US labour watchdog halts Apple cases after group’s lawyer picked for top job
ft.com
ft.com
I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple. Looks like we'll be trusting their judgement quite a bit going forwards.
With stuff like this, why should we extend them trust?
I hope the opposite. Faith is exploitable and leads to complacency and accepting excuses. I hope Americans do not have faith in Apple and that will either make them work harder to earn and keep that trust, or that it’ll lead to the mask coming down. Having trust in someone covertly deceiving you looks like the worst possible outcome.
It's a $3T company. It got there by extracting the maximum possible from customers, app developers, and labor. They are well known for exploiting offshore workers [1] many times over. They force customers to upgrade off working hardware. They force customers to buy multiple devices when one could do the job. There are monopoly complaints world over. Customers who are happy with this have Stockholm Syndrome.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/china-ap...
2) the suicide rate at the foxconn factory was, even before the nets, lower per capita than the province in which it is situated. using your logic, the foxconn factory simply existing prevents deaths that would have otherwise happened if it did not.
i’m all for calling apple on their shit when warranted, but the suicide nets meme needs to die.
That only holds if the foxconn employees were randomly selected from the general population.
Calling out unspoken assumptions can be useful, but it's not a refutation unless the assumptions are unreasonable or demonstrably wrong.
The west should copy this, nets are known to prevent a lot of suicide, in general people don't immediately go and try again.
Faith is a good word to use when discussing the true believers following the fruit factory. The company has been very successful in turning commercial transactions into quasi-religious ceremonies and managed to convince people that they can trust their judgement. Well, yes, you can certainly trust their judgement as long as you realise that their judgement revolves around profit maximisation. While this in itself does not need to be a problem is does become a problem when one half goes into the transaction based on faith with the other half being aware of this.
Don't be deluded, you can trust them just as much/little as you can trust other large vendors. If you like their products you can buy them but it does not make sense to 'trust their judgement' once supervision is lifted since it is not a question if they will abuse this trust but when and the answer is they already have, many times over. Every time they claim their products do not offer freedom of choice because of ${reasons} they abuse this trust because they fail to state that ${reasons} is a constant which is initialised as follows:
const reasons=profit_maximisationAnd Hacker News gestalt generally thinks politics is off topic - guess what happens to "disruptors" in a crony capitalistic system?
Hacker News and YCombinator, more than anyone, should be at the vanguard of stopping this. It will set innovation back by a decade by the end of the current administration's term.
> Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-mil...
He basically paid $1M to try and save thousands of jobs at Apple (and of course increase Apple’s value)
This is something that should be expected in an absolute monarchy, not a democracy.
While that might sound like an improvement (and kind of is as at least we're getting more honest), I also view it as a big regression. At least when there's perceived shame in being corrupt, people aspire to be better. When it just becomes routine, I fear it's the beginning of the end.
Tim Cook is going to find out very soon what happens to anyone who makes a deal with Donald Trump: he gets what he wants, and they don't get paid.
> I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin
Why, are you a personal friend of his?
The billionaries are the only people who can actually apply a meaningful level of practical opposition to autocratic rulers. Instead they chose to bend the knee, because they think it better fits their self-interest. Which is what their Russian counterparts did with Putin 20 years ago, and where are they now? Either confined inside a pariah state, or dead.
Apple is the 8-th largest company in the world by revenue [1]. If they wanted to oppose the admin, they would be uniquely positioned to do so. That they choose not to tells me that either they support the admin or that they choose not to. That they chose the option that shows active support for the admin has a negative impact on my ability to empathize with their CEO.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...
But fundamentally, shareholder maximization is the goal stated by both common business sense and legal rulings. I personally believe that long-term optimization rather than short term is a more successful strategy. But in the short term the board could remove him for going against the feds. Shareholders could sue if it caused a drop in value or impacted global operations. Caused by I don't know, tariffs that could have been avoided with a corrupt monetary contribution.
I'd love to actually see a CEO refuse to grease the palm and them get sued for not doing something corrupt. Would be a case to follow.
The point is, as I understand it, that CEOs of publicly traded corps are not afforded the freedom required to make an ideological stand and keep their job.
If, hypothetically, Cook said "fuck this administration, we don't like their politics, we're not going to work with them", their shareholders could and probably would sue them. Those shareholders could make a case that Cook was asking of his own political interests, point to other organizations that did make exemption deals, and sue for losses in their share value. The reason for this is not entirely wacky: when you borrow someone's money to do something, you can't do your own pet projects with it.
Now that, of course, doesn't mean that Cook had to donate. But Cook is businessman himself, runs Apple to make money, and doing that is his modus operandi.
In this case, it's already happening:
https://electrek.co/2025/04/02/nyc-sue-tesla-over-elon-musk-...
Shareholders can sue, yes, but in the U. S. you can sue anyone for anything, and "suing" is not the same as "winning".
It is also entirely true that you cannot just do whatever you personally want with shareholder money.
The truth here is in the middle.
Apple (well, Cook) certainly did not have to donate to him. But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
This is true. But it has nothing to do with fiduciary duty.
Now ?
No. Reject this.
If Tim Cook gave you a million dollars, would it be fair to say he doesn’t support you?
It’s silly the kind of gymnastics we engage in to preserve our mental models. The facts are the facts.
I don't think he "supports" or is "against" this administration, I think it's much simpler: he does not care. I know this is cynical, but if the last three years in the software world has taught us anything, it seems like these tech CEOs regard their employees as expendable, and they're willing to change their political allegiances when they feel like it.
Maybe all of us would do that if put into this position, I don't know, no one wants to give me billions of dollars to run this experiment. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
Did you also call Biden's inaugural funding as corruption when he was donated ~$62 million ?
Donations included several billionaires - including the Gates family.
Is raising Presidential inaugural funds considered as "corruption" only for one party ? Or only when it crosses ~$100 million like President Trump did ?
I believe you missed another option. The President-elect has been convicted for fraud, is a big believer in quid pro quo, and did similar actions in his first term.
Sometimes it really is about corruption.
Sometimes it really is about extreme corruption.
Would cancel my Apple family plan but like my family, instead, bought a refurbished second hand iPhone instead of buying a new one recently.
Will be speaking with my wallet in a variety of ways, along with calling, marching, etc. We start here... let's see where we end up. The moment is _now_.
Trump dropped his lawsuit against Meta for suspending him after the insurrection.[1] They want to avoid an antitrust trial.[2] They want Trump to pressure the EU into allowing surveillance capitalism.[3] They want influence in negotiations over Section 230.[4]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/trump-meta-settlement-zuckerberg-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/meta-ceo-zuckerberg-lobbies...
[3] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[4] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/section_230_bipartisan_b...
At which point does the ordinary MAGA hat realize Trump isn't working for them?
Also, with everything being written down nowadays (on your social media), changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you. Then again, the idiots in power seem to have developed a thick skin for this.
A little over a month ago: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/g-s1-50605/conspiracy-theorie... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194910
This has to be one of the most damaging things about social media, in my opinion. I never really understood why changing your mind about something as you get new information is looked down on and mocked, but it is.
Or, "I do my own research".
I was also at the gun range last week and overheard a conversation between two Trump supporters. They were outraged by his behavior since taking office, and said outright "if we had to vote again right now, half of us wouldn't vote for him".
Trying to say "I was wrong" after years of making your whole life, social circle, etc. about whatever thing you were wrong about is incredibly hard. It takes a very strong mental to do that. And, I wager for some/most people who fall deep into any cult-like movement (whatever it may be: conspiracies, etc.), they didn't start with a super strong mental fortitude in the first place, making it even more difficult.
It's almost as if the scope of the corruption and incompetence is so extensive that there isn't enough time to reflect on the misinformation process that everyone was so focused on for so long.
Obviously not everyone succumbed to it but even today the coverage in major outlets is completely distorted. Media just accept what the administration is saying as if it still has some kind of verdicality by virtue of power, a historically unprecedented example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. People constantly arguing that the Trump administration won't actually do this or that, that it's all a bluff, and so forth, are similarly misleading.
The discussions about mandates is bizarre to me for this reason, not just because of the tiny magnitude and minority nature of the electoral win, but because Trump and his administration vehemently denied doing exactly what they are currently doing. They dismissed it as insane paranoid ramblings of a deficient left. It's not just that they are failing to keep an electoral promise, they are doing the exact things they denied that they would do, and criticized their opponents for claiming they would do.
I guess I bring this up because it seems to me a lot of people have basically been lied to. Being a victim has its own shame and reluctance but it seems like a more tractable — and accurate in many cases — way to engage with some people than them being wrong.
It's a concerning vision for the country.
They never changed their mind.
The tyranny of being forced to treat black people equally.
Countless communities across the US chose to destroy their infrastructure and amenities (specifically community pools) rather than allow their families to mingle with black people. There's an entire, well documented era of "white flight".
It's a common refrain by conservative voters that "The democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", but note they've been saying this for decades, so the ones that claim "identity politics" are the reason are wrong. Meanwhile they adored Reagan's fiscal policy, which was adopted wholesale by democrats after Reagan's landslide election proved any other fiscal policy was unacceptable to Americans. So nope, that also can't be what people mean by "abandon blue collar workers".
If you follow those claims back, they are from the civil rights era.
When people say "Democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", whether they realize it or not, they are saying "Democrats abandoned the WHITE blue collar worker by supporting black equality and integration".
This is evident if you look at the Democrat politicians who moved to the Republican party between the civil rights era and Reagan, and why they did so. They specify the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond openly switched to the republican party claiming that the Democrat's support and passing of the civil rights act and voting rights act meant they "no longer represented people like him"
This is also clear if you understand the history of black people in the south. It was a core part of southern "heritage" and history that white people were inherently superior to black people. It was a common topic of Sunday sermons during the civil war era for pastors to remind their congregation that it was God's Will that the black man be enslaved by the white, since they were barbarians and the White man was supposed to guide them. This is not an exaggeration.
"History not hate" is a contradiction, because the history WAS hate. Casual, institutional, systemic hate.
Republicans and conservative states have endeavored to not teach this, for decades. People in the south are genuinely taught that the North started the Civil War (outright false), that slavery wasn't the issue (False, several states explicitly submitted documents saying their reasoning for secession was to protect the institution of slavery), and that it was a "state's rights" issue (False, the slave states did not care about states rights, as they attempted to enforce Slave Catching laws in Free states by using federal authority, ie the exact thing they were critiquing the north for, and more importantly, the Confederate government openly talked about dropping the Facade of "states rights" now that they had their own government and could just install an authoritarian system that guaranteed slavery as an institution).
You can read all these Confederate government documents yourself. They were not shy about their intentions because it was a genuinely held belief that the white man was better than the black man.
A huge amount of our current law was built by segregationists.
May I ask, how do you know this? Does she say that about her own motivation? If not, why would she say she does it?
I've spent decades having to deal with this person. I assure you that I am not misrepresenting her.
“They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.
With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.
So, never.
Everything bad is blamed on the "others", and the solution is more Trump.
We can only hope enough of the rest of people who supported him will figure it out eventually.
Because they will insist that "I don't like the guy" right before they participate in a "Trump vs generic democrat" poll where they vote for Trump.
I see arguments about "this is the way it always has been" as essentially normalizing rampant authoritarian corruption. To me, it's taking projection and accepting it as fact without evidence.
Also, regardless, it seems two wrongs don't make a right, and the appropriate response is to reject it when it it exists.
Of course
> The US labour watchdog froze two cases against Apple days after Donald Trump nominated an attorney who represents the tech group to be the agency’s top legal official.
> Trump last week nominated Crystal Carey, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, to be the NLRB’s general counsel. She is listed in the agency’s records as an attorney acting in Apple’s defence in both cases against the Silicon Valley tech group.
the level of just complete capture of the regulatory state by random rich companies is amazing, even beyond trump's first time bullshit like "Appoint the CEO of Exxon to be Secretary of State"
Ugh, knowing you have a clearly malicious actor as top dog of the country -_- it can’t get more frustrating. Except for the fact that a big part of the country supports it as well.
I do wonder if they even believe in him wholeheartedly or just put on an act cause they’re in too deep and don’t want to give the people who said they were making the wrong choice the “satisfaction” of admitting they were right.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Steve Mnuchin (especially) and Rex Tillerson were two of the best appointments last time around. These guys have no redeeming value. And they're far more brazen about the corruption, too.
The government stepping in and eliminating one of (American) big tech's biggest competitors is an extremely pro-(American)-big-tech move.
> The policies are more anti-regulation, which big-tech wants right now.
Well, yeah. Exactly. They're all on the same team. They want fewer barriers in the way of their quest for more personal power.
I was also under the impression we're also entering a regulatory climate where amount of regulation isn't so much decreasing (TikTok ban for example is heavy handed), but that big tech has much more involvement in forming that regulation, which is useful for moat-building.
I'm not too knowledgeable on these, it's just the general gist I've been picking up so far this year, looking for correction if I got the wrong idea.
Not op, but yes.
>>>Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.
Short term. Long term you are establishing a precedent that you can intervene and take away the power of any large tech player. If it can happen to tiktok it can happen to others.
Im not against tikton ban, but im against it in its current form , since its not for the right reason. (China plays unfair with us corps, we should reciprocate our treatment of their own in our borders. The law instead claims some US patriot act natsec prerogative bs)
The USG forcing a sale of the 3rd largest social media platform to FAANG from China is extremely pro-big-tech.
Also, the most recent administration is seeped with VCs. The Vice President JD Vance is a Peter Thiel protege.
Capital has always sided with populists and always will, because populists reinforce the status quo capital benefits from. You'll see the same thing with ostensibly liberal establishment media organizations. Like their presenters may hate Trump and his administration on the outside, but their owners love the fact that they have millions of viewers re-glued to their televisions for the latest stupid bullshit the White House is pulling, and no matter what they may ideologically disagree on, Ellen DeGeneres and Donald Trump have INFINITELY more in common with one another than either do with any working class person.
To put it short: It's the MONEY son, the MONEY. Oh they'll bicker and spat at one another in public, sure, but most of these folks are perfectly fine with one another when the cameras aren't rolling. They don't give a shit. Rightly or wrongly, wealthy minority folk think they don't need to worry about the reactionary Right, and honestly, they're probably correct given how fixated said reactionaries are on Drag Queens supposedly being a threat to children when it feels like we have daily news stories of cops, clergy, and teachers diddling kids.
https://youtu.be/XI0MUoW28VE?feature=shared
As for apple, their serfdom labor practice during Covid was shockingly public
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/04/04/trump-a...?
(I call it serfdom labor because people were not allowed freedom of movement without threat of imprisonment.)
The most reluctant or the least vocal to comply, maybe, but far from antagonistic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/apple-ceo-tim-cook-and-preid...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ceo-tim-cook-meet-w...
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-don...
“Group” can be used when talking about a large organisation as a whole, rather than a smaller component or subsidiary.
So the FT is explicitly drawing attention to the argument that the people were fired because of something they did (attempting to unionise) and that that decision was made or sanctioned by Apple at the top level (not some regional CEO or middle manager).
I like this language quirk a lot. It almost feels subversive, pointing out through grammar that group entities are just people, responsible for their choices like everyone else.
The examples are all just so disgustingly blatant now, like Eric Adams in NYC, or the founder of Nikola paying millions in bribes (err, sorry, "campaign donations") to get a pardon.
Our republic may survive the current administration (not sure, probably give it less than a 50% chance these days), but the facade of our righteousness is gone forever. Trump won the election fair and square, and both the electoral college and the popular vote. People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
The Fed chairman is going to make a speech in 10 min, and the US President is currently live on his social platform accusing him of playing Politics. You will then achieve the same level of governance as Türkiye.
They have an agenda that is based on errors, ignorance, and being manipulated by parties that are adversaries to America and democracy. Soon this will be irrecoverable within this generation, at least.
People have the mistaken belief that things are bad right now. They can get drastically worse.
[1] "...The relevant legislation holds that a member of the Federal Reserve board may be “removed for cause by the president”. But in this context, courts have interpreted “for cause” to refer to misconduct or impropriety. The president cannot remove the members of the board purely for policy or political reasons.
However, Trump could attempt to demote Powell from chair to an ordinary member of the Federal Reserve, and put another candidate in charge. Here, there is less of a legal precedent. Previous presidents have always assumed they did not have the power to do this..."
[1] https://theconversation.com/trump-has-threatened-to-fire-the...
Trump will try to replace Powell extra-constitutionally and at this point, I suspect he may succeed. It will be close to the lights going out at that point.
My read is the election was a rejection of globalist neoliberal capitalism and Trump was the closest choice to that. If the democrats had run someone who was even willing to lie about making changes for regular people they would have won easily.
> "Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," he said.
> His decision to drop the case permanently, Judge Ho said, ensured that the administration could not use the indictment as "leverage" over Adams or the city of New York.
I live in NYC, and I have triple-checked to make sure that I will be able to vote in the primary to try and avoid him getting the democrat nomination, and this is the first time in my life that I've genuinely considered voting Republican if he does manage to get the nomination.
once the world was willing to forgive, but twice is a pattern that can't be ignored
the 97% of the rest of the world now needs to de-risk itself from the US and its businesses
longer term, the self-inflicted loss of economic, military and cultural domination will hopefully result in the US electorate realising that "US exceptionalism" was only ever a set of lucky circumstances, which are unlikely to be repeated
at which point the forced humility should result in a return to long-term stability
the worse outcome is the US attempts to hang onto its dying empire with warfare, and it appears we're seeing the groundwork being laid for this already (canada, greenland, panama, ...)
I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know this forum loves to prognosticate but the right thing is what one must do to survive.
if you're a government it's quite easy to "encourage" it to occur
example: "US cloud provider revenue levy", starting at 0%, increasing 1% each month until 40%
the aim being to add a large risk premium to all purchases of US cloud services, encouraging companies to switch to domestic suppliers
the EU is already publicly talking about retaliating in this manner
I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc.
I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US.
So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.
This is a long time in the making. Florida is Ground Zero, and if you care to look back in time to the late 1990s, there is much to find.
Epstein was cooking. Offshore Playboys were living large and public lives and making plans for the future.
St. Petersburg, FL in particular holds so many secrets.
A psychological device of "blutkit" (blood cement). For example; young Nazi SS officers were recruited via a ritual attrocity like participation in a massacre. After that "we're all in this together" sealed loyalty through a mix of guilt and fear.
The race is on for the Trump administration to elicit the most unforgivable and insane actions in order to sinter those participants into a "death pact".
EDIT: spotted recently posted [0] (Also of course C.R Browning's Ordinary Men [1]) both underline the point that you don't need to recruit intrinsically corrupted people - you can make them,
Edit: once your regime has achieved a certain level of internal cohesiveness and stability, you can begin the next step, which is to turn lower-level state actors against the population. You can do this partly by ordering them to perpetrate violence and outrage. This has a numerous benefits: first, it makes the state actors themselves afraid of the population, partly because they fear accountability, which makes them more inclined to violence and more protective of the regime; second, it stokes anger against them, which validates all the fears I listed under the first point; third, it distracts from the less shocking crimes of the regime (mere theft as opposed to bodily harm or murder -- but eventually that too!); fourth, as the regime gradually ratchets up the violence, the population becomes increasingly fearful and willing to collaborate and thus decreasingly capable of organizing and resisting.
Edit 2: I've noticed in my two or three decades of intellectual and political awareness that the right frequently seems to benefit from this kind of compounding effect and stacked benefit. No matter what happens, good or bad, it seems to redound to their benefit. I can't think of any cases where I've felt that the left enjoyed similar structural or inherent political advantages.
No America goes even lower...
The US has historically held the rule of law as an important idea. Social security has largely eliminated deep elderly poverty.
What you're describing is the first step, where the wealthy attempt to install a ruler friendly to their interests, someone they think they can control and reason with. Joke's on them -- and on everybody else, too, unfortunately.
Edit: this led me to realize that the advanced age of Fake Tan President is a saving grace. He simply won't live long enough to implement the kind of system Putin has been able to solidify over the past twenty or thirty years. And I'm not aware of anybody in the GOP who can replace him in the cult of personality that a stable dictatorship generally requires.
We shouldnt expect companies to be Moral. We shouldn't expect the government to be Just. The sooner we realize how politics actually work, the smarter we can make personal decisions that comply with realities.
There is no reason to waste time and effort. The only people who can topple Apple are going to be major players, not the multitude.
Separating an expected outcome from the factual evidence and artifacts of a situation is arguably why the justice system exists at all.
Politics isn't Byrne's The Secret, you can't materialize good leadership by ignoring every issue and praying to a higher power.
Indeed. We must be vigilant to acquire and maintain our freedoms and good governance. People suffered and some died to build the parts worth saving now. Apathy isn't going to fix anything.
The powerful are incentivized to use that power for their own benefit. Those without power do not even get to have a light shone on their poor treatment.
I've got some tough news for you: Apple isn't anywhere near the main problem here.