Of course #1 is the easier path; we wouldn't be having this argument otherwise. But the purpose of the ongoing protests is to make #1 less easy, so that even if Apple doesn't do the right thing for the right reasons, it might still be forced to do the right thing.
There are, though, numerous examples of companies going beyond the current national regulations of whatever country they work in, either out of a desire to do the right thing, or a desire to gain the publicity of appearing to do the right thing. Many companies advertise their green practices, or their all-natural ingredients, or the happy nature of their workers. Heck, Foxconn itself already argues that its conditions are much better than comparable factories around it. And thinking back to the American factories you mention, Ford was famous for paying his workers much higher wages than the market dictated because (he claimed) it was the right thing to do. There's nothing stopping Apple from doing the same thing. Sure, it would only improve the lives of their own employees and not (directly) change standards in China as a whole, but that's still hundreds of thousands of people.
And if Apple doesn't want to do the right thing on its own, we'll just have to tarnish its squeaky-clean brand enough that the additional costs of paying better wages are less than the costs of the advertising needed to repair its brand.
You make this sound a lot more complicated than it is. Yes, we're asking Apple to forgo perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of profits in order to either give more money to its workers, or improve their conditions, or both. But note that we already do this: they could literally be enslaved and forced to work until they die, but that is not acceptable even in China. The objective is to move the bar of what is unacceptable higher, just as was done in most first-world countries decades ago. It's really not that complicated. Apple has easily enough clout to force Foxconn to raise wages and reduce hours, as long as Apple is willing to shoulder some of the reduced profits this entails.
Moral logic 1: As long as all their other options are worse, you are justified in making the option you provide only better enough to make sure they prefer it to the horrible alternatives.
Moral logic 2: If is within your power to make their lives better, you should do so, especially when the cost to you is very low.
Amazing how many people here seem to prefer 1 to 2. It goes against almost every major religious or secular moral code I can think of. I'd hate to see how those folks raise their own children.
And incidentally, the reason this is especially applicable to Apple (besides the publicity) is that its giant profit margins and huge cash backlog means that the second clause of 2 is especially relevant. It would cost Apple very little indeed to make these people's lives significantly better.
I guess Paulites don't have the brains to recognize that some junk gawker added after the .html is probably what should be removed.
(Try adding a long link, as opanitch did above, and you'll see that there's a flaw in gizmodo.com's mechanism for making links live. I guess that means you've never added a link yourself?)
Correct link, for the problem-solving-impaired: "[bit.ly]". I look forward to your point-by-point responses.
(And opanitch's fixed link: "[bit.ly]")
Sadly, I don't think that links to random websites are going to convince you, and nor should they. You'll have to do some actual research! But here's a place to get you started:
Things Ron Paul would abolish: Civil Rights Act, Disabilities Act, Medicare, public education, food safety testing, environmental protection, the minimum wage, income tax, interstate highways.
Things Ron Paul doesn't believe in: evolution, global warming, immigration, abortion, that black and gays are equal to whites.
And though he claims to be a libertarian, he is perfectly happy to have the states (rather than the federal government) be totally free to do whatever they want to infringe on your rights.
He would be a disaster as a president.
So format wars means that Apple will hold the education of kids with Android tablets hostage until they or their school district coughs up the money for a redundant tablet.
It turns out there are problems when you mix the free market ("Apple can do what it wants; don't buy it if you don't like it") with human rights stuff like kids and public education.
Please use the *telephone*, not the web or email, to contact your representative. They pay 100 times more attention to a phone call than an electronic message. If it's busy try back later or even tomorrow. It's worth the extra effort.
Right -- even the diagram suggests a single particle looping forward and backward through time. But I meant it apropos of the one-electron universe. If zillions of such particle pairs are appearing and disappearing every second, it makes it very hard to explain how it could all be one electron/positron. Not that I think anyone ever took the idea seriously...
What about electron-positron virtual pairs?
"But I didn't switch for political reasons, or as an act of protest"
If your objection is that you can easily opt-out but don't think that's right, then that objection really is political, not personal. Face up to it: it's a bigger issue than your own convenience, and that matters. Write a properly political essay next time.
"I do have some lingering doubts about just how ecological of a solution this is."
Over 4% of Japan's home electricity use goes to electric toilet seats:
[whatjapanthinks.com]
It depends on your attitude towards summary executions in wartime. But context doesn't change the fact that it is a photo of one man shooting another in the head. Photos of suffering are useful in that they can resist efforts to recontextualize a murder as ok because the general was fairly honorable and the other guy may have committed terrible crimes.
The beginning in particular reads like a parody of a high-literature treatment of genre fiction. Multi-page paragraphs of reminiscence and musing on the nature of the city and capitalist culture while being attacked in unsuspenseful slow-motion by a small batch of threat-free zombies. But though the narrative payoffs were as unrealized as one would expect, damned if it didn't keep me coming back until I finished. And the idea that civilization is just a series of lacunae in between periods of apocalypse was a strangely moving one; even though one guesses how it will end, one is continually succumbing to the idea that this time, the rebuilding has properly begun.
By "single treatment," I didn't mean one injection, but what the study said: "Half got two infusions of rituximab given two weeks apart." This was not an ongoing treatment, but something remarkably brief given the duration of the effect. And the argument that if X were a real disease, every subject would benefit from some treatment is silly. What's sad is the repeated effort of dismiss CFS as a real disease with, clearly, no knowledge of science or CFS whatsoever. (And that's not condescension, btw -- just disgust.)
Please just read more carefully. 67% of patients in the treatment group, versus 13% of patients in the placebo group. That's a statistically significant difference, meaning that anything shared between the two groups -- such as doctor attention -- could not be causing the apparent effectiveness of the drug.
The fact that the effect faded months after a single treatment with the drug is like almost every other drug in existence, and signifies nothing about doctor attention. And the long-term effects are not claimed to be statistically different between the treatment and placebo groups, just suggestive.
These are all simple, logical points that hold for any study with a treatment and control group. Please learn at least the first thing about how science works before offering up an "opinion" that just happens to match what careless doctors have been (incorrectly) saying for decades. There's no point in seeing "further studies" on this topic if you can't understand what the studies you already have mean.
How is it that that article, about the interaction between the immune system and CFS, can be interpreted as evidence that CFS is in the mind?
I imagine the people here suggesting that CFS is psychological are ignorant both of the long battle those with CFS have waged to convince the medical establishment that it is not just depression (a battle they have largely won), and of the long history of other diseases (like Multiple Sclerosis and Lyme disease) that were repeatedly dismissed as psychological. But "just offering an opinion" is a weasely way of acknowledging that your opinion is probably offensive, without taking responsibility for the thoughtless expression of it.
That egregiously written second sentence is indicative of the level of mental acuity necessary to believe it's ok for Facebook to do this.
We didn't intend it as a structural piece, we just intended to eat it (no cardboard or other cheats inside, just the one tubular cookie). But like many gingerbread houses, we couldn't bear to eat it until it was far too late. When one of us tried to crush it from above and couldn't, the books started.
