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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Setting aside the possibility that some workplace suicides are just suicides and not an artifact of capitalist oppression, sure. By that standard, there should be postage stamps emblazoned with the image of a disgruntled postal worker shooting his coworkers to death, just so we as consumers know what's at stake when we send a letter.

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Yes, but this game isn't just about random workplace suicides. It's about workplace suicides in the context of manufacturing phones. It's about the specific plant that manufactures these phones. That context is important to understanding the game, and taken outside of that context, yes it would be absurd.

Didn’t someone run the numbers and find that the number of suicides / head at Foxconn was significantly lower than the number of suicides / head for the general population in that region?

IIRC, it was something like 20 suicides in the last year, with Foxconn employing 300,000-400,000 people at the facility.

According to wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...), the average total number of suicides per 100,000 in China is around 6.6.

So you get, depending on the actual number of workers, either the national average for China, or slightly below it.

Its also lower than a similar demographic from the US.

We should really be comparing the Foxconn suicide rate with the suicide rate of employed people in the surrounding area. I suspect that the currently unemployed may up a decent part of the general population suicide rate.

yeah: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/media-gets-its-facts-wron...

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