The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker

Re:The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker by asdff on Monday November 12, 2018 @01:38PM (#18434571)

And in the modern U.S., the very same can happen to the working poor if they loose their job, or an unforeseen expense comes up to make paying for life's necessities suddenly impossible. Perhaps even at the same rate that a natural famine once every decade or so has killed off the poor; last season at least 80,000 people died in the U.S. from the flu [1], a disease that disproportionately affects the working poor and homeless due to poorer overall health. Not much has changed for the poor in this modern world even if they aren't subsistence farmers.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/health/flu-deaths-2017--2018-...

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Re:The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker by umanwizard on Monday November 12, 2018 @05:58PM (#18436784)

You were responding to a comment about starving to death with some info about flu deaths...

Starving to death is indeed very, very rare in the United States.

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Re:The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker by asdff on Monday November 12, 2018 @10:43PM (#18438373)

But evidently flu deaths are not so rare. Just as starving to death is a consequence of economics for the farmer, dying of the flu is a consequence of economics for the poor in the United States. One cannot pay for food during a famine, and the other cannot pay for health services during the yearly epidemic.

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Re:The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker by umanwizard on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @01:10AM (#18438989)

What is your point exactly? That industrialized civilization isn’t actually better than abject rural poverty, because a tiny minority of people still die of poverty-related causes? How do the numbers stack up on each side?

80,000 people is less than 1 in 3750 Americans — I’ll take my chances with those odds over living somewhere with regular famines.

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