One of the most troublesome high-tech news stories to linger in the media is the way that high-tech workers are treated in China. Foxconn, who employs a million workers in China building the iPhone and many other consumer electronic devices, has repeatedly come under file for creating working conditions that would be criminal in this country. Among the allegations are hiring children as young as 12 and paying them 70 cents per hour, enforcing 14-16 hour days hours in spartan and often dangerous conditions, and injuring or even crippling workers through non-existent safety practices and then simply firing them without paying for their medical treatment. The conditions are so bad that suicides are not infrequent (a problem that the company addressed by installing nets beneath the taller buildings). In case you haven’t been following the story, there’s good coverage in Business Insider.

Every time a new allegation emerges, iPhone users wag their fingers at Apple and threaten a boycott unless something is done. Apple responds by sending someone to investigate, and they return with stories of frank conversations with management, improving conditions and promises to do better. But the reality is that we, as citizens of the first world, cannot improve the working conditions in other countries, and shouldn’t. In the short run, our interference can only make the conditions worse.

Working conditions in China’s factories today are little different from the conditions during the early Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the U.S. Then, eight year old children routinely worked 14-hour shifts for the equivalent of fifty cents in today’s money, although adult men might do considerably better, making $2.50/day (adjusted).

The conditions were dismal; poor light, unbreathable air, dangerous and heavy equipment with no safety features, and routine exposure to toxic chemicals. If you didn’t want to freeze, you brought in your own lump of coal for the furnace. Beatings and mistreatment were the norm for even the smallest offense, like being a minute late. Workers had absolutely no rights and were immediately fired for any infraction or injury. Unions were illegal and you could be arrested for inciting unrest if you tried to organize. Factories were sometimes fenced with barbed wire to “keep the young imps inside.”

Still, people flocked to the factories and stood in long lines for hours for the chance of employment. Why? Because these jobs, grim as they were, represented their best option. It was better to be a slave than to be a beggar or starve to death.

Child labor had never been a subject of controversy in a world dominated by agricultural and handcraft economies. Children always worked on family farms and boys as young as 10 were apprenticed to their crafts. As a result, improvement came slowly.

In 1833, the controversial Factory Act passed by British Parliament. Under this enlightened law, children 9-13 years of age were only allowed to work 8 hours a day and those 14-18 years of age could not work more than 12 hours. By 1899, about half the states had passed laws regulating child labor, but these were almost never enforced. In 1912, after a 9-year battle, activists in the U.S. forced the government to establish the Children’s Bureau to monitor child labor, but it wasn’t until 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act that the Federal government finally regulated the minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children.

These changes in working conditions could not have come about without the rise of an educated middle class, without the development of modern social and government institutions, and the improvements in the standard of living which were the benefits of industrialization itself. There is no short-circuit. Just as a child needs to grow through those awkward teenage years in order to develop the skills required to take on adult responsibility, a society needs to suffer the growing pains which lead to the development of institutions and an enlightened population.

Our outrage at the labor practices in China (or Nike paying teenagers $2.17/day to make sneakers in Jakarta) only serves to pressure companies to take those jobs elsewhere, removing the engine that was providing the possibility for economic and social growth. Higher salaries only fuel the type of rampant inflation that destroys local economies and breeds crime. For proof, we need look no farther than any modern tourist destination.

Fair trade programs, the darlings of the coffee, chocolate and handcraft industry, have fared poorly as well. While making American consumers feel good about buying foreign products, they have done little to help local farmers and may have even hurt them by creating an addiction to US markets and acting as a disincentive to the modernization and mechanization which could provide real and lasting benefit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know what is best for the whole world. The factory jobs at Foxconn, as dismal as they may seem to us, are far superior to slaving in a rice paddy all day and represent real opportunity for the Chinese people, especially the women. So go ahead and enjoy your iPhone and your other toys. You are providing real economic opportunity to developing countries who, like us, will one day enjoy a standard of living that prices them right out of the global labor market. It just won’t happen overnight.

Elsewhere on the Web

David Pogue, What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found

What is the world’s biggest secret? Perhaps you are thinking “the formula for Coca-Cola”, “who shot Kennedy”,” what happened to the Holy Grail”, or “the location of Atlantis”. All good guesses, but these are merely historical curiosities.

Right now, the biggest secret in the world is the encryption key that unlocks the Wikileaks “insurance” file. In case you haven’t been following the story closely, Wikileaks has only published a small fraction of the massive database of government and commercial secrets which were leaked to them. However, on July 30, in response to strong US government threats, Wikileaks released to the world a 1.4 GB “insurance” file.

The file is encrypted with AES256, the same encryption algorithm used by the government to protect it’s own “Top Secret” files. Although Wikileaks has not made any public statements about the contents of this file, its purpose seems clear: in case something happens to the site or to Julian Assange himself, they made a backup of their secrets and stored it in the one place where it can never be destroyed; everywhere. Speculation is that this information bomb contains the balance of the State Department cables, as well as commercial and military secrets ranging from BP to The Vatican.

Every spy organization in the world and a half-million hackers and computer science students are hard at work analyzing this file. But without the key, they have little chance of success. What does a 256-bit key look like? In hexadecimal, it might be: “496e2031363932203139206d656e20616e642074776f20776f6d656e20″. But such a key is unwieldly.

A binary key is difficult to store and transmit, and it looks like, well, an encryption key.  More than likely, the key hidden in plain sight; a common, publicly available reference (perhaps the first line of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”).  To create a 256-bit key like the one above, you only need 29 characters, so “In 1692 19 men and two women ” would do nicely. Of course, you could also make it be much longer.

One thing is certain: someday we will know the answer. It is highly unlikely that several young people will all carry this secret to their graves, never succumbing to pressure, argument or temptation, and never making a mistake. And once we have the key, we will have everything because the file that it unlocks is readily available. (There are millions of copies of it around the world. You could easily get a copy for yourself.)

Cracking the code through “brute force” methods is far beyond the capabilities of the worlds fastest (and most secret) supercomputers. An entirely new generation of computers, based on quantum physics, may have a chance, but that type of innovation is decades away.

Until then, unless someone screws up or forces Julian Assange’s hand, the Wikileaks insurance file will remain one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world.

Portable Speakerphone

I have one of those legendary Jawbone BlueTooth headsets. It works great, but I hate having to deal with it: Put it on. Take it off. Forget you have it on and look like a dork. Charge it when you get home. Lose it.

What I REALLY wanted was a speakerphone for my car that I never had to think about. It would just work when I got in and quit when I got out. Well,  now I have one; the BlueAnt ST3.

I tried a bunch of different devices before settling on this one — Sony, Motorola, BlueConnect. None of them met my specs for performance and convenience.

The ST3 is small, just barely bigger than my phone. At first, I was suspicious because of the unit’s small size and light weight. I wondered how much battery power it had onboard (read “talk time” and “standby time”). I’m going to save to you bunch of time and give you the answers: an unbelievable 15 hours of talk time and one month of standby time on a single 3-hour charge.

The sound quality is very good. It’s plenty loud enough even at freeway speeds and the other end of the conversation is ALMOST as good as my Jawbone (which is saying a lot).

If your phone supports BlueTooth directory integration (which the Android sadly does not until later this month), the ST3′s text to speech processor will even announce who’s calling and allow you to voice answer or not, making the unit truly hands-free.

I don’t even bother turning it on or off. When it notices the BlueTooth signal fade as you walk away, the ST3 shuts down. But it has a vibration sensor in it similar to the ones used in car alarms. When you return to your car, the ST3 wakes up, finds your phone, and locks on.

I suppose that some time, a week or two from now, my ST3 will ask to be recharged. It comes with both an AC charger and a car cable, so no problem. Meanwhile, I’m giving it 5 stars.

Rating: * * * * *

Street price: under $100

Related:

BlueAnt Wireless Website

"Same S*** Different Fuel"

Ahhh…the hydrogen economy. What a wonderful idea! Hydrogen can be made from electricity and water. Then you can put the hydrogen into your car where it is turned directly into electricity in a fuel cell, and the only waste product is water. It’s a completely closed system; water to hydrogen to water to hydrogen to water. There’s really only one problem with it:  it doesn’t work.

A little basic science: Hydrogen, in its cleanest form, is made from water by putting in electricity (one electron for every hydrogen atom.) But the process is highly inefficient. The very best that you could even theoretically hope to achieve would be breaking even (although we realistically have no hope of ever coming close to that). Which means, you have to think of hydrogen as a battery (although not a very efficient one). It stores energy from electricity (that you have already made elsewhere), gives some of it back, and wastes the rest.

The simple truth is, there is no free lunch. There are no hydrogen mines and hydrogen can never be used to make the electricity to make itself because it is a net consumer of electricity. So why are we even talking about it?

Oil companies are promoting H2 (that’s science geek speak for “hydrogen”) for a couple of reasons. First of all, you will still have to go to the pump to fill up on hydrogen. This means they don’t have to release their stranglehold on you and your gas tank. The very thought of a world where people have clean energy delivered directly to their homes WITHOUT making a trip to the 167,000 gas stations in America is terrifying.

Secondly, you have to ask “Where are they planning to get all this hydrogen?” Simple, the same place they get everything else; oil!  That’s right, just because you can make H2 from water doesn’t mean you have to. Remember, splitting the hydrogen out of water requires putting energy into the process; more energy than you get out by using the hydrogen. Even if they wanted to make hydrogen the clean way, where would they get all that energy?

Nope, better to just make hydrogen from oil. After all, half of the energy in simple hydrocarbons (natural gas and such) comes from hydrogen. The problem is, the other half comes from carbon (read “greenhouse gas”). That means that oil companies can just retool their big refineries into making hydrogen instead of gasoline. Problem is, splitting the hydrogen out leaves a big pile of carbon (probably as carbon dioxide). That leaves us back where we started which, frankly, is just what they had in mind.

The oil companies are hoping that you were asleep during high school chemistry and that, with a little sleight of hand, they can make the carbon “disappear” and get you off their backs. But the truth is that we have built these massive global enterprises with the sole purpose of digging up carbon and distributing it to everyone inexpensively so they can burn it. Until we stop doing that, we’re going to be in trouble. As the old saying goes, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Car companies are promoting hydrogen, too. What’s their angle? They know that economical availability of  hydrogen is years away. By coming out in favor of hydrogen, they can appear to be promoting a green technology which, unfortunately, just isn’t there yet. Net result, again, business as usual. No need to retool the factories and no need to sell electric cars until the hydrogen fuel cell is available.

But why resist? Wouldn’t they make just as much money selling electric cars and regular cars? Yes, and therein lies the problem. Car manufacturers and their dealer channels don’t make any money selling cars. They make their money servicing cars; performing oil changes every 6,000 miles and servicing the the thousands of parts in an internal combustion engine that are damaged by the high temperatures and RPMs or simply wear out. Electric cars, on the other hand require almost no service. Electric cars would put the traditional dealer channel out of business.

Electricity is the answer. For now. Converting oil into hydrogen and carbon dioxide doesn’t fix the problem. Converting electricity into hydrogen and back into energy doesn’t make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is putting electricity directly into your car and using it as electricity.

Where will we get all this electricity? There isn’t an easy answer to this question for now. We have hydroelectric today, and solar and wind are coming online fast, with geothermal and tidal and a host of other technologies in the wings. And for the time being, a bunch of it will have to be generated by burning carbon and using (God help us) nuclear reactors.

But we don’t have any electricty to waste, and hydrogen is a wasteful technology. Its only advantage is that it props-up oil company and auto company profits.

So, tell the car companies that you know they are stalling. Tell the oil companies that you know they are hiding all that carbon somewhere. And let’s quit pretending that there ever could be such a thing as a “hydrogen economy.”

Nixie tubes

Back in 1954, before we had LED’s and digital readouts, Nixie Tubes were the only way to display digital data. Today, these delicate glass tubes are very rare.

I’ve been buying them from decommissioned factories in Russia and designing them into retro electronic devices like clocks and other art pieces.

Nixies fell out of favor as soon as other technologies replaced them because the fragile glass tubes are sensitive to shock and vibration and they require 180 volts to operate.