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Explosion At Foxconn Factory Kills 2, Injures 16
arielCo writes "There are several reports in the news about an explosion in a Foxconn factory in Chengdu that manufactures the iPad 2, killing two workers and injuring another 16. 'The Chengdu Municipal government said the explosion occurred in Foxconn's "polishing plant" at around 7 p.m. Experts say it is likely a cleaning stage at the end of the production process after devices are assembled.' There's a short amateur video of the ensuing fire, taken during the evacuation. Apple said they are working with Foxconn to investigate."
Is this what happens when you make everyone sign no suicide contracts?
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Somehow I doubt that this was an accident.
Even the Foxconn buildings are trying to commit suicide now.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I've just ordered an iPad. I hope I don't get one that has been damaged by the explosion.
... the rapture.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
I suppose, if Apple is that much of a religion to Apple fans, then does that make these lost plant workers martyrs?
... the rest were fired for leaving their posts.
This probably wouldn't happen in the western world because we have some expectation of safety and working conditions. In a ideal world, we'd be manufacturing this sort of thing at home. Any form of economic prosperity in one area is balanced by a social or economic cost in another.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
We demand that our toys be delivered quickly and at the lowest possible cost. We are not willing to pay a fair price for a product built by happy people earning a decent wage. You can blame Apple, Microsoft, Google or whichever company you choose but the blame rests squarely on our shoulders. Flame suit on.
The worst thing about this story it that it would probably be unnoticed if it happened at any other factory in china. But now it's Foxconn and iPad 2 so now it's interesting.
I think the interest in publishing these stories stems from the contrast between the death and hardship suffered on the workers' side, as opposed to the blatant enjoyment and consumerism of using non-essential things like iPads, portraying a sort of class gap intending to elicit feelings of guilt. I have a rooted Android tablet (nook color); therefore I am entitled to feel good, twice!
Let's go back to the Sinclair model: we assemble our own gizmos. Really, it's more fun than unboxing, and it gives an opportunity for the geeks to interact with people who can't assemble the things by themselves.
but dead-on funny satire
dude that happened like last year, more than 20 people got killed
enjoy! right now all they have is like the stuff you could buy at Dollar Tree , but i think its only a matter of time.
In Capitalist West, high product prices kill you!
... Communism - helping America into the New Digital World
In Communist China nothing kills you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Over a billion people in China so plenty more of them - they're expendable.
Jobs should keep some of the injured on life support so he has a supply of organs just in case - he owes it to us shareholders.
I'm just saying if people want to kill themselves and they sign contracts that prevent their families from collecting benefits if they do they may cause "accidents" so their families can still benefit.
I don't see how any fucktard can interpret that as trolling.
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Wait, didn't you mean "EXPLODEY at APPLE factory that only builds APPLE stuff and APPLE totally controls and really, really does not build stuff for anyone else and we're totally not just tying it to APPLE for page hits!"
Foxxcom was rapidly dismantled to make way for glorious new tractor factory.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Unlike here in the west(US/Cdn/Europe/etc), smoking is still a pretty common thing in asian countries. And so is smoking on the job unless you work in an office building. So it really wouldn't surprise me a single bit.
Om, nomnomnom...
Why as soon as a Foxconn story breaks out the Apple bashing start? I don't care for the company, but they seem to be the only actually trying to do something about it when these articles hit the news, while you never hear a thing from the executives of all the other companies who manufacture their product there.
If smoking on the job is common and allowed at the factory it should be set up so that a smoking employee doesn't cause an explosion.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
especially with all the complains of non-Apple tablets being overpriced compared to the iPad--- when being cheaper then Apple is considered to be the primary reason of buying a non-Apple tablet in the first place.
As it is, all the non-iPad competitors are having a touch time matching Apple's price & feature set as it is.. So an Android tablet entirely made in the U.S.A.? It would probably cost something like $5000.
So the BP oil platform explosion didn't happen and killed nobody. It must be a conspiracy theory by the anti-Western propagandists. Thank you for telling us about that.
China doesn't exactly have a glowing reputation for safety standards. And what safety standards exist can be 'greased away' by paying the proper people.
Om, nomnomnom...
economics is not a zero sum game, where someone must lose so that someone else must win. economics is a more-for-everyone game. the chinese are enjoying more prosperity than they had before. you are assuming if they weren't manufacturing iPads their life would be better. compared to the usa, indeed, their life is worse, right now. but it would be even more worse without this plant
the chinese are where the usa and great britain were in the 1800s. and they are already fighting for their rights, like workers in the west had to to enjoy protections:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09labor.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire
the chinese will eventually become just as prosperous as the usa, eventually, if not surpassing the usa, as soon as workers start fighting for their rights. but you don't get something by not fighting for it in this world
and you don't become economically prosperous by doing nothing. and you certainly don't get to complain about not having something that someone else has because you are doing nothing while the prosperous are doing something that made them prosperous. the chinese know that, why don't you?
the end game of globalization is prosperity for everyone. of course that's not painless. but stopping globalization perpetuates inequalities, it doesn't solve them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People died. It's not funny,
Its got a lot to do with the culture and technical savvy of the population. We're still trying to keep immigrants from firing up a barbecue indoors for heat during the winter. Or not run generators in closed garages.
Have gnu, will travel.
Who gives a darn? How many baby iPads were damaged? Will they survive? How are they doing and what are their prospects for recovery?
Preliminary reports from m.i.c. gadget (an off-shore China news site, which is not subject to China goverment. censorship) say that the explosion occurred in a part of the assembly line, where the workers use a flammable dust to polish iPad screens. It is believed that a worker, who was smoking a cigarette in a prohibited area, caused the explosion. Access to the building is limited right now until the risk of secondary explosions can be minimized.
See this local article at fortune.com
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/21/inside-the-apple-ipad-factory/
Pretty obvious what happaned. Safety standards for the operating assembly line will need to be reviewed and enforced. As for the impact on iPad2 output remains to be seen, but preliminary reports at the Apple store speculate that wait times for iPad2 may go up 1-2 weeks. Since most of the iPad2 manufacturing was based in Chengdu, one will have to see what subsequent effect this explosion will have on manufacturing capacity.
Workplace deaths happen in every country. Over three year period one large steelworks I worked in lost four people to forklifts, three to carbon monoxide and two to a steam explosion in a great big container full of molten steel and scrap. Bad as that is the construction and mining industries have much higher death tolls.
(the joke is in the title) ...but it makes one wonder. Sure they had to sign a "I will not kill myself" pledge.....but they never signed a "I will not cause an industrial accident so my family can collect the insurance" pledge.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
I just wasted my last modpoint or I'd mod you troll. The vast majority of suicides are done in a manner than doesn't endanger anyone else. Not to mention that the general description of the accident makes it sound like it would be a horribly silly way to attempt suicide. And the fact you are bringing up anti-suicide pacts indicates some irrational spite against Apple (or simply gross ignorance about suicide, this incident, and life in general) such that you would earn a troll mod and it wouldn't be the fault of the moderator being a fucktard...
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A few months ago there was a widely read story here (in China) that I saw poke its head above the horizon in the west as well about Chinese manufacturers complaining about Apple's requirements on them relating to iPad 2 manufacturing and worker safety. Please understand that I see people everyday at the market or (for example today at Aushan, a hypermarket) just on the street who are suffering from work related disabling injuries from burns to loss of limbs. The worker laws here are mostly non-existent, so when a manufacturer complains then it means something is bad. Why? the general rule here is that a human life in a factory is worth about 10,000 RMB (divide by @6.6 to get equivalent dollars, or @9.0 for Euros). So a major factory explosion does cost the factory something and that is what they wanted to avoid: death and disability.
They failed.
Apple, I'm sure, is very distraught about this.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
the fact you are bringing up anti-suicide pacts indicates some irrational spite against Apple
Or it could be because it was recently covered on slashdot.
It sounds to me like you might have some sort of irrational love for Apple, any time anyone says anything that isn't positive about Apple (this includes neutral statements like my own) the Apple image mod bunch comes out in droves and protects the image of their beloved religious icons. Your statement pretty much backs up my statement. Besides, plenty of people moded me troll already, just click on the my score.
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I know it was brought up. If you were going for funny, then you missed and deserved troll. If you weren't going for funny, then you were pedantic, condescending, and, well, incorrect. There is no justification you gave, or could give, that would free you from deserving the troll mod.
Learn to love Alaska
I am a proud troll, I've made the front page of the art of trolling multiple times. In this case I am not trolling and seriously think anti-suicide contracts creating an environment where "accidents" happen is a serious thing to consider, even if this case isn't one of those.
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Has there ever been a case of an anti-suicide contract resulting in someone committing mass murder? If not, then you are a troll. If so, then there would at least be an argument that you aren't a troll, but you'd have to prove at least one incident. I'd start with airplane crashes. My understanding is that there was a finding once that a commercial pilot committed suicide, but that the government lied to cover it up to prevent people from thinking that pilots could be suicidal (and all the implications of that). But then, that wasn't a suicide contract, unless you consider regular life insurance policies (many of which not paying on suicide) to be an anti-suicide pact, and even then I have no idea if there was life insurance involved.
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Has there ever been a case of an anti-suicide contract resulting in someone committing mass murder?
Are you telling me something can't happen unless it's already happened before?
I'm going to argue anti-suicide contracts, at least in the form they were given to workers at this factory are quite rare, however I will go with the insurance example you have given. People have committed suicide in ways to cover it up for family/insurance purposes. There was a case of a guy here in Houston that was proven to have intentionally flattened his own tire with a pocket knife before jumping out in front of traffic to commit suicide so his wife would still benefit. They proved the hole in the tire matched the shape of the knife. Had that incident, or one similar to it, accidentally caused the death of another then it would have happened before. There's been lots of cases similar to his, it's just one that comes to mind.
I would argue anyone who goes apeshit with a knife, sword, or gun in public killing as many people as they can until someone else takes them out effectively committed suicide by cop.
I'm going to argue that you are a troll by attempting to engage me in an argument to prove my point by giving a past example without leaving any room to accept a first case scenario. I'm fairly certain such a thing has happened before, but I have a full time job, two part time jobs (in an attempt to become self employed), and a family. I'm not going to devote many, many hours browsing case files across all 50 states and however many countries I decide to dig through until I find a case that matches the requirements you've taken it upon yourself to set in order for me to win the argument you appear to have established a debate win/lose guideline for. If you would like to dig through historic cases I'll give you a hint, it was generally "against the rules" or frowned upon for those who were oppressed/enslaved to kill themselves, I'm sure you can find a couple of cases related to river boat boilers or cotton gins where suicide and murder went together. That's just historic US slavery, this sort of thing happened everywhere throughout history, just be a little flexible on your interpretations.
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Are you telling me something can't happen unless it's already happened before?
I'm telling you that you fail at risk management. You might as well have asked whether they tested the site for meteor rock because the insects on the other side of the galaxy just sent a rock hurling into Buenos Aires, I mean Foxconn.
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