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That's funny because I've thought it is the same for years and I'm happy to see someone else post a comment about it instead.

Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on why you think it's not the same.






These are the extremely obviously different. A company that has to take specific measures to prevent the suicide of their workers should raise a much different level of scrutiny that the fact that a massive bridge available to millions of people is used to commit suicide.

The company had just shy of a million people in it at the time, making the comparison "about the entire population of South Dakota" (which had 139 suicides that year) or "121% of the population of San Francisco" (32 jumped from specifically the Golden Gate bridge in 2010, which was Foxconn's worst year[0], and that doesn't count any of the other suicides in SF that year, just jumping specifically off that specific bridge), and it's nowhere near the only example of this in the USA.

This university had three students jump to their deaths in 2010, out of about 26k students, compared to 15 in Foxconn's worst year out of 980,000 employees:

https://news.sky.com/story/suicide-nets-college-attempts-to-...

Population adjusted, what happened at Cornell University was as if 112 people rather than 15 had jumped in Foxconn.

Or this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Holmes_Bobst_Library

"""In late 2003, the library was the site of two suicides. In separate incidents, students jumped from the open-air crosswalks inside the library and fell to the stereogram-patterned marble floor below.

After the second suicide, the university installed Plexiglas barricades on each level and along the stairways to prevent further jumping. In 2009, a third student jumped to his death from the tenth floor, apparently scaling the plexiglas barricade.[7]

The library has since added floor-to-ceiling metal barriers to prevent any future suicide attempts. The barrier is made of randomly perforated aluminum screens that evoke the zeros and ones of a digital waterfall.[8]"""

2 out of 59,144 students would be equivalent to 33 out of the 980k Foxconn employees, double the number who actually jumped.

[0] https://abc7news.com/archive/7878562/


Why should a company require more strict scrutiny than, say, a public bridge? Well of course there are many reasons, but specifically: in the case of addressing suicide? If a bridge is being used to commit suicide then... perhaps the problems causing suicide should be addressed instead of (or... in addition to) the symptom of suicide being prevented.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a public bridge and a destination for suicidal people.

Foxconn is a place where people live and work. Not accessible to the public.

Where is the overlap?


Foxconn is the same size of the combination of all of San Francisco on one side of the bridge with quite a lot of the small settlements on the north side.

Treating Foxconn as "a company" is fine for legal purposes, but it's on a scale of "one of the larger incorporated cities, close to the top 10" by US standards — or indeed "South Dakota". (Similar population, but Foxconn's revenue is about 3.7x South Dakota's GDP or 81% of San Francisco's GDP).




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