Category Archives: Politics

“Fake Steve Jobs” on the true cost of Chinese manufacturing

I often complain about how just about everything is made in China these days. It’s about the exploitation of workers for the sake of cheaper goods. Well, in case you didn’t hear about it, a worker at the Chinese factory that makes iPhones committed suicide recently because he lost a prototype fourth-generation iPhone. And why did he commit suicide over this? Because he was apparently being tortured by his employers (Foxconn) over it. Presumably because this is the kind of mistake that might cost Foxconn their lucrative contract with Apple.

What was that factory worker’s life worth? Less than Foxconn’s iPhone manufacturing contract? Less than Apple’s potentially stolen trade secrets?

“Fake Steve Jobs” has posted a blog entry on the matter. If you’ve never read his blog before, the tone may be a bit shocking to you, but cut through the parody and there are a couple of paragraphs here that are probably the best critique ever of our reliance on cheap Chinese labor to manufacture the high-tech, low-cost devices we consume so voraciously:

Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them. We can’t make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the quality would be about half what we get out of China. But these guys play rough. They really do. They are not nice people. And, though we talk a good game about how we insist on workers being treated with dignity, blah blah blah, well, I mean, come on. Have you ever been to China? We have. We’ve been to China. We know what goes on there. We know how they open your mail, and listen to your phone calls, and let their factories pollute like crazy and exploit workers, all in the name of progress. And we turn a blind eye to it. We let them know when we’re coming to visit, and they give us a tour and put on a little show of how great things are, and how wonderful the dorm life is, and afterward we pretend to keep an eye on them — but it’s all theater. It is. We know it. What’s more, you know it. Everyone knows it.

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

I’ve read plenty about the conditions in Chinese factories, enough to make me want to never buy anything that says “Made in China” on the label. But, honestly, that’s getting nearly impossible these days. It’s not just about being too cheap to buy the more expensive version of the product made somewhere else with better labor laws; it’s that in many cases there is no other option that wasn’t also made in China.

Apple products present the biggest dilemma for me personally. I’ve been a Mac-o-phile for over 15 years. I’ve staked my livelihood around work that depends integrally on things Apple makes, and they’re all made in China. And Apple’s not alone — as far as I know, all of the major computer companies contract out their manufacturing to Chinese firms. I suppose I could build my own PCs and switch to Linux, but even then, it would be hard to find all of the necessary components that go into a computer, with a “nothing-made-in-China” restriction.

So, for me, in many cases, boycotting Chinese-made goods is simply impossible. But I do what I can. If there’s another option, I’ll take it. I’m willing to pay more if I have to. And even though I’m writing this on an Apple computer that was manufactured in one of these same Chinese factories, perhaps speaking out on the matter is some small penance for my complicity in what’s going on.

There’s more on the story from Gizmodo and, as usual, I learned about it all from Daring Fireball.

Yes, it has been colder in Minneapolis this summer… except when it wasn’t

There’s a bit of a brouhaha afoot with regard to our weather in Minnesota this summer, and whether it proves or disproves climate change.

A good summary of the “debate” appeared yesterday on Alas!

It started with a Minneapolis-based wingnut blogger relying on anecdotal evidence to prove… something.

Statistics guru Nate Silver responded with a bunch of boring old facts that dispel the argument of a colder-than-normal summer.

I just have a few comments to add to the fray:

1. If climate change is real (and it’s pretty much impossible for an honest, rational person to deny at this point), anecdotal evidence of a chilly month of July in one city doesn’t do anything to disprove it. And if you’re not looking at hard numbers, it’s easy to endure this cold July and forget just how hot it really was at the end of June.

2. Rising global temperatures associated with climate change emphatically do not mean that the resulting weather change in any particular location will manifest as a simple 2-3 degree temperature increase, and identical weather as before. In fact what it means is that global weather patterns will change significantly, and unpredictably, with some parts of the globe experiencing significantly hotter temperatures, some cooler, and more severe weather events occurring in more places than before.

Forget red state/blue state: it’s really red browser/blue browser

Sean Tevis browser statsAnyone who’s read this blog for any period of time knows my political leanings pretty well. I’m about as liberal as they come in this country (which means I’m probably middle-of-the-road anywhere else). And the same reader(s) probably also know(s) how I feel about Internet Explorer 6.

Well it’s interesting to see that there seems to be a correlation between political viewpoint and web browser usage. As (almost) always, this comes from Daring Fireball. We’re looking at the decidedly non-traditional campaign blog of Kansas Democrat Sean Tevis. His campaign did a survey that, among other things, discovered that users of outdated browsers like Internet Explorer 6, AOL, “Don’t Know” and “No Internet” preferred, strongly, his Republican opponent, while users of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari preferred Tevis. Interestingly, IE 7/8 users slightly favored Tevis.

It would be interesting to see the raw numbers, rather than just percent deviation, to get a sense of the relative proportions of the electorate who fell into each category, especially considering that Tevis apparently lost, by a small margin.

It’s also interesting to look at the strength of each group’s leanings. Those who most strongly favored the Republican candidate were the AOL users and non-Internet users, a.k.a. the Luddites. Chrome users (all on Windows) were the strongest Tevis supporters, followed by Safari (presumably all or nearly all Mac) users. Firefox users were slightly weaker supporters of Tevis. This makes sense to me in that I suspect there’s a high correlation between “average” Mac users (who almost all use Safari, just like most “average” Windows users run IE) and Democratic leanings, whereas users of Firefox (and of open source software in general) are as likely (or moreso) to be libertarian as liberal. Opera… well… I don’t know. Contrarians?

That IE 7/8 users slightly favored Tevis is most interesting to me. IE 7/8 represent by far the largest percentage of the Internet-using population. And the country as a whole moved slightly in the Democrats’ direction in the 2008 election. But Kansas is far more conservative than the US populace as a whole; combine that with the “No Internet” crowd, and a small margin of victory in favor of the Republican candidate makes sense.

P.S. Sean Tevis for President 2016.

Bob Cesca on Glenn Beck

Not literally, of course.

I have never watched Glenn Beck, although I’ve seen clips of his tearful, logically incoherent rantings enough times on shows I do watch that I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what he’s all about. (I’ve also seen a few clips on YouTube of Shepard Smith — probably the only person on Fox News who doesn’t bring me to the bring of nausea — jabbing Glenn Beck for his antics.)

Perhaps seeing Glenn Beck’s insanity concentrated down to a highlight reel gives me a misguided impression of just how crazy he is, but… well, based on what I’ve seen I’m unlikely to give him a chance to prove me wrong.

Now, it’s all well and good for me to try to sound clever with my little rips on Glenn Beck in this insignificant little blog of mine, but there’s a genuine concern that the things he’s saying may be inciting the crazier element of his audience to go out and do terrible things. That’s no joke. And it’s worth paying attention to. To that end, I’d like to direct you over to Bob Cesca’s commentary on the Huffington Post.

(T)he most dangerous aspect of Beck’s show isn’t necessarily what he says, it’s that he appears to be inclined to say anything while enouraging his viewers to believe anything “even if it’s wrong.” Fine, if he’s going that far out on a limb, then he needs to seriously consider taking responsibility for his nonsensical, inflammatory statements. And perhaps once he accepts the potential consequences of his words, he’ll reconsider some of the more incendiary ones.