Personal Dork Assistant

Euphemism

eu·phe·mism: The act or an example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt, or offensive.

Just in case you thought it's now perfectly mainstream and normal to be an anime fan, there's ADV's Najica Blitz Tactics Collectors Edition. Usually I'm all for special edition anime releases, complete with useless extra stuff, but Najica is a little different. The online store lists the item as "Najica Blitz Tactics DVD 1 (Hyb) + Empty Artbox + Garment." Now, neither boxes or garments are new in collector's sets, but usually we're talking about a cardboard box and a T-shirt, but in this case, we have the super-duper bonus of:

Exclusive Collector's Edition Box; includes Vol 1 of the series and a box to hold all three volumes, plus an exclusive pair of Najica Blitz Tactics panties!

Oh, so that's what they meant by "garment." Now, I'll buy just about anything if it's cheap enough, and I'm hardly against fanservice, but I am not buying female undergarments, even if it's clean and unused.

Losers (Wacky Japanese Division)

No, not the chick. She's okay. The rest of the crowd? Not so much. Courtesy of the Tokyo Auto Salon, where Gran Turismo comes to life! Although I do admit that if I were there, I'd be right in there blending in with the crowd with my cam.

Happy Days

You know the economy is going good when there's a homeless vet on each corner of the busy intersection next to the VA Hospital.

Good and Bad

A great set of articles in this week's New York Times Magazine. The story about the sexual slavery of young (as in 10-13 years young!) women is the kind of thing that makes me want to crawl into bed and hide under the covers. It's not just that these girls are being raped and tortured daily for years on end. It's the vast machinery that takes, processes, and exploits them so damn efficiently. Everyone from Russian Mafia, Mexican street thugs, to American professionals who are paying 100 times markup for the sloppy seconds of said thugs. The fact that the girls are young, scared, and psychologically broken is actually a selling point for the johns.

Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with 20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the brutalizing pace of 20 men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much as $2,000 a week. In the U.S., that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000 per week.

The article doesn't even pretend to offer any hope or solutions to the problem, so intractible it seems. And the reporter only followed the Mexico-American axis with mentions of Eastern Europe. Let's not even get into the sort of stuff going on in Asia. It seemed like every day in Taiwan there would be a new case of smuggled mainland women in the news. Of course, the cameras only chase after the women, not the people behind the operation or the paying customers.

Norah Jones' PR-flack must be hopping mad that her softball profile got stuck in the same issue with the grim main article. I don't care how talented and humble you are, it's hard not to seem like a spoiled bitch in comparison to those poor girls.

The apartment is hardly haute, either: walking around the first floor, you can see just how little time Jones has had for anything extramusical. There's a piano, Alexander's ceiling-high double bass, silos of CD's, audiogeek equipment that Alexander bought off eBay, but no newspapers, no art, no real decor, except the silver foil Christmas decoration that Jones's mother pinned to the ceiling. The room does have a distinct temperature: all the music, from a Ray Charles box set to a John Prine LP to the current Blur CD to the Thorens turntable and speakers with tubes, even the books -- David Sedaris, Sylvia Plath, ''Vanity Fair'' -- are set to the same cultural thermostat, about 44 degrees F.

Seems like an awesome lady, but the thought of "too cool for school" does come to mind.

I'd be all over the Treo 600, too, if I could get Sprint reception at home. A camera-PDA-phone is obviously sexy to a gadget-guy like me, but the article perfectly captures the wider appeal of the uber-device.

If conspicuous consumption is about showing off an item that's needlessly expensive (a $6,000 shower curtain that doesn't keep water off the bathroom floor any better than the one from Kmart), the promise of a gadget like the Treo 600 takes this idea in a different direction: it implies almost limitless functionality, practicality and maybe even a certain technical wizardry on the part of the owner. (Surely there's some skill involved in tracking down and installing the third-party applications that make this little bundle live up to its full potential, right?) This is conspicuous utility.

I am totally down with the "conspicuous utility" thing, paying the premium for things that just work better, e.g. Powerbook, iPod, and Tivo. The latest example, as part of my quest to make the home theater workable by mom, is the Home Theater Master MX700 remote control. Sure it's a $170 remote, but it was a good eBay deal considering that it retails for $300, and it is the most programmable hard-button remote available, thanks to the PC-link and software. Sure, I gave the Pronto a shot, but the B/W screen just doesn't have enough contrast, and the all-touchscreen interface isn't as couch-potato-friendly as the classic button-clicker format. It's annoying to see people buy a pile of hot-shot HT equipment, and then complain about how their wives can't handle it. Well, that's because there's ten remotes on the table and a zillion steps involved in turning on the TV and receiver, and switching both components to the correct inputs, etc. before a picture will even show up on the screen. On the other hand, they probably have a life.

Fucking Hilarious

Damn it, I usually expect the Obscure Store to be more cynical. They decided to call this story "tragic." I disagree.

Alex Plucknett would have turned 15 next week, an athletic Jacksonville eighth-grader with all the hopes and dreams of adolescence ahead of him...

Witnesses told deputies Alex Plucknett was in a ditch next to a tree about 225 yards from the camp, when someone yelled, "Hog!"

Dennis Plucknett grabbed his .308-caliber Ruger rifle with scope, steadied his shot on the hood of a bus and told police he fired one round at something black he saw moving in the distance...

"Dennis and Jon immediately ran in the direction where Dennis thought he shot the hog, only to discover Alex lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the back of his head," wrote Baker County Officer Charles Goldsmith. "Alex was wearing a black toboggan cap with a camouflage jacket without a reflective vest."

He died at the scene.

One-shot kill from 225 yards out. Man, that would be a good show at Fort Benning. That or Counterstrike.

Sunday Thoughts

• What's the difference between green beans and haricot vert at the farmers' market? About two bucks a pound.
• The bastards at Ralphs are still using scabs, and even then they've had to close down the deli section for the lack of manpower. Only reason I went in was because I was out of dishwasher detergent. On the other hand, I'm not sure how shopping at non-union stores is going to help the union.
• Crappy made-in-Taiwan CDs have such a thin layer of metal that I could literally see right through them. Unfortunately, so does my CD player, which has trouble detecting the CD's presence. Should've bought the CDs in Hong Kong. Best buy of the trip was definitely the Pet Shop Boys' Pop Art set. HK gets the British release, with the bonus Mix disc, and it's just cool to get all the PSB singles and hits in one box without paying import prices.
• Is there a slower sports weekend than the weekend before the Super Bowl? Yawn. Then there's the wasteland between the Super Bowl and Selection Sunday. I guess it's about time to start taking Bracketology seriously.
• Man, Dean got the crap kicked out of him in Iowa. Fun to see how the Internet echo-chamber spin themselves into the ground on how their favorite-son got squished by old-fashioned politics. Meanwhile, Dean's helping GarageBand get some free pub thanks to easy remixes of his infamous I Have A Scream speech.
• You can now add this blog or any other RSS-feed to your My Yahoo! page thanks to the new RSS Headlines module for My Yahoo! Just add the module and plop in this URL: http://blog.personaldork.com/index.rdf. It's also a roundabout way to add the New York Times headlines back to Yahoo! Although I'm okay without it, between the Washington Post and the LA Times headlines.

A Human Connection

"Double-double-grilled-onions, and fries-no-salt?"

"Yep."

"Want some ketchup?"

"Sure."

"How you like the Tivo?"

"Oh, it's awesome."

"Yeah, it's the best thing I bought this year"

"Cool."

"Alright, you have a good day."

"Thanks."

This convesation is brought to you by the Tivo window cling.

The New (Year) Economy

The Contrary Investor has a nice roundup of the pitfalls in the US economy for this coming year. There are the obvious caveats about one-shot tax rebates, record low interest rates which can only go up, and the craziness that is real estate. However, they also give a good explanation of the apparent paradox between the decline in the value of the dollar and the continued support of the US financial market by foreign money. The US has been printing dollars at a furious pace ($800 billion rise in M3 over the last two years), so simple supply-and-demand dictates that the value of the dollar will fall relative to hard goods like commodities and more stable currencies. However, other countries, especially in Asia, have been inflating lockstep in order to suppress their own currencies vs. the dollar. This has created a global rise in liquidity which is inflating the current runup in the financial markets.

For now, there is really only one thing going down - the US dollar.  So although history suggests that at some point a declining dollar will negatively affect US equities and fixed income markets, is excess liquidity holding back or delaying this assumed rational reconciliatory path?  As we look ahead into 2004, which of the following three will be the most powerful in terms of influencing the pricing of various asset classes - a declining dollar, excess global liquidity, or foreign flows of capital into US dollar denominated fixed income assets?

It's commendable that they don't try to answer the question with pat textbook theories.

Massive global liquidity creation and the continued significant flows of foreign capital into US dollar denominated assets have largely offset the negatives for US financial assets.  And of course the Catch-22 is that our large trade deficit has supported the flows of foreign capital back into US dollar denominated financial markets.  As crazy as this may sound, if our trade deficit were truly to contract meaningfully ahead, we would expect foreign flows of capital into the US to likewise contract, clearly pressuring US fixed income prices.

Low cost global sources of labor have been a big factor behind this ability of foreign exporters to conceptually ignore the dollar decline, but that only goes so far.  At some point the declining dollar will cut into the foreign corporation profitability bone.  As we move through 2004, we suggest keeping a very sharp eye on global capital flows, US import prices, and global money supply growth.  We believe changes in these factors will foreshadow an end to the in place lag between a declining dollar and levitating US financial asset prices.

Whatever it takes to raise the crappy interest rates on my money market account, damn it.

It's not just random websites that's worried about the effects of foreign capital on the US market. The Wall Street Journal has an anecdotal look at the mindset of the foreign investor. Interesting that three out of the five people/businesses profiled were from Asia.

A couple of years ago, clients of Goldman Sachs & Co.'s private-wealth-management business in Asia — which accepts no accounts under $10 million — invested 50 percent to 70 percent of their assets in the U.S., says Gary Giglio, who runs the business. "If you look at those same accounts today, you're talking anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent in U.S. assets," he says. Mr. Giglio says a lot of Asian investors were spooked by the recent, two-year bear market in the U.S.

We know folks who used to run that division of GS. They know what they're doing. So it looks like it's the Asian governments that's doing most of the dollar-buying for now. Anyway, the smart cookies at Goldman will find a way for their $10-million-plus clients profit from this inequity, most likely at the expense of the governments who are fighting to keep their export-economies competitive. Looks like they're doing alright, if Christmas sales figures were any indication. On the other hand, the buy-dollars strategy seems to be working for China, too. So everybody wins, right?

On the micro-micro-economic scale, there's the story of Caroline Payne, a woman whose income has stagnated between $8,000 and $12,000 a year for almost 30 years. It's like a Calvin & Hobbes story, except we're not talking about Bill Watterson here. Instead we have a hard-working woman pre-destined to live a nasty, brutish, and short life.

Caroline's is the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution. If she were not poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor. Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing, not just one problem but a constellation of problems: not just inadequate wages but also inadequate education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households. The villains are not just exploitative employers but also incapable employees, not just overworked teachers but also defeated and unruly pupils, not just bureaucrats who cheat the poor but also the poor who cheat themselves.

Her employers (WalMart and friends) sure weren't going to do anything to help her out.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable and beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law permeates the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. The most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents' employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. Wages and hours are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal.

Not that she's some saint or anything. Why the fuck would anyone making <$12K a year smoke is beyond comprehension. Of course, once addicted it's hard to kick the habit without any help, and the story was crystal-clear in establishing that no help was forthcoming.

And finally, in the who-gives-a-fuck-about-ugly-poor-people department, Cree had a kick-ass 2nd quarter, which is good news in that they're a bellwether for the LED business.

"Our (results) were driven by strong LED sales as we benefited from increased demand for LEDs in mobile phone applications," Chuck Swoboda, Cree's chief executive, said in a statement. He added that the company now targets "an even stronger second half."

LEDs in mobile phones requires exactly the sort of miniaturized, surface-mount packaging that we do well.

If you were afraid that the Bay Area was still hurting, it was the only region in the US where the BMW 325 made the top-10 bestselling cars list, not to mention the Mustang.

Sunday Morning

Whole Paycheck had a table of Asian veggies and foods set up in the produce section. Not sure if it's just a Chinese New Year thing or a permanent display. They even had more obscure things like gai choi at $0.99 a pound, which was decent, but I passed because I wasn't quite sure how to cook it correctly, and it turns bitter if you don't do it the right way. I wasn't paying $1.79 a pound for bok choi, though, organic or not, when it's a third the price at 99 Ranch. They were also featuring YanJing (燕京) Beer for $3.99 a six-pack, half the price of the Pilsner Urquell. Grabbed a bottle of the Chinese beer for fun, but I'm sticking with the good stuff for the big game.

Funny how "Gun hay fat choy" (恭喜發財) has become the standard catchphrase for Chinese New Year in America. "Congratulations for getting rich" is just about the least cheerful greeting out of all the standard choices. I guess that's what you get when you take things from the Cantonese. What's wrong with Happy New Year (新年快樂 = "xin nian kwai le")?

When you carry the iPod around long enough, sometimes the music clicks with the surroundings like an engaging clutch and it's like a movie soundtrack kicking in.

Most recent iTune: "Lost in the Supermarket" on London Calling by The Clash at 09:10, 01/18/2004

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble

Bought a box of Japanese curry paste long ago at 99 Ranch and it's been languishing in the pantry ever since. Well, I wasn't inspired to cook much of anything right now, after being fed by vastly more competent cooks during my time away, so a simple dish like curry sounded like a good idea. After all, it can be made in a big batch, goes well over rice, and gives me a chance to use up my frozen boneless chicken thighs before they're freezer-burned to oblivion. Didn't quite have as much meat as the box recommended, but I tossed in some potatoes and other veggies to compensate. Still didn't quite know what I'd got myself into until I put in all six cups of water as directed. The liquid plus the stuff was filling up my biggest pot almost to the brim, and that was before I put in the curry paste. I guess mom must've only used half a box's worth of paste at a time. The curry turned out fine. The box's worth of curry goop thickened and flavored all that liquid in nothing flat. But it looks like I'll be eating curry-and-rice for a long time. I hope curry freezes well.

On a smaller culinary scale, I managed to replicate the orange-dissection technique of uncle's Japanese restaurant in Taiwan. Trim the rinds off the top and bottom of the orange to create flat surfaces, then halve the orange parallel to the flat ends. Run a paring knife at an angle against the skin on the inside to remove the fruit, leaving an annulus of orange peel. The fruit is cut into bite-sized pieces. The trimmed top piece of rind is put back into the peel ring to form a base, making a little bowl for the fruit. Alternatively, I think the a couple scoops of ice cream in the orange-peel bowl, with the sectioned fruit on top, would make a lovely dessert presentation.

Sad and Unfortunate

Apparently Japanese TV stations like to show ultimate-fighting-type bouts for New Years. K-1 is the biggest show in town, thanks to characters like Bob Sapp. But the big bad black man needed a big bad opponent. Akebono? I thought a sumo yokozuna was suppose to have more dignity than that. But I guess you can't pay the bills with dignity. Wasn't much of a fight, though, as a 500-pound man with bad knees = punching bag.

Personally, I prefer the NHK's Red-and-White Song Contest ("Kohaku Utagassen" = 紅白歌合戦), which is grandma's (and apparently half of Japan's) favorite TV event of the year. Unfortunately, KTSF only ran an abridged version of it in the Bay Area, but I can only handle so much old-school crooning anyway. The contest is men vs. women, but it wasn't really fair this year, as the White team (of males) had SMAP batting cleanup. You could hear the girls in the audience squealing with delight like three acts before SMAP even came on stage. And middle-aged kimono-wearing ladies just weren't going to beat out the biggest boy-band in town.

Then there was the poor sap who had to watch everything on New Year's eve and write about it. Yes, even New Year's programming on Japanese TV is falling to new lows in taste, so it's not just Western Civilization that's going to hell in a handbasket.

Loser of the Week (Slashdot Edition)

Yeah, because your parents wouldn't dare to piss you off while you're living in their basement.

I feel your pain with running wires. You should see my basement. It's a disaster from all my computer-related wiring. My parents aren't too thrilled, but they don't say much because they know if I don't have my network, I'll become a *very* unhappy camper.

My "high-tech" home should include broadband internet as the first, most important thing. Next would be a KVM switch thad did something unusual--it would come with wireless adapters for the PCs that draw their transmitting power from the USB so that I don't have to have a quarter mile of KVM cabling to have all my PCs hooked up to the switch. Third would be a plasma TV in the living room and each of the two bedrooms. A digital satellite system with a builtin DVR would be nice, too. And, hell, while we're at it, a 10-disc DVD changer (for watching all three Matrixmovies and the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies all in one long session). And forget the concept of the remote controls we have now--instead, I want touchscreen panels embedded in the arms of my couch and chairs, alaStar Trek: The Next Generation. I want a voice recognition system, too, so that I don't have to do everything by hand. And finally, two fiber and two cat5e drops one stud away from each electrical drop, in every room except the bathroom (WiFi for there :) ).

That's MY high-tech home.

Not a single fucking thing even remotely geeky. All it is a laundry list of techno-yuppie toys to be charged to the credit card. Well, I guess sitting through all the Matrix movies and the LotR extended-edition movies count as geeky, if you're a lard-assed-loser-geek, that is. Not to say that I wouldn't kill for some more Ethernet drops at home, but wireless will do for now, and one of these days I'll get myself some tools to run real wire through the walls. Actually, that's a pretty good shopping list he's listed, but at least wait until you move out of the parents' house before you spooge over YOUR high-tech home, eh?

Yuck

I didn't think it was a good idea when I first saw it, but I didn't want to criticize something when I haven't experienced it for myself, so I kept quiet. Well, now I can say from personal experience that soy milk in coffee is flat out nasty. It might be okay if you're used to skim milk, but I prefer half-and-half, and the lack of fat really takes away from the mouth feel (i.e. watery instead of creamy). Plus I just can't deal with the intrusive bean flavor on top of the coffee taste. If I didn't mind adding funky-tasting protein to coffee I would've just masturbated into the cup. Guess I'll have to take my soy milk straight up (maybe with a dollop of maple syrup to sweeten), and hit Trader Joe's for the moo juice.

I only had soy milk at the time because I happened to hit 99 Ranch first, since it was near where I picked up my held mail, and the SD branch didn't stock half-and-half, unlike the Richmond store. Although they did have the freshly-made, still-warm, unsweetened soy milk, unlike in the Bay Area. Hence the acquisition. Fuji apples were 79 cents a pound. They must be dyin' up in Washington.

Das Blinkenlichten

Ah, a Slashdot Poll that warms my heart. Used to be that only expensive supercomputers had banks of blinking lights to show off their activity. Now every old electronic gadget has a rainbow of indicator lamps blinking, pulsing, and lighting up the room. Uncle talked about a big contract he just landed in Korea, where the lamps will go into... kimchee refrigerators. Apparently you gotta have lots of information on the environmental condition of your pickling cabbage.

Darn

Back to the old Net-browsing routine, including good old Obscure Store.

Robert Ligon is going to federal prison for 15 months for mislabelling his donuts as low-fat (when each one contains 18g of fat and 530 calories) and selling them to health-food stores. Apparently the grease ring left behind by the "low-fat" donut was the giveaway. The FDA was led to investigate when customers complained that the donuts just tasted too darn good to be health food.

More interesting than some two-bit fraud case was the background story of the apparently paradoxical notion of the low-fat donut. Not even corporate donut giants and fancy food labs (as described beautifully in Fast Food Nation) have been able to chase down "the Holy Grail of the food industry."

Perhaps no other bakery good is so dependent on fat. After the batter is shaped into rings and dropped into hot oil, the deep-frying process preserves the shape, gives the doughnut a crust and pushes out moisture, allowing for the absorption of fat. The fat itself is responsible for most of its flavor. A doughnut contains as much as 25% fat; the bulk of that is the oil absorbed during frying, according to the American Institute of Baking, a research and teaching outfit funded by the baking industry.

The low-fat doughnut, declares Len Heflich, an industry executive at the American Bakers Association, is "not possible."

— Wall Street Journal, January 5th, 2004

No, baking the batter doesn't count, "but doughnut-makers say that's cheating: If it's baked, it's a cake."

Now I think I'll go have myself a low-fat Double-Double and a low-fat order of fries (no salt, please), and wash it down with some low-fat Coke. Hey, it's been a while. For a healthier dose of carbohydrates, stick to rice. The cooking of which seems to be the most important practical application so far for fuzzy logic. Sure, we still have the old dumb on-off cooker at home for steaming, but for the actual rice-cooking it's all about the hot-rod Zojirushi fuzzy-logic.

Sleepy Time

Jet lag in action:

• Go to sleep at 11pm = 7am Asia time. Can sleep for a little while because it's like sleeping in late.
• Wake up at 4am = noon. Because my body believes it's noon and it's time to get up.
• Toss and turn for a while until it gets around 6-7am = 3-4 pm, when it's time for a (afternoon) nap.
• Get up at 1pm = 9pm because that's about as long a nap as one can have.
• Start feeling sleepy again at 4pm = midnight because it's getting late.
• Take a nap and get up again at 6pm = 2am for a nightcap (a.k.a. dinner).
• Rinse, lather, repeat.

Good thing I've had a few days at home to adjust. Infusions of caffeine at the appropriate times help. Couldn't even keep track of the date, not until the weekend, anyway. Nothing like a few football games to get one into the weekend mood. Sam put money on the Cowboys to win over the Panthers at Carolina. Now, I don't take The Sports Guy seriously when it comes to actual sports knowledge, but Simmons was right on when he said:

Rule No. 1 applies: "Never bet on a shaky QB on the road."

Before you bet on Dallas, check out Quincy Carter's QB rating. Let's see: Quincy Carter (and his 71 QB rating) on a Saturday night, going against a quality defense on the road, with one of the loudest crowds in the league screaming on every play... and Parcells muttering expletives to himself after every incompletion. I think that qualifies.

Not that Jake Delhomme is all that, but he was playing at home. At least Sam wised up and went with Air McNair over Anthony Wright in the Tennessee-Baltimore game.

Now, TSG may not know anything about sports, but he knows all about being whipped:

My stepmom and the Sports Gal are stepping out of it. They're carrying Christmas gifts and food. Please note: The game is fucking [ESPN.com can't spell it out, so I will — me] starting. It's exactly 1:30. The timing wasn't just impeccable, it was downright "Biggie's last album being called 'Life After Death' "-level eerie. Of course, they're completely oblivious and could care less about the Pats, homefield advantage, my 75 different two-team teasers or anything else. Either we make small talk with them, or we're shoved in the doghouse like the Chazzes (Woodson and Garner) for the rest of the day.

(I mean... does this stuff happen to anyone else? Anyone?)

Haven't seen Holly in about two years, and God only knows where she's off to now that she's done with the degree. Of course, the one day we're both (barely) free is the day of the NFL Playoffs and the (other) college football National Championship game. Oh the sacrifices we make for friendship.

Welcome Home

Still adjusting to the time difference. Got up today just in time for the Rose Bowl. Looks like I picked the right day to fly home, as it rained the day before, and today after I got in, but it was perfectly clear when I arrived. Had a window seat on the left side of the plane, and I opened the window 15 minutes before landing, just as we were passing the Marin headlands, and I could see the bridges and the entirety of San Francisco spread out below. The rain had cleared all the crud out of the air, and it was crystal clear. Great view.

Sam sent me this link after he got back to the US after our trip to Shenzhen. I especially like the story about the pharmaceutical factory, which produces drugs clean and pure enough to be sold in US and Europe, but the wastewater is so poisonous that the person who went in to clean the pipe was killed instantly by the chemicals. Even better was when they sent in a second person to clean the same pipe the next day. He died, too. Meanwhile, that same waste water was being dumped directly into the river without treatment. Shows that the factory could be clean if it's profitable, and that people don't cost very much when they die. One would have to be an ignorant moron to not know, or not guess at, the abuses in the factories, which is why this is news to Americans, I guess. Lots of people will see the New York Times article, then they'll go to WalMart to buy more stuff from China because it's so cheap. It's hard to see why anyone here will care, unless you can convince people that these abuses cost them jobs in America. It's just like what the Western world went through during the Industrial Revolution. Things got better through unionization and (violent) labor strikes. Activities that might not be so easy in China.