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Microsoft Closing Two Phone Factories In China
randomErr writes: Microsoft is closing two factories in China by the end of March. About 9,000 people worked in these factories, and those jobs were cut a while back as part of the company's major restructuring after its Nokia purchase. Much of the equipment located in these factories from Beijing and the southeastern city of Dongguan is being shipped to Vietnam.
They finally got rid of the ability to follow comment histories on the nobeta. Now it's impossible to see if a comment has been replied to and following any comment thread has to be done manually, one post at a time.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Make sense. Chinese wages and standards of living have been increasing rapidly over the last few years, while the political systems/economies in parts of South East Asia are becoming developed enough to provide confidence to foreign investment. Will be interesting to see how China deals with this shift. Hopefully not in the western way, with all the bosses patting themselves on the back for lowering costs while the consumer economy falls apart around them.
Now if they would only close the shop in Redmond.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. If you commoditize your labor market (which means you are competing on price) you run the risk that someone else will offer a cheaper alternative. If you can't defend your position on price, you have to compete with some sort of other value add like offering skilled labor. If you can't do that, you've got a real problem.
Given that China has historically been the nominally-communist-but-attractively-cheap-and-open-for-business destination, they can't be entirely surprised that Vietnam is now cutting into their action.
That aside, though, I wonder if this is more or less purely cost focused, or whether the quasi-mercantalist Chinese government policies aimed at aiding domestic firms and speeding up acquisition of foreign firms' tech has a bigger role? They aren't necessarily irrational, given that competing on price and low environmental standards isn't exactly a fun game, even when you are winning it; but such policies presumably do encourage foreign firms to head for the exit more quickly at the same time as they reduce the impact of their doing so.
At first I thought this was a story of Microsoft heralding a broadsword by bringing their interests home.
As it tuns out, even the repressed have it bad in the 'global economy'.
Here it is folks, the wealthy rule the earth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It looks like some of the other bugs have been fixed as well - comments were not always full-width, which made it a PITA on large screens. Much appreciated. The message links still work for me (they were an off-and-on thing for quite a while) so it's not harder to follow a discussion or replies to posts ... (shrug).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Personally, I expected an India closure.
Especially after India "discovered" Nokia "owed" $3.4B in "taxes", as soon as they heard Nokia was being sold to Microsoft.