With Great Power comes Great Responsibility

If you were the Executive of the Tobacco Monopoly, what would you do with the power at your disposal?  This particular Executive seems to be hanging out in his van playing video games on his cell phone.  Sounds like a reasonable choice to me...

Taken at the crossroads

A couple of pictures from the main intersection just outside the side gate of the university where we live.

Squiggly Snacks

You know how in America, you get all kinds of packaged snacks that are sweet and stale and utterly disgusting, yet also totally compelling and delicious at the same time?  One cool thing about China is that you can get that same exact snacking sensation, but without all that extra packaging.  Yum!  Now, if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go get me some of those...

Don't think I've got very much to add to this one

I mean really, what's there left to say?

Can I interest you in an eye care massager?

What I love about China: I can be sitting in my office in the English department, grading papers, and someone can walk in out of the blue and try to sell me a pair of opaque sunglasses with bumps on the back. Thankfully, my Chinese is good enough that I could A: understand the main gist of what she was asking me, and B: politely tell her that I was not interested.

the iPad and us (part 3 - the Story of Stuff)

Okay, here's a little video interlude in this whole bit. Ironically, it was the video I had shown to my students on the Thursday before the iPad plant explosion on Friday.



Yeah, I know, it's a bit simplified and propagandistic (and hey, what isn't?), but her main points are fairly clear and succinct, and bear repeating:

• Most electronic products are "designed for the dump", that is, they are made to become quickly obsolete, so that consumers will get rid of them and buy new products and a faster rate.
  
• The amount of time that we own our electronic devices is just a short blip in their life cycle; they start affecting the environment from the moment their raw materials are extracted, and they continue to harm the environment through the release of toxins long after we throw them away.
• There are many externalized costs in the manufacture of consumer goods - negative effects from these products on people and the environment that are not paid by either the consumer or the manufacturer.
• Around the world, consumers are starting to demand that manufacturers start programs for product takeback - that they bear the burden of safely recycling their products after disposal.

And, just to bring home the point that it isn't just cartoons she's talking about, I showed the class a few pictures by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, including the following, taken at recycling facilities in the Southeast of China.






Next up: Getting closer to home....

the iPad and us (part 2 - full disclosure)

Okay, here's the thing. Jane and I, lesson planners, web surfers, international corresponders, digital photographers, and all around online junkies that we are, have sometimes been known to (brace yourself here) fight over who gets to use our household's one computer - an Apple MacBook that will turn five years old (I think that's around 167 in dog years) this summer. Add three kids clamoring to watch a video or go onto Starfall.com every now and then, and we soon started thinking that we wanted to get another computer. No, we needed a new computer. Funny how these things escalate, isn't it?

And we wanted an Apple - not so much because we're fiercely partisan in the whole Mac vs. Windows war, but because we've had Macs for the last going on ten years now, and it would be a huge pain to switch over. And there's viruses, spyware, the hassle of buying any kind of computer in China with government-mandated software, the fact that our Macs have been incredibly reliable over their lifetimes, and the additional fact every time I've used a PC lately, I've felt like I'm driving a 1986 Buick Skylark. (So yeah, maybe we do lean to the Mac side here, don't we?)

It was about then that the news of the iPad 2 came out. It's an iPad! And hey, wow, there's a big number 2 after it! And all for less than half the price of a (new Apple) laptop! I had heard about David Hockney's iPad paintings before, so I was already hooked on the idea of getting one. All it took was a session of Fruit Ninja on a friend's iPad in Chengdu, and Jane was in as well.

And if it's good enough for David Hockney, it's good enough for me...

So, a couple of bits of research here, a couple of online ordering sections there, and our American credit card, and I'd ordered an iPad (black, 3g enabled, no-engraving-on-the-back-but-thanks anyway) to be shipped to our organizations headquarters in Virginia so that it would arrive in time for our boss to bring it to us when he was due out in mid May. Which he did, and now we are the proud owners of a new iPad, complete with the painting application, a pretty cool Chinese dictionary, and yes, Fruit Ninja...

(the real productivity tool that we've been looking for)

Now back up a moment - did anyone notice anything strange here? Remember what the Foxconn factory down the road makes? Yep, the iPad2. So there's a pretty good chance that our iPad could have been made in Hongguang, trucked out to the port of Shenzhen, put onto a container ship to Long Beach, sent to a warehouse in Silicon Valley somewhere, flown to an air cargo processing center outside of DC, trucked again to my boss's place in Virginia, driven back to DC inside his luggage, flown back to Beijing and then to Chengdu, and then taken by high speed train back to our house, which is a 15 minute bike ride from where it was initially made. Hmm, why didn't I just bike over to the factory, knock on the door, and ask them to give me my iPad directly? My Chinese is probably good enough, and I would have saved everyone a lot of trouble...

Another strange thing? All of this, and I bought our iPad for about 80% of what it would cost to buy an iPad here in China. How in the world can a piece of electronics travel halfway around the earth and back and still cost me less than, say, what we used to pay for car repairs each year back home? More on that in the next post, though here's a clue...

the iPad and us (part 1 - in the News)

Don't know how prominently it was featured, but our local community of Hongguang made international news last Friday, and not in a particularly good way...



Seems that there was an explosion at a local factory, owned by the Taiwan-based Foxconn corporation. Two workers died at the scene, and one died a few days later following complications from injuries. A further 15 people were severely burned.

You may have heard of Foxconn before, because they are one of Apple Computer's main contracted manufacturers, making both the iPhone and, here in Hongguang, the iPad2. They've been in the news last year as well, because of the working conditions at their factory in the eastern city of Shenzhen. There, to stop a rash of worker suicides at their factory, they installed anti-suicide nets, among other measures.

In fact, it was the situation in Shenzhen, along with huge customer demand for the iPad, that led Foxconn to build a factory here in the Chengdu area in the first place. Labor is cheaper here in Sichuan province than out on the coast, and most of Foxconn's workers out east come from Sichauan anyway. So they built a factory here in record time - in just 70 days, according to one source. According to some interviews with workers, labor conditions at the Chengdu plant weren't much different from conditions in Shenzhen.

So what caused the explosion? Nobody's sure yet. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a factory built in 70 days + low-paid employees + high demand + forced overtime = a less than ideally safe working environment. Oh yeah, and it happened in a section of the factory where they polish parts with, among other things, manganese powder. Which happens to be highly explosive if it saturates the air in any given area. Hmmm.

So, again the question. What do we pay for the stuff we have? What do others pay for us? More about my connection to all of this coming up soon.

There's a first time for everything...

I had a field trip out with my students about three weeks ago. Not a particularly glamorous one - we just went to the local market, then outside the university gate for a bit. We talked about observation, not taking things for granted, sensory vocabulary, and so on.

Quite appropriate, then, that on that day, I saw:

A) The first Porsche that I've ever seen in our neighborhood (though not the first in China by a long shot: more on that in another post); and...



B) A guy with a trained monkey, that he kept on the end of a leash and forced to do tricks for passersby, asking for a little change in return.



Now, mind you, I'm not condoning either practice. Indeed, quite the opposite. (Which is worse? I'll leave that for the comments...) However, it is quite interesting, and more than a bit strange, to be in a country where one can take these two pictures within 200 meters of each other on the same day...

Oh, and speaking of Endangered Species...

I always used to like to look at bugs under glass. You know, the little shadow boxes that you can see at the State Fair with the way cool iridescent beetles that are as big as your fist? (Okay, they were at the Wisconsin State Fair about ten years ago, anyway...)

Then I ran into this booth in the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok...



The booth was about twenty by twenty feet, and was piled floor to ceiling with bugs in plastic. Framed bugs, encased bugs, mounted bugs, you name it. And underneath the display shelves, more and more stacks of boxes. Full of bugs.





Now, I'm no expert in the beetle keychain industry, but I've got to wonder - how sustainable is this, exactly...? And for what purpose? (Besides still looking cool in a creepy kind of State Fair science geek Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way, that is.) And what will the archaeologists think a couple of thousand years from now? Ah, the dilemmas of our modern rain forest-straight-to-WalMart existence...

Fortunately, there will always be pictures of lenticular puppies once the beetles go extinct: