Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Inside the rivalry (video)

Allies, rivals, partners: How two tech visionaries inspired the digital revolution and changed the lives of billions.

 On May 30, 2007, two of America's most brilliant minds, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, sat down for a joint interview at the All Things Digital Conference. The two pioneers of the computer world spoke fondly of the other's contribution to technology. 

But what preceded this historic exchange was more than three decades of rocky collaborations and rivalry. Gates and Jobs had battled to dominate a new age and, in the process, revolutionised billions of lives.

"Though they never worked in the same company, they created an industry together, and we have a hippie and a nerd ... With Bill, it was always about the money. With Steve ... money was nice, but it was never about the money. And so that made them black and white. Up and down. Hot and cold. They were very, very different people," says journalist Robert Cringely, who worked with Gates and Jobs in the late-1970s.

Indonesia tobacco plantations using child labour

Who could imagine a large multinational corroboration exploiting it's workforce? It's not like every major clothing manufacturer does this, or companies like Nike or Apple. Common people these are your favorite socially responsible brands.  That coffee you buy from Starbucks, do you truly believe those employed to pick coffee beans aren't exploited through low wages and dangerous working conditions of course they are.  For you the consumer of these and other products it doesn't matter as long as you're able to purchase them  at the lowest possible price.   So, don't act all surprised and indignant when you discover that major corporations also exploit child labour for higher higher profit margins.  

Big cigarette companies accused of feigning ignorance while young children work in plantations in hazardous conditions.

Some of the world's best known tobacco companies have been accused of turning a blind eye to the exploitation of child labour in Indonesian plantations that serve as their suppliers.

The tobacco industry employs about six million Indonesians. The figure includes many children that face hazardous conditions while working on the fields.

Researchers say tobacco companies insist their cigarettes are legal products without appearing to check whether their suppliers are complying with the law.

Human-rights groups have long noted the dangers of working in tobacco farms, especially for vulnerable youth children.

When The Global Brands You Love Exploit The Vulnerble

In March 2013 more than 1,100 garment workers were killed in Bangladesh when the building they  were working in collapsed.  They garments they were sewing are sold by the worlds major retail outlets like the Gap, Walmart and Benetton.  Given the number of people killed you'd think these clothing retailers would work to change the conditions which these women work. Instead they stonewalled efforts to protect these workers. You'd be wrong as these women continue to be exploited by these corporations.

Apple the corporation beloved by liberals has been implicated in worker exploitation in the factories which under license to a Taiwanese corporation  has seen worker riots and suicides due to working conditions.

Consumerism marches on as they turn a blind eye to the abuses. What's more important, the appearance of a social conscience  or cheap consumer products? Cheap consumer products always wins.

Wishing not to be left behind in the exploitation circus and the race for higher profits the worlds major manufacturers of cosmetics have no problem with using child labor in Indian mines. 

 

Ugly truth behind global beauty industry

 Top cosmetic brands rely on Indian children working in illegal mines to extract mica, key ingredient in makeup products.

Koderma, India - Children toiling illegally in Indian mines are producing a key ingredient used in the products of some of the global cosmetics industry's most prominent names.
A report by campaign group DanWatch said child labour is being used in the eastern states of Jharkhand and Bihar to extract mica, which is then added to the make-up produced by at least 12 multinational companies.
At least 5,000 children may be producing mica - used to add glitter to natural cosmetics - which is bought by intermediaries and then exported to high-profile international customers such as L'Oreal and Estee Lauder.

Deadly work
The abandoned mica mines start shimmering under the rising sun in Koderma, Jharkhand, as a group of sleepy children trudges towards the Charki mine holding their tools.
Five-year-old Ajay Das hurriedly slips into a narrow hole and starts his day. His tiny hands can barely balance the hammer, but he still hits the glistening wall accurately.
Ajay works six days a week and after labouring for seven to eight hours each day in hazardous conditions,he manages to earn a paltry 20 rupees ($0.33) - barely enough to kill his hunger pangs.

It's all for the greater good. Of corporate profits and lower prices. 

Apple Proudly Anouces Payment By iPhone: Japan's Had That For Ten Years

Tim Cook CEO of Apple Corp proudly announced that the latest generation of the iPhone would allow users to to make purchases with their phone.  Japanese mobile phones have had that technology for 10 years.  For the average mobile phone user here it's second nature that such a application already exists.

Apple's Tim Cook must proud to be 10 years behind Japan.

 A type of Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, known in Japan as FeliCa, was introduced to the Japanese mobile market in June 2004 and has been been implanted in almost all phones sold in the country since.
   
Ten years ago the charismatic Takeshi Natsuno, who was then multimedia services director of Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, extolled the benefits of swapping cash for cell phones.

“When I leave my house in the morning, all I take with me is my phone, which lets me do everything—pay, take public transport—simply by swiping a special reader in shops, stations or airports,” he said at the time.

Those Prawns Your Eating Were Produced By Slave Labor

Like so many must have consumer products for the developed worlds markets nobody ever asks who made these available to us.   Like Apple computers made in China, or clothes manufactured in Bangladesh or those Nike shoes that you love made by damn near slave labor in Vietnam and Indonesia.  It's ok because it feeds your desire to have the latest in consumer products.  No matter that the person or persons who produced it aren't paid a living wage just as long as you can have it at a reasonable price.  

Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK

Thai "ghost ships" that enslave, brutalise and even kill workers are linked to global prawn supply chain, Guardian investigation discovers

• Trafficked into slavery on Thai trawlers to catch food for prawns 
• Thailand's seafood industry: state-sanctioned slavery?

Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.

A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailandare integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.

The investigation found that the world's largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves.

The woman who nearly died making your iPad

Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window

At around 8am on 17 March 2010, Tian Yu threw herself from the fourth floor of her factory dormitory in Shenzhen, southern China. For the past month, the teenager had worked on an assembly line churning out parts for Apple iPhones and iPads. At Foxconn's Longhua facility, that is what the 400,000 employees do: produce the smartphones and tablets that are sold by Samsung or Sony or Dell and end up in British and American homes.
But most famously of all, China's biggest factory makes gadgets for Apple. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant's current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.

What's most important here is that the western consumer have the latest in iPhone technology while caring little about those who manufactured it or their working conditions.

Yu was interviewed over three years by Jenny Chan and Sacom, a Hong Kong-based group of rights campaigners. From her hospital recuperation in Shenzhen to her return to her family's village, Chan and her colleagues kept in touch throughout and have published the interviews in the latest issue of an academic journal called New Technology, Work and Employment. The result is a rare and revealing insight into how big electronics companies now rely on what is effectively a human battery-farming system: employing young, poor migrants from the Chinese countryside, cramming them into vast workhouses and crowded dorms, then spitting out the ones who struggle to keep up.

It's like being a sharecropper:  working to provide a better life for yourself and your family but somehow remaining in debt and service to the company.

In her first month, Yu had to work two seven-day weeks back to back. Foreign reporters who visit Longhua campus are shown its Olympic-sized swimming pools and shops, but she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. She was swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dormitory where she barely knew the names of her fellow sleepers.
Stranded in a city far from her family, unable to make friends or even get a decent night's sleep, Yu finally broke when bosses didn't pay her for the month's labour because of some administrative foul-up. In desperation, she hurled herself out of a window. She was owed £140 in basic pay and overtime, or around a quarter of a new iPhone 5.

 Poor Tim Cook the CEO of Apple made a meager $4 million  last year one wonders if that was enough to house and feed his family.

After her suicide attempt, Yu received a one-off "humanitarian payment" of ¥180,000 (£18,000) to help her go home. According to her father: "It was as if they were buying and selling a thing." 

Foxconn workers go on strike over iphone 5 working conditions

Thousands of factory workers at Foxconn went on strike Friday to protest their working conditions on the iPhone 5's production lines, according to a report from an independent workers' rights organization.

Workers at Foxconn's plant in Zhengzhou, China, were furious after management enacted "overly strict demands" for production of Apple's(AAPL, Fortune 500) new iPhone 5, according to a report late Friday from China Labor Watch (CLW), a New York-based advocacy group that works closely with sources in China.

The trouble began after workers were given new, impossibly strict standards, demanding precision down to increments as small as two-hundredths of a millimeter, according to CLW.
"Employees could not even turn out iPhones that met the standard," CLW's report said, because of "design defects" in the iPhone 5.
Foxconn's exacting demands, coupled with the fact that workers were not allowed to take vacation time during a recent week-long holiday, created a high-pressure situation. Workers and inspectors clashed in fights that sometimes turned physical, the CLW said, with some hospitalized as a result.

 These people are treated no better than indentured servants yet consumers in America and Europe are blissfully ignorant of the conditions Foxconn employee's are  forced to endure just so they can have the latest iPhone or iPad.