On semi-skilled labor, not without some serious protectionism in our trade agreements. On skilled labor, absolutely. We have a serious cultural advantage in our approach to knowledge engineering fields (CS is my personal area of experience). From everything I've seen, Asia just can't compete in any real sense.

The real estate prices of the "crammed on top of each other" housing that "nobody sane wants" seem to disagree with you. And I know several people 30s or older who do have roommates. I even know some who willingly take on roommates to help pay the mortgage on a house in the middle of the "crammed on top of each other" area of the city, where they really want to live and own property but couldn't afford on their own.

You have a weird conflation between roommates and hassle. Surely there are other people around the same age who want relative privacy, sleep, quiet, etc. and would not be partying at 3am if you roomed with them. The idea that everyone over 22 is entitled to their own private home is a relatively recent development, and not one that's necessarily beneficial.

Question is, though, do you have the authority during your regular days to take steps to prevent being paged after hours? I'm guessing you do. Foxconn employees do not.

Uh... they most certainly do not go to Apple stockholders. Apple doesn't pay dividends. They go into Apple's ridiculously oversized war chest, and toward R&D that ends up generating more exploitative profit centers.

Any money that stockholders make comes from selling their stock, which means it comes from the next sucker to buy it, NOT the money that Apple is pulling in from sales.

The issue is that Western manufacturers need to find a way to be as flexible as the Chinese competition while providing an acceptable lifestyle for their staff.

Or the people on the design end could fix their damn process. Changing a fundamental part of the assembly line after it was already set up and tested (which the OP appears to be implying) doesn't HAVE to be done in a 12 hour turnaround. The bosses like it, because it lets them save their ass by covering the fact that they screwed up the original design. One or two guys at headquarters probably avoided getting fired by making 8000 slaves jump for them.

If this had been a US plant, assume it takes a week to retool, instead of 12 hours. You push your product launch back by a week. A couple guys at HQ learn to check their work a little more thoroughly for next time. The product still sells millions of units, and the entire incident becomes a blip that nobody remembers in 3 months.

Whenever anybody in management says "flexibility", you should be very, very skeptical. Management shouldn't get to be flexible at the end of the process. It's almost always code for covering up bad decisions or bad process.

It's fairly unusual to be in a situation to leave the USA for a cheap part of Asia, but still get the same salary (assuming that's what you meant). Most of the time if you do that you'll end up being paid equivalent to the local living wage, which totally screws your savings account if your goal is to ever come back.

Getting a roommate is not torture. Jesus Christ, have you read up on the conditions in the Foxconn dormitories in the OP? 8 people to a room, rotated frequently so they don't start becoming friendly. Compared to that, sharing a 2 bedroom apartment with one other person is antisocial. If you think you can live all by yourself, there are places in Montana or Wyoming where you can probably go do that. Build a cabin out in the woods, I doubt they'd notice you for years if ever. If you want to live near the conveniences that go with a population center, though, you're going to have to deal with the consequences of other people existing, and that includes a premium on living space.

You know this isn't the norm everywhere, right? A number of American cities have a lot more of a European feel than the stereotypical "American" style of housing. I'm talking about relatively small floor plans, multi-use rooms out of necessity, and little or no dedicated space for automobiles.

"This isn't about money; the economy is soft right now, and I'm going to use this opportunity to increase my profit margin by cutting your wages. Don't like it, there's the door."

Ah, the free market at work. Remember, don't try to stop him, or he'll move the jobs to China. We have to keep our workforce equally defenseless and exploitable.... uh, I mean "attractive", in order to remain the greatest nation on earth!

College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.

Not exactly true. While you're right about state subsidies, in a lot of fields the problem is also that the people they have teaching could make a lot of money in private industry. So they have to raise their payroll costs to keep up with industry in order to hire and retain skilled professors, but the people they're employing aren't suddenly more efficient at teaching. Class sizes stay the same but cost more per head, or else class sizes raise and quality declines.

The root cause is an unequal application of technology. In industry, an engineer can oversee design aided by computers, simulations, robotics... in general, lots and lots of automation, which lets them spend most of their time actively applying their training to the most difficult problems. In many classrooms, by contrast, professors and teachers still have to grade written test answers by hand. Until the education field picks up technology to the point that the teachers can spend a minimal amount of time on manual work, their pay is going to continue to outgrow their effectiveness, and school costs will keep increasing.

Given all the studies about micro-purchases and turning a blind eye to piracy actually INCREASING sales -- which the studios are currently ignoring -- yes, I think there's a fairly obvious set of changes to the current business model which would pair well with either of those companies.

This is happening already, they're just growing it organically. Apple is getting into digital publishing. Amazon has been self publishing digital for a while, and recently started printing physical books on its own label. Buying one or more major publisher in any of the 3 major media would give them access to a huge amount of established content, as well as the facilities and manpower to ramp up their publishing chops that much more quickly.

Granted if they wait a couple years the major publishers will probably just be that much cheaper of a purchase, but there's a question of who gets what, too. Whichever one eventually buys Disney/Pixar gets a lockdown on all their copyrights as well. When the content distributors finally turn around and start buying up the content producers, it'll be a land grab to get access to the most desirable IP.

Seriously. Apple has 76B sitting in the bank, Microsoft has 55B. Time Warner has a market cap of 37B, hell even the media giant that is Disney/Pixar has a market cap of only 70B. A lot of the music companies are a fair bit smaller.

The distribution channels (Apple, Google, etc) are bending over backwards on deals with companies that they could acquire in a hostile takeover tomorrow if they wanted to. It's crazy.

I'm not saying there are no outliers. And some parts of libertarianism are very attractive, and I find Ron Paul's stance on social freedoms fairly reasoned and compelling. I'm talking more about the large number of people who were suggesting with any level of sincerity during the health care debates in 2010 that the rich should seriously start "going Galt". It's kind of the same crowd of libertarians who were recently in the news claiming that nobody needs college anymore... they're almost always convinced that they're such astounding geniuses that their small business will naturally be in the 5% of small businesses that don't fail in the first year.

In general, public figures are probably not going to be sheep in the movement. But most of my experience with the rank and file of self-identified "libertarians" is that they're not really adding new ideas to the body of the movement. It's really just anecdotal, so I realize it's not definitive.

Most libertarian-ish people have to find that way of thinking on their own (or at least seek out alternative literature)

Are you shitting me? Most "libertarian-ish" people bought into the Ayn Rand (tm) brand and are convinced that they are a unique and special flower who should be worshiped by the rest of the world for gracing them with their existence because they read it in a book. Almost by definition, any belief system that has a widely recognized name is going to be made up of mindless sheep.

and may even face a speedier than usual decline unless they actually sell shit (real hardware or software products, not just sets of "mouse clicks") like Microsoft and Apple do

You must not have looked recently... they have stores for music, movies, and books, and have for at least 6 months or so.