Sunday Open Thread [1.22.12]

Comments (14)

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1. Andy says:

   January 22, 2012 at 12:42 pm

   They are still very well financed and as we know as long as money is speach their brand of speach will be heard by many and still go along way

2. Jason330 says:

   January 22, 2012 at 2:04 pm

   Organizations that live by nursing human fears will thrive as long as the grass grows and the sky is blue.

3. Joseph Cerasari says:

   January 22, 2012 at 2:23 pm

   How’s that nihilism thing work’n Jason?

4. Jason330 says:

   January 22, 2012 at 2:45 pm

   As with everything, I’m a dilettante when it comes to nihilism.

5. puck says:

   January 22, 2012 at 2:48 pm

   I tried nihilism once but it wasn’t fulfilling.

6. puck says:

   January 22, 2012 at 2:58 pm

   Governor Markell said something in the State of the State last week that needs to be called out. He quoted the late Steve Jobs as saying:

   “Apple employs seven hundred thousand factory workers in China because it can’t find the thirty thousand engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants.”

   Steve Jobs was lying, Governor Markell, and as a tech executive yourself, you knew or ought to have known that. A NYT article from yesterday tells the real story.

   First of all, what Jobs really means is;

   “Apple employs seven hundred thousand factory workers in China because it can’t find the thirty thousand engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants at the price it wants to pay.”

   Fixed that for you, Steve.

   But even that isn’t right. Because Apple doesn’t even employ 700K factory workers in China. And Apple doesn’t employ 30K engineers in China. According to the NYT:

   Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s.

   The remainder are contractors serving other manufacturers as well as Apple:

   Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

   So Steve was indulging in a bit of his trademark grandiosity.

   And here’s why Apple chose the factory in China:

   When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

   The owners made engineers available at almost no cost…

   And here is what being on call 24 hours is like for those Chinese factory workers:

   Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

   A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

   And what would it cost to have those 700K Apple jobs in the US instead of China?

   … various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense.

   So according to Jobs, he shipped 700K jobs to China so Apple investors could make $65 extra per iPhone, in government-subsidized factories. Which he is entitled to do. But we don’t have to swallow his justification of “not being able to hire qualified engineers.’

   Nobody, especially not Governor Markell, should even think about using Steve Job’s hyperbolic marketing spiel as a basis for education policy.

   Of course Delaware should strengthen STEM education, and offer AP-level computer science classes. Sure, we need to graduate more engineers, in the areas where they are needed. But at the same time, we need to change national policy to make it harder for executives like Steve Jobs to ship jobs overseas, and easier to keep them here.

7. Jason330 says:

   January 22, 2012 at 3:06 pm

   Markell needs to be called out? Wrong. He needs to be congratulated on being transparent. These neo-trans-nationalist capitalist Dems like markell and Obama think that we need to get to China/Mexico labor parity to be competitive.

   They admit it.

8. Nancy Willing says:

   January 22, 2012 at 3:53 pm

   Good on Puck. So. Right.

9. Joe Cass says:

   January 22, 2012 at 4:12 pm

   He shoots! Puck scores!!!

10. John Young says:

    January 22, 2012 at 4:54 pm

    Puck, dead on. For every three STEM grads, one job.

    Q: Why should DE DISPROPORTIONALLY focus on this as part of ED policy?

    A: we shouldn’t

11. anon says:

    January 22, 2012 at 5:31 pm

    If religion researchers only examine Sunday sermons, they’re missing the bigger picture. They ought to be checking out the thriving online Christian communities, such as Crosswalk.com.

12. cassandra m says:

    January 22, 2012 at 6:50 pm

    God does work in mysterious ways: Black church in South Carolina declared landlord of KKK gift shop

13. Valentine says:

    January 23, 2012 at 9:26 am

    Conservative Christianity may or may not be on the decline, but that constituency has captured the GOP and has so much power in Congress that the Christian Right agenda is still a serious threat.

14. Keith Phillips says:

    January 23, 2012 at 1:46 pm

    Thank God!