10 ms·
The $205.4B Gulag
- sayinbu 4y agoI switched to iphone from android very recently and I do feel bad about it.
- keewee7 4y agoAlmost all consumer electronics are made at these Chinese manufacturers. Only the high-end chips are from Taiwan, South Korea, or Arizona. I'm software engineer at a Danish company that also manufactures a lot of industrial electronics. Our insight is that China is still the cheapest place to manufacture PCBs but it is surprisingly more efficient to setup pick-and-place robots here in Denmark to place the components onto the PCBs. The pick-and-place machines and assembly robots run all night now. If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU we will no longer have any critical reliance on China.
- trasz2 4y ago
- sayinbu 4y agoAlmost all is not all right?
- yitianjian 4y agoMost Androids are included in the almost all, even if the chips are made in fabs in Taiwan so many other components have Chinese sourcing
- ummonk 4y agoSure, a small but growing percentage of iPhones are assembled in India, sure. Some other manufacturers will be doing the same.
- Etheryte 4y agoIt's pretty safe to rest assured that the cheaper the device (or piece of clothing or mostly any consumer good) you're buying, the more shoddy the kitchen side of it is.
- AlbertCory 4y ago> If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU see my other post. It used to be part of a garage-shop economy here in Silicon Valley.
- STM32F030R8 4y agoModern pcbs cannot be compared to garage shop pcbs. No one in a garage is going to be making me blind/buried/stacked micro vias, controlled impedance traces, exotic substrates etc. there are a handful of proto shops in the USA that can do it but the vast vast majority is in china. For large scale pcbs needed for consumer electronics I’m not sure any domestic supplier could meet the demand. I don’t know the situation in EU but it’s probably similar. Don’t even get me started on flex pcb vendors…
- AlbertCory 4y agothat was kinda tongue-in-cheek. Back when you could do it in garages, things were a little simpler.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- darthrupert 4y agoApple is moving their iPhone production to India, so you supported that in some way, perhaps. Dunno if their factories will be any less gulags, but given what kind of a place China is, perhaps they are.
- trasz2 4y ago
- thefz 4y ago> Due to the fatal flaw I mentioned above, I’ve always thought that the factories that build these tools/toys must be fascinating places that take materials, humans and magic in and push amazement out. Giant robotic arms moving around in a never-ending sync, working their magic, in harmony, producing our toys. Yeah, "magic".
- the_only_law 4y agoEh, it’s substack. Not expecting much.
- tristor 4y agoI am making a concerted effort in my life to avoid buying things made in China. It’s harder than it sounds, and in the case of consumer electronics, impossible. If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China, and most under even worse conditions than FoxConn.
- andsoitis 4y agoWho decides to make it in China? Who demands that companies be highly highly profitable?
- BurningFrog 4y agoProfitable companies outcompete less competitive ones. No one decided that, it's just a fact.
- colechristensen 4y agoWhat is decided are the rules of the game, the outcome is then somewhat obvious.
- tsimionescu 4y agoActually, a company that accrues a lot of profit could always be outcompeted by one willing to make less profits. Profit is a cost to the company itself, it is only beneficial to shareholders. On the other hand, it's true that companies with lower costs will tend to outcompete others, so moving to China is sort of dictated by the market.
- AstralStorm 4y agoTo a point. You cannot go lower than base cost, and can be made irrelevant by sheer volume.
- zeven7 4y ago> If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China I would still say it's good to call attention to the problem even if there's no real solution for consumers.
- daniel-s 4y agoIf employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?
- kennywinker 4y agoIs this a joke, or are you that out of touch with what poverty is like?
- epistasis 4y agoDefinitely a case of Poe's law here.
- Etheryte 4y agoMore often than not, no. Many of these types of factories are intentionally designed to lock workers into a never ending loop, where they're tied in living paycheck to paycheck, often paying rent for a room that's owned by the same company that runs the factory, buying food from a store that's owned by the same company, etc. There are even cases where workers get paid in cash in a custom "currency" operated by the company so there is no way to ever break free after you're in the loop.
- Invictus0 4y agoYou just made all that up. The foxconn dorms are free. There is no "foxconn bucks".
- AstralStorm 4y agoFree until you do anything against the company policy. The point stands, the employer controls ever now of your livelihood making the cost of disobedience and switching employment higher.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y agoSimilar tactics were used in US mining towns in the 19th century: https://youtu.be/E5VMZqgVzRo https://youtu.be/E5VMZqgVzRo
- epistasis 4y agoI'd like to remind people about the terrible working conditions in extremely wealthy places such as California too. Right now, University of California grad students and researchers, who produce a massive proportion of science on the West coast, are on strike. In most locations, it's nearly impossible to pay rent on their stipends. Grad students may be in training, but they are also the source of nearly all the novel ideas and the analysis and the basic work that goes into moving science forward. Principal Investigators these days write grants, and perhaps collaborate on the ideas and analysis, but in nearly every major paper I have seen come from a lab where I know the people well, it's the grad students at the heart of the intellectual work. This inability to pay rent isn't as much because wages got lowered, it's mostly because certain cities decided that they didn't want any more housing, in order to appease land owners and drive up housing prices to astronomical levels. But it's also unethical to pay somebody for a job if they can't use those wages to live. Fortunately I'm not aware of any police violence against the grad students yet, but there has been plenty of UC police violence in the past against striking workers. This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article. But as tech heavy as HN we may not be as in touch with a workforces that get squeezed on basic ability to survive, such as assembly in China or grad students in California. (Or dare I mention the farm workers that put all the food on our table...)
- rayiner 4y agoComparing factory workers anywhere to grad students in California is remarkable. Grad students endure the conditions voluntarily. They would have tons of alternative options in the private sector if they chose to do that.
- wstuartcl 4y agoThere may be issues on both fronts but yeah, scale does matter -- there is a difference between someone that is basically an indentured (and locked up at night) servant and a grad student that is doing research that is not making comfortable wage in a high COL area.
- dbspin 4y agoDefending paying people less than a living wage is remarkable. There are an endless number of contrarian positions to take, but 'scientists shouldn't protest being paid too little to live on' takes the cake. Incidentally having worked both in a factory role and as a graduate student - the former was significantly better paid.
- reallydontask 4y agoI guess for me the takeaway is: Buy fewer electronics
- cpsns 4y agoThat's is extremely unpopular with the general public, much less here on HN. Ask people to reduce their consumption and they have a tendency to lash out.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhy is that? I've noticed that nearly all of these new toys don't improve my quality of life. Do people buy things as a dopamine hit and form of escapism? It certainly seems that way.
- cpsns 4y agoYes, that's exactly what it is. We live in a society where happiness is just an amazon box away. It doesn't last long, but with overnight shipping people don't need it to. Almost every ad you see is trying to tell people how much better their life will be with a product and how much happier they'll be.
- Elinvynia 4y agoEspecially if it concerns meat!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 4y agoBuy less, period.
- duxup 4y agoIf I were to switch to an android phone would a better factory get more business?
- ihm 4y agoInteresting that the author felt the need to make an anti-communist comparison to describe a typical capitalist workplace.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI have a fairly unusual history relative to my general cohort in that between high school and college, I spent about two years working in electronics manufacturing and assembly factories (age 17 to 19) in California. I did work like injection-molding cases for devices, cutting cable and crimping connectors for computer cables, and finally, a bit of work in a laser-welding facility for precision components in Silicon Valley. The pay was remarkably good for someone my age with nothing but a high-school education, particularly when production ramped up and overtime was available (I could afford my own small apartment, and bought a car), but eventually the tedium convinced me to go to college (plus, the people upstairs in the R&D division had better pay and more interesting jobs). Some of those jobs still exist but most of that work has been outsourced to China and Mexico and Indonesia and the Philippines. There seem to be a fair amount of high-end prototyping shops but very little mass production activity, particularly of the basic components that go into tech devices. That's because: > ""PCB [printed circuit board] manufacturing and assembly is a very low-margin business and is largely located in Asia. It comes down to access to low-cost labor, a vast ecosystem of factory infrastructure, and flexibility. It is hard to replicate the ecosystem in the US today," said Kundojjala. " https://www.pcmag.com/news/silicon-usa-technology-made-in-america https://www.pcmag.com/news/silicon-usa-technology-made-in-am... The primary reason Apple and others pushed for oversea production via NAFTA trade deals, WTO membership for China, etc. is to cut labor costs. Paying kids with high-school education relatively high wages was seen as too onerous, so the factories were shipped overseas. While I worked in electronics, this exact same thing happened with the similarly-sized garment manufactuing industry. Now if you're wondering why there's an epidemic of homelessness and poverty in California, and it's become the state with the largest income gap in the USA, well, that's why.
- andsoitis 4y ago> Now if you're wondering why there's an epidemic of homelessness and poverty in California, and it's become the state with the largest income gap in the USA, well, that's why. Because companies moved low skill labor elsewhere because it is cheaper there?
- photochemsyn 4y ago
- gameshot911 4y agoI absolutely believe we should strive to improve the lives of all living beings in the world. But purely to provide an alternative perspective and spark some lively conversation, I want to explore a different point of view: No one is forcing these workers in China to take these jobs. The workers willingly choose to take them because they are an improvement over their status quo. The jobs pay more, and offer better benefits for them and their families, than they may be able to obtain elsewhere. That's one of the great benefits of globalization. A factory job manufacturing cell phones may offer substandard wages in the US, but it's a big step forward for workers in a developing country. In this way both countries benefit. Obviously everyone wants to continue to improve their lot, and a Chinese worker may BOTH realize that their factory job is better than they can attain elsewhere, AND they may suffer under poor conditions at that job. But they can always quit, and odds are someone else will immediately jump on that same job. That says a lot about the comparative quality of the opportunity. In the end these jobs, as flawed as they are, are still living millions out of even worse conditions every day across the globe.
- Isamu 4y ago>But they can always quit You’d think, right? But part of the unrest leading to this point were two or three waves of breakouts of employees escaping lockdowns by jumping the fences and pushing past roadblocks set up by local authorities. Then they started pressuring locals to work there.
- riskable 4y agoIt seems to me that this is a straightforward monopsony problem: The workers are already at what could be the best job they can get and yet the conditions are still terrible. They can get a job somewhere else but it won't be as good. Better to protest/strike at their current job than go somewhere else. Especially when you consider that there's no reason why their current employer can't pay more and improve conditions other than greed. If there was more realistic competition in the area for workers then the pay and conditions would never have gotten to this point.
- lxe 4y agoThis is a first and the simplest layer of the argument. If "just quitting" was such a great option, what's the point of the entire labor rights movement?
- Isamu 4y agoIt would be nice to see an article that bothered to explain the situation instead of an easy outrage piece. Engagement with China has gone very, very bad with Xi Jinping’s regime. He is absolutely the root of the problem and is doubling down in a bid to become Mao 2.
- antoniuschan99 4y agoThis video gives a pretty comprehensive idea how a smartphone is constructed. https://youtu.be/ES-s9KQrUTY https://youtu.be/ES-s9KQrUTY
- LastTrain 4y agoGould: One account, one blog post, two tweets.
- coaltunbey 4y agoyou have to start from somewhere :) why don't you give me a follow?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thedudeabides5 4y agoI'm sure these protests have nothing whatsoever to do with lockdown and are 100% due to the fact that Foxconn is a 'western capitalist company.'
- Syme 4y ago