LePoisson@lemmy.world
on 27 May 13:51
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I guess the NYT no longer has an editor on staff? Who the fuck let that go to print, also who writes something like that into an article - that little paragraph where the NYT claims that “industry experts” said Chinese girls are better at assembling phones reads like cringe AI slop.
I feel like literally one person proofreading that should have been enough for them to go, “maybe don’t print the stupid racist thing about small fingers.”
capitalist mutual masturbation and manufactured cognitive dissonance / distraction so they don’t have to actually change anything and effect profit potential. while they wait for daddy dictator trump to open their proposals in the form of a cotton sack with a dollar sign on the side.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:41
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Authors name is “Tripp” and if he’s a real person he 100% used AI to write it.
I’m guessing his grandfather was/is loaded and connected. I’ve never met a man in my life who goes by “Tripp” and isn’t an insufferable douche coasting off generational wealth.
The crazy part is he just “wrote” a book about Apple, and there’s a good chance Apple execs he talked to really said that stupid racist thing.
He goes by tripp because, according to his personal image consultant, “Leopold reitbarth the third” didn’t test well with under 30s in their focus groups
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 18:04
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They will fire the editor and writer (who are probably overworked and forced to use AI slop to meet deadlines), and the cycle begins anew.
LadyButterfly@lazysoci.al
on 27 May 13:54
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— so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.
Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?
Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).
LadyButterfly@lazysoci.al
on 27 May 14:40
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Yep exactly!
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 18:07
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Alright you hooked me, I want to hear about the gun slinging interviewer.
The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.
A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?
Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.
Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:
Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.
None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.
But that final job interview… Yeah.
I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.
“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”
And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.
And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.
In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.
That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.
¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 28 May 14:12
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Glad I asked. Sounds like you wouldn’t have needed good health care there anyway, that dude shoots to kill.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 13:56
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Yeah, that’s weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make in the US has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it’s purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can’t do that in the US. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 27 May 14:10
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China ain't the cheapest anymore and has not been for a while.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 14:55
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No, but it’s substantially cheaper than the US and cheap enough that moving operations isn’t practical. Companies are moving to other south Asian countries, but China remains a staple for reasonably competent and reasonably cheap labor.
China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector. That honestly is the biggest thing keeping manufacturing there. Things made from raw resources could be moved easily but the lower labor costs would be offset by the decreased demand due to most of their customers being back in China.
Things are even worse for anyone making something that requires manufactured components as all those suppliers are in China so now not only are they taking a hit for reduced demand, but also the headaches of having to import their components from China just to build anything. Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 18:44
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China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector
So does the US, they just do a lot less manufacturing than they used to because it became cheaper to send that to other countries. The US does a lot more design work than actual production.
Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.
Right, which is why labor moved to China in the first place. If labor gets more expensive in China, manufacturing will move elsewhere, both for components and finished products.
The only way to get large scale back to developed countries is through automation, which dramatically reduces the labor cost. But at that point, it’s not creating jobs anyway, so why not do that nearer to where the raw materials are extracted anyway?
I personally don’t understand why developed countries are so interested in moving manufacturing back. I understand it’s not great for national security and whatnot, so it makes sense to have some domestic production capability if there’s ever war in the region, but a lot of that issue can be solved by diversifying where things are produced, since war is unlikely to impact the entire supply chain if you maintain naval dominance, which the US has and they share it w/ other developed western powers.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 14:18
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hire
They’ve been known to literally lock people in their factories, and even put up suicide nets to prevent slaves from killing themselves.
Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren’t available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 14:41
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Neither did China until Apple trained them
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 27 May 15:04
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nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 21:36
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We? Not unless the entire government decided to fundamentally change overnight. The US government would never tell conglomerates what to do, it takes it’s orders from them.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 15:06
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The US had and has plenty, which is why manufacturing started in the US and migrated out once processes standardized enough to bring in less competent labor. Then labor became more competent, so more companies moved their operations there. A lot of US manufacturing engineers work with Chinese manufacturing facilities, because that’s where the labor is.
If the US wants to bring manufacturing back, it needs to be cheaper to do it domestically. That means automation, better materials transportation, and cheap raw materials.
I don’t see the point. Instead of bringing back manufacturing, improve education and focus on higher value work.
the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain
That’s because it was all outsourced to China because they utilize cheap/free labor.
If we had started doing tariffs 30 years ago we could have prevented that. Or if we enacted tariffs as part of a larger plan to slowly transition that industry back over the next 20 years, we could probably do that as well.
But just slapping a 250% tariff overnight and expecting everything to sort itself out is the kind of a plan only the orange moron could come up with.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:34
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What’s important to note is all the pieces that get screwed together are still made over there…
We can pay tariffs on all the pieces and screw them together here, but that’s going to essentially have the same tariff costs as a completed iPhone.
Having someone screw the pieces together here would also raise costs due to labor costs. But they’re two completely different things.
Quick edit:
Times author is legitimately named “Trip” and started out as a sports writer before pivoting to “apple, bourbon, and beer”.
These days it might just be AI, but if it’s a human it’s almost certainly a nepo hire…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 14:52
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They could even waive the tariffs and it would still be impractical to assemble in the US. The only way it’s practical here is with near full automation, and even then it’s probably still cheaper in China.
Labor and land are just so much cheaper there.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:59
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Apple spent literal decades training workers over there, and the Chinese government busted up Apple and all their workers went to competitors…
Like, sure, someone has to assemble the screws but it didn’t take Apple 20 years of investment to just teach them to use a screwdriver. It’s skilled labor.
Jon Stewart had some guy that wrote a book on it a week or two ago.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 15:15
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There’s some skilled labor, sure, but most of it is processes, and those can be replicated elsewhere. Apple brought the processes and refined them with local labor. But none of it is so special that it can’t be replicated elsewhere in a couple years (assuming facilities exist).
Look at phone repair, you can go to any mall and a teenager can disassemble and reassemble your phone with only a month or so of training. Making that process efficient is the hard part, and that only requires a few skilled jobs in a factory of thousands. The vast majority of jobs in assembly are pretty unskilled.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 27 May 15:20
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and those can be replicated elsewhere
Apple isn’t in the process of spending billions over decades to train people just to install screws…
Like, fuck Apple, I’ve never owned a single Apple product. But they wouldn’t have spent that much for so long to train people for unskilled labor.
Quick edit:
Apple in China[1] is a 2025 book by Patrick McGee[2][3][4] (Financial Times reporter[5] from 2013 to 2023[6]), about how Apple Inc. invested in China in order to build iPhones and other technology, and by doing so helped China become more competitive. In the book, McGee says that under Tim Cook Apple invested $275 billion over five years from 2016. McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan as this is in excess of other corporate spending. McGee says the Marshall Plan was about half Apple’s investment, in real terms.
That’s 55 billion a year, for five years straight.
It doesn’t cost that much to train someone to put a screw in
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 18:47
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Sure, but it does cost that much to build a suite of factories complete w/ automation and whatnot. Buildings are expensive, especially high tech ones, but that doesn’t mean the labor involved is particularly high skill. Components, processes, software, etc are still largely designed by highly skilled workers in western countries.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 27 May 19:00
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Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
You can just keep repeating the same thing over and over again despite it being wrong…
Doesn’t make it true tho, just makes other people eventually stop responding
Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 18:38
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Sure, but I don’t think supply chains are the critical factor here. You don’t necessarily need local supply if you can break up delivery into small enough chunks, so whether it takes a day or a month to get a part isn’t important once the flow is going smoothly. You only need local supply if there’s a significant risk of disruption/delays.
Yes, it’s probably a bit cheaper to assemble things closer to where they’re produced, but I still think labor costs are the determining factor. US workers expect higher pay, more PTO, less hours worked per week, and more benefits, so even if all the parts were shipped in perfectly consistently, it would still be significantly more expensive to assemble iPhones in the US vs in China.
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing minimum wage is ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 27 May 20:13
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Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 14:08
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“Grown ass men with sausage fingers are also out there painting tiny dolls using nail art brushes so they can play house… with their friends,” Jeong joked. “American men have plenty of manual dexterity.”
OH, man. I feel attacked. I’m going to cry onto my D&D minis now.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
on 27 May 14:10
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"Young Chinese women have small fingers," the article reads, "and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said."
This 100% reads like LLM output; it's confidently wrong, isn't using proper news copy syntax, and got weirdly vague as it trailed off ("the small device").
NYT is publishing AI articles.
AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:39
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Wasn’t this also the argument for child labor? “Small children can fit into tight spaces easier, lets use them to unjam dangerous machinery”
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:55
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Does it? They’re a middle-upper income country now, and child labor tends to be an issue at much lower levels of development. Anyway, for the Chinese electronics sector, you’re vastly more likely to see humanoid robots than children.
Yes. For example I know in textiles especially, they were small enough to run under & between machines to get things without the factory having to them off. (Surprise surprise, guess how kids got maimed and/or killed…)
Yeah def what I was thinking. It’s strange that instead of admitting to this they’re just rolling with it saying it’s based off something they read.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 27 May 15:43
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We can’t claim that everything weird is written by AI, because there are weird human writers too. Although even if not AI, “experts claim” is such a dodgy source, that alone makes it untrustworthy.
kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 May 16:19
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Ah, NYT. Amongst all subscriptions that I have come across in my country, NYT is the most expensive. Since they haven’t heard of region specific pricing and just multiply by exchange rate; it’s only six times more expensive than YT Premium in India.
Atleast I was under the belief that they had decent editorial standards but looks like that ship has sailed away as well.
Boss I hate to be the one to tell you, but this is exactly what their editorial standards have always been lol
kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de
on 28 May 01:27
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Huh, didn’t realize that NYT was disliked from before only. I thought it was a decent American newspaper. The only other American newspaper I can think of is Washington Post, but that is so capitalist friendly to say the least.
Among overseas newspapers, I had decent idea of UK based ones (looks and judges Sun readers :p) but not otherwise.
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:30
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Does anyone else remember this fake commercial from a real life movie with actual brand names in it?
Blade9732@lemmy.world
on 27 May 14:43
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So, NYT, do the Swiss all have micro hands? How do you explain Swiss watchmaking? For that matter, how about American watchmaking? America used to make all kinds of tiny wristwatches, including movements. There is also a few current American watchmakers, with a few building intricate movements.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 27 May 15:10
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The worst garbage imperial propagandists pushing racist pseudo-science in service to capitalism? Genocidal fascists promoting colonialism? I’m shocked!!! SHOCKED!!! \s
Your first link is from 2018 titled, “A Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?” I’ll quote from the article:
“An investigation by The New York Times found that Ms. Najjar, and what happened on the evening of June 1, were far more complicated than either narrative allowed… The Palestinians trying to tear down the fence are risking their lives to make a point, knowing that the protests amount to little more than a public relations stunt…”
Now let’s see if they question Israel’s narratives the same way?
Titled “In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas” and I quote:
“Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States… Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7. The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict.”
Where is the investigation? This is a video that wasn’t even taken by NYT. Regardless, for every 10 Israeli propaganda article, maybe one or two being slightly critical doesn’t mean jack shit.
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.”
Fucking what? Who are these supply chain experts? Did you pull them out of your ass?
This reads like AI. I’ve lost any speck of respect I still had for NYT.
Response from New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander:
Our reporting does not make racial or genetic generalizations, but simply cites experts who have experience with the industrial process in U.S. and Chinese factories.
I can point you to the comments of Patrick McGee, author of the new book Apple in China. On a recent podcast appearance, he said “The tasks that often are being done to make iPhones require little fingers. The fact that it’s young Chinese women with little fingers like that actually matters. Apple engineers will talk about this”
Their response is literally “he said it on a podcast,” and his comment on the podcast was the fingers statement plus “Apple engineers talk about this.”
Go suck a railroad spike bud, you might as well have said that foot binding is the reason for good workplace retention, because Apple workers said so.
Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.
China has millions of people who migrate around the country to work in factories as Apple revs up production around a new iPhone. They often work from the summer until Chinese New Year, when production slows down, so Apple’s suppliers don’t have to pay them for a full year of work. They live in dormitories connected to factories with assembly lines longer than a football field, clustered nearby component suppliers.
turtlesareneat@discuss.online
on 28 May 03:25
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It’s been the punchline of a dark joke for years.
You gotta get those little hands building the little toys.
We make the dark joke because we know it’s true, but we can collectively point at a tech company and say it’s their fault, and still enjoy the fruits of their labor at prices we can afford.
Globalism - hyperglobal capitalism - is all about externalizing the negativities and internalizing the positives.
I agree with the outrage, but I don’t know that using race science to combat race science is the way to attack this horseshit. Futurism essentially says “the NYT says Asians have small hands, but what the race science actually says is that hand size is yada yada etc. etc.”
Like, is race science silly or is it not? 🤷 If science said that, yes, Asian women have unusually small and “nimble” fingers, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; the entire concept is stupid and racist, not just the inaccuracy of the hand measurements. Needling over the microdifferences in index finger girth between Asians and Americans (who may well be of Asian descent themselves) is missing the whole-ass point.
uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca
on 27 May 20:28
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TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world
on 28 May 00:17
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applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
on 27 May 21:03
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Terrible journalism. The author entirely neglects the fact that lemurs possess fingers even smaller than those of Chinese women. Why not have lemurs manufacture iPhones, given the particular daintiness of their digits? A true investigative journalist wouldn’t leave such crucial avenues of inquiry unexplored.
andybytes@programming.dev
on 28 May 08:36
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it’s hard for apple to manufacture devices in a country with robust labor rights.
Robust labor rights? The US?
We have child labor making a comeback here. It’s not that far fetched to imagine children working in hypothetical US factories if things keep going the way they’re going.
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.” […]
there doesn’t seem to be a lick of evidence […] that small hands are preferable for manufacturing small devices. The closest thing we could find was a paper that found that surgeons with smaller hands actually had a harder time manipulating dextrous operating tools, which would seem to contradict the NYT’s claim that small hands are an advantage for small specialized movements.
(…so should they be hiring big white men instead? Not clear to me how this article thinks that’s a rebuttal of the ‘race science’)
I don’t really know what I’m talking about nor do I have a horse in this race, but could it be that small handed surgeons struggle with tools because the tools themselves are designed for big hands?
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
on 28 May 04:42
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Okay but what about the Japanese people that have long torsos but very thick muscular short legs? I’ve noticed that in both men and women. Its counterintuitive for karate for example. Short legs don’t help for high kicks and such. Bicycles would be awesome with short powerful legs though. Key cars would fit fine. Anyway its just a stereotype. I don’t think all Japanese people have that body shape. I don’t think the small hand thing actually helps. Its probably more like the people working tend to be kids maybe? And they want to cover it up or justify it somehow?
The use of “race science” in this headline has been bugging me and I only just realized why. Questionable race science would be claiming that e.g. asian women think in some particularly useful way, or any other specific claim about race that is hard to prove. But it’s actually quite easy to show asian women have small hands, I assume – at least, it seems to me like asian women do tend to have much smaller hands than men of other races. This is not the dubious claim. The dubious claim is whether those smaller hands are useful or not.
I am not really sure what to make of this, I’m still grappling with this one. Just thought I’d share my scattered thoughts.
To be clear, you’re saying that asian women typically having smaller hands is dubious? I have to double-check because I’m astonished anyone doubts this.
For one thing, it’s not even clear that the claim that Chinese women have small fingers is even true. Research on global hand size is lacking, but one study found that the average Chinese person has a hand size approximately equal to that of the average German. An analysis of hand size around the world, though it didn’t include China, found that even the largest average differences in women’s hand size between countries was negligible.
Interesting! I wouldn’t have expected germans and chinese people to have similar hand sizes, given their heights differ.
The study you linked right off the bat claims that women from the Philippines have markedly larger hand sizes than other women. I notice that analysis doesn’t include standard deviation or calculate statistical significance. It also looks like women from vietnam have smaller hand sizes, which is not surprising to me, because people from vietnam tend to be shaped in a way that is different from people from other countries, though I don’t know why.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee
on 28 May 05:59
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As with most news source, I take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the news sources are owned by billionaires who have financial incentive to twist public media
Donebrach@lemmy.world
on 28 May 06:30
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yall seriously need some media literacy classes. or basic reading comprehension classes.
NYT paraphrased some industry people who posited that Chinese manufacturing benefits from small lady hands. that’s literally just covering a story. they didn’t say “us can’t make stuff because we don’t have little china-fingers and only tiny-china-fingers can make the pocket computers.” they just reported that some unnamed assholes said that.
Follow your own advice then, you’ll learn that it’s the role of the journalist to qualify wrong and offensive statements reported, or it is implied that the journalist approves of the position.
andybytes@programming.dev
on 28 May 08:43
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The comment section is all over the place gawd damn
threaded - newest
I guess the NYT no longer has an editor on staff? Who the fuck let that go to print, also who writes something like that into an article - that little paragraph where the NYT claims that “industry experts” said Chinese girls are better at assembling phones reads like cringe AI slop.
I feel like literally one person proofreading that should have been enough for them to go, “maybe don’t print the stupid racist thing about small fingers.”
If it’s children doing it then it’s not racist anymore. – NYT, probably
capitalist mutual masturbation and manufactured cognitive dissonance / distraction so they don’t have to actually change anything and effect profit potential. while they wait for daddy dictator trump to open their proposals in the form of a cotton sack with a dollar sign on the side.
Authors name is “Tripp” and if he’s a real person he 100% used AI to write it.
I’m guessing his grandfather was/is loaded and connected. I’ve never met a man in my life who goes by “Tripp” and isn’t an insufferable douche coasting off generational wealth.
The crazy part is he just “wrote” a book about Apple, and there’s a good chance Apple execs he talked to really said that stupid racist thing.
He goes by tripp because, according to his personal image consultant, “Leopold reitbarth the third” didn’t test well with under 30s in their focus groups
They will fire the editor and writer (who are probably overworked and forced to use AI slop to meet deadlines), and the cycle begins anew.
@ZDL@ttrpg.network
What stood out for me was this line:
Robust labour rights? An American is talking about “robust labor rights”!? If someone from the EU had written that I’d have gone “fair enough”. But against an American employer?
Let’s put it this way: I’ve worked in China for 25 years. I turned down a job in the USA shortly before moving here (about two years before). There’s a reason for this (and it wasn’t just the gun in the job interview).
Yep exactly!
Alright you hooked me, I want to hear about the gun slinging interviewer.
The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.
A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?
Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.
Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:
None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.
But that final job interview… Yeah.
I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.
“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”
And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.
And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.
In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.
That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.
¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.
Glad I asked. Sounds like you wouldn’t have needed good health care there anyway, that dude shoots to kill.
Yeah, that’s weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make in the US has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it’s purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can’t do that in the US. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
China ain't the cheapest anymore and has not been for a while.
No, but it’s substantially cheaper than the US and cheap enough that moving operations isn’t practical. Companies are moving to other south Asian countries, but China remains a staple for reasonably competent and reasonably cheap labor.
China also has an established, robust, and technically advanced manufacturing sector. That honestly is the biggest thing keeping manufacturing there. Things made from raw resources could be moved easily but the lower labor costs would be offset by the decreased demand due to most of their customers being back in China.
Things are even worse for anyone making something that requires manufactured components as all those suppliers are in China so now not only are they taking a hit for reduced demand, but also the headaches of having to import their components from China just to build anything. Labor would need to be ridiculously cheap compared to China for that to start looking like a good idea.
So does the US, they just do a lot less manufacturing than they used to because it became cheaper to send that to other countries. The US does a lot more design work than actual production.
Right, which is why labor moved to China in the first place. If labor gets more expensive in China, manufacturing will move elsewhere, both for components and finished products.
The only way to get large scale back to developed countries is through automation, which dramatically reduces the labor cost. But at that point, it’s not creating jobs anyway, so why not do that nearer to where the raw materials are extracted anyway?
I personally don’t understand why developed countries are so interested in moving manufacturing back. I understand it’s not great for national security and whatnot, so it makes sense to have some domestic production capability if there’s ever war in the region, but a lot of that issue can be solved by diversifying where things are produced, since war is unlikely to impact the entire supply chain if you maintain naval dominance, which the US has and they share it w/ other developed western powers.
They’ve been known to literally lock people in their factories, and even put up suicide nets to prevent slaves from killing themselves.
Iqbal Masih
Google this boy if you haven’t heard of him everyone. Two adult men assassinated a child for what he had to say
This is the darkest thing I’ve seen today, thanks
Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren’t available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.
Neither did China until Apple trained them
While being subsidized by the tax code to do so🤡
Shenzen’s supply chain is hardly all on Apple’s behalf or behest.
So 20-25 years from now we can be in the same place?
Yes. But also the labour thing. Like alot.
We? Not unless the entire government decided to fundamentally change overnight. The US government would never tell conglomerates what to do, it takes it’s orders from them.
The US had and has plenty, which is why manufacturing started in the US and migrated out once processes standardized enough to bring in less competent labor. Then labor became more competent, so more companies moved their operations there. A lot of US manufacturing engineers work with Chinese manufacturing facilities, because that’s where the labor is.
If the US wants to bring manufacturing back, it needs to be cheaper to do it domestically. That means automation, better materials transportation, and cheap raw materials.
I don’t see the point. Instead of bringing back manufacturing, improve education and focus on higher value work.
That’s because it was all outsourced to China because they utilize cheap/free labor.
If we had started doing tariffs 30 years ago we could have prevented that. Or if we enacted tariffs as part of a larger plan to slowly transition that industry back over the next 20 years, we could probably do that as well.
But just slapping a 250% tariff overnight and expecting everything to sort itself out is the kind of a plan only the orange moron could come up with.
What’s important to note is all the pieces that get screwed together are still made over there…
We can pay tariffs on all the pieces and screw them together here, but that’s going to essentially have the same tariff costs as a completed iPhone.
Having someone screw the pieces together here would also raise costs due to labor costs. But they’re two completely different things.
Quick edit:
Times author is legitimately named “Trip” and started out as a sports writer before pivoting to “apple, bourbon, and beer”.
These days it might just be AI, but if it’s a human it’s almost certainly a nepo hire…
They could even waive the tariffs and it would still be impractical to assemble in the US. The only way it’s practical here is with near full automation, and even then it’s probably still cheaper in China.
Labor and land are just so much cheaper there.
Apple spent literal decades training workers over there, and the Chinese government busted up Apple and all their workers went to competitors…
Like, sure, someone has to assemble the screws but it didn’t take Apple 20 years of investment to just teach them to use a screwdriver. It’s skilled labor.
Jon Stewart had some guy that wrote a book on it a week or two ago.
There’s some skilled labor, sure, but most of it is processes, and those can be replicated elsewhere. Apple brought the processes and refined them with local labor. But none of it is so special that it can’t be replicated elsewhere in a couple years (assuming facilities exist).
Look at phone repair, you can go to any mall and a teenager can disassemble and reassemble your phone with only a month or so of training. Making that process efficient is the hard part, and that only requires a few skilled jobs in a factory of thousands. The vast majority of jobs in assembly are pretty unskilled.
Apple isn’t in the process of spending billions over decades to train people just to install screws…
Like, fuck Apple, I’ve never owned a single Apple product. But they wouldn’t have spent that much for so long to train people for unskilled labor.
Quick edit:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
275,000,000,000 over five years…
That’s 55 billion a year, for five years straight.
It doesn’t cost that much to train someone to put a screw in
Sure, but it does cost that much to build a suite of factories complete w/ automation and whatnot. Buildings are expensive, especially high tech ones, but that doesn’t mean the labor involved is particularly high skill. Components, processes, software, etc are still largely designed by highly skilled workers in western countries.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.
You can just keep repeating the same thing over and over again despite it being wrong…
Doesn’t make it true tho, just makes other people eventually stop responding
Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
Sure, but I don’t think supply chains are the critical factor here. You don’t necessarily need local supply if you can break up delivery into small enough chunks, so whether it takes a day or a month to get a part isn’t important once the flow is going smoothly. You only need local supply if there’s a significant risk of disruption/delays.
Yes, it’s probably a bit cheaper to assemble things closer to where they’re produced, but I still think labor costs are the determining factor. US workers expect higher pay, more PTO, less hours worked per week, and more benefits, so even if all the parts were shipped in perfectly consistently, it would still be significantly more expensive to assemble iPhones in the US vs in China.
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing minimum wage is ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
NYT mirror: archive.is/…/apple-iphone-trump-india-china.html
I guess they can’t comprehend tweezers?
.
Never change, NYT. Wait maybe change a little.
Owned by Bezos, or am I misremembering?
That’s the Washington Post
That’s the Washington Post.
No, that’s the Washington Post. The NYT did change ownership a few years ago and that’s why it’s gone to shit, but the owner isn’t a household name.
Nyt has been weird for as long as I can remember, and that's a long time.
.
OH, man. I feel attacked. I’m going to cry onto my D&D minis now.
"All the crap that fits, we print."
It takes tiny hands to fit all the type on the page.
This 100% reads like LLM output; it's confidently wrong, isn't using proper news copy syntax, and got weirdly vague as it trailed off ("the small device").
NYT is publishing AI articles.
Wasn’t this also the argument for child labor? “Small children can fit into tight spaces easier, lets use them to unjam dangerous machinery”
But the children yearn for the mines!
It’s all about the roboblox these days. The kids yearn for robots.
Probably scrapped articles with “labor in Asia” to get this spat out
The right watched snow piercer and needed therapy after see all the horrible things that the back of the train did to their betters.
China use child labor, so……
Does it? They’re a middle-upper income country now, and child labor tends to be an issue at much lower levels of development. Anyway, for the Chinese electronics sector, you’re vastly more likely to see humanoid robots than children.
Yes. For example I know in textiles especially, they were small enough to run under & between machines to get things without the factory having to them off. (Surprise surprise, guess how kids got maimed and/or killed…)
Yeah def what I was thinking. It’s strange that instead of admitting to this they’re just rolling with it saying it’s based off something they read.
We can’t claim that everything weird is written by AI, because there are weird human writers too. Although even if not AI, “experts claim” is such a dodgy source, that alone makes it untrustworthy.
Ah, NYT. Amongst all subscriptions that I have come across in my country, NYT is the most expensive. Since they haven’t heard of region specific pricing and just multiply by exchange rate; it’s only six times more expensive than YT Premium in India.
Atleast I was under the belief that they had decent editorial standards but looks like that ship has sailed away as well.
Boss I hate to be the one to tell you, but this is exactly what their editorial standards have always been lol
Huh, didn’t realize that NYT was disliked from before only. I thought it was a decent American newspaper. The only other American newspaper I can think of is Washington Post, but that is so capitalist friendly to say the least.
Among overseas newspapers, I had decent idea of UK based ones (looks and judges Sun readers :p) but not otherwise.
Does anyone else remember this fake commercial from a real life movie with actual brand names in it?
Crazy People, Sony Commercial
So, NYT, do the Swiss all have micro hands? How do you explain Swiss watchmaking? For that matter, how about American watchmaking? America used to make all kinds of tiny wristwatches, including movements. There is also a few current American watchmakers, with a few building intricate movements.
They are simply quoting supply chain executives.
Full response from the New York Times:
<img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/f87cca2e-4358-46e1-aff7-d8b53e7dc41c.jpeg">
Source: bsky.app/profile/…/3lpwhwcm4es24
.
The worst garbage imperial propagandists pushing racist pseudo-science in service to capitalism? Genocidal fascists promoting colonialism? I’m shocked!!! SHOCKED!!! \s
People are just now waking up to realize a pro genocide & pro wealth disparity publication isn’t moral?
With all due respect, your statements are non-sense.
They have published very hard hitting investigations against Israel:
nytimes.com/…/gaza-medic-israel-shooting.html
www.nytimes.com/…/gaza-doctor-interviews.html
nytimes.com/…/israel-gaza-medics-attack-idf.html
With all non-due respect, you’re being dishonest & disingenuous.
Your first link is from 2018 titled, “A Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?” I’ll quote from the article:
“An investigation by The New York Times found that Ms. Najjar, and what happened on the evening of June 1, were far more complicated than either narrative allowed… The Palestinians trying to tear down the fence are risking their lives to make a point, knowing that the protests amount to little more than a public relations stunt…”
Now let’s see if they question Israel’s narratives the same way?
nytimes.com/…/israel-hamas-information-war.html
Titled “In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas” and I quote:
“Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States… Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7. The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict.”
This is an opinion piece, right up there alongside:
The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity: www.nytimes.com/…/israel-hamas-war-genocide.html
The Reason for an Israeli Curfew: Palestinian Terrorism: www.nytimes.com/2020/…/israel-palestinians.html
Where is the investigation? This is a video that wasn’t even taken by NYT. Regardless, for every 10 Israeli propaganda article, maybe one or two being slightly critical doesn’t mean jack shit.
dropsitenews.com/…/new-york-times-ignored-doubts-…
theintercept.com/…/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-pales…
Let’s look at this recent story:
“The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States…”
Nyt is compromised
Fucking what? Who are these supply chain experts? Did you pull them out of your ass?
This reads like AI. I’ve lost any speck of respect I still had for NYT.
A woman just wrote to the New York Times:
<img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/bc329a5c-90df-4916-882b-48d3737886f6.jpeg">
bsky.app/profile/…/3lpwhwcm4es24
Response from New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander:
pbs.twimg.com/media/GrvKbVlXwAEFLjs?format=jpg&na…
bsky.app/profile/…/3lpwokddpo22k
Their response is literally “he said it on a podcast,” and his comment on the podcast was the fingers statement plus “Apple engineers talk about this.”
Go suck a railroad spike bud, you might as well have said that foot binding is the reason for good workplace retention, because Apple workers said so.
You still had respect for it? It’s owned by and has been pushing Bezo’s agenda for ages now
Bezos owns the Washington Post not the NYT.
From the article:
nytimes.com/…/apple-iphone-trump-india-china.html
Is it wrong? Well, I’m actually not sure.
The Financial Times revealed that the iPhone X was manufactured by underage Chinese teenagers:
ft.com/…/7cb56786-cda1-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc
It’s been the punchline of a dark joke for years.
You gotta get those little hands building the little toys.
We make the dark joke because we know it’s true, but we can collectively point at a tech company and say it’s their fault, and still enjoy the fruits of their labor at prices we can afford.
Globalism - hyperglobal capitalism - is all about externalizing the negativities and internalizing the positives.
I agree with the outrage, but I don’t know that using race science to combat race science is the way to attack this horseshit. Futurism essentially says “the NYT says Asians have small hands, but what the race science actually says is that hand size is yada yada etc. etc.”
Like, is race science silly or is it not? 🤷 If science said that, yes, Asian women have unusually small and “nimble” fingers, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference; the entire concept is stupid and racist, not just the inaccuracy of the hand measurements. Needling over the microdifferences in index finger girth between Asians and Americans (who may well be of Asian descent themselves) is missing the whole-ass point.
Wait, wait, I’ve seen this one!
Caucasians are too damn tall.
applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
Terrible journalism. The author entirely neglects the fact that lemurs possess fingers even smaller than those of Chinese women. Why not have lemurs manufacture iPhones, given the particular daintiness of their digits? A true investigative journalist wouldn’t leave such crucial avenues of inquiry unexplored.
Hahahhhaahahha
Wait a second:
Robust labor rights? The US?
We have child labor making a comeback here. It’s not that far fetched to imagine children working in hypothetical US factories if things keep going the way they’re going.
After China and India, yeah, the US has very robust labor laws
Gigaset produces in Germany.
I think that’s exactly where they were aiming with the small finger stuff. They want kids in factories again.
I wipe my ass with NYT these days. All they’ve been publishing is straight garbage
Wiping your ass with horse shit is not quite something to be proud of.
TLDR
(…so should they be hiring big white men instead? Not clear to me how this article thinks that’s a rebuttal of the ‘race science’)
I don’t really know what I’m talking about nor do I have a horse in this race, but could it be that small handed surgeons struggle with tools because the tools themselves are designed for big hands?
A valid hypothesis
that does seem plausible.
The size of the tools are dictated from the use of the tool, not the surgeon’s hand size. You simply have the same tool in different size.
Okay but what about the Japanese people that have long torsos but very thick muscular short legs? I’ve noticed that in both men and women. Its counterintuitive for karate for example. Short legs don’t help for high kicks and such. Bicycles would be awesome with short powerful legs though. Key cars would fit fine. Anyway its just a stereotype. I don’t think all Japanese people have that body shape. I don’t think the small hand thing actually helps. Its probably more like the people working tend to be kids maybe? And they want to cover it up or justify it somehow?
The use of “race science” in this headline has been bugging me and I only just realized why. Questionable race science would be claiming that e.g. asian women think in some particularly useful way, or any other specific claim about race that is hard to prove. But it’s actually quite easy to show asian women have small hands, I assume – at least, it seems to me like asian women do tend to have much smaller hands than men of other races. This is not the dubious claim. The dubious claim is whether those smaller hands are useful or not.
I am not really sure what to make of this, I’m still grappling with this one. Just thought I’d share my scattered thoughts.
It is dubious.
To be clear, you’re saying that asian women typically having smaller hands is dubious? I have to double-check because I’m astonished anyone doubts this.
From the article :
Interesting! I wouldn’t have expected germans and chinese people to have similar hand sizes, given their heights differ.
The study you linked right off the bat claims that women from the Philippines have markedly larger hand sizes than other women. I notice that analysis doesn’t include standard deviation or calculate statistical significance. It also looks like women from vietnam have smaller hand sizes, which is not surprising to me, because people from vietnam tend to be shaped in a way that is different from people from other countries, though I don’t know why.
As with most news source, I take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the news sources are owned by billionaires who have financial incentive to twist public media
yall seriously need some media literacy classes. or basic reading comprehension classes.
NYT paraphrased some industry people who posited that Chinese manufacturing benefits from small lady hands. that’s literally just covering a story. they didn’t say “us can’t make stuff because we don’t have little china-fingers and only tiny-china-fingers can make the pocket computers.” they just reported that some unnamed assholes said that.
Follow your own advice then, you’ll learn that it’s the role of the journalist to qualify wrong and offensive statements reported, or it is implied that the journalist approves of the position.
The comment section is all over the place gawd damn
youtu.be/96iJsdGkl44