The amount of pressure Apple is taking without folding is, in itself, disturbing.
I guess Tim Cook isn’t the sort to have anyone tell him what to do.
I guess Tim Cook isn’t the sort to have anyone tell him what to do.
Their marketing was starting to get to me as far as being the privacy company. I was really considering buying my first iphone. They had to know they were throwing all that marketing/effort down the drain.
There is no way they are going back on this. They will just wait out the collective short term memory to move on to something else. In a year this will just be normal. In 5 years all the other things that have been added to scan for will also just be normal.
For me, I am old and just accept we will live in an ever growing dystopian surveillance state. I am so grateful I was able to live my youth the way it was. If you are young? Yea, I have no answers.
May you live in interesting times? At least we have that going for us.
I.e. Manual labor continuously gets automated, so less low education positions available each year.
Upcoming climate crises that's going to displace a lot of people that won't have jobs anymore.
Air quality continuously worsening. We're globally at 415 CO2 now, up from below 300 before industrialization. With each sizeable increase people will statistically perform worse on intellectual tasks. If current trends continue we'll be at 500 before 2100.
Continuously improving neural networks/"ai" will make fully automated armed defenses on private properties viable, so this is likely the first time in history in which people in power won't be dependent on their guards, making worker uprisings basically impossible
I am glad as well that Im always well into my 30th and make an effort to enjoy each day without thinking too much about the future. It's looking grim, so all the more reason to enjoy the present
Urban areas are already regularly over 500ppm. I know because my dad certified hospital air systems with a 500ppm limit. Hospitals are having to put carbon filter on their air intakes.
Tim Cook receives zero respect from me.
Even Apple is not capable of being able to sell a product that can’t take advantage of the economies of scale of Chinese/southeast Asian electronics manufacturing, or the metals that come from the middle of Africa.
No one is going to pay $10k for an iPhone versus a $1k Samsung. One company might be able to push the wages and quality of life a little bit, and be able to sell at a 10% or 30% premium. But it is not going to be enough.
Gervais was probably wearing clothes made of materials coming from some Asian country from factories with even worse wages. Easy to criticize and make “smart” comments as a comedian, certainly easier than working in the supply chain and managing logistics for 3 decades and actually knowing what is and is not possible.
A better use of time would have been if Gervais asked Cook what can be done to speed up the improvement in working conditions or what the roadblocks are that prevent it from happening.
Impressive, usually that type of "no u" argument needs a specific target; how much more useful it is when one can tar anyone wearing clothes with the easy certainty that somewhere in the supply chain substandard working conditions exist.
Even more impressive is the snuck premise that, since Gervais is implicitly OK with his clothes (probably) originating in some sweatshop, he should be OK with the state of modern electronics in both their manufacture and their role as panopticon.
The argument is that even something as simple as clothing is difficult to have an economically viable business in if not sourcing from places around the world with low wages and lax labor and environmental laws. I would expect Gervais to recognize this, and understand that Tim Cook cannot be expected to have the power to completely rectify the situation regarding the inputs of the most complicated devices every made in history.
>Even more impressive is the snuck premise that, since Gervais is implicitly OK with his clothes (probably) originating in some sweatshop, he should be OK with the state of modern electronics in both their manufacture and their role as panopticon.
I do not agree with this interpretation of my premise due to the ill defined word "OK". It is possible to be realistic and expect solutions to take time, but that does not mean one would be "OK" with labor conditions if they did not have to be.
People like to blame big corporations, politicians, other countries, anyone but themselves. But push comes to shove, where is the political support for higher fossil fuel taxes? Where is the patronizing of local businesses that use local labor to make goods?
What is the purpose of asking Tim Cook about child labor when people in society destroyed every business that did not offer products at the lowest possible prices? I have known about clothing made with child labor since I was in grade school, and I am in my mid 30s, and clothes still come from Bangladesh and we (society as a whole) still buy it from there. Nobody is going to pay the premium required to make an iPhone outside of SE Asia or without the metals from Africa, it is probably not even possible.
There are many companies that produce and sell american made apparel. [0] I buy from several of them (on the the rare occasions when I buy more clothes.)
> Where is the patronizing of local businesses that use local labor to make goods?
Perhaps if you spent less time making assumptions about where other people buy their clothes and more time looking for local options you would actually be helping.
The end goal should not be the end of international trade but an insistance that we do not allow international trade to facilitate abuses. The core problem is that people like you and Tim Cook brush off legitimate concerns about the practices of international trade partners as "just the way things are".
Edit: I would hope that Ricky Gervais, when confronted with a question about the source of this clothing, would respond thoughfully and even consider changing where he buys his clothes. Ethical business practices may be a niche market today, but the way we expand that market share isn't by just accepting the way things are.
[0] https://www.rather-be-shopping.com/blog/american-clothing-ma...
Same for Sony, LG, etcetra.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2023286/foxconn-samsung-face...
But Samsung has facilities in China too:
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/about-us/location/manu...
Another 2012 article about labor practices at Samsung factories:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/these...
The point is everyone uses cheap labor for manufacturing if possible, whether it's China or elsewhere. If they did not, then their mass market products would probably be priced too high and customers would reward competitors and they would go out of business. No one is paying higher paid people in South Korea or Japan to assemble phones if it can be done drastically cheaper elsewhere.
Another article about Sony using Foxconn and other ODMs:
http://www.xperiablog.net/2012/06/19/sony-mobile-partners-wi...
I assume LG and Samsung are big enough to have their own facilities and be ODMs themselves, but I would guess the smaller players like Sony have to outsource to them.
Fact is, they do manufacture phones in South Korea. Not all their phones, but they do manufacture them. Evidently it's still profitable enough to do so, and evidently they do not charge $10K for their top-of-the-line Galaxy S phones made in SK. https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-gumi-factory-2014-5?...
Sony has also made phones in SK and Japan.
Obviously these are not contenders for the cheapest phone, but we weren't talking about the cheap Xiaomis and Huaweis anyway. And evidently lots and lots of people are happy to pay for more expensive phones. Apple has ridiculous profit margins and people still pay for it.
I assume if Samsung had figured out how to make phones with better labor practices than Apple, then they would be advertising it. Seems like pretty easy PR points to win business, so I would have to wonder why not? I am guessing it is either inconsistent across their product lines or labor practices are increasing over the years.
They dont. The only model they did that was some specific Chinese Model. And even that was small volume.
His point was dont act like you are Saint and lecturing the public when you not Saint.