• TheFriar@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    Wait a second:

    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.

  • baduhai@sopuli.xyz
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    7 days ago

    “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.

      • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        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.

    • burghler@sh.itjust.works
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      7 days ago

      You still had respect for it? It’s owned by and has been pushing Bezo’s agenda for ages now

  • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • Donebrach@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • zloubida@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      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.

  • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    TLDR

    “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’)

    • Godric@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      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?

    • turtlesareneat@discuss.online
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      7 days ago

      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.

  • carrion0409@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    I wipe my ass with NYT these days. All they’ve been publishing is straight garbage

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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    6 days ago

    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

  • 58008@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    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.

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        6 days ago

        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.

        • zloubida@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          From the article :

          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.

          • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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            6 days ago

            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.

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
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    6 days ago

    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?