We Need More Science

On John Oliver, Edward Snowden Says Keep Taking Dick Pics

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Paul Rand, the Visionary Who Showed Us That Design Matters

Coronet Brandy magazine advertisement, 1946 Courtesy of Museum of City of NY, Private Collection

In 1986, Steve Jobs was a guy trying to launch a start-up. Having been ousted from Apple the year before, he and a small band of employees were in the early stages of building a new computer company called Next. Jobs had invested millions in the venture, and his reputation as a visionary business leader was staked on its success. The group was still working out key details about its products. But Jobs was certain about one thing: He needed a logo from Paul Rand.

Perhaps more than any other single designer, Paul Rand was responsible for defining visual culture in America in the decades following World War II. He radically transformed advertising, blowing away the dust of the Depression era and pioneering a new, modern approach to selling products. He helped convince some of nation’s biggest corporations that good design was good business, crafting indelible logos for the likes of IBM, UPS, and ABC.

Everything Is Design, an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York on display through July, collects over a hundred examples of Rand’s work, including magazine spreads, book covers, and product packages in addition to advertisements and logos. In every form, the work reflects Rand’s conception of good design, one which seems utterly obvious today but was largely foreign—at least in America—before Rand demonstrated it so convincingly. It was a simple idea: Graphic design can, and should, be both beautiful and functional.

A New Type of Ad Man

Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Rand was creative from a young age. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Manhattan and practiced drawing constantly. One of his first jobs was laying out product spreads for Apparel Arts, a popular men’s fashion magazine owned by Esquire. Soon after that he started doing magazine covers. His work was instantly noticed. By his early 20s, Rand was considered one of the most important designers of his generation.

Rand’s cover for Jazzways magazine. Note the shadows that give the simple composition an engaging depth. Courtesy of Museum of City of NY/Private CollectionAs art director and critic Steven Heller points out in his definitive monograph on the designer, Rand was one of the first American graphic designers to look to Europe for inspiration. As a student, he became obsessed with commercial arts journals from Britain and Germany, which featured cutting-edge work by graphic designers like A.M. Cassandre. Rand became a devotee of Swiss Expressionist Paul Klee. He absorbed new typographic theory from Switzerland and drank in the Modernist thinking on form and function coming out of the Bauhaus in Germany. These influences reflected in his work, which variously used—and often combined—collage, montage, hand-lettering, drawing and photography to bracing effect.

In 1941, at the age of 27, Rand was named chief art director of the newly-formed ad agency William H. Weintraub & Co. American advertising at the time had changed little since the late 19th Century, especially in terms of how the ads were conceived.

“Before Paul Rand, the copywriter was the lead,” says Donald Albrecht, the curator of the new exhibition. The copywriter would supply the words—often times a great many of them—and the words would dictate the layout of the ad, often drawn from one of several templates or formats. The visuals would be filled in later by commercial artists, who typically just illustrated whatever the copy was describing. Creativity was in short supply.

Inspired by the bold graphic work being done in Europe, Rand brought a radically different approach to the job. As he saw it, an ad’s effectiveness lay in the way words and images were combined on the page. “Rand’s ads have words and pictures, but they’re all fused into one symbol,” Albrecht says. Rand introduced a crucial new ingredient into commercial art: form. By paring down copy and breathing white space into his compositions, Rand made his advertisements stand out from the dense copy surrounding them. He embraced wit and humor, developing friendly hand-drawn characters for spirit-maker Dubbonet and the cigar company El Producto. He used bold, arresting colors. He signed every one of his creations. “He thought he was bringing art to advertising,” Albrecht says.

This Jacqueline Cochran ad from the early ’40s shows Rand’s approach to combining image and text. Courtesy of Museum of City of NY/Steven Heller

Across the industry, Rand helped initiate a crucial shift in creative power from copywriters to art directors. He laid the groundwork for the so-called Creative Revolution the industry enjoyed in the 1960s. As one of his contemporaries later put it, Rand “brought ideas and intelligence to advertising where before him there was no semblance of thought.”

In 1947, Rand published his first book, Thoughts on Design. It would remain influential for decades, making the case for the essential relationship between how something looked and what it accomplished. A good piece of commercial art had to be both beautiful and persuasive, Rand argued. As Heller notes, Rand “valued both aesthetic perfection and clear communication.” For Rand, advertising wasn’t a dirty job. It was a chance to instill a bit of beauty into peoples’ lives—just so long as that beauty was in service of selling the product.

Rand’s reputation continued to grow. An ad that ran in the The New York Times in 1953 gives some sense of his stature. “Wanted: Art Director with a modern, creative touch. Need not be a Rand but must be able to inspire an art department.”

A New Look for Business

Rand’s experience as an ad man—his uncanny skill for marrying art and commerce—was the foundation for the next big phase in his career. By the mid-1950s, American corporations were taking notice of their counterparts in Europe, who in the previous few decades had embraced a cleaner, more unified approach to branding. Thomas Watson Jr., who had inherited the reins of IBM from his father, was especially envious of Olivetti, the stylish Italian typewriter company. Watson hired Elliot Noyes, a designer and curator for the Museum of Modern Art, to overhaul IBM’s design company-wide. One of Noyes’ first moves was to hire Paul Rand.

Rand’s influence at IBM was slow and gradual. He not only had to create a design system for the sprawling company but also convince the designers at its many outposts to adhere to that system. He worked on packaging, on showrooms, on interiors for the company’s offices. “The other thing he does is introduces all of these bright colors,” Albrecht says. “In the exhibition we have carbon paper boxes that are pink and brown. And that gives the company a very colorful, hip appearance…All of this is meant to make the company more personable.”

Rand thought the striped IBM logotype gave the name visual rhythm and a less monolithic appearance. Courtesy of Museum of City of NY/Display

Rand’s most enduring contribution to IBM came in 1962, when he introduced the slated IBM logo still in use today. Rand had been chewing on the problem for years, and the horizontal stripes of the final design solved two problems. Aesthetically, they unified the letters, whose disparate shapes Rand thought made for an awkward visual rhythm. The stripes also had the effect of making the company name feel lighter and less monolithic—something useful to a multinational giant whose products loomed over the business world.

Rand’s logo for Next.Identities and logos for Westinghouse, UPS, ABC and others followed. Rand’s work for these companies helped show the business the value of identity systems and consistent branding—again, something that’s completely obvious today.

Where can we see Rand’s influence today? “You see it in what Apple does,” Albrecht says. “You see it in the idea that design is an important part of your business plan. That design is not something you add on but is part and parcel of your business. That it’s good for business. And that it’s not just window dressing.”

Rand was 72 when he designed the logo for Next. He billed Jobs $100,000. In return, he produced a single, finished logo, along with an elaborate book explaining the rationale behind it. Jobs was delighted with the work.

Behind the Scenes with #maketechhuman Luminaries

As we all know, there is much to be excited about in terms of the human possibilities of technology. But there’s also much concern about the unintended consequences to humanity of future innovations– in just the past few months, no less than Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking have all expressed their own fears of “super intelligence” aka AI.

And of course there are worries about many issues beyond AI: surveillance tech, hacking of corporations and governments, pandemics, climate change, the increasing wealth gap, and robots – even the ones that aren’t super intelligent – stealing our jobs.

It seemed like a good time to get a reality check on some of these issues, so we convened a group of great minds at TED to ignite our #maketechhuman conversation before the video cameras. Check out our behind-the-scenes photos and stay tuned for the full interviews.

How China Is Screwing Over Its Poisoned Factory Workers

The gate to “Foxconn City” in northern Shenzhen. Sim Chi Yin/VII

Long Li didn't ask what was in it. All she knew was that she was supposed to use it to clean cell phone screens, hundreds of them every hour. Fumes filled the air in the windowless room where she worked, in a three-story factory outside the southeastern China city of Dongguan.

Long, the 18-year-old daughter of peasant farmers from Guizhou, was supposed to dip her rubber-gloved right index finger into the oil and then rub each screen for 10 to 20 seconds. The company—Fangtai Huawei Electronic Technology—gave Long and her coworkers paper masks, but they rarely used them. They were too hot, and anyway the women who worked there often exhaled onto the screens because the condensed moisture from their breath made cleaning easier. Long worked from 8 am until 11 pm, and as late as 4 am in the busy season.

She didn't complain. Long had fallen onto a kerosene lamp when she was 1 year old and burned her face; her father told her she had to be extra cheerful to make up for the scarring. Long had hoped to be a teacher for blind and deaf children, to help them through their own disabilities, but, tired of watching her parents labor in the field day after day, Long left for the city in the winter of 2011. At Fangtai Huawei, with overtime she could earn as much as 3,000 yuan (about $485) a month to help her family.

Long moved to Dongguan when the working conditions of Chinese tech laborers had become an international issue. Suicides in 2010 at a factory owned by Foxconn Technology Group—a supplier for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and other transnational companies—sparked investigations that found laborers were working long hours for insufficient pay and living in substandard housing. In response, in March 2012 Foxconn pledged to make things right. Apple and Samsung publicly investigated their Chinese supply chains and promised to hold contractors to Western health and safety standards.

But if working conditions were improving at Chinese factories, Long did not see it. Soon after she began working at Fangtai Huawei, her fingertips started tingling. After a few months, her feet and hands were numb. Long couldn't hold the screens properly. Her coworkers started getting sick too—Zi Renchun, a 25-year-old from Yunnan province, lost her appetite. Shang Jiaojiao, who had begun working at age 14, had joint pain and eventually could barely lift herself out of bed. By summer, some of the workers were collapsing.

I saw my son, but it was not my son. He was in a coma, his face was swollen, his eyes shut. It was like my soul escaped from my body.

In mid-July, Long found herself unable to move her legs. “I was just lying on my bed all day and needed help to eat,” she says. Long ended up in a hospital in Guangzhou with more than 30 other Fangtai Huawei workers. Doctors found they'd been exposed to n-hexane, presumably in the “banana oil.” It's an industrial solvent that causes neurological damage at just 50 parts per million. Workers using it are supposed to wear respirators and operate in a ventilated area. As treatment, Long endured daily injections—she says they “hurt more than anything else in the world.” We interviewed her in a hotel a few blocks from the hospital; officials there wouldn't answer our questions or allow us to see her on the premises. Long still tries to stay cheerful. “When I cry,” she says, “I cry secretly.”

Even after the reforms triggered by the Foxconn scandal, thousands of people like Long arrive young and healthy in China's cities every year only to face the health consequences of working for factories with inadequate labor safeguards. Nobody really knows how many are injured or get sick; official Chinese government statistics put the workplace injury rate at 115 per 10,000 workers—slightly higher than the US and significantly higher than the European Union. But few observers trust China's numbers. The government underreports occupational injuries, and one survey found that as many as seven out of 10 migrant workers, who make up a third of the workforce, don't participate in China's workers' compensation system.

Over the past two years we have interviewed multiple experts and 70 workers at 15 Chinese factories. Our investigation suggests that while some Chinese companies raised wages and reduced working hours, other problems with workplace health and safety remain unresolved. In many cases, companies have merely pushed the problems outward from their own factories to contractors and subcontractors, where compliance is more difficult to enforce. The underlying dynamic has not changed: Squeezed by global brands to produce ever-cheaper high tech products, Chinese factories continue to cut corners on safety.

But the problems don't end in the factories. Changes to China's workers' compensation system require companies to pay into a fund and then pay a portion of an injured worker's salary, living expenses, and medical care. So companies now have a motive to deny that workers were injured on the job. Government corruption and interference cause further delays and setbacks for patients, who are often left struggling to pay for treatment out of pocket for years or are trapped in lengthy legal fights. Many Chinese factories are still unsafe, and a tangled health care system prevents workers from getting help. Put simply, China's tech-factory workers are getting red-taped to death.

According to the China Labor Support Network, more than a quarter of the labor force in China is at risk of occupational poisoning. Sim Chi Yin/VII

During the Foxconn scandal, analysts connected unsafe conditions to the demand for cheap devices in the West. “A huge issue is how companies walk the line between trying to get the best financial performance and also achieving high safety standards,” says Kate Cacciatore, former corporate responsibility director at STMicroelectronics. “There is a constant pressure on companies to cut costs, and that pressure works itself down the supply chain.”

Cacciatore is a former board member of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, a group of 105 electronics companies formed in 2004 in response to criticism of conditions at contract manufacturers. Their code of conduct requires that member companies monitor and control chemical exposure and other risks. But the EICC doesn't set specific numeric standards, instead deferring to local laws. That's quite a loophole. Member companies complete a self-assessment to identify the greatest areas of hazard and, to complete admission, the EICC assigns an auditor. The group has never expelled a member for failing to live up to its code. Also, EICC standards apply only to suppliers that represent 80 percent of a company's total spending. That's most likely the first tier of contractors in the supply chain—companies that make or assemble components for member companies—or the second- or third-tier suppliers, contractors to the contractors. Companies further down the line aren't monitored.

Even figuring out who those companies are turns out to be problematic. Four workers at Fangtai Huawei said they worked on products for Nokia, Samsung, and Chinese electronics giant TCL during their time at the factory. Long claims she worked on Apple products. Other workers said they physically delivered products to companies that supply Apple, Samsung, TCL, and Microsoft.

But did the company actually make products for those big-name clients? Fangtai Huawei representatives denied requests for an interview. The Chinese technology industry is rife with counterfeits and copyright violations; it's possible the workers at Fangtai Huawei saw logos on fakes. Interrelationships along the supply chain in China are byzantine.

In theory, workers compensation law protects Chinese employees, but in practice, abuses prevail.

Considering Apple's reputation for precise control of its supply chain, it's nearly impossible to imagine the company doesn't know who makes the screens for its flagship product. Chris Gaither, Apple's director of corporate public relations, says the company scoured its contractor database and found no mention of Fangtai Huawei. Apple also queried Foxconn, and the manufacturing giant denied having any business with Fangtai Huawei. Samsung representatives said the company has “no relationship” with the manufacturer. Microsoft acquired Nokia's cell phone division in 2014, but a spokesperson at Microsoft referred our questions to Nokia, and Nokia's spokesperson said the company had not been a supplier since 2004. TCL didn't respond to our request for comment. But Fangtai was making screens for someone.

Apple is particularly sensitive to claims of neglect. The company surpasses EICC standards and has an updated code of conduct and a 100-page list of work requirements for suppliers deep into the supply chain. The Apple Supplier Environment, Health, and Safety Academy, an 18-month program with over 150 hours of training, teaches managers proper risk management and safety standards. And the company performed 633 audits at facilities worldwide in 2014, nearly three times as many as in 2011.

Still, Apple's own reports show that 30 percent of its suppliers don't comply with the company's own safety standards and 18 percent fail to comply with standards on hazardous chemical exposure. In fact, the company finds some level of noncompliance in every annual report. But Apple says that's just evidence that the process works—that the company helps its suppliers resolve every violation. “People sometimes point to the discovery of problems as evidence that our process isn't working,” wrote Apple's senior vice president of operations, Jeff Williams, on the company's supplier responsibility website in February. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Other investigations have found serious issues with suppliers in China. China Labor Watch, a nonprofit with bases in New York, Sichuan, and Shenzhen, interviewed workers and sent undercover operatives into 14 Apple suppliers in China in 2012 and 2013. Despite Apple's commitment to provide at least 24 hours of safety training, CLW found workers had eight hours at most, and often less. In late 2013, CLW discovered that at least five workers had died at the Shanghai factory of Pegatron, a Taiwan-based supplier producing the iPhone 5c, though CLW couldn't link the deaths to working conditions. Pegatron eventually said it would investigate, though when we asked for the results the company declined to comment. Apple policy is to respond to all specific allegations, and in this case, after sending its own team to the factory, Apple said it found “no evidence of any link to working conditions.” Last summer, reports said that Pegatron would be a supplier of the iPhone 6, producing 30 percent of the phones, with Foxconn producing the rest, and that Pegatron would expand its workforce at one factory by a third to fill the orders.

In 2012, CLW investigated 11 Samsung factories, six of which were majority-owned by the company. While the group found labor violations at all of them, the problems were particularly egregious at some independent suppliers—no safety training, no masks for workers in contact with fumes. Samsung told us that “corrective measures have already been taken” but didn't offer specifics.

SICK DAYS

Maintaining humane working conditions requires codes that regulate everything from injury prevention measures to dorms and dining facilities. But when HP, Apple, and Samsung— the top three makers of information and communications hardware—conducted audits of their factories, they found plenty of room for improvement.—VICTORIA TANG

Ming Gaosheng leads the way down a trash-strewn alley in Shenzhen. Together we climb four flights of stairs to a tiny apartment, where Ming's son Kunpeng pokes his head out of his room. He's stick-thin, wearing red athletic shorts. Green tubes run from his nose to an oxygen tank. Removing them, he sits down on a wooden bed frame in the kitchen, every once in a while interrupting himself with a phlegmy cough. His story is about more than just working conditions. It's about health care for people who get sick or hurt on the job.

In 2007, when he was 20 years old, Ming Kunpeng began working at a factory then owned by Dutch company ASM International—a leading manufacturer of assembly equipment for computer chips, phones, and tablets. For two years, Ming cleaned motherboards with chemicals including benzene, a sweet-smelling and particularly effective industrial solvent and degreaser. It is also a carcinogen. Where people still use it, the International Labour Organization recommends wearing helmets with a face piece blowing clean air and gloves made of Viton, an expensive heat- and chemical-resistant fluoroelastomer. Ming Kunpeng says he was given only masks and standard gloves.

In 2009 he was diagnosed with leukemia from benzene exposure, according to medical records. But as recently as 2013, changes to China's health care system continued to make health care untenable for him—and many others with work-related problems. When the family asked ASM for compensation, the company refused to pay, disputing the cause. They fought for a year, while Ming waited for a bone marrow transplant. In desperation, his family says, they agreed to a onetime settlement in return for dropping their case. Ming got the transplant, but his lung collapsed a few months later, leading to an almost permanent need for an oxygen tank. In 2011 he was hospitalized full-time. The family moved from their village in Hubei province to be nearby. “We don't dare expect anything else from the factory,” his father says. “The company gave us a sum of money, and now our relation is no more.” (For its part, a spokesperson for ASM denied that the chemicals Ming was exposed to included benzene.)

Though the family had his medical bills reimbursed by the government, they had to pay some costs out of pocket. Ming Kunpeng had his own room, but his brother's family slept together in a large bed in another room, and his parents slept in the kitchen. “Back home, we have our own land. We eat what we plant. Here it is so expensive,” Ming's father says.

A few months after we interviewed the family, Ming Kunpeng climbed to the roof of the hospital where he was receiving treatment and jumped, killing himself. His family told us he felt he had become a burden.

Before 1994, the Chinese government owned most of the country's factories and covered almost every citizen's medical costs. But as China has moved from a socialist economy to a partially privatized one, the “iron rice bowl” that covered health care from cradle to grave has given way to private insurance. To protect workers, the state requires all industrial companies to pay about 1 percent of each worker's salary into the Industrial Injury Insurance Fund, with about $16.2 billion in assets. The local government administers payments. When workers get injured, the fund is supposed to pay medical expenses, living expenses, and survivor benefits. Employers, furthermore, are supposed to continue paying the employee's full salary and, depending on the type and severity of the injury, might also have to pay a portion of medical bills.

In theory the law protects workers, but in practice, abuses gut it. That's the conclusion of Zhai Yujuan, a professor of labor law and social security at Shenzhen University. Zhai has studied occupational injury and workers' compensation in China for a decade and has written several books on the topic. In her estimation the system needs reform. “In some cases the companies just pay the 1 percent, but they don't want to pay for additional compensation,” Zhai says. Worse than that, by some estimates fully 75 percent of companies fail to pay into the insurance system at all. Technically, a nonpaying company is supposed to pay the salary and expenses for an injured worker—a responsibility it often tries to avoid. “It's a loophole in the system,” she says.

The catch for workers trying to claim compensation is that, by law, they need two documents: confirmation they worked at the specific factory and a diagnosis from a federally certified medical clinic that shows the injury was work-related. Getting both documents is an onerous process, even after the government reformed the system in 2012 to allow workers to get them at the same time instead of sequentially. Companies often block one or both, Zhai says, either denying workers the proof of employment or putting pressure on the hospitals to issue a less severe diagnosis (or to deny the injury or illness was work-related at all). “If you get leukemia, they will say it's tuberculosis,” Zhai says.

Workers from the countryside, whose villages might be hundreds of miles away, are required to stay in the city where they worked to continue to receive treatment from designated regional health clinics. Many opt to receive a onetime settlement from the company—frequently less than the cost of their medical bills—instead of fighting for the proper documentation and diagnoses, which can drag on interminably. “It can be like one or two years or up to 10 years. And because the process is so long, in the meantime you have to pay out of your own pocket,” Zhai says. Many leave. “They want to just get their big package of money and go home.”

Entire wards of Shenzhen hospitals are filled with patients injured on the job. Traumatic injuries are common—hands lost to factory machinery, for example—and victims face the same obstacles as people with chemical exposure. In one of the largest hospitals, People's Hospital Number 2, we meet a former equipment maintenance engineer named Zhang Tingzhen, an honors student and a champion athlete in his province, who in October 2011 fell while working at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory and suffered a brain injury.

When his father, Zhang Guangde, found out, he took the next train to Shenzhen. By the time he arrived, his son had already undergone two operations, one of which involved removing the left side of his brain. “I saw my son, but it was not my son,” Zhang says, talking to us in an apartment next door to the hospital that he and his wife share with six other families. “He was in a coma, and his face was swollen, and his eyes were shut. It was like my soul escaped from my body.”

After lunch, Zhang takes us across the yard to the hospital to visit Tingzhen. Dressed in a pair of striped pajamas, the young man sits on the side of the bed, smiling pleasantly and speaking in simple words and phrases; he has the mental capacity of a 3-year-old, and he only somewhat remembers his parents and sister.

When Zhang tried to get compensation for his son in 2012, Foxconn would not provide documentation that he worked at the factory. Instead, the company claimed he was hired in Shenzhen for a position in another factory, in the city of Huizhou, 60 miles away, where wages were lower and where Foxconn would be required to pay less compensation. The company refused to pay unless Zhang left Shenzhen and submitted to a government medical assessment in Huizhou. His father says his son is not able to travel.

Factory uniforms and young people’s clothing hang on laundry racks in an apartment block rented out to migrant workers. Sim Chi Yin/VII

That left the family in legal limbo—without occupational injury documentation, the government wouldn't pay. So Zhang Guangde started protesting—an extreme step in China, where labor activists are routinely harassed and jailed. Eventually Foxconn agreed to provide 11,000 yuan (about $1,800) a month. “The company has been very responsible in meeting and continuing to meet its obligations to Mr. Zhang,” Foxconn said in a statement, “including the provision of financial, medical, and rehabilitation care.” But Zhang says it wasn't enough, that the family has gone 30,000 yuan in debt paying for medicine and expenses, and that Foxconn's payments stopped after just five months.

After leaving the hospital, we drive a half hour north to Foxconn's enormous campus, employing over a half-million workers. The main gate is like a border crossing, with trucks lined up at tollbooths seeking entry and another line full of product waiting to depart. Thousands of people in polo shirts color-coded to the division where they work—black, red, white—stream through the pedestrian gates. In 2010 this factory produced a reported 137,000 iPhones a day. Today that number is likely much higher. We arrive at dinnertime; the smell of roasting meat rises from dozens of stalls outside the gate amid a bazaar of cheap electronics and clothing, catering to workers as they get off their shift.

Zhang finds a spot on an overpass to unfurl a large banner decrying Foxconn as “the empire of inhumane thugs.” Curious workers gather to watch. “My son used to be an engineer, now he cannot recognize a single Chinese character,” Zhang shouts. “This is the company you are working for. My son is now a vegetable in the hospital and cannot recognize anybody.” He seems small, dwarfed by the giant factory rising behind him. Still, a crowd of 50 or 60 people gathers, most of them workers from the factory itself. Some take pictures with their iPhones.

After Zhang's protests, Foxconn resumed payments, but he believes that the company wouldn't be paying him anything at all if he didn't keep it up—and he still hasn't been paid the full amount of his son's salary and monthly care costs. As we watch, one passing worker shouts back at him, “Foxconn creates jobs!”

“Yeah,” Zhang answers. “But they also kill people.”

Zhang eventually sued Foxconn, but in 2014 a court ruled that his son did indeed have to get assessed in Huizhou to receive compensation—and Foxconn offered Zhang a onetime settlement of 2 million yuan if he would agree to say that his son worked in Huizhou and to recant his criticisms of the company. Zhang declined.

IN MAY 2014, Samsung issued a rare public apology. In its plants in South Korea, the company acknowledged, 26 workers got leukemia and lymphoma after working with undisclosed chemicals, and 10 died.

Many major electronics companies use benzene, and even the ones that forbid it don't seem to be enforcing that rule with their suppliers. The same goes for n-hexane. In 2010, Nokia issued a public statement saying that “n-hexane is not used in the manufacturing process of our products or their components.”

Two weeks after we sent Apple a list of questions that included inquiries about benzene and n-hexane, the company issued a statement specifically banning these two chemicals. (Gaither, the spokesperson, said that the company had been working on the issue for months.) “Apple treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously,” the press release said, pointing to its own investigations of 22 suppliers from March through June 2014. Four had been using benzene or n-hexane “in low concentrations,” with no adverse effects on workers, Apple said. Since then, the company said, it has updated its “tight restrictions on benzene and n-hexane to explicitly prohibit their use”—but only “in final assembly processes,” meaning once again that smaller subcontractors would not be bound by the policy. Moreover, many of Apple's final assembly facilities didn't use those chemicals anyway.

The Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition's code of conduct doesn't ban any particular chemicals, though the organization is considering it. Fundamentally, companies use these toxic chemicals because of cost. Safer alternatives exist, but they're more expensive, as are proper ventilation systems and training. “If someone is on a 12-hour shift, you'd need three sets of gloves. In factories with 40,000 or 50,000 workers, that would be very expensive,” says Garrett Brown, a former compliance officer with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health who has been investigating factories in China for more than a decade. “It makes much more sense to substitute a less-toxic chemical or use it in a way where there is near-zero exposure.”

Watch a trailer for coauthor Heather White’s documentary, Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Electronics.

Whoever Fangtai Huawei builds components for, the factory has obviously fallen through a gap. The general manager of Fangtai Huawei refused to talk to us, but he told the Dongguan Times newspaper that the leukemia cases were “unexpected” since the company trained new employees on safety precautions. “We will try all means to save the workers and pay each of them a monthly salary of 2,300 yuan,” he said, adding that the factory would fully comply with government requirements. But the workers who got sick say no one told them the chemicals they were using were hazardous nor encouraged them to use even the meager safety equipment provided.

When they did get sick, they say, the company told several of them that the illnesses they were suffering from were an unrelated syndrome that had nothing to do with the working conditions at the factory. It was only when a critical mass of workers became ill that Fangtai Huawei took responsibility. The workers say the company provided them only with 2,300 yuan (about $370) a month, though most made more than that with overtime.

In the summer of 2013, after a year in the hospital, the workers got word that the company wanted them to sign a document stating that their rehabilitation was complete. “We almost died in that factory, and now they are telling us to leave,” Long Li says. Payments stopped arriving on time, and several of the workers staged a protest at the local labor bureau. Police arrested three of them, including Long. She spent the night in jail and while there texted: “I'm so scared. I want to kill myself.”

In February, Long finally went home to her family. The company continues to operate. Outside the factory in Dongguan is a deserted security booth with a paper in the window advertising jobs. “Only girls 18–35,” it reads. “Obedient to management. Able to take hardship.”

The Afflicted

Sim Chi Yin/VII

XIE FENGPING, 36. After working for five years at Huasheng Electric Motor, Xie was diagnosed with leukemia in late 2013. Her responsibilities at the workshop put her in direct contact with hazardous printing materials. A doctor linked the cancer to benzene exposure, which Huasheng disputed. But the Guangdong Prevention and Treatment Center for Occupational Diseases analyzed an ink sample from the company and found xylene, methylbenzene, and ethylbenzene. The company paid for her first stage of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant (donated by her sister). Unable to afford the rest of the treatment on her own, Xie borrowed money from friends. She says Huasheng paid 1,300 yuan (about $210) a month for medical costs until last December, but now she's fighting for a 40,000 yuan (about $6,500) reimbursement.

Sim Chi Yin/VII

LIN SUBI, 30 In a factory manufacturing imitation iPhones, Lin used n-hexane as a cleaner. A few months in, she had a pins-and-needles sensation in her limbs. A hospital diagnosed her with nerve damage and estimated that the treatment she needed would take about two years, with an average monthly medical cost of 8,000 yuan (about $1,300). The factory paid only part of her medical expenses and has not contributed to her cost of living or loss of working time. When she started her job, Lin didn't realize she was pregnant with her second child. After her doctor warned her of the possibility of deformities, Lin decided to get an abortion. “At that moment, all I thought was I wanted to end my life. I couldn't even, however, lift a finger to kill myself,” she says.

Sim Chi Yin/VII

HE, 20 He is recovering from organic-solvent poisoning. As a circuit board inspector in a small Shenzhen factory, she checked cell phone parts cleaned with an unknown chemical. “It smelled bad,” He recalls. “We just called it ‘circuit wash.’” The factory didn't require gloves. After about a month, she went to the hospital in September 2014 with a fever and rash. The Guangdong Prevention and Treatment Center for Occupational Diseases attributed her symptoms to working conditions. “I didn't know there were occupation-related diseases until I got sick,” He says. The factory paid only for her medical expenses at the center, not for prior costs. Fearing retaliation, He asked to be identified only by her last name.

Sim Chi Yin/VII

YAO, 38 Leaving her son in the care of her parents in Hubei, Yao moved to Shenzhen to work in a camera factory. Her duties mostly consisted of cleaning glass optics, painting a coating onto parts, and polishing lenses. They exposed her to chemicals for up to 10 hours a day. A series of air-quality tests of her work environment revealed the presence of trichloroethylene, n-hexane, benzene, methylbenzene, and xylene. In 2007 she began experiencing constant headaches. Following her doctor's advice, she stopped working in July 2013. Yao requested to be identified only by her last name.

Bill to Ban Undetectable 3-D Printed Guns Is Coming Back

Rep. Steve Israel speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 25, 2015. Andrew Harnik/AP

Since Congressman Steve Israel first called for legislation that would ban 3-D printed guns, those plastic-printed firearms have evolved from a few simple components to a full one-shot pistol to rifles and multi-shot revolvers, with more advances on the horizon. Israel’s bill, meanwhile, has gone nowhere, leaving a widening gap between DIY weapons and the law.

But the representative from New York says he hasn’t given up: In the next few months, Israel’s office tells WIRED he plans to reintroduce legislation that would ban 3-D printed guns or any other fully-plastic firearm. The Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, which Israel first tried and failed to pass last year, forbids the possession or manufacture of any gun that could slip through a standard metal detector unnoticed, including those that include a removable chunk of non-functional metal—what he sees as a loophole in the current law against plastic weapons.

“My legislation is about making sure that we have laws in place to ensure that criminals and terrorists can’t produce guns that can easily be made undetectable. Security checkpoints will do little good if criminals can produce plastic firearms and bring those firearms through metal detectors into secure areas like airports or courthouses,” Israel wrote in a statement to WIRED. “When I started talking about the issue of completely plastic firearms, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. That science-fiction is now a dangerous reality.”

Since Israel first began focusing on 3-D printed weapons as an issue, he has shifted from seeking to specifically forbid their printing to instead banning all undetectable weapons—an umbrella he intends to include 3-D printed ones. “What we’re trying to do is make it clear that if you choose to construct a weapon or weapon component using a 3-D printer, and it’s homemade, you’ll be subject to penalties,” Israel told me in early 2013. More recently he’s made clear that he doesn’t intend to target 3-D printing specifically: The bill he introduced at the end of 2013 never mentioned 3-D printing by name.

But Israel’s bill does seem designed to address weapons like the Liberator, a one-shot 3-D printed pistol whose digital blueprints were released by the gun access group Defense Distributed in 2013. The Liberator, as manufactured and demonstrated by Defense Distributed’s founder Cody Wilson, was technically detectable by a standard metal detector, because it included a chunk of steel in its body to comply with the current Undetectable Firearms Act. But that piece was entirely non-functional and could be removed at any time.

Like the bill he already introduced, the new one will require that crucial functional components be made of detectable metal. In rifles and shotguns, the combination of the slide, barrel and receiver would have to be as detectable as a 3.7-ounce piece of steel. In handguns, the same would be required of the gun’s cylinder and barrel. All of that would make a working, fully 3-D printed gun essentially impossible to legally produce.

The currently active Undetectable Firearms Act, by contrast, merely demands that the entire gun be as detectable as that 3.7 ounce chunk of steel. And while that law was renewed last year, Israel failed to push through his changes to it. That’s perhaps no surprise given congress’s general unwillingness to pass any gun control law. The renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act was the only gun control law passed last year. “Current law is completely inadequate, and though for my Republican colleagues it was easier to live with current law than to expand it, it is critical that we continue the national dialogue about undetectable fire arms,” Israel writes to WIRED.

The new bill would make a working, fully 3-D printed gun essentially impossible to legally produce.

What the congressman hasn’t addressed is how the bill might have better luck this time around. Congress, after all, has only become more Republican since the 2014 mid-term elections. When his Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act was introduced last time around, the legislation was co-sponsored by Republican Representative Peter King. Israel’s office wouldn’t comment on whether any Republican might co-sponsor the bill this time, and King’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But Israel may be thinking that the technological advancement of 3-D printed guns will push them back into the national conversation. Since he first began raising the issue, after all, home-printed firearms have taken leaps forward in accessibility, durability, and power. And Defense Distributed’s latest project seeks to develop a gun that can be 3-D printed in carbon fiber, a material that has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than aluminum. The result could be homemade, undetectable weapons that are far more practical than the original Liberator. A single real-world incident involving those potentially deadly weapons would bring them back into the spotlight.

But even Israel’s bill, it’s important to note, doesn’t deal with all the recent advancements in DIY gunsmithing. It wouldn’t prevent anyone from 3-D printing a lower receiver for their AR-15, for instance—the most regulated component of the semi-automatic weapon. Anyone could still print just that one piece and buy the rest of the weapon online legally. Defense Distributed’s latest project has been selling computer-controlled mills that carve those lower receivers out of aluminum, another way to obtain a semi-automatic weapon with no serial number that still wouldn’t violate Israel’s bill’s undetectability requirements.

Supporters of 3-D printing were initially wary of Israel’s bill, which in his initial statements appeared to be the first attempt to regulate the emerging technology. But the Congressman’s general focus on gun detectability rather than any particular manufacturing process is a better approach, says Michael Weinberg, a 3-D printing-focused analyst with the non-profit Public Knowledge who recently took a job as general counsel of the 3-D printing firm Shapeways. “What we didn’t want to happen was a situation where 3-D printing of guns explicitly was made illegal,” says Weinberg. “There are a lot of ways to make undetectable firearms, and if you focus on each one you’ll end up with pretty ineffective legislation.”

The NRA, not surprisingly, isn’t so supportive. “The NRA strongly opposes ANY expansion of the Undetectable Firearms Act, including applying the UFA to magazines, gun parts, or the development of new technologies,” reads a statement from the group’s website. “We will continue to aggressively fight any expansion of the UFA or any other proposal that would infringe on our Second Amendment rights.”

On the other side of the gun debate, however, gun control advocates’ support for the bill isn’t quite so unequivocal. The gun control group the Brady Campaign, for its part, says it agrees that homemade and 3-D printed guns represent a real issue. “As technology continues to advance and it becomes possible to make guns in homes and garages across the country, it creates a dangerous loophole for domestic abusers, felons and other criminals to make guns without any background checks and use them to harm others,” a spokesperson writes to WIRED. “Any gun made should not be able to slip through security checkpoints and certainly should not slip into the hands of dangerous people.”

But not every gun control group sees homemade or undetectable weapons as such a high priority. “The notion that a mass shooter or a street criminal is going to buy a 3-D printer, download blueprints, and try a few test runs before producing their own gun is very unlikely,” says Ladd Everitt, the communications director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “It’s a hassle, when you can just buy a gun with zero accountability in this country.”

Everitt says he sees the issue of undetectable 3-D printed guns as having less to do with run-of-the-mill gun violence than with the possibility of a terrorism threat, given the weapons’ potential to bypass both background checks and security checkpoints. “I would salute any legislator on Capitol Hill being forward-looking at thinking about how we can deal with this problem,” he says. “But in the overall universe of gun laws, this is not at the top of our list.”

Those sorts of comments from even gun control advocates suggest an uncertain outcome for Israel’s bill. The technological future of 3-D printed guns, meanwhile, looks brighter every day.

These Are The People Who Graduate From Code Bootcamp

The learn-to-code movement has expanded well beyond the realm of hobbyists. As President Obama acknowledged just last month, the many coding bootcamps that speckle the country are becoming important economic drivers, helping train American workers in the skills they need to fill an ever expanding pool of tech jobs and in a fraction of the time it would take them to pursue a four-year degree.

But just who are these daring folks who drop their day jobs in pursuit of a career in tech, and what, if anything, do they get for the $10,000 price of admission that most of these bootcamps charge?

That was the question on Louis Beryl’s mind. He’s the founder and CEO of Earnest, an online lender that, among other things, partners with coding bootcamps to offer loans to their students. He wanted to know who the average coding student is and what becomes of them after graduation. So he and his team dug into the data from 10 different coding bootcamps to find out more about their students and their outcomes.

“What we wanted to do by showing who the typical person was, was help people in this generation understand this is an opportunity,” Beryl explains. “It’s like: ‘Wow, people like me are doing this.’ This is a way that the economy is changing. So I think that’s what we want to help people understand.”

According to Earnest, the average student made $45,000 a year before enrolling in coding school, but afterward, the average starting salary for graduates was between $60,000 and $80,000. What’s more, about 94 percent of students actually landed a job within three months of graduating, though Earnest can’t confirm how many of those jobs were actually in tech.

The data revealed that 63 percent of the students are male, and the average age is 28.5. But some other findings were actually quite surprising. The average coding student, for instance, owes $29,900 in debt before enrolling in a coding school, almost half of that from student loans.

For Beryl, that was a strong sign that it’s not just the people who happen to have the money to pay for one of these bootcamps who are enrolling. Instead, it’s people looking for ways to increase their earning capacity or, as President Obama put it in his talk, book “a ticket into the middle class.”

Beryl sees all this as promising, particularly given the rate at which tech jobs are expected to grow over the next few years. Still, there are those, like Kristen Titus, founding director of the newly created NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, who say that anyone interested in enrolling in one of these bootcamps should do so with a healthy bit of skepticism.

Not all programs are created equal, she says. That’s one reason why the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline was created—to make sure people are getting a quality tech education that will actually lead to a quality job in tech. “I have reason to believe that not every bootcamp program puts emphasis on that second piece,” Titus says. “Many of the bootcamps and training providers we’ve seen have not been built with employers in mind.”

That said, Titus believes there are plenty of reputable schools out there for people interested in a career in tech, as long as people do their research first to find out where graduates from any given program are landing jobs, how soon after graduation they’re finding those jobs, and what the quality of those jobs are. “We have a lot of work to do to define who’s doing what well,” she says. “If we had a perfect solution we wouldn’t see the dearth we do today.”

Mad Men Recap: Sorry, But Happiness Isn’t on the Menu

Seeing Mad Men through its ads: Every week, WIRED takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign by advertising agency Sterling Cooper & Partners.

Webster’s Dictionary defines happiness as “a state of well-being and contentment; joy…a pleasurable or satisfying experience.” It offers an obsolete definition as well: “good fortune; prosperity.” Here it draws close to the definition articulated by Don Draper—Draper’s Dictionary, so to speak—back in Mad Men‘s very first episode. “Advertising,” he tells his clients, “is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.” Whatever else a life of safety, comfort, and new cars involves, good fortune and prosperity are certainly key ingredients.

But this is itself an obsolete definition. In Season Five, the revised edition of Draper’s Dictionary presented a more up-to-date version, aimed at skeptical DuPont executives who didn’t understand why they’d hire Don to blow up their marketing strategy when they’re on top of the market. Don’s answer? “Because even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You get hungry even though you’ve just eaten…. You’re happy because you’re successful—for now. But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” The goal can never be reached, because it is, by definition, unreachable. A moment of happiness is just that: a moment. When it ends—and it always ends—the hunt begins again.

Don Draper has grappled with his own definition of happiness for the entirety of Mad Men‘s seven seasons, and in last night’s premiere, “Severance,” that battle rages on. Many critics of the show see this as its fatal flaw: Perpetually searching, perpetually unhappy, Don never changes. But even if we grant the faulty proposition that a psychologically constant character automatically makes for bad drama, we’re selling Don short. The man himself has changed plenty, and not just when he transformed from Dick Whitman into “Don Draper” in the first place. He has morphed from a family man to a bachelor; from an up-and-comer to a partner to an outcast back to a partner; from a divorcé to a remarried man back to a divorcé; from compulsive philanderer to faithful husband to obsessed Other Man to long-distance significant other to , finally, tomcat extraordinaire. The problem is that the impossibility of happiness has stayed maddeningly static, no matter what he does.

This dilemma is reflected in the ad campaign for Wilkinson razors that Don is spearheading. The episode begins with a beautiful model showing off her smooth skin from beneath an expensive fur coat as Don, his colleagues Ted and Pete, and a pair of Wilkinson execs leer in appreciation. Based on conversations Don has with both Ted and his secretary Meredith, not to mention the seven seasons’ worth of Mad Men casting sequences under our belts, it’s clear this process has gone on for some time—solely because the Wilkinson guys think it’s nice work if you can get it. “What can I say?” Don responds when Ted complains to him that, in an effort to decide between their top three candidates, the razor company has requested a binder full of photos featuring 120 women. “They’re perverts.”

Adman, heal thyself. When Don returns home from a long night of carousing with his pal Roger and several young women, his answering service functions as a Nixon-era Tinder. It provides him with sex à la carte, presenting him with messages from three willing women with whom to pursue his evening’s entertainment. Everyone here’s a consenting adult, and it’s not wise to conflate the distasteful with the immoral. But there’s certainly something creepy about how Don conducts his personal life given the alacrity with which he sees through the “perverts” at Wilkinson. It’s the same thing as the casting, only no cash changes hands.

Until it does. When Don encounters a diner waitress who may or may not be Midge, the beatnik turned junkie with whom he once had an ongoing affair, she interprets his interest—accurately, it turns out—as sexual in nature, screwing him out back for $100. In prostitution, societal boundaries between the personal and the professional break down, as Don’s whorehouse upbringing taught him. Now it’s just more out in the open than it is when Don applies the techniques of his dayjob to his nightlife.

But the spheres of his existence had already begun to collide before his alleyway assignation. His first glimpse of Midge/”Diana” apparently inspired a dream in which Rachel Mencken, another lover from the time period, shows up at the Wilkinson casting and wows him. “You’re not just smooth, you’re Wilkinson smooth” he tells her, using an advertising slogan to bestow his seal of approval. The dream then feeds back into Don’s work, when it gives him the idea to contact her to see if her department store would adopt the agency’s pantyhose client Topaz as a house brand. (Topaz’s product itself can be seen not just as a knockoff of the more successful L’eggs brand it hopes to emulate, but the smooth legs of the archetypal Wikinson woman.)

But when Don learns Rachel has died, he returns to Diana’s diner, perhaps hoping she’ll replace the happiness he can no longer find with his late lover. Only then does the sexual transaction take place. Like Midge, Rachel actually meant something to Don, yet some part of him still sees them as interchangeable—“cogs in a wheel,” as Ken Cosgrove describes his DuPont executive father-in-law elsewhere in the episode. The commodification of these human beings into goods to be selected from a menu, as if sex is a cosmic diner waitress asking you “what’ll it be, honey?”, is merely the most grotesque example of the core capitalist conceit: This one’s good, but the next one’ll be even better!

Don’s not the only person capable of calling bullshit on this endless bait-and-switch, even as he falls victim to it. The philosopher Andre Vantino writes, “Sexual encounters are desired in the same way in which art is desired. Desire is not a biological need….Desire springs from the void at the centre of life.” The drive to fill that void is so powerful that Freud named it the death instinct in light of its self-destructive potential—a potential Don has demonstrated time and time again. He’s tried to fill that void, to find the permanent moment of happiness, with sex, family, money, respectability, creativity, professional success, and industrial quantities of booze.

But as Peggy Lee puts it in the song that begins and ends the episode (though I prefer the quaalude-dosed disdain of Cristina’s version), is that all there is? Nothing ever meets expectations, because expectations cannot be met. The void cannot be filled. Until Don truly comes to terms with this, every handhold he grabs will crumble to dust in his hand, forcing him to reach out again, and again, and again. He may be smooth, but he can never be Wilkinson smooth.