Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour

[joshcryer]

15. I think we, as a consumer oriented culture, just don't care that much. We want the "cheap stuff."

Apple was targeted by the author (if people read the article it's quite good), because they have an enormous, overwhelming profit margin. At least mainboards have a very low profit margin and are almost sold at cost. This whistle blowing (wrong term?) is going to at the minimum, if we can have good hopes, help end the child labor practice, I don't know for sure, but I think it will anyway.

If you do apply those tariffs the cost for electronics will skyrocket, and we can't have that!

There has to be a concerted effort to 1) bring back manufacturing here (most computers were made here in the early age of computing!) and 2) automate the heck out of it. Perhaps an automated electronic manufacturing grant would be the way to go. The government could set aside $10 billion to the first 10 companies to achieve it (plus the patent rights!). The Fujitsu TS plant in Germany automates 90% of the assembly of their mainboards.

We don't need this slave labor, and the comments that "it's how stuff is currently made" really kill me from a technology standpoint, we can do better!