I frankly don't give a fuck what the kids call anything. They can talk to me when they can hack their way out of a paper bag. I respect skills, not age. Old, young, male, female, black, white - none of that matters the least bit. All I care is if people use their brains, or waste them.
And doing things differently just because you feel a pressing need to differentiate yourself from the generation of your parents is a waste. The social psychology behind that is quite interesting, but all that energy could be used in so much more productive ways.
A man who has a "happily married life" does not lie to his spouse and participate in affairs without her knowledge. It's as simple as that.
Nothing in humans is simple. You do not know the details of this persons life. Maybe you are right and he is deluded. Maybe a choice quote doesn't tell a persons life story.
Whatever is between his wife and him is between them and not your business nor mine. Maybe his marriage was not always happy. Maybe they just restored it from completely broken. Sure he should have been honest with her, but do you know all the circumstances so you can judge, or are you taking all your information from a three-liner in an online paper?
Should his wife and kids suffer because of his actions? Probably not -- but they'd probably be better off in the long run knowing what kind of scumbag they're trusting
Right. Because human beings are so simple that we can classify them with binary parameters.
I'll let you know where I come from. Many years ago, I was betrayed. I hit her in the face and left, the only time in my life I've ever hit a woman. But I'm also smart enough to ask myself why it happened and how much of it was my fault (pro hint: If you answer 0% you are always wrong). I understand that people are humans and nobody is the villain of their own life story.
I don't judge this guy without knowing a lot more about what was going on in his life. Maybe he's a scumbag, maybe he's just weak, maybe I could even understand him. The point is: I don't know and I find it disgusting how we judge other people from three lines of text.
I think having an affair would be one of the most emotionally hurtful things one person can do to another.
I see you are new to the human race. Pro hint: We are a lot more creative than that when it comes to hurting each other, including emotionally.
I'm not saying it's low on the list. But the most hurtful? Nah.
We override raw instincts with reason and intellect all the time.
And sometimes our intellect is right and sometimes it is wrong. Just "reason" is not a sufficient reason for superiority. Again, I'm not saying we should shut down our brains, on the contrary. But do not underestimate instincts - they made us survive these past million years.
The math just doesn't let polygamy work all that well, so we've deemed it bad for society and outlawed it.
That is true to some extent. Even in societies that allow polygamy it is in practice limited to a) the rich who can afford multiple partners and b) economic security. The most common case for muslim men to have multiple women is apparently that a man dies and his brother marries his wife to give her and the kids a home. In a society where she's not allowed to work that's pretty much the only way to ensure your family genes in that branch survive.
However, in most poly talk we always assume it's a 1:n relationship. In modern polyamoury, the relationships are usually m:n so the relative number of partners in each gender is not of importance because all involved have multiple partners. Will it work? I don't think so, it will remain a niche, because it requires so much communication and emotional maturity from all involved members that I simply can't see it as a working model for society as a whole. But I personally know enough people who live now or temporarily lived in the past in such arrangements that it seems to me it's no better or worse than traditional monogamy.
To come back to your point: I think we should stop regulating relationships with laws. Our society has advanced enough that the previous arguments - mostly economical - are now moot.
The complaints being reported here suggest that where Munich has fallen down is in training. People literally have no idea how to use their computers.
The people writing this complaint are from the CSU. That is our equivalent of the worst part of the republican party. In ideology and stupidity. They don't want to understand how to use their computers, because computers are witchcraft.
Nah, I will not argue. I simply remember a study I once read and I couldn't even find it again without a big effort.
But I live in the city, and near the center. When I moved here, I actually sold my car in part because I spent so much time looking for (scarce) parking spaces, and then usually found them so far away, that I could just as well walk to the bus or underground. At certain days and times, it's so pointless to even look that I parked out of the area and once I actually took the underground for one station because that's how far away I had to park my car.
That's anecdotal evidence, of course. The point is that most cars in the world are parking most of the time, and that alone is a huge waste of space and resources. We could easily move the same amount of people with a fraction of the cars, traffic, pollution, everything. If it were better organized.
Self-driving rental cars are a great way to let the system self-organize.
This is what I've been saying for more than a year now. It should become clear to everyone by now.
We have short-time rental car companies in the city already, where you can pick up a car wherever you find it (your smartphone will tell you the nearest one), drive to where you want and simply leave it there.
This system has only 2 disadvantages: You need to find a car at point A and a parking space at point B.
A self-driving car would not have this problem. Call it with your smartphone, whenever I checked for one there was one within 5 minutes driving distance, and most times within 2 minutes when you're near the center. At the destination, it simply drives itself to the nearest parking spot, or to the next person.
There was a statistic that said 30% of the traffic in the center of cities is cars looking for parking space. Imagine what would happen if we would eliminate that traffic.
I want self-driving taxis. They can be fully electric (when empty, go and recharge, there are enough others to replace you). This will revolutionize urban travel.
The only effect web ads have on me, at least until the IP shows up in my hosts list, is to slow pages down.
Wrong. Advertisement works, that is why it's a billion dollar industry. You think you don't read billboards and ignore other ads? Think again. Your brain picks them up long before it even tells your conscious mind about it. Filtering it out is an intentional process that takes effort (tiny, but effort). And images and emotions are processed by your mind if you want it or not.
It is pretty much the only way to fund "free" services of all kinds that have large reach but no direct income
No, it is not.
Advertisement created this idea of free services being paid by advertisement. There was a different time in this world, when you paid for your newspaper at the kiosk, and if you wanted to have a website for your journal, you would pay a hosting company.
There were also shared-cost services long before things became commerzialised. Back in FIDOnet days, email was transported by phone lines, and a bunch of people would come together, one of them set up a small server that would do the long-distance delivery and the others would pay him a buck or two a month to cover his phone bills while they got their mail for free or very cheap at local rates.
There is no reason that Facebook could not charge for its service. Except that the advertisement industry has created the concept of everything being free. Nowadays, having a pay service is not viable, not for any sane reasons, but simply because of this parlour trick.
Radio and TV in the time when they were sent by radio waves (and not digitally via cable) are about the only things where there are actual technical reasons why a pay service is not going to work. You can use encryption, but in pre-ubiquituous-computing times, it dramatically raises costs for new customers who need a hardware box.
But those times are over. Today, I challenge you to name one service that for technical or other reasons that were not artificially created (i.e. the expectation of customers that it should be free) has to use advertisement. I don't think you can. Everything that can be monetized by advertisement could be monetized in other ways. The "there are no alternatives" claim is a damned lie, in politics as well as in business.
philosopher Thomas Wells is out to change the way you think about Google and its ilk.
Not really, no. He's just saying what I've been thinking (and saying, but since I'm not a reknown philosopher, few listen) for many years.
If you know anything at all about the mind and the brain, you understand that attention isn't free. That even "filtering out" advertisement (and we don't really, we just consume it unconsciously) takes up valuable mind-effort. That living in a city is stressful in parts because our brains are constantly busy, busy, busy with the environment, running a million-year-old program that constantly scans the area for potential threats or mates, and advertisement intentionally triggers those subroutines all the time (why do you think "sex sells"?).
Advertisement is a massive drain of resources, and the best thing I've ever done for myself was to throw out my television and stop listening to the radio. At least the inside of my home is mostly ad-free.
Heck, we aren't talking about some banana republic here. Or are we?
I see you're not up to date with current german politics. We are.
Merkel doesn't give a flying fuck because she really doesn't give a fuck about anything. She was trained very well how to get into and stay in power, and that's the only thing she's doing. Every move of her makes sense if you analyze it from that perspective. This is no different - big trouble with the USA is not a career-improving path, but the people of Germany are too forgiving and will let her and her party get away with all this shit.
Ironically, I large stay away from complex CSS. But "mobile-ready" largely is complex CSS and Javascript and three other things, for breakpoints and responsiveness.
I don't care if my site ranks last when you Google on your smartphone. If I didn't design it to be mobile-friendly, your mobile device is welcome to stay away.
But this sounds much like it would be punished in general, even when the visitory is searching using his desktop computer. And that's just wrong.
You cut down the interesting part. That it's not just about rounding. It's a about domain knowledge that tells you what to round in which context and how (i.e. how many significant digits does a good answer have?).
That's not a very easy task, and it's not solved by simply rounding everything somehow.
Because the mobile device was the nearest available thing capable of browsing the web at the time I wanted to look at the content.
I understand that.
But I'm one guy running a website, not a company with budget for a web-designer. My content is now being punished not for its content, but for its presentation.
And what if my website isn't intended for a mobile audience at all? I'll readily admit I'm stuck 10 years in the past with my web design, but a few of my sites are intentionally not built for mobile because the content they have is not intended for mobile and if you told me you're using your phone to access the site, I'd get a puzzled look and say "but why?".
Can I set a "X-intentionally-not-designed-for-mobile: true" header?
I watched this some days ago (/. isn't the place to read things first anymore) and came away half impressed and half underwhelmed.
The speech recognition part is nice, and that's understating it a lot given the complexity of the topic. That for a demo they'd use examples they made sure work nicely is a goven. That it can understand fairly complex, disorganized questions is really cute. No, seriously, on this I am impressed.
But it is clearly still very far from human. It lands smack middle in the uncanny valley. It becomes incredibly clear when it talks about population numbers and lists them down to the last digit. Not only is that typical computer-ish, it's also vastly less useful than a human who would tell you "about 80 million".
When I ask my personal assistant device how long it'll take to get to city X, I'm not interested in an answer that says "3 hours, 57 minutes, 48 seconds". I want to hear "4 hours", because we humans understand it's an estimate anyways and a few minutes more or less doesn't matter anyways.
Then again, when I'm building a bomb and ask my phone for the recipe, I'd like to have exact numbers. Again, a human would understand that in this situation, "about 200 grams" is not an ok answer.
This intelligence is still missing, and it's crucial.
The point is not in this. I could've used their income easily. The point is that the inequality is so crazy. What do you think is the combined net worth of the poorest one billion people? Do you think it is less, equal or more than the top 10 ?
Now remember that by numbers, we are comparing 10 people to the combined population of three USAs. Find a justification that would survive five minutes of philosophical debate.
I'm all for income inequality. I like to earn more than other people because I studied, I know my stuff, I can work hard and constantly learn. I like to be rewarded for being good at what I do.
But the rate of inequality is just crazy.
I'm ok with me earning 5 times as much as someone else. I'm also ok with someone better than me earning 5 times as much as I do.
It's pure propaganda to make this about employee law. He could have had taxes overdue or not paid his utility bills, it's absolutely the same thing. He didn't pay a bill that he knew about and it killed his company. Balancing your budget is what the CEO (in bigger companies CFO) job is about. He didn't do his job and now he's trying to put the blame elsewhere.
If one of the top-10 richest people in the world would distribute half of his personal wealth to the poorest one billion, it would be a months salary for each of them.
We can easily provide a comfortable life to 6 billion people. Maybe not iPads and diamond rings, but definitely clean water and a house.
Depends on what you measure. If you measure economy by the usual statistics, it looks good on paper, absolutely. But if you measure by what people get from it, the picture is much less clear. 15% of our children are below the poverty line. 35% of single mothers and fathers are. That's ashaming for an allegedly rich country.
That is a nice socialist way of saying 'reducing deficit and preventing tax increases that would have hurt the economy'.
You're an imbecile. If their interest would've been to reduce the deficit, there would have been one hundred other ways to do it.
They like to create the impression it's all based on numbers and economy and so on, but it's all bullshit. The reality is that it's a philosophy. Benefits to unemployed people are cut not because it's necessary to save the economy (one bank's bonus payouts is equal to those savings). It's done because of the assumption that unemployed people are lazy and need to be forced more strongly. Basically, all of this is the brain-child of one top CEO, it's even named after him (Harz), and he's a victim to the assumption that everyone in the world is like him. As a CEO he lives in a cut-throat world of ambitious people, so to him everyone who is not successful must be lazy.
There's a lot more in this direction, but the point is that all these failures of the social system that create a lot of misery and poverty were intentionally created in order to protect the profits of international export companies. Note: Profit of companies. Not of people. That is what's wrong with it. If you need to change things to save people, then it's a noble thing to do what is hard to do. But to sacrifice the people for the artificial constructions of economic law is ethically wrong.
But here's the point: The loss was far from unexpected. From what I read, it was absolutely clear that he owed the people he layed off a severance package and he simply didn't pay it. They went to court and made him pay. Nothing unexpected there at all. He should have figured these payments into his restructuring plan, expected and budgeted them.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither have I, because it was an american magazine. :-)
But thanks for the heads-up. I appreciate a good poke, when it's done with a smile and a thought.
I frankly don't give a fuck what the kids call anything. They can talk to me when they can hack their way out of a paper bag. I respect skills, not age. Old, young, male, female, black, white - none of that matters the least bit. All I care is if people use their brains, or waste them.
And doing things differently just because you feel a pressing need to differentiate yourself from the generation of your parents is a waste. The social psychology behind that is quite interesting, but all that energy could be used in so much more productive ways.
A man who has a "happily married life" does not lie to his spouse and participate in affairs without her knowledge. It's as simple as that.
Nothing in humans is simple. You do not know the details of this persons life. Maybe you are right and he is deluded. Maybe a choice quote doesn't tell a persons life story.
Whatever is between his wife and him is between them and not your business nor mine. Maybe his marriage was not always happy. Maybe they just restored it from completely broken. Sure he should have been honest with her, but do you know all the circumstances so you can judge, or are you taking all your information from a three-liner in an online paper?
Should his wife and kids suffer because of his actions? Probably not -- but they'd probably be better off in the long run knowing what kind of scumbag they're trusting
Right. Because human beings are so simple that we can classify them with binary parameters.
I'll let you know where I come from. Many years ago, I was betrayed. I hit her in the face and left, the only time in my life I've ever hit a woman. But I'm also smart enough to ask myself why it happened and how much of it was my fault (pro hint: If you answer 0% you are always wrong). I understand that people are humans and nobody is the villain of their own life story.
I don't judge this guy without knowing a lot more about what was going on in his life. Maybe he's a scumbag, maybe he's just weak, maybe I could even understand him. The point is: I don't know and I find it disgusting how we judge other people from three lines of text.
I think having an affair would be one of the most emotionally hurtful things one person can do to another.
I see you are new to the human race. Pro hint: We are a lot more creative than that when it comes to hurting each other, including emotionally.
I'm not saying it's low on the list. But the most hurtful? Nah.
We override raw instincts with reason and intellect all the time.
And sometimes our intellect is right and sometimes it is wrong. Just "reason" is not a sufficient reason for superiority. Again, I'm not saying we should shut down our brains, on the contrary. But do not underestimate instincts - they made us survive these past million years.
The math just doesn't let polygamy work all that well, so we've deemed it bad for society and outlawed it.
That is true to some extent. Even in societies that allow polygamy it is in practice limited to a) the rich who can afford multiple partners and b) economic security. The most common case for muslim men to have multiple women is apparently that a man dies and his brother marries his wife to give her and the kids a home. In a society where she's not allowed to work that's pretty much the only way to ensure your family genes in that branch survive.
However, in most poly talk we always assume it's a 1:n relationship. In modern polyamoury, the relationships are usually m:n so the relative number of partners in each gender is not of importance because all involved have multiple partners.
Will it work? I don't think so, it will remain a niche, because it requires so much communication and emotional maturity from all involved members that I simply can't see it as a working model for society as a whole. But I personally know enough people who live now or temporarily lived in the past in such arrangements that it seems to me it's no better or worse than traditional monogamy.
To come back to your point: I think we should stop regulating relationships with laws. Our society has advanced enough that the previous arguments - mostly economical - are now moot.
The complaints being reported here suggest that where Munich has fallen down is in training. People literally have no idea how to use their computers.
The people writing this complaint are from the CSU. That is our equivalent of the worst part of the republican party. In ideology and stupidity. They don't want to understand how to use their computers, because computers are witchcraft.
Which is why nobody did it. There was a multi-year transition period with multiple steps.
Speak from knowledge, not ignorance. It's better for your karma.
Nah, I will not argue. I simply remember a study I once read and I couldn't even find it again without a big effort.
But I live in the city, and near the center. When I moved here, I actually sold my car in part because I spent so much time looking for (scarce) parking spaces, and then usually found them so far away, that I could just as well walk to the bus or underground. At certain days and times, it's so pointless to even look that I parked out of the area and once I actually took the underground for one station because that's how far away I had to park my car.
That's anecdotal evidence, of course. The point is that most cars in the world are parking most of the time, and that alone is a huge waste of space and resources. We could easily move the same amount of people with a fraction of the cars, traffic, pollution, everything. If it were better organized.
Self-driving rental cars are a great way to let the system self-organize.
This is what I've been saying for more than a year now. It should become clear to everyone by now.
We have short-time rental car companies in the city already, where you can pick up a car wherever you find it (your smartphone will tell you the nearest one), drive to where you want and simply leave it there.
This system has only 2 disadvantages: You need to find a car at point A and a parking space at point B.
A self-driving car would not have this problem. Call it with your smartphone, whenever I checked for one there was one within 5 minutes driving distance, and most times within 2 minutes when you're near the center. At the destination, it simply drives itself to the nearest parking spot, or to the next person.
There was a statistic that said 30% of the traffic in the center of cities is cars looking for parking space. Imagine what would happen if we would eliminate that traffic.
I want self-driving taxis. They can be fully electric (when empty, go and recharge, there are enough others to replace you). This will revolutionize urban travel.
If you're not using an ad blocker in 2015, you're an idiot. It really is that simple.
The only effect web ads have on me, at least until the IP shows up in my hosts list, is to slow pages down.
Wrong. Advertisement works, that is why it's a billion dollar industry. You think you don't read billboards and ignore other ads? Think again. Your brain picks them up long before it even tells your conscious mind about it. Filtering it out is an intentional process that takes effort (tiny, but effort). And images and emotions are processed by your mind if you want it or not.
It is pretty much the only way to fund "free" services of all kinds that have large reach but no direct income
No, it is not.
Advertisement created this idea of free services being paid by advertisement. There was a different time in this world, when you paid for your newspaper at the kiosk, and if you wanted to have a website for your journal, you would pay a hosting company.
There were also shared-cost services long before things became commerzialised. Back in FIDOnet days, email was transported by phone lines, and a bunch of people would come together, one of them set up a small server that would do the long-distance delivery and the others would pay him a buck or two a month to cover his phone bills while they got their mail for free or very cheap at local rates.
There is no reason that Facebook could not charge for its service. Except that the advertisement industry has created the concept of everything being free. Nowadays, having a pay service is not viable, not for any sane reasons, but simply because of this parlour trick.
Radio and TV in the time when they were sent by radio waves (and not digitally via cable) are about the only things where there are actual technical reasons why a pay service is not going to work. You can use encryption, but in pre-ubiquituous-computing times, it dramatically raises costs for new customers who need a hardware box.
But those times are over. Today, I challenge you to name one service that for technical or other reasons that were not artificially created (i.e. the expectation of customers that it should be free) has to use advertisement. I don't think you can. Everything that can be monetized by advertisement could be monetized in other ways.
The "there are no alternatives" claim is a damned lie, in politics as well as in business.
philosopher Thomas Wells is out to change the way you think about Google and its ilk.
Not really, no. He's just saying what I've been thinking (and saying, but since I'm not a reknown philosopher, few listen) for many years.
If you know anything at all about the mind and the brain, you understand that attention isn't free. That even "filtering out" advertisement (and we don't really, we just consume it unconsciously) takes up valuable mind-effort. That living in a city is stressful in parts because our brains are constantly busy, busy, busy with the environment, running a million-year-old program that constantly scans the area for potential threats or mates, and advertisement intentionally triggers those subroutines all the time (why do you think "sex sells"?).
Advertisement is a massive drain of resources, and the best thing I've ever done for myself was to throw out my television and stop listening to the radio. At least the inside of my home is mostly ad-free.
Heck, we aren't talking about some banana republic here. Or are we?
I see you're not up to date with current german politics. We are.
Merkel doesn't give a flying fuck because she really doesn't give a fuck about anything. She was trained very well how to get into and stay in power, and that's the only thing she's doing. Every move of her makes sense if you analyze it from that perspective. This is no different - big trouble with the USA is not a career-improving path, but the people of Germany are too forgiving and will let her and her party get away with all this shit.
Ironically, I large stay away from complex CSS. But "mobile-ready" largely is complex CSS and Javascript and three other things, for breakpoints and responsiveness.
I don't care if my site ranks last when you Google on your smartphone. If I didn't design it to be mobile-friendly, your mobile device is welcome to stay away.
But this sounds much like it would be punished in general, even when the visitory is searching using his desktop computer. And that's just wrong.
You cut down the interesting part. That it's not just about rounding. It's a about domain knowledge that tells you what to round in which context and how (i.e. how many significant digits does a good answer have?).
That's not a very easy task, and it's not solved by simply rounding everything somehow.
Because the mobile device was the nearest available thing capable of browsing the web at the time I wanted to look at the content.
I understand that.
But I'm one guy running a website, not a company with budget for a web-designer. My content is now being punished not for its content, but for its presentation.
And what if my website isn't intended for a mobile audience at all? I'll readily admit I'm stuck 10 years in the past with my web design, but a few of my sites are intentionally not built for mobile because the content they have is not intended for mobile and if you told me you're using your phone to access the site, I'd get a puzzled look and say "but why?".
Can I set a "X-intentionally-not-designed-for-mobile: true" header?
I watched this some days ago (/. isn't the place to read things first anymore) and came away half impressed and half underwhelmed.
The speech recognition part is nice, and that's understating it a lot given the complexity of the topic. That for a demo they'd use examples they made sure work nicely is a goven. That it can understand fairly complex, disorganized questions is really cute. No, seriously, on this I am impressed.
But it is clearly still very far from human. It lands smack middle in the uncanny valley. It becomes incredibly clear when it talks about population numbers and lists them down to the last digit. Not only is that typical computer-ish, it's also vastly less useful than a human who would tell you "about 80 million".
When I ask my personal assistant device how long it'll take to get to city X, I'm not interested in an answer that says "3 hours, 57 minutes, 48 seconds". I want to hear "4 hours", because we humans understand it's an estimate anyways and a few minutes more or less doesn't matter anyways.
Then again, when I'm building a bomb and ask my phone for the recipe, I'd like to have exact numbers. Again, a human would understand that in this situation, "about 200 grams" is not an ok answer.
This intelligence is still missing, and it's crucial.
Not at all.
The point is not in this. I could've used their income easily. The point is that the inequality is so crazy. What do you think is the combined net worth of the poorest one billion people? Do you think it is less, equal or more than the top 10 ?
Now remember that by numbers, we are comparing 10 people to the combined population of three USAs. Find a justification that would survive five minutes of philosophical debate.
I'm all for income inequality. I like to earn more than other people because I studied, I know my stuff, I can work hard and constantly learn. I like to be rewarded for being good at what I do.
But the rate of inequality is just crazy.
I'm ok with me earning 5 times as much as someone else. I'm also ok with someone better than me earning 5 times as much as I do.
But 500 times? You must be kidding.
Stop being silly.
It's pure propaganda to make this about employee law. He could have had taxes overdue or not paid his utility bills, it's absolutely the same thing. He didn't pay a bill that he knew about and it killed his company. Balancing your budget is what the CEO (in bigger companies CFO) job is about. He didn't do his job and now he's trying to put the blame elsewhere.
If one of the top-10 richest people in the world would distribute half of his personal wealth to the poorest one billion, it would be a months salary for each of them.
We can easily provide a comfortable life to 6 billion people. Maybe not iPads and diamond rings, but definitely clean water and a house.
Depends on what you measure. If you measure economy by the usual statistics, it looks good on paper, absolutely. But if you measure by what people get from it, the picture is much less clear. 15% of our children are below the poverty line. 35% of single mothers and fathers are. That's ashaming for an allegedly rich country.
That is a nice socialist way of saying 'reducing deficit and preventing tax increases that would have hurt the economy'.
You're an imbecile. If their interest would've been to reduce the deficit, there would have been one hundred other ways to do it.
They like to create the impression it's all based on numbers and economy and so on, but it's all bullshit. The reality is that it's a philosophy. Benefits to unemployed people are cut not because it's necessary to save the economy (one bank's bonus payouts is equal to those savings). It's done because of the assumption that unemployed people are lazy and need to be forced more strongly. Basically, all of this is the brain-child of one top CEO, it's even named after him (Harz), and he's a victim to the assumption that everyone in the world is like him. As a CEO he lives in a cut-throat world of ambitious people, so to him everyone who is not successful must be lazy.
There's a lot more in this direction, but the point is that all these failures of the social system that create a lot of misery and poverty were intentionally created in order to protect the profits of international export companies. Note: Profit of companies. Not of people. That is what's wrong with it. If you need to change things to save people, then it's a noble thing to do what is hard to do. But to sacrifice the people for the artificial constructions of economic law is ethically wrong.
No, that only brough the whole globalization thing home. The real issue is that everything is made in China these days for cents per hour.
But one day, all these chinese people will want to buy all this nice stuff, too. This economy simply isn't sustainable.
But here's the point: The loss was far from unexpected. From what I read, it was absolutely clear that he owed the people he layed off a severance package and he simply didn't pay it. They went to court and made him pay. Nothing unexpected there at all. He should have figured these payments into his restructuring plan, expected and budgeted them.