Foxconn using forced student labor to build Sony’s PS4 | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn using forced student labor to build Sony’s PS4

gamesinasia.com

107 pointsImpossible102 comments

While you're ranting at Sony/Apple, don't forget to spare some outrage for the Chinese professors, managers, bosses etc. who are willing participants.

Sony are the customer, and could share some blame, but honestly, this smacks of a couple of professors from the uni getting nice kickbacks (ie. "consultancy" fees) and everyone looking good to some local government officials for their "modern" internship programmes. That's generally how stuff works in China.

The companies who happily make use of suppliers who utilize this kind of labor are just as culpable.

They can take their business elsewhere, but obviously, capitalism being what it is, there's no incentive to do that.

Capitalism being what it is, no one is required to buy a PS4 or anything else that they do not want to (please do not take me into a rat hole about healthcare or other government mandated purchases). If the only source of water was to purchase it form a corporation that enslaved people I'd get your point, but we're talking about a PS4... it's a video game console... a PS4 does not matter that much if you really care about taking care of workers.

Well I'll be doing my part by continuing to not purchase Sony products (a decision I made years ago for other reasons; this just adds to the pile.)

Do you think Sony execs had a say in this or were even aware of it?

They should have known or been monitoring the situation, especially after Apple's findings/blight. Ignorance on how your multi-billion dollar flagship home entertainment product is produced sounds like someone who should be out of a job.

I bet that Sony probably don't know, and at worst just turn a blind eye. My guess would be that Foxconn's unofficial position is "fine, the uni/local government wants to throw a bunch of free workers at us, and doesn't care a bit how we use them", and the local gov/university are the active partners.

Do you think Sony execs could have researched and performed checks themselves to make sure this kind of thing wasn't happening? Do you think "built by slave labor" might affect their brand?

You don't have to go across the ocean to find labor issues. The agriculture industry in the U.S. has questionable labor practices, and everyone has to buy food. There is little transparency with how food is produced, just like how there is little transparency with how the PS4 is produced, at least to the average consumer.

Lack of transparency and awareness channels is why grassroots consumer boycotts cannot be relied upon to improve society/humanity.

It's not just on the producer to create transparency. It's on the consumer to want transparency. There is also a lack of desire for knowledge by the consumer, in either food or PS4 production.

Saying "there's little transparency" suggests that the world (and not a small, vocal protest community) is clamoring for information, and the accused company / industry is failing to provide it. When, in reality, most people really don't care.

I disagree. Lack of transparency is to the benefit of the companies, and they prefer to keep it that way. You are not going to get an honest answer from a company on a touchy subject unless it's already in their marketing/press releases. Usually customer inquiries are handled by powerless and uninformed employees who are not in the loop, and have no power to accurately answer difficult questions. This goes for negative customer experiences, as well as things like working conditions. Companies know that an individual voice is weak and the masses have trouble congregating. At the same time companies often have large marketing budgets to push either what they want people to believe or distractions.

There is also the matter of time. Companies have plenty of time and a unified goal to sell their products all day long. Meanwhile consumers have to split their attention between dozens of different and pressing tasks. Becoming a one-man consumer watchdog group is a job in and of itself. I think it's unrealistic to expect or rely on a majority of consumers becoming experts on all the products they purchase, as well supply chain logistics and day-to-day geopolitical rumblings.

Even if consumers are willfully ignorant, it still does not excuse abuses or poor practices. Your second paragraph is akin to the philosophical tree falling in a forest, "If a Chinese factory worker is abused and nobody cares, is he really being abused?". Of course he is, and consumer ignorance still does not make it alright for the company to exploit the worker.

In case anyone's interested, those companies are:

Acer, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Major_customers

This was one of the reasons I traded in my other smartphones and went with a BlackBerry Q10. Privacy and human rights issues.

Another reason is because it has the best smartphone OS of any I've tried (but I digress).

While I agree with you I really don't understand what this has to do with Apple. Apple didn't even get mentioned by the author of article.

What is that people try to mention Apple in every situation?

Foxconn is the company which manufactures iPhones, etc. If they're using forced labor for Sony products, they're probably using forced labor for Apple products as well.

sorry, the "/Apple" was because other comments mention Foxconn and Apple, and then it turns into a generalised rant about Apple because people love to hate them. My point was that what hooks us into the story is Sony and PS4, but the reality is that Sony are probably well removed from what's happening, and the real story is corruption between a university, foxconn and some local government.

Do you really think that professors want to send their students to work?

Same stuff happens in Uzbekistan (only with Cotton). If teachers and professors don't send their students to work during semester, the professors will lose their jobs.

Note that this unlawful child labor happens on the local level. The central government fights it but the minute the Capital turns a blind eye, the local government starts sending directions to local schools and universities.

Teachers and professors make way more money by tutoring. Wasting time in the factory or on the fields hits them financially but teachers have to comply if they value their jobs.

"But students have said that once they got to Foxconn, they were assigned to jobs that had no relation whatsoever to their fields of study, including grunt work like distribution and shipping."

Sounds like a lot of American internships haha. But seriously, people have given me advice to try "working at a McDonalds" or "work as a dishwaser" to gain some experience outside of sitting in front of a computer all day.

McDonalds might not be too bad, if you keep your eyes and ears open. They have great operations, that turns unskilled labour into steady source of income.

Plus they teach great customer service. When my step mother was in retail she would always hire people with McD's on their resume because she knew she wouldn't have to teach them how to treat customers.

I was just thinking recently how good customer service is for McDonald's and fast food as a whole. McD's has 'served billions and billions' and scaled their workforce to an impressive extent while still retaining food safety and decent customer service. A philosophy of technology professor in college loved to use them as an example as the pinnacle of engineering, from supply chain down to point-of-sale. And while minimum wage might seem demeaning, they invest a lot more in people than many companies and (sadly) is one of a few good employers in many towns.

I've heard that attitude echoed by a few small business owners. Especially coffee shops.

I worked @ McDonalds for about 6 months many years ago. I learned that I wanted to really like my work and that customer's care about what they get; clean restaurants and food prepared according to spec is good business. I got cheap food, good pay for a teenager, and learned that you should always look at the health score wherever you eat... a low score doesn't mean you don't eat there... but you better really love the place if you do (my restaurant always scored well, and when you know what goes into a health score you know what to look out for).

> They have great operations, that turns unskilled labour into steady source of income.

Interesting turn of phrase, given the context. I bet you could say the same thing about plantation owners in the old west.

Plantations were horribly inefficient compared to McDonalds.

And it's probably a bad idea to de-value the slaves' experiences by these comparisons.

Perhaps. I admit I drew some inspiration from:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/01/16/t...

Thanks, that seems like an interesting article.

People joke a lot about American internships, but it seems the reality of internships in America depends heavily on major. I had three very relevant and very well paying internships as a CS student (working as an intern on the west coast, I got paid more than many people working fulltime on the east coast in entry level full time positions). A chemical engineer I know got stuck counting fish by hand on a 'fish ladder' webcam. Outside of STEM, unpaid internships seem semi-common, and are obvious scams / attempts to keep lower class people out of the industry (only rich kids can afford to work for free for several years).

Your last comment about unpaid internships being an attempt to keep lower class people out of the industry seems pretty tinfoil-hat-ish. It's a much more logical conclusion that companies want to save money by not paying interns. They're able to do this outside of STEM because of the lower barrier to entry in these fields and thus larger surplus of potential candidates. Basically, companies do it because they can.

I doubt STEM companies are abnormally altruistic in this sense. If they could get away with it, they would. Unfortunately for STEM, hiring low quality engineers is much higher risk than hiring low quality marketing interns.

From what I understand, it is the common explanation of unpaid internships in particular industries, particularly fashion and Hollywood. I've often heard that working in these unpaid internships is seen as "paying your dues"; some sort of artificial hardship that you must be able to endure before you are considered to be "in".

Whether or not it is the intent (difficult to prove, to say the least) it is the effect.

I think it's less of an explicit class warfare type thing and more of an implicit one, but it's not just unpaid internships:

- Afterschool classes and clubs require parents who are free after 3.30pm to drive you there and back.

- That spring break trip to Rwanda to help underprivileged youths would look great on your college application! Too bad it costs $500 to join the mission.

- You're not taking 4 AP classes and volunteering on weekends? You must be lazy, and its certainly not that you have to work 20 hours/wk after school to help put food on the table.

- etc. etc.

(I say this as a very privileged person who was fortunate enough to have two full-time parents -- but also as someone who knew people who weren't.)

I can attest to the after school thing. It was basically impossible for me to do any after school clubs or activities because my parents couldn't afford a house in walking distance to the high school, and they had to work and couldn't come home before 7 PM.

It's rigged, but only in the short term.

supply and demand. there are so many people dying to get into fashion and Hollywood that if someone won't work for free they'll find someone who can.

That's not an entirely fair perspective. We're not just talking about aspiring actors and models. People with legitimate business degrees are forced into (frequently unpaid) internships just so they can work in the less glamorous production/marketing/financial arms of the entertainment industry - the parts that they won't get famous or rich for, but which they want to do because that's their dream.

My significant other will be graduating college soon in exactly that predicament, she wants to work on Broadway.

i'm not suggesting the perspective is fair. i'm suggesting it's consensual. we're saying the same thing.

You're completely right. My girlfriend had two unpaid internships, and will have another before she graduates college (her college mandates her last semester be entirely a documented unpaid internship). She described it exactly as you just did - "paying your dues."

She has a dual major in business and arts, and wants to work on Broadway doing marketing or production work. I find it sickening, and it saddens me the way interns are considered a completely free, fungible, and exploitable resource just so they can get phony career advancement "at some point."

I don't doubt that it may be a residual effect, but to say that it's an attempt at class warfare is to imply intent. I simply don't believe that intent is there. Then again, I generally err on the side of assuming people are acting somewhat rationally rather than maliciously irrationally.

That's terrible! I will definitely remember this when I go to buy a next-generation game console.

Posted from my iPhone 5S 64GB (Gold)

Sometimes I wonder if competitors attempt to dig up dirt like this.

Does it matter if it's true?

I don't care who digs it up if it's factual.

That's a very dangerous attitude. The availability heuristic is very real when determining attitudes and beliefs, especially at scale. When you hear something bad about company X - especially when it smacks of "dirt", as this does - do you then go and perform analysis on other similar companies, in an effort to re-balance your perspectives? Of course not. Who has time for that?

If all the dirt on political party A was laid bare in the public, but B managed to cover theirs up, it could swing an election. Do you care about that?

Availability of information is extremely important in the public discourse and closing your eyes to factors affecting it - such as manipulation attempts, as this could be - is bad mental hygiene.

> When you hear something bad about company X - especially when it smacks of "dirt", as this does - do you then go and perform analysis on other similar companies, in an effort to re-balance your perspectives?

Well maybe some people don't have such a naive view of the world where they assume nobody is corrupt until it's slapped in their face (And even then). Some people can look at stories at this and not think "Hey fuck the PS4 for using forced labor, Ima buy a Xbox One instead".

> If all the dirt on political party A was laid bare in the public, but B managed to cover theirs up, it could swing an election. Do you care about that?

So you would argue in that case it would be better to see party A's actions covered up so that there would be a fairer playing field between the two?

> Availability of information is extremely important in the public discourse and closing your eyes to factors affecting it

But he isn't closing his eyes, he's got them wide open. He's just saying that he doesn't care who bringing him his info as long as it's factual.

like Mike Daisey when pretended his stuff was fact?

Hopefully this will have some impact or otherwise everyone stops bothering.

I am not going to defend the Chinese this time. How stupid is that? How much money can you save by hiring students? While I don't think top managements like the CEO has any idea of this (I really doubt), they are still responsible for this horrible practice.

Here is the actual press from the school.

http://www.bxait.cn/html/2013/01bxxw_1009/2881.html

It basically said "the students (total of 45) had made a milestone, breaking Foxconn's record." The press praised the students for their hard work. It was written so.. idk how to explain it... the kind of statement you get from a government news press. It's ridiculous.

More importantly this is about as close to "mortgaging your future" as you can get. Take Chinese students, in a high-tech degree program which could equip them to earn 6-figure salaries...and waste their time forcing them to provide free-labor doing unpaid menial assembly jobs.

The Chinese optics on this are absurd.

If this involved Apple, the article's headline would be "Apple using forced student labor to build iPhone"

Indeed. This title should properly reflect that Sony is responsible.

Maybe they don't know though. Imagine you contract out some work, say building a website, to party A. How do you know they did it? Maybe they sub-contract.

While I'm sure Sony's contract has lots of details in it, there is probably no "don't trick university students" clause and Foxconn saw an opportunity to do something underhanded and increase profits.

It's someone's job to know. I knew a buyer at a major office supply company. The buyers' responsibilities included occasional visits to the factories where suppliers made the products that were bought and then put on sale in the stores. This particular company had standards that they held suppliers to. When a buyer found workers at a factory with duct tape on their mouths, people living in squalor in the "dormitories", child labor or any other nonsense it was not uncommon for those suppliers to be thrown out of the store if it was not corrected. This was for a few million dollars worth of back to school supplies.

There's no way someone enters into a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for high end electronics without ever visiting the factory and knowing what goes on there. They know damn well what kind of conditions exist and chose to do business with the supplier anyway. If they didn't know then they're too stupid to have their job.

But even if you personally visit the factory, how do you know that guy in a mouth cover working over there is a college student being forced to work?

I may just be cynical but I think there are still shenanigans going on. Like the link posted above

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6525582

You can't be everywhere all the time and you have to actively do audits to make sure you're satisfied with your factory conditions.....

They absolutely know.

I awarded a Chinese factory with a low five figures contract and I know exactly how everything is processed and made. For billions of dollars or purchase orders, I am pretty sure you can expect at least the same level of service.

From what I recall this is actually against the code of conduct that Sony makes all their suppliers sign (which includes a prohibition on forced labor), so it's probably a breach of contract.

I think Apple uses foxconn as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Major_customers

They do. I remember all of the parts in my G4 Cube having "FOXCONN" stamped into them.

I'm sure that we will see that headline applied to this case as well with other media outlets.

I prefer

"Steve Jobs Tortures Chinese slaves from beyond the grave."

This is pretty widespread. There was an interesting investigative piece last year done by a HK station [1], but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online. Plenty of kickbacks going to the local government/schools to keep the students flowing.

This made the headlines last year too except it was Apple that time:

32,000 Students Choose: Build Your iPhone 5 Or Get Expelled From School [2]

China Contractor Again Faces Labor Issue on iPhones [3]

[1] http://programme.tvb.com/news/pearlreport/episode/20120409/

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/09/11/32000-stud...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/technology/foxconn-said-to...

...the PS5, on the other hand, will be built by the players themselves, as the games will just be transforms on robot-guiding, chip-stamping, box-printing...

Computational complexity theory tries to find equivalence classes of problems that can map to one another. Each class has a primary representative such as TSP (travelling salesman problem) or 3-SAT that memorably capture the essence of the class. While it's not clear that you can map Grand Theft Auto to anything useful, you might be onto something here: Imagine a mechanical turk system where the grunt tasks are remapped onto inherently enjoyable gameplay scenarios. It would be an arbitrage play between turk vendors needing menial tasks done, and players needing entertainment. Recaptcha is a (brilliant) example, but I don't know of others. Maybe UAV control might be one. (Note that mapping one valuable task to another enjoyable task is a different idea than the "gamification" fad of inventing events to adorn with tawdry badges.)

Just add points to arbitrary tasks and people will do them for free and with unexpected ability. Did you know there are amateur human protein folders and they pretty much outperform computational folders?

It wouldn't have to be a full time task but could be inserted into a game to provide a change to the flow. For example putting together an iphone from pieces found in an old cardboard box while zombies are trying to break in the door you just locked. This is kind of like the use of in game advertising in that when done well it doesn't actually detract from the game but adds to it.

Reminds me of a similar idea I had related to remapping body motions from a motion-based control scheme in a game, to real world assembly lines. "Solve the puzzle and get $10 in Labor Points towards your next iPhone!"

One man's forced labor is another's "real world work credits to finish your degree". This seems to be a storm in a teacup that will naturally play very well for historical reasons.

Getting student interns to do the grunt work is an outdated practice? I was almost convinced that was standard operating procedure at most North American tech firms.

If you think tech internships are bad, you should look at literally any other field.

I recently mentored two high-school interns at a Fortune 500 tech company. My goal was to give them a real experience in what it's like to work at a big company (code for I had no budget to woo them w/ fancy dinners, concerts, toys, etc.) and to give them real work. They built a useful mobile app. I gave them minimal supervision, directed and helped when I could... based on their feedback I think it was a huge success. I'm glad the company I work for considers interns as an opportunity to train up the next generation of great programmers, managers, and leaders, and practically realizes these people are their next employees. If I'd exploited them as menial labor (getting me coffee, processing mail, doing boring work) they'd lose out and my company would too. Perhaps China has a labor pool large enough to develop and exploit at the same time (that's sad if they do).

Sounds a lot like the unpaid internship positions I've seen offered at plenty of startups.

Just on an industrial scale.

While I want to stop buying such stuff, where does it end? A quick look at my favourite supermarket shows that almost 90% of the products are "Made in China". How do I know they were not made under similar circumstances? Or the t-shirts that are made in Bangladesh that I can expect to be made pretty much under the same conditions of forced labour. I would love to buy things made in USA or Canada but that is not happening. I have tried to do this in the past and I am even willing to pay extra dollars for this, but I find most companies have shifted manufacturing to China. My recent conversation with a company went like:

Me: Where do you manufacture your products? Company: We used to manufacture them in Canada but we shifted to China. But rest assured, our quality is the same and blah blah blah.

So my point is, we do not have a choice. You can boycott Apple or Sony PS4 now, but it doesn't end there.

Where do you live? It's odd to me that 90% of the products at your favorite supermarket are made in China. Like bananas, oranges, bread, beer, hamburger, celery, avacados, beans, cereal, milk, fish... these do not seem like things that are made in China if you live in the Western hemisphere. I know I have many things made in China, but they seem to be more physical long-term goods; toys, electronics (maybe?), physical things.

He lives in China.

I was not talking about eatables. I was talking about electronics and non-edible stuff. Should have clarified.

No worries. I do not think 90% of the thing I buy from Walmart and other common "supermarkets" in the South Eastern US are from China, but I cannot vouch or the labor laws of these sources... that doesn't mean they're bad, it means I need to pay more attention to these things.

Much of the produce you mentioned is picked by farm workers who also endure poor labor conditions.

While I haven't found anything for electronics, you can get a lot of toys and clothes that aren't made in china and agree to fair workers rights.

Usually (not always) if you buy organic clothes, they are manufactured somewhere else than China. The UK has a thriving eco toys industry with toys made of wood and metal instead of plastic. Germany has quite good producers of kitchenware that also don't outsource to China.

But yeah, you will have to search around and mostly order online but you can find most stuff from brands that don't outsource to China.

It's not just about where it's made. Both Amazon (fulfilment centres) and Wall Mart have pretty poor labour practices (to name just two US companies).

There's also a trend towards doing just "final assembly" wherever to get the "made in"-sticker to read "friendly". This makes it very hard to know where clothes (or at least the textiles) are actually manufactured.

"One student, for example, majored in finance and accounting but has been assigned to a job that entails glueing together parts of Sony’s Playstation 4...."

Am I the only one who thinks that sounds great? Why shouldn't finance an accounting guys get some insights into the working conditions of people "below" them?

99% of all internships in Poland are not paid for. And you HAVE to do them to pass the course. Yet I am yet to see an article talking about "forced student labour" building anything in Poland. Maybe because the same issue in China is more sensational?

Any company that has suicide nets and barred up windows is breaking some serious humanitarian laws. Free labour aside, the bleak truth for many of these students who are going down the professional track is that their country's industry isn't large enough to offer most of them placements.

Despite being smart, hard working and well educated, many will have to go into manufacturing like this after they graduate. The article talks about Xi'an that's roughly in the centre of the country, a good distance away from the international East coast where the majority of the professional appointments are.

I don't understand how people can go on pointing at the suicides when it is well known that suicide rates are lower at Foxconn than the average Chinese suicide rates?

Do you know saddest part in all this?

These kind of jobs might be the only way those students can earn enough(to pay for their education) in hopes of a better life later. I've been is such a situation before, and it totally sucks. But that is the only available option before you. Imagine having to this, when you have no other options left. I mean these people are not lazy, not stupid and very capable. But they have to do this because of scarcity of opportunity.

... until they graduate and get high paying jobs in finance. Is it really so bad to have to work "student jobs"?

Guess what, Foxconn makes boards for Linux boxes as well, blaming Sony and Apple for using Foxconn and ignoring that everybody else uses them as well is absurd.

Banks do pretty much the same thing with their internships... which, of course, just makes it even bigger argument against this type of modern slavery...

Just don't forget, sweatshops are better than no employment at all. Though it is bad that they exist, they are a sign of progress.

Except that these students aren't getting paid for their work.

The public-relations fallout concerning their labour practices has become a serious problem for Foxconn. I think that they should voluntarily appoint international-standard labour auditors to vet all their labour practices and to phrase recommendations as to what exactly their management should seriously consider changing. The foxconn management may not always be aware of sensitivities in their overseas markets. With small changes in their procedures, they could already achieve quite a few things. It is not a problem to hire students and interns, but they should beware of anything that could make it look like indentured labour.

>The public-relations fallout concerning their labour practices has become a serious problem for Foxconn.

What do you mean by this? What are the ramifications of this "serious problem"? Are they making less money?

Consequences do exist, although it's still very minimal. This may prompt Sony to do something as significant as Apple's move though and actively audit the companies they work with -

    In one case, Apple terminated its relationship with a
    component maker after discovering 74 cases in which 
    underage workers were being employed. Apple also found 
    that an employment agency had forged documents to allow 
    children to work illegally at the supplier.

    Apple reported both the supplier and the employment 
    agency to the local authorities, the company said in its 
    latest annual report on the conditions in its supply chain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/technology/apple-labor-aud...

> " This may prompt Sony to do something as significant as Apple's move though..."

Where do they [or Apple] go if not Foxconn? Foxconn is huge. Moving production elsewhere, even outside of a major product launch, is likely in the realm of the infeasible.

I don't know much about this stuff but presumably Foxconn has competitors - Samsung and Qualcomm maybe? I'm not sure Foxconn would even fail the audits at this point, they copped a lot of flack for their appalling work conditions and suicide rates in 2010 which I believe contributed to Apple's stance on work conditions since it reflected terribly on them too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

Foxconn... really doesn't have any competitors at scale. Maybe Quanta, but that's it off the top of my head. They are unlike any other company in the world. Too big to fail, and too big to give a shit about human rights sounds about right for them.

I suppose the common approach is to go look for another contractor, ignoring the possibility that that contractor might sub-contract back to Foxxconn... but maybe I'm just too cynical.

But that's not Foxconn, is it? From what I can see outside of Chinese labor cost inflation it's been pretty smooth sailing for Foxconn in recent years.

It wasn't Foxconn, but I think after Foxconn got dragged through the spotlight in 2010 they had to clean their act up significantly - but I don't know if this is just the groups that work with Apple or their entire operation. The link I posted above did have a pretty drastic drop in suicides after 2010.

Apple, Sony, and everyone still uses Foxconn to make their stuff and it appears no one has boycotted the client company's products over it. I think as it stands right now, it makes them money.

Of course morally, someone should fix it. However, the market hasn't created a financial incentive.

re: market. I've been waiting for this "fair phone" with baited breath. it's supposed in ship pre-orders in December now!

http://buy-a-phone-start-a-movement.fairphone.com/en/fairpho...

but can anyone tell me if this is compatible with U.S. carriers such as T-Mobile? It is very focused on Europe!

It's not perfect, but it's emphasis is on sourcing materials fairly, which is a problem on par with that of coercive labor problem. they also claim to be improving labor conditions.

I went to an event they held in London recently and got to try one out. They seem to have a working product right now and are in the process of firming up their supply and manufacturing, and polishing the software.

They acknowledge their phone won't be perfect, but they want to improve as they go and they seem to be making a lot of strides already in stuff like mineral sourcing and labour practices.

It has a dual-sim and I'm pretty sure the guy said it would work internationally.

Forced labor leads to better US consumer prices!

Sad thing is - the target audience for the PS4 doesn't give a damn. As long as it is not them and they never have to see the people or be affected in a personal way because of it, they are happy to look the other way.

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