iPod terrorists!

[John99]

Patriots of America unite! United we stand strong against terrorism and their vile quest for facism!

The following story came to my attention about the evil Ipod.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5262110.stm

The enemy has a face!

The iPod is made in China!!! A communist terrorist country! A country aspiring to join the axis of evil! A country who supported north korea, an established member of the axis of evil, to kill american heroes!

What does Apple do?!? It manufactures its iPods in China! In a communist factory! 200.000 people work in this factory of slavery alone. An estimated 30.000 are making iPods doing 60 hours a week shifts if they have a easy week.

That's 45.000 american jobs stolen away! 45.000 american lives which are ruined because of the unamerican ways of this terrorist organization which pretends to be a respectable corporation. YUCK!

Capitalism is terrorism!

American patriots unite!

Together we shall rid our fine nation of infidels and their evil friends!

Do not buy an iPod or ANY Apple product untill this company returns to its godfearing american ways!

Moreover, if you happen to live in Florida and have a concealed weapon shoot anyone with white headphones. Yes, they are a listening device made by the devil. Shoot those unpatriotic traitors with american made hand guns!

If you life outside florida do a citizens arrest. Arrest them for treason. For terrorism. For 9/11.


Together we can do this my patriotic friends.

You are either with us or against us, and for the first time we now have a visual cue that distinguishes friend from foe.

This is a war.

Too many exclamation marks warning


------------------

I think that after Apple management leaves a worksite that is seemingly better than the norm all hell breaks loose and the whip gets cracked.

Do European manufacturers ousource?

 

[Neildo]

Speak for yourself; I use mine for music, photos, university lecture podcasts and as a flashdrive to hold my experimental data and image backups. Its 30 GB of pure usefulness.

I didn't say MP3 players are overrated, but the Ipod version is. There's so many more that are better than Apple's yet everyone buys an Ipod for it's name -- they must really love U2.

- N

 

[S.A.M.]

I didn't say MP3 players are overrated, but the Ipod version is. There's so many more that are better than Apple's yet everyone buys an Ipod for it's name -- they must really love U2.

- N

Are there mp3 players which play music, video, podcasts, and function as flashdrives?

I'd like to know. (Mine was a gift).

 

[Nickelodeon]

I like the clickwheel.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

China's GDP is growing at the astounding rate of ten percent per year. Of course they're reinvesting a lot of that in infrastructure and capital construction, but still it translates into arguably the fastest rise in personal income and standard of living of any country on earth. The "starving children in China" that my mother used to taunt me with to shame me into eating my carrots are long gone. (Little did I know then that raw carrots have almost no nutritional value, they really are child abuse.) People in remote villages have TVs and cell phones. Only the ethnic minorities have consistently hard times, and which of our exalted countries has no complaints of abuse from its ethnic minorities?

You can thank Apple, Wal-Mart, and all the other villains in your scenario for that prosperity. For the fact that China may still be a dictatorship but it's not a very faithfully communist dictatorship or even a socialist one. For the fact that China can see its way out of its problems through economic means rather than military.

Very few of us would buy those iPods or fashion sneakers if they were made by unionized American high-school dropouts making $45,000 a year for pushing a bloody button on a machine. We wouldn't even buy them if they were made by Chinese workers who were paid the equivalent in Chinese money, adjusting for the lower cost of living. It would not be a moral decision, we simply couldn't afford to buy them.

So the Chinese people have a simple choice. Work for what to them is at least a living wage, a wage their parents couldn't even dream of, a wage that allows most of them to have a roof, a full belly, electricity most of the time, and some modest comforts. Or overthrow their government (for the sake of argument) and create a people's paradise (oh wait didn't they already try that) where everybody makes at least $10,000 a year... and then watch their products sit on the shelf because none of us can afford to buy them.

Every industry in which America has ever achieved prominence has been one that draws on our strengths: creativity, risk-taking, innovation. We're cowboys, oil-well drillers, movie moguls, railroad builders, inventors, trail-blazers. Whenever one of our industries matures, we lose our edge. Autos, steel, electronics, originally these were frontier industries requiring big ideas with no fear of failure. And we rule in that environment.

Now they need quality assurance, incremental improvements, perfectability, economic efficiency... and we absolutely suck at that stuff. We can't even spell QA, and as a process improvement consultant I can assure you that most American leaders fall asleep when you start talking about doing what they're already doing, just a little bit better, instead of doing something exciting and new.

We have to let these industries migrate offshore, where different cultures have different strengths. No people on earth love to take somebody else's ideas and find a way to make them a little more efficient than the Japanese. No people on earth love to pore over a procedure exhaustively until it comes out perfect like the Germans. The Indians, the Chinese, the Brazilians, the Ghanaians, they all have their cultural predisposition.

And so do we. Ours is the love of doing something new and different even when everybody says it won't work. Sometimes it doesn't work but when it does it changes the world.

We need to stick with that. We need to stop lamenting the loss of manufacturing jobs and instead realize that what we're manufacturing are the products of mature industries that have no home in America. We need business leaders who are risk takers, not bookkeepers.

We also need to retake the lead in information technology. It's not just an industry, it's the infrastructure for the entire new world economy. Whoever misses out on this will be the new Third World countries. There is still lots of room for creativity and innovation in IT, especially in software development. We build software like it was still 1967, we treat it like a medieval guild craft rather than a true engineering discipline. Many other countries like Estonia are already doing much better, but we all have a long way to go. Our IT managers need to have vision and be willing to try out new ideas, but instead they are all either bean counters who transferred into IT for the money, or technicians who got promoted as a reward for good work but have no management aptitude.

 

[Neildo]

Are there mp3 players which play music, video, podcasts, and function as flashdrives?

I'd like to know. (Mine was a gift).

Yes, usually any MP3 player that is over 10GB, and that's only for the video part since they're large files. Any MP3 player can be used as a flashdrive and any MP3 player can play podcasts as podcasts are just MP3 files, heh. Podcast is just a buzzword.

And also on the MP3 players with more memory, they're able to play FLAC or other large lossless file types for better audio quality. Not to mention non-Ipods can play more different file types than Ipods can as you have to convert most audio formats to play on an Apple product.

They also usually all have built-in FM radio whereas with the Ipod, you have to buy a special device for it. You can also record what you're listening to on the radio as well. And I forget if Ipods have built-in microphones that you can record with, but most MP3 players have that ability too.

Also, other than the 60GB Ipod, they'll cost less than an Ipod in the same gigabyte range. For the price of a 2GB Ipod mini, you can get a 5 or 6GB MP3 player from another company.

- N

 

[spuriousmonkey]

Do European manufacturers outsource?

Hell yes.

recently there was an article on the related story of Dutch companies being bought by foreign investors. In almost every case this just leads to reorganization (read laying off of workers) to increase the value of the stock.

An entire city was thriving around 'Philips'. Production costs were rising and factories got closed down, factories moved. But this classic example happened decades ago.

But yes. It's a common phenomenon in western countries.

 

[alain]

Doesn't that apply to most companies?

True, but Apple seem worse then most.

 

[John99]

Hell yes.

recently there was an article on the related story of Dutch companies being bought by foreign investors. In almost every case this just leads to reorganization (read laying off of workers) to increase the value of the stock.

An entire city was thriving around 'Philips'. Production costs were rising and factories got closed down, factories moved. But this classic example happened decades ago.

But yes. It's a common phenomenon in western countries.

Too bad, I bought something distinctly British only to find out it was made in China.

I talk to India now more than people in the states- for tech support, credit cards etc. :bugeye:

 

[spuriousmonkey]

In finland you have the nice system that anything made here get's a special label. Well, i think there is more than one label actually. There is the Swan label:

The "gott från finland-" or "good from Finland-" swan is a voluntary label
that is used on ready packaged products and refined provisions. The swan
label can be found on about 9200 different products, that are manufactured
by 273 companies.
To be able to display the swan label, 75% of the raw material has to be of
Finnish origin. When it concerns meat, fish, egg or dairy products, 100%.
The swan products are manufactured in Finland. The usage of the label is
monitored by frequent inspection visits.

There is another one for non-food products but I can't find it.

An easy way to buy stuff made locally. And it's more than just the company being Finnish. The product actually has to be largely made in finland.

 

[Zephyr]

This savage looking terrorist (see beard) solved one of the hardest problems in math.

That's not a beard! This is a beard!

And he's the founder of the communistical Free Software Foundation. BSD is allied with the devil! We must pray to Bush to save us from all this terrrrist open source! *spasms*

(He's American, BTW.)