It Ain't Satire

Faithful reader may recall the coining (so far as I know) of "flesh robot" in an earlier essay. The point being that the very notion that manufacturing, in the Red Blooded USofA, is by definition, entry into a blue collar middle class is a pile of horseshit. Yes, there was such a blue collar middle class, made of largely sub-GED knuckledraggers (who, nevertheless, put a shiv in the back of the party that built that sort of middle class). But it wasn't anywhere near the bulk of manufacturing.

A thought experiment: why and how could a cohort of under-educated and unskilled laborers get comfortable wages? For a start, their employers have to have market mojo to, themselves, get above market moolah for the widgets they make. Adam Smith would be appalled. And so, of course, your average Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnut would be, too. "Not a penny more than what I decide your pathetic hands are worth!!! God damn it!!!" And so forth.

But, we do know that there was a blue collar middle class of non-trivial size, up to about the Arab Oil Embargo of the 70s. How did that happen? The answer: countervailing power.

What the hell is that, one might ask? Well, if the employers have some amount of price-setting power, and they are faced with employees who are backed by a union with some price-setting power, then the two sides can work out an accommodation. And so it came to be in about the two decades following WWII. And, that was possible because the Powers That Be in DC were, by and large, still feeling that "we're all in this life together" glow. So, DC allowed unions to apply that countervailing power. It only really could work with large employers who operated, though they'd never admit it, oligopolies. Or, in other words, price-setting power.

But, in due time that glow of shared fellowship dimmed, and the CxO class came for their pound or two of flesh. Move production to fascist Red states (then known just as The South). When that didn't keep profits up enough, then Mexico. And so on.

And, still, the sub-GED class blamed the Donkey party for their fall, not the Elephant party which engineered it. We have shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw running amok just because the sub-GED class is way too stupid to see who's actually on their side. These morons have, for decades, voted for pols whose prime directive is keep them and theirs uneducated, unhealthy, and poor. Even now, with the "big, beautiful bill" laying waste to Red state interests, they still don't seem to get it. Ah, but Mad Dictator Don is laying waste to Harvard and any other school that isn't at least as far right as Project 2025. We'll show them thar pointy headed liberals what the real world is like!!!

So, now we get this report on the flesh robot phenomenon.

What does China offer that the United States doesn't?

Small hands, a massive, seasonal work force and millions of engineers.

Young Chinese women have small fingers, 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. In a recent analysis the company did to explore the feasibility of moving production to the United States, the company determined that it couldn't find people with those skills in the United States, said two people familiar with the analysis who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Flesh robots by another name. In basketball there's the olde saying, "you can't coach height"; you can't make a short little shit taller. Who knew it was all about little fingers and the iPhone? Everybody knows Mad Dictator Don has tiny hands. May be he could earn a living making iPhones? If you've seen a video of modern circuit board assemply, it's all about robots, the machine version populating the board. What Apple has found is that people are cheaper than machines. At least for some tasks. People also have another advantage: you can dump them and quit paying them when demand slackens or the production quota is reached. You have to pay the machine no matter how many widgets it makes.