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Apple is a master at this. News of its child and slave labor abuses have been brushed off because people love their products.
by mgh2 5y ago
Apple is a master at this. News of its child and slave labor abuses have been brushed off because people love their products.
- trissylegs 5y agoAlso making a lot money off what is essentially a huge casino. (games that use Addictive Gambling Mechanics to sell Micro-transations)
- sunshinerag 5y agoThat is on android too. So Google too
- trissylegs 5y agoIt is too. (And Tencent, Epic, Blizzard, Valve, etc)
- dannyw 5y agoWhat's the net social outcome of this? Would these people be spending money at the casino instead?
- username90 5y agoNo, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before. The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.
- hedora 5y agoThat’s a good theory, but everyone I know that’s worked with game microtransaction data says the majority of money comes from a few “whales”. Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).
- imtringued 5y agoSome whales spend $1000 every weekend at the club/bar. They simply have that much money and dont care how they spend it.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoAlso because almost every other tech company (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc.) make their products at the exact same Foxconn factories. Apple just gets the biggest headline.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoCite sources for that claim please.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoYou can look it up online. Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting. But it also applies to others: Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules) Nintendo DS Manufacturer: Foxconn Modern Nokia / HMD Global Devices Manufacturer: Foxconn Xbox 360 Manufacturer: Foxconn AMD Threadripper TR4 Socket Manufacturer: Foxconn And so on. Apple, Foxconn. Because almost everybody uses Foxconn. So when you see those articles about "Apple factory suicide nets," calling it the whole tech industry's contract manufacturer of choice would have been more apt.
- temp8964 5y agoFoxconn has lots of factories in lots of different places. Does it matter to specify which factory / place has the problem?
- johannes1234321 5y agoNo, it doesn't matter, as cheap labor in on fab subsidizes the other fabs, even if those would have best working conditions thinkable.
- ben_w 5y agoPerhaps, but unlikely. I can’t find how many people worked at Foxconn at the time, but right now it’s employing more than the population of any of the smallest eight US states. Wikipedia’s list of suicide rates by state is from a different year than the population, but it looks like those states are about 5 times the population-adjusted rate that Foxconn had. Wikipedia also says that China’s national suicide rate is difficult to study due to political concerns, before saying the WHO says it was 9.7/100k in 2016. That would mean you should expect closer to 126 suicides per year (in Foxconn’s current workforce), rather than the 14 in 6 months that made the news.