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Riot Breaks Out At Foxconn
Presto Vivace writes with news (as reported by Engadget) of a riot at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant, reportedly over guards beating up a worker, and writes "Something is going on at Foxconn. Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?" Reports of the riot are also at Reuters, TUAW, and CNBC, to name a few.
I was trying to find the plant in question on IOS Maps, but I don't see it.
The code here must suck. No matter what OS or browser I use there is always some kind of rendering issues. I don't get that from other sites.
They rioted because they didn't get the free iPhone 5s they were promised.
Yes, and slashdot readers are a great source of news from Chinese sweatshop plants because demographics are, like, so close.
CNN has no story on this.
It goes against their "wanking off to apple" policy.
"Something is going on at Foxconn. Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?"
This is China. There won't be any news.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Who cares? I'm sitting in a coffee shop sipping on fairtrade coffee on blogging on my retina macbook pro about Obama and talking on my new iphone 5.
Scumbag western liberals: claims to support the working class, gladly buys products from a communist dictatorship with an abysmal human rights record
This seems related to similar problems in China with Apple manufacture - huge demand. Foxcon rolling out a lot of Windows 8 smartphone devices from there maybe. Qualcomm has all their chips fabbed there so they not, and every Windows 8 smartphone runs on a qualcomm chip so...demand?
BTW, it's Taiwan guys. They're still relatively democratic, co the news sources are probably ok.
Makes me wonder how much an iPhone would cost to manufacture in the U.S. I wonder how automated the production line could be.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Is another man's fight.
Western countries starting buying products made there?
Maybe the Western countries aren't the problem. Maybe China is the problem.
No one really cares what's happening at foxcon. This is not news or of importance.
YIPPEEEEEE!
almost all the money they make is from sales of hardware. It is their entire business model.
The Chinese government reports that there was no riot and all Foxconn employees are happy, enjoying their productive lives in a workers' paradise.
There !! All fixed now !! Carry on !!
AC just removed the Slashdot RSS Feed from his browser. Bu Bye.
Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?
I am sure, Foxconn, Apple, CIA, Chinese Communist Party and Dalai Lama have plenty to say about those things. Or, by "good" you mean something that is not pure spin? Then no.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Key points:
Since when? ;-)
But I thought Apple told us they made it all right and everything is good at Foxconn. We can believe what Apple tells us, can't we?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
union labor.
YES! Go China! Riot and take down Apple! PC FOREVER! 3
Sounds like old days in USA where workers faced the same work conditions.
They need real workers rights fast or soon the workers may just burn the factory down.
Chairman Yang would approve.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
No, not hemp; it's rainbows shat out by unicorns and then sun-dried.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Drat! If only there was someone on the scene with a smartphone with a really good camera and fast data connection!
will they be thrown into the iCube?
...when people realized that there might be shortages of iPhone 5's as a result of the Foxconn riot.
The guys at wehateapple.com are saying it's the worst thing in history and that Apple will finally get what's coming to them for all teh evils. But the guys at appleisgreat.com are saying it's no big deal and stuff like this happens all the time.
Meanwhile, the guys at mindyourownbusiness.com don't have a report about it at all, but they do have some good reports that seem relevant to my own life. At mindsomeoneelsesbusiness.com, they're extremely interested in whether African tribes that make their own beer are at a greater risk for gout from too much yeast and they think it's the fault of the US government for some reason.
At newsfornerds.com, they're just trolling for clicks, so they put up a story with no information to get Apple haters and Apple fanboys sniping at each other. Later, they'll be posting stories about evolution, Mitt Romney's failure to announce any female cabinet members, an ask newsfornerds.com question about whether Dragon Age 3 will be more heterosexual-friendly than Dragon Age 2, and a statement from RMS about how the government should stop paying school teachers because they should be sharing their knowledge for free.
"a fight among workers from different production lines,"
From the local news "" Translation: Foxconn security started the fight, which triggered riots in Shandong and Henan.
How could this become "a fight among workers" in international news I wondered.
The only thing international news coverage is correctly accounted for is that the root cause is still a mystery, but we would imagine it should be more along the line of suppression under high working pressure.
no, no they do not
the chineese factories rely on on near slave labor, the US makers can do nearly the same cost per unit with high levels of automation
robots do no rebel, no matter what jizztastic si-fi fan fict you read, and you dont have to stay up till 3 am to talk to some low level dumbass who speaks 3 words of english cause your getting screwed over
Except there was no progress in industrial automation since cheap workers became available. Good luck translating iPhone assembly procedure into GE/Fanuc G-code.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If the Chinese aren't careful, they're going to have a communist revolution on their hands.
Sorry, I might have trotted that one out before; but it has fit so perfectly the past decade or so.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!
and why not? you can take a funcionally illiterate farmer into a g-code processor in a day and make them feel good about it
What about all the other companies that buy from Foxconn?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
If the US decides to stop giving China(and like countries to prevent shifts to other non-US countries) the kid gloves treatment, one could make it more profitable in the US by default - with a lot less impact than you think.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Those countries won't look inviting when trade policy has the choices being a non-front-company in the US(and not in a RTW state) or the same in the higher-cost EU. The US just needs someone willing to play hardball.
If they want to manufacture closer to their customers in the US, then by all means make it effectively impossible to reward a despotic Third World country.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Quoted from Terry Gou
China is as despotic as any of the US's declared enemies and their government shows it.
That country will not get out of that era as long as businesses want a large & pliant pool of workers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
A reputable editor would have mentioned that the "riot" broke out in a private dormitory, not that it matters on /.
You do realize the first image on that site (north america labeled as Australia) is a total fabrication, right? I mean if you're just going to outright lie about Apple Map problems people are really going to think you are crying wolf.
If you think Google is going to save you, you might want to think again. It can't even find an Arby's when you need it, much less this other stuff:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/11/05/21st-century-war-google-maps-error-leads-to-nicaraguan-invasion/
http://www.maproomblog.com/2010/09/google_maps_errors_and_disappearing_cities.php
http://www.maproomblog.com/2010/06/more_fun_with_google_maps_errors.php
http://www.maproomblog.com/2010/05/saint-pierre_and_miquelon_are_apparently_underwater.php
http://www.maproomblog.com/2010/06/more_fun_with_google_maps_errors.php
http://www.maproomblog.com/2010/05/saint-pierre_and_miquelon_are_apparently_underwater.php
http://www.firegang.com/google-maps-showing-errors
http://www.martijnbeijk.com/google-maps-errors-caused-by-teleatlas
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjdelc/92865795
http://www.nodalbits.com/bits/google-maps-new-changes-new-errors
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2. Communism and Dictatorship are mutually exclusive (at least in theory).
In implementation, they end up one and the same. See the USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, and post-WWII China.
3. China doesn't have the best human rights record, but they don't exactly have anywhere near the worst one either. The US isn't any saint either:
* The US set up Guantanamo Bay to purposely get around constitutionally guaranteed rights when they were inconvenient.
I see your GITMO and raise you one Tiananmen Square Massacre. In order to put down the event, the CPC brought in military from the countryside to guarantee enforcement of orders. In addition, involvement meant that you would be completely disappeared.
With GITMO and other places, you're not completely removed from existence as deeply as performed in China. Never mind that GITMO treats its detainees quite well compared to China's equivalent - to the point where detained Uighurs are not sent home to China.
In addition, the United States does not have closed regions like Tibet that restrict foreigners from entry.
* The white people who settled in the US basically killed all of the existing red people.
Then you might explain the flood of Han Chinese in Tibet - the same region that has excluded foreigners for purely political reasons.
In addition, the monks get the same treatment if not worse by CPC policies(as implemented, not as written).
* Privacy as a right went out the window a while ago with all the warrant-less wiretaps, GPS vehicle tracking, etc.
* From my understanding, anyone can be detained without trial or attorney, as long as they are classified as a "terrorist".
It takes a LOT more effort to fall foul of those provisions in the US. As for China, you can just tell a bad joke about a government official and you are gone. Even high-up officials like Bo Xilai are not immune to such provisions - even if their family has favor.
In China, there would be no equivalent to the Tea Party or Breitbart that survives in the open.
* The "Child labor" that bleeding hearts in the US complain about was considered normal and routine in the US not all that long ago, and is still considered
normal and even desired in many countries overseas.
Those practices refer to a society that willfully forsakes freedom for all. 50 years will pass and China will still be as despotic towards its workers in deference to its little princes that run their factories like fiefdoms.
The closest I know is some domestic model Sony Vaio models (the most expensive ones) are supposedly 100% "made in Japan" - even those will probably have at least some parts from Taiwan, Korea, etc.
With IBM, some machines do have an order code for a US-friendly setup. That is, the machine will be made from parts that would pass muster with the DoD as being from the US and close allies with the US - China not being one of them. At one time, this also included US assembly of laptops for government contracts but is primarily for their midrange machines.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The biggest problem is that at this level of assembly you have to account for variations in parts. Just try to use a robot to snap a clamshell. A human will apply the right amount of force where it is needed, and he will immediately see if something goes wrong. The vast majority of consumer electronics is not designed for easy assembly; they are designed for low cost, and as result half of the assembly is on glue, another half is snaps, and yet another half is all sorts of tiny special screws. You have to keep fragile flex connectors plugged correctly, you have to check that no wires are sticking out, you have to make sure that all 17 pieces of the puzzle are in before you put the last one on top.
Robots are very good with pick and place because these operations require minimal feedback. Once your activity starts depending on the feedback the first thing you need to develop is fingers with a good number of pressure sensors and with fine motors that can drive those fingers just like human hands do. Those robots will cost you more than the peanuts that a Chinese worker costs you today. There are only a few experimental fingers that are getting close to what is needed.
It's certainly possible to design for robotic FA&T, just as through hole PCBs were replaced with surface mounted parts. However this will impact the end product. It will be hard to make enclosures that look like solid pieces of material, with no seams or with no obvious means to open and close them. You would have to give up on technologies that only humans can do efficiently (like mating of small connectors.) You would want the assembly to consist of very few basic moves, with blind mates for all parts and with easy means to check that the mating is complete.
I don't want to sound like automation of the final assembly is impossible. I only want to mention that it is not a simple replacement of the worker with a robot.
On top of that, imagine that 1000 factory owners own all factories in the country and they need no workers. Owners still want money to pay for the raw materials, for the investments into robots, and for their wear and replacement, and for taxes, and for their own profits. Who is going to come up with the money to buy their goods if hardly anyone in the whole country is employed? The current thinking centers around the government becoming the center of ownership of robotic factories and of distribution of their products. IMO, this only changes one boss for another boss; even worse, you can never leave the new boss.
Is his job a joke? Is his love-life DOA?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Major customers of Foxconn currently include:
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)[40]
Amazon.com (United States)[7]
Apple Inc. (United States)[41]
Cisco (United States)[42]
Dell (United States)[43]
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[44]
Intel (United States)[45]
Microsoft (United States)[9]
Motorola Mobility (United States)[43]
Nintendo (Japan)[46]
Nokia (Finland)[41]
Sony (Japan)[8]
Toshiba (Japan) [47]
Vizio (United States)[48]
You don't care about these workers, you are only bothered with your Apple hate so that you even ignore the facts. Only on slashdot this can be modded up. Sickening !
And that's where a Lemote Yeedong running gNewSense comes in! I wonder whether emacs comes in Cantonese?
...Because clearly the brawl was between employees working on Samsung phones, and employees working on Apple devices.
Fanboyism just got real, yo!
I think the answer is you could pretty well 100% automate phone assembly and packing if you had the right design. The downside would be that repairability might be low (it's easier to dispense glue than insert screws) and the design might be more constrained. The cost of the equipment would vary according to the complexity of the final assembly and the expected volumes, but we are probably talking in the 1-10 million dollar range for an assembly system. Re-tooling is the expensive part. Ideally you want to decide on a form factor and stick to it until the tooling wore out, which is the most economical approach. But the basics of an assembly machine - pick and place, automatic screwdrivers, robot arms- would stay pretty constant.
Which is cheaper? The short answer is that in the long run automatic assembly will be cheaper again, it is just a question of when. Every Chinese riot brings that day a little closer.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The ability to take small alterations to an automated manufacturing process quickly has been a focus of research since the 80s. I've been out of for a while (in fact since I got out of manufacturing when my then company decided that they needed a plant in China so the VPs could boast about it) and I wonder if eyes have been taken off the ball. But with the latest generations of small manufacturing robots, I suspect the example you gave no longer holds. A lot of the expense in trivial engineering changes is documentation required for the human activities around the change. CAD to machine workflow automation should take care of that.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The robotic automated control systems are typically shit, but that doesn't mean it's not doable, it just means that mechanical and electrical engineers should not write robotic control systems, they should leave it to software engineers. In other words, it's the same problem that the Diamond Viper video cards had back in the day when they let EE's write the video BIOS, instead of hiring a software engineer to do it.
I recently spent some quality time programming a Toshiba CA10-M00 controller interfaced robot for the purposes of doing testing on capacitive touch devices, such as trackpads, and the programming interface at the lowest level was, to put it bluntly, incredibly badly designed. The one saving grace was "palletizing" mode, and all that let you do was do things like fill columns in a biological sample tray while moving the pallet on which it was situated over one row at a time, and then repeating the previous instruction.
In any case, the controller was pretty terrible, very limited in capability, and only capable of controlling 4 degrees of freedom without being ganged to another controller for the next 4 degrees of freedom; even then; you'd want to install optional interface modules to use for step-signalling between the controllers, rather than ganging them, based on the limited number of steps available under the control of a single controller, and the inability to do anything remotely useful in only 1000 steps (with 4 degrees of freedom, 1000 steps was pushing rationality as it was).
As delivered, the hardware didn't actually function (had to send it back once to have a servo replaced), and when driven from other than the EEPROM, the command language is insufficiently rich to perform motion on more than a single axis at a time (which basically meant writing a program to write a program, rather than controlling it directly). Additionally, the plat was oriented incorrectly, and there were no registration marks on any of the manual adjustments, and the robot was not set up to be capable of non-2-d self interference (read: if incorrectly programmed, it could beat itself to death).
To top all this joy off, they very much expected you to use a "teaching pendant" to do a single static program, and I had to reverse engineer how to talk to the thing with a documented list of serial functions, with no documentation of order or the requirements for baseline settings.
All in all, to get a suite of repeatable test motions that could be applied to multiple devices with different form-factors required some fairly clever hackery. What I ended up with was a library of code that could be used to write a program that could program the robot. The most interesting of those are not in the public repository, but the rest of the code is here: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/touchbot.git;a=tree
The bottom line is that by using meta-programming, instead of using the default crap interface you get by applying teaching-pendant programming, it'd be pretty trivial to change over the location of a screw, or even radically alter the layout.
And just practically speaking, fetching a screw is a subroutine, putting in a screw is a subroutine, and where to put the screw in is a point in the X,Y,Z,R point table, if you wrote your code correctly in the first place, which you'd be unlikely to do if using the teaching pendant, but which was still technically possible using one. Which'd mean just rewriting the point table after issuing a region erase command to the robot controller over an RS232C link, after jamming the robot into a receptive mode with 5 other command would move the screw.
But doing the metaprogramming approach, it'd also be possible to radically alter the robot behaviour pretty trivially and be up and running on the real assembly line once you got your test line working correctly to the new model.
Which is to say, the argument that you can't as trivially recon
You do realize that image is a fabrication, right? On the iPad currently maps correctly labels the countries.
How easily are the Apple Haters fooled...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Major customers of Foxconn currently include:
You don't care about these workers, you are only bothered with your Apple hate so that you even ignore the facts. Only on slashdot this can be modded up. Sickening !
What is sickening!! you have posted a list of companies that use these workers without bothering with a good list like Samsung have manufacturing plants in America, and Goggle famously left China for ethical reasons and introduced a new Nexus product made in America. I think its time you stopped queuing for the iPhone 5 and wend and bought a Samsung Galaxy III.
China Labor Watch reports worker abuse, underage employment at Samsung factories
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3293674/china-labor-watch-samsung-labor-abuse-underage-employment
So how is that Nexus III going for you ?
You really claim that these days you can buy stuff that doesn't has one or mulitple components not manufactered in China ?
Mmm... and who is the No 2 manufacturer for Apple, Acer, Dell, Toshiba, HP, Sony and Microsoft ?
Capable of scaling up to 200% when the need arises.
Just in case -- a factory burns down or something; riots break out in a country, a government gets nasty, or the place gets hit by an earthquake?
It's obvious, he stood up to the oppression there and their hatred pitted the workers against each other.
You really claim that these days you can buy stuff that doesn't has one or mulitple components not manufactered in China ?
Absolutely not!! Do I buy from the companies that are producing hardware in companies where worker rights are protected like America like Intel; Samsung and companies trying to move manufacturing to countries protected by workers rights like Google with the Nexus Q. Do I Boycott companies like Apple that charge a premium and laugh at the prospect of producing hardware in places where workers rights are protected...to the president no less. Its not complicated to be an ethical consumer...give money to companies that act ethically don't give money to those that don't. ....have a biscuit!!!!
Sounds like the good ole US of A - Ludlow Massacre
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDd64suDz1A&feature=fvsr
Either real worker rights, or they need to find somewhere else their own "China", with 30+ billion population, that will provide slavery manufacturing services for 1+ billion of Chinese people.
839*929
That single word right there, shows the horror in all its detail.
A company needs no *guards* against its workers. A factory needs no *guards* against its workers.
A slave labor prison does.
Yep, SuperKendall, BasilBrush, and a few others are there to try to eliminate adverse talk about Apple Corp.
It's odd that YOU speak of elimination, when I have never down-modded an anti-Apple post.
Instead what I do is constructive; I provide the needed counterpoint. For that, I am in fact silenced (in this case) by people that agree with you, not me. I am the one being censored because you hate what I have to say.
I don't know why, but I assume they work for them.
Should we all then assume you work for Google? I guess so, according to you it is the only answer.
The why for myself is plain; I hate misrepresentation. I dislike people being misled, and seek to correct such things where found, for any topic - not just Apple.
I can't really see why they'd die in a ditch defending Apple...
I would not lay my life out for any company. But I will seek to help PEOPLE, not companies, where I can.
You seem to be the person all about companies, specifically stopping at nothing to try and take Apple down a notch without regard to who you mislead to do so. As long as it hurts your despised Apple, all is fair game.
I guess like you said we should presume you are a Google shill. Is it really worth it for you, getting money to try and mislead people? That's something I never could understand.
I'll let you have the last post because it's exactly at this point paid Apple Haters such as yourself go off on rambling tirades of no interest to anyone, certainly not myself; I understand you probably have some kind of quota to meet though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's because while all those companies are guilty on this account, and some are guilty on many accounts, Apple (and Microsoft) are guilty on *all* accounts.
They are the multiple-time convicted mass-murderer / mass-rapist criminals of the IT business world.
If they were people (@Neocons: They are not!) they would be that guy with the many tattoos, the psycho look, and more mutilated bodies in his basement than any of the famous mass-murderer/-rapists. And on top of that, he would be the guy who manages to get a constant free pass from the judges, because they are in his pockets.
You'd not even *think* about going anywhere near that guy!
Buuut, because it's a company... Aaand because in the US, restricting the crimes of companies with *any laws whatsoever* is apparently considered "eevil guvnment destroyin’ teh FREE_MARKET_FUCK_YEAH!", this is somehow totally awww-right
It is exactly the core of what is wrong with this disgusting mutation of capitalism. (Same as what North Korea is, is what's wrong with that disgusting mutation of communism.)
Guards are "workers" too by many definitions. A fight among workers can easily be spin from "clash between guards and assembly workers."
Lots of spin going on here. That a simple fight can turn into a riot? With cars turned over? Doubting it. Most such fights are simply watched by people as a form of entertainment. But when the dispute is something close to the observers' hearts (such as working conditions and abuses) others joining in and working together is natural.
Why arent more linux people promoting OSM.
Why isnt Ubuntu using it in its desktop maps app?
Why isnt slashdot using links to OSM maps when ever a map is needed.
The fact that you can download all 9GIG and have a 100% local maps kicks but over all maps, and its OSS for gods sake.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The workers rioted trying to reduce the 25 hour work day to 24 hours.
Perhaps you should try the real CNN, CNNi, the international version, or CNNAsia.
Who wants to hear about mitromney or american crap all day.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I know its not a prison camp, but it is an area where you can get shot at for walking.
Plus if there are aliens there, they are being treated badly.
Plus if you havent heard there are lots of national parks where entry is strictly enforced as NO ENTRY.
http://www.infowars.com/house-gop-backs-homeland-security-powers-for-natl-parks-in-border-zone/
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yeah, they usually end with a bullet going through the disputer's brain.
Now shut up and get back to work. Clean up the blood and guts on your own time.
"China has the largest piles of rare earth minerals"
Such a bunch of nonsense. Rare Earths are everywhere. Have a look here. Until 1983 or so, the biggest producer was USA. China was insignificant. Production moved to China because... it was cheaper. For that reason, USA mines closed shop.
With the price rise, there are efforts underway to re-open old USA sites.
english cause your
Ooh, this is that "irony" thing everyone's always talking about, isn't it?
Here's what really blows me away about Foxconn, China and our willingness to have them produce our electronics. They could easily open Foxconn stores and sell rebranded iPhone's for pennies on the dollar and absolutely destroy Apple. China would support them and any labor contracts they would lose from the US would easily be made up by the increase in demand for the new FoxFone. Do you think the US, in its weakened economic state, totally dependent on cheap Chinese labor would start a trade war over that? I don't.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-23/apples-foxconn-china-plant-damaged-riots-resume
Stick it to apple!
Actually, I have pushed Apple for some time. The reason is that they have a decent OS. In fact, my 75 y.o dad switched my 70 y.o mother from Windows to Apple based on what I was suggesting. Why? Because once he does die, he needs to leave my mother in a decent situation.
My post is about the issue here is that Apple likes to portrait themselves as a different company. They are not. That is my point. And you need to re-read what I wrote. if you noticed, I DID in fact list off other companies that I knew used foxconn. Apple still sux as bad as the rest. Simple as that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oddly, I was just researching news on Digitimes that Apple was moving away from Taiwan-Shenzhen touch screen production, moving the work to Japan and Korea. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2012/09/revolution-number-nine-apple-google.html Stay tuned for opinions to swing on axis.
Gently reply
I don't think it's so simple as to say that Samsung is ethical and Apple isn't. Both do stuff that is and isn't ethical. It may well be reasonable however to say that Samsung is more ethical than Apple. I suspect it's true since Samsung has been moving in this direction and Apple has been moving in that direction (physically, I mean!) but I don't have omniscience either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It usually goes something like this. The police order the slaves back to work and if they don't then the shooting starts.
Their Jails.
RIM have stopped innovating.
GP is probably referring to the way US factories were like in, say, 1903 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, before OSHA and the FDA existed. Sinclair specifically mentions in the book an incident he observed where a guy fell into a vat of beef waiting to be ground up and ended up becoming part of people's "ground beef". The public was outraged about this, not because somebody had died in the factory but because of the contamination of their food.
I am officially gone from
I wonder why in many examples of capitalism, all markets are free except labor. If a nation is truly based on capitalist ideas, why not have a market for labor. In this case workers could band together and sell their labor to the highest bidder. For some reason, this is never considered a part of capitalism, which I believe is just a convenient inconsistency by the rich.
Because China does not have a free labor market, it is not a shining example of capitalism. It is a shining example of the powerful taking advantage, which happens everywhere.
You're not aware of the history of labor in this country. Our history has been whitewashed of what workers went through to get that 40 hour week and overtime pay Americans seem to think was decreed by God in the Constitution. I've seen some great documentaries on labor struggles in this country; e.g getting your head bashed in by Pinkertons for a raise. One of the coolest I saw was about the *real* rednecks; West Virginia miners who wore scarves during their labor protests. Of course, it has a whole new connotation derived from insults against these poor, uneducated rural folk.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Motherboard has been following Foxconn for a while and they have a new report out today, which talks about the OTHER riots breaking out in China over the last 24 hours. But they have a whole cache of material pertaining to Foxconn over the past couple of years. I would also look to BetaBeat's story today and The Verge.
The U.S.A. is IN FACT a republic. The notion that you disagree with the outcome of a scenario does not change the nature of the scenario.
mechanical and electrical engineers should not write robotic control systems, they should leave it to software engineers
You mean the guys who created Vista?
Look, its China, there was a big old brawl.
We don't care why, or whose "human rights" were affected. If we cared, we'd be embargoing or something; but they don't have oil we can easily gank.
So, lets get down to the only thing we really do care about. This is China, there was a big fight.
I want movies, and I want ninja kung-fu action. Chop chop!!!
What's wrong with mods today!!!!???? The modding privilege granting algorithms really need tweaking, or slashdot will go down like the comments at Yahoo.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
...Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, GE, etc.
? They do not present themselves as 'caring' companies. Apple does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Some more information on
this page
Apparently 10 deaths.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/24/the-foxconn-iphone-riot-was-just-one-of-hundreds-in-china-today While it might have been an intramural fight between the Foxconn employees in this case, this is the mere tip of a giant Chinese iceberg. Sure, Foxconn builds electronics as cheaply as it can for whomever wants to cut a deal with them... That's been part of the company's mission statement since it was founded, but should this stop people like Anthony Kosner at Forbes from approaching or musing on the idea that the heightened demand for a product like iPhone has just gotta be killing people in China for the sake of consumer contempt over issues like the phone being too lightweight. Ugh, the absurdity. I wonder if we can find out how many iPhone units have been returned because the customer 'didn't like it enough.'
The most common tactic to cleanse unionbusting is to make it look like a legally clean action. Whether it is to find a policy violation or another termination condition that is beyond the NLRB laws, no unionbusting activity is performed in the open. It is always hidden behind another offense, especially when they were terminated upon making their union status known.
Sounds like you'd have fit in with the CCC folks in the massacres of late 1890's-1900's Colorado. I may not have the desire to join a labor union, but they have acted as a counterweight against China-like practices making a return.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Now that the OWS crowd all has their iPhone 5's they should be free to scream and pout and whine about the evils of Apple.
Smithers, Release the Hounds!
Er, Samsung recently moved their camera production TO China from Korea in order to make it cheaper. Try again with your white-washing of that giant with its tendrils deep in the South Korean government - military dictatorship or fledgling democracy alike.
All companies try to market themselves as different than the competition, that's a given.
Well at least you are trying to engage in the discussion rather than just throw insults around. But the point the parent is trying to make is that on the contrary it's very difficult to determine if the smartphone you have in your hand is ethically sourced. To do the research for yourself you either have to be rich and have a lot of time on your hands, or have a really weird hobby. To rely on the various scare stories, for and against, probably just involves reinforcing the opinions you already have. I know I'm susceptible and tend to look for the argument that puts apple in the best light - it's a hard skill to learn to listen to arguments from the "other side".
Yes, but there was a time when companies were HONEST. Not anymore. Far too many of these companies are disgusting liars. CONSTANT liars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The iPhone is like the electronic equivalent of a Fox Fur coat. People with iPhones just look icky to me.
you think the neckbeards here give a flying fuck? They only want you to shop for the same shit they buy. Fuck them in the ass with a broken bottle.
wow - your understanding of the business world is so bad you must believe in creationism too.
I totally agree, in fact the nav app I mostly use is Waze, a cross-platform crowdsourced traffic/police/hazard notating app that rests atop OSM.
In fact I feel like Apple would have been better off if they would use OSM as a primary source of trust over TomTom data. I think Apple is using OSM to some degree but it's hard to say how much. They already give credit to Waze (pretty sure that's where Apple's traffic data comes from), so a credit link for OSM would not be a huge burden...
OSM is why I feel like Apple has a chance of catching up to Google in a short timeframe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a riot at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant [in China], reportedly over guards beating up a worker
Good for them! Now if they can just start standing up for all their mistreated and underpaid workers, maybe they'll push wages high enough to bring some jobs back to the US!
I know, I'm dreaming. But it's not a bad one!
THINK! It's patriotic