I managed to crush one once. It was in a laptop pouch in a backpack with a couple of robust plastic binders and books in the main compartment, and I must have thrown it once too often into the corner/side of the corridor, having other things to do. I assume I cracked something inside, maybe even the PCB or so, as it looks dead. I might check if the screen is still alive, as it might be an issue with the logic board instead of the screen, as I now remember it (it's been a couple years, it was an iirc. 3rd gen low-end device).
> the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.
Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges. The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees. A useful way to paraphrase this is:
Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year? Not how many google employees commit suicide overall.
When phrased this way, it becomes clear that other companies have much lower suicide rates than Foxconn.
That's what is critical to compare. It turns out Foxconn's suicide rate is massively higher than equivalent Chinese employers and the inference is the alleged egregious mistreatment of Foxconn laborers by Foxconn is the cause.
>The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees.
A very large proportion of Chinese factory workers (including a majority of Foxconn workers) live in company-owned dormitories located on or near the factory site. Most Chinese factory workers are internal migrants from poorer northern and central provinces. These workers generally prefer dormitory accommodation, because it allows them to save a larger proportion of their salary towards their future plans.
You would only be comparing like-with-like if Google provided on-site housing at the Googleplex to a majority of their workers.
>Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year?
Google employees don't live at the Googleplex so that's not valid.
If you want to compare them to other companies you would either need to include suicide off campus of the other companies or exclude suicide off-shift at Foxconn.
Why do you think the Foxconn suicide figures don't include all suicide attempts by employees?
Note that one of the attempts catalogued on Wikipedia states that one Mr. 刘 "threw himself from the sixth floor of a dormitory building". That would tend to imply that the statistics cover the workers while they're on or off the job -- the statistics are for suicide attempts on campus, but the employees live on campus.
And that would tend to imply that the appropriate comparison is indeed "how many people commit suicide anywhere?", not "how many people commit suicide in the office?".
If you have a bunch of companies trying to keep their shit together while barely able to make their product and then someone kills himself simple because the situation is no longer worth living - then it is a sad thing.
If the product is one of the most successful things in human history the suicide is a design goal.
If we don't stand up to it and at least voice our objection we will all be treated like that eventually - regardless of corporate success or personal productivity.
The only other role is that of the psychopath pressuring those who do the work in order to meet the suicide quota. If you don't meet the suicide quota your workers are not working hard enough or you are paying them to much. It's simple business logic nothing personal.
This contains a common logical error in most of the poor-people-suffer-to-serve-us-rich-people arguments. That is to ignore anyone whose suffering has no causal link from us. For example, an isolated tribesman may die from an easily treatable disease because he has no medicine and we don't blame rich people for that. But if he moves to town to earn money for medicine and then dies in a construction site accident, we blame ourselves for causing the construction site to exist. We forget that he may have been in greater danger or suffering more before getting involved with us.
It applies to low wages for illegal immigrants too. Once they're in our country, we feel responsible for them. Before they got here, we don't care at all how little they earn. Some people even go so far as to want to kick them out to save them from earning low wages. Really it just saves us the guilt but makes it worse for the individual.
Someone quits or is fired and within a week commits suicide. Not counted. If that's the case, it is another reason it isn't fair to compare with national numbers.
And if someone lives on corporate campus but commits suicide off of a bridge in town, not counted?
At the time of the plundering, the countries that the East India Company plundered were not the third world. They were literally wealthy self-sufficient countries that had not seen famine or serious poverty. It is not an exaggeration that the EIC brought those countries to their knee.
Eg:
"A country that was the world leader in at least three industries- textiles, steel and ship building. A country that had everything... And after 200 years of exploitation, expropriation and clean outright looting, this country was reduced to one of the poorest countries in the world by the time the British left in 1947," he said.
I'm not much happy to defend the EIC, but Tharoor sits at the sharp edge of nascent Hindu nationalist resurgence and is known to have a bit of an axe to grind where the Raj was concerned.
That's an ad-hominem argument. And Shashi Tharoor is pretty far in my mind from Hindu nationalism. He's a member of the party that Hindu nationalists oppose.
Additionally, the linked article itself is guilty of lots of omissions. For example
> Europe went to a different level in that period, particularly England after the Restoration and the forming of the Royal Society and the genius of Boyle, Hooke, Newton and all the rest of it. We remained where we were
Fails to mention that the Industrial Revolution didn't reach India for a long time because colonial government taxes on domestically produced goods stunted the growth of Indian industry.
In fact the only substantive argument the article makes is that various armed forces in India and the colonial Indian army was a professional fighting force that went to battle for whoever paid them. And that the British took over India by playing one rival faction against the other and ultimately screwing over both. Which has very little to do with the reasons for India's relative lack of development.
On balance I'll still admit that the British were responsible for making India a united nation. And India after independence adopted less-than-ideal economic policies, and suffers from lots of corruption that hobbles growth. But to pretend that looting isn't a legacy of colonial rule is wilful blindness.
I view constructs like the EIC or The Empire much like waves on an ocean - functions of their time, circumstance and fortune - so don't see much point in specifically apportioning blame or contemporarily-ascribed guilt. For sure these were not entirely saintly enterprises and did indeed result in misery and misfortune for untold millions of otherwise-deserving people. But as much abroad, as at home.
As much as the wave that was Empire screwed over natives in subjugated colonies, it screwed its own at home - Britain's underclasses sacrificed at the altar of industrialism and history.
If it weren't England tramping over the various bits of Asia, it would've been its imperical antecessor. If it was not to be England's time, then their descendant. America took over from England, China might in turn America. Each Imperium is an evolution of that to which it was at first mere reaction.
These are functions of reality, and everything and everryone plays its part.
I don't see the point in creating monolithic scapegoats, because in apportioning specific blame to abstractions, we ignore the underlying causes and diminish what should be learnt.
> Tharoor sits at the sharp edge of nascent Hindu nationalist resurgence
The link you gave does not substantiate that claim at all.
> is known to have a bit of an axe to grind where the Raj was concerned.
I would not be surprised that someone who is a victim has an axe to grind with a genocidal expropriative regime. What is surprising is that there are colonial apologists still around and pushing typical justifications for slavery, genocide and other crimes against humanity.
> The link you gave does not substantiate that claim at all.
No, which is why I didn't [link] it - I gave it as an example of internal criticism which postures an alternate reason for some of India's woes.
> I would not be surprised that someone who is a victim has an axe to grind with a genocidal expropriative regime
Thank goodness we're not resorting to hyperbole here. I'm not sure how much of a victim he is given his status and the historical gulf of time before his birth and the period in question.*
> What is surprising is that there are colonial apologists
Zzz, I think I tried to state I wasn't comfortable framing my response in terms endearing towards some of The Empire's worst excesses. A shame criticism must remain so rigidly polarised - I am sure that's how history was too, hard aligned and absolute.
[edit: * as a Scot with family originating from the Highlands am I ok to play the victim card for much of my ancestry moving to the other side of the Atlantic?]
>Thank goodness we're not resorting to hyperbole here. I'm not sure how much of a victim he is given his status and the historical gulf of time before his birth and the period in question
The person's country is the victim the parent referred to, not the person.
A person's whose country or community has been wrong will also rightly have an axe to grind with the aggressors, whether the person is a Black, Jew, Native American, Indian, etc.
You've got to be kidding. What about the cast system? Do you think that would be better or worse now if the british had never colonialised india? Would india be a democracy now?
> What about the cast system? Do you think that would be better or worse now if the british had never colonialised india?
The British aggressively codified, intensified and encouraged increased enforcement of the caste system in India in order to facilitate their divide-and-conquer strategy. Did you really not know that?
> We're never going to run out of lime. Ever. It is literally everywhere.
Not true. Limestone suitable for mining is a limited resource. That's why cement companies like Lafarge pay millions for mining rights in South East Asia. They clear out entire mountain ranges to turn into cement.
They will mine wherever they can make the greatest profit.
That doesn't mean we will ever run out, or even ever run out of good-quality limestone. It just means that for a variety of reasons (mostly lax taxation laws and a population in poverty that will work for terrible wages) Vietnam is a hotspot for mining in SE Asia, but its total production is a rounding error compared to what is produced in China alone.
There is a lot to be discussed about exploiting poorer areas for resource extraction. It's a subject that goes beyond any one particular resource. But (in the case of lime) it also does not imply scarcity. Keep in mind that lime can be regenerated- the lime cycle is an endless loop.
> limestone mining destroys the landscape just like any quarry does
In South East Asia, limestone quarrying and mining has destroyed the habitat of many species. There are dozens of species that are extinct, or are going extinct due to limestone mining. They clear entire limestone mountain ranges and turn them into cement.
> Hi, Ursa from Visionect here, the company powering the Sydney traffic signs.
You're also the poster of the article which is an ad from your company.
> In many applications, it can also prove to be as much as four times more reliable than LCD.
That's a really vague answer. Are you saying your solar powered road side display panels are 4 times more reliable than the LCD panels used with everything else? Could you share some data with us?
Life expectancy of LCD/LEDs depends greatly on the type (consumer would die fairly quickly in outdoor scenarios) and I'm sure one could build an LCD/LED display that will last 4 years outdoors. It's hard to deploy such LCD/LED sign (you require power and lots of it to be visible in sunlight) but it's possible.
The important thing here is that this first production outdoor deployment of EPD signs in the world works for for years without any serious problems which confirms that e-paper is a viable technology for outdoor deployments. There was a lot of skepticism back in 2013 if this is at all possible.
> It's hard to deploy such LCD/LED sign (you require power and lots of it to be visible in sunlight) but it's possible.
What? Most of the signboards you see on the road are LED signboards. You know the ones we have in freezing winter or in blazing summer! So not only is it possible, it's what's commonly done.
> The important thing here is that this first production outdoor deployment
There's very little data provided in the article, no real accurate data on what kind of environmental conditions were experienced by the devices. Seems like a puff piece.
Depends what your definition of 'terra nullius' is, and whether you believe that Aboriginal people were 'uncivilised' and if they were uncivilised then can another country claim legal settlement of that land for that reason.
The debate will never cease.
In the thousands of years Aboriginal people had here, it's a pity they didn't unite in greater numbers, and have the foresight to build a few permanent structures as symbols of a united people, both for their own reasons and in anticipation of invaders from across the seas.
Upon seeing obvious signs of a united people, impressions would have been different. But they didn't have a sense of ownership of the land. It never occurred to them that other humans may come and want what they had. They were unprepared.
It puzzles me why they couldn't envision such an invasion, when they would invade each others tribes routinely. They were not strangers to war and conflict including turf wars over hunting grounds. But they failed to unite as one people, probably due to the huge distances in Australia, but still... 40,000 years was plenty of time to get organised.
The defining feature of an immigrant is the act of immigration. Nobody born an Australian is an immigrant, regardless of whether their ancestors arrived by aeroplane, by boat, or by foot and canoe, unless they've chosen to emigrate. There is no technicality by which they can be considered an immigrant.
Lets be generous and say that all Indians in the USA work in the tech sector. That would be 2 million. Then lets be even more generous and add the entire population of Bangalore, 4 million as tech workers. 6E6/1.3E9 = 0.4 percent.
That's a simple standard showing that you are a minority and under-represented on a global level.
Considering the entire population of India is an absurd premise when discussing Asian-Indian representation in the US tech sector. Asian-Indians make up about 1% of the US population - I don't know how many work in tech in the USA, but I can guarantee you it's a greater share than 1%.
"New products, Fitbit BlazeTM and AltaTM, including related accessories, comprised 54% of Q216 revenue".
I don't know how revenue is split between the two, but it sounds like they're selling a lot of blazes.
Edit:
"In the first quarter, Fitbit sold 4.8 million wearable devices, including one million of the Fitbit Blaze and another one million of the Fitbit Alta."
Now this is first quarter data (when Blaze + Alta did 50% of overall revenue). Since Blaze costs 199$ and Alta 99$, one could split the revenue Blaze (33%) and Alta (17%) roughly.
One third of Fitbit revenue from Blaze (smartwatch) - that's a LOT!
hmm, i have the opposite impression. compared to lcd, eink displays seem pretty robust.