The Apple of their Eye

[DSpencer]

Re: The Apple of their Eye

The quote never said inventions were useless, or that they didn't make tasks easier. It said merely that they didn't lighten a day's toil. And I see little evidence that they do.

What do you think living 300 years ago was like? You got a climate controlled home - the concept of fire in the middle of a dwelling is pretty damned old. So is the concept of living in caves (It's like geothermal heat-pumps for free. Go green).

The life-expectancy thing is somewhat a sham. "People are living longer," they tell you. It's not true. It's just that infant mortality rates drop. They're having babies in hospitals instead of farmhouses. That's all.

This absurd idea that everyone died in their 40s in the past is silly. The idea that people will soon commonly live to 110 needs to go. You get until your 70s or 80s unless something gets you first. Modern medical science combined with first-response times might get you an extra shot at a heart attack.

Sahelanthropus lived into his 70s 7 million years ago - the last few decades with a mangled jaw. People took care of him. Ramsees II went into his 80s 6,000 years ago, and Franklin through his 80s 300 years ago. It's like multiplying a dog's lifespan times 7 or something, weird, huh?

Tetracycline levels, likely from ancient beer, were sufficiently high as to be a consistent low-dose antibiotic, even though they didn't know why. Besides, most of the nastiest bugs (bacteria) forming death-risk infections were products of city-dwelling, particularly the type of dirty city-dwelling practiced in medieval Europe and Asia.

Anyhow, there are plenty of enjoyable modern conveniences and activities. But life was not so Hobbesian in the past as it is often made out to be, nor is it so gentile today.

Here's the low-down on workweeks over the last century. It bounces around a bit, but it seems to be rather stable.

Really? Living in a cave is an equal substitute for a modern house? I will go out on a limb and assume that despite the potential cost savings, you probably still live in a house/apartment.

Increased life expectancy is somewhat a sham? People are not living longer? Have any data to back that up?

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

So a white male at 10 years old would be expected to live another 48 years in 1850. In 2004 the expectation was 66.3. 18+ years. What a sham.

Are we looking at the same graph? By "seems to be rather stable" do you mean that it took a massive dive and then bounced back to a level that is still 11 hours short of where it started?

I have read that hunter gatherer societies do have more leisure time. Maybe that is the proof. Even if it's true, it's questionable whether it's more toil to work 40 hours at a desk or 20 hours outside catching dinner.

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Apple of their Eye

Really? Living in a cave is an equal substitute for a modern house? I will go out on a limb and assume that despite the potential cost savings, you probably still live in a house/apartment.

Nope, I'm coming at you live on the internet from a cave. In Kandahar. I picked it up cheap off Bin Laden's estate - even came with the dialysis machine.

Seriously, though, all I was saying is that climate controlled homes are a very old concept. I've spent nights sleeping outside where I would have paid good money for a cave though...

Increased life expectancy is somewhat a sham? People are not living longer? Have any data to back that up?
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

So a white male at 10 years old would be expected to live another 48 years in 1850. In 2004 the expectation was 66.3. 18+ years. What a sham.

Introduce me to someone who's 130 years old then. All I said was that you get until about 70 or 80 regardless of the century unless something gets you first. I said you'd get an extra shot at a heart attack etc. There are plenty of countries today that have actuarial figures worse off than the ones from USA 1840 that you post here. Mozambique and Angloa come to mind - things do not necessarily get better over time, especially when we look everywhere.

Are we looking at the same graph? By "seems to be rather stable" do you mean that it took a massive dive and then bounced back to a level that is still 11 hours short of where it started?

All-in-all they stayed pretty comfortably between 30 and 50 averaging out about 40.

As for your observation of bouncing back short of 50, there is one reason for that. It's the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Minimum wage combined with overtime pay reduced worked hours. It wasn't due to machines, though. It was due to FDR. There are many who would repeal this law today should they have the chance. Work hours would increase overnight.

Also it only applied to the US. As the Apple article this thread discusses points out, working for no money and being awakened in a factory dorm at midnight to pull a 12 hour shift is still alive and well in China. And it is precisely due to our modern machines that this happens.

I have read that hunter gatherer societies do have more leisure time. Maybe that is the proof. Even if it's true, it's questionable whether it's more toil to work 40 hours at a desk or 20 hours outside catching dinner.

Not everyone works at a desk. Some folks (myself included) consider it leisure to spend 20 hours outside catching dinner or growing food. Others yearn for the desk. I mean, if it's 20 hours fishing and gardening and hunting vs. 40 hours doing the grind...I know which one feels like leisure to me...even if I have to hunt with an atlatl. Also, I enjoy my work. Can't keep a good man down...

Regardless, there is some scholarship pointing towards the fact that economic growth and population growth are essentially equivalent. At any rate, they appear fairly close over the last decade:





I have no way of knowing the accuracy of these figures or whether they will hold up over time. But for the last 50 years, neither population growth rates nor world GDP growth ever reached beyond the 6% range and they each average somewhere between 3 and 4% with a gap less than a percentage point over 10-year periods, depending on whose numbers you trust.

But let's assume a 0.1% GDP growth over population growth model, given that one can assume numbers from this last decade are more accurate. That's 700 years for world real gdp per capita to double. Even at a 1% gap, which very much optimistic, it's 70 years. Those don't seem like "beam me up, Scotty" numbers to me. And I'm not even considering random or not-so-random catastrophe.

Also, I'm not saying that things always get worse either. I do not mean to disparage modern conveniences. But I will always view with suspicion any utopian dreams of 20 hour workweeks for people who, in comfort, live to be 150. Technology has made individual tasks easier, but every time it does humanity added people and complexity into the equation to compensate. Also, we're genetically programmed to live only so long before we fall apart. Nothing in the biological and medical sciences, genomics included, (not even that supposed RNA telomerase silver bullet a few years back) has led me to believe that this is significantly closer to changing than it was in the time of alchemists.

What John Stewart Mill said in the 1840s (I believe he lived until about 70 - take that actuaries) was more true than what Asimov said in the 1950s (Who I think also lived until his 70s...imagine that). That's the main point here.

[c1ue]

Re: The Apple of their Eye

Turns out Mike Daisey's comments are at least partially "artistic license"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03...s_mike_daisey/

The όberpopular US public-radio show This American Life has retracted a story it aired in January – the most listened-to show in its history – in which monologist Mike Daisey detailed what he claimed were his personal experiences when investigating heinous working conditions in plants operated by Apple's Chinese contract manufacturers.

An investigation into some of the details of that broadcast, based on Daisey's critically lauded one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", was begun by a China correspondent from American Public Media's Marketplace business report who was famliar with Chinese manufacturing practices, Rob Schmitz.

Schmitz was troubled that his own experiences in China were different from what Daisey had recounted as his experiences, so he contacted Li Guifen – who goes by the name Cathy Lee in western circles – who worked as Daisey's translator during his trip.

Li, Schmitz reports, contradicted many of Daisey's reports, saying that many of the experiences he recounted in his show simply didn't happen.

"Daisey told This American Life and numerous other news outlets that his account was all true," writes Schmitz. "But it wasn't."

For example, Daisey's show mentions meeting workers poisoned by hexane whose "hands shake uncontrollably". Didn't happen, says Li.

Daisey noted that guards at the contract manufacturer Foxconn had guns. No they didn't, says Li.

"Daisey claims he met underage workers at Foxconn," writes Schmitz. "He says he talked to a man whose hand was twisted into a claw from making iPads. He describes visiting factory dorm rooms with beds stacked to the ceiling." Li denied that any of these events happened, Schmitz reports.

Regarding the hexane allegations, Schmitz recounts a conversation that he and This American Life's executive producer and host Ira Glass had when they confronted Daisey with Li's statements.

Rob Schmitz: Cathy says you did not talk to workers who were poisoned with hexane.
Mike Daisey: That's correct.
RS: So you lied about that? That wasn't what you saw?
MD: I wouldn't express it that way.
RS: How would you express it?
MD: I would say that I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip.
Ira Glass: Did you meet workers like that? Or did you just read about the issue?
MD: I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was a constant conversation among those workers.
IG: So you didn't meet an actual worker who'd been poisoned by hexane.
MD: That's correct.

In a statement on his blog, Daisey stands by his work. "It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story," he says, "and I believe it does so with integrity."

Daisey does admit fault, but cloaks his motives in artistic license. "What I do is not journalism," he writes. "The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed This American Life to air an excerpt from my monologue. This American Life is essentially a journalistic – not a theatrical – enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret."

In addition to issuing its retraction, This American Life will devote its entire show this weekend to the errors it uncovered in its investigation of Daisey's story.

"We're letting the audience know that too many of the details about the people he says he met are in dispute for us to stand by the story," writes Glass. "I suspect that many things that Mike Daisey claims to have experienced personally did not actually happen, but listeners can judge for themselves."

From this Reg reporter's readings and conversations with Chinese expats about working conditions in Chinese factories, the truth lies somewhere between Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Google's bocce-ball courts, massages, and eyebrow shaping. The country's rapid industrialization and often-corrupt local officials and bosses have, indeed, led to working conditions that can be wildly inferior to those in more-settled industrialized nations.

But actual – if yellow-tinged – journalism as practiced by the likes of The New York Times has done more to move Apple into cooperation with the Fair Labor Association in auditing conditions at its suppliers than has dramatic license as practiced by a spotlight-seeking moralist piggybacking on the fame of another.

Which brings this reporter to a question that has been nagging at him through all of this "Apple as Simon Legree" hysteria. Thousands of American companies contract work out to Chinese suppliers, and many of them – Dell, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, and others, if reports are correct – use the same Foxconn facilities as does Apple. Why, then, is Apple the only company facing fierce scrutiny, petitions, and – yes – "dramatic license"?

Oh, I forgot. Apple is evil – and apparently more evil than companies that don't audit their suppliers, but merely look away and hope no one notices.