black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             
“After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. After locating plants in other countries like China, Intel is opening its most advanced plant right here at home. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.”
POTUS
“Apple, whose products the world cannot get enough of, has been justifiably criticized for poor working conditions and low wages at the factories of its chief supplier in China, Foxconn. Now, however, there are signs that all the negative attention, including reports in this newspaper, has caused the companies to make changes, like raising wages, limiting work hours and providing chairs with backs instead of stools at workstations.  As Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg recently reported in The Times, Apple and Foxconn are working to reduce workweeks, first to 60 hours and eventually to 49. Wages have also been increased, in some cases by as much as 50 percent, to make up for fewer hours of overtime. While tentative and disputed by some independent labor groups, these changes, along with improvements made by Hewlett-Packard and other companies, are a positive first step in what will very likely be a long process of ensuring fair compensation and sound factory conditions for the millions working in this industry. […] Independent labor activists acknowledge that Apple and Foxconn, which is China’s largest private sector employer with 1.4 million workers, are no worse than other companies in the industry and are probably doing more than their competitors to improve working conditions. As leaders in technology manufacturing, they should chart the course for others to follow. But Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have both been very secretive about factory conditions and even reforms, refusing to release audit and investigative reports that would help raise standards across the industry. In May, Timothy Cook, the chief executive, said Apple would be “the most transparent company” in the world on issues related to workers’ welfare and supplier responsibility. It is time for the company to start living up to that promise. The production of iPhones and iPads requires skilled and semiskilled workers who increasingly have more bargaining power and cannot be as easily replaced as, say, the Bangladeshi women who stitch clothes for American retailers like Walmart. For companies operating in China and earning billions in profits, corporate responsibility demands that workers be treated and paid fairly.” Progress Where They Make iPhones | NYT

“Apple, whose products the world cannot get enough of, has been justifiably criticized for poor working conditions and low wages at the factories of its chief supplier in China, Foxconn. Now, however, there are signs that all the negative attention, including reports in this newspaper, has caused the companies to make changes, like raising wages, limiting work hours and providing chairs with backs instead of stools at workstations. 

As Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg recently reported in The Times, Apple and Foxconn are working to reduce workweeks, first to 60 hours and eventually to 49. Wages have also been increased, in some cases by as much as 50 percent, to make up for fewer hours of overtime.

While tentative and disputed by some independent labor groups, these changes, along with improvements made by Hewlett-Packard and other companies, are a positive first step in what will very likely be a long process of ensuring fair compensation and sound factory conditions for the millions working in this industry. […]

Independent labor activists acknowledge that Apple and Foxconn, which is China’s largest private sector employer with 1.4 million workers, are no worse than other companies in the industry and are probably doing more than their competitors to improve working conditions. As leaders in technology manufacturing, they should chart the course for others to follow. But Apple and Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan, have both been very secretive about factory conditions and even reforms, refusing to release audit and investigative reports that would help raise standards across the industry.

In May, Timothy Cook, the chief executive, said Apple would be “the most transparent company” in the world on issues related to workers’ welfare and supplier responsibility. It is time for the company to start living up to that promise. The production of iPhones and iPads requires skilled and semiskilled workers who increasingly have more bargaining power and cannot be as easily replaced as, say, the Bangladeshi women who stitch clothes for American retailers like Walmart. For companies operating in China and earning billions in profits, corporate responsibility demands that workers be treated and paid fairly.”

Progress Where They Make iPhones | NYT

“The closest thing Maps can find for ‘Dulles Airport’ is ‘Dulles Airport Taxi.’ Search for Cleveland, Ga., and you’ll wind up right smack in Cleveland, Tenn. Riverside Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla, is in the right place but the wrong decade; it became a Publix supermarket 11 years ago.

And on, and on, and on. Entire lakes, train stations, bridges and tourist attractions have been moved, mislabeled or simply erased. Satellite photo views consist of stitched-together scenes from completely different seasons, weather conditions and even years. The point-of-interest data, in particular, seems to be incomplete or flaky, especially overseas (many snarky examples at theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com).

The most stunning new feature, Flyover, offers interactive, photorealistic 3-D models of major cities — but some scenes have gone horribly wrong. The Brooklyn Bridge has melted into the river, the road to the Hoover Dam plunges straight down into a canyon and Auckland’s main train station is in the middle of the sea.

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.“ 

NYT

This American Life retracts Mike Daisey’s Apple-Foxconn piece, Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory, as “partially fabricated:” This American Life has retracted this story because we learned that many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated. We have removed the audio from our site, and have left this transcript up only for reference. We produced an entire new episode about the retraction, featuring Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Mike’s translator Cathy and discovered discrepancies between her account and Mike’s, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who has reported extensively on Apple. Ira also re-interviewed Mike Daisey to learn why he misled us. 

This American Life retracts Mike Daisey’s Apple-Foxconn piece, Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory, as “partially fabricated:”

This American Life has retracted this story because we learned that many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated. We have removed the audio from our site, and have left this transcript up only for reference. We produced an entire new episode about the retraction, featuring Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who interviewed Mike’s translator Cathy and discovered discrepancies between her account and Mike’s, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who has reported extensively on Apple. Ira also re-interviewed Mike Daisey to learn why he misled us. 

“Still, there’s a reason for optimism about America’s workforce, and a good lesson to be learned from Apple’s surge. What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms. As Marc Andreessen argued in the Wall Street Journal this summer, “software is eating the world.” Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways and a central kitchen that roasts three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice a day.

So perhaps there’s a different insight from Apple for Obama. Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.

That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop “an economy that’s built to last.”

— Nicholas Thompson

©2011 Kateoplis