Posted 1:24 PM by Floyd

The Mercury News frequently bugs the shit out of me; the worst is when it goes on a crusade to deny jobs to people from the Third World. For instance, several years ago the Merc ran an article on Vietnamese immigrants who perform piecemeal work assembling computers and such. This was a mini-crusade, with the Merc shocked and appalled that people would

• Work at home
  
• Work long hours
  
• Willingly expose themselves to chemicals that, when force-fed to rats, might make them more likely to develop cancer
  

Last week the Merc published a three-part series entitled "Silicon Valley's dark side". (There is no link, because I have better things to do with my time than trawl the Merc's hopeless RealCities site for the article. The 7-day archives link did not work, and a search did not bring up the article.) Here is a snarky summary:

Silicon Valley makes computers. When a computer is obsolete, it cannot be disposed of in a trivial fashion by, say, dissolving it in water. Nor can you open the case of a computer and eat its contents. It is expensive and difficult to dispose of computer equipment in the US -- I have a busted monitor sitting under my house because the nearest disposal site is nearly half an hour away -- so the slack is being picked up by enterprises in mainland China. Evil Silicon Valley companies beam mind-control waves at Chinese citizens to entice them to work with this hazardous waste.

These sorts of articles are made all the more stroke-inducing by the Moment of Shit that follows: A self-congratulatory editorial reminding the unwashed masses that it's not enough to gape slack-jawed at the Mercury News' incredible reporting skills; we must all Do Something About It. Quite a surprise isn't it -- We Approve of the Content of Our Newspaper. (By the way, guys, your editorial could actually have some miniscule value if it linked to the articles that you pontificate about. Well done, RealCities!)

But the real outrage is not the Merc's reporting skills or its thumb-sucking pontification. The reporters and editorialists who work for the Mercury News are unable, despite all their feverish commitment to diversity, to imagine life from the perspective of a poor person in China. Such people can work on a farm, doing backbreaking labor with little usage of modern agricultural equipment. Or they can go to a city and get higher-paying and easier work. Most Chinese do not need to reduce their risk of contracting cancer by 0.5%; they need a job, food on the table, education for their kids.

Here is the Merc's prescription: More expensive computers AND no jobs for Third-Worlders. The only person who wins in this scenario is the high-minded crusader who pats himself on his back for his commitment to "social justice".