Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 7 pm in association with NZ Mint.
I welcome your additions in the comments below or via email tobernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
I'll pop the extras into the comment stream. See all previous Top 10s here.
My must read today is #1. It's just plain sobering.
1. Is there something wrong in the world? - I have a confession to make.
I have an iPad that I use a lot. It does some great things. It seems cheap for what it is and does.
It was made in a factory in China where workers live in dormitories away from their families and are paid a fraction of workers in other places. Workers in these slave camps kill themselves or are killed in accidents.
The iPad has been a hit for Apple, which yesterday disclosed a cash pile of almost US$100 billion and that its CEO Tim Cook received compensation US$378 million last year, albeit much of it in stock options. Cook is the man responsible for Apple's much vaunted outsourced supply chain.
Is this the world we want to live in?
Apple can make us great stuff and make huge profits for shareholders while paying its CEO an amount of compensation that is so mind bogglingly large as to be unthinkable.
Is this OK? I read the Isaacson book on Jobs over the holidays. He didn't care about people very much. He cared about himself and his products a lot.
Here's the New York Times with some deep reporting on these Chinese factories:
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
And here's the quote that stood out for me:
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management atFoxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.
“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.
2. The €1.4 billion house - Irish artist Frank Buckley is building a house in Dublin from bricks made from the euro notes shredded by Ireland's national mint.
This is after he borrowed a 100% loan to buy a house...
And here's the Irish Times on the story:
“I’m sitting in my studio with my feet up on a box of €4 million of shredded notes and I thought, ‘God, this is just paper’,” Buckley said. “I just felt there needs to be a debate on this. Kids in school need to come down and see and get talking about it. What does currency mean?”
3. Austerity debt spiral - The IMF's Fiscal Monitor paints a dire picture of government austerity driving economies even deeper into recession.
This chart tells the story.
While deficits and debt in many advanced economies are high, the pace of consolidation projected in 2012 is considerable given the weak economic environment. Moreover, fiscal policy in many countries is already tighter with respect to the cycle than had been projected in the September 2011 Fiscal Monitor (Figure 3), partly because a lack of affordable additional financing is compelling some euro area economies to introduce new measures to attain existing headline deficit targets, rather than allowing the automatic stabilizers to operate.
4. Here's how desperate Americans are for a job - This is a video of a line of people waiting to apply for some jobs in a Ford factory in Chicago.
The sound is NSFW. The pictures tell the story.
5. This is curious - WSJ's excellent ChinaRealTime report points to the amazing traction that the 2009 movie about an Apocalypse in 2012 is getting in China.
All across China citizens are expressing the belief that in this year, the world may come to an end. “Husband, the end of the world is drawing near, why don’t we have a baby. We have 10 months left,” said one user of the popular Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo. Her comment was only one of many in a thread that’s been started about the end of humanity.
What’s behind this belief? Look no further than “2012,” director Roland Emmerich’s 2009 film about a global disaster that brought the end of the world.
While the movie received a luke-warm reception in the U.S., Chinese audiences latched onto it. With $466 million in Chinese box office revenues, “2012″ ranks as one of Hollywood’s top-grossing films of all time in China, according to film industry research company EntGroup.
6. George Soros is buying Italian bonds - Reuters reports from an interview with a man who may have a position he is front-running. He is picking deflation.
Salmon talks about this Newsweek interview with Soros:
“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
8. Tibetan strife - Here's Bloomberg on problems in Tibet.
Police in southwestern China opened fire on protesters in a Tibetan enclave during a clash Jan. 24, the second straight day of deadly protests in the area, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The confrontation occurred after a crowd gathered two days ago near the Chengguan Police Station, Xinhua said yesterday, citing an unidentified police officer. The crowd refused to disperse and then stormed the station with knives, gasoline bottles and stones, according to the report.
9. US$140/bbl - The Telegraph reports the IMF has warned sanctions on Iranian oil would push the oil price up.
10. Totally irrelevant Stephen Colbert interview with Maurice 'Where the Wild Things Are' Sendak. It made me laugh.
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