system that melts contacts and turns watches into flaming hot metal pain will alo cause permenent vision damage? http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Micro waving_Iraq.htm

Here are views from different sides:

UAW report, from the left.

This report, from a fringe right-wing guy.

This report, from Jim Hightower, also on the left.

Cache of Bob Johnson campaign site, right-winger. Relevant quote: "in dealing with the slave labor camps in Red China, we have to rmember that about 5% of China is in slave labor camps, amounting to 50 million Chinese working"

Indian NGOs site. See part about Chinese slaves making footballs(soccer balls).

Chinese human rights group site

Another Laogai article

Archimedes supposedly set fire to the Roman Navy using an arrangement of mirrors.

And you probably wouldn't want to have this guy as a neighbour, as he used reflected light from 100 mirrors to "cut" the tops off several trees.