Mood:  loud

^{http://www.szcpost.com/2012/11/foxconn-tries-to-get-rid-of-labor-disputes-through-robots.html}

Foxconn, the largest electronic industry manufacturer in the world, has ranked top of the 200 powerful export enterprises for consecutive nine years. In 2009, it ascended to the 60th of the global top 500 companies. However, Foxconn has gone through hardships in the negative news of employee turbulence, suicide, bad working conditions and employment of students, which, fortunately have been solved.

Early this year, Foxconn announced it had planned to replace one million employees with robots in three years, and now the plan has been implemented. According to relevant report, Foxconn has put into use the first 10 thousand robots and it aims to get in 20 thousand robots by the end of this year.

Those robots, designed by Foxconn itself, are used to conduct simple and repeated actions with high working efficiency.

The cost of those robots are low. The manufacture cost of one Foxconn robot is 20-25 thousand dollars, about three years salary of an ordinary worker, which is very cheap. So we estimate Foxconn will complete its three-year plan in advance if those robots operate well in daily productions.

Allen from Shenzhen Post (original post)

http://www.szcpost.com/2012/11/foxconn-tries-to-get-rid-of-labor-disputes-through-robots.html

RELATED FOXCONN TOPIC:

Foxconn-buys-land-in-brazil

^{http://www.szcpost.com/2012/11/foxconn-buys-land-in-brazil-for-new-factory-development.html}

Foxconn  CMMSG Industria de Electronicos Ltda, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., revealed that it has bought 1.42 million square meters or about 350 acres of land in Brazil from Toulous Incorporacao SPE LTDA Group for a total price of 12,640,000 dollars.

One of Hon Hai’s subsidiaries, Foxconn , is the largest manufacturer of computer fittings in the world and also an internationally well-known enterprise that cooperate with Apple, Sony, Nokia and other multinational companies. Foxconn has exclusively assembled iPhone and iPad tablets for Apple Corporation.

The purchase verifies Hon Hai’s announcement earlier that it would make an investment of total 492 million dollars to establish a new factory in Sao Paulo in Brazil for production of smart phones, tablets and other electronic equipments, according to relevant information.

Hon Hai Group also said, Brazilian government’s tax reduction policy and local market’s preferential policies make the country the best manufactory place except for China. It is also a good opportunity for Foxconn to develop it business. There is no more details in the company’s announcement.

Allen from Shenzhen Post (original post):

http://www.szcpost.com/2012/11/foxconn-buys-land-in-brazil-for-new-factory-development.html

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:33 AM PST

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Mood:  chatty

• Department of Homeland Security
• September 2, 2012
• By: Julia Davis

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOUND HERE:

 http://www.examiner.com/article/department-of-homeland-security-s-untouchables-shielded-by-the-badge

Related topics

• Department of Homeland Security
• corruption
• conviction
• sentencing
• ice
• CBP

A woman from South Korea is enslaved by the owner of a bar in Queens, New York. As it typically happens in cases of human sex trafficking, the captor takes away the victim’s passport and forces her into prostitution. Terrified, the woman attempts to escape her grim predicament. The bar owner involves two goons to intimidate his prey into submission. One of them speaks Korean, which enables co-conspirators to threaten the captive in her native language. To punish the woman for refusing to prostitute herself, they threaten her with deportation and incarceration in her home country. Taking their threats one step further, the perpetrators shove her into a taxicab and claim that she is being taken to the airport to get deported. Desperate to get away from her tormentors, the woman makes a daring move and escapes.

The criminal plot is finally uncovered. The victim’s passport is found at the residence of Goon No. 1, who is identified as a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO). Goon No. 2 is a Federal Air Marshal (FAM). CBPO pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to 120 months confinement and 5 years supervised release. The FAM also pleaded guilty to deprivation of civil rights and was sentenced to 4 years probation.

The same disturbing trend runs through the myriad of corruption cases involving the Department of Homeland Security’s employees. Crime doesn’t match the punishment that any civilian would face if they were to commit the same offenses. Here are some astonishing examples:

• CBP technician Thomas Chapman and his friend Paul Brickman stole a Customs declaration form, filled out by the late Astronaut Neil Armstrong. They’ve attempted to sell it at an auction. For stealing and conveying an official record of the United States, the thieves were facing up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to the United States Attorney's Office. What was the actual sentence? After pleading guilty to Theft of U.S. Government Property, Chapman was sentenced to 24 months of probation.

• TSA Officer wanted to have some fun, so he called in a fake bomb threat at the Columbus Regional Airport on May 6, 2009, where he was employed. On November 17, 2009, the TSO was sentenced to 24 months of probation.

• Transportation Security Administration manager Bryant Jermaine Livingston had an interesting hobby: he was running a prostitution ring out of a Crowne Plaza Hotel in Maryland. Responding to a hotel manager's complaint about a man who often invited large groups of people into his room, police went in to take a look. Livingston opened the door and proudly introduced himself as the Department of Homeland Security manager, handing the officers his TSA business card. Glancing into the room, police officers observed 11 subjects (male and female), many of whom were naked and trying to get dressed in a hurry. It was later uncovered that males would routinely pay Livingston $100 dollars to enter the room and cavort with the prostitutes he was pimping out. Livingston was charged with four counts of general prostitution. He pleaded guilty, received no prison time and was ordered to pay a $500 dollar fine.

• ICE Agent Taryn Johnston figured out a nifty way to make a living without having to show up to work. All it took is being married to Frank Johnston, Assistant Special Agent in Charge for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Los Angeles. Taryn Johnson received approximately $582,000 in salary and benefits from ICE and its predecessor agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service, essentially as a gift from the government. She was convicted of making false statements to federal investigators, sentenced to 30 days in federal prison and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine.

• U.S. Border Patrol Agent Eduardo Moreno brutally assaulted a Mexican national who was in his custody. Moreno admitted that while he was walking the man through the processing center, he struck him in the stomach with a baton, threw him to the ground, kicked and punched him for no reason whatsoever. The victim suffered severe bodily injuries. Moreno pleaded guilty to a federal criminal civil rights charge, facing 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Outrageously, he won’t serve any time in prison. Moreno was sentenced to 12 months supervised release, 4 months under house arrest and was ordered to pay a miserly restitution of $1,392.25 towards his victim’s medical expenses.

• Jovana Deas, a former special agent with ICE Homeland Security Investigations, ran queries in law enforcement databases, as requested by her sister in Mexico, Dana Maria Samaniego Montes, who had direct ties to violent drug cartels. One of the people Deas looked up using her work computer was later assassinated in Juarez, Mexico, after she provided her sister with the man’s photo and other information. Prosecutor said that Deas may have caused the man’s murder. A copy of the photo was later discovered in the computer of sister’s ex-husband, Miguel Angel Mendoza Estrada, during a drug-trafficking investigation in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Deas pleaded guilty to a 21-count indictment. Instead of spending decades in prison, Deas received a short 2.5-year sentence.

• Border Patrol agent Teofilo Rodarte stole a woman's purse and used her credit cards to buy $231 in merchandise at Walmart. He was charged with fraudulent schemes and artifices, three counts of computer tampering, third-degree burglary, two counts of identity theft, three counts of forgery and three counts of theft. Rodarte was sentenced to 3 years of probation.

• An ICE Special Agent covertly imported banned steroids from China for illegal distribution in the U.S. He pleaded guilty to one count of importation of controlled substances and was sentenced to 24 months of probation.

• CBP Officer Manuel Salazar, an 8-year veteran who was assigned to the Pharr, Texas, Port of Entry, allowed drug smugglers to transport 1,700 pounds of marijuana through his inspection lane in exchange for a bribe of $10,000 dollars. During the course of investigation, Salazar lied to investigators under oath. He was subsequently convicted of providing materially false statements to investigators and accepting bribes. Salazar was sentenced to 24 months of probation.

• Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer of ICE in Detroit, Michigan decided to single-handedly solve the burglary of a relative’s residence. He kidnapped a man at gunpoint, forcing him into a government-owned vehicle. The ICE officer drove the man to an abandoned house, where he pistol-whipped the victim with his duty weapon. The man was able to escape after the officer fired one round from his duty weapon to intimidate him. On May 25, 2009, the same officer approached another man, threw him to the ground and threatened him at gun point. This ICE Supervisor was convicted in September 2009 for Unlawful Imprisonment; Felonious Assault; and Felony Firearm Possession. He was sentenced to 48 months incarceration and was ordered to pay a $600 fine.

• A CBP Officer was caught red-handed, acting as a “lookout” for a drug trafficker who was transporting narcotics from New York to Cleveland, OH. He also transported the proceeds of illicit drug sales back to New York and was paid $15,000 by the trafficker. The CBP Officer pleaded guilty to distributing and possessing narcotics and was sentenced to 36 months of probation.

• CBP Officer Tori Ferrari (Detroit, MI), pleaded guilty to altering an immigration document. He falsified the status of an Iranian national (Iran is on an official list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” designated by the State Department) by forging an F-1 visa into an F-2 visa. Ferrari was sentenced to 24 months of supervised probation.

• Border Patrol Agent (BPA) in Wilcox, AZ, punched a fellow BPA, then pulled his loaded service weapon and pointed it at the victim’s head. Playing their own version of “Fashion Police”, the victim ridiculed the offender’s attire. The BPA was convicted and sentenced to time served (which means that he would not serve any prison time after the sentencing).

• TSA Officer Elliot Iglesias worked at the Orlando, FL, International Airport. Over a three year period, he had stolen more than 80 laptop computers and other electronic devices, valued at $80,000, from passenger luggage. Iglesias admitted that he fenced the items in Osceola County, FL. He pleaded guilty to Federal charges of embezzlement and theft and was sentenced to 24 months of probation.

• FPS Program Analyst entered into a sham marriage that gained unwarranted immigration benefits for his “wife”. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 months of probation and 4 months of home detention.

• A Department of Defense Contract Employee had obtained a Top Secret security clearance, based on her fraudulently obtained immigration status. She pleaded guilty to Immigration Fraud and was sentenced to 24 months of supervised probation.

• Two Department of State contract employees illegally obtained valid immigration documents and sold them for cash. One pleaded guilty to procuring citizenship unlawfully and was sentenced to 36 months probation. His accomplice, who at one time held a Secret-level security clearance, pleaded guilty to fraud and procuring citizenship unlawfully. He was also sentenced to 36 months of probation.

• USCG Auxiliary Member used government fleet credit cards to buy gasoline that he gave to a drug dealer in exchange for cocaine. He also used government fleet cards to purchase gasoline for himself, his friends, and family. He was sentenced to 12 months of unsupervised release.

• DHS Security Specialist William Thorpe (Washington, DC), received over $200,000 from Total Security Products, as kickbacks for contract-rigging. This company was identified as the lowest bidder on a $100,000 DHS security contract. Thorpe pleaded guilty to improperly providing internal DHS documents to a company that was competing for a government contract. He was sentenced to 12 months of probation.

• Pawnshop owner reported a number of laptop computers with DHS property stickers being sold to his store. A DHS Information Technology contractor had stolen more than $8,000 worth of DHS computers and sold them to various pawnshops in Maryland. DHS may not have even noticed that its laptops were missing. According to an OIG report, the agency doesn’t keep an accurate inventory of its laptops containing classified data. In this particular instance, the DHS contractor pleaded guilty to theft of government property and was sentenced to 12 months of probation and $650 in restitution.

• ICE Deportation Officer in Chicago, Illinois, accepted bribes for destroying the U.S. immigration “A” files of two deportable Iraqi alien nationals and preventing their deportation (Iraq is on the State Department’s list of Special Interest Countries with terrorist ties). He also fraudulently issued an Alien Documentation, Identification, and Telecommunication stamp to another deportable alien and arranged an illegal release of an alien in ICE custody. The ICE Officer was charged with one count of Obstruction, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of 3 months incarceration and 24 months probation.

• Eric Higgins, CBP Officer at Port Huron, Michigan, used the Internet to communicate sexually explicit messages to underage girls and viewed child pornography on his laptop computer. Search of his laptop computer by the United States Secret Service turned up over 40 images previously identified as child pornography by the National Association for Missing and Exploited Children. On August 31, 2010, Higgins pleaded guilty in Federal Court, Eastern District of Michigan, for violations of Possession of Child Pornography. This crime is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. Higgins was sentenced to 1 year and 8 months in prison.

• TSA Officer and a Delta Airlines baggage handler were arrested for stealing items from checked luggage. Both offenders were sentenced in May 2010 to 45 days confinement and 60 months probation.

• An ICE Special Agent and two CBP Officers in Tucson, Arizona conspired with two employees of a local car repair garage to scam the government by using DHS fleet cards. They’ve cooked up fraudulent invoices totaling over $55,479, which was then shared amongst co-conspirators. On March 12, 2010, in the District of Arizona, one of the CBP officers was sentenced to 12 months of home confinement and 36 months of supervised release, and was ordered to pay $37,525 restitution. The ICE Special Agent was sentenced to 60 months probation and $6,613 restitution, and the other CBP officer was sentenced to 60 months probation and ordered to pay $6,531 restitution.

• A CBP Officer working at the Houston International Airport in Texas was covertly providing information from a law enforcement database to an individual under investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The CBP Officer also ran queries in government databases for the names of his accomplices’ friends, family and other partners in criminal activities. On October 13, 2009 the CBP Officer was sentenced to 36 months probation and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine.

• Background investigator for DHS was caught inventing falsified interviews of persons associated with the background investigations he was supposed to conduct on applicants for employment with the CBP. On May 25, 2010, he pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Michigan and was sentenced to 12 months probation.

• CBP Officer assigned to Field Operations in Tucson, Arizona, misused his official position by running queries in law enforcement and other government databases to obtain information about a person he was suing in a civil case. He was charged with three counts of misdemeanor Misuse of Government Computers. The Officer pleaded guilty and on February 1, 2010, was sentenced in the U.S. District Court of Arizona to 3 years of probation and a fine of $3,000.

• CBPO at a Port of Entry in San Ysidro, California, was assisting a known alien and drug smuggling organization. He had accepted cash bribes from the smuggling organization for allowing vehicles loaded with marijuana and/or illegal aliens to enter the U.S. without inspection. The CBPO laundered his bribe money through a front business and paid bribes of $15,000 to $20,000 a week to Daphiney Caganap, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) intelligence unit and anti-smuggling operations at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. She covered up an illegal alien and drug smuggling operation, allowing it to continue for years. When questioned by the FBI, Caganap lied under oath. Even though the government was well aware of Caganap’s bribery, she continued to receive promotions and was appointed as the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Port Director at the Metro Detroit Airport. After being indicted, Daphiney Caganap was placed on administrative leave (which means that she continued to receive her exorbitant salary, courtesy of American taxpayers). Caganap was facing 36 years in prison. She was sentenced to 3 years of probation and a fine of $3,000. She was allowed to keep all of the bribes she received in the commission of her crimes, as no restitution was ordered.

• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) District Adjudications Officer (DAO) in San Jose, California was extorting money from immigration applicants, promising to approve citizenship applications for a bribe of $2,000 in cash. The DAO pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 4 years of probation, 100 hours of community service, $3,000 restitution and a $200 fine.

• Immigration Information Officer facilitated the illegal entry of at least 116 aliens from Lebanon and Yemen into U.S. Her scheme included the advance parole of aliens, creation of fictitious alien files and unauthorized approval of applications to replace permanent residence cards. She was charged with alien smuggling, conspiracy and bribery, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 24 months confinement and 12 months probation.

• USCIS employee was stealing money orders received with immigration applications and altering them to make herself the payee. She pocketed $10,527 dollars as a result of this scheme. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months confinement, but almost all of the sentence was suspended, whereas she served only 45 days in prison. She was ordered to pay $5,137 dollars (only half of the amount she stole) and $100 in court costs.

• ICE Special Agent in Miami, Florida was receiving kickbacks from ICE informants who were paid by the agency for their cooperation. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months probation.

• Supervisory Transportation Security Officer (STSO) had been communicating via the Internet with an undercover CBI agent whom he believed to be a 13-year-old girl. The STSO’s communications were sexually explicit and as a special treat, included a photograph of him wearing his TSA uniform, with his genitals exposed. The STSO was arrested and charged with sending harmful matter to a minor. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 1 year confinement and 5 years probation.

• Two Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) at the Honolulu, Hawaii, International Airport were stealing large sums of money from the checked luggage of Japanese tourists. Both TSOs pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to three and a half months intermittent confinement (periodically showing up to prison to serve out the sentence at their convenience).

• A TSO in Phoenix, Arizona, attempted to pass narcotics to a prisoner at the Federal Correctional Facility in Tucson, Arizona. The TSO pleaded guilty to unlawful distribution of a controlled substance, was sentenced to 1 year probation and ordered to pay a special assessment of $25. The federal inmate in the same case was charged with the same crime and sentenced to 8 months incarceration. The disparity in sentencing is quite striking.

• DHS Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle was using the Internet to solicit a minor for sexual acts. Doyle sent pornographic materials to a person he believed to be an underage girl, who was really a Florida law enforcement officer. Doyle couldn't have been more brazen, giving out his title, calling from his DHS office, even sending a photo showing his Department of Homeland Security identity card along with his genitals. Polk County, Fla., Sheriff Grady Judd said, "It doesn't come any more hard core. He graphically explained to a 14-year old girl what he would like to do to her and what he would like her to do to him." This is not the first time Doyle's lust for pornography landed him in trouble. While working at Time Magazine's Washington bureau prior to his DHS employment, Doyle was caught looking at pornography on a receptionist's computer late at night. He admitted to the incident, was reprimanded, and had to issue a formal apology to staffers. Apparently, the DHS wasn’t bothered by this information in conducting their Deputy Press Secretary’s background check. He was charged with 16 counts of transmission of harmful material to a minor and 7 counts of using a computer to seduce a child. Doyle was sentenced to 5 years incarceration and 10 years probation.

• A United States Secret Service contract employee stole approximately 60 laptop computers from a warehouse at the DHS Headquarters. When interviewed, the contract employee admitted to stealing an estimated 60 computers. He pleaded guilty to one count of theft of government property, was sentenced to 36 months supervised release and directed to pay a $1,000 fine.

The takeaway from all of this – if you’re inclined to be a criminal, join the Department of Homeland Security first. That way, the seriousness of your crimes notwithstanding, you’ll most likely get away with probation and a silly little fine. Those empowered to enforce the law often consider themselves far above it.

Additional sources:

OIG Special Report: Summary of Significant Investigations January 1, 2011, to December 31, 2011

OIG Special Report: Summary of Significant Investigations October 1, 2009 to December 31, 2010

OIG Special Report: Summary of Significant Investigations October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009

Special Report: Summary of Significant Investigations March 1, 2003 - September 30, 2008

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This post was copied from:

http://www.examiner.com/article/department-of-homeland-security-s-untouchables-shielded-by-the-badge

Posted by Joe Anybody at 9:18 AM PST

Updated: Friday, 23 November 2012 9:21 AM PST

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Mood:  don't ask

Foxconn

to replace workers with 1 million robots

 http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/11/foxconn-installs-first-10000-robots-of.html

 ^{Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots}

Singularity Hub - a first batch of 10,000 robots — aptly named Foxbots — appear to have made its way into at least one Foxconn factory, and by the end of 2012, another 20,000 more will be installed. Foxconn is aiming to replace 1 million Foxconn workers with robots within 3 years. According to a translated page from the Chinese site Techweb, each robot costs between $20,000 to $25,000, which is over three times the average salary of one worker. However, amid international pressure, Foxconn continues to increase worker salaries with a 25 percent bump occurring earlier this year.

Foxconn, which has 1.2 million employees in China, has come under scrutiny in the past few years amid reports of employees committing suicide at company facilities. The company has also been accused of employing underage laborers, providing poor living conditions at its dormitory housing, and overworking employees.

Prior to the announcement of the the robot initiative last year, at least 16 workers reportedly committed suicide since the beginning of 2010 at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen, China, a plant that employs hundreds of thousands of workers. Another three have attempted to suicide at the job site.

Most of the suicides have involved jumping from buildings. In response to the situation, the company promised to install "suicide nets" to discourage employees from jumping, as well as raise salaries by 25 percent.

http://youtu.be/Vd5R7BHcFfo

           Original Article was found here:

• http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/11/foxconn-installs-first-10000-robots-of.html

--> 29 comments

Posted by Joe Anybody at 8:58 AM PST

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Mood:  happy

JUN JUL AUG 19 2005 2006 2010 59 captures 9 Feb 02 - 21 Jul 11

Close Help

Open publishing is the same as free software

http://web.archive.org/web/20060719020350/http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html

Matthew Arnison <maffew@cat.org.au>
composed March 2001
$Revision: 1.23 $ $Date: 2006/01/21 06:42:39 $
Translations: French, Portuguese

A working definition of open publishingOpen publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.

The full rave

Open publishing is the same as free software.

They're both (r)evolutionary responses to the privatisation of information by multinational monopolies. For software it's Microsoft. For publishing it's CNN. For both software and publishing it's AOL Time Warner.

Free software is a gift to humanity. If you have a piece of free software, you can give it to someone else for free. You can charge for free software, but once someone else has a copy, they can give away as many copies as they like. So free software often comes at no charge. Let's call it free beer. But this alone is not free software. Free software is also free as in free speech, not just free beer.

It's about software freedom. A software liberation movement. The source code, the genetic blueprint, the internal mechanics are open for others to see (hence free software is also called open source). So others can take it and change it and pass on their changes to other people. The product is freely available, and the process of production is free and transparent.

If someone doesn't like it, they can take it and change it. The one thing they can't change is its freedom. The only strings attached are there to stop people from tying it down. The strings of freedom are called the GNU copyleft, a beautiful subversion of copyright law that guarantees freedom for a piece of code and all its mutations.

The means is the end. The journey is the destination.

You might think this process wouldn't produce anything truly creative, awe-inspiring, staggering, huge, complex, simple, small, pedantic, reliable, random or enjoyable.

If you thought that, you'd be drastically underestimating what humans get up to for fun. Because all of those adjectives apply to free software. Geeks like to joke about what free software needs to do next to achieve world domination.

Microsoft doesn't think this joke is very funny. Microsoft is one of the biggest corporations in the world. Microsoft spends billions of dollars to pay programmers to keep their software closed and internals secret.

Free software is overwhelmingly written by volunteers. Free software runs the internet and Microsoft does not. The number and diversity of people using free software is accelerating.

Microsoft usually responds to such threats by buying them out and assimilating them. But free software cannot be privatised. Free software is not frugal with its genetic code. Free software spreads itself like a benevolent microbe after an evolutionary leap forward.

Microsoft assumes people are stupid and holds focus groups to determine exactly in what way are they stupid. They then pay a small number of people a lot of money to engineer that stupidity into software. Sometimes this works well, because everyone is stupid sometimes. But it doesn't cater well for everyone being smart.

Free software assumes people are smart and creative and can choose for themselves to swim in the shallow or the deep end of the technology pool. Even the geekiest programmer might want to have their feet planted on the bottom sometimes, and the freshest beginner might make the biggest splash diving into the deep end.

Free software programmers still manage to eat despite giving away their code.

Software is information. So are news stories. So are opinion pieces. They can be easily copied and shared. Maybe information wants to be free?

Under the dominant multinational global news system, news is not free, news is not open. It is very expensive. It is highly secretive.

To see the news you need to pay with money or with your time spent watching ads (usually for cars) or both. To create the news you need to pay expensive public relations consultants. To write the news you need to obey corporate news values, making stories on a production line, for maximum advertising impact at minimum cost. To edit the news you need to be a global stock market newswire service or a multinational media company. To distribute the news you need to have one of 6 TV transmission towers in a city of millions.

Media corporations assume the viewers are stupid. In their eyes the total creative potential of the audience is Funniest Home Videos. Creative people do not buy more stuff, they make their own. This is a problem for media multinationals. They do not trust their audience to be creative. It might be bad for profits, bad for executive salaries.

But it's OK. The audience doesn't trust the corporate media either.

This situation has led to rampant confusion and alienation of society. We are disconnected from ourselves and our ecology. Our planet is functioning as a global ecosystem more than ever before due to the global nature of human activity, yet the humans don't have any way of communicating with each other. Systemic problems go unseen and unsolved by billions. Only the issues that are important to sell ads or grease the stock exchange have reliable global news impact.

What we have is a very complex system within which the humans have recently gained enourmous power but as yet they have no correspondingly powerful network of communication infrastructure to support it. We have no neural network to process information. Not so much a global village as a global megaphone.

Then the internet was added to the global communications pool. If you can read the internet, you can also write to it. If someone else has told a story on the internet, you can choose to hear it. Information flows between the net and other communication systems: the phone, the TV, the radio and newspapers, forming a much more balanced web of information transfer. This is a global village where you can climb out of the traffic jam and bump into people on the electronic street and have a chat.

The internet makes possible open publishing on a citywide and global scale. Citizens finally have access to the same cheap and powerful two-way global communication that colonial governments and multinationals have had access to for centuries.

What is open publishing?

Like free software, with open publishing the news is often distributed at no charge. There are no ads to eat up your time and corrupt the content. But that is not the most important thing.

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site.

The working parts of journalism are exposed. Open publishing assumes the reader is smart and creative and might want to be a writer and an editor and a distributor and even a software programmer. Open publishing assumes that the reader can tell a crappy story from a good one. That the reader can find what they're after, and might help other readers looking for the same trail.

We trust the audience and it seems that the audience trusts us in return.

Open publishing is playing at the opposite end of the trust spectrum to the corporate media.

We are not working to convince people that this is a good way to do things. We are providing a space in which people might decide themselves if this is a good way to do things.

The journey is the destination.

Open publishing is not new. It is an electronic reinvention of the ancient art of story telling.

Open publishing is free software. It's freedom of information, freedom for creativity.

Open publishing is overwhelmingly done by volunteers.

Who will do the investigative journalism? How will people give a perspective from overseas? What will provide a sense of overview, connectedness and common identity? Will anyone get paid for their work? What will become of motion pictures? Of musicians? Where will be the sustained efforts by hundreds of people?

I am hoping the above questions about open publishing have already been answered by free software. And partly by indymedia, and thousands of other open publishing websites. Open publishing is merely taking an existing trend and identifying it, amplifying it, and strategically applying it to weak points in the global monopolies on power and information.

The pyramids are awe inspiring. They were also built by slave labour. We've evolved as a species. We can do a lot of amazing things without brutal Egyptian slave handling techniques. We can do without new pyramids.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction of species. We need to figure out how to live in harmony with the ecosystem of this planet before the ecosystem goes into negative feedback and kills lifeforms by the billions. We're not going to get there by sacrificing our lives for the motor car, trading our human rights for shoes, killing our people for drug companies, hiding our creativity for the multinationals.

We can do better. Forget the pyramids. Bypass world domination.

Free software is wiring the globe. Open publishing just might help us use those wires to save the planet.

footnotes

• www.active.org.au
• www.indymedia.org
• www.kuro5hin.org

Note that while slashdot.org has many open publishing features, and was an important inspiration for open publishing, I don't think it really is open publishing. Significantly, the stories (as opposed to the comments) are taken from reader contributions, but are processed behind closed doors.

By the way, none of the above four sites would exist without free software. I guess it's one more reason why open publishing is free software.

................

Obviously I think we can learn a lot from the free software movement. One idea we haven't developed much yet is an open publishing copyleft, similar to the free software copyleft. The copyleft defines how the information can be shared, hijacking the copyright laws to ensure that the free information may only be re-used in a free context. This encourages growth of free spaces, autonomous zones, as the process of sharing information is spread along with the information itself. This may be a key part of what we need to define open publishing to ourselves and potential collaborators. It doesn't have to be legally watertight to be useful. That can be evolved in later, The most useful thing would be to start playing with the definition. This is partly what we are doing with our work on defining the indymedia network. But I think we will also need to define how we share chunks of information smaller than that involved in total membership of the network. And the basic chunk of information is a story and the copyleft license that applies to it.

The most interesting idea to me so far in this area applied to news stories is the idea that a story can be reused anywhere, but only if all readers/viewers exposed to it, can easily identify and reach the source of the news story. For example by a subtitle on the picture with the web address of the indymedia site the story came from. This means the viewer can not only verify the original version of the story, but also add their own creative juices to the flow. This would help ensure that whereever the story goes, there is a solid link back to the working parts, the raw process that made it possible and allows new people to contribute and mutate and evolve.

This does involve giving up the right to demand payment for every copy made. Free software sacrifices the same thing and it turns out there that it really works. We need to try it for news stories and documentaries, and see if it works equally well.

One key point is that yu can still charge for copies of copyleft information. You just can't stop someone else from giving away the copy they bought, including access to the source materials. And the source materials have to be available for no more than the raw cost of distribution.

And it turns out that people still do buy free software. An awful lot of it in fact.

And that in addition, the reputation of free software spreads very quickly if it is good. Which benefits the software project by providing more feedback, more volunteers to help improve it, and in some cases more money.

The analogy for a video documentary would be placing it under copyleft so that anyone could copy it as long as the copy prominently said it was copyleft and any viewer could find a link back to the source (e.g. the indymedia web address for the city it came from). But the video maker could still charge for copies to be made. They could charge especially high rates for multinational TV networks that want copies urgently for example. The TV network would have to pay if they wanted the footage quickly without chasing down someone else who had it and was willing to copy it fast. And regardless of how badly they edited the piece, because of the copyleft license, they would legally have to give over some of the attention of their viewers to a web address for the source. That viewer attention is an extremely valuable resource for the network, because it is extremely powerful. It can also be powerful for us. If they fail to give the web address, they can be sued for the value of that viewer attention. That's quite a liability.

There are ways to play the system. I'm not sure if this would work, but it might be fun and I think it's worth a try!

Update April 2003: I just discovered these great creative commons licenses, which I think could be perfect for the job.

.......

Ideals and reality: many of the things I say above are ideals. They do not match reality exactly. But they are useful as a way of thinking about different approaches.

For example free software and open publishing are not actually free of charge, but the charge is reduced to the bare cost of distribution. This is hundreds of times less than the previous cost of purchase, which tended to include the cost of luxury cars, houses and jets for multinational executives. There is a real difference.

Another important point with free software is that programming is a skill in very high demand, which gives programmers an unusual amount of power as a group of people at this point in history. Historically I think this has lead to great social change. A flaw in this rant might be that programmers may become far less in demand and that story tellers and journalists are already in oversupply in economic thinking.

However, once we turn down various patterns of overconsumption, we can create a virtuous circle that gives us more leisure time, greater quality of life for both us and people living in other countries poorer (financially) than ours (I live in a rich country, this is written for a rich country audience). For example, getting rid of a car creates a huge amount of leisure time because you no longer need to spend all that time earning enough money to sit in traffic jams. Again, this is simplistic, there are urban planning issues to consider, but I believe a lot of it is cultural and information exchange is part of changing our culture to be more responsive to our own needs as well as the planet's.

In other words, with any luck and lots of hard work and fun, things might just start falling into place in time to grow and evolve as a species and a global ecosystem.

...

It seems many parts of society are being privatised. Health, water, communications, community media. Being owned by the government or a non-profit is no guarantee. Sometimes there are some benefits from privatisation. But I'm not convinced it's the only way to get such benefits, and there are heavy costs. Particularly in poorer countries, where prices for basics (such as water in Bolivia) can become suddenly way out of reach.

Free software can't be privatised.

Especially copyleft free software.

Corporations can use it, improve it, but they can't get an exclusive hold of it, they can't deny others from using it and changing it.

Can open publishing be privatised? I think the right definition will be strong protection against privatisation. But the large effects of the subtle difference in licensing between copyleft and BSD shows how important the definition can be. Let's play with a few and see which ones work best.

...

All the fuss about sharing music and dotbombs in the mainstream media is hiding an important trend: the most successful internet sites rely on the creativity of their users, not on professional producers as was the tradition with earlier electronic media.

• geocities.com is a universe of web pages which anyone can add to, and last i heard it's a top-ten website (imagine a TV channel where viewers could contribute whatever they liked, and it having shows in the top-ten: it sounds unlikely, and this is an example of why the net is so different to TV)
• amazon.com relies heavily on readers for book reviews (and they've bought imdb.com, which is a massive compilation of user data on movies)
• egroups.com is about people getting together in groups and yakking about whatever they're passionate about
• ebay.com is about people selling stuff to each other: a bazaar, not a mall full of franchises

These are all sites with very big audiences, and they all facilitate creativity, rather than have their staff create it directly. Of course, when anyone can contribute, you have a problem where users need to figure out what things they can trust. Most of these sites are successful because they've figured out some neat ways of helping that to happen, often using some sort of user-ratings system (user-editorial). So these sites all have some of the spirit of open publishing.

On the old one-way systems, community media was the exception. On the net, community media is very much a part of the mainstream.

Yes, there have been stories showing that AOL users spend most of their time just using AOL services, implying that people are happy to stay in AOL corporate land. However, those stories did not reveal what those users were doing. I reckon they'd be doing email, instant messaging, and just a little browsing. Since they use AOL tools to do email and messaging that counts as AOL time, so in fact a better indication of the diversity of their surfing would be found by looking just at the time spent browsing. The rest of the time they're spending communicating with other users. Every time in the past that a closed network has been tried, it's failed when faced with the internet (the biggest example was compuserve). So AOL may be closer than anyone else to creating a shopping mall version of the net, but they're still a lot further away than they'd like you to believe.

People want to communicate, they want to be creative. TV is a technology that can't handle such things very well, yet we've managed to convince ourselves after decades of TV that we need professionals to do our story telling.

Imagine if you tried to sell phones but they could only dial Pizza Hut or send messages written by Hallmark? Nobody would buy them (it's been tried: a very early marketing idea for the telephone had people using it to listen to opera). People are social animals, we want to use our communication tools to talk to other people. The only reason this didn't happen with TV, is because TV technology is one-way only.

So just because TV didn't live up to idealistic expectations, doesn't mean that the net has to follow the same path. The net is a fully two-way technology, and that makes a very big difference. The reason you mightn't hear about this trend is because a lot of the internet commentary we see is still coming from the old one-way media.

For more on this point, see my rant Is the internet elitist?.

...

open editing

Indymedia is struggling to cross a threshold in the size of its audience and in the sheer number of indymedia collectives. Many indymedia groups are also grappling with what to do when they are not covering a major event.

As the size of the audience goes up, so does the number of people posting stories, and therefore the number of stories that are more annoying than useful to most readers. A classic example is the rising tide of american postings on sydney indymedia. The posters don't seem to realise that we are quite capable of clicking on an american indymedia site if we wish to hear american news.

Open publishing I think has been very important in helping us to find new ways of organising media, often taking advantage of what the internet makes possible. A crucial part of Seattle Indymedia's success in Nov 99 was the automated online open-publishing newswire. I think what indymedia needs to get to the next level is automated open-editing.

Just as open publishing allows any readers to also write stories, open editing allows any reader to help sub-edit other people's stories. They might help sort stories by whatever criteria they think are important, or rewrite story summaries, translate to different languages, or compile groups of stories into a feature. Changes would be tracked so that original authors do not get trampled on. Much of this is already happening, but automation would turbo-charge it.

Done well, it will clear a lot of bottlenecks and allow a lot of exta creativity to plug into the network. It will make the sites more approachable for new readers, and more useful for activist media hacks. I think it could have a similar impact to open publishing. All we need is some geeks to implement it.

It's a bit like web search engines. Altavista was much better than all the rest back in the late 90's, but then the web got too big, Altavista's approach became ineffective, and google stepped in with an enhanced method for making sense of the net without imposing entralised order or missing things out. Interestingly, google introduced the idea of weighting search results by the number of pages that link to each other. Which is a bit like the user highlights stuff that some of us have been talking about for indymedia.

Google deals usefully with the explosion of information and diversity on the web in a way that heirachical and even simple raw search methods do not. Expect a similar leap in the impact of indymedia if and when open editing starts to kick in.

For more on open editing see:

• Open editing: a crucial part of open publishing a clearer piece on open editing by me

   

• Three Proposals for Open Publishing - Towards a transparent, collaborative editorial framework by Dru Jay

   

• Proposed user design specification: audience highlights by kellan and me

I think my rants could do with some open-editing.

...

What's in the open publishing and open editing toolbox?

June 2002

Hopefully at the bottom of a news story in the near future you'll see tools like these:

• Open publishing tools:
  • contribute a story
  • add a comment
• Open editing tools:
  • highlight this story (add this story to your highlights page, which in turn allows you to email newsblasts of your highlights, and to collect stories into a feature for consideration for the front page)
  • choose a topic area for this story (is this story about poverty? human rights? forests? then help us make sense of the flow and pick some keywords. also, what lifespan does this story have? short-term, long term? is it a local story or an international one? does it include local perspective?)
  • check the facts (add sources for facts cited in this story)
  • major revision (make it clearer, tighten the writing, add new points; revisions appear in the sidebar; the contributor or their delegate must approve before it becomes the version displayed by default)
  • cosmetic revision (spelling, grammar, formatting; as above author or delegate approval involved)
  • translate (into another language, into another culture e.g. from english to spanish, or from academic jargon to straight journo style)
  • verify this story (I'm not sure what this really means, maybe if a story has collected enough highlights to be considered for the front page, or keywords have been proposed, or a revision or translation has been proposed and an author has delegated the audience to subedit; then random people will be asked to verify if a proposed action is a good idea; a formula based on audience size and creativity determines the threshhold for action)
  • list other stories needing verification (if the user has been given random votes I guess)
  • flag this story as wildly inappropriate (strict conditions: a verbatim duplicate, summary does not match story, story contains a software virus, spam, or shocking images with no political context - the flagger must provide a short (and optionally additional longer) comment as to why; low karma users can only flag limited numbers of stories, e.g. one per week)
  • ignore this story, show me another one (if the story is boring, then just move on to the next thing, no need to take explicit action)

Sidebar:

• Story status: is it a fresh contribution? is it in the bin? number of comments, highlighted N times, is it proposed for the front page? Link to full log of editorial actions for this story.
• Highlighters: link to people's highlights pages which have picked this sstory
• Keywords: list keywords and list recent stories with the same keywords
• Revisions: list proposed revisions and older versions
• Translations
• Fact checking: list sources for information and statistics in this article
• Comments: show a selection of comments attached to this story; show total number of comments; give tools for diving into discussion (e.g. top rated comments? recent comments?)

Now the tricky part is how to balance the creativity of the audience with the very small percentage of people who want to disrupt a creative space.

There may be different stages to go through. This is because of the ratios of audience participation (see below) change as the audience size increases. A smaller audience might have a more cosy feel, and therefore a higher percentage of creative contributors. A larger audience will tend to cross a threshhold where disruptive people are numerous enough to have a major effect.

There is also the difference between live coverage of a major event, as against ongoing coverage of a place or an issue.

So the default needs to be that people can contribute material that other audience members get to see straight away.

Then take away a small number of posts that are dangerous to the site as a whole. For example spam or viruses or items that attract lawsuits. Individual collectives will have to figure out where to draw the line.

For the rest, it's a matter of priority. For a busy site, a new article would need to go through various checks to get onto the front page. A key tension pops up during live coverage of an event, between the need to check stories and the desire to see news come through quickly. But presumably if there is a big audience for a live event (indymedia's audience usually explodes during such times) and therefore more people to help with open editing, and thus ways for important news to get to the front page more quickly. News junkines will drill down to the latest news, and we need exactly those people to help highlight stuff for wider viewing.

The main thing is that the checks on a story's priority can't involve too many built-in delays (e.g. waiting seven days for votes to come in from a fixed collective) if you want a flexible system. Ideally any ratios used are tied to some sort of rough average of the current audience and the number of stories and contributors.

Another thing to consider is that some stories have a short lifetime, maybe hours or days, and others - considered opinion pieces, deailed issue coverage - might be relevant for much longer.

But what checks do we need? Can we build some sort of rough framework that can stretch to fit these various scenarios?

Let's start by trusting most readers to be able to judge when a story is important and interesting enough to recommend other people look at it. That's when they might choose to highlight it on their personal highlights page. The cool thing about this is there's no need to verify that action, because that page is owned by that user, and any people they choose to share write access with.

Some readers might only highlight stories that many people think are useless. Well, that's still useful in a way, and it doesn't really harm anything at that point.

The next stage is how to use those highlighting choices (or other editorial choices like revisions and translations) to change the priority of a story.

This is where you need to try and weed out abuse of the system. Any such weeding of course needs to be documented in an open way (use free software, show logs of changes to an article's status, list the editorial actions a user has taken, require comments for such actions, and finally allow anyone to rummage through the bin).

A helpful characteristic of abuse is that (almost by definition) it seems to be remain a very small percentage of the audience. So a major tactic is to try and encourage as large a section of the audience as possible to get involved in open publishing and open editing, and for the collective running a site to set a good example using those tools. A healthy plant is less likely to be attacked by parasites.

Another tactic it to require independent and random confirmation. You should not be able to bump up the pirority of a story if you contributed it. You should not be able to (easily) organise a small group of people to bump up each other's stories. Tactics for doing this include handing out votes to random users, and limiting the number of votes (based on some formula tied to the audience and contributor numbers for that day or week).

Another tactic is the idea of karma. People who contribute to the site can build up a reputation within the software, so that they are trusted a bit more, or a bit less. You don't want to go too far with this or it encourages a clique and starts to leach diversity.

...

formulas for open publishing audience sizes and participation

1%, say, of your audience at an open publishing site will contribute stories

0.2% will help with open editing, including weeding out spam

0.1% will contribute stories with closed publishing

0.1% will contribute spam with open publishing

0.01% will help with closed editing

the figures are guessed, but they give an idea of the ratios, and are roughly based on my experience, e.g. with large mailing lists, and the statistics for www.indymedia.org in early 2002.

open publishing/editing also implies for me that it's encouraged and easy to use and well designed.

so if you only have 10 people in your audience, open editing isn't useful, and on average only 1 person is contributing stories.

if you have 1000 people in your audience (which actualyl translates to a lot of hits) then you have 100 people contributing stories, which is starting to get interesting.

if, say, it turns out you need 100 people doing open editing for it to be useful (no good if only one person is making ratings) then u need an audience of 10,000.

if anything, these percentages are actually a bit high. they probably decay a bit as the audience gets bigger. closed systems will tend to hit a hard limit, beyond which communication amongst the team becomes very tough, or increasingly heirachical, especially if the team is working long distance. lots of other factors of course too. and of course "open" and "closed" are pretty vague, in fact there's a full range between them, so a more open system will tend to push the numbers up, and a more closed one will push them down.

...

April 2002

The New York Times says communication is making the world less tolerant. But while they mention the internet at the beginning of the story, most of the piece is actually about global television. If anything, this makes the case for open publishing stronger. It's not just whether communications are global, but how they are global.

One of the slashdot comments on the story points out another problem: that viewers are most attracted to conflict.

Conflict is a basic element of good drama. If everyone in a story just gets along, it's a boring story. This is an issue that indymedia must deal with. So far the most popular indymedia coverage is of big conflicts with authorities during large protests. If we want to get away from that, we need to find a way to present the interesting conflict in a story that still presents positive possibilities rather than being all negative. Conflict and creativity. Co-operation and competition. We need to find a good balance between these extremes.

...

September 2002

Content is not king. I've been saying this for years, but nowhere near as elloquently as Andrew Odlyzko does.

What does this mean for open publishing? Why bother making the process of creating content open if the end product doesn't matter that much?

Because what does matter is communication, social interaction. And open publishing means the process of creating content is opened up for people to engage in. Automated software and the web make this accessible and possible for much greater numbers of people than ever before, despite the best, noble and admirable efforts of community media.

And that process of writing news, publishing it, commenting on it, editing it, that engagement of people in the fundamental task of telling a good story, of sifting through which stories are important, and having a good old chinwag when the storyteller finishes. That process, may turn out to be more important than the story itself. That process is what may open up new opinions, new opportunities, new action for social justice. That the process is open, that more people get in and help do it. That is what would strengthen the fabric of our society, to enable us to repair the wrongs and improve all our lives.

One thing I've been saying for a while is that the net is a communications crutch. Our cities have cut us apart and made it hard for people to come together and communicate. Shared space is all given over to cars and commerce. People don't feel safe meeting other people in public.

So the net is like a crutch, we are leaning on it heavily as we communicate and find each other, helping us to meet people with common ground, and figure out who we humans really are. But there's nothing like meeting in the flesh. So one day with any luck the crutch will fade away to a minor role, when we fix our cities and our lives, and find society in the street and buildings and open spaces of our lives.

...

indymedia, internet and the global middle class
December 2002
indymedia's third birthday

most of the people I have met through indymedia are white, middle class, from an english speaking background. people like myself.

most, but not all.

a lot of indymedia depends on the internet, and i think the internet is a middle class tool. that still makes a potential audience of hundreds of millions of people around the planet.

and i think many of those people are ignored in the mainstream media, dominated as it is by just 6 corporations. many of those middle class people are ignored in elections, where the president of the USA is voted in by just 1% of the planet's population.

i think when you criticise indymedia and the net, it's important to remember what we had before.

which is better? the corporate media, or indymedia? television or the net?

there are obvious limits to what can be done with a mostly middle class audience. by sheer numbers alone, it cannot be the sole basis for planetwide democracy.

the USA, for all its faults, did a lot of good things by empowering its middle class, rather than leaving all the power with the royal family.

throughout US history, people have been saying that more should have been done to respect all the people's rights. there is a very tragic history of what happened instead, what is still happening. but atleast, atleast they did as much as they did. after all, some people's battles were won. to say otherwise is to write off all the achievements, diversity, and people of the USA. i think we can acknowledge what's good, without ignoring the bad.

nowadays, with power gone global, i feel creating more power among a billion people has got to be better than leaving it in a handful of mega corps.

in fact i think one reason the US government has gotten so crazy over the last hundred years is because power went global, but democracy did not. which means even within the USA, and within other "western democracies", national democracy is meaningless and feels obsolete.

how can we do even better?

i think part of it is teaching people who have resources about the people who have not. and another part is sharing those resources.

many indymedia collectives are consciously working on this. they setup media centres and train people how to use them. they print out stories and distribute free papers. they collaborate with radio stations. there are links to resistance groups in poor countries, collaborations between north and south.

these sorts of things must be done before indymedia can really call itself a people's media. this truly democratic media would be a crucial part of achieving real democracy and human rights for all 6 billion people on the planet.

meanwhile, you can write off the global middle class if you like.

i am more optimistic.

...

the more i think about what the US and other middle class democracies have done to the poor people of their countries and of the world, the more i worry about global media democracy.

even middle class democracy these days can be a bit of a sham, but that doesn't make it any better to leave out the poor of the planet.

i still think indymedia has got to be a step in the right direction, but it still leaves so far to go.

but being conscious of this dilemma and caring about it is an important step to finding solutions and fixing it. let's atleast not pretend that indymedia is for "everyone" just yet. but make sure we acknowledge what we have done, and keep working to expand the circle of diversities of all kinds.

...

June 2003

Lots happening in blogspace.

Emergent democracy talks about how to bootstrap our global decision making to a level that can cope with global complexity. And has some details and speculations on how a blog-like communication structure may help to do that.

Key author of that piece, Joi Ito, later blogged that journalism has to change as well as it is part of democracy. That's why I'm linking it in here.

...

Many ideas in here are shamelessly ripped off from other places. I really should credit those places and people. Or, if you like an idea in here, please assume I ripped it off, and do a web search and find it (actually you might have to wait a few years for search engines that can actually find ideas as opposed to phrases).

You can copy and distribute this article, as long as you include the web address of the original (http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html) in a way that the whole audience can see. Please let me know if you do reproduce it somewhere, especially if you make changes to it.

$Id: openpub.html,v 1.23 2006/01/21 06:42:39 maffew Exp $

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PST

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Foxconn reportedly installing

Robots to replace workers

Following a rash of suicides and criticism of factory working conditions, the Taiwanese hardware maker announced the move last year, saying it was designed to improve efficiency and combat rising labor costs.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57549450-92/foxconn-reportedly-installing-robots-to-replace-workers/

 ORIGIN LINK IS PASTED ABOVE THIS TEXT

Chinese tech site TechWeb says the robots cost up to $25,000 a piece to manufacture.

Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant frequently criticized for poor working conditions, has reportedly begun replacing its factory workers with robots.

After a rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories in China, the manufacturer of hardware for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Sony announced its intention last year to replace some of its workers with robots. Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, told employees at a dance in July 2011 that the move was designed to improve efficiency and combat rising labor costs.

The first batch of 10,000 robots -- nicknamed "Foxbots" -- have arrived in at least one Foxconn factory, with another 20,000 due by the end of the year, according to a Singularity Hub post. The robots cost between $20,000 and $25,000 apiece to produce -- about three times the average annual salary of Foxconn's factory workers, according to a report on the Chinese Web site TechWeb.

CNET has contacted Foxconn for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

Foxconn, which has 1.2 million employees in China, has come under scrutiny in the past few years amid reports of employees committing suicide at company facilities. The company has also been accused of employing underage laborers, providing poor living conditions at its dormitory housing, and overworking employees.

Prior to the announcement of the the robot initiative last year, at least 16 workers reportedly committed suicide since the beginning of 2010 at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen, China, a plant that employs hundreds of thousands of workers. Another three have attempted to suicide at the job site.

Most of the suicides have involved jumping from buildings. In response to the situation, the company promised to install "suicide nets" to discourage employees from jumping, as well as raise salaries by 25 percent.

Foxconn facilities have also been rocked by violent clashes involving factory workers. An hours-long riot involving thousands of employees forced one Foxconn factory in China to temporarily close in August. While Foxconn confirmed that incident and promised to address its causes, the company has denied reports that 3,000 to 4,000 workers staged a strike at another Foxconn factory in October.

 Article was found here:

_{http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57549450-92/foxconn-reportedly-installing-robots-to-replace-workers/}

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:13 AM PST

Updated: Friday, 16 November 2012 11:15 AM PST

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Mood:  chillin'

Foxconn Surprises with Increased Profits

 http://www.theferrarigroup.com/supply-chain-matters/2012/11/01/foxconn-surprises-with-increased-profits/

No doubt, this week is turning out to be an incredibly active week in terms of supply chain related news and developments.  There are implications to the monster storm that impacted the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., a major merger announcement involving two best-of-breed supply chain technology providers, and a slew of quarterly earnings announcements that provide supply chain-related consequences.  In commentary through the remainder of this week, Supply Chain Matters will touch upon these developments.

A significant earnings announcement involves the world’s largest contract manufacturer, Foxconn. In its first nine months, net profits have risen 24 percent to $1.9 billion, based on a 20 percent revenue increase. Gross margin were reported as an increase to 4.6 percent, vs. a 3.7 percent level a year earlier.

Dwell on that gross margin number for a moment.  How many firms can successfully manage that level of margin when physical manufacturing services are concerned?

The answer is obviously making every cost expenditure count and having massive scale and volume to leverage physical assets. Having the globe’s most popular consumer electronics provider, namely Apple, fuel that scale, obviously makes the formula work.  Having other large volume customers and global-scale is also essential to grow profitability over the longer term.

In its reporting of Foxconn earnings, the Financial Times discloses (paid subscription or free metered view) the impact that Apple actually has.  While Foxconn does not dare disclose anything related to Apple for obvious reasons, FT quotes equity analysts as indicating that Apple represents 40 to 50 percent of Foxconn’s current revenues.  We believe that that number is probably highly conservative.

In our Supply Chain Matters previous commentary related to Apple’s latest quarterly earnings we noted the total volume of quarterly unit output as well as the signs of constrained supply. Yet in spite of ongoing Apple supply constraints and a number of troubling workforce-related incidents, Foxconn marches on and defies classic business case thinking. The FT article is quick to also point out that with the two most recent Apple product introductions, the new iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, and the holiday buying season yet to unfold, the prospects for continued volume growth look good for Foxconn.

Longer-term, however, Foxconn must focus on its broader strategic plan. Worker demands for higher pay and better working conditions obviously lead toward the need for increased automation of repetitive and monotonous production tasks, which imply increased capital costs.  The trick is influencing primary customers like Apple to share the bulk of that burden.  Then again, Apple needs to put some of its hoards of foreign-based cash to good use.

Apple has also begun to exercise its own supply chain risk mitigation strategy by dual sourcing of the assembly production of the iPad Mini among two contract manufacturers, the other being Pegatron. Foxconn must therefore seek to offset continued needs for added margin with increased scale, further supply chain vertical integration while recruiting additional customers.

In the end, however, we believe that the contract manufacturing business model will have to significantly change, since sustaining single-digit margins, while bearing the brunt of labor, capital and social responsibility burdens is not sustainable over the long-term.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:01 AM PDT

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Mood:  don't ask

US Detention Of Imran Khan Part Of Trend To Harass Anti-Drone Advocates

Imran Khan is, according to numerous polls, the most popular politician in Pakistan and may very well be that country's next Prime Minister. He is also a vehement critic of US drone attacks on his country, vowing to order them shot down if he is Prime Minister and leading an anti-drone protest march last month.

On Saturday, Khan boarded a flight from Canada to New York in order to appear at a fundraising lunch and other events. But before the flight could take off, US immigration officials removed him from the plane and detained him for two hours, causing him to miss the flight. On Twitter, Khan reported that he was "interrogated on [his] views on drones" and then added: "My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop." He then defiantly noted: "Missed flight and sad to miss the Fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance."

The State Department acknowledged Khan's detention and said: "The issue was resolved. Mr Khan is welcome in the United States." Customs and immigration officials refused to comment except to note that "our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband," and added that the burden is on the visitor "to demonstrate that they are admissible" and "the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility."

There are several obvious points raised by this episode. Strictly on pragmatic grounds, it seems quite ill-advised to subject the most popular leader in Pakistan - the potential next Prime Minister - to trivial, vindictive humiliations of this sort. It is also a breach of the most basic diplomatic protocol: just imagine the outrage if a US politician were removed from a plane by Pakistani officials in order to be questioned about their publicly expressed political views. And harassing prominent critics of US policy is hardly likely to dilute anti-US animosity; the exact opposite is far more likely to occur.

But the most important point here is that Khan's detention is part of a clear trend by the Obama administration to harass and intimidate critics of its drone attacks. As Marcy Wheeler notes, "this is at least the third time this year that the US has delayed or denied entry to the US for Pakistani drone critics."

Last May, I wrote about the amazing case of Muhammad Danish Qasim, a Pakistani student who produced a short film entitled "The Other Side", which "revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan." As he put it, "the film takes the audience very close to the damage caused by drone attacks" by humanizing the tragedy of civilian deaths and also documenting how those deaths are exploited by actual terrorists for recruitment purposes.

Qasim and his co-producers were chosen as the winner of the Audience Award for Best International Film at the 2012 National Film Festival For Talented Youth, held annually in Seattle, Washington. He intended to travel to the US to accept his award and discuss his film, but was twice denied a visa to enter the US, and thus was barred from making any appearances in the US.

The month prior, Shahzad Akbar - a Pakistani lawyer who represents drone victims in lawsuits against the US and the co-founder of the Pakistani human rights organization, Foundation for Fundamental Rights - was scheduled to speak at a conference on drones in Washington. He, too, was denied a visa, and the Obama administration relented only once an international outcry erupted.

There are two clear dynamics driving this. First, the US is eager to impose a price for effectively challenging its policies and to prevent the public - the domestic public, that is - from hearing critics with first-hand knowledge of the impact of those policies. As Wheeler asks, "Why is the government so afraid of Pakistanis explaining to Americans what the drone attacks look like from a Pakistani perspective?"

This form of intimidation is not confined to drone critics. Last April, I reported on the serial harassment of Laura Poitras, the Oscar-nominated documentarian who produced two films - one from Iraq and the other from Yemen - that showed the views and perspectives of America's adversaries in those countries. For four years, she was detained every single time she reentered the US, often having her reporters' notebook and laptop copied and even seized. Although this all stopped once that article was published - demonstrating that there was never any legitimate purpose to it - that intimidation campaign against her imposed real limits on her work.

That is what this serial harassment of drone critics is intended to achieve. That is why a refusal to grant visas to prominent critics of US foreign policy was also a favorite tactic of the Bush administration.

Second, and probably even more insidious, this reflects the Obama administration's view that critics of its drone policies are either terrorists or, at best, sympathetic to terrorists. Recall how the New York Times earlier this year - in an article describing a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documenting the targeting of Pakistani rescuers and funerals with US drones - granted anonymity to a "senior American counterterrorism official" to smear the Bureau's journalists and its sources as wanting to "help al-Qaida succeed".

For years, Bush officials and their supporters equated opposition to their foreign policies with support for the terrorists and a general hatred of and desire to harm the US. During the Obama presidency, many Democratic partisans have adopted the same lowly tactic with vigor.

That mindset is a major factor in this series of harassment of drone critics: namely, those who oppose the Obama administration's use of drones are helping the terrorists and may even be terrorist sympathizers. It is that logic which would lead US officials to view Khan as some sort of national security threat by virtue of his political beliefs and perceive a need to drag him off a plane in order to detain and interrogate him about those views before allowing him entrance to the US.

What makes this most ironic is that the US loves to sermonize to the world about the need for open ideas and political debate. In April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lectured the planet on how "those societies that believe they can be closed to change, to ideas, cultures, and beliefs that are different from theirs, will find quickly that in our internet world they will be left behind."

Posted by Joe Anybody at 9:15 AM PDT

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Thank you for your interest  in learning more about what Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala will do on taking office.

We urge you to read about Jill and Cheri's Green New Deal, the centerpiece of their campaign. The Green New Deal is an emergency four part program of specific solutions for moving America quickly out of crisis into the secure green future. You can read all about the Green New Deal by clicking here.

JOBS                                                                                                             

• Enact the Full Employment Program which will directly provide 25 million green jobs in sustainable energy, mass transit, sustainable organic agriculture, and clean manufacturing, as well as social work, teaching, and and other service jobs.
• Provide grants and low-interest loans to green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community, rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors.
• Renegotiate NAFTA and other "free trade'' agreements that export American jobs, depress wages, and undermine the sovereign right of Americans and citizens of other countries to control their own economy.

WORKER RIGHTS

• Provide full protection for workplace rights, including the right to a safe workplace and the right to organize a union without fear of firing or reprisal by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
• Support the formation of worker-owned cooperatives to provide alternatives to exploitative business models.
• Make the minimum wage a living wage.    
• Oppose two-tier wage systems.  
• Ensure equal pay for equal work, ending discrimination based on race, gender, or generation. 

BUDGET AND TAXES  

• Reduce the budget deficit by restoring full employment, cutting the bloated military budget, and cutting private health insurance waste. 
• Eliminate needless tax giveaways that increase the deficit.
• Require full disclosure of corporate subsidies in the budget and stop hiding subsidies in complicated tax code.  
• Rewrite the entire tax code to be truly progressive with tax cuts for working families, the poor and middle class, and higher taxes for the richest Americans. 
• Reject cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
• Stop draining the non-profit sectors of our economy in order to give tax cuts to the for-profit sectors.
• Relieve the debt overhang holding back the economy by reducing homeowner and student debt burdens.
• Ensure the right to accessible and affordable utilities – heat, electricity, phone, internet, and public transportation – through democratically run, publicly owned utilities that operate at cost, not for profit.
• Maintain and upgrade our nation's essential public infrastructure, including highways, railways, electrical grids, water systems, schools, libraries, and the Internet, resisting privatization or policy manipulation by for-profit interests.
• Establish a 90% tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers.

FINANCIAL REFORM

• Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail,” starting with Bank of America.
• Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.
• End bailouts for the financial elite and use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off. 
• Bring monetary policy under democratic control by prohibiting private banks from creating money, thus restoring government's Constitutional authority.   
• Let pension funds be managed by boards controlled by workers, not corporate managers.  
• Regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.
• Require banks to use honest bookkeeping so that toxic assets cannot be hidden or sold to unsuspecting persons.        
• Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.         
• Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means nationalizing the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and placing them under a Federal Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department.
• Establish federal, state, and municipal publicly-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities and focus on helping people, not enriching themselves.

EDUCATION

• Provide tuition-free education from kindergarten through college, thus eliminating the student debt crisis.         
• Forgive existing student debt.         
• Protect our public school systems from privatization         
• End high-stakes testing and stop punishing students and teachers for failures of the system in which they work. 
• Stop denying students diplomas based on tests.  
• Stop using merit pay to punish teachers.                                                           

HEALTH CARE

• Provide complete, affordable, quality health care for every American through an improved Medicare-for-all insurance program.        
• Allow full access to all medically justified contraceptive and reproductive care. 
• Expand women's access to the "morning after" contraception by lifting the Obama Administration's ban.         
• Roll back the community drivers of chronic disease, including poor nutrition, health-damaging pollution, and passive dirty transportation.     
• Avoid chronic diseases by investing in essential community health infrastructure such as local, fresh, organic food systems, pollution-free renewable energy, phasing out toxic chemicals, and active transportation such as bike paths and safe sidewalks that dovetail with public transit.
• End overcharging for prescription drugs by using bulk purchasing negotiations.
• Ensure that consumers have essential information for making informed food choices by expanding product labeling requirements for country of origin, GMO content, toxic chemical ingredients, fair trade practices, etc.           

HOUSING   

• Impose an immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.  
• Offer capital grants to non-profit developers of affordable housing until all people can obtain decent housing at no more than 25% of their income.
• Create a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgages, and either restructure the mortgages to affordable levels, or if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, rent homes to the occupants.
• Expand rental and home ownership assistance and create ample public housing.                                                           

CLEAN ENERGY

• Create a binding international treaty to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels deemed safe by scientific analysis to reduce global warming.
• Phase out coal power plants to end their unacceptable harm to the climate, health and the economy. 
• End mountaintop removal in Appalachia.   
• Redirect research funds from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries toward research in renewable energy and conservation. 
• Build a nationwide smart electricity grid that can pool and store power from a diversity of renewable sources, giving the nation clean, democratically-controlled, terrorist-proof energy.
• Phase out nuclear power and end nuclear subsidies.   
• Stop hydrofracking to prevent devastating pollution of groundwater, destruction of roads from the transport of millions of tons of toxic water, and the threats of earthquakes recently determined to be caused by drilling and disposal of fracking water in seismically unstable regions.              
• End Federal subsidies for "clean coal" -- an expensive, carbon intensive, unproven technology promoted by the coal industry public relations campaign.
• Halt all drilling that poses a threat to public lands or water resources.    
• Halt the Keystone XL pipeline and bring the tar sand oils under a comprehensive climate protection treaty.

CIVIL LIBERTIES

• Issue an Executive Order prohibiting Federal agencies from conspiring with local police to infringe upon right of assembly and peaceful protest.
• Repeal the Patriot Act that violates our constitutional right to privacy and protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
• Repeal the unconstitutional provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act that gives the president the power to indefinitely imprison and even assassinate American citizens without due process.
• Oppose the Online Piracy Act and all other legislation that would undermine freedom and equality on the Internet.
• Pass the Equal Rights Amendment to forever end discrimination based on gender.
• Eliminate the doctrine of corporate personhood with a constitutional amendment to clarify that only human beings have constitutional rights.   
• Implement marriage equality nationwide to end discrimination against same-sex couples.   
• Expand federal support for locally-owned broadcast media and local print media.                                                                                                           

VOTING RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY

• Enact the full Voter's Bill of Rights guaranteeing each person's right to vote, the right to have our votes counted on hand-marked paper ballots, and the right to vote within systems that give each vote meaning.
• Abolish the electoral college and directly elect the President. 
• Get the big money payoffs out of politics by implementing public funding of election campaigns.
• Reverse the Citizens United ruling to revoke corporate personhood, and amend our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.   
• Restore the right to run for office and eliminate unopposed races by removing ballot access barriers.
• Require the use of auditable, hand-counted paper ballots in all local, state, and federal elections.        
• Guarantee equal access to the ballot and to the debates to all qualified candidates
• Eliminate “winner take all” elections in which the “winner” does not have the support of most of the voters, and replace that system with instant runoff voting and proportional representation.      
• Provide equal and free access to the airways for all candidates, not just those with big campaign warchests.         
• Enact statehood for the District of Columbia to ensure the region has full representation in Congress, and full powers of self-rule.       
• Restore voting rights to ex-offenders who’ve paid their debt to society.
• Require that all votes are counted before election results are released.
• Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions.
• Celebrate our democratic aspirations by making Election Day a national holiday.
• Bring simplified, safe same-day voter registration to the nation so that no qualified voter is barred from the polls.
• Protect our right to vote by supporting Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s proposed “Right to Vote Amendment,” to clarify to the Supreme Court that yes, we do have a constitutional right to vote.
• Protect the legitimate exercise of local democracy by making clear that acts of Congress establish a floor, and not a ceiling, on laws relating to economic regulation, workers rights, human rights, and the environment.

PEACE AND FOREIGN POLICY

• Cut the bloated Pentagon budget by 50%.
• End use of assassination as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, including collaborative assassination through intermediaries.
• Increase our energy security by reducing our nation's dependence on oil. 
• Demilitarize U.S. foreign policy to emphasize human rights, international law, multinational diplomatic initiatives and support for democratic movements across the world.       
• Restore the National Guard as the centerpiece of our defense.    
• Create a nuclear free zone in the Middle East region and require all nations in area to join. 
• Oppose attacks on nuclear facilities.          
• Ban use of drone aircraft for assassination, bombing, and other offensive purposes.      
• End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, withdrawing both troops and military contractors.
• Make human rights and international law the basis of our policy in the Middle East.      
• Join 159 other nations in signing the Ottawa treaty banning the use of anti-personnel land mines.        
• Close some 140 U.S. military bases abroad. 
• Initiate a new round of nuclear disarmament initiatives.

ENVIRONMENT

• Create millions of green jobs in areas such as weatherization, recycling, public transportation, worker and community owned cooperatives, and energy-efficient infrastructure.
• Adopt the EPA's new tougher standards on ozone pollution.          
• Promote conversion to sustainable, nontoxic materials.    
• Promote use of closed-loop, zero waste processes.  
• Promote organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.

IMMIGRATION

• Grant undocumented immigrants who are already residing and working in the United States a legal status which includes the chance to become U.S. citizens. 
• Halt deportations of law-abiding undocumented immigrants.
• Repeal the deceptively named Secure Communities Act. 
• Improve economic conditions abroad to reduce flow of immigrants, in part by repealing NAFTA.
• Demilitarize border crossings throughout North America.   
• End the war on immigrants, including the cruel, so-called “secure communities” program.                                                                                                                  

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

• Repair our communities rather than dump resources into the prison-industrial complex. 
• Work to eliminate laws tying judge’s hands with mandatory sentencing requirements. 
• Immediately legalize medical use of marijuana and move to permit general legal sales under suitable regulatory framework.
• End the ineffective and costly War on Drugs and begin to treat drug use as a public health problem, not a criminal problem.    

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:37 AM PDT

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