Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory – It’s About Us

This American Life is pretty much always great, but this podcast – covering one man’s journey into the Chinese factories that make our tech products – affected me deeply.

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

Heartbreaking and fascinating, seriously worth 45 minutes of your life. Stories of extraordinarily long hours, child labor, and repetitive stress injuries that make our own seem like hangnails in comparison. Stories of people assembling parts as small as human hairs by hand for 16 hours at a stretch, stories of people working with their hands until their bones simply crumble (and they’re out of work for life). Stories of experiments with neurotoxins like hexane being done on unwitting human workers. It goes on and on.

But listen through to the last ten minutes, where the emotional impact, and the anger the story generates,  is sort of qualified by observations of economic realities in China: “Hundreds of thousands of Chinese choose the grimness of factory life over the grimness of the rice paddies.”

I remember when the suicide nets went up around the Foxconn factory, and the simplistic reactions people had to their existence. But some perspective helps – the truth is, China as a whole has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, while those rates are actually lower in factory cities like Chengdu than they are in the rest of the country. And Foxconn is doing the right thing by trying to prevent them – that’s a good thing, not an example of Foxconn simply accepting suicide as a cost of doing business.

But while Apple is  a sexy centerpoint for the story, it’s important to remember that this isn’t really a story about Apple – virtually every single technology product we buy, from DVD players to smartphones to game consoles to blenders, is made under similar conditions.

Actually, this isn’t even a story about the human cost of our enjoyment of technology. Virtually everything on the shelves at Walmart and Target is made in China. The clothes on your back, that car you drive… chances are high those things were made in conditions that are similar or worse than those at Foxconn. It’s not about Apple – it’s about us (ZDNet’s Larry Dignan does a good job widening the scope of the story in this post).

The popularity of this story is an opportunity for the west to reflect on the implications of its addiction to cheap products in general. We’ve grown into  a dangerous symbiotic relationship with China – we can’t shake the allure of cheap products, and they can’t shake the allure of jobs for their citizens. Your cheap jeans create jobs for peasants. And if we were somehow to bring those jobs back to the U.S., we would be throwing those peasants back into the poverty they’ve partially escaped in the past decade. Reality is messy.

Coupled with a recent NY Times piece covering the same topic, it’s been a hard week for Apple, who are scrambling to do spin control. But whether this is an Apple problem or a larger problem of our addiction to cheap goods, Apple could be stepping up as a leader in making a difference here. With the company’s insane bankroll, they could and should be doing more to affect manufacturing conditions.

What about you? Would you be willing to pay 50% more for an iPhone or an HP laptop if it meant you knew it was made in the U.S., under different conditions?

See also: Apple CEO Steve Cook Responds to Allegations

Metric Century

Less talk, more action! Just signed up to do a 65-mile (metric century) bike tour of Chico’s wildflower wilderness this April, with +Chris Tweney and whoever else wants to join. Could be up to 4,000 riders on the run.

http://www.chicovelo.org/main/century-series/26-wildflower

Though I bicycle commute daily, have never done a ride this long before. Time to start training, but my commuter bike is too heavy, and wrong riding position. Hit up a friend for advice, scoured the craigslist boards, and ended up with a 2005 LeMond Tourmalet – tightly tuned and ready to go! Got what I consider a very good deal.

Next weekend will probably see what I can do on a 20-miler.

Arduino Local Ethernet Connections via Shared WiFi

There are a ton of great ideas out there for intertube-connected Arduino projects, but you may find yourself in this situation:

  • Router has no more unused ports
  • You prefer not to be chained to your router, which may be inconveniently located
  • Your Arduino network shield is not WiFi enabled

I prefer to work on a Mac laptop with a WiFi connection, but wanted to do network experiments with an ethernet Arduino shield. Here’s the solution:

  1. Go to System Preferences | Sharing
  2. Enable Internet Sharing
  3. Share the connection from WiFi to Ethernet

Now you can connect an Ethernet cable from your Mac to your Ethernet shield. Because the Mac takes care of crossovers automatically, this will “just work.”

Next you need to find out what IP address to use in your Arduino sketches. Open  a Terminal and type:

ifconfig en0

A few lines down, you’ll see something like:

inet 192.168.2.1

Change that “.1” at the end to any number under 255 and you should have an address that’s shared through your WiFi network, through your Mac, and usable in any Arduino ethernet sketches (I’m using 192.168.2.10).  Now you can work without worrying about being tethered to a physical router, or being out of free ports.

 

 

Arduino experiments

Got the Ethernet shield today, and was able to put together a simple circuit and hack up / modify a couple of existing sketches. I can now contact Twitter through the API, examine a tweet, and light the green LED if a certain word exists in that tweet, light up red if it doesn’t. Baby steps, but it’s starting to click.

Circuit hacking is fun!