Kite Making Day at V’s school. We’ll let her play with it eventually. (Taken with instagram)
January 31, 2012
January 31, 2012
January 31, 2012
I’m just saying ladies…it’s around the corner. (Taken with Instagram at Harvard & Stone)
January 31, 2012
January 31, 2012
bmichael asked: Hey thanks for the reblog, and your comments were really insightful. Reading through the Chinese letters to the NYT (they published them a day or so after the first story), there was a good mix of voices for and against working at the electronics factories. I can see why people would be for it — there are no jobs otherwise. Why do you think it is that there's such a lack of jobs, though? It seems weird, since China exports so much. Where does the money go, and why don't people there have any?
Yo bro.
It’s not that there are a lack of jobs - there are plenty, but they don’t pay as well as those in electronics. The problem is a lack of labor. China’s population is much smaller than it was ten years ago due to the one child per household rule. The garment factory workers of ten - twenty years ago, who are now aging, sent money back to their families so that the children were able to study engineering. Now those kids work for FoxConn. Wages are rising, factory conditions are improving, but China still has a long way to go. Apple could do so much right now to improve working conditions. Sure, other companies have had factory issues, and they even exist here is the US, but frankly, I hold Apple to a different standard. They are not like the average garment manufacturer. Apple has the power to do more than turn a quick buck, and yet here they are, failing at humanity.
Also, regarding jobs: as the minimum wage rises, manufacturers are naturally searching for less costly labor in other countries. Not to mention that ten years ago there were incentive programs offered by the Chinese government. Those programs ceased about five years ago. So Apple pays FoxConn for cheap labor, FoxConn pays better than garment factories, the few workers in China flock to FoxConn, and garment factories move to other countries.
January 31, 2012
Apple’s Avarice: Efficient, Excellent, and Economically Sound. Is It Fair?
We might not have the flying cars, yet, but we’re sprinting to the future anyway. One company in particular, Apple, has constructed fabulous technological edifices that effortlessly extend our capabilities. Its contributions — inaugurating computer revolution after revolution revitalizing digital media, bringing technology to bear on education’s problems — they seem miraculous. But a barrage of spate of recent news has delineated their actual human cost. These stories are a somber reminder that Apple’s seemingly ex nihilo tech goodies come to market because of its implacable business drive.
Apple’s products are to most eyes beautiful instantiations of the old design saw: form follows function. Before the iPhone’s debut in 2007, everything about mobile phones was different. Now, virtually all smartphones follow the iPhone’s form — and arguably fall short of its function. On the back of every iPhone, there is a brief line that tells its owner exactly why its so special: “Design by Apple in California Assembled in China”. Those eight words effectively describe a situation many consumers are unaware they’re participating in: the high level of Apple’s California-based design is what’s most obvious about the iPhone, but it wouldn’t exist without Apple’s fabled supply chain management and its manufacturing capabilities in China.
The New York Times recently published two reports critical of Apple’s labor practices in China. The first noted the vast scale of the California-based company’s operations in China: the iPhone alone requires more than 200,000 workers and 8,7000 engineers for its manufacture. On his passing away last year, Steve Jobs was widely lauded for his innovation; President Obama said, he “he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries”. But the exact dimensions and ramifications of Jobs’s transformation of personal computing is somewhat misunderstood. Just last week after the president’s Sate of the Union address, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said, “The late Steve Jobs, what a fitting name he had, created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew”. If it’s American jobs that are at issue, then Apple’s success has created 60,400, 59% of which are retail jobs — a pittance compared to its operations overseas. According to the Walter Isaacson biography, Steve Jobs was the primary force in creating Apple’s dominant retail position, but he was also the catalyst for closing Apple’s American factories and moving virtually all of Apple’s manufacturing jobs to China.
Apple has long had a reputation for making luxury goods, at best, and overpriced doodads at worst. The grounds for that reputation are gone. Steve Jobs had a dual-genius for intuitive design and having the steel will to realize it. His successor, Tim Cook, has a single-minded expertise in trimming fat and cutting down the bottom line. He’s an operations guru renowned for keeping costs low. Again, according to the Isaacson biography, Cook “forced” suppliers to cut their prices and move their operations next to Apple’s plants in China. Apple enjoys such a powerful and efficient manufacturing process that it’s now a price leader for laptops, and virtually the only profitable manufacturer of tablet PCs.
Definitely worth reading.
Also please read this asshole on Forbes who probably also believes in child labor.
I feel pretty strongly about all of this from having 15 years of manufacturing experience in China and having traveled there several times.
One interesting point is that the US does not have the technology to produce the way China does. The machines are made there and they are not sold in the US. It would take a huge initial capital investment for manufacturing to return to the US, but who better to lead that revolution than Apple?
And yeah, I’m sure that the wages being paid to factory worker at FoxConn are better than usual. I know this to be a fact: during my last trip to China in August, the garment factory owner I spoke with told me that there is a huge manual labor shortage in China as most workers are becoming engineers. The thing is, Apple has the leverage to create working environments where people aren’t killing themselves. It’s a matter of ethics.
Every large manufacturer has a Supplier Code of Conduct and conducts factory audits to ensure the codes are met. I’ve done this myself. If a factory fails, you drop them until they’re up to par, or drop them altogether. This obviously isn’t being done properly. I can only imagine the kickbacks to third party auditors that are happening. Explosions due to lack of ventilation? Are you kidding me?
Apple needs to get their shit together.
January 31, 2012
So I’m really excited about the slow cooker I bought on sale for $12 yesterday.
On one hand, who the fuck have I become that I get excited over a crock pot and then on the other hand CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS TONIGHT, you know?
January 30, 2012
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Tupac ft. Dr. Dre, California Love
I would like to dedicate this song to getting drunk in my new apartment for the first time.
January 30, 2012
god I miss cocaine.
Wow it sure sounds different when a single mom says it, huh?
January 30, 2012
Instagramming for two in K-Town. (Taken with Instagram at Myung Dong Kyoja (명동교자)
January 30, 2012
(via New Local Beverage Unites The Powers Of Caffeine & Coconut Water: LAist)
Fucking LA, you know? “Let’s mix coconut water and coffee, thereby making our product both important and irrelevant!”
Just kidding, you know I’ll be drinking that shit by the caseload.
January 30, 2012
It’s Not For You
…
But there’s an even bigger problem than a failure to match up the right people with the right things. (That actually does happen pretty regularly — there are good editors out there.) The bigger problem is that the predominance of white male writers covering basically everything says to me that popular culture as written will tend to be packaged and understood from a white male point of view. Not everything is for you.
It’s not that the above writers aren’t great. In fact, the opposite. But I want other points of view. The problem I have with some publications is that, through chance more than design, the staffs are predominantly white and male, and so we get a critical consensus behind Bon Iver, say, instead of The-Dream or the above Rihanna. I think Talk That Talk is much better than Bon Iver, Bon Iver, but the shape of musical discourse is structurally and perhaps inexorably white and male perspective’d. It’s not to say Bon Iver is objectively worse than Rihanna, but viewed through ‘our internet media’ there is really no way to tell.
If you conduct a thought experiment where all the major online music publications are run by women and people of color, I’m sure our idea of a 10.0 perfect album would be a lot different. Maybe Bon Iver, Bon Iver gets the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy treatment, and it does get a 10.0 (to great and loud derision). And maybe Rihanna, Miguel, Drake, Janelle Monae, and The-Dream are the usual suspects crowding up every top ten of the year list.
In a country with our ethnic and gender demographics, I refuse to believe that the best ten to fifty albums every year are mostly made by white guys. And I’m not saying that anyone at the big online magazines is racist or sexist. But there is a privileging of perspective, and a process of normalization, just because we are who we are. And not everything is for everyone else — either by taste or by rights.
When Jessica Hopper said, “Funny how a lot of the Lana Del Rey review are more or less aesthetic slut-shaming, esp. when you isolate the critical phrases/language used”, there’s a point behind the point. Sure, many women may dislike the album for aesthetic reasons — and of course women aren’t going to automatically have an affinity for a thing because it was made by another woman — but the structure of thought and language framing most every topic on the internet is a white male one. The way we make sense of things aesthetically is not natural; there is no natural aesthetic framework as concerns pop music, I don’t think.
It’s slightly vexing that there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution. And I’m not trying to sound vituperative or anything. But it pays to keep in mind that the issues of the day are usually framed by someone else’s perspective. Also, you know, I think that people — guys especially — should maybe ask other people what they think of things before spouting off. The ‘general idea’ of things is usually a guy’s idea of them. But not everything is for us. You know, I have no idea what it’s like to be a teenage girl. I have no idea what it’s like to be a black woman or a black man. It’s hard to acknowledge the fact that your opinion and thoughts aren’t the be-all/end-all of something.
THANK YOU.
January 30, 2012
In China, Human Costs are Built into the iPad
Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.
Then the screams began.
When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.
At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.
Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.
“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”
“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”
After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.
Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.
In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.
“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”
In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.
For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”
So disgusting. I wish Apple would respond publicly.
January 29, 2012
it's all over, she's learned how to read.
| V: | Do you blog Mama? |
| Me, eyebrow raised: | NO. |
| V: | Yes you do. I see you blogging sometimes. |
| Me: | No, I don't. What're you talking about? |
| V: | I see you blogging about me. |
| Me: | Go to your room! |
January 29, 2012
How to Cook Like Heston | E3
Blowtorch defrosting and melted chocolate in a paint gun. Really great series.
1 of 10
Next page
