U.S. anti-competitiveness

-
The NY Times has an article up about the iPhone jobs ending up in China.  It (i think) is supposed to be about how they are more flexible, faster, etc.  except that I read it as being behavior that we explicitly don't want.  Choice quotes
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.
 To me, this sounds like exactly the kind of behavior that we rail against - we don't want our government subsidizing our industries, picking winners/losers, etc.  do we?


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.

 Isn't this basically indentured servitude?  Again, wasn't this exactly the kind of stuff that we fought against, and eventually got rid of?  "A biscuit and a cup of tea" - great.  And a pat on the back too when they're done, I bet.

Just saying...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Spot The Difference — Deep Learning Edition

-
Image
You’ve played  Spot The Difference  at some point, right? (Of course you did. We  all  did  ). Think about what you actually did when you were trying to Spot The Difference — in fact, just do it again with SpongeBob juggling above. You’re probably doing something like 1. Quick glance to the left. 2. Quick glance to the right 3. “ Spatula on the left. Wonder if there is one on the right? ” 4. “ Yup, there is. Sriracha on the right. Is that on the left? ” 5. “ Nope! It’s a ketchup bottle on the left! And there is nothing on the plate below it! ” etc. To summarize, what you’re basically doing is looking at each image alternately, identifying objects in each image, and trying to find the same object in the other image. As it turns out, what most Deep Learning systems do is something quite different. They basically do something like this 1. Figure out everything in the first image (“ ketchup bottle at 1 o-clock, empty plate at 3 o-clock, spatula at 1...
Read more