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Roderick

The whole Foxconn thing

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Over the last year, we've heard some disturbing news about Foxconn, the major supplier/manufacturer of most of the gaming machines that we play on (PC purists here possibly excluded). It's all put down rather succinctly in this Kotaku post: http://kotaku.com/5879476/do-apple-microsoft-sony-and-nintendo-really-care-do-we?tag=china (one of their more journalistically sound efforts). If you have a Thing against Kotaku, here's a good bit in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html.

It's rather disturbing to see our ravenous hunger for technology being fed by what essentially boils down to slave labor. Those people work under heinous circumstances. It makes me a little sick to look at my (second hand) iPhone, to be honest. I'm playing silly little games on machines that drove an entire assembly line to climb on a roof ready to jump off in desperation.

What can consumers do to improve this situation? Boycot hardware produced in this fashion? Write letters?

Edited by Rodi

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What can consumers do to improve this situation? Boycot hardware produced in this fashion? Write letters?

Boycotting is the only thing I can see being genuinely impactful. This is, after all, an economic decision that companies are making. The reason they would change it is if it stopped being so cost effective.

The unfortunate truth about boycotting, however, is that it really requires a critical mass of people to be disciplined enough to do it before it makes any difference at all. Since you mentioned the iPhone, can you conceive of the number of people that would have to boycott iDevices for it to make any realistic difference? Apple has sold, what, 250 million of the modern generation of iDevices?

Not trying to be pessimistic here, just saying that although boycotting makes the most sense to me, there still might need to be a more effective solution. The only thing I can see making more of a difference right now is actually bringing more/stronger laws into effect to counteract this practice. However, making changes in a legal system is incredibly hard at the best of times, and in the middle of a worldwide economic recession is not the best of times when you're basically asking companies to cut their profit margins.

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I feel as awkwardly bleak about this as I do about metals like coltan ore, needed for mobile phones, coming from warring areas of Africa.

It's not just owning a phone or a laptop, or particular companies. It's threaded really deeply into all of the infrastructure our lives are based on. I think a lot of people who gain awareness of the problem kind of just mentally stare and blink. I find it hard to think of an adequate response that isn't "Become a hermit".

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Over the last year, we've heard some disturbing news about Foxconn, the major supplier/manufacturer of most of the gaming machines that we play on (PC purists here possibly excluded). It's all put down rather succinctly in this Kotaku post: http://kotaku.com/5879476/do-apple-microsoft-sony-and-nintendo-really-care-do-we?tag=china (one of their more journalistically sound efforts). If you have a Thing against Kotaku, here's a good bit in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html.

It's rather disturbing to see our ravenous hunger for technology being fed by what essentially boils down to slave labor. Those people work under heinous circumstances. It makes me a little sick to look at my (second hand) iPhone, to be honest. I'm playing silly little games on machines that drove an entire assembly line to climb on a roof ready to jump off in desperation.

What can consumers do to improve this situation? Boycot hardware produced in this fashion? Write letters?

Even PC gamers will use parts sourced from Foxconn, despite motherboards and GPUs being manufactured by Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and the like, there are components on these which are manufactured at Foxconn. CPU ports for example along with other small parts.

I kind of agree with Nachimir, with Foxconn's reach being as it is then it's hard to avoid them, you can't boycott them as easily as you can Coffee, or Nestle.

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Boycotting is the only thing I can see being genuinely impactful. This is, after all, an economic decision that companies are making. The reason they would change it is if it stopped being so cost effective.

Yea agreed.

That's the biggest problem is boycotting would work, but as people it's pretty much impossible to do on mass unless it's something we don't care about in the first place.

Just look at the companies that supported SOPA. Try boycotting that, it would be literally impossible unless you go live in a cave.

What's shitty, and possibly misleading, is I that I saw on the Daily Show that goods like Ipods would cost 23% more if they were manufactured somewhere slightly better. I'm not sure how much better or if that means manufactured in America, but here in British Columbia we already pay nearly that much on any item in taxes.

If there was a significant impact on working conditions for 23% more on goods it would be crazy not to. Even if it meant I had to save up longer for tech devices like that... which I guess companies don't want.

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If there was a significant impact on working conditions for 23% more on goods it would be crazy not to. Even if it meant I had to save up longer for tech devices like that... which I guess companies don't want.

They don't, but theoretically if their profit margin stayed the same (ie. if they passed the cost of better standards for works on to the consumers rather than took it on themselves) there isn't a huge reason for companies not to do it. The issue then becomes what happens to them when another company brings out a similar product for cheaper because they are still using sweatshops.

The idea is that we always buy things according to our principles, right? Then the free market sorts this out for us. But the real world is a bit more complicated, and that's why battery farmed chicken still gets sold alongside free range, and why Fairtrade coffee still gets sold alongside regular. There's a market for conspicuously ethical products, particularly over the past few decades, but it's not the whole market for sure.

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Price is not the only issue. One of the interesting things that came out of the NY Times article is that we can't produce those things in the West anymore. Not because we're too expensive, but because the immediate and iterative nature of the hardware demands a veritable army of middle-educated people ready to literally get up in the dead of the night at a foreman's call to work a 12-hour shift. It's the very nature of the tech industry that makes it impossible, it's not just about saving a buck.

The only long-term solution is for all countries like China to develop decent protection of their workers, so that it becomes legally impossible to create these scenarios. Either that or a thorough restructuring of our modern consumer electronic needs, which is so impossible it's hilarious. We're all in the same treadmill, we just happen to be on the top of it in the West, but we're not a single jot better or more deserving of it than anyone else out there.

It's hard not to walk around in a big media discounter like I did just now, see the vacuous eyes of the customers running around with boxes of TV's because today the taxes are slashed off of prices, and not feel entirely estranged of the human race.

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This is where I first heard about the whole Foxconn debacle, great episode. I almost bought a Foxconn motherboard two years ago, but I suppose it doesn't matter, because as you guys say, I probably have other things manufactured there.

I don't know what you'd do something about this, I really just wish outsourcing to other countries with a lower standard of living would stop. It's always to save a buck and I think our tech needs in the U.S. are more than a little insane (Speaking as someone who really isn't good at buying newer technology).

But then there's the difficulties as Rodi said, so I get all sad faced.

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Update on that This American Life episode. Wow.

Just finished listening to that. It was odd that they gave the guy many outs that he could have used but instead decided to try and stand by his story. I guess that when you ride it for two months and take every appearance that you can get based on appearing on This American Life you try to stick to your guns. Still though. Messed up.

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Just listening to it as well. That moment where the interviewer goes "So you lied about it" and the bit that follows... The most UNCOMFORTABLE pauses ever.

It's also not that odd that he stands by his story, given that this is a lie he has been perpetuating for a looong time. In my experience there is a whole bunch of self-deception going on with liars, that even if you give them an out, in a way they've started to believe the lie themselves. Not really, of course, but a delusion strong enough that they maintain that they're right. They're just building on a rotten foundation and when that foundation starts shaking, everything built on top of it will just come crumbling down. Eventually!

That guy is gonna have a rough time ahead of him!

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It's also not that odd that he stands by his story, given that this is a lie he has been perpetuating for a looong time. In my experience there is a whole bunch of self-deception going on with liars, that even if you give them an out, in a way they've started to believe the lie themselves. Not really, of course, but a delusion strong enough that they maintain that they're right. They're just building on a rotten foundation and when that foundation starts shaking, everything built on top of it will just come crumbling down. Eventually!

:edge: :edge: :edge:

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Just listening to it as well. That moment where the interviewer goes "So you lied about it" and the bit that follows... The most UNCOMFORTABLE pauses ever.

And they don't stop! As the interview goes on they just get more frequent and longer. I listened to it at work and thought that I had hit the pause button on my headphones a couple of times. The worst was when Ira said something about the pause, when he admitted that he didn't want to say something. It was a pause, Ira pointing out the pause, pause, reply, pause, three words, pause. I love that the person that defended him the most was the one person that blew the most holes in his story, the translator.

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And they don't stop! As the interview goes on they just get more frequent and longer. I listened to it at work and thought that I had hit the pause button on my headphones a couple of times.

Haha, I actually paused it during one of those moments to make some lunch. By the time I got back and resumed play, I thought the stream had bugged and I lost audio on it. Not the case. :grin:

brb unpacking some complexities

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He's been a massive, self-serving dickhead and his career should burn for it.

What bugs me most is that a lot of gadget fans now think "He lied, so everything is fine. Nothing is wrong with the companies that make my lovely, shiny precioussses". Much of our stuff is still made in really bad working conditions.

He told stories and dressed them up as journalism. That doesn't mean the truth is the diametric opposite of everything he said.

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He's been a massive, self-serving dickhead and his career should burn for it.

I think that if, when approached, he had said that he put things in his act that had happened but he did not witness it would have been fine. At one point they even give him that out. I think that even if he had done that the story was done well enough that This American Life could have worked around it with the facts or said something about those points being reported from something else.

The thing that kind of bothers me is that he says that he did this because he wanted people to pay attention to the suicides, but that is the one part of the story that he basically made me not care about. He goes so far as to say that based on the population of the people that are working in those factories that number is kind of low. So you wanted to bring attention to something that you not only downplay but tell everyone to ignore? How does that work?

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Ugh, this feels so gross.The guy's delivery was the usual regular public radio awkward lisp, but now it's all slimy and disgusting replayed in the retraction episode.

However, the issues brought up with Foxconn and Chinese workers are important, but I wish it was something more honest and less theatric who had done it. The guy did actually visit and saw it from the inside but missed the chance of handling it correctly for the sake of having exaggerated emotional and tragic parts in his stage show. When first hearing the show, those parts were the weakest anyway as they were kind of straying towards facts and asking for extreme empathy.

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The bigger problem with the whole Foxconn kerfuffle is that Foxconn is the rule, not the exception. They just get attention for the Apple connection. Chinese labor laws are a goddamned joke, and labor conditions there are pretty much across-the-board terrible. The corollary of this is that there is virtually nothing any of us can do about it - until China is no longer the low-cost-labor destination of choice, or until the international community stops fellating the Chinese government at every opportunity (or just buckling to their bullshit), the only way to make any difference is not to boycott Foxconn products, but to boycott literally everything made in China. And good luck with that.

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Dunno, if China improves their labour laws, companies will likely move their production lines to cheaper countries with worse labour laws. It's the demand for products made in such manner that is also the problem, not only the supply. I don't see a solution.

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