I remember reading some reports that actually looked at suicide rate based on the number of people working there and didn't find it that elevated compared to the average. Fact is, anytime you have a big concentration of people in a small place you will have some suicides just by virtue of statistics, so I'm not sure if there's really a much higher number of suicides or if the few that did happen were sensationalised because it sells.

That's not to say that working in a company like Foxconn is the nicest possible job (it's not but it seems to be better than a lot of places) or that China is great and can do no wrong (I'm generally very critical of the CCP) but I do think that sometimes it's easy to just spin up a story to shock people because that sells.

Yup - the suicide nets story is pure disinformation. Yes they had nets, but the suicide rate at the factory before the nets were installed was lower than of students at US colleges.

Do you have a source for this?

In addition, while suicide nets might sound silly, they actually do reduce the suicide rate.

They're being installed on bridges all over the US for exactly that reason.

For example: https://www.goldengate.org/district/district-projects/suicid...

Suicides or no, I watched a documentary about how the women who work at chipmaking companies, due to the chemicals involved, all developed serious health problems with their hormones and reproductive system.

The hysteria about Foxconn suicides was complete clickbait garbage. Even during their worst year of suicides that was reported by The Wire, the suicide rate at FoxConn was 1/10th of that of the US and 1/20th of that of China overall.

>It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

This is actually overwhelmingly a good thing. Life expectancy and living standards have exploded in Asia. They just haven't reached the point of developed Western nations yet. It's impossible to transition from very shitty conditions to good conditions hitting a midpoint of moderately shitty conditions. For example, the abundance of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs incentives teenagers to drop out of school and work instead. Of course, we are right to call out Apple for relying on child labor, but the goal should be to have a better control of their supply chain rather than move manufacturing back to the US.

The raw materials have a pretty bad track record as well.

As they do for every tech supplier, Apple is just the very large and easy target to pin it all on. Your Lenovo, Dell or Samsung products are no cleaner.

I have been using second hand phones for a while. My current phone is running Android 5.

I don't treat them as secure, however. I have not entered credit cards nor my Google account.

> It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

Watching some in depth documentaries on the global low-cost-fashion trade in textiles and garments is also a real eye opener.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Rana_Plaza_factory_collap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Dhaka_garment_factory_fir...

>It's a tough pill to swallow to learn all our tech stuff we all enjoy is built on the backs of poor people on the other side of the planet.

It's far far more than 'tech' stuff. A lot of everything we enjoy is built off the backs of the poor and exploited, that's how most of the system we have works at a fundamental level.

> I assume this is about Foxconn. Does that mean you'll be boycotting other companies that also work with them, like Amazon, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Vizio, Acer, Lenovo, Nintendo, and Sony?

It would be easier to just ban them with legislation, similar to what's been done with Huawei