Apple asks suppliers to shift AirPods, Beats production to India

As for your complaints about business discounts... I see it as a win for the consumer that they don't have to be a "business" to artificially pay less. Fuck that.

https://www.apple.com/retail/business/

And Apple gave even my teensy little company (when it was running) discounts. They have (or at least had) a business program which required some proof of business license (DUN, or summat?), and enjoy your discount. I'd look it up, but parent isn't going to, so I won't bother.

They don’t want a foreign gov to torpedo an important business for politics but they don’t need to protect against market forces. There’s no market risk to apple disappearing overnight. If it’s over a long time scale, pension funds can self manage. It won’t implode the market.

You are 100% right in that this is the primary mechanism for increasing the standard of living around the world. It's worked so well in fact that the wages in China are not nearly as low as they once were. I would say that low wages alone are no longer the primary benefit of having something made in China. It's much more the scale and loose environmental regulations that are valuable now. There are quite a few things that you use every day which are almost exclusively made in China or India or similar.

I think people in general do not realize just how much we rely on China and Chinese manufacturing, and how beneficial it is for everyone to have things made abroad. People focus on the higher end factory items like iPhone assembly but don't often think about all the sub-components. Base materials like adhesive, spray on preservatives, plastic containers, labels, etc. are almost all made in China or somewhere with loose environmental regulations. There are so many items that go into day-to-day items that are either made in China or made from products imported from China. If it's made from plastic or for plastic, and it's made at scale, there is a really good chance it's made in China.

How Russia got itself to the point where one person has consolidated all authority, surrounded himself with corrupt sycophants, and cannot accurately gather or integrate information from the rest of the society is the complicated question here. It’s a pretty good demonstration for anyone watching around the world that unchecked power can lead to disastrous decisions. It should inspire us to stand up for democracy and against corruption and consolidation of wealth and power in our own societies.

It’s impossible to determine Putin’s personal motivations from outside; the best we can do is speculate. My speculation is that involves some combination of (a) doing what he thinks will best maintain internal political control, (b) satisfying an egoistical urge for historical glory, and (c) a narcissistic belief that others must bow to his personal whims and a raging narcissistic grudge when they do not.

Russia starting a nuclear war would be bad for China, India and others; there's some point at which they'll cut off Russian trade.

Both can prosper when things go good, it's when shit hits the fan that you notice the difference.

"Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past."

https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

And America can't afford to lose business with China. So China will make the calculation that it can get away with an invasion of Taiwan.

We won't stop eating beef 3x a day even though we know it's literally destroying the world, we still buy diamonds mined by child slaves and clothes sewn by people making pennies per hour and even the sanctions against Russia carved out exceptions for everything the West really wanted/needed.

We didn't stop doing business with China for a genocide in Tibet, an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the brutality in Hong Kong or the human rights violations in current lockdowns.

If China invades Taiwan, we'll buy iPhones from them anyway and tweet that we don't like what they're doing. Maybe we'll send a few billion dollars to Lockheed and Raytheon to make some weapons for Taiwain, but we won't do anything that actually requires an American to give up the slightest bit of comfort.

Being able to replace broken iPhone12s with new iPhone12s is real. An iPhone18XR on paper is just a piece of paper.

Now, it still may be true that it's easier to manufacture iPhones than design them, but easier does not mean easy. Personally, I think you're just vastly underestimating how hard it is to manufacture iPhones at scale, which means not just finding the right part, but a part that can be delivered in the quantity and quality required to meet their production needs, and repeated for all the parts they need.

It'd obviously be a mistake to say that economic interconnectivity totally prevents war, but the fact that wars break out doesn't falsify the notion that it might make conflict less common on average. The west's relationship with Russia and China has certainly been less rocky over the past 30 years than its relationship with the Soviet Union ever was.

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Double standards is not a good habit.

If it could truly be done anywhere it would still be happening in the US.

Nearly all of the energy available on Earth comes from our sun, including all fossil fuels, shallow geothermal, biomass, hydro, tidal, wave, wind and solar energies. The remainder came from other suns, such as nuclear and deep geothermal.

I don't think a loss of value to the tune of $2.5T would go well for the US economy.

I don't think either country cares much about unemployment, but the US, at least, has a history of going to great lengths to maintain the value of its assets.

And I'm sure there are companies eagerly awaiting to get the business Foxconn turned down because Apple outbid them or made favorable agreements.

US of course gains a lot... weakening both russia and EU while selling overpriced LPG. On the other hand, US has been afraid of a strong germany-russia cooperation for decades and has done everything possible to stop it,... the us-bombing-nordstream accusations are not something new, since US was opposed to nordstream and threatened against it for years now, way before the russia-ukraine war.

Does being a neighbor matter here?

Because if a madmen attacks a country half a planet away, we (the europeans) help them by sending our soldiers to help (syria, libya, afghanistan,...).

We also tend to treat separatists differently, depending on where and who they are... Kosovo people want to be independent, let them be independent, and think later how to (re)paint nato as a purely defensive organization, when the nato bombings of yugoslavia are over. People from republika srpska also want to leave bosnia and hercegovina... no no, the country must stay whole, we won't change maps. Catalunya? What? Where? Who? Sorry, I have to go.

But somewhere behind that I do believe they have a vision for the country. I have lived here for 5 years now and I see a country going though a rapid transition from extreme poverty (just 20-30 years ago) to now, in places like Da Nang, Quy Nhon, Dalat, parts of HCMC and Hanoi, being fairly developed and rapidly becoming more so. Apparently they have lifted a million people per year out of extreme poverty for the last 30 years and there's a rapidly growing middle class too.

Of course, from those areas, you can just drive 50km (or even just down a side street in a big city) and be in an area that seems like it hasn't been touched by development, although you can still probably get a 200mb internet connection in these places. And there are entire provinces that are still very poor. It's a big and complicated country on a winding but largely positive trajectory. Don't dismiss the leaders here in the same breathe as the Saudis. They have their own highly complex and developed culture, with both good and bad sides, and you need to take the time to understand it before you can comment on it.

If I was in industry, I would bet on this country as being a good place for manufacturing. Right now, for low-medium tech stuff. But in ten or twenty years I predict this country will be a high tech manufacturing hub.

Nigeria is projected to have a population in the top 3 (china, india, then nigeria) in the next 30yrs. The population excuse will soon not be good enough anymore.

https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2022/08/12/fg-by-2050-...

A strong culture of corruption and self-interested politicians is pretty common but I feel like there's some lack of proper messaging or a lack of simple interest in having big goals. There seems to be a defeatist culture in many of these places, where they are so used to the status quo they forget they still have a choice if enough people cared.

Maybe brain drain is the true killer in our global economy. The smart kids don't even bother, they just move to the west or help India/China.

In China, the children are expected to take care of their parents in their twilight years, and the husband is typically expected to provide for the wife and kid(s), so you basically have 1 dude providing for 8 people: himself + his wife + 2 kids + his parents + his wife's parents.

Any way you cut it, China is due for ~35 years of an absolutely horrendous labor participation rate. And unlike developed nations with declining birthrates, it's unlikely immigrants will be able to take up the slack, as extreme xenophobia is omnipresent in China and her population is absolutely massive.

I asked the question because their English seemed so good to me that it seemed intentional, it also seemed unusual.

To me it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from my grandparents. It's weird and old-fashioned. Even most news sources use the genderless "it" for countries nowadays.

It's honestly a bit cringy to read.

While I like the theory, its cute, I dont know that that's true. L'automobile is male in Italian and Spanish. And its easy for a native speaker in either language to come up with numerous examples.

In fact gender really is just grammar. We shouldn't see much into it trying to project ourselves into it. Otherwise, why can the same object have different genders through synonyms? Again:

La macchina L'automobile.

La yerba (granted in Spanish its lost its meaning as grass) El cesped

La nave Il barco

La embarcación El bote

Or changes from the addition of a mere diminutive:

Il banco La bancarella

Il barco La barchetta

Gender is just a classification, largely binary (although Spanish retains the neuter) that got the unfortunate sexual labels of male and female

Going by the languages I have some knowledge of, that doesn't hold true for Portuguese, where the word "country" itself is masculine but the truth is different countries have different genders. I guess it would be the same for other latin languages? (at least for Spanish). German is also the same but the word "country" is neutral.

I guess it does somewhat hold true for my native language, Hebrew, where all the words you specified but "house" are feminine. So I guess it might also hold true for Arabic then?

But you don't have to. "it" is considered impolite, something you don't use for something you treasure. Furthermore English has a perfectly long history of referring to countries as shes. This has fallen in disuse in the past 50 years as we've gotten fussy about the sexes. But it is certainly not incorrect or foreign to English.

The most robust part of India's "democracy" is its voting system which is among the most accessible in the world and is likely one of the best in the world.

By all other metrics and measures, India is a feudal state where laws are great on paper but terrible otherwise. People should - rightfully so - be wary of labelling India a democracy.

Direct Democracy doesn't work if the population is too big. Anything greater than a few thousand people you will need Representative Democracy.

So when one says "True Democracy" it invariably points to Representative Democracy with a Multi-Party system. Direct Democracy is a dead idea from the get go.

And where they don't have that support, they "buy" elected reps: https://www.google.com/search?q=bjp+buy+mp+mla

Where exactly is freedoms limited for non Hindus? Can you name some of these freedoms that have been limited?

When you have a large part of population as riot hungry foreign funded troublemakers, to maintain peace, cutting off the internet in times of escalating situations is necessary evil.

It is not at all an admission of wrong but a forced retraction due to circumstances. The Farm laws were actually extremely progressive of all laws passed by the Government. The issue was more to do with raising the spectre of the dead Khalistani movement and Terrorism spillover that India had to deal with in the 80s and 90s. India cannot afford a weak border with Pakistan at this juncture and with Punjab (border state) being the epicenter of protests did not make things any better. Repealing the Farm laws took India's agriculture backward by at least 2 decades [1] and [2] as the protests were orchestrated by wealthy farmers of Punjab, Haryana and to some extent UP. They are not representative of farmers across India, who are so poor that they could never have had the ability to organize large scale counter-protests. The consequence of repealing the farm laws have hurt the poor farmers whose grievances have gone completely unheard.

> Stifling communication and censoring the internet isn't what any just democratic ruler does, regardless of their party affiliation.

Isn't this exactly what Trudeau did when Farmers protested in Canada? By freezing their bank accounts and censoring channels that supported the protests? I have seen this exact thing done in multiple first-world "Democratic" countries with no one calling them out. Feels like "Democracy for thee — but not for me".

[1]: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/repeal-of-farm-...

[2]: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/five-implications-...