Apple Remains in Trump's Crosshairs as Trade Advisor Again Criticizes China Reliance

[Analog Kid]

people like to use U3, especially politicians, becasue it is a lower number and makes things sound better than they really are for a lot of people.

Yeah, I think there's two problems wrapped up in this. One is that people have a bad tendency to want to boil complex analyses down to single numbers. There will never be one number that can tell the whole story.

The second is that people want to reappropriate numbers meant to measure one thing to represent something related but not quite the same. In this case, the Unemployment Rate (U-anything) was never meant to be a misery index, it's meant to measure slack in the labor market to guide policy, full stop, so when people complain "4% makes it sound like fewer people are suffering", its because that's not what that number was ever meant to represent. Likewise, low unemployment shouldn't be used to imply the sun is always shining for everyone. You can draw general conclusions that when the number goes up less people are happy, and when the number goes down more people are, but it's not an opinion poll or a wellness check, it's measuring scarcity of a commodity-- in this case workers.

 

[imamacperson]

Yeah. The general goal for a company is to pay as little as possible to make a product, and sell it for as much as possible. It's sort of their entire purpose of existing.

But should they make if off the back of human slave labor?

 

[cocky jeremy]

But should they make if off the back of human slave labor?

Profit is profit.

 

[frownface]

Might as well tell Apple they need to manufacture their products on Mars. There's no way it can easily be moved to the U.S. It's a nice idea but if it were easy it would have been done already.

if they can set up shop in brazil half a world away from where the components are made, they can set up shop in the US. it's not impossible, It comes down to a matter of cost.

 

[CarlJ]

if they can set up shop in brazil half a world away from where the components are made, they can set up shop in the US. it's not impossible, It comes down to a matter of cost.

The Brazil installation isn't trying to feed a market the size of the US. To get full iPhone production in the US, it's not just money, it's finding 100,000 workers skilled at small assembly (that we don't have), who are all willing to move to the same small town somewhere (turning it into a large town), to get something approaching the scale that they're doing in China. And a sizable portion of that workforce need engineering skills that we don't teach in the US.

It is simply not a problem you can fix overnight by throwing money at it - the only overnight fix involves a magic wand. In the real world, it'd take 5-10 years minimum to build out the factory and train all the people needed.

And then you'll run into another problem - everybody says they want manufacturing jobs brought back to the US. But then when you ask which people want to work in those factories, all those hands go back down. Filling those factories with qualified skilled workers is not something the US has the drive to do right now.

If manufacturing for iPhones does come back to the US eventually (and I think it should), it'll likely be in the form of massively automated factories, where the vast majority of the work is done by robots, with a comparatively small crew of high-level engineers overseeing the production lines - technicians and engineers to keep the plant running, robots to do the mass production work. And it will be good to have the phones produced here, without relying on the whims of other countries for continued supply, but it won't bring the millions of manufacturing jobs that the politicians are promising.