news about The Foxconn Technology Group (China)

Interesting - live, work, eat, play, recreate, die - everything in a little "city" controlled by your employer (where I doubt you have any say in how things are run); I would say this sounds like something out of a cyber-dystopian novel from the 1980s, but the fact is those authors simply extrapolated from the trends that were happening then.

It doesn't really surprise me that multiple serial suicides could happen in that kind of controlled insular environment, depending on the conditions. So now they plan to offer people more money (I wonder if the money is in some form of "company store" cash/credits, like old-time southwestern American mining towns used to have/abuse?)...

I wonder how close we are to such a thing here (again, I suppose - like I mentioned before, it was around back in the day in mining towns) in the US (on the surface, it doesn't seem like anything like that exists here; but then again, people fear losing their health insurance because of job layoffs or such - hmm)? It probably can't happen on that great of scale because we have more freedom of travel and means within our borders - unless further "predictions" of those same authors come true, and the suburb enclaves that we are seeing become more like insular "burbclaves" as one writer (Stephenson? Gibson? Sterling? One of the three) coined - with everything inside, network links to the outside, armed guards and fortress walls, and of course, Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery...

;D