This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
After China and India, yeah, the US has very robust labor laws
I think that's exactly where they were aiming with the small finger stuff. They want kids in factories again.
Gigaset produces in Germany.
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.
Hahahhhaahahha
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.
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.
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')
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?
that does seem plausible.
A valid hypothesis
The size of the tools are dictated from the use of the tool, not the surgeon's hand size. You simply have the same tool in different size.
Wait, wait, I've seen this one!
applies Netherlands flag sticker to 8 ft. ceiling by extending arm and making small hop
I wipe my ass with NYT these days. All they've been publishing is straight garbage
Wiping your ass with horse shit is not quite something to be proud of.
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
The comment section is all over the place gawd damn
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.
This is not the dubious claim.
It is dubious.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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."
This 100% reads like LLM output; it's confidently wrong, isn't using proper news copy syntax, and got weirdly vague as it trailed off ("the small device").
NYT is publishing AI articles.
Wasn't this also the argument for child labor? "Small children can fit into tight spaces easier, lets use them to unjam dangerous machinery"
Yes. For example I know in textiles especially, they were small enough to run under & between machines to get things without the factory having to them off. (Surprise surprise, guess how kids got maimed and/or killed...)
China use child labor, so……
Does it? They're a middle-upper income country now, and child labor tends to be an issue at much lower levels of development. Anyway, for the Chinese electronics sector, you're vastly more likely to see humanoid robots than children.
We can't claim that everything weird is written by AI, because there are weird human writers too. Although even if not AI, "experts claim" is such a dodgy source, that alone makes it untrustworthy.
Yeah, that's weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make in the US has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it's purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can't do that in the US. That's it. That's the only reason.
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing minimum wage is ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
I guess the NYT no longer has an editor on staff? Who the fuck let that go to print, also who writes something like that into an article - that little paragraph where the NYT claims that "industry experts" said Chinese girls are better at assembling phones reads like cringe AI slop.
I feel like literally one person proofreading that should have been enough for them to go, "maybe don't print the stupid racist thing about small fingers."
"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.
