Yes, I suppose so! Technically with child labor too!
We just call them factories here though, not sweat shops. They have varying levels of working conditions, and child labor has been more or less eliminated.
Some are awful, and others are quite OK! I’ve personally had worse jobs than the OK ones. Some have integrated housing too, I knew someone that designed it. The ones they designed looked quite reasonable, at least – I’ve unambiguously lived worse places. You won’t save much money working for an OK sweatshop, but you will accumulate a small pension, eat, have a place to live, and get 2 weeks vacation a year (usually accompanied with a bonus equal to a month’s pay). Most people I know see them as a sort of always-available job that’s the closest thing we have to a social net right now.
I run a small tech company though, not a sweat shop. Just recently, an opportunity to help open one did come up though!
A client is looking at setting up backoffice work in the countryside, so far it looks like we’ll be able to offer decent working conditions and wages. I’m slowly building the management software – fewer managers means we can pay workers better as well as be more profitable. If it works out, it would probably pay about double the regional minimum wage, which amounts to a decent job, certainly better than a lot of people have currently.
It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. There’s still a hundred ways it can go wrong and fail. So far we only have 10 staff, but it’s going steady.
For about 3 years though, I earned less running my company than the workers in the worst sweatshops. Even with all my video game experience! That was hard. Still, video games were my first experiences with management, accounting, economics and so on. It was better than nothing.
Anyway that’s a slice of life for you, fresh from Southeast Asia.
Oh man, that brings back memories. All my Dwarf Fortress games were horrific dystopias. Full-on police states optimized for the production and export of lead children’s toys (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).
Then new unskilled arrivals would wait in a room with retractable spikes before they met anyone. It was someone’s job to pull a lever all day. Then the clothes would be exported (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).
Everyone left was either in the army or a skilled worker confined to a 2x2 room containing a bed, table, chair, and statue of the mayor. The doors locked from the outside.
Newer versions have made this strategy less productive I think – I haven’t really kept up. At the time a single death could send your fortress into a fatal spiral of depression and it worked pretty well though.
Eve Online taught me that math + leadership are effective ways to win. Also the importance of thinking strategically and weighing risks.
World of Warcraft taught me that many people are willing to craft items all day, if it earns more in-game gold than actually doing anything fun in the game (actually in hindsight this was true of Eve, and real life for that matter). I sort of… ran an exploitative in-game sweatshop producing things for the in-game markets (e.g. not involving real money or anything that violated the rules of the game).
These two groups of realizations made me pretty good at online games for a little while! My gaming hobby came to an abrupt end when I realized I could just… start a company IRL and be paid non-virtual money.
When space, time, or power it requires is no longer a good trade in exchange for the task it completes.
I live in Asia, so the space something physically takes up is often the biggest cost. The footprint of my house is like 25 square meters, so if I want to keep a bunch of older computers around, I’m going to need to rent a bigger house.
My time has also grown more expensive over the years.
No worries! I’m just glad to share a neat thing :)
Oh one more thing I just remembered – ancient bronze coins were made with a fair amount of lead. If you go to a dealer, sometimes it’s a huge pile of dusty coins… that dust is like 10% lead. So resist the urge to lick your fingers, and instead go wash your hands :P
Oh damn, that is now isn’t it. I always lose track of the Lunar calendar. And also the Gregorian calendar. Actually come to think of it, it’s 50-50 that I know what day of the week it is.
Anyway, I don’t observe it personally, but I better bring something to the in-laws this weekend. Normally we construct houses with a room on the top floor for the family shrine – it’s a bit like a balcony, I guess! We use that room for this kind of thing. I see people put things out on the street too.
I think last night I saw someone offering a whole boiled chicken. That’s a common one. You eat it after – so it’s very practical :)
Cigarettes and rice wine are pretty common things I see too. Or beer – you pour a glass and leave it. Then you drink it after too, if you don’t mind flat beer that smells like incense :)
Ok, I’m having a slow day… so I’ll try and summarize some possibly useful knowledge!
You can find them on eBay and various sites. Search for “Chinese cash”. I wouldn’t pay more than 5$ a coin. Here in Vietnam, 2-3$ for Chinese coins in good condition is normal (Vietnamese ones cost extra). In Singapore, maybe 5$.
Be advised that online vendors probably buy in bulk from antique shops who have picked out anything actually rare from their stock. So claims of “rare” are almost always false, and claims of “ancient” are irrelevant – so many hundreds of millions of these coins were produced that anything less than about 2200 years old is super common. There are a few exceptions, like coins produced by weird factions and rebels and stuff.
There are a lot of fakes. Some of the fakes are also ancient – those are interesting. Some depict “fantasy” dynasties from legend that never existed. Like if it reads “dragon phoenix eternal dynasty” or something, it’s fake, but might still be hundreds of years old. Also some temples and whatever issued coins for visitors. This type of fake often goes on family shrines (at least they do with my in-laws).
Then there are modern replicas (I won’t call them fake as they are not produced with the intent to sell as the real deal). These are mostly for divination (e.g. I Ching), feng shui good luck charms, or for religious use. These are usually pretty obvious as they lack any real patina.
One way people collect these coins is to try and get one from every emperor. Or to create N-emperor charms, I think the most common is the 5-emperor charm (Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing). These are used in traditional feng shui – since China was prosperous under those emperors, their names bring prosperity or something like that. You hang it somewhere specific.
Personally, I’m an anti-feng-shui practitioner. I optimize my life for the worst possible feng shui, so I get cheaper stuff superstitious people don’t want. It’s worked pretty well. Can maybe apply to these coins too – the coins for 5-emperor charms are probably more in demand. By this logic, I would make a 5-worst-emperors charm to save money (I am notoriously shrewd in matters of finance).
Next, to date the coins, you normally read the text from top-bottom-right-left (there are a few exceptions that are clockwise too I think). These symbols form the historical period when the coin was minted, which usually won’t be an exact date, but often will be within a decade or whatever unless it’s one of the ones that was produced for centuries. Sometimes there are mint marks on the verso you can use too.
You tell which part of the coin is up, by looking for the character “Bao” (寶). This is almost always the leftmost character. The character ‘Tong’ (通) is a common right-hand character, but there are several others.
Complicating matters is the occasional use of old imperial seal script instead of traditional Chinese characters. You’ll know it when you see it :D Some coins have a version in both. Knowing these things, you should be able to ID a coin on Google within about 30 minutes if you can’t read Chinese (I know this because I can’t read Chinese).
All the above applies to the Tang dynasty (say 621 CE and later). These are the more interesting and diverse ones. Earlier coins are harder to assign dates to. Wu Zhu coins (going back to 118 BCE) have some small differences over time you can sometimes use. Then before that, you’ve got knife money – little dull bronze knives that were used for trade as they could be melted down into real knives and tools. These get more expensive though, if you stick to Wu Zhu and Tong Bao coins it’s pretty affordable.
If you get a coin you can’t ID, or think you’re getting ripped off, ping me and I’ll give it a go!
Also as a shameless plug, if you message kong_ming on my instance, a Byzantine maze of technologies will set into motion, resulting in a I Ching reading sent back to you. Unless some part of the Rube Goldberg machine is down :D
(It’s a prototype hardware random number generator sitting on my desk, sending data over MQTT to the cloud, where a python script calculates yarrow-stick divinations, that then get sent to a Lemmy bot)
Ah, some context – I live in Vietnam. We don’t get tools or books from the 70’s and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn’t afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That’s why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.
AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.
I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That’s usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I’ve just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.
The main cost is time, overall. I’m not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I’m in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.
Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools – no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I’m legitimately using it for client work though).
Anyway that’s a little slice of my life :)
Yeah, but not for anything Unix-like or Windows. More like small operating systems for some piece of specific hardware. One that comes to mind is some custom OS for a small robot that maps rooms.
Probably the longest technical document I know very well is the datasheet for AVR microcontrollers (the full one, not the summary). Those are 170-300 pages long, depending on the exact chip. They detail how every feature of the chip operates and is accessed. It’s pretty normal in my occupation to know one or two chips really well.
One neat thing is ancient Chinese coinage has a square hole in a round coin, I always thought that looked cool. Civilization is old in this part of the world, so there are tons of old coins. Song dynasty coins are about 50k VND locally (2.50). Want something older, from the Three Kingdoms period (over two millenia old)? That will be… the same price. They are so common that no one cares.
Ancient Vietnamese coins are a bit harder to find, and look pretty similar too. I have one of the first coins minted in the country, found it in some scrap metal recovered while dredging a river or a shipwreck or something. It’s worth… about 50 cents.
Great coins to collect for someone on a budget. Watch out for fakes – but they are pretty easy to spot.
I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you’ve got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you’ve got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least – or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.
I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you’re the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.
Hey! I’m in a similar boat. I also do electronics design and can’t deal with the 100% pay cut that a PhD would incur. At least not yet.
My current solution is just to research things on my own, without a university. I design things I think might be interesting, then get the boards made at a factory (cheap these days), then populate them and test it out. Cost tends to be quite low per project (under 100$ even for fairly advanced things like particle physics). Then I write it up online or do a conference talk if people think it’s interesting enough – and if they don’t, I really don’t care: I’m already all about the next project!
If I strip away all the “publish or perish” nonsense as well as grant applications and teaching requirements, it turns out I can do a satisfying amount of research in my spare time. Equipment costs are not a disaster either – maybe a 1000$ oscilloscope (which I need for work anyway), but very ordinary other stuff otherwise.
A good side effect is the stuff I work on keeps me sharp at work, and on rare occasions produces something commercially useful. It also forms a body of work that I use to advance my career, as examples of neat stuff I know how to do. I’d have a hard time putting a number do it, but I’d estimate my research has a negative cost.
Right now, I’m trying to do audio processing in 16 bytes of RAM and under 500 bytes of program. So far, it looks like it will work, but I don’t know yet!
Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn’t a super fun few years.
…and if we’re being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn’t so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I’d surely be considered mentally ill – but it’s just one subject instead of another.
It’s weird where we draw the line, isn’t it?
The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it’s almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn’t too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.
It’s not something I can do for another person. You’ll have to adopt yourself.
I have some admittedly unusual work habits.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I’d say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say “Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that – so I’ll need a budget)” whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it’s little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no ‘divide’ instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I’ll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than “should” be possible – although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I’ll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there’s always tomorrow to get something done. When I don’t have “work”, I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of “work”). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
Perception. Everyone knows what they think they heard you say. Very few people are privy to why you said it. The perception of what you did has a far greater reach than the intention, and is therefore the more important thing to control. This was as true in antiquity history as it is today – although the Internet certainly amplifies this effect.
Did Nero really fiddle while Rome burned? Did Marie Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake”? All that matters is public perception.
Machiavelli covers a lot of things like this very well, I feel he’s unfairly maligned – most of The Prince is ethically-neutral and practical leadership advice.
Well, I’m from a neighboring country (Vietnam). We have the CVP. I immigrated here a bit over a decade ago to start a business. I do speak and read Vietnamese, but poorly. It’s not 100% on topic, but I can share my experience for what it’s worth, in case you don’t get tons of replies from our Chinese colleagues.
In practice, most of my interactions with government bodies have been positive. They’ve helped me figure out the tax system, granted me legal status and various licenses here, some tax cuts, and so on. I got married at a People’s Committee (UBNQ), which is sort of our equivalent to a town hall.
At the start, most other non-nationals I knew told me it was impossible to do anything legally (full stop), or without constantly paying bribes. I ignored them, filled out forms and submitted them without ‘extra fees’, everything worked out just fine. So I mostly ignore “what people say” about bureaucratic processes, and just call my lawyer for advice – they usually tell a very different story.
It’s not a carefree paradise, we’re a developing nation and life has it’s difficulties. However on a daily basis, my main concerns are traffic, workplace politics, air pollution, and occasionally neighbors singing karaoke. Top things I struggle with on longer timescales are things like home ownership, maintaining my health, and planning for retirement. I live in a slum, but it’s safe and people seem “big picture” fairly happy and decent. Except for one mean lady in the market who gossips all day – there’s a good term in Vietnamese for this kind of person that roughly translates to “many stories”.
Oh I also have to mention the big red propaganda posters! Most of them say things like “don’t do drugs, kids”, “don’t drink and drive”, and “try to eat less sugar / salt”. Or “don’t spit in public, that’s gross”. A few pertain to upcoming national holidays or anniversaries of historical events too. They’re sort of like the “public service messages” we used to get in Canada, except with nicer artwork. Also if we’re being honest, I probably should eat less salt.
So that’s a slice of my life. My thoughts on the CVP remain moderately positive, but I’m not particularly political – this describes most people I know here. I suspect it’s a lot more ordinary than what you might think from all the angry politics online. I imagine it’s similar with my Chinese colleagues (my main client is a Chinese company), but don’t really know since we really only talk about work.
Thanks! The truth is, such plans rarely work out. My life is a series of hundreds of such schemes, most result in nothing (or less). Only as handful work. Only a handful have to.
…but just like in video games, you can just try again and again.