David Custis Kimball - blog
You: Why Dave; why now?
Me: Well, I've two talented kids; the younger mentioned my stopping with the lectures. Then enthusiastically asked, 'Dad, can I help you set up a blog?' Moments later, Me: 'OK, that's a great idea, thinkin' they might just read it someday.
me ---> 'Gaarr of Blog' <---
Goto oft comments on Art, Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), CommoNonsense, Dance, Dark Matter, Design, Etc., Environment, Eventspace, Fable, Food, Frogsense, Hazard Mitigation, Hegel, History, Horsense, Human Affairs, Humor, Law+Lawless, Mathematics, Medicine, Music, Nerd Stuff, Parenting, Physics, Psychophysics, Real Estate, Sailing, Science, Science Fiction, Swimming, Technology, Theology, UncommonSense, and Waldo, alphabetically.
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Matters of Import & Timely Expertise
repressing gossip and hate-speech.
An Unmapped Ponderocity:
To say: '"He is a man of truth," is to say nothing; to say: "He is a man of of," is to state an elementary truth of logic.'
Winston Davids, 1969 - Trinity College Valedictorian - 1970; known endeavor: actuarial contributions to The Donald; since has contacted me and sadly is quite ill. Ask prayers for recovery; thanks for his brilliance and music.
After hours, many workers live in on-site dormitories, where heavy staff turnover makes long-lasting personal connections impossible. That combination - long workdays and a minimal social safety net - leaves vulnerable young workers with few places to turn, says Liu. “Foxconn has 420,000 people; in the U.S. that would be a big city. Even in China that would be a big city, but it’s a city without any families. Everyone is working. They live in a dormitory for seven months and don’t know their own roommates’ names. ” -
Foxconn Suicides: iPhone and iPad Factory Under Scrutiny - Yahoo! News
History, Human Affairs, Technology
At what price? $130/month for 250 hours work is $.52 per hour… oh but you get to have a sleepover … just like when you were in Jr. High. I don’t think I want to hear anyone say that to me. I worked as a prototype technician in a company who later won a Nobel prize for their innovation… and I thought $916 per month or $5.20 was starvation wage, even when my rental was $242 per month. That was 1978.
32 years later Chinese workers make 10 percent of what I made in a low paying job during a ‘recession’. Granted, my job varied and was not considered anything like ‘assembly line’. We assembled new prototypes by reading the drawings of the design engineers. An elderly design engineer, from Moscow, USSR who was designing a transmitter of a low voltage signal to be sent along a high voltage electrical line. We became friends; he liked the way I would minimize wiring; avoid cross wiring or possible interference issues, and generally really respected his schematic. He told me of Soviet attempts to install alarms on expensive cars, but the problem was the alarm could not tell the difference between your ‘admiring’ the car and ‘coveting’ it in preparation of stealing it. We would stroll to Harvard Sq., and he couldn’t believe the opulence. I told him they had a $9Billion dollar trust fund; that anyone they thought was qualified could go to Harvard and didn’t have to worry about paying. He smiled, then thought I might be kidding… free world really?… Of course in the Soviet Union, the same standard applied… because no one had anything. We saw some tennis courts and thought we should try to play sometime… but things got busy…. and I got promoted; he went on to something else because the whole project was doomed by a Packaging Engineer, a Nazi prisoner of war guy, who like me, Arian Dave, too, but he had 500,000 of these fancy boxes made … and were too small to hold all the components necessary, especially those to keep the transmitter cooled…. so Sequence matters in System design…. The company hired a great Systems engineer, but too late. I moved on and got my own Reliability Lab, near the NASA folks working on a Solar Polar satellite. I got to blow up stuff, or over voltage it or over current it …. and see which components went first… which lasted…. and from there the report went not to the Design Engineer, but to the VP of Engineering Systems…. he reviewed it… he informed the Design Engineer.
Well, that’s how you make sure what is best is implemented. Something like trust, but verify. Design people can get very irrational about their own stuff… and usually it wasn’t about the design, but about the quality of the component. So the VP had the overall interest and authority to weigh and praise and scold, especially subcontractors who supplied stuff which wasn’t measuring up.
You heard the story of the relay whose case was too big and it worked its way out of the socket…. yep.
Well, China is counting on us to Design stuff, that will employ their workers, and they too are designing stuff, but certainly we don’t want to work for that $.52 hourly.
So what are we doing messing with innovators? Why are we giving authority to some bureaucrat whose only good day is when he gets offered some Porn on somebody else’s computer or a ‘fat envelope’? What are we doing to destroy incentive to succeed? Relying on Government to be our Boss. They should only be our servant. We pay them, after all, and yet we obey them? I’m sure the Chinese did not feel government was the people’s servant. Not according to their history… and Hegel’s 1810 collection ‘Philosophy of History’. And this is where the people are now…. servants and hoping that the government will keep them alive.
