Foxconn To Employ 1 Million Robots 372
hackingbear writes "Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency. Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, employing 1 million (human) laborers in mainland China, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants. As labor regulations tighten up in China, human laborers demanding wage rises become replaceable."
Welcome! (Score:2)
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Since the 90s we've been feed a line about globalization and free trade, one which I used to believe in, that manufacturing jobs moving out of the US would be replaced with more valuable knowledge jobs at home, and that free trade would foster peace and prosperity throughout the world. Sort of the seeds of The Federation.
Something else is going on. All those knowledge based jobs are also being offshored. And now we hear that the slave labor wages paid to workers offshore, isn't cheap enough. We've been
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I remember reading a while back, that per capita, Foxconn employees commit suicide at a lower rate than the Chinese population overall. It's good to have a job, even if the job sucks, and there are far worse places to be in that country.
Of course, now that Chinese labor standards are going up, and workers are demanding higher wages, all their jobs will start getting outsourced to other countries where the labor is even cheaper (or I guess, replaced by robots).
Robots problems (Score:2, Funny)
What happens when the robots start committing suicide?
Re:Robots problems (Score:4, Funny)
Same as my, er, Android phone. Schedule a reboot every five days.
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statistically, working at FC is no more suicideagenic than being Chinese.
Interesting, but irrelevant.
"being Chinese" is not the peer group a reasonable study would compare Foxconn works too.
You'd look at factory workers doing similar jobs.
And unlike the general Chinese population, the workers at Foxconn are killing themselves specifically because of the shitty conditions at Foxconn.
Re:Robots problems (Score:4, Informative)
The suicide rate for workers in Foxconn was something like a quarter of the Chinese national average. I've never seen suicide statistics for the general factory worker population in China, but without this information there is no evidence that working for Foxconn is a risk factor.
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Do you believe that because you looked into that yourself or because you saw the words 'Foxconn', 'suicide', 'Apple', and 'working conditions' numerous times right here on Slashdot?
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the workers at Foxconn are killing themselves specifically because of the shitty conditions at Foxconn.
And not at all because their life sucked - working for Foxconn or not - but if they died then Foxconn paid their families a comparatively large amount of money.
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Maybe.
What if you live at work? Most of us in the US don't, but in a Chinese factory things are a bit different.
The closest I can think for an analogy is the military. Where does an airman (or a soldier, or whoever) kill himself, if he lives and works in the same compound?
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What happens when the robots start committing suicide?
Sir, it seems to have jumped on the floor.
Cutting expenses (Score:2)
No doubt they will pass the savings onto us... And iPads will be cheaper than a bushel of wheat, even if they are a bit crunchy
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Crunchy? Does it taste like chicken?
Peak Employment? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Do you have any clue what peak oil even is? Or what a logistic model of growth is, and why grows exponentially first and then slopes off as the marginal cost of growth increases?
Human labor is not inhibited like population growth, or it's first-derivative cousin natural resource extraction, because there's a fixed amount of it at any given time. If there's a decrease in demand for labor, then the price of it falls until the quantity demanded matches the quantity supplied. If that sounds scary, what that mea
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> but freshwater is growing expensive
Consider that wealth of average person is constantly growing (normal western workers live like kings used to live a few hundred years ago). So it might not matter in the future that water is expensive if everyone can afford it. We got plenty of seawater and like metals, water is reusable. A household could recycle their own water using plants.
> farmable land is finite
Perhaps, but humans have a history if increasing both the land size and amount of food that we can
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Average wealth is growing ... but median wealth is dropping, the only thing propping up consumption is debt, debt and more debt.
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It will be expensive because it's scarce. You can have all the money in the world it's not going to make it rain.
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I don't understand the point, do you confuse demand with quantity demanded? And in what world does producing clothes from new fabric become cheaper than the process of producing clean clothes? Even if somehow daily shipments to your doorstep became cheaper than throwing it in a washing machine, there's other disposable goods to look to, the concept of one-use goods isn't anything new. Once we reach the point where people are buying new food every day, where do you go from there? We already do, and food isn'
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The topic title is peak employment, not peak labour.
He is theorizing that for an environmentally sustainable level of consumption the number of necessary workers per capita could start falling so low there won't be enough jobs to go around ... at least not with a 40 hour work week.
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Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Seems like there will always be a need for humans in the chain, no matter how technologically advanced things get.
Perhaps, but that need is decreasing all the time.
Few hundred years ago pretty much everyone was working in farming and forest industry. Now one man with a harvester can cut down a whole forest. And a couple of people with fully automatic milking robots can take care of hundreds of cows.
And when I was a kid I used to buy train tickets from a person. Now I buy those from a machine.
When programming was just born profession, programmers had assistant to write the code to a punch card. Nowadays those assistants are not needed as code is typed directly into computers.
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There's probably peak employment by sector. I don't think anyone really wants to be an assembly line worker. When we had a society of relatively poor, illiterate people who came off hard manual labour jobs on farms and into the cities good wages made up for it. But they sent their kids to school precisely so they didn't have to live through the same experience. It's an odd thing to think that your parents wanted a better life for you than they had, and that applies who whole generations of people. Mil
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Our economy depends on money moving around. Until people develope a concept of 'enough money', no, there will never be peak employment.
Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
almost all manufacturing is much better done if the workers are free to engineer the repetitive human work out of the equation. however, the number of "robots" is irrelevant, which parts they do isn't irrelevant though. unions for large parts try to stop this, as for many workers the aim is to just do the same shift over and over again until they die.
I mean, you can pound metal with a hammer, or have a machine hammer pounding which is massively better way to do it than with human muscle. similarly you can solder with a machine massively better than by doing it by hand and place components on the boards with machines better and even the assembly stage you can do better if you automate it somehow. however what's good with human workers is that you can start assembling as soon as you get the parts, but you can in no way compete with a more automated, better engineered assembly line with them(this is one thing Ford never understood properly and one thing why gm has been repeatedly put on the brink of bankruptcy and beyond by Japanese and European manufacturers).
humanoid robots would be for most things be just an intermediate solution, so saying "1 million robots" means actually pretty much nothing, and they don't know yet what they're going to manufacture anyways.
anyhow, peak employment died when we started building tractors and created an abundance of food. only a very little slice of western society is in any way related to what's necessary for survival, the rest is just people trying to convince others that they're providing a service worth paying for and which could be called a job.
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"We've heard of Peak Oil."
More applicable then you might think. Foxconn is putting their eggs in one basket with this approach. They've tied their entire workforce to the price of coal and oil (seeing as most of the energy used to power robots would come from one or the other), as opposed to the price of food, housing and paper money.
They've also put their entire workforce at risk of going on "strike", much like the Iranians had a bunch of centrifuges go on "strike". Brings corporate cyber-sabotage to a who
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"Brings corporate cyber-sabotage to a whole new level when you are wiping out a workforce. Humans, you put up a hiring both, three million robots, you go bankrupt."
Wow. That came out wrong. Dr. Mengele and I sincerely apologize. We'll get back to our logs now.
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The food that people need to eat to work is also tied to the price of coal and oil. To produce a calorie of food, several calories of other fuels are needed.
Of course, it would also depend on the efficiency of the robot worker compared to the human worker, but I think it should be possible to make the robot more energy efficient per item produced.
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There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete
These have been around for quite a long time; tractors replacing large groups of field workers, factories replacing blacksmiths, steam engines replacing human muscle -- in all cases it's true that the employment for unskilled manual labour was decimated, however many more jobs opened up in higher-level areas, and the average income and quality of life was raised for all.
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There'll always be demand for personal services, if anything most of the western world is looking at a wave of elderly who'll need care which robots are very poor at. The question is more if the distribution of wealth would become more and more uneven between workers and capitalists. I'm from Norway, a very rich country. I went to vacation in Thailand, a relative poor country though not bottom of the barrel. There was staff everywhere, why? Because it costs almost nothing compared to my Norwegian income, so
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work on the problems we haven't solved yet. do what they are interested in. leisure time is an advancement! encourage ppl to use it towards continuing to advance knowledge, and we're on our way to utopia.
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Re:Peak Employment? (Score:4, Insightful)
The easiest and least inequitable way to solve the problem is to simply reduce working hours (which would, incidentally, make it a lot easier to manage retirement problems as well, as it's easier to keep people working if they work a lot less).
Ultimately, as production capacity vastly outstrips demand, you only have two realistic choices: divide the product of the labour or divide the labour. I'd certainly prefer the latter.
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Engrish? (Score:2)
Dunno if it's a bad sentence, but if ""Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots" I would be flattered if it took one million robots to replace me.
Re:Engrish? (Score:4, Funny)
My wife replaced me with a simple mechanism involving an electric motor and an offset rotating mass. It doesn't even need a microcontroller.
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http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/05/teardown.cfm [theiet.org] notes an ipad2 has "1,227 (excluding box contents), of which 652 components reside on the Main PCB and 227 on the 3G Module."
~1000 parts to move around
More robots to keep parts flowing 24/7
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Taiwan vs. mainland (Score:2)
Foxconn HQ is in Taiwan, but most of the employees are on the mainland. Are they planning to move more production back to Taiwan?
Sorry (Score:2)
But what were they hiring before? I know it was not skilled labor for a fair wage, or every chunk of shit I have bought in the last few years would not have killed itself in embarrassment.
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"I know it was not skilled labor for a fair wage, or every chunk of shit I have bought in the last few years would not have killed itself in embarrassment."
One has nothing to do with the other. You chose to buy expendable consumer goods for good prices and you got what you got.
Short term pain for long term pain? (Score:2)
I thought one of the major driving forces to outsourcing was that human labour was cheaper than mechanization. Provided, of course, that the human labour accepted minimal standards for employment (pay, safety, etc.). And that's exactly what developing nations provided.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ours
Re:Short term pain for long term pain? (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to look a bit further back in history to see when we shot ourselves in the head. Back in the 70s and 80s when robotics first began to be introduced into manufacturing, there was considerable resistance to it in the West because it displaced blue collar workers. We prioritized their jobs over market efficiency. Consequently in the 90s and 00s when a certain country stepped forward who was willing to play hardball in the labor market, a lot of those jobs ended up moving over there.
If we'd opted for efficiency over jobs in the 70s and 80s and pressed full speed ahead with automated assembly lines, the cost of robotic labor in the West might have been low enough to compete with human labor in China. Those manufacturing industries might have been able to stay here, along with jobs operating and maintaining those automated manufacturing facilities. This is the risk you take when you prioritize anything over efficiency - that someone else will swoop in with a less costly and/or more efficient process and steal all your business from you.
Foxconn is now shielding themselves so another developing country cannot do to them what they did to the West. If they stuck with human labor as we did, as their wages rose another developing country could undercut their labor prices and steal business from them. To prevent this, they're getting the robots in place now. That'll make it difficult or impossible for another developing country to undercut their manufacturing costs, thus guaranteeing those manufacturing industries stay put in China.
They see the writing on the wall when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans. The inexorable march of progress in AI and robotics means that long-term, blue collar manufacturing jobs worldwide are a dead end. It may take 30 years, it may take 100+ years, but the inevitable outcome is that all manufacturing labor will be done by machines, not people. It's simply a waste of our time to be doing such mundane tasks. This should have been obvious in the 70s. We should have embraced automation back then and set up re-education programs to teach assembly line workers how to operate and maintain the robots. Then maybe those manufacturing industries might never have moved over to China in the first place.
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I largely agree with you except the premise that it was unavoidable. The thing with machines, unlike humans, is that they can be shipped from one area (country) to the next. Aside shipping, they won't have to think about moving, get compensation for moving, have wives and kids in a school they like.
So while, in the 1970s/1980s, if we fully automated, it may have slowed down the move to China, I'm not sure it would have stopped it. In the past, factories located where the existing resources were close (st
Re:Not everyone is adverse to Short term pain (Score:3)
Well it could just be some managements, in some companies, in some counties, are looking beyond what will affect their next bonus check and are actually planning for the future.
And this could just have something to do with why their companies are expanding in a vibrant economy, while most most of the places you've worked at have economised for so many years for short term gains. Now having probably laid off half their labour force they are now wondering why no one can afford to buy their products.
If those employees are smart... (Score:2)
...they'll start learning how to operate or repair robots now. Jobs may disappear, but they get replaced by other ones.
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Not as many though. You only need a handful of people to fix the robot that replaced 100 jobs.
time to replace the politicians (Score:2)
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As long as you have an endless supply of raw resources and energy, that'll work just great.
Kurt Vonnegut: Player Piano (Score:5, Interesting)
There's an 'interesting' economic problem and endgame in full automation too, most humans aren't 'earning' [except the ones twiddling the robotic controls, that can be done by other robots too] and so they don't have any wages to 'consume'. The utopian 1950s view of this was vastly increased leisure, flying cars and people in white togas. The 2000s view is probably a vast undernourished resentful underclass and maximised value for 'shareholders'.
Oh well, I guess the world just fills up with robot-prduced Barbies [tm] in big warehouses and the masses east kibble [tm], three meals, every day.
We can do that! (Score:2)
My two cents (Score:2)
This would be a good thing if it didn't mean a consolidation of money in the hands of a few. Right?
When we look back... (Score:4, Interesting)
... I think we will call this the beginning of the "Post Labor Age." We've had the industrial revolution, the computer revolution and the Internet age.
>> I seriously think that we CANNOT keep society intact and life civil without changing the way we look at "earning a living." We already have so many "make work" jobs in our economy -- to keep people busy. I'd say that only 5% of us even do something necessary.
And before you tell everyone how NECESSARY your job is -- consider that marketing, accounting, legal and sales are all about "distributing" or influencing people to purchase. Tax complications, keep many accountants employed. Haggling with insurance companies for a Doctors office.
Once automation is able to replace most construction, and expert systems most accountants and boiler-plate legal work -- the amount of money that goes to those who OWN these smart factories of the future will be greater -- and the demand for labor, less.
The planet just hit 7 Billion people and it is estimated, we are using resources that would require 1 and a half earths to fulfill (an estimate of the "load bearing" capacity of the planet).
>> AS harsh as we are now in the USA to what we call "deadbeats", I think we are a generation away from most people being useless -- intensive education of the brightest, or the OWNING of resources and patents will only employ a small percentage of the population.
It could be a golden age -- or a Darwinian nightmare -- it all depends on how we deal with this as a society. I fear that the Wealthiest, are too busy trying to create a police state and already look upon the teaming masses as useless eaters.
Oh, just great (Score:3)
I guess I can look forward to reading stories about robot suicides in a year or two...
Asimov!!!!!! (Score:2)
The Spacers would be proud.
Gou's idea of a party (Score:2)
The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers' dance party Friday night.
The guy really knows how to play the crowd.
Suicides. (Score:3)
I wonder how many people might kill themselves for having been replaced by a robot and have no job rather than killed themselves over nasty working conditions. I doubt the possibility really isn't that unrealistic.
Chinese conomy effects? (Score:3)
With potentially 1million 'consumers' out of the mix i wonder what effect this will have on the overall economy growth of China.
I realize its not a HUGE percentage of people and sure they can still export and make a handful very wealthy, but with that many people out of work again, the local economies will have to suffer.
Welcome to the dark Future (Score:3)
China was beating out robot and hi tech tool assisted manufacturing because they were using humans as much like robots as they could. Undercutting places with high startup costs, high costs in adapting to change, and expensive maintenance -- which cut the number of well paid workers but could not beat the exploited low cost human workers.... until NOW....
Robotics will eventually win the global RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Meanwhile, our economic system depends upon constant growth when we have limited resources and
Re:Well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us on the left have long argued that socialism was the only way to deal with the consequences of rising productivity and automation: that in a world in which we have permanently moved beyond labor scarcity, the current system is unworkable.
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The alternative approach is that we all work less, and find different things to make for each other. 100% socialism is pretty much discredited in humans anyway. Given a chance we will sit on our fat arses until we die of premature heart disease.
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That is actually less true than you think. Many people work, hard, even though they don't need to. But while there will always be work to be done, we need to transition away from thinking that everyone needs to work: there are many people who should be paid *not* to work.
Socialism is not necessarily the coordination of all economic activity by a centralized national state. It is the end of the artificial distinction between political citizenship (where we have rights, and everyone is equal) and economic fun
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That is actually less true than you think. Many people work, hard, even though they don't need to. But while there will always be work to be done, we need to transition away from thinking that everyone needs to work: there are many people who should be paid *not* to work.
Socialism is not necessarily the coordination of all economic activity by a centralized national state. It is the end of the artificial distinction between political citizenship (where we have rights, and everyone is equal) and economic function (where you have no real rights except the "right" to compete, and we are not equal.) This artificial distinction was useful for a time, but I believe it has outlived its usefulness.
The problem is there hasn't been a "true" socialism" movement.
You don't want to have communism or the crappy socialism we've had up till now? Easy, stop making it so whomevers in charge, has no one to answer to.
We have to put check and balances in, and make it so everyone has someone to report to. No lifelong Senate positions, no lifelong government positions. Everyone does there part.
The problem is, with most government, is there are loopholes for people to stay in power. That will change.
But of cou
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The idea is that by automating menial tasks, humans can devote themselves to "higher-level" tasks and less menial jobs. But for those being replaced that transition will of course be a significant change because they need to find something else to do.
Here in Norway there is a number of people who scoff at service workers, academics and "desk workers" and claim that only the "primary professions" (farming, fishing, logging etc.) and industry are contributing value. However, those areas have been automating a
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The "invisible hand of the market" always finds a way. I'm of the opinion that there will always be things that only humans can do for other humans/themselves.
I think of pure mathematics as one example. Yes, there are computer algebra systems and even attempts at using computers to work out mathematical proofs. But, I doubt the 'art', the creativity, and the curiosity of pure mathematics can ever be written down in a finite program. (I'm also not entirely impressed with the computer software written for
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The rest of us have long argued that socialism is the only way to deal with rising productivity. So far, history has proven us right. Indeed socialism works so well in this respect that it is a crime doing nothing in places not specifically designated for doing nothing (called "factories").
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Intriguing. Do you feel the same way about people who buy products from the other companies [wikipedia.org] that Foxconn manufactures for, like Cisco, HP, Nintendo etc.?
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Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's still cheaper to maintain the robots in china, and it's still easier to dodge environmental rules in china, and it's still growing like crazy and the main target market for what you're making in the next few years.
And the chinese don't have two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
Oh and in china you don't need to provide healthcare, and wouldn't want to anyway, since if your employees die due to disease you don't need to replace them and no one will do anything if you don't try to help.
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Translation: China is pro-business while America is full of Marxists who want to put business out of business.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: China is anti-human rights while America is full of constitutionalists who protect self-evident unalienable rights.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
fixed that for you.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, China is pro-business ... and America is pro-rich. No one is terribly interested in putting business out of business as a goal in and of itself, but if it drives 1% more wealth to the top 0.1% in the short term the US will do it.
If you want to see socialism in action look at Sweden, if you want to see capitalism in action look at China, if you want to see money captured politics in action look at the US and the EU.
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A bullet behind the ear.
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two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised,
You say that as if raising the debt ceiling is desirable?
, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
That part, I can agree with. Congress COULD create balanced budgets, if they just set their minds to it. For starters, they could roll back their own salaries to about the level of 1960, then start working on rolling back all other federal employees. Of greater importance, though, would be eliminating lobbyists - big business, small business, special interests, foreign interests. Damned congress critters should be representing the voters, no one e
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Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:4, Funny)
Three wars? You forget that US drones are also currently bombing Pakistan and more recently, Yemen. Or is it not a war when a drone does it?
We're America so we group all those peripheral encounters in with the smallest non-peacful action currently taking place. We think of them as accessories (even though they usually turn out not to be very fashionable).
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Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and government, but if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Members of congress make less than $200k per year. Their campaigns (admittedly not out of their own pockets) cost millions of dollars, and most of them were millionaires before running. And anyway, eliminating their salaries completely would pay for about 15 minutes in Iraq.
Guarding your pocket change is pointless when big business has the key to your safe.
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if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Private compensation has been stagnant for years (yes this is all sweeping generalization, just insert the usual caveats) and effectively backwards for the past half decade with inflation, while government employees continued to receive job security, nicer benefits, guaranteed pay raises, and cost of living, destroying the validity of that decades old perspective.
It used to be you took a government job for the security and sacrificed pay. That is no longer the case.
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You say that as if raising the debt ceiling is desirable?
No what he's saying is that raising the debt ceiling has occurred only like 102 times. Under, the last five presidents it has been raised 17: Reagan; 5: H. Bush; 4: Clinton; 7: W. Bush. He's saying that Congress is playing chicken over something they've historically done easily.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Isn't the average person's IQ 100, by definition of IQ?And if you had a population of rocket scientists and designed an IQ test for them, the median IQ would still be 100.
An IQ test tells us nothing about a population, because its parameters are defined by that population. You can only use it to measure the deviation between a specific individual and the whole population.
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It buys you time AND it buys you oil.
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If you US citizens are sane then you have to raise taxes for the rich. You should look at the EU. We can provide health care for everyone hat half the cost of the US on a per person basis. Have a look at the OECD report on that subject when you don't trust me. While in Europe the game is "We do not leave anybody behind" the US model is "If everybody cares for himself, then it is cared for everybody". I personally find the first option better.
The US needs to set its priorities right. Which means you have to
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Cutting corners on paychecks and forcing workers to work/live in squalid conditions carries a stiffer price when you do it at home. When it's brown people halfway across the world, even slightly less inexpensive brown people, if human rights groups go in and see problems you can at least promise "a full investigation" and to hold your supply chain "more accountable". In the end it's about separating yourself from your labor to maintain plausible deniability.
Re:So Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "brown people" have never lived better in Chinese history.
Westerners see anything less than their (current, RECENT) luxury as slavery. China was a smoking ruin within living memory. Warlordism, the Japanese invasion, massive famines, etc aren't ancient history.
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You're a nicer person than I am. I would also have told AC that he was a blooming idiot. Even a color blind person such as myself can see that the Chinese aren't "brown".
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One reason (of many) to stop this nonsense.
Buy local.
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And so on till there is the same level of pain and suffering