A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
(www.404media.co)
from cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Apr 2025 02:56
https://lemmy.world/post/27965719
from cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Apr 2025 02:56
https://lemmy.world/post/27965719
threaded - newest
Sure that’s not automated yet?
Everything’s computer!
Apparently jobs like that, which require fine motor skills, are extremely difficult to automate.
Weird. Not like pcb fabs haven’t been doing that for ages. And not necessarily the solder flood type chip mounts either.
Pick and place machines are one thing, but plugging in tiny connectors, screws that need a little wiggle to go in the hole, things like that are a different story.
Probably also a factor is that you would be spinning up a whole production line and automation systems for phones that will only be in production for 12 to 18 months, after which you’d have to adapt or redo everything for the new model.
Use the same cameras and AI that Musk said were gonna fully automate Tesla
I don’t want my iPhone to get the build quality of a motorized dumpster
Musk has quite famously admitted that robots can’t do everything, and humans are extremely good at problem solving.
Nope, I’ve long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it’s still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.
That really is the least of the worries, there just isn’t the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn’t feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.
Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.
IPhone 17:
<img alt="Brick phone" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b137dae0-131a-447c-aa79-1811885f3e4f.jpeg">
That would be the first iPhone I’d actually buy.
$76.999 price will surely stop you.
Nah, I’ll just use my “Tariff Dividend” check when Trump writes it. China will pay for it.
Physical keys and what looks like a headphone jack? Seems like an upgrade
Replacable battery, I bet
.
I’ve seen M.A.S.H.. You can just crank the handle a few times to charge it!
Only $4000 for the entry model. That’s how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.
That is before Apple levels of profit added on, right? Otherwise that seems a bit low.
Or the Google tax of a few hundred bucks for the OS. Which could happen. Google is worse than Micro$uck at this point and I say this as someone who returned their OEM license before. See Revolution OS youtu.be/k0RYQVkQmWU
Even Linux is now weaponized for profits over anything else…:.::.
So argument invalid
?? Google pays Apple to put their search in Apple’s OS
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.
.
Sure, plenty of small phones with good battery life back then. Owned a new phone every three months or so, innovation went that fast in the 90’s.
But those small phones have a few drawbacks. Too small for my hands and you can’t really shoulder it like we used to with landlines.
I also mis proper flip phones like the Motorola Startac. You could snap those closed with authority. Can’t quite do that with those modern folding screen flips.
Oooh! I had this back in the day. It was absolutely fantastic. I would love for this to come back again. I miss physical buttons and being able to do everything on the phone with one hand.
This model was pretty cool!
My last Sony Ericsson was the S710
<img alt="Sony Ericsson S710" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1241aeaf-32fa-449e-8e51-538cf1c6341b.jpeg">
I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.
Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…
If they slap an Apple logo on it the gullible sheep would buy it anyway.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/d699e1c5-cef7-4997-ac56-ed4170429a1b.png">
Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango
Steven
not to mention one of the reasons we eagerly off-shored electronics fabrication in the first place is because it’s a toxic nightmare
Toxic as in workplace relations or toxic as in environmental effects? Or some other third meaning?
environmental effects
Fortune article last year just talked about water and power in just the chip sector: The chip industry’s dirty little secret: It’s very dirty
Good thing Trump gives zero fucks about the climate and environment then /s
You get a Bhopal! And you get a Bhopal! Everyone gets a Bhopal!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/97264559-58af-4aa2-adfe-3df85f56a1e7.png">
Sucks to suck, buy used
Do they have tariffs on second hand goods from Asia being imported to sell to poor Americans who cant afford local?
the kicker will be when new-from-China plus 100% tariff is still cheaper than American made …
Exactly. US manufacturing will have to gut wages in order to compete. Hope they enjoy their $12/ dozen eggs. After rent and insurance and petrol, they may not even be able to afford those imported Chinese goods either. Outside of the US bubble though…
If it’s imported, there’s a tariff.
There might be a loophole if it’s declared as e-waste.
What if the ‘used’ run out?
Repair, smuggle, Jerry rig
By that time it will be the new world order...
You will have bigger issues to worry about lol
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I don’t doubt that it’s possible, but it would cost $7,000 or some shit.
I’m genuinely surprised Trump killed the CHIPS act, when he could’ve let that roll through and taken credit for it as the whole POINT of that was to improve US manufacturing.
Also reintroduce the build back better with whatever re-branding.
If he were truly interested in american manufacturing he’d have gone all in on these.
But no. he wants company owners and worldl eaders to come to him and beg for exemptions.
He wants to get rid of everything associated with bEYEden and also wants to stick it to CHAIna.
Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.
I’m not surprised.
The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.
As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.
Don’t talk nonsense. Trump will destroy America and take Europe down the same path if he gets the chance.
The breakdown of trust in the Atlantic alliance alone is one of the worst things that could have happened to both sides and this is just the beginning. They’re going to fuck themselves and they’re going to fuck us in the process.
I hope our EU government get some sense and stop acting like the vasals they are.
This could be the push we need.
The US never were our friends and this ‘alliance’ is nothing more than being in their sphere of influence and serving their interests. Bcs they are losing power in the world they are now canibalising their own side.
Who said ‘there will be no more Nordstream’?
And then in a pure act of terror blew it up forcing us to buy 8x more expensive US fracking gas.
Not one peep from our sell-out leaders.
We needed to drop this horrible country long time ago, regardless of Trump.
The EU is not as detached from global economics as you seem to believe it is. The fall of the US will have world wide implications, for many generations.
I never said that, but it needs to be done.
We need to cut ties before they drag us down further.
Our economy is already going to shit with the high energy prices caused by them blowing up Nordstream.
And that was under Genocide Joe.
I would rather have an incompetent moron in charge of the country seeing us as vasals since forever.
And if it’s up to them they will gladly see us all at war again like WW2.
Their competition destroying themselves while they benefit and sell arms.
Fuck that whole country
Do you have the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” in Europe?
that doesn’t apply.
It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.
And how do you plan on doing that today? You are also delusional like Trump if you think you can just cut ties and happily watch US go up in flames. That simply isn’t gonna happen, certainly not before his current term ends.
It can happen pretty fast, look what Russia did with those sactions.
The EU, their neighbour, simply got replaced.
We can certainly do the same with the US.
The USSR was not thoroughly embedded in the world economies. Nor did it have as staunch of allies in major positions in EU government as the US does today. Don’t get me wrong, despite being in the US, I do think that countries divesting and becoming less dependent upon a slave state, like the US, is a good thing. However, as the “Great Recession” demonstrated, EU economies are very much entangled with the US economy, with few lessons seeming to have been learned in the last decade and a half.
Sure, the US might be more impacted, but the EU will not be unscathed, if there isn’t more effort to decouple and ditch neoliberal policies. That kind of stuff can’t happen overnight.
I think you accidentally blockquoted the whole thing. Probably can fix by adding a new line after each quote block.
I’d say, maybe, oversimplified. Until the later stages, no country was as extremely embedded in global economies as has occurred between the late 20th century and now. The soviets did embed themselves in places where they saw possible advantage over the West, saw opportunity for vassal states, and engaged in some of the aul’ imperialism. Even in Eastern Europe, it wasn’t as embedded as the US economy has become at this point. Greater levels of industrialization and not being dependent on high tech sectors that are largely US-controlled, as well as proximity to the EU made the economic stagnation easier to weather.
Sorry. I had it framed in my head as a comparison between the breaking up of the USSR and potential dissolution of the US.
As someone living in the US, with a hard lean into anarchism, I absolutely agree with all of that. Allowing the US, with its push for unfettered, neoliberal capitalism to dig itself in and influence policy has caused extraordinary harm. Since the fall of the USSR, economic decision-makers in the US have seen no reason to improve the lives of the average citizen nor reasons not to intentionally bleed them dry for profit.
If you don’t root out neoliberalism in Europe, the same will happen there (look at the UK).
Yes the Soviets mostly traded with their sphere and they are/were probably the most autarkic state in the world but even at the height of the cold war, they kept trading with the US for example.
Business over politics.
The situation in Europe could get as bad as in the US and worse.
Plenty of countries where it’s difficult to keep the extreme right out of power.
I don’t see how it can be stopped.
The ‘sanctions’ that massively backfired are destroying our economy. We know what that led to in the 30’s.
And the insane governments and their media are determined to send the kids off to the eastern front again sice they have their scapegoat.
Could be that soon you may consider yourself in the better position where Europe is getting destroyed in full on war while you are far away.
Anyway, I wish us both good luck fir the bleak future.
Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.
Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.
I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.
I’m surprised that people like you are still surprised at what Trump does.
And what is THAT supposed to be?
I’ve been screaming about the republicans since they made it clear they were going for pure obstructionism with Obama.
Understanding Trump is simple: he’s a narcissist. For example, if the CHIPS act succeeds, Biden gets credit, so it’s bad. It’s really quite simple.
It appears that CHIPS was kept, but revamped.
Right, basically renamed. Trump wants the for credit. His opposition to Obama and Biden isn’t over policy, but that his name isn’t on it.
I’d have to look into it more, but my gut tells me the CHIPS act & ‘Build Back Better’ was filled to the brim with pork & bullshit. You’d have to parse through, line by line, and take out all the shit. And hope all the changes get passed & implemented, and of course you’re still touting the worthless name of a project that your people hate that you didn’t even create. Or just blindly trust your opponent’s judgment calls & let it roll through, based on “just trust me, bro”. Nooooo thank you. Why bother?
With stuff like this, it tends to be easier & more expedient to take it behind the shed & shoot it. Replace it with your distinctly different, branded equivalent.
However. If this is true, it appears that Trump didn’t fully raze the CHIPS act & merely revamped it, is taking credit for it. Like you said. CHIPS must have been pretty true to cause.
Oh I’m sure there was pork there, but to just dismissi t out of hand is kinda disengenouls especially when all the politicians (mostly republican) that voted against it tried snapping up credit come time for the ribbon cutting and new construction to aged infrastructure.
Granted Manchan and Senna opposed the build back better initiative and both were explicitely paid off by fossil fuel industry wonks… And i figure if they’re in opposition, ‘I want it even more out of sheer fucking spite to you greedy assholes that make money killing the planet my niece is going to have to live in.’
Even if he had gone all in on manufacturing, it’s not like a supply network of industrial goods can be built in a day. Hell, it’s hard to build that in a 4-year term. Trump is virtue signalling while at the same time jeopardizing any chance America had of reshoring.
It’s honestly infuriating me how big projects needed to improve our infrastructure take years and years to complete, when from one administration to the next, those same projects can be cancelled.
It takes multiple presidencies to build something good, and it takes one to tear it all down.
I see now the benefits of China’s 5 year plans with how well organized they can control their economy.
My phone came from Samsung, who doesn’t use Chinese slave child labor. So this whole idea is pretty insane to me. You iPhone people don’t give a shit. Stop pretending.
Where do you think Samsung phones are made and by whom?
Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-mad…
A post this dumb is almost certainly trolling, but in case you’re actually serious about bragging your phone was made in a Vietnamese sweatshop instead of a Chinese one, maybe you should read the news more: thenation.com/…/was-your-smartphone-built-in-a-sw…
Watch out for the leopard!
Everyone playing along that this is some kind of genuine policy play are just buying into Trump as a legitimate leader in a similar way to how MAGA-heads do. Trump does not give a fuck about American manufacturing, American jobs, onshoring, offshoring, none of that. It’s all a grift. He’s waiting for some kind of payoff here, be it in the form of countries giving in to bad deals for the Trump Organization or investing in Truth or $TRMP. In some cases he gets to be feted at state dinners and sign some watered down, meaningless “trade deal,” temporarily backfilling his deep insecurities. Enough of this and most of the tariffs evaporate.
That’s just how the media work unfortunately. They keep explaining how tariffs work to people that know it while MAGA voters post ‘Fuck Biden’ over and over on twitter.
Instead of Vietnamese children making t-shirts to sell to the USA, they want American children to make t-shirts to sell to Vietnam.
This makes absolutely no fucking sense even from a nationalistic standpoint.
In that case, it would make sense why they are so pro-life - more child slaves to make products. Reminds me of that one family guy episode … www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd6Shxz9UUs
Nah man, they’ll start using the prisons for more then menial labor. You don’t have to pay them at all
But then they have to fill those prisons with more and more people. How can America just increase the crime rate on a whim?
glances briefly to American history
Oh right, shit.
Slavery never ended in the US, it just got better PR.
“Only prisoners can be sentenced to slave labor.”
Makes a while bunch of stuff punishable by prison time and makes prison sentences longer.
Ameristan will be lucky to produce calculators if they keep up this crap.
And they’ll cost $600 each
Texas Instruments has entered the chat
Even that’s gonna take some work.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/eb5a70cd-10b8-46f3-a935-e5fb885d7c38.jpeg">
Probably not a fantasy, but it’s gonna cost like 3k bucks lmao
Bold of you to assume that Trump and Company won’t put the average American to work for almost nothing. The planned economic recession is to convince the people to do so.
The new generation of American children will not spend most of their time studying in school, but rather working in factories for a handful of peanuts. That’s Trump’s America.
Prison labor, that’s the answer. They’ll just start making the prisons into actual factories
They already are, prison labor expansion would be at the expense of existing companies.
And it would be completely legal under the Constitution.
Foxcon nets to catch jumpers in the US when?
This is the premise of Tom Maughan’s short story “Flyover Country”
shouldn’t affect sales though because apple fanboys will sell their grandmother to buy the latest
status symbolphoneChina has a lot more leverage to increase this price. Export tariffs on US listed companies to US, and perhaps to countries that choose to further increase sycophancy to US empire. Prevent US manufacturing with more export controls.
The problem with decades of propaganda/smearing is that too many people believe it. Bessent yesterday said “They only have a pair of 2s” as cards. No one in the room has not been programmed to “repeat that China is on brink of collapse for all of the last 20 years”. Hitler couldn’t win war because generals had to be loyal to every syphilis inspired thought of the dotard.
Chinese phones are vastly superior to this ridiculous brand.
Lol.
youtu.be/7ibXU-QvPgk
lmao.
Sure, believe some China bad YT channel.
Ah yes. Everything i disagree with is fake news.
Ah yes, every garbage YT ‘news’ that fits my Sinophobic narrative is true.
When is China’s economy going to crash? Any day now I hear.
Keep gobbling that Global Times 🥱
How good are the foldable iPhones? Oh, that’s right…
They don’t exist, but even motorolla has decent foldable tech
As a global company, Apple could just re-establish itself in europe, e.g. Ireland, and continue trading with China, they can just put the US on hold for a couple of years.
Meanwhile for those who really addicted to istuff, coyotes can smuggle iphones across the border, so maybe this solves the fentanyl ‘issue’.
Let me check if my silicon dealer can hook you up…
Apple already has an entity in Ireland which is the one that has most of the money. Google as well. When I pay my Google cloud bills, I don’t pay the us business, but a separate EU incorporated business. So I think, if apple sells to Europe, none of the iPhones or iPhone parts have to go through the US or pay any tarrifs.
And if chinese buy iphones, do they now have to pay 84% tariff? - maybe HQ in europe solves that too?
Most Apple products are assembled in China — some in India and Vietnam — from parts made in the region so there’s no new tariffs involved. Only Americans will have to pay more. It’s sort of like how Toyota and Honda having plants in Alabama won’t pay import tariffs.
Cars might be a bad example because their supply chains are so complex. They’ll still be more expensive because the components are often made overseas and Trump, idiotically, has tariffs on those parts (and steel and aluminum to boot). But a “foreign” car that rolls off the assembly line in the U.S. won’t have tariffs while an “American” car assembled in Mexico will.
But other businesses only have distributions centers in the US. So they import to US, pay tarrifs, and then I can buy from them in Europe, so indirectly I also paid the tarrifs. Even though product was made in China and I live in Europe.
If anything good comes from this, it’ll be reforming that. Even if tariffs were still a couple percentage points instead of based on a formula zero economists endorsed, you shouldn’t be forced to pay (or the companies able to avoid) tariffs by using a distribution center in a third country. It should all be based on country of origin and final destination.
A Chinese (or American) company setting up a factory in Vietnam is an entirely different thing. I’m not talking about that. The product was made in Vietnam and real foreign direct investment happened that’s beneficial to everyone. I just mean logistics hubs should be irrelevant when calculating tariffs.
The “ideal” solution if we must use tariffs would be to take into account where it’s all made but that’s way too complicated to implement and easy to game^1^, unfortunately. An iPhone is assembled in China but using parts from all over Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) and with a substantial portion of the actual value coming from California and the UK. Where is an iPhone really made if a Taiwan Semiconductor fab makes a bespoke processor based on ARM but designed in California? “Made in China” is what’s stamped on the box (actually they put “Made in China, Designed in California).
And that’s just the processor and a few other advanced chips. I think Samsung makes the screens in South Korea based on technology developed in the U.S. by Corning. If Apple wanted to skirt tariffs under that sort of regime, they could plausibly argue that the assembly is worth $10, manufacturing is worth $90, and the design and software are worth $900. I mean, smartphones are commodities now. People use iPhones because they like the software.
Tariffs based on the final step of assembly don’t make sense for complicated products made by multinational companies in the 21st century. The world makes an iPhone. Accounting for it all would be impossible.
In that case the EU will have to tax them proper.
This is actually one of the best solutions to this problem I’ve seen this whole time. Expand it to include all affected US companies. What’s she point of being a global company, if you can’t leverage your globalized nature for your advantage?
Also shows how much they actually can’t or won’t leave based just on just a (much needed) tax increase.
But it’s a bitch to strap them on a coyote and get it go where you want it to go. Oh coyote as in a smuggler not the 4 legged canine type
Yeah, but you just gave me an idea too, how about AI-directed canines? “apple-intelligence” applied to follow-your-nose. My dog loves to chase small spots of light, which might be a trick to steer them.
Lmao the image of a coyote with a belt of iPhones around its belly and a laser mounted on a rotating turret on its back chasing the dot across the border is quite something.
The people addicted to apple products will just buy it even with a 100%+ tariff. To them it’s a status thing.
While I don’t doubt this, I’m also sure that tarrifs will also affect the pricing/availability of utility (non-status symbol) mobile devices.
We are going to have to deal with this for 4 years (unless some Rs will vote the remove in 2) and recovery won’t be immediate. I hope my current mobile lasts that long, but I usually only get about 3 years out of a battery. Replacement parts will be hit by tarrifs, too.
The Galaxy S series and the Pixel devices cost about the same tbh, with some of the foldable models being particularly expensive. Buying way too much phone isn’t exclusive to Apple users. Apple is just clever by not really providing an entry-level priced phone. It’s both a scumbag move to make more money, but also a way to make sure that inferior devices providing an inferior experience don’t ruin their rep.
So? That’s not what the person you replied was even saying. You completely missed the point of their comment.
I was pointing out that it’s not only Apple users who pay out the ass for their phones. It transcends brand loyalty. Everyone is spending too much on phones and will continue to do so even if prices rise.
Hehe that is funny, sadly I think the US is Apples biggest market, so they probably wouldn’t want to let go and give up any marketshare.
US usually is the most important market for most (international) companies I believe.
US has only 4% of the world’s population, there are now plenty of super-rich in China, India, etc. who like to flaunt i-stuff.
I have no source, but I remember seeing a graph of where iPhones sell and places like China/India were 80% android phones (mostly Samsung I think).
I don’t think the asian marketplace puts Apple products in such high regard as the US.
Samsung phones are still premium, I think they appeal more in other countries.
I see what you mean though with 20% of just China being almost the US population, but they are still losing 300m customers.
Aaaaand the US is the new North Korea…
Indeed it seems Trump picked up some ideas about “Juche” (national self-reliance?) from his best buddy “rocket-man”.
Where would they get the chips and batteries?
Probably just lean super heavily on Taiwan, and Taiwan is also pledging to build a chip factory in the US. Georgia area, IIRC.
Batteries fucking suck. Can’t live with 'em, can’t live without 'em…but they’re always saying we’re on the cusp of an exciting new battery technology. Lately, they’re touting the idea of better, more efficient sodium batteries with all organic components.
While obviously it has a ways to go to reach working parity with lithium, there are also some big pros when it comes to safety & the ridiculous availability of sodium. If we can switch to sodium batteries, China takes a fucking massive hit.
I also hate batteries. Batteries suck.
I thought it was Arizona that the Taiwanese company was building in.
It’s actually interesting as a sort of exception-proving-the-rule because with the chip factory they discovered they simply couldn’t run its creation without having a bunch of skilled workers come over from Taiwan. which in turn caused culture shock/clash issues between the Taiwanese and American workers.
Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.
and no doubt at the same time their oligarch fantasy-wealthy overlords will preach to them about Spartan values or something. Ultranationalist Jingo Ghouls will talk about how its tough times create strong men, or about how we all have to prepare for war with China or something.
Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.
But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.
Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.
USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.
???
You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.
Basically a group of Marxist revolutionaries captured power in a big enough country, and their intention was to build a new society, a new world order, without capitalism as they saw it, and by means they could somehow devise.
So - I’m too dumb to expand well on this, but see the (formally dead since late 20s) concept of a soviet (a council) in the initial intended system. Citizens would both decide the fate of their polity and be inseparable from a collective, so soviet system is very simple - an atomic unit (a house, a factory line) elects their representative, on the next level (a factory or a street, for example) such representatives elect ones for the next level (a district or a town), and so on. A polity can retract their representative any time, they just need to vote on it. That works for all levels, so if the new representative decides to retract polity’s vote for the level after it, there’s a new vote, and a chain effect is possible of removing the highest representatives.
This would seem OK and fine for you, but in fact it means that a lower polity can be pressed\intimidated\deceived into doing what I described any time, and so on. Which is why during Stalin’s ascent to unchallenged power he didn’t even break that system, just put a little bit of social pressure more via speeches than via threats.
So - this mandatory grouping seems to me in idea similar.
One can see some similarity between Soviet education not system, but rather pipeline, and the age cohorts in Sparta, say, toddlers were “consecrated” or “accepted” into “oktyabryata”, in 12 (if I remember correctly), into “pioneers”, schools and universities and technicums all had that strong grouping in activities, say, schoolchildren were sent in groups by age to mandatory competitions and warlike games (“Zarnitsa”, BTW, actually a good thing, teaches one orientation, coordination of movements of large groups of people, use of radio for communication and detecting communications of others, - all useful), students were sent in large groups to construction sites or harvests to work, etc. There were both rituals and actual mechanisms similar.
OK, I guess I’m just trying to find something
I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.
Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.
When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.
I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.
Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.
The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.
I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.
USSR was the same except it made trash aristocracy. There was one difference, the CC CPSU really was a college, Brezhnev couldn’t make decisions all alone, for example. But, well, Sparta was sort of a college on top too, if I remember correctly.
See those movies and stories of USSR’s public culture of the 30s-50s - that pompous imperial pretense, those main heroes with steel scornful faces looking down at subservient or immoral or not to be trusted helpers. Not everything, but there is a feel.
Like “Fourth height” - unironically a movie of a girl who flew airplanes in her teens, in USSR, as sport, then became an actress, and then a medic on a frontline and killed there. That’s even less normal social level in the USSR than, say, in England. But such things were given as a something normal, there are those people rightfully better in our just socialist society.
Again, that’s Stalin’s time.
You do realize all the official parts of Soviet art were about ideology and what didn’t impede it? And heavy industries were built around military goals. Most of Soviet industries existed in peacetime just so it would be easier to convert them in case of war, and what they were producing in peacetime was secondary.
They were actually subsidized (or one can say paid as mercenaries) by other cities\rulers often. They were apparently not too shit at war for that, but certainly not qualitatively better than everyone else.
Nah, it even officially was world revolution first, military for that, industries for that, communism later. Stalin retconned it into socialism in one country, but industries still for war, because it fit him better. After him Soviet ideology was retconned into socialist friendship of peoples, unification of humanity and industries to achieve that and communism.
Usually hateful parts are done “because we can” and are not the main reason.
For a couple of years, until that was made illegal and a mental illness, together with banning abortions and other progressive socialist future-aimed policies.
I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?
Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?
I’m not bashing it, just kinda full of some things of its legacy.
Too bad.
No, in the way Soviet propaganda presented Soviet citizens its place in the civilized part of history. Which ideas we follow, which we don’t, what is civilization and what is barbarism. Community and ascetism were kinda there, and it was thoroughly militarized and in theory prepared for a supposed full mobilization all the time, except nothing would really work. Not much more than that.
Soviet propaganda was actually very keen on that idea of civilization, antique references all over the place when you read anything touching philosophy from approved things. And the descent to barbarism would be what the “imperialist” or “capitalist” world was doing.
At the same time, due to Soviet economy’s limitations, there was also promotion of ascetism as something morally superior, say, they have all those nice things and rock-n-roll, while we have well-read people and value the spiritual above the material. That part is not new, of course, it can be found in German and Austrian stuff before WWI and in every totalitarian regime around.
I think some of the people creating that aesthetic were actually sincere, which is hard to imagine now, but touching it you feel that. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a painful one.
What does this have to do with Spartans specifically? I don’t know, but the structure of the Soviet society for me looks like something deliberately imagined after a romanticized version of Lycurgus’ Sparta, except done by crooked mind and crooked hands. Which would match the demographic of “old Bolsheviks” and other revolutionaries of early XX century, who were mostly students (mostly dropouts too) of social sciences.
They are fine on their island hideouts on Martha’s Vineyard and gated forts in Florida
Soon we can translate all the GDR jokes and use them for the US.
Phones are the de facto platform for two factor authentication of everything; I don’t see how society is going to walk backwards to phones being an optional luxury item.
the market will be taken over by cheaper, less “luxury” alternatives.
Spartan values would be accurate given that it was a slave state with something like 7 to 10 helots per Spartan. And yet 300 has turned King Leonidas into a legendary hero… for defending a slave state. Human perspective is too malleable.
Just give us about 30 or so years
US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.
I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.
The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.
Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.
Which is what subsidies are for. Encourage companies to do the things you want, don’t destroy the economy by making everything else impractical lmao. I see what the end goal is, supposedly, it’s just an extremely stupid, naive, or outright malicious way of accomplishing it.
The taxes will continue until manufacturing improves.
This guy just spews his bullshit, Would it be nice if they could be made in United States? Yeah sure but the thing is an iPhone would cost like $3500. And I know damn straight I’m not paying that much for a phone. And I’m pretty sure you guys wouldn’t either and that’s coming from someone that sometimes makes some stupid financial decisions and that is not one I would make
If Apple didn’t try to make 400% markup on their underpowered trash, it would probably just cost what it costs now. Except the child slave labor part would go away.
I hate to say it, but it’s actually quite powerful trash that they produce.
Yeah, I’m in the process of shifting all of my workflows over to Linux/Android from all-Apple, but my Macs are a huge sticking point. My main computer is an M2 Macbook Air, which is ridiculously quick. I’m basically just waiting for Asahi to gain display port over USB, at which point I’ll ditch macOS. But until then…
8GB of RAM on a laptop today is f-ing ridiculous.
Way more than you need for Facebook and pornhub. 8GB is fine for a low spec laptop.
That’s how much more efficient MacOS and the M series silicon is.
My Linux system uses about 1 GB idle and yet I’m glad to have 16 GB - not because I wouldn’t mostly be fine with 8, but because it just keeps more doors open. Can run more demanding programs, more programs simultaneously, can host something in the background, …
The OS itself is more efficient than Windows, yes. But that’s not a hard task, and it’s less efficient than many Linux distros. No matter how efficient you are, 8 GB non-expandable RAM is not enough nowadays.
Lol I agree. The value is horrendous when you spec one of their products to have decent storage/ram, but nevertheless can’t fault the speed of their ARM chips.
That’s the neat part, the republicans are trying to repeal child labor laws.
My almost five year old piece of under powered apple trash cost me less than 45 US cents a day, still has regular OS updates and works between eight to ten hours most days running my entire life. I might even splurge out and buy a new one if they ever release an overpowered non trash handset…
I mean I would pay a premium for a made in America phone. Probably about 2 times as much. Iphones just suck ass so I’d never pay for one at all
Why? All those kids are going to need something to do after they tear down the education system.
They’ll have their hands full extracting the lithium from the dead Tesla batteries.
But their tubby little fingers aren’t nimble enough nor can they hold their attention span nor take basic instructions, so they can’t be employed for production unlike their healthier and more dutiful same aged Asian counterparts
They won’t be tubby for long. Food about to get expensive. Timmy about to be on a fucking diet.
They won’t be making iphones, they will be mining the minerals for them.
Well that I can’t believe.
Sure, we can tell them it is the new version of Minecraft. /s
“I…am Steve (Jobs).”
Something I’ve been thinking about is how schools are affected by population decline. Schools take a lot of infrastructure, labor and money. It seems like hardly anyone in my generation is having kids. So what happens to this expensive school system when there’s too few students to justify the costs?
Will it simply disintegrate into private schooling like olden times?
Well if it’s funded by taxes they can scale down. That’s the nice thing about everyone chipping in. If less is needed just take less. It’s not like a business that needs to turn a profit.
iPhone about to cost $5000
iPhone 17: Patriots-Only Edition
The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.
It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.
Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.
The year is 2039, life is hard.
Just used the last of the clean water, food is almost unobtainable.
“Thanks Obama”
Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.
wouldn’t higher wages make stuff cost more? I’m kinda confused
CEO pay can mitigate that if they’re willing to make less.
But then how would they afford multiple cars, planes, and houses?
/s
Hahaha
This whole presidency is raised for maximizing CEO income and no taxes for everyone at the top.
It will be interesting if Trump actually manages to pull it off, because he’ll make the US swap places with China:
No one trusts the country anymore, but if it has low enough wages and proper production capability it will produce everything cheaply just to export it all overseas where the luxury goods will be sold. Of course all profits will be made overseas, not in the US because hardly anyone can afford the luxury items no more.
Meanwhile the production states will get deep smog clouds and intense small coal particle pollution in return. And the need for face masks will be back…
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As opposed to what reason for owning a factory??
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That’s one of the issues with how we’ve (most western capitalist countries) been doing this.
People are struggling for money so minimum wage goes up. Labour to create things is now more expensive and prices go up.
There is only one solution and that’s to theoretically (or technically) eating the rich that are hoarding all of the wealth.
What really needs to stop is the obscene bonus culture. It is quite disgusting to keep reading a company needs to lay off 500 people only to then give some CEO a bonus of 15million. Or banks running a deep 9 digit number loss in a year but still the higher ups get a bonus for some reason or a vague years old contractual promise. The top should feel loss first before it “trickles down”, and honest pay for honest work should include the top as well.
And while I am at it, senseless management jobs should be allowed to be contested, no more “manager toiletpaper” who only shows up once a week to make an order, yet makes 5x the wages of people under him.
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That would be one step in the theoretical eating of the rich, yes.
The sheer amount of money being removed by the 1 percent is regoddamndiculous. It’s something like 45 trillion dollars since wages diverged from productivity in 1975.
And it’s only speeding up now that we have a cabinet of billionaires for billionaires.
And they’re pumping and dumping the market every single day.
In a “frictionless vacuum”, yes. Real world economics is much more complex however and higher wages = higher product prices doesn’t quite hold true. Read productivity-pay gap.
It’s not even about wages. The precision tooling and engineering equipment would probably take a decade of development to get the US equivalent with China. We just don’t have it here.
And it’s not about rising wages with productivity. Americans by and large don’t want to work in factories or manufacturing. The pay would have to be astronomical to fill the needed positions.
The pay WOULD be astronomical if it had kept pace with CEOs, that’s the point
They are promising to gut the CHIPS Act which would be needed to even think about doing this.
Can’t have a Biden law. Biden introduced that so it must be bad for the US.
I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”
It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”
Ah, corporate politics.
Architects and engineers are mortal enemies.
Apple tried this in the past. Who knew making special little screws was way more expensive to make in the US. Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …
It’s kind of awesome for everyone if you don’t piss off your trading partners. It happens in the first place because it’s better for everyone involved! It’s a consensual arrangement that parties only engage in because it is in their interests.
The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn’t meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we’ve been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it’s a comeuppance.
Disclaimer: I don’t know what’s going on.
Realistically? For some stuff American jobs will move back, but I think most of the jobs will just move to other countries that don’t have the scrutiny that China has. Countries like the Philippines which have only a 17% tariff on the new scheme. On top of that, they probably are lower cost for labor and the biggest cost is the factory itself and shipping infrastructure. If a company has to finance a new factory anyways, the Philippines is more attractive than the US.
And that’s just a random country I picked from the tariff list. I’m sure there some country out there that has the right mix of cheap labor, shipping infrastructure, location, and obscurity that lets it avoid tariffs to the point where most good come from there instead.
I think that definitely sounds reasonable, and I think, if there’s any hope for these tariffs to actually meet their stated purpose, the government of the US would need to just say, if working conditions don’t meet the same standards, there will be additional tariffs. I think that’s exactly where tariffs ought to be applied, when some country takes advantage of, essentially, human rights. We don’t have the right to stop them, but we do have the right to tax their products for it, to the point it’s not worth it.
Obviously, that’s not how things will go.
So you people finally admit you want and need slave work to satisfy your petty desires?
Good, good! Baby steps
Toyota is able to build Camrys, Highlanders, Tundras, etc. in the US. So I don’t see why we can’t have a factory in the US to build the iPhone?
Does building an iPhone require more manual labor than building a car? Maybe it requires more precision than cars, but I don’t see why we can’t train and equip people to do it here.
There are microchips being made in the US today. See Intel. Maybe not the latest process node but it is not an outdated node either.
It requires people who eventually jump off the roof of the building…
The problem is, while you and I have a problem with that, billionaires don’t.
The problem is the average American ain’t gonna do that kinda work.
I 100% agree, and hope that remains to be an option. But also… things can change, and they can change fast. We are all only a few days of missed meals or missed mortgage payments from having very different standards.
Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.
They will when the choice is work or starve.
It would require Apple to accept a dollar less in profit.
You absolutely can, but the price of the workers for these kinds of things are way higher in the US as opposed to China. Also, if Apple could automate away manual labour to the point it would be economically viable they sure as heck would’ve done so already. Price increases using US-based manual labour are inevitable - its one of the major reasons why the global market is as it is today, cheap labour in developing countries.
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In the meantime, the Liberty phone seems to be the closest option for a US-made smartphone. While not entirely comprised of US-sourced components, the PCBs are manufactured in California, as well as device packaging and assembly.
April 10 update: Right on time, the author of the OP’s linked article has now published an article on the Liberty phone.
Decade old specs for decade in the future price.
I have not looked beyond the front page of the link you shared here, and I don’t mean my criticism to be more than tongue in cheek, but oh boy, $2k for that is… Something.
5-10h battery life. Their goal list includes 20h idle time and recording video. It seems to be using some nonstandard SIM and only has GNSS, not GPS. Which is probably fine functionally but apparently they weren’t able to source a GPS chip to use the US system that met whatever their standards are? Large list of negatives for something the price of a shiny new foldable, or several non-foldable smartphones.
They also seem to be doing the usual dance of “Made in USA!!!*”
* what you think of when you think “electronic components” sourced from Asian countries, mostly we’re talking about assembly and that this is where it’s put in the consumer packaging.
By “nonstandard SIM” do you mean one of two common SIM sizes that are not “nano”, which is preferred by current phones?
GNSS means it’s global. Which includes US GPS, as well as Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, and China’s BeiDou. Wikipedia
Fair, apparently at some point I conflated GNSS and Galileo.
The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.
It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.
As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.
That last part for sure resonates. I can’t remember if I said it here or elsewhere, but our prices have been subsidized by substandard working conditions in China, there is no way around it. And all because large corporations wanted to make more money. And we, as consumers, shouted a resounded “hell yeah” to those Chinese suicides at Foxcon, because we wanted cheaper components and cheaper phones.
And so I basically don’t know how I feel about anything. I try to be more cognizant about what I buy, where it’s from, how it’s made, but the speed and ease, and basically not having to think, sometimes trumps those thoughts.
Plus, AFAIK, Purism is one of the few companies that pays their developers to write FOSS code, which produced the Phosh UI, basic call and text apps, and mobile-friendly UI library.
There was article written by their former marketing director or something stating that the CPU, GPU and stuff are still sourced from China, and other places as well. They hide it from you. So like it’s an eye-watering price for old specs and doesn’t really deliver what it says it does.
Found the link: …locals.com/…/why-i-wont-be-buying-purisms-librem…
Obviously the CPU and GPU are made in China. You’d have to be an idiot to believe they were made in the US.
Just because you can make phones with an army of cheap Chinese labour doesn’t mean that’s the only or best way. With suitable “design for manufacture”, pick and place robots like those used in PCB design could relatively easily be adopted to screw screws in where needed. Use plugs instead of those flat cable things, then the whole lot could be easily automated. Remove any aspect of the design that needs fingers and the whole process can be automated.
If that were possible they would have already done that, since it’s cheaper to fully automate everything in the long run than to have humans involved in any part of the manufacturing process. No matter how cheap you get the labor automation will still beat it out, unless they are literal slaves, and even then the quality of work probably won’t be as good as an automated system, so it still might not be economically sensible.
Wow what a great idea, I wonder why nobody else has ever thought about it.
TBH most of the cost is from the individual components. The core chip fab, the memory fab, the oled screen fab, the battery, power regulation, cameras, all massive operations and very automated. Not to speak of the software stack. Or the chip R&D and tape out costs.
The child labor is awful, but it’s not the most expensive part of a $1k+ iPhone.
The most expensive part of an iPhone is the >50% profit margin
An old chart: <img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/f2f224b1-1ff3-44e4-a0c2-6dcad6fa8b66.png">
Trump “saving” America from anything is pure fantasy true, and yet he got elected - TWICE. The fantasy of idiocracy is reality. Make people desperate enough for work by gutting minimum wage, Medicare, and everything else MAGA plans to do to create a feudal system, and the US becomes a cheap labor source to sell US-made iPhones and all kinds of other shit abroad. Either get used to that reality or figure out what to do about it.
Of course it is. They want 1500 bucks for something with a few hundred dollars of overhead. R and d not withstanding they’ll want the same amount of profit for the phone if it’s made in America and profits have to increase year after year! They can’t make a little less profit they have to make more than before!
it’s not just acost the issue, there’s not enough skilled people to actually build them.
Industrial engineers, people that would be willing to assemble devices would be in short supply
As someone who has done a bunch of phone repairs with the help of YouTube, assembly isn’t that hard. If they don’t want to assemble them here, it’s completely about profit margins. We should be taking steps to reduce that profit margin. Tax the rich and all that.
China uses little kids to build them. If we did the same in the US, America s would want to have MORE CHILDREN because they would literally pay for themselves!
Just imagine if all middle schools in the US required 2 hours of iPhone assembly per day. It would be excellent industrial training for the future generation!
Meh, once they grow up their things aren’t nimble enough to assemble stuff any more. Waste of energy training them.
If you offer good pay and good benefits at a decent working environment people will flock to assembly lines in the US. Christ they were basically invented here.
However unemployment figures suggest that would be impossible to do in practice.
No. No it doesn’t.
There are 7.1 million people unemployed in the US officially. Realistically that number is probably much, much higher.
You’re saying apple can’t hire a few hundred people to work on an assembly line?
That’s ~4% that is typically considered low but even if it wasn’t.
It’s not one assembly line, and one product only… it’s every component from the chips to the glass, screen, circuit board and then the final one on.
You would need also experienced people in every part you would need to manufacture including engineers that are in short supply, an nevermind building the factories etc…
If Apple were forced by law to manufacture iPhones exclusively in the U.S., they wouldn’t go under they’d adapt. They have the money (~$54B in liquidity), the brand loyalty, and the organizational muscle to pull it off.
There are ~7 million unemployed people in the U.S. plenty of potential labor, especially if Apple funds large-scale training and leans hard into automation. Would it be expensive? Absolutely. Costs would skyrocket. You’re probably looking at a $1,800–$2,000 iPhone. But guess what? People would still buy it.
They’d need 5–10 years to fully build out fabs, assembly plants, and domestic supply chains, but it’s feasible. TSMC is already building fabs in Arizona. Apple would just have to scale that approach to the rest of the production ecosystem.
Forced U.S. iPhone manufacturing wouldn’t kill Apple. It’d just make them the biggest American manufacturer since WWII.
The issue is like for every other major corporation in this country is that they’re just cheap bastards.
I work in the repair industry and what I tell all my clients when I do warranty work for them if it’s the difference between repairing their item or the CEO of the warranty company getting a new yacht it’s always going to be the yacht first.
Don’t be so negative. By 2035, a 2500 dollar us made iPhone might be possible.
Because of the child laborers making 85 cents an hour?
Inflation
Yeah but by 2035 the US dollar will be worth about 8 pence. If they’re lucky.
I’m hoping for 1USD = 1 yen, then were really going to be #winning by stealing all of the Japanese manufacturing industry!
That would make building a $2500 iPhone in the US even more difficult.
We already have foldables in that price range.
Why is the iPhone the benchmark?
<img alt="images" src="https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/66395d5fd77857b343a2064e/Top-10-smartphones-in-Q1-2024/960x0.png?format=png&width=1440">
Source: forbes.com/…/global-top-10-best-selling-smartphon…
This is also global, not even US data; iPhones are phenomenally more popular over there than anywhere else as far as I know. This is also one of the reasons some seriously begin to believe Android would be a “poor man’s phone”.
They’re more often subsidized by carriers here (in the US), too. I didn’t really want an iPhone, but $400 new for a Plus, with a plan discount, just makes an Android set not worth it.
At that point I would start questioning why that particular phone is subsidized so much. Seems sus.
Excess carrier inventory they can write off as a loss since the Plus didn’t sell as well, or so I was told.
It gets even worse if you separate users by age groups. Younger people overwhelmingly go for iPhones.
Yes but when it comes to OS share, Android completely dominates.
They already tried “made in America” Apple products and they did not sell! Americans don’t want to pay $5K for an iPhone when they can pay 80% less for one made in China.
Ok but what if they cannot pay 80% less for one made in China?
What? They do. Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones each year in the US.
They did past tense. How about with a 140%+ tariff?
They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.
Haha as if that will stop Trump
What if you dont want your economy to work?
Well that sucks but they sure as hell won’t be able to buy one “made in America” either. The raw materials for batteries alone would have tariffs on them as well. Unless we have massive amounts of cobalt, lithium, copper, silicon, cadmium, etc, to be able to produce these items domestically, working class and middle class Americans will not be able to afford them.
just when i thought he couldn’t idiot any harder - he pours on the coal. Fucking scam artist.
The beautiful clean coal.
Just ask AI to do it for you
They’ll slash wages and say it’s because of AI, and it is. But not because AI actually makes the process any more efficient, but just that it’s a good excuse to slash wages.
Sure it will come to america. gotta have wage slaves.
Or just slaves.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/29d7a1fe-5f14-45d7-8321-0ac545b73b38.jpeg">
And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.
You are correct, but the reason they want slavery again is power and control and cruelty.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.
Tim Cook and Donald Trump = Tim Crook