Cost of labour is a tiny part of the cost of electronic devices nowadays. Believe me...I have worked as an industrial engineer, and I believe that the issue is much more related to the desire to reduce working capital employed, incentives offered by foreign governments, corruption, and fashion - moving assembly to China was seen as big dick swinging by many executives, who could also avoid some of that pesky having to manage people stuff. Assemblers do not want to invest in dedicated automation.
A converse example is the car industry, where automation is unavoidable because the assemblies are too heavy to be easily manipulated by people. The result is that cars get made in the USA, Europe and Japan.
I suspect that whoever cited $1400 to make an iPad in the US was either manufacturing-illiterate or had a financial incentive to misrepresent the facts. I would be surprised if assembly in the US added more than $25 to the cost, and unsurprised to find it was more like $5 when everything was taken into account.
Mine was made in Hungary...which used to have a considerable phone-making business back in the Soviet Union era. But I think the BB Playbook is Chinese.
That said, I suspect that globalisation is heading into a lot of flak at the moment. There has always been a conflict between the perceived strategic needs of the US and what American corporations will do. In WW2 they were the begin with supplying both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with arms and technology although it was not in the interests of the USA to do so. You can see the transfer of manufacturing to China as hastening the downfall of the USA, but corporate executives will simply buy citizenship of whatever country offers the most benefits to them; they have no loyalty whatsoever to any particular country.
So no, you will never get any piece of electronics nowadays that can be called "ethically sourced", but it is just about possible to decide which is most in your interest to buy, assuming that you have, or want, to live in one country.
For an inhabitant of CA, that is probably Apple. For anybody else, YMMV.
I'm not about to get into a pissing match on this because my original comment was a two-minute squib intended to be semi-humorous (how much is infinitesimal? It's as close to zero as you can get without being at zero.) Had I known it would be extensively reviewed by experts like yourself, I think I would have expressed myself more carefully. Did I say reservoir designers were stupid? I'm sorry if you are one and think your profession has been impugned...because I didn't. I was actually making the point that all the posts about poop in the water were pretty silly, because water treatment is so well understood.
Well, the three water treatment specialists I know include two PhDs and a mere MSc, who between them have done research into everything from rural water purification in Africa to the adhesion of bacterial colonies on permanent water hardness deposition in domestic pipes. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
My experience of firewalls and water treatment is this: that water treatment is designed and operated by some extremely professional people who know exactly what they are doing, and that this is not often the case for firewalls. Given how some firewalls are configured, the water treatment analogy would be to stop most things and restrict the flow of the water, while letting the really nasty bugs through.
OT but possibly of interest: the daughter of a friend of ours studied environmental biology at university. Her mother wondered what use it could possibly be. As a researcher into water treatment, she is now into her second paid postgraduate placement with the prospect of a very well paid international job at the end of it. Oil may be sexier, but water is actually the more important resource.
Haven't you ever heard of filters, guys? I mean big cloth or paper things that get stretched on big frames and then the water gets pumped through them and all the muck gets extracted, not the sort of filters that IT people know about. Have you ever stopped to think about the amount of mud in a water reservoir after the wind and rain have whipped it up a bit? Doesn't get in your drinking water, does it?
I am afraid that my opinion of the IQ of the average/. reader just dropped an infinitesimal amount.
Your point is well made. The human eye does a lot of visual pre-processing (e.g. edge and pattern detection) and passes on to the brain a kind of summary data. The eye doesn't know there is an oncoming car, but it alerts the brain by reporting on a movement in peripheral vision, and we can act on it.
In effect you're saying we need correlates for content quality. I imagine there are several of these: word frequency, especially based around clusters might do for a start. What would be really good is something that could produce an analysis of the use of technical words and meta-technical words, which would go some way to differentiate useful content from sales and marketing fluff.
Gould was always very keen to make people understand that evolution does not necessarily involve greater intelligence, strength or complexity as part of "fitness". Google is doing a kind of environmental step change will will result in rapid forced evolution among system gamers. It will be interesting to see which way it turns out: ever more complex strategies trying to game the system, or a reduction to simple but crude techniques.
The principle appears to be that they cannot seize assets without him having his day in court. From Guantanamo Bay to the English High Courts, the principle of trying to shut people up without having the put up with their legal representation is getting rather too common.
Years ago Hilaire Belloc made a rather good joke about many apparently worthy causes actually being the work of the "Society for the prevention of annoyances to the rich". This seems to be what is going on nowadays - the Internet is allowing (relatively) poor people to cause annoyance to the rich and they are trying to stop it. But, sadly for them, it is simply not true that there are no honest lawyers.
Speaking as someone who has done research into corrosion resistance and plating, it doesn't work like that. The corrosion resistance of "gold" plating depends on the performance of the nickel layer underneath. There are many engineering applications for which gold plating is unsuitable. It is good for connectors because its resistance doesn't depend on an oxide layer, unlike chromium. As for gold alloys, don't go there. The metallurgy of gold alloys, except with copper and silver, is not something you would want to have to work with to create corrosion resistant alloys based on strong materials. If there are elements that I would like to see available cheaply, they are the lanthanides, copper, nickel and cobalt. Cheap nickel metal hydride batteries and cheap efficient DC motors along with cheap solar power would do a lot to improve the prospects for an orderly transition to an oil free world. Cheap gold would achieve very little.
OK, perhaps slight trolling, but this is an example of why, on everything from evolution to climate change, I prefer the views of scientists to those of politicians or the religious authorities. This is an example of research happening exactly as it is intended to. Initial unexpected result, investigation, experimental flaw, better experiment. It creates a warm glow in the callous, hardened bit of my brain that was once a young, enthusiastic researcher.
Our lecturer on addictive drugs told us that in the UK, until the law changed as a result of pressure from the US, a major component of heroin addicts were medical professionals who took it to dampen the anxiety caused by the responsibility of their jobs. A significant number of physicians and senior nurses were addicts. Because they knew what they were doing and had easy access, nobody noticed. There were also a lot of alcoholic physicians whose performance would have been far more seriously affected - but alcoholism is still seen in many quarters as acceptable.
They become bad people because of the cost of feeding their addiction.
Rich, bored people with personal problems can get prescription opiate drugs (Michael Jackson being an obvious example.) Poor people with similar problems turn to heroin, which they cannot afford without turning to crime. Since heroin is dirt cheap to make, it might just as well be made available cheaply to them. But our duty of social care means we should work with the people who take heroin to try and resolve the problems that lead to it in the first place.
Of course, that's a rational socialist strategy, which is why it can't be adopted by US administrations; there is too much money in the supply of illegal drugs and the operation of prisons. Since the present American system severely harms the competitiveness of the American economy, the rest of the world might think it has little interest in bringing about change there.
The main reasons for the negativity directed against the EU in the UK are:
Rupert Murdoch wanted the UK to be a low-cost production area for his newspapers with poor worker protection - the EU prevents that
If the EU survives its early problems - so far no Civil War like the one the USA had on its way to union - it will eventually have more power than the US, and the US doesn't like that
Most European countries have standards of journalism which embarrass the likes of the Sun and the Mail - even Bild is moving up market slowly - and UK media owners are afraid of EU regulation
Small Conservative businesses who don't see why they shouldn't exploit their workforces
People who still think there is a British Empire.
Personally, I feel that the European parliament is far more likely to do the right thing than the British one, simply because (a) it is far more diverse and (b) it has members from countries who know that war is a really bad thing.
The Meccano construction kit, which was metal, had a "No. 10" set which was really aimed at universities and engineering companies. I once used one to build a test rig for a UL-type test in which a hot wire had to be pressed against an electronic assembly with a controlled force. It took a couple of hours to build something that would have taken a week for the machine shop to fabricate.
With an interconnected driverless car system, people will get income from driverless taxis that will efficiently pick up and put down shared fares. Current buses are inefficient because they follow fixed routes and set off without knowing what the demand will be. If you only have, in effect, to share a quarter of a car, everything becomes much more affordable.
You do realise that driverless cars and renewable energy have almost unlimited potential upsides? This makes it very difficult to provide a standard ROI calculation, just as the "investors" failed to realise that the events to which they were assigning low probabilities (collapse of housing market, for instance) had potentially unlimited downsides, and so conventional risk assessment no longer worked.
I would thoroughly approve if Apple spent $100 billion trying to destroy Android. The legal profession would spend a lot of the money on expensive consumer goods, so some of it would end up back in the economy instead of being part of a notional company value. Apple would demonstrate that it had run out of ideas and was not longer a fit custodian of all that money. If companies cannot work out what to do with piles of cash, they should find a way to get them to people who do know.
Google is about search technology and pattern recognition. In fact, that is the major challenge with driverless cars now.
At one time the challenge was mechanical - mechanical gearshifts and brakes were just too hard to control. Since the first Prius, that is a solved problem. Now a car can easily be operated by an automated platform, the problem is to guide it safely.
Once that is solved, there are many new opportunities. Optimum guidance; optimum traffic patterning, looking for people who would like to share your journey all become objects of research.
If Google cracks driverless cars, it will change the developed world. It will affect town planning, investment patterns, and the way people live. And of course it will transform the car industry beyond recognition.
This is one area where Google could leverage its core technology to become so huge it could buy Apple to provide in-car entertainment.
You just need those funny Torx screwdrivers, and about 15kg of a mixture of 1 part Portland cement, 3 parts ball bearings and water to make a medium thick mud. Attach a threaded 12mm eye through the top, put some really big nuts loose on the shank, fill with the concrete mix. Re-attach back, wait a week. You have now upgraded a not very good doorstop to a reasonably good mud anchor.
I said nothing about the location of nuclear plants (in fact my local plant at Hinckley Point is in a pretty good place and I supported its upgrade.) There are plenty of good places...isolated enough to provide security and reduce the impact of a major disaster, good access to cooling water, terrain not too difficult for pylons. A nuclear weapons facility, on the other hand, is NOT a nuclear reactor. It is a place where physically very small subcritical masses of plutonium get assembled into bombs along with very large quantities of tritium, where quantities of interesting potential neutron emitters are stored, and where there are significant quantities of very high flame propagation speed conventional explosives. The USA has more sense than to stick them into what, by US standards, is a densely populated urban area.
An article in The Guardian this weekend is about the people who live closer than a block to the Dungeness nuclear plant. They like it because there is excellent security for them and their children, it is peaceful, and they have lots of space. (It is also pretty safe).
On the other hand, the UK (in a fit of what I can only describe as mindblowing insanity) has its nuclear weapons plant in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas in the country, and indeed of the planet. A really good disaster at Burgefield would lay waste to some of the most expensive housing in the UK and cause the evacuation of millions of people. Compared to living in the relevant part of the Home Counties, I would far rather live next to the perimeter fence at Dungeness.
People are simply piss-poor at assessing risk, or the entire population for ten kilometres around Burgefield would be marching on Parliament, demanding the cancellation of Trident, and engaging in massive civil disobedience.
I didn't want to get caught up in writing a long essay on Buddhist ideas, especially as I am no kind of expert, but I am glad that someone has provided this explanation (though of course I can't up-mod it.) I have been called out for putting my own interpretation on the Buddhist teachings (which is what we all do...but never mind) but I would like to add that this idea that consciousness, mind, soul or whatever you want to call it is in fact an emergent property of the universe with its own persistence is to be found in many places, including the novel Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.
"Reincarnation" is I feel too simplistic a term for the ideas in different Indian religions. The Jains, for instance, have a doctrine of reincarnation in which the thing that is reincarnated has no memory of its previous existence and passes through the chain of created beings from a stone to a God and back again, over and over. It is not reincarnation as the majority of Westerners imagine it.
Interestingly to me, Quakers (who call one another "Friend") do sometimes use the term as a kind of passive aggression as you do here.
The short answer is that I can and do deny that reincarnation is fundamental to Buddhism. Fundamental to Buddhism is that by right thinking and right practices we can be freed from our illusions about the world, and when we become free we see that there is no afterlife and no reincarnation, and can therefore be free of suffering. I think you are confusing certain versions of Buddhism with the teachings of the Buddha. The exact same with Christianity: You can be a fundamentalist as, sadly, so many Americans seem to be, and absorb the whole mythos and optionally the post-Roman accretions or the Protestant obsessions with complicated sin and justification. Or you can believe that Jesus was a great prophet and that his teachings can be the basis of an ethical belief system that helps people to live well - which fits the world picture of a lot of Episcopalians, Unitarians and Quakers.
As (as I note above) a Quaker and a Zen Buddhist, I think your thinking is in exactly the silo that led to that observation "The Arhats are like a dirty lavatory". You think that the accidental is fundamental.
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A converse example is the car industry, where automation is unavoidable because the assemblies are too heavy to be easily manipulated by people. The result is that cars get made in the USA, Europe and Japan.
I suspect that whoever cited $1400 to make an iPad in the US was either manufacturing-illiterate or had a financial incentive to misrepresent the facts. I would be surprised if assembly in the US added more than $25 to the cost, and unsurprised to find it was more like $5 when everything was taken into account.
That said, I suspect that globalisation is heading into a lot of flak at the moment. There has always been a conflict between the perceived strategic needs of the US and what American corporations will do. In WW2 they were the begin with supplying both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with arms and technology although it was not in the interests of the USA to do so. You can see the transfer of manufacturing to China as hastening the downfall of the USA, but corporate executives will simply buy citizenship of whatever country offers the most benefits to them; they have no loyalty whatsoever to any particular country.
So no, you will never get any piece of electronics nowadays that can be called "ethically sourced", but it is just about possible to decide which is most in your interest to buy, assuming that you have, or want, to live in one country.
For an inhabitant of CA, that is probably Apple. For anybody else, YMMV.
Anyway, thanks for the epithets.
Well, the three water treatment specialists I know include two PhDs and a mere MSc, who between them have done research into everything from rural water purification in Africa to the adhesion of bacterial colonies on permanent water hardness deposition in domestic pipes. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
OT but possibly of interest: the daughter of a friend of ours studied environmental biology at university. Her mother wondered what use it could possibly be. As a researcher into water treatment, she is now into her second paid postgraduate placement with the prospect of a very well paid international job at the end of it. Oil may be sexier, but water is actually the more important resource.
I am afraid that my opinion of the IQ of the average /. reader just dropped an infinitesimal amount.
In effect you're saying we need correlates for content quality. I imagine there are several of these: word frequency, especially based around clusters might do for a start. What would be really good is something that could produce an analysis of the use of technical words and meta-technical words, which would go some way to differentiate useful content from sales and marketing fluff.
Gould was always very keen to make people understand that evolution does not necessarily involve greater intelligence, strength or complexity as part of "fitness". Google is doing a kind of environmental step change will will result in rapid forced evolution among system gamers. It will be interesting to see which way it turns out: ever more complex strategies trying to game the system, or a reduction to simple but crude techniques.
Years ago Hilaire Belloc made a rather good joke about many apparently worthy causes actually being the work of the "Society for the prevention of annoyances to the rich". This seems to be what is going on nowadays - the Internet is allowing (relatively) poor people to cause annoyance to the rich and they are trying to stop it. But, sadly for them, it is simply not true that there are no honest lawyers.
Speaking as someone who has done research into corrosion resistance and plating, it doesn't work like that. The corrosion resistance of "gold" plating depends on the performance of the nickel layer underneath. There are many engineering applications for which gold plating is unsuitable. It is good for connectors because its resistance doesn't depend on an oxide layer, unlike chromium. As for gold alloys, don't go there. The metallurgy of gold alloys, except with copper and silver, is not something you would want to have to work with to create corrosion resistant alloys based on strong materials. If there are elements that I would like to see available cheaply, they are the lanthanides, copper, nickel and cobalt. Cheap nickel metal hydride batteries and cheap efficient DC motors along with cheap solar power would do a lot to improve the prospects for an orderly transition to an oil free world. Cheap gold would achieve very little.
OK, perhaps slight trolling, but this is an example of why, on everything from evolution to climate change, I prefer the views of scientists to those of politicians or the religious authorities. This is an example of research happening exactly as it is intended to. Initial unexpected result, investigation, experimental flaw, better experiment. It creates a warm glow in the callous, hardened bit of my brain that was once a young, enthusiastic researcher.
Our lecturer on addictive drugs told us that in the UK, until the law changed as a result of pressure from the US, a major component of heroin addicts were medical professionals who took it to dampen the anxiety caused by the responsibility of their jobs. A significant number of physicians and senior nurses were addicts. Because they knew what they were doing and had easy access, nobody noticed. There were also a lot of alcoholic physicians whose performance would have been far more seriously affected - but alcoholism is still seen in many quarters as acceptable.
Rich, bored people with personal problems can get prescription opiate drugs (Michael Jackson being an obvious example.) Poor people with similar problems turn to heroin, which they cannot afford without turning to crime. Since heroin is dirt cheap to make, it might just as well be made available cheaply to them. But our duty of social care means we should work with the people who take heroin to try and resolve the problems that lead to it in the first place.
Of course, that's a rational socialist strategy, which is why it can't be adopted by US administrations; there is too much money in the supply of illegal drugs and the operation of prisons. Since the present American system severely harms the competitiveness of the American economy, the rest of the world might think it has little interest in bringing about change there.
Personally, I feel that the European parliament is far more likely to do the right thing than the British one, simply because (a) it is far more diverse and (b) it has members from countries who know that war is a really bad thing.
In my part of town, pv panels are quite common. I can see three sets just from my bedroom window (mine are above it). It's happening.
The Meccano construction kit, which was metal, had a "No. 10" set which was really aimed at universities and engineering companies. I once used one to build a test rig for a UL-type test in which a hot wire had to be pressed against an electronic assembly with a controlled force. It took a couple of hours to build something that would have taken a week for the machine shop to fabricate.
With an interconnected driverless car system, people will get income from driverless taxis that will efficiently pick up and put down shared fares. Current buses are inefficient because they follow fixed routes and set off without knowing what the demand will be. If you only have, in effect, to share a quarter of a car, everything becomes much more affordable.
You do realise that driverless cars and renewable energy have almost unlimited potential upsides? This makes it very difficult to provide a standard ROI calculation, just as the "investors" failed to realise that the events to which they were assigning low probabilities (collapse of housing market, for instance) had potentially unlimited downsides, and so conventional risk assessment no longer worked.
I would thoroughly approve if Apple spent $100 billion trying to destroy Android. The legal profession would spend a lot of the money on expensive consumer goods, so some of it would end up back in the economy instead of being part of a notional company value. Apple would demonstrate that it had run out of ideas and was not longer a fit custodian of all that money. If companies cannot work out what to do with piles of cash, they should find a way to get them to people who do know.
At one time the challenge was mechanical - mechanical gearshifts and brakes were just too hard to control. Since the first Prius, that is a solved problem. Now a car can easily be operated by an automated platform, the problem is to guide it safely.
Once that is solved, there are many new opportunities. Optimum guidance; optimum traffic patterning, looking for people who would like to share your journey all become objects of research.
If Google cracks driverless cars, it will change the developed world. It will affect town planning, investment patterns, and the way people live. And of course it will transform the car industry beyond recognition.
This is one area where Google could leverage its core technology to become so huge it could buy Apple to provide in-car entertainment.
You just need those funny Torx screwdrivers, and about 15kg of a mixture of 1 part Portland cement, 3 parts ball bearings and water to make a medium thick mud. Attach a threaded 12mm eye through the top, put some really big nuts loose on the shank, fill with the concrete mix. Re-attach back, wait a week. You have now upgraded a not very good doorstop to a reasonably good mud anchor.
Be careful of making straw men; they burn easily.
On the other hand, the UK (in a fit of what I can only describe as mindblowing insanity) has its nuclear weapons plant in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas in the country, and indeed of the planet. A really good disaster at Burgefield would lay waste to some of the most expensive housing in the UK and cause the evacuation of millions of people. Compared to living in the relevant part of the Home Counties, I would far rather live next to the perimeter fence at Dungeness.
People are simply piss-poor at assessing risk, or the entire population for ten kilometres around Burgefield would be marching on Parliament, demanding the cancellation of Trident, and engaging in massive civil disobedience.
"Reincarnation" is I feel too simplistic a term for the ideas in different Indian religions. The Jains, for instance, have a doctrine of reincarnation in which the thing that is reincarnated has no memory of its previous existence and passes through the chain of created beings from a stone to a God and back again, over and over. It is not reincarnation as the majority of Westerners imagine it.
Interestingly to me, Quakers (who call one another "Friend") do sometimes use the term as a kind of passive aggression as you do here.
The short answer is that I can and do deny that reincarnation is fundamental to Buddhism. Fundamental to Buddhism is that by right thinking and right practices we can be freed from our illusions about the world, and when we become free we see that there is no afterlife and no reincarnation, and can therefore be free of suffering. I think you are confusing certain versions of Buddhism with the teachings of the Buddha. The exact same with Christianity: You can be a fundamentalist as, sadly, so many Americans seem to be, and absorb the whole mythos and optionally the post-Roman accretions or the Protestant obsessions with complicated sin and justification. Or you can believe that Jesus was a great prophet and that his teachings can be the basis of an ethical belief system that helps people to live well - which fits the world picture of a lot of Episcopalians, Unitarians and Quakers.
As (as I note above) a Quaker and a Zen Buddhist, I think your thinking is in exactly the silo that led to that observation "The Arhats are like a dirty lavatory". You think that the accidental is fundamental.