I can tell you right now that it is not outside the realm of possibility to engineer viruses that kill people who don't meet a certain genetic template. More to the point, if you have a gene for X, it kills you or sterilizes you. "Gene X" could be anything from skin color to blood type to a gene predisposing you to breast cancer or familial hyperlipidemia.
This is certainly a frightening prospect. But the most frightening is a killer virus targeting skin color or other racial phenotype. The problem with doing this, ISTM, is that there simply is no genetically pure race. Say white supremacists create a gene that kills black people. They'll find they're killing a few of their own (how rich an irony that would be)! Because we're simply too genetically related to target "race" that specifically.
...when "double the prevailing wage" is still far below the national poverty line for that nation.
Simply not true, at least in the case of China (and very unlikely to be true in any country, if you think about it for a second). This table shows World Bank poverty estimates for every country in the world. If you look up China, you will see that well under 10% of the population is under the poverty line. The prevailing wage is what the median worker makes, and clearly even this amount if over the poverty line. So double this wage would be well over.
It is the responsibility of the government to enforce minimum standards for employment (both over there and over here).
I suppose by "the government" you mean the U.S. government, since clearly the Chinese government can't do much (which was my point). In a sense, you're right; since Apple's headquarters are here, the U.S. government could act in this case. But it would still decrease Apple's employment. I don't understand why you or anyone would consider this an "empty threat" - as you say, Apple is driven by (as you would say) "greed" (or as I would say, profit) and wants to maximize their return on investment. If the cost of labor goes up, Apple will require that average productivity increase, which means (given that not all workers are identically productive) that employment must decrease.
Unless you come up with any particularly new and enlightening points, I'll let you get the last word here.
When I read the title of this book, I expected it to be about efficient one-pass algorithms, i.e. ones that you can do quickly on a stream of network information without using a ton of memory or CPU time per packet. I took a course in grad school a few years back about this, and it's a pretty interesting (and relatively recent) subject. You can read more about it here (home page of my prof): http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~muthu/.
But their choice isn't "work here for a pittance or starve". Their choice is "work here for double the prevailing wage or work on a farm for a pittance." Don't you think this changes your analysis a bit?
It also changes your analysis if people Q (I suppose you consider yourself a Q), while acting with the best of intentions, are actually more likely to put the plant workers back on those farms instead of raising their standard of living. I realize you think you can avoid this by enacting some sort of global regulations via the UN or WTO or some other paper tiger, but don't you realize that even if you did this, you'd just decrease global employment? Unless you nationalize all industries everywhere and run them according to your preferences, you simply can't make them hire workers for more than they're willing to pay.
Thanks for the discussion! It's a pleasure to engage someone who isn't interested in flamewars. Too bad there's probably not a single other person on the planet reading this by now.
Quick note on the Lump of Labor Fallacy, and then I'll sign off: It may be true that shorter hours promote more jobs, but not the number you would expect. IOW, if I have 200 people working 50 hours, and shorten the work week to 40 hours, I would expect to create fewer than 50 new jobs. I might create 20, but overall productivity has still decreased.
My theory is not at all fringe - it's backed by several famous economists, including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. I will grant you that it is not management theory, but the proposition is economic, ISTM. Your argument even has a name, the Lump of Labor Fallacy, which you can read more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallac y or simply Google it. (Or, if you really want to, I highly recommend Hayek's work on the subject - or any subject; he was a polymath.)
I fear, btw, that part of the problem here is that you are repeatedly misstating the facts. We are not talking about Chinese workers constantly working themselves to exhaustion (and if it were, and it were clearly in Apple's best interest to just hire more workers, why wouldn't they? Can you think of any possible rationale?). We're talking about occasional overtime. True, the standard work day is stated as 60 hours, which sounds long. But who says that 60 hours is automatically less productive than 40? For every industry, for every worker? 60 hours used to be common in Western countries, only a century ago.
There is a further factual error in your previous post, which is that Scandinavian countries enjoy a higher standard of living than North Americans. They do not, in fact. They may have more vacation time, by and large, but per capita they earn about 80-85%, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, of the U.S. (which earns a fair bit more than Canadians, so the gap is narrower for y'all up there). You may be thinking of those "quality of life" measurements which arbitrarily assign value to vacations and the environment and so on and conclude that Scandinavians have the highest "quality of life" in the world. Maybe. But the analysis is clearly unscientific.
Frankly, it strikes me as a bit silly to be comparing post-industrial Western countries to China, anyway. What is our hypothetical agrarian $300/year Chinese worker go to do on his extra vacation time? He's probably used to working 80 hours a week on a farm, so 60 hours a week for better pay and working conditions must seem like a slice of paradise.
I would like to see data that shows that when you limit the work week, unemployment falls as a result. Since that's effectively the argument you're making.
I agree that the labor laws exist for the purpose of decreasing unemployment (and promoting egalitarianism, which they undoubtedly do - everyone becomes poorer together). My doubt is whether they actually do this.
You are conveniently forgetting that especially in developing economies overtime for one person means poverty for another.
Actually, I'm not forgetting it: I'm denying it, and I challenge you to show me data that this is true.
Suppose Apple had not opened a plant in China. Then neither X nor Y would be working there. As it is, worker X got a job there and is now making more money. Worker Y did not and is no worse off than before. If X works overtime, this still does not make Y's situation any worse than status quo, although clearly X's is much better.
Forcing Apple to hire Y will eventually, given enough forcing, cause Apple to say "screw it" and shut the plant down entirely. In which case both X and Y are back to square one.
Yes, but my point is that the people you claim are being exploited are not being exploited... except perhaps by China. Apple is giving them opportunities they never would have had otherwise. How is that exploitation? Would it be better if they continued to work on rice farms?
People seem to think that American companies are really screwing over foreign workers by coming in and giving them jobs at double the prevailing wages in their country. And not that it's related, but how are companies screwing over illegal immigrants by giving them jobs? The immigrants don't seem to mind.
I guess I look at it thusly: If an entity X is doing something and the people P directly affected by it willingly participate, then when other people Q complain that X is not being nice to P, I get confused.
This is pretty cool stuff. Makes me wonder how exactly it works (IANAC). Suppose you set up the lattice and then dropped a new molecule right in the middle of an existing pore. Presumably it would be attracted to one of the edges, but what then? Does the whole lattice get rearranged as the new molecule is shuffled into place? Where does the energy come from for all of that?
So you're comparing working overtime - voluntarily - to slavery (or rather, to indentured servitude)? Surely there's some corollary to Godwin's Law that applies here!
Look, it's one thing if American companies are working incahoots with foreign governments to corral workers into camps and make them work for wages that are low even for those countries. But that isn't what's happening. What's happening is that American companies come in and open plants where they pay maybe twice the prevailing wage, and workers line up around the block to work there. If you force the plants to pay more, they're simply going to close the plant and find a more hospitable country.
This isn't to say that abuses are nonexistent, but the level of wages is not one of them.
That's kind of an important difference, though. I can make my $300/year go a lot farther in China than I can make the same amount go here, and that illegal immigrant is living here, which is the whole point of being of immigrant.
The $300/year worker in China is still poor, but you'd be in abject poverty on $300/month in the US.
I'm confused. Guy wants to work more and make more money, when he's currently dirt poor. Apple is (you allege) circumventing a tyrannical system that doesn't let the guy do it... but it's Apple that's being exploitative? What about the Chinese government? They're being humane by preventing the guy from working overtime? Gee, thanks.
Well, not really, but I can see how you might think so.
Let's take some product which is licensed per CPU and consider who is buying this product. At the high end, you've got your Wal-Marts, Googles, etc., who are installing the product on thousands of CPUs. They pay tens of millions of dollars for the product. To balance them you have maybe thousands of customers who are installing the product on a handful (1, 2 or 4) CPUs each. Together they pay tens of millions. So the big guys and the little fish are each paying about 50% of the total revenue. For simplicity, let's say this is exactly the case.
Now suppose the product is licensed on a per-company basis, with an equal amount charged per company. If revenues are to stay anywhere close to the same, the amount charged is going to have to roughly double. I don't know about you, but if my company had to pay twice as much for licenses, we'd be a lot pickier about which (and how many) licenses we bought!
So this pricing model essentially allows software companies to charge big, greedy, rich customers like Wal-Mart a lot so that they can charge poor, friendly mom-and-pop customers a little. Would you call still this practice "greed"?
The fact is that the USA implements a representative democracy.
Of course it does. But they aren't equal, and you can have an non-representative democracy without resorting to authoritarianism.
Civil liberties where historically the root cause of the "fork" from authoritarian forms of governments.
Well, not really (cf Magna Carta - civil liberties or a bunch of tax-oppressed barons? cf 1776 - civil liberties or a bunch of tax-oppressed rich colonists? hmmm... maybe the "fork" has to do with taxes?). But it isn't important. Because there is no right to privacy in the Constitution (or at least not until 1973).
Note the difference between civil liberties and the right to privacy. The OP is not saying "civil liberties are important for a democracy" (a statement with which I agree), he is saying "government transparency and personal privacy equals democracy", which is absurd. Not that there's no connection between the two, but asserting equality goes way too far.
Those are supposed to be definitions? You failed PoliSci, didn't you?
For future reference: Democratic != Representative; "free access to information" is important but not the only differentiating factor distinguishing democracy from authoritarianism; the "right to privacy" has nothing to do with form of government. Other than that, your analysis is penetrating and insightful.
Not fair! I want to be able to keep all my data private and my accounts separate, but also get all the benefits of letting Google see all my data and keeping my accounts in one place. We can send a man to the moon but we can't do this?!
Yes, that is technically true - the beam of light is not a stright line. However, in this case it happens not to matter (given a couple of assumptions about the speed of rotation and the radius of the ball). The beam of light will actually form a segment of a spiral. But tangency with the ball is still a well-defined term, and as the beam approaches tangency, the point of intersection will still be moving along the ball infinitely fast. This is actually one reason why I chose to use a ball instead of a flat wall (the other reason is that for the example to work with a flat wall, the wall would have to be infinitely long, whereas the ball can be nice and finite).
Slashdot Mirror
This is certainly a frightening prospect. But the most frightening is a killer virus targeting skin color or other racial phenotype. The problem with doing this, ISTM, is that there simply is no genetically pure race. Say white supremacists create a gene that kills black people. They'll find they're killing a few of their own (how rich an irony that would be)! Because we're simply too genetically related to target "race" that specifically.
At least, I hope so.
Yep, that's what I always look for when I'm sifting through resumes.
Simply not true, at least in the case of China (and very unlikely to be true in any country, if you think about it for a second). This table shows World Bank poverty estimates for every country in the world. If you look up China, you will see that well under 10% of the population is under the poverty line. The prevailing wage is what the median worker makes, and clearly even this amount if over the poverty line. So double this wage would be well over.
I suppose by "the government" you mean the U.S. government, since clearly the Chinese government can't do much (which was my point). In a sense, you're right; since Apple's headquarters are here, the U.S. government could act in this case. But it would still decrease Apple's employment. I don't understand why you or anyone would consider this an "empty threat" - as you say, Apple is driven by (as you would say) "greed" (or as I would say, profit) and wants to maximize their return on investment. If the cost of labor goes up, Apple will require that average productivity increase, which means (given that not all workers are identically productive) that employment must decrease.
Unless you come up with any particularly new and enlightening points, I'll let you get the last word here.
When I read the title of this book, I expected it to be about efficient one-pass algorithms, i.e. ones that you can do quickly on a stream of network information without using a ton of memory or CPU time per packet. I took a course in grad school a few years back about this, and it's a pretty interesting (and relatively recent) subject. You can read more about it here (home page of my prof): http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~muthu/.
Yeah, well, if you can do this without destroying a small town you're going to be very, very rich.
But their choice isn't "work here for a pittance or starve". Their choice is "work here for double the prevailing wage or work on a farm for a pittance." Don't you think this changes your analysis a bit?
It also changes your analysis if people Q (I suppose you consider yourself a Q), while acting with the best of intentions, are actually more likely to put the plant workers back on those farms instead of raising their standard of living. I realize you think you can avoid this by enacting some sort of global regulations via the UN or WTO or some other paper tiger, but don't you realize that even if you did this, you'd just decrease global employment? Unless you nationalize all industries everywhere and run them according to your preferences, you simply can't make them hire workers for more than they're willing to pay.
Thanks for the discussion! It's a pleasure to engage someone who isn't interested in flamewars. Too bad there's probably not a single other person on the planet reading this by now.
Quick note on the Lump of Labor Fallacy, and then I'll sign off: It may be true that shorter hours promote more jobs, but not the number you would expect. IOW, if I have 200 people working 50 hours, and shorten the work week to 40 hours, I would expect to create fewer than 50 new jobs. I might create 20, but overall productivity has still decreased.
Well, thanks for starting, at least.
My theory is not at all fringe - it's backed by several famous economists, including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. I will grant you that it is not management theory, but the proposition is economic, ISTM. Your argument even has a name, the Lump of Labor Fallacy, which you can read more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallac y or simply Google it. (Or, if you really want to, I highly recommend Hayek's work on the subject - or any subject; he was a polymath.)
I fear, btw, that part of the problem here is that you are repeatedly misstating the facts. We are not talking about Chinese workers constantly working themselves to exhaustion (and if it were, and it were clearly in Apple's best interest to just hire more workers, why wouldn't they? Can you think of any possible rationale?). We're talking about occasional overtime. True, the standard work day is stated as 60 hours, which sounds long. But who says that 60 hours is automatically less productive than 40? For every industry, for every worker? 60 hours used to be common in Western countries, only a century ago.
There is a further factual error in your previous post, which is that Scandinavian countries enjoy a higher standard of living than North Americans. They do not, in fact. They may have more vacation time, by and large, but per capita they earn about 80-85%, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, of the U.S. (which earns a fair bit more than Canadians, so the gap is narrower for y'all up there). You may be thinking of those "quality of life" measurements which arbitrarily assign value to vacations and the environment and so on and conclude that Scandinavians have the highest "quality of life" in the world. Maybe. But the analysis is clearly unscientific.
Frankly, it strikes me as a bit silly to be comparing post-industrial Western countries to China, anyway. What is our hypothetical agrarian $300/year Chinese worker go to do on his extra vacation time? He's probably used to working 80 hours a week on a farm, so 60 hours a week for better pay and working conditions must seem like a slice of paradise.
I would like to see data that shows that when you limit the work week, unemployment falls as a result. Since that's effectively the argument you're making.
I agree that the labor laws exist for the purpose of decreasing unemployment (and promoting egalitarianism, which they undoubtedly do - everyone becomes poorer together). My doubt is whether they actually do this.
Actually, I'm not forgetting it: I'm denying it, and I challenge you to show me data that this is true.
Suppose Apple had not opened a plant in China. Then neither X nor Y would be working there. As it is, worker X got a job there and is now making more money. Worker Y did not and is no worse off than before. If X works overtime, this still does not make Y's situation any worse than status quo, although clearly X's is much better.
Forcing Apple to hire Y will eventually, given enough forcing, cause Apple to say "screw it" and shut the plant down entirely. In which case both X and Y are back to square one.
True, it makes sense that a tyrannical government would enact tyrannical laws. I applaud their consistency.
Yes, but my point is that the people you claim are being exploited are not being exploited... except perhaps by China. Apple is giving them opportunities they never would have had otherwise. How is that exploitation? Would it be better if they continued to work on rice farms?
People seem to think that American companies are really screwing over foreign workers by coming in and giving them jobs at double the prevailing wages in their country. And not that it's related, but how are companies screwing over illegal immigrants by giving them jobs? The immigrants don't seem to mind.
I guess I look at it thusly: If an entity X is doing something and the people P directly affected by it willingly participate, then when other people Q complain that X is not being nice to P, I get confused.
This is pretty cool stuff. Makes me wonder how exactly it works (IANAC). Suppose you set up the lattice and then dropped a new molecule right in the middle of an existing pore. Presumably it would be attracted to one of the edges, but what then? Does the whole lattice get rearranged as the new molecule is shuffled into place? Where does the energy come from for all of that?
Way more interesting than a salt crystal, btw.
So you're comparing working overtime - voluntarily - to slavery (or rather, to indentured servitude)? Surely there's some corollary to Godwin's Law that applies here!
Look, it's one thing if American companies are working incahoots with foreign governments to corral workers into camps and make them work for wages that are low even for those countries. But that isn't what's happening. What's happening is that American companies come in and open plants where they pay maybe twice the prevailing wage, and workers line up around the block to work there. If you force the plants to pay more, they're simply going to close the plant and find a more hospitable country.
This isn't to say that abuses are nonexistent, but the level of wages is not one of them.
That's kind of an important difference, though. I can make my $300/year go a lot farther in China than I can make the same amount go here, and that illegal immigrant is living here, which is the whole point of being of immigrant.
The $300/year worker in China is still poor, but you'd be in abject poverty on $300/month in the US.
I'm confused. Guy wants to work more and make more money, when he's currently dirt poor. Apple is (you allege) circumventing a tyrannical system that doesn't let the guy do it... but it's Apple that's being exploitative? What about the Chinese government? They're being humane by preventing the guy from working overtime? Gee, thanks.
I, alas, have only a PSAT-solver. Sigh.
True, it is sort of confusing... a "dry run" could be a real trip to Mars, right?
Well, not really, but I can see how you might think so.
Let's take some product which is licensed per CPU and consider who is buying this product. At the high end, you've got your Wal-Marts, Googles, etc., who are installing the product on thousands of CPUs. They pay tens of millions of dollars for the product. To balance them you have maybe thousands of customers who are installing the product on a handful (1, 2 or 4) CPUs each. Together they pay tens of millions. So the big guys and the little fish are each paying about 50% of the total revenue. For simplicity, let's say this is exactly the case.
Now suppose the product is licensed on a per-company basis, with an equal amount charged per company. If revenues are to stay anywhere close to the same, the amount charged is going to have to roughly double. I don't know about you, but if my company had to pay twice as much for licenses, we'd be a lot pickier about which (and how many) licenses we bought!
So this pricing model essentially allows software companies to charge big, greedy, rich customers like Wal-Mart a lot so that they can charge poor, friendly mom-and-pop customers a little. Would you call still this practice "greed"?
Of course it does. But they aren't equal, and you can have an non-representative democracy without resorting to authoritarianism.
Well, not really (cf Magna Carta - civil liberties or a bunch of tax-oppressed barons? cf 1776 - civil liberties or a bunch of tax-oppressed rich colonists? hmmm... maybe the "fork" has to do with taxes?). But it isn't important. Because there is no right to privacy in the Constitution (or at least not until 1973).
Note the difference between civil liberties and the right to privacy. The OP is not saying "civil liberties are important for a democracy" (a statement with which I agree), he is saying "government transparency and personal privacy equals democracy", which is absurd. Not that there's no connection between the two, but asserting equality goes way too far.
Those are supposed to be definitions? You failed PoliSci, didn't you?
For future reference: Democratic != Representative; "free access to information" is important but not the only differentiating factor distinguishing democracy from authoritarianism; the "right to privacy" has nothing to do with form of government. Other than that, your analysis is penetrating and insightful.
Not fair! I want to be able to keep all my data private and my accounts separate, but also get all the benefits of letting Google see all my data and keeping my accounts in one place. We can send a man to the moon but we can't do this?!
For those of you who don't read Farsi, it's simple multiple choice:
Question: Are the US and Israel are trying to trigger a new world war?
(a) Yes.
(b) Definitely.
(c) The Great Satan must die!
(d) No.
(If you chose (d), please supply your name and home address here to receive free literature: _____________________.)
I'll take hyperbole for $1,000, Alex.
Yes, that is technically true - the beam of light is not a stright line. However, in this case it happens not to matter (given a couple of assumptions about the speed of rotation and the radius of the ball). The beam of light will actually form a segment of a spiral. But tangency with the ball is still a well-defined term, and as the beam approaches tangency, the point of intersection will still be moving along the ball infinitely fast. This is actually one reason why I chose to use a ball instead of a flat wall (the other reason is that for the example to work with a flat wall, the wall would have to be infinitely long, whereas the ball can be nice and finite).