After a long time of suc­cess­fully man­ag­ing to avoid the blog, I even­tu­ally clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reac­tion to the news that an employee of Fox­conn, one of Apple’s Chi­nese ‘man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ners’, com­mit­ted sui­cide shortly after report­ing a miss­ing iPhone v4 prototype.

We can’t make these prod­ucts in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the qual­ity would be about half what we get out of China. […]

We all know that there’s no fuck­ing way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrig­er­a­tors and TV sets and every­thing else at the prices we’re pay­ing for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and every­thing is done fair and square and every­one gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused—what we’re talk­ing about here is our way of life. Our stan­dard of liv­ing. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because every­thing you own, it’s all done on the backs of mil­lions of poor peo­ple whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imag­ine them, peo­ple who will do any­thing to get a life that is a tiny bit bet­ter than the shitty one they were born into, peo­ple who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

You know that, and I know that. Okay? Let’s just be hon­est here.

It reminds me some­what of Jared Diamond’s Col­lapse, specif­i­cally where he dis­cusses how “[China and Japan con­serve their] own forests by export­ing defor­esta­tion to other coun­tries, sev­eral of which (includ­ing Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Aus­tralia) have already reached or are on the road to cat­a­strophic defor­esta­tion” (empha­sis mine).

Now, are first world coun­tries like the U.S. and those of West­ern Europe not just export­ing poor work envi­ron­ment stan­dards to the sec­ond world coun­tries of Indone­sia, Malaysia and China (as a con­se­quence of large-scale, inex­pen­sive man­u­fac­tur­ing that we no longer can/want to undertake)?