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Re:I was offered a job at Foxconn to assemble iPhones for $1... by m0zg on Saturday May 18, 2019 @09:17PM (#19950759)
I go by the stats I have. If you have the median, sure, bring it out. But are you going to seriously argue that $10/day is adequate pay when a single iPhone has more _margin_ baked in it than a worker makes in a month? I mean, seriously, how the fuck is this defensible at all?
Re:I was offered a job at Foxconn to assemble iPhones for $1... by wutbrodo on Sunday May 19, 2019 @03:27PM (#19954962)
This is what I mean when I say that people are forgoing critical thinking in favor of smelling the farts of their moral outrage,whether it's tied to reality or not.

Saying that Foxconn workers are being paid "starvation wages" is an infinitely different question from whether they're getting paid "adequately" (a squishy term that contains several orders of magnitude within it) relative to Apple's margins. It's very difficult for me to believe that people who are as uninterested in understanding the facts of the situation as your comment implies actually care about the situation or these people at all.

Understanding the factual landscape of the situation is separate from having an emotional response to it, but it is a prerequisite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and economically illiterate (or willfully ignorant) emotional appeals like the one you're making have done immense damage to humanity.

I'm not even just talking about the standard examples of Communist dictatorships: there are a million less dramatic examples, like the straightforward Indian child labor law that did almost nothing but damage to the people it was supposed to protect: metrics across the board worsened for the families in question, including years of education, calories consumed, and most damningly, _hours of child labor_ (which increased).

By the way, I'm not insensitive to the notion that the balance between capital and labor's share of income could use some improvement. My point is about the damage that disinterest in understanding the distinction causes.