Slashdot Mirror
Ninth Suicide At iPhone Factory
shar303 writes "A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21-year-old worker was the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms."
Turns out there is an extremely high suicide rate amongst engineers who lost their iPhone prototypes.
One was in such despair that he shot himself 25 times, with several different caliber weapons.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms.
Workers killing themselves as proof their employer mistreats them? Seems just a tad presumptuous. Likely? Sure. Matter of fact? Of course not.
Whale
It's not unique to Apple; this is capitalism itself in action.
noting that this factory's staff is over 400k employees -- or roughly the size of Cleveland -- and that this is not really news, and I tend to agree.
Don't know if you all saw this or if it was on Slashdot at all, but Engadget has a full, human-done English translation of the article written by a reporter who went undercover at the factory.
Living With a Nerd
Blood will have gone into my next phone. I will purchase it humbly.
Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.
Maybe one day the workers in China will get together and form a national union to ensure workers' rights. Maybe through their collective efforts they could make a workers' paradise. Heck, maybe they could turn the entire country into some sort of commune where everyone has to do their fair share and they all benefit from the profits.
I wonder if that could ever work. It's amazing that no people have ever tried it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I have never seen so much liberal-bullshit crammed into a single sentence as that last one. Congrats, you must be proud.
Yes, if you die because of good old-fashioned US-American values like capitalism, you deserve to; and you should be proud to die for such a heroic principle. Every death that makes somebody a few bucks is a good death.
So... is that where all the magic comes from?
It seems to be worse on Apple's factories. See these videos.
I am no Apple fan boy but you are not being fair.
This is Foxconn and not Apple. If Apple offered to pay more for the product what makes you think that Foxconn would pass that on to the workers or improve the workers conditions?
Also from the wikipedia.
"Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone for Apple Inc.;
Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.;
various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard;
motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm;
the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;
the Xbox 360 for Microsoft,
cell phones for Motorola,
the Amazon Kindle,
and Cisco equipment"
Apple is no more to blame than Nintendo, Sony, HP, Dell, Motorola, Amazon, and Cisco.
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really! At one time Apple made computers in the US as did other companies.
Or at least make them in countries that care a little about their employees?
If you are going to fire off blame put it first on China. China needs to put in labor laws to protect it's own people. Second lay the blame on Foxconn for exploiting those people. Then put the blame on all the companies listed.
Finally lets all take a little blame for not caring where we get our toys from.
I am glad to say that when I went shopping for a lawn mower I worked hard to find one that was not made in China. It was made in Canada.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
See the Chinese news reports cited below where the undercover reporter both connects the dots for you and, if you work for a living, gives you a terrifying glimpse of your future.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/the-fate-of-a-generation-of-workers-foxconn-undercover-fully-tr/
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone, with all the misery and environmental destructiveness that comes with it. Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.
The sad fact is that life is naturally miserable. Solving that problem is not easy, and the answer isn't to dumbly blame capitalism when the problem is really so much bigger.
Qxe4
... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?
I wonder how many Happy Meal Toy factory employees off themselves in a year?
Also: according to Wikipedia, Foxconn also makes "Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
...then that only makes the article even more damning, because Apple does not come off well in this report. The article also provides a terrifying glimpse of your future if you work for a living.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
This is unregulated capitalism in action. China is like the US or Britain during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Demand for manufactured product from China has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, and the Chinese have a seemingly unending supply of unskilled labor to do the work. Companies can work employees to death with no particular worries, since there are lots of people to replace those workers with and the government doesn't seem to care. Many of the worst abuses of 19th century Western labor are present today in China.
Hopefully someday the Chinese government will enact (and enforce!) the kind of health and safety regulations that put an end to this sort of thing in the Western world (for the most part), but it will take sustained pressure both from inside and outside the country to get it done. Unfortunately, the Chinese government ruthlessly puts down dissent internally, and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it. Consumer pressure could play a big role in forcing change, but most people seem too enamored with their cheap Chinese-made crap to care about the people who make it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but until the Chinese government can be persuaded to regulate its industries we'll continue to see stories of this nature (the ones that aren't suppressed, anyway).
Why the heck don't we just make more stuff in the US. I mean really!
How many Americans do you know who would really be willing to work on an assembly line? I did it once for a summer job, and it wasn't fun. Already we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork, and yardwork is way better than assembly-line stuff. It would take a serious economic downturn before people would want to go back to factories.
Qxe4
Oh jeez, Canada? That's even worse. Those poor Canucks spend their days working in -40 CELSIUS, that's like I dunno -9000 Fahrenheit, for like 12 hours a day. Oh and their days are really dark since they are so far north. Their factories are just really big igloos and most Canadians have to forage for their own food. For instance, I had to go club a few seals the other day just to feed my family, and then PETA threw blood all over my igloo. Don't get me started on the epic trek it is just to GET to work, most men my age have to wear their fathers pajamas and make it to work through blizzard or polar bear.
Restrict access to the roof? Just saying... if you can't get access to get out of the building up high, you have a hard time jumping from the window you can't get out or from the roof you can't get to.
-- Terry
The alternative to capitalism is subsistence farming for everyone,
Um, no.
You're confusing industrialism and capitalism.
Or you could go with communism, which by necessity is state organized oppression of those who disagree with how things are done.
Um, no.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism.
Steve jobs once developed a factory that was almost entirely automated, requiring a very minimum number of employees to build 20,000 computers a month. they spent alot of time and energy developing and refining the process, and it was an achievement that he was really proud of..
Except they didn't sell 20,000 Next cubes a month. Probably not even in the first year!
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/02/26/73121/index.htm
From the article "Says Jobs: ''I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.''"
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! The choice is not, nor has it ever been, between pure unregulated capitalism and Soviet-style communism. What China has now is basically a political oligarchy that controls the people with an iron fist while allowing corporations to practice almost completely unrestricted capitalism.
The Gilded Age, in which a small group of elites grew enormously rich and powerful on the backs of people who remained incredibly poor, and the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model. Since then, we've struggled to find the right level of regulation that will encourage stability and maintain a robust middle class while enabling growth. Different people have different theories on how much and what type regulation is the most effective, but the idea that unrestrained capitalism is the way to go takes an almost willful ignorance of history.
Thousands of people in this country would jump at a chance to do assembly line work.
As for the line that "we need to import immigrants to do things like yardwork", thats just the line pro-immigrant-explotation people spew. Yards were cleaned and grass was clipped before everything went to illegal and migrant labor in the 1990s. I should know, I worked yard crew in college, about the time the immigration laws stopped being enforced the illegals who would work hard and cheaper put us all out of business.
Have you ever seen films like Roger & Me?
There were Americans who were proud to work those kinds of jobs, proud to say they worked in such a factory.
The factory in question supposedly employs 400,000 workers. The annual suicide rate in China (as reported by the WHO) is 16.7 per 100,000 people. That means that in a population of randomly selected Chinese the size of the factory workforce, we should expect to see 400000 people * 16.7 suicides/(100000 people * 1 year) * 5 months / 12 months = 27.8 suicides so far this year.
Can we conclude that assembling shiny gadgets makes it less likely that one will commit suicide? It meets the standards for publication...
and the external forces with the power to stop it are too busy counting their profits to care about it
What about all those people with ipads, iphones, apple laptops and so on. Don't those things show don't care people die for their entertainment ?
Apple is just doing the bidding of their customers, nothing more. Blaming the company for doing something everyone wants it to do, regardless of the consequences, is hypocritical in the extreme.
What is the blame on apple users ?
Bollics on the unions.
Really. The US has labor laws to protect workers. Unions where useful in the past but the law protects workers.
Sorry but when my company had to pay a Union worker $200 to watch us plug in powerstrips and set up our booths at convention in Chicago any desire for Unions went out the window.
Also Toyota other manufactures have plants in the US that are none Union. The workers are well paid and seem happy.
I do not believe that Unions are part of the solution anymore.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A command economy requires a commander. It is fair to relate communism and totalitarianism.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Debt-related suicide in Taiwan has been going up for some time and it's likely to just become worse.
Just to clarify, are you talking about debt in terms of owed money, or are you talking about the debt owed to the common good for bringing more apple products into the world?
It seems to be worse on Apple's factories. See these videos.
I did. I RTFA too. You might want to do that. The videos are in chinese, and the images are disturbing, but if you read the article, it's starts to make sense. And what you just said is apparently completely made up by you. From TFA you linked to:
This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the "sweatshop" that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly. Compared to others, the facilities here are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day just to find a place of their own, to find a dream that they'll probably never realize.
This isn't a factory's inside story, but the fate of a generation of workers.
This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already, lit a fire under Foxconn's ass, because the job, besides being low pay, isn't at all bad. What I'm reading from the article is that the social culture is being blamed for these suicides, not Foxconn's treatment of their workers under Apple's direction, as much as you'd like to believe that.
The Admin and the Engineer
They killed themselves while at the factory. It does not count (if any) the number of employees who killed themselves at home, while the overall China stat o f 13 per 100,000 counts all suicides.
That's not exactly true. The entire concept of marketing is to shape what your customers want. Apple markets its products so that people do what Apple wants (become its customers).
But that doesn't really make a difference.
You can't say that a hired assassin has no culpability because he is just doing what his customer wants. Apple must also take responsibility for its actions, whatever they may be.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.
Wow, I totally overlooked that "Don't Beat Your Workers" price tag at WalMart, as well my local "No Oppression Electronics" store.
OK, look, forgive my snark and the angry frustration that follows, but the general public is not to blame for the horrific way these factories are managed. Prices are set as high as the market will bear. Companies have entire departments whose whole job is to figure out "At what price are our profits maximized?" and costs do not enter into it. No company has ever said, "Wow, we could make a profit at $10, so even though we'd make the same number of sales at $100 for our widget, we just wouldn't feel right taking the extra money..."
The blood money these companies make does not go into my pocket. I paid plenty for my goods. At the price I paid, these workers would have full, meaningful lives if only management paid them their fair share.
Ever since Tiananmen, I have tried my best to boycott China. I routinely pay extra to buy "Made in the USA" only to find that label is a lie.
I have no way of knowing how the products I buy on a day-to-day basis were manufactured. I don't buy Nike. Guess what? Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places. Oh, "Quit buying yuppie crap," you say? All the generic goods say "Made in Godawful Horror" as well.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs. I understand "Our CEO Below" has quite the sweatshop prepared for him. Given the shaky state of his liver, you'd think Steve would be a bit more worried about his soul.
Yeah, that was a cheap shot. Cheap shots are all I have left. My political vote seems to count for squat. I can't even say "Vote with my wallet" with a straight face. I'd be more than happy to join the protest, but protesting from the "free speech zone" in a chainlink box in the next town doesn't get it done. I'm not willing to hurt anybody.
So if reminding the man who is responsible for this blood of his own mortality is the only shot I have left, I'll take it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Not really, no. Would you like to point out such a period?
There is a much greater correlation between poor governance and economic ruin than there is between any single economic policy and economic ruin.
If anything, what we have learned is that extreme capitalism and communism both have the same problem: they would work only if people did not behave the way they do. In light of that, neither system is a good idea, which leaves us with needing to find something in the middle. The problem we're having right now is that people are so shy of communism that they've relabeled ANYTHING other than unrestricted capitalism as extreme, and we're tilting heavily in the other way. It is unsustainable, and if people don't figure out the real issue soon enough (that the wealthiest people in our society are often the least productive, and that the occupations currently given the highest rewards are ones which explicitly do not create anything of actual value, just bigger numbers after the dollar sign) what has happened so far will look like a drop in the bucket. Real financial reform would bring back into balance the financial reward of shuffling numbers on paper with the value of producing actual things of real value... I am unaware of any current effort in any body of any government to do so, so at least for now I'd say to expect more of the same.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Bull.
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all. Not even once. The Chinese reporters are talking about it, because there's a real problem at Foxcon that does not exist in their other factories.
Watch the video - workers are supposed to get a 10 minute break every hour, but the managers took away the privilege. No wonder they feel burned out
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>the job, besides being low pay, isn't at all bad
The video shows a 24 year old woman committing suicide. She's so tired she can barely walk. It shows workers being denied their 10 minute breaks. It shows that 5% of the workers quit every month, and a diary where a man says he feels like he's living in workplace hell, day-after-day, year-after-year. Not that bad of a job? I certainly wouldn't do it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Bully for you. I, on the other hand, will purchase my next phone hungrily
|SPARKLE| |SPARKLE|*
* Vampires sparkle now, right? Or do they still brood palely in the corner while the Cocteau Twins' tender but dark lyrics float over the crowd? I can't keep my pop culture undead types straight anymore, what with all these kids and their newfangled** ways of representing the dark lords of the night.
**newFANGled... get it? Hah! Don't forget to tip your waitress, I'll be here all week, try the type-O negative!***
***Get it? I substituted a blood type for "fish". Because this post is about vampires. And there just aren't enough re-hashed vampire jokes on the internets, probably because they all suck***
****Not a joke about sucking blood. Stale vampire jokes really do suck. The freshness of our internet LOLs is at literally at stake***** here!
****OK, I'm done now. I'm not going to explain that one, though it crushes my heart to leave it a mystery.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Subsistence farming is not really sustainable. At the scale required to sustain the earth's current population, it WOULD be more environmentally destructive. We could kill a lot of people, but that is a different problem.
Qxe4
Is that's true, then why did the Chinese government start an investigation after suicide 6? Why is the news reporter saying Foxcon has management problems, and that it's destroying lives of their young people, and should be sharing some of it ~500 million earning with the workers? Sounds like concern to me --- not the cold-hearted "oh well, that's life" you described.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Look at the U.S. It's a combination of capitalism and communism. Our government collects portions of our income and disperses it into public projects: infrastructure, aid, health care...even the occasional direct payment which, as far as I can tell, is a completely political piece of nonsense used to pander to the masses. It works fairly well, but it should apply a little more taxation on the truly rich. Not giving money to the poor directly, but not forcing the poor to pay the rich person's prices.
The government in the U.S. would do well by subsidizing more things: farming is well subsidized; education needs a whole hell of a lot more money; alternative fuel research and implementation would help drive down gas prices as well as provide more economic means of transportation. I don't want to take your iPhone, nor do I want straight-up handouts. But why not tweak the market a bit more to bring down internet prices, deploy a better network infrastructure, etc.
Communism has no government. The workers make decisions democratically about what items to make in their factory, and then make those items.
Of course such a system would never work outside of Marx's book. In the real world either there would be undirected chaos, or there would be a dictator (or oligarchs) who would take advantage of the situation and become the central leader --- which is what happened to the Soviet Union. In theory the "soviets" (groups of workers) were supposed to have a voice in their local factories and communities, similar to a democracy, but in reality it became a top-down system where the workers voices were ignored.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
the multiple market crashes and panics that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taught us that unrestrained capitalism is not a sustainable economic model.
Bullshit. What you're implying is that the natural economic business cycles are able to be avoided if we can just tweak the formula. I find it interesting that you blame "unrestrained capitalism" rather than "pure Socialism" on the market crashes. You realize Socialist countries experience these crashes as well, right?
Unions push for the laws that protect workers. Without a unified voice, the workers will be drowned out by the big voice that is the corporation.
Says one stuck in the 1980s.
You could try actually learning what Marx et all were actually about. What Russia (and China, now) are displaying are [b][u]NOT[/u][/b] anything [i]close[/i] to communism.
I'm not saying it would work. But I am saying, well, exactly what I just said.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all.
And of course, Foxconn only makes products for Apple, and nobody but Apple, right?
... and then they built the supercollider.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism
How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms. Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism applied with slightly larger communist cell sizes.
But I think what you're talking about is socialism. There is a connection between totalitarianism and socialism, in that the more socialism is prevalent in an economy, the more centralized resources are, the easier it is for someone to take control and establish a totalitarian regime. That doesn't mean you can't have extreme levels of socialism in a completely democratic system of government, it's just more difficult to maintain.
This seems to be a case where Western mores are being applied to the Chinese. Media here in the US and the West continually attempt to reinforce their guilty feelings...
Human rights are universal. My wife's Asian. She was endowed by her Creator with the same rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that I was. My children, bearing epicanthic folds around their eyes, do not somehow possess fewer natural rights than I do.
Many of those who are working in those factories got lucky: they would be working just as hard or harder farming their own land for next to nothing.
Nope, sorry, try again. My grandparents were hillbilly subsistence farmers. Give a man a plot of land and the right to keep what he grows and he'll prosper. It's sharecroppers, constantly robbed of their harvest, who suffer. Read the histories of industrialization, particularly that of Britain and India. When factories and their need for labor enter the picture, government policies are soon implemented to drive farmers off their land.
I have loved ones in Asia. I'm offended at the suggestion that they should be grateful for simply being allowed to survive.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The Foxconn plant issues are typical of plants in China, where the employees make dollars a day and work 80 hour weeks and the owner makes millions and drives a Mercedes-Benz.
This is not capitalism in action. This is greed in action.
A local Honda supplier plant here in Central Indiana that makes engines for North American Honda Civics and where the president of said plant makes less than 5x the amount of the workers is capitalism in action. Indiana automotive workers are part of capitalism in action and are not treated in the same manner as Chinese workers. Honda engines could be made in China for significantly less, but they aren't, and that is also capitalism in action.
Wait what? 400,000 people inside that factory?
China's suicide rate is 13.9 per 100,000 people, so for this given subset of the population, the suicide rate is considerably lower than average.
The Amish and the Hudderites are fairly Communist, and they seem to work out just fine. Granted, they're a much smaller group.
Literally that same factory makes stuff for Sony, MS, Nintendo, HP, Dell... It's not exclusively an Apple factory. It is easier to infer that though, with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Victorian workhouse conditions are clearly not what we want to see, but it is in no way unique to Apple.
You won't really be able to put any of the money in the bank. You would get what you'd need to survive. You wouldn't get welfare if you have any savings anyway. So you'd sit and watch TV or internet? You think you could afford cable? Tip: try the library, it's free and it's probably got internet. You wouldn't have much choice when it comes to housing either. It's actually not that big a problem, simply because such an existence isn't much of a life. You'll survive, potentially in reasonable health, but not much more.
The only way to stay sane in an insane world, is to be mad yourself...
How would you consider using taxpayer funds to bail out billionaires not government abuse?
Or governments forbidding people to get married based on color (past) or sex (present)?
Capitalism is not necessarily democratic. It can be fascist - capitalists made money under the Nazis. (No wonder it's called "filthy lucre.")
And then we have the current state - corporatism.
Throw in shareholder liability. People will then have their own self-interest at stake in making ethical investments, instead of feeding the ponzi scheme of exploding mortgages.
Damn, I haven't even watched the videos, but... A ten minute break every hour - lost privilege (how much?), 36 hour work week, paycheck shallow enough to *beg* for overtime, if it wasn't for the 5% percent attrition rate I'd guess this was fast food. Anyways, working PC support I was considering leaving and going INTO fast food just last week, as a manager I'd make the same and nobody ever comes into McDonald's asking for a flying cheeseburger and throws a goddamn fit over it. They throw fits, but they don't ask for flying fucking cheeseburgers.
Yeah, you should try 6 days, 12 hours, labor in warehousing or 40hrs at a legitimate old hillbilly saw mill.
8 out of 400,000 = .00002%
I don't know if that's high or not and I don't mean to be insensitive, but maybe they should have quit. I dunno.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
You might want to look into US history to see how the factories used to be. They were, and are, capitalistic, the conditions however have changed, mainly due to worker organization and government regulations.
I'm well aware of Stalin's atrocities and the problems with the Soviet Union. The factories and farms were owned by the an authoritarian state, certainly not by the workers.
Either way the factories in China are capitalistic, not state or worker owned. It's not about who owns the factory, but how it's run.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I talk to 'ordinary people' all the time. What opinion do you want them to have? That Obama is not an American? I can find some 'ordinary people' who feel that way. Sure, there are some people who want to work on an assembly line, just like there are some people who run off into the woods for years to get away from it all. Doesn't mean it's representative of the population.
Michael Moore has an agenda, so he will show you what he wants you to see. If you want a clearer picture, you have to go elsewhere.
Qxe4
> education needs a whole hell of a lot more money;
Nope. We spend more than Germany or Japan, and we don't get what we pay for. Adding funding to a broken system doesn't fix the system.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe Apple is not worse than other manufacturers, but why is the US condoning these sweatshops?
Why does the US not insist on more humane conditions? Why is China a "most favored" nation?
Why does the US not forbid US companies from using labor in countries that do not meet humane conditions?
If you think like that, and you truly believe that everyone is a brainless moron that just does what corporations want, then how & why would YOU be different ?
Quite frankly, if you are indeed correct, and apple users have no culpability, no control over apple, then you need to be locked up. Simply because of what you imply you'd do if you ever heard the "kill the poor" single.
Besides, if what you say were true, why would apple bother to actually build working devices ? If marketing has 1% the power you say it has, surely it wouldn't necessitate such hard work.
Apple users deserve at least a 50% share of the blame, especially since they're perfectly well aware of the way these devices are made.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that fast food workers are not treated this well at all. I worked at McDonald's, and we got one 30 minute break no matter how many hours we worked.
Le français vous intéresse?
They are only able to operate in such a way because they have the necessary trappings of government - things like defense - taken care of for them.
It only really works if you can do it in isolation, which is why communes tend to be out in the middle of nowhere. It also only works in small enough numbers that pure democracy works, and even then they invariably have natural leaders - like the pastor and deacons of the Amish church.
Pure Communism is pretty much impossible.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
More per child. Mostly, it gets wasted on bureaucrats who never see the inside of a classroom.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of our school funding situation here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."