Actually the article says that factory makes nearly all of Apple's products, including the iPhone and iPad.
Re-read the part where the phone salesman tries to sell one of the factory workers an iPhone (outside the factory, obviously). The worker is totally disinterested, because he's seen a million of them, and everything else Apple is selling. He may even have been one of the ones to put them together. It also cost 3 months pay ($330), so not even worth considering.
...since no one seems to know what this particular factory makes.
It employs 400,000+ people. That's more people than live in my city, and I think my city is a fairly decent size. It makes fucking everything. As I said, it makes almost the entire line of Apple products, and that's probably not a large percentage of the equipment made at the factory. It's only significant because the iPhone and iPad are so popular right now. Saying "Ninth Suicide At Intel Motherboard Factory" doesn't really grab.
What's really sad is they are on pace to hit about 20 suicides on suicide, which is actually half the rate of suicides for China at large. These workers are actually better off than the average Chinese worker is. Sad, no?
Holy shit, where did you learn math? Because I want to stay as far away from there as I can.
The per-100k rate for Foxconn was about 1.8 if you use the total number of foxconn workers, or 3.3 for the factory. The article I read wasn't entirely clear which the 9 deaths applied to.
In any case, on what planet is either of those 7.5 times greater than 13.9? I'll help you out a bit, just so you'll learn something.
Here's the math: 486,000 / 100,000 or 270,000 / 100,000 - you did that part correctly, at least. That's 4.86 or 2.7. Now: 9 / 4.86, or 9/2.7 to get the rate per 100,000. That's 1.8 or 2.7. Next, to get the percentage of Foxconn's suicide rate relative to China as a whole, simply divide 1.8 or 2.7 by 13.9. That's 13% or 19% of the mainland rate. Given that the year is almost half over, you can expect that number to double to a whopping 26% or 38% of the overall Chinese suicide rate.
In other words, if the 9 suicides covers all Chinese Foxconn employees, then the formula is (9 / 4.86) / 13.9. If it's just for that one factory, the formula is (9 / 2.7) / 13.9.
Seriously man, getting an answer that says 9 suicides per 400,000+ is somehow 7+ times greater than 14 suicides per 100,000 should have been a MAJOR clue that your math was way, way off. You basically did it completely backwards, and got a terrible result. What's worse you obviously didn't even use common sense to check your work. That's just inexcusable man.
If your "sample" is 100% of the population - 1.34 billion for the Chinese suicide rate and 400,000 for the Foxconn rate - do you know what your sampling bias is? Zero, zip, nadda. You don't have a bias because you didn't take a sample, you took the whole damn thing. For example, one figure in 2007 has China's number of suicides at about 287,000 per year. That's about 21 per 100,000. Now, Foxconn has had 9 suicides so far, which is 2.25 suicides per 100,000.
There is no sampling bias there, them's the facts jack. Foxconn is on pace for about half the yearly rate of suicides that China in general has. That's not exactly a condemnation of Foxconn's working conditions relative to China. It's pretty clear the work is draining and the hours long, but the workers are treated relatively well.
Unions are still legitimate, however they long ago stopped being a group of workers banding together to protect themselves against management and have since become bullies themselves.
There are a lot of jobs that you simply cannot work unless you are a union member, and they treat non-union members like shit. The unions today are highly politicized, when they should be entirely politically neutral.
I believe most unions could be shifted from large, country-wide unions to much smaller, local unions. You only need a union that is about the same size as the company the members work for. It needs to be an equal balance of power. As it is now, unions like the AFL-CIO have the companies that must utilize their labor at a distinct disadvantage - even the largest corporations are smaller than the labor unions, so management gets no voice. In fact, within the union the members still have little to no say. It's only fortunate that the unions are fairly anti-management that it works out well for them.
I don't believe there is any legitimate reason for any union to be that size. They have far too much power concentrated into far too few people's hands. Unions shouldn't be eliminated by any means, the serve an important check against poor management like you see happening in China. However, what we have is unions gone wild, potentially causing more damage than they prevent.
I remember seeing a documentary on Michael Moore. There is a shot in Bowling for Columbine that he staged to look like you could walk into a store, lay down cash, and walk out with a gun, with basically no checks of any kind. The truth was he had set the whole thing up a week in advance, and had been working on getting the gun the whole time, and the only part of it that he actually filmed was the part where he went in and picked it up after clearing all the checks and whatnot. In fact, the place he picked the gun at was a holding point for the purchased guns, they don't stock weapons, so there is absolutely no way to go in there and just decide to buy one.
Moore is a douche, plain and simple. He's gotten rich by distorting what other people do and say by framing it in a context that is completely different from reality. It's how he makes all of his movies - he has a specific agenda before making the movie, and he frames his questions and he edits the footage to achieve his goal. He is not a documentarian you can trust, and that matters a lot with documentaries.
I would not be surprised at all if the factory worker footage the GP is talking about is staged. I haven't seen it, so I really have no idea, but frankly I don't trust Moore to show me an accurate picture of reality. Suppose he had just handed those guys $1,000 just before filming and asked them to talk about how great it was? I don't think even Moore would be that blatant, but it's an easy example of a situation where he could get the workers to say it's the greatest job ever when in fact they ordinarily hate it.
If you can't trust that what he is showing you is accurate, you can't take any of his arguments seriously. That doesn't mean that none of his arguments have merit, it just means without the ability to personally verify them you can't trust a word he says unless someone more credible confirms it.
Meh, if not for free global trade we probably would have simply automated more to boost the efficiency instead of relying on inefficient but cheap labor. Much larger initial investment, but with enough product moving through the door it can be offset by speed and efficiency.
Things would probably be a bit more expensive, but for most products I can't imagine more than 150% of Walmart's prices (initially much higher, of course).
And what a push for alternative energy there would be if we didn't buy from OPEC!
That's the way I see it. If you look at the ideals of communism, then compare it to the way the Chinese government/economy is structured, they are in no way similar. The only real similarity between communism and China is they put "People's Republic of" in front of "China". It means nothing, and has nothing to do with communism anyway.
The reality is, they are little more than a fascist oligarchy. They are still plenty socialist, but they are in no way communist.
China is communist in name only. "Peoples Republic" means nothing with regards to communism.
Communism requires a stateless government, which allows the workers at the factories to dictate what is produced, and how much, and for whom.
China, and all other Communist countries, found that they could not transition out of the necessary totalitarian stage and into Communism. Marx described it as a necessary evil, but it is simply not possible to move from rigid order to no order, it will break down long before the transition is complete.
That's what has happened to all Communist countries, they really aught to be called Pre-Communist countries, because they never actually made it to Communism. Those countries that wanted to survive in the long term had to cast off their economic goals and revert to capitalism, which is naturally efficient, if heartless. Once they do that, they in no way resemble Communism. It's simply a totalitarian oligarchy with a barely regulated capitalist economy.
It is important to note that there is a big difference between countries that call themselves "communist" and true communism.
China is communist in name only, it has none of the key elements of communism. Like all communist countries, they got stuck in the pre-communist stage (totalitarian oligarchy or dictatorship) and were never able to transition into actual communism. Then, in order to survive, they had to completely back out of their pre-communist economy and switched to capitalism. All that's left is the totalitarian regime, which was supposed to just be a necessary evil to transition into communism.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, a true communist country. It is too unwieldy on that scale. There have been a handful of pretty successful communities who practice the communist ideal (whether they subscribe to Marx or not). The Amish are probably the best example. They practice a form of minimal demarchy for the government structure, with almost all decisions made in a purely democratic fashion. Everyone in the society is completely equal, and this is enforced through tradition as opposed to any sort of rules laid down. In other words, everyone agrees together that this is how their society should be, and those who don't are shunned but not otherwise punished in any way. They shun technology for religious reasons, or they'd probably be significantly more successful than they already are.
The system is that there is no one in charge. It's still technically a system. It's like choosing not to choose - well, you still made a choice of sorts there, didn't you?
It's kinda like atheism, even though the belief is that there is no god, it's still a belief about things spiritual, and thus it can be considered a religion. Sort of a default religion for most athiests, but a religion non the less - especially for those who define themselves as athiests, they can be as dogmatic as any christian evangelist.
The problem with communism is that it is not just an economic system. It is an economic system that requires a certain type of government that is, frankly, impossible to achieve.
Ideal communism requires a stateless government where the workers democratically decide what will be produced. No country that has ever tried to become communist has ever achieved this. Marx described a stage just before Communism where a totalitarian dictatorship or oligarchy must be setup to facilitate the transition into a worker's democracy. That is where all communist countries have stopped - partly because once you gain massive amounts of power it's incredibly difficult to simply give that up, and partly because the leaders of the countries recognize, after they are in that position, that a worker's democracy is simply impossible. The key to Communism, however, was never the government, that was just to facilitate the change. The key is that the workers decide what is produced democratically, not management or the government.
China is not Communist in any way, shape or form. They are simply a totalitarian oligarchy that owns all property. It's definitely socialist, but all you need to see is that the workers are oppressed and you know it's nothing at all like Communism.
Soviet Russia tried to become Communist, but it ended up being the Government telling the workers what to produce, not the workers deciding it democratically. In other words, it was just another fascist dictatorship, it was never Communist.
The same is true of every other Communist country - North Korea, Laos, Cuba, you name it. Not one of them are even remotely similar to Communism as Marx described it. They've tried and failed, and all that's left is a totalitarian regime of one form or another.
Basically Communism is doomed because it is both an inefficient economic model and a terrible governing model, and it requires the governing model to implement the economic model. It just doesn't work.
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
Said just like someone who really doesn't understand the way the economy works. A capitalist society needs capital. It's in the name, so you've got to recognize that it's pretty darned important. The stock market facilitates moving capital from an area where it's less useful (i.e. some rich guy's bank account) to somewhere where it is more useful (a growing company). If that growing company is successful, the rich guy gets more money back than he put in. That means the company is able to do more than it could have without him. The stock market is not some betting game on the side guessing who will win or lose, when someone buys a stock, that money goes directly into the bank account of the company who's stock he purchased. They then use that money to produce more than they could have without it.
When you talk about risk and reward, people immediately think of gambling, but it's nothing of the sort (well, for those who don't know better it actually is). Companies analyze risk and reward all the time, particularly when deciding to bring a new product to market. The risk, of course, is that you invest millions of dollars in a product to get it out to stores and get good placement, and nobody wants to buy it, or they just don't want to pay what you have to sell it for. The billionaires in the stock market do exactly the same thing, and their money can mean the success of whatever company they invest in.
It's a very efficient system, and it automatically weeds out the idiots (i.e. the gamblers). The wealthiest people in our society are usually the most productive. The wealth they amass is evidence for that, not against it. Had they been unproductive they would have nothing.
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.
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.
That's socialism, not communism. The US is a long, long ways off from Communist, and every day we move closer to fascism, not communism. We are somewhat-socialist republic (not the way Communist countries like to abuse the term) with a strong capitalistic economic foundation. That capitalism is burdened by the socialist tendancies of the government, but it's still strong capitalism.
Communism, by definition, requires a stateless government. There is no truly Communist country in the world. The furthest any have gotten is the transition totalitarian oligarchy that Marx felt was necessary just before communism could be achieved. He didn't recon that the leap from totalitarian to stateless was pretty much impossible. A country simply cannot function without leadership, and Communism requires that there be no leader. It is literally impossible.
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms.
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy. Marx envisioned the necessary totalitarian government that all modern communist countries function as to be a transition state before becoming a pure democracy. Unfortunately, he was completely wrong about communism being the most ideal economic system in the world, it is actually incredibly inefficient in practice, and no government has successfully transition into pure communism mode. Really, what we call communist countries should not be called such.
Obviously, Marx didn't read enough Greek philosophy or Roman and Greek history to recognize that pure democracy cannot function beyond a certain size, after which it simply becomes mob rule - the most oppressive form of government known to man. I doubt he ever envisioned a factory with more than a few hundred workers, let alone thousands. In such numbers there is no fairness, simply mobs. People gravitate toward leaders, who run campaigns to get their views enacted, and in short order the democracy is gone.
He viewed communism as the most stable form of government/economy possible, without recognizing that the purely democratic government upon which the idea was based is the least stable form of government possible. At sufficiently large sizes, it is little more than anarchy.
Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other. The economic makeup of the family unit is fascist, not communist, as the parents own all the resources, and the children own nothing except what the parents allow.
Socialist, yes. Communist, no. For it to be Communist as Marx defined it, the parents would have no more authority than the parents, and every decision would have to be made with an up or down vote of the entire family.
Pure communism requires a stateless government and worker-owned resources, but not individually owned resources. It's in the definition. You could say everybody owns everything, but in truth everybody owns nothing. The workers decide democratically what products are to be produced. Anybody with moderate reasoning skills should be able to figure out how long that will last in the real world.
I always thought Communism sounded really nice on paper.
However, when I was a kid I did a research paper on Karl Marx, and found him to be a lazy, degenerate, good for nothing schmuck who would rather sit on his ass and muse about how "the common man" was being oppressed instead of getting off his ass, getting a job, and providing for his wife and kids. He lived his entire life as a leech. It's no wonder he came up with an impossible economic system where everyone in the world got to be leeches.
The guy was a serious loser, in every way, and since then I've wanted nothing to do with any idea that came from his head.
with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Funny, the last one I read was about Microsoft, not Apple, and Microsoft only accounted for about 25-30% of the factory's contracts.
It's nothing new - pick the biggest name you can, and target it. It doesn't matter who. It's happened to Nike, Microsoft, Sony, Magnavox, you name it, if they've been the biggest contract at a Chinese factory, they've been the headline of one of these stories. Most of them you start out with "WTF! Who would do that!" then read a bit and think "Oh, well, that's not TOO bad, considering how poor everyone is there anyway."
Apple is just getting their fair share of the heat, that's all. Nothing to freak out about, Mr. Fanboi.
Frankly, it's difficult to put these stories into the correct context. It's true that nobody in the US or EU would take a job like this, but I'm sure there are thousands of people in Africa who would leap at the chance to get 3 square meals and a roof over their head, never mind actually getting paid too. A lot of what they do wouldn't be criminal in the US, or at least not criminal enough that the average US worker would risk losing their job over filing a grievance over it. Things like losing their break privileges and being made to work overtime are not uncommon over hear. There is usually better compensation involved, but that doesn't factor into whether it's right or wrong to make someone work 60-70 hours a week. People do it all the time, and they bitch about it, but it is still worth it. Same with these guys.
Some things are easy to recognize, like supervisors physically beating employees or denying them food or not permitting them to leave. A lot of what comes up in these complaints, though, is borderline or edge case for the factory. In that case it's hard to tell whether this is how the company is encouraged to run, or if it's just a bad supervisor who hasn't been caught and dealt with.
In this case, though, the suicide rate for the factory is about 1/4 the suicide rate for China in general, which basically means the premise of the story is utter bullshit. I think it's good to keep the companies that use these places on their toes, though. It helps keep them in line.
It's no different than the article a month or so ago that bashed Microsoft for the pay the Chinese workers were receiving, and I think Microsoft only made up about 30% of the factory's orders.
That situation was nothing compared to this, people weren't killing themselves, they were actually making better than average wages (for China, mind you). They just treated the employees like prisoners with lots of options to run away - that was literally how you quit, you didn't go in and tell your boss you were leaving, you just left and missed out on your last paycheck.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured. That's significant. More significant, I would argue, than the place Microsoft Intellimouse mice are manufactured, which was the case for the Microsoft example.
We've often held major corporations responsible for turning a blind eye to the conditions the workers endure in the overseas factories that produce their goods. Apple should be no different. Nike and Microsoft certainly aren't, and there is always hell to pay for them.
Rather than admit that his company is too small to devote the resources to develop on PS3
From what I've heard, almost all companies are too small to devote the resources to develop on PS3. Why do you think there are so few games for it? It's complete shit.
I don't know if you know this, but Valve is a heavy-hitter in the video game world. They aren't near as big as EA, but they are big enough you'd expect them to produce games on all platforms. In fact, they do on all platforms that can handle their games - including playstations before the PS3. Now they are pretty much left with Xbox360 and the PC, which really makes their dev process easier, but still leaves out a chunk of the market.
You realize that list couldn't fill a single shelf at a big box store, right? Well, maybe one, but that's about it. Most of what came up in google was open source.
It's a pretty pitiful list.
The point was not that there are no commercial Linux apps for the desktop, the point was that there were very, very few. Few enough that it's deep within the "small niche market" territory, like selling buttons or something.
Look at your list again, and think about how many millions of commercial desktop apps there are for Windows, then think about the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of open source applications there are for Linux, and tell me a few hundred (and I'm being pretty generous) commercial apps is significant.
You were speaking from the developer level when you were talking about case insensitivity. 95% of people own a computer that is case-insensitive in the practical sense. The default setting in OSX is case insensitive, and most people never go through the trouble to change it. Doing so requires either above average technical skill to do it the hard way, or way above average technical skill to do it the easy way.
I cannot see how you can honestly say that case insensitivity is the exception and not the rule when 99% of people in the world use a filesystem that is case insensitive for all practical purposes.
Seriously, a case sensitive filesystem with a shim to make it case insensitive is *drumroll* case insensitive!
In other words, your arguments did you no favors.
That said, hard-coding paths is sloppy, but forgivable considering their background and the very small subset of users it affects.
But, honestly it's really not reasonable to blame the patent holders for the problem - blame the political entities that permit and enforce such patents, as they're the ones that have created and continue to foster this kind of environment.
The real problem as I see it is not patents, or the basics of how patents work. It's that for some reason the patent office cannot seem to apply the same rules for physical inventions to software inventions in any consistent manner. One non-obvious patent gets rejected, while another incredibly obvious patent is accepted, and then again a current invention that is now "on computers" is somehow patented. The pace of invention in the world of software is so furious too that you get six generations that overlap, creating a mine-field for the next generation of a technology to be born into. The result is anybody who comes up with anything new must be prepared to go to court dozens of times to defend their rights to produce their patent.
It should be pretty clear that this will eventually have a net negative effect on software innovation. I actually think compression technologies are the more legitimate forms of software patents. Things like Amazon's "One Click" patent just get in the way of progress, and muddy the field for the legitimate patents.
Nobody said they were, dumbass. Re-read the post, you may need read it three or four times, and work on your comprehension a bit while you're at it. The GP never said Jobs was a part MPEG-LA, he said if you are part of Jobs's Dictatorship you can't use Flash.
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Actually the article says that factory makes nearly all of Apple's products, including the iPhone and iPad.
Re-read the part where the phone salesman tries to sell one of the factory workers an iPhone (outside the factory, obviously). The worker is totally disinterested, because he's seen a million of them, and everything else Apple is selling. He may even have been one of the ones to put them together. It also cost 3 months pay ($330), so not even worth considering.
...since no one seems to know what this particular factory makes.
It employs 400,000+ people. That's more people than live in my city, and I think my city is a fairly decent size. It makes fucking everything. As I said, it makes almost the entire line of Apple products, and that's probably not a large percentage of the equipment made at the factory. It's only significant because the iPhone and iPad are so popular right now. Saying "Ninth Suicide At Intel Motherboard Factory" doesn't really grab.
What's really sad is they are on pace to hit about 20 suicides on suicide, which is actually half the rate of suicides for China at large. These workers are actually better off than the average Chinese worker is. Sad, no?
Holy shit, where did you learn math? Because I want to stay as far away from there as I can.
The per-100k rate for Foxconn was about 1.8 if you use the total number of foxconn workers, or 3.3 for the factory. The article I read wasn't entirely clear which the 9 deaths applied to.
In any case, on what planet is either of those 7.5 times greater than 13.9? I'll help you out a bit, just so you'll learn something.
Here's the math: 486,000 / 100,000 or 270,000 / 100,000 - you did that part correctly, at least. That's 4.86 or 2.7. Now: 9 / 4.86, or 9/2.7 to get the rate per 100,000. That's 1.8 or 2.7. Next, to get the percentage of Foxconn's suicide rate relative to China as a whole, simply divide 1.8 or 2.7 by 13.9. That's 13% or 19% of the mainland rate. Given that the year is almost half over, you can expect that number to double to a whopping 26% or 38% of the overall Chinese suicide rate.
In other words, if the 9 suicides covers all Chinese Foxconn employees, then the formula is (9 / 4.86) / 13.9. If it's just for that one factory, the formula is (9 / 2.7) / 13.9.
Seriously man, getting an answer that says 9 suicides per 400,000+ is somehow 7+ times greater than 14 suicides per 100,000 should have been a MAJOR clue that your math was way, way off. You basically did it completely backwards, and got a terrible result. What's worse you obviously didn't even use common sense to check your work. That's just inexcusable man.
Somebody doesn't understand what a "sample" is.
If your "sample" is 100% of the population - 1.34 billion for the Chinese suicide rate and 400,000 for the Foxconn rate - do you know what your sampling bias is? Zero, zip, nadda. You don't have a bias because you didn't take a sample, you took the whole damn thing. For example, one figure in 2007 has China's number of suicides at about 287,000 per year. That's about 21 per 100,000. Now, Foxconn has had 9 suicides so far, which is 2.25 suicides per 100,000.
There is no sampling bias there, them's the facts jack. Foxconn is on pace for about half the yearly rate of suicides that China in general has. That's not exactly a condemnation of Foxconn's working conditions relative to China. It's pretty clear the work is draining and the hours long, but the workers are treated relatively well.
Unions are still legitimate, however they long ago stopped being a group of workers banding together to protect themselves against management and have since become bullies themselves.
There are a lot of jobs that you simply cannot work unless you are a union member, and they treat non-union members like shit. The unions today are highly politicized, when they should be entirely politically neutral.
I believe most unions could be shifted from large, country-wide unions to much smaller, local unions. You only need a union that is about the same size as the company the members work for. It needs to be an equal balance of power. As it is now, unions like the AFL-CIO have the companies that must utilize their labor at a distinct disadvantage - even the largest corporations are smaller than the labor unions, so management gets no voice. In fact, within the union the members still have little to no say. It's only fortunate that the unions are fairly anti-management that it works out well for them.
I don't believe there is any legitimate reason for any union to be that size. They have far too much power concentrated into far too few people's hands. Unions shouldn't be eliminated by any means, the serve an important check against poor management like you see happening in China. However, what we have is unions gone wild, potentially causing more damage than they prevent.
I remember seeing a documentary on Michael Moore. There is a shot in Bowling for Columbine that he staged to look like you could walk into a store, lay down cash, and walk out with a gun, with basically no checks of any kind. The truth was he had set the whole thing up a week in advance, and had been working on getting the gun the whole time, and the only part of it that he actually filmed was the part where he went in and picked it up after clearing all the checks and whatnot. In fact, the place he picked the gun at was a holding point for the purchased guns, they don't stock weapons, so there is absolutely no way to go in there and just decide to buy one.
Moore is a douche, plain and simple. He's gotten rich by distorting what other people do and say by framing it in a context that is completely different from reality. It's how he makes all of his movies - he has a specific agenda before making the movie, and he frames his questions and he edits the footage to achieve his goal. He is not a documentarian you can trust, and that matters a lot with documentaries.
I would not be surprised at all if the factory worker footage the GP is talking about is staged. I haven't seen it, so I really have no idea, but frankly I don't trust Moore to show me an accurate picture of reality. Suppose he had just handed those guys $1,000 just before filming and asked them to talk about how great it was? I don't think even Moore would be that blatant, but it's an easy example of a situation where he could get the workers to say it's the greatest job ever when in fact they ordinarily hate it.
If you can't trust that what he is showing you is accurate, you can't take any of his arguments seriously. That doesn't mean that none of his arguments have merit, it just means without the ability to personally verify them you can't trust a word he says unless someone more credible confirms it.
Credibility is very important.
Meh, if not for free global trade we probably would have simply automated more to boost the efficiency instead of relying on inefficient but cheap labor. Much larger initial investment, but with enough product moving through the door it can be offset by speed and efficiency.
Things would probably be a bit more expensive, but for most products I can't imagine more than 150% of Walmart's prices (initially much higher, of course).
And what a push for alternative energy there would be if we didn't buy from OPEC!
That's the way I see it. If you look at the ideals of communism, then compare it to the way the Chinese government/economy is structured, they are in no way similar. The only real similarity between communism and China is they put "People's Republic of" in front of "China". It means nothing, and has nothing to do with communism anyway.
The reality is, they are little more than a fascist oligarchy. They are still plenty socialist, but they are in no way communist.
China is communist in name only. "Peoples Republic" means nothing with regards to communism.
Communism requires a stateless government, which allows the workers at the factories to dictate what is produced, and how much, and for whom.
China, and all other Communist countries, found that they could not transition out of the necessary totalitarian stage and into Communism. Marx described it as a necessary evil, but it is simply not possible to move from rigid order to no order, it will break down long before the transition is complete.
That's what has happened to all Communist countries, they really aught to be called Pre-Communist countries, because they never actually made it to Communism. Those countries that wanted to survive in the long term had to cast off their economic goals and revert to capitalism, which is naturally efficient, if heartless. Once they do that, they in no way resemble Communism. It's simply a totalitarian oligarchy with a barely regulated capitalist economy.
It is important to note that there is a big difference between countries that call themselves "communist" and true communism.
China is communist in name only, it has none of the key elements of communism. Like all communist countries, they got stuck in the pre-communist stage (totalitarian oligarchy or dictatorship) and were never able to transition into actual communism. Then, in order to survive, they had to completely back out of their pre-communist economy and switched to capitalism. All that's left is the totalitarian regime, which was supposed to just be a necessary evil to transition into communism.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, a true communist country. It is too unwieldy on that scale. There have been a handful of pretty successful communities who practice the communist ideal (whether they subscribe to Marx or not). The Amish are probably the best example. They practice a form of minimal demarchy for the government structure, with almost all decisions made in a purely democratic fashion. Everyone in the society is completely equal, and this is enforced through tradition as opposed to any sort of rules laid down. In other words, everyone agrees together that this is how their society should be, and those who don't are shunned but not otherwise punished in any way. They shun technology for religious reasons, or they'd probably be significantly more successful than they already are.
The system is that there is no one in charge. It's still technically a system. It's like choosing not to choose - well, you still made a choice of sorts there, didn't you?
It's kinda like atheism, even though the belief is that there is no god, it's still a belief about things spiritual, and thus it can be considered a religion. Sort of a default religion for most athiests, but a religion non the less - especially for those who define themselves as athiests, they can be as dogmatic as any christian evangelist.
Yup it's called slavery, and Patric Henry would rather die than be a slave.
Thus, the famous quote.
The problem with communism is that it is not just an economic system. It is an economic system that requires a certain type of government that is, frankly, impossible to achieve.
Ideal communism requires a stateless government where the workers democratically decide what will be produced. No country that has ever tried to become communist has ever achieved this. Marx described a stage just before Communism where a totalitarian dictatorship or oligarchy must be setup to facilitate the transition into a worker's democracy. That is where all communist countries have stopped - partly because once you gain massive amounts of power it's incredibly difficult to simply give that up, and partly because the leaders of the countries recognize, after they are in that position, that a worker's democracy is simply impossible. The key to Communism, however, was never the government, that was just to facilitate the change. The key is that the workers decide what is produced democratically, not management or the government.
China is not Communist in any way, shape or form. They are simply a totalitarian oligarchy that owns all property. It's definitely socialist, but all you need to see is that the workers are oppressed and you know it's nothing at all like Communism.
Soviet Russia tried to become Communist, but it ended up being the Government telling the workers what to produce, not the workers deciding it democratically. In other words, it was just another fascist dictatorship, it was never Communist.
The same is true of every other Communist country - North Korea, Laos, Cuba, you name it. Not one of them are even remotely similar to Communism as Marx described it. They've tried and failed, and all that's left is a totalitarian regime of one form or another.
Basically Communism is doomed because it is both an inefficient economic model and a terrible governing model, and it requires the governing model to implement the economic model. It just doesn't work.
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
Said just like someone who really doesn't understand the way the economy works. A capitalist society needs capital. It's in the name, so you've got to recognize that it's pretty darned important. The stock market facilitates moving capital from an area where it's less useful (i.e. some rich guy's bank account) to somewhere where it is more useful (a growing company). If that growing company is successful, the rich guy gets more money back than he put in. That means the company is able to do more than it could have without him. The stock market is not some betting game on the side guessing who will win or lose, when someone buys a stock, that money goes directly into the bank account of the company who's stock he purchased. They then use that money to produce more than they could have without it.
When you talk about risk and reward, people immediately think of gambling, but it's nothing of the sort (well, for those who don't know better it actually is). Companies analyze risk and reward all the time, particularly when deciding to bring a new product to market. The risk, of course, is that you invest millions of dollars in a product to get it out to stores and get good placement, and nobody wants to buy it, or they just don't want to pay what you have to sell it for. The billionaires in the stock market do exactly the same thing, and their money can mean the success of whatever company they invest in.
It's a very efficient system, and it automatically weeds out the idiots (i.e. the gamblers). The wealthiest people in our society are usually the most productive. The wealth they amass is evidence for that, not against it. Had they been unproductive they would have nothing.
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.
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.
That's socialism, not communism. The US is a long, long ways off from Communist, and every day we move closer to fascism, not communism. We are somewhat-socialist republic (not the way Communist countries like to abuse the term) with a strong capitalistic economic foundation. That capitalism is burdened by the socialist tendancies of the government, but it's still strong capitalism.
Communism, by definition, requires a stateless government. There is no truly Communist country in the world. The furthest any have gotten is the transition totalitarian oligarchy that Marx felt was necessary just before communism could be achieved. He didn't recon that the leap from totalitarian to stateless was pretty much impossible. A country simply cannot function without leadership, and Communism requires that there be no leader. It is literally impossible.
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms.
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy. Marx envisioned the necessary totalitarian government that all modern communist countries function as to be a transition state before becoming a pure democracy. Unfortunately, he was completely wrong about communism being the most ideal economic system in the world, it is actually incredibly inefficient in practice, and no government has successfully transition into pure communism mode. Really, what we call communist countries should not be called such.
Obviously, Marx didn't read enough Greek philosophy or Roman and Greek history to recognize that pure democracy cannot function beyond a certain size, after which it simply becomes mob rule - the most oppressive form of government known to man. I doubt he ever envisioned a factory with more than a few hundred workers, let alone thousands. In such numbers there is no fairness, simply mobs. People gravitate toward leaders, who run campaigns to get their views enacted, and in short order the democracy is gone.
He viewed communism as the most stable form of government/economy possible, without recognizing that the purely democratic government upon which the idea was based is the least stable form of government possible. At sufficiently large sizes, it is little more than anarchy.
Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other. The economic makeup of the family unit is fascist, not communist, as the parents own all the resources, and the children own nothing except what the parents allow.
Socialist, yes. Communist, no. For it to be Communist as Marx defined it, the parents would have no more authority than the parents, and every decision would have to be made with an up or down vote of the entire family.
Pure communism requires a stateless government and worker-owned resources, but not individually owned resources. It's in the definition. You could say everybody owns everything, but in truth everybody owns nothing. The workers decide democratically what products are to be produced. Anybody with moderate reasoning skills should be able to figure out how long that will last in the real world.
I always thought Communism sounded really nice on paper.
However, when I was a kid I did a research paper on Karl Marx, and found him to be a lazy, degenerate, good for nothing schmuck who would rather sit on his ass and muse about how "the common man" was being oppressed instead of getting off his ass, getting a job, and providing for his wife and kids. He lived his entire life as a leech. It's no wonder he came up with an impossible economic system where everyone in the world got to be leeches.
The guy was a serious loser, in every way, and since then I've wanted nothing to do with any idea that came from his head.
with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Funny, the last one I read was about Microsoft, not Apple, and Microsoft only accounted for about 25-30% of the factory's contracts.
It's nothing new - pick the biggest name you can, and target it. It doesn't matter who. It's happened to Nike, Microsoft, Sony, Magnavox, you name it, if they've been the biggest contract at a Chinese factory, they've been the headline of one of these stories. Most of them you start out with "WTF! Who would do that!" then read a bit and think "Oh, well, that's not TOO bad, considering how poor everyone is there anyway."
Apple is just getting their fair share of the heat, that's all. Nothing to freak out about, Mr. Fanboi.
Frankly, it's difficult to put these stories into the correct context. It's true that nobody in the US or EU would take a job like this, but I'm sure there are thousands of people in Africa who would leap at the chance to get 3 square meals and a roof over their head, never mind actually getting paid too. A lot of what they do wouldn't be criminal in the US, or at least not criminal enough that the average US worker would risk losing their job over filing a grievance over it. Things like losing their break privileges and being made to work overtime are not uncommon over hear. There is usually better compensation involved, but that doesn't factor into whether it's right or wrong to make someone work 60-70 hours a week. People do it all the time, and they bitch about it, but it is still worth it. Same with these guys.
Some things are easy to recognize, like supervisors physically beating employees or denying them food or not permitting them to leave. A lot of what comes up in these complaints, though, is borderline or edge case for the factory. In that case it's hard to tell whether this is how the company is encouraged to run, or if it's just a bad supervisor who hasn't been caught and dealt with.
In this case, though, the suicide rate for the factory is about 1/4 the suicide rate for China in general, which basically means the premise of the story is utter bullshit. I think it's good to keep the companies that use these places on their toes, though. It helps keep them in line.
It's no different than the article a month or so ago that bashed Microsoft for the pay the Chinese workers were receiving, and I think Microsoft only made up about 30% of the factory's orders.
That situation was nothing compared to this, people weren't killing themselves, they were actually making better than average wages (for China, mind you). They just treated the employees like prisoners with lots of options to run away - that was literally how you quit, you didn't go in and tell your boss you were leaving, you just left and missed out on your last paycheck.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured. That's significant. More significant, I would argue, than the place Microsoft Intellimouse mice are manufactured, which was the case for the Microsoft example.
We've often held major corporations responsible for turning a blind eye to the conditions the workers endure in the overseas factories that produce their goods. Apple should be no different. Nike and Microsoft certainly aren't, and there is always hell to pay for them.
Rather than admit that his company is too small to devote the resources to develop on PS3
From what I've heard, almost all companies are too small to devote the resources to develop on PS3. Why do you think there are so few games for it? It's complete shit.
I don't know if you know this, but Valve is a heavy-hitter in the video game world. They aren't near as big as EA, but they are big enough you'd expect them to produce games on all platforms. In fact, they do on all platforms that can handle their games - including playstations before the PS3. Now they are pretty much left with Xbox360 and the PC, which really makes their dev process easier, but still leaves out a chunk of the market.
You realize that list couldn't fill a single shelf at a big box store, right? Well, maybe one, but that's about it. Most of what came up in google was open source.
It's a pretty pitiful list.
The point was not that there are no commercial Linux apps for the desktop, the point was that there were very, very few. Few enough that it's deep within the "small niche market" territory, like selling buttons or something.
Look at your list again, and think about how many millions of commercial desktop apps there are for Windows, then think about the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of open source applications there are for Linux, and tell me a few hundred (and I'm being pretty generous) commercial apps is significant.
This is a terribly-written sentence.
It's a bit cumbersome, perhaps, but your only real problem was in concatenating the two independent clauses.
In the case of a list of items preceding a comma and conjunction, you should use a semicolon instead of the comma.
So
"...(the CEDET stuff), and I'll take Visual Studio over any of them..."
becomes
"...(the CEDET stuff); and I'll take Visual Studio over any of them..."
and the boundary between list items and clauses is now clear.
You were speaking from the developer level when you were talking about case insensitivity. 95% of people own a computer that is case-insensitive in the practical sense. The default setting in OSX is case insensitive, and most people never go through the trouble to change it. Doing so requires either above average technical skill to do it the hard way, or way above average technical skill to do it the easy way.
I cannot see how you can honestly say that case insensitivity is the exception and not the rule when 99% of people in the world use a filesystem that is case insensitive for all practical purposes.
Seriously, a case sensitive filesystem with a shim to make it case insensitive is *drumroll* case insensitive!
In other words, your arguments did you no favors.
That said, hard-coding paths is sloppy, but forgivable considering their background and the very small subset of users it affects.
That's just because we don't like Iran, and Iran doesn't like us. ;)
But, honestly it's really not reasonable to blame the patent holders for the problem - blame the political entities that permit and enforce such patents, as they're the ones that have created and continue to foster this kind of environment.
The real problem as I see it is not patents, or the basics of how patents work. It's that for some reason the patent office cannot seem to apply the same rules for physical inventions to software inventions in any consistent manner. One non-obvious patent gets rejected, while another incredibly obvious patent is accepted, and then again a current invention that is now "on computers" is somehow patented. The pace of invention in the world of software is so furious too that you get six generations that overlap, creating a mine-field for the next generation of a technology to be born into. The result is anybody who comes up with anything new must be prepared to go to court dozens of times to defend their rights to produce their patent.
It should be pretty clear that this will eventually have a net negative effect on software innovation. I actually think compression technologies are the more legitimate forms of software patents. Things like Amazon's "One Click" patent just get in the way of progress, and muddy the field for the legitimate patents.
MPEG-LA is not Apple. Apple is not MPEG-LA.
Nobody said they were, dumbass. Re-read the post, you may need read it three or four times, and work on your comprehension a bit while you're at it. The GP never said Jobs was a part MPEG-LA, he said if you are part of Jobs's Dictatorship you can't use Flash.
Seriously, get a grip man.