"This is the world we are living in"

You must have heard about this. Some dude who worked for us in China had a bunch of prototype next-generation iPhones (which by the way do not actually exist) and he lost one of them and the security dudes at Foxconn, our manufacturing partner, scared the shit out of him and mistreated him and finally he jumped off a building and killed himself. Twenty-five years old. I'm totally freaked about this. Because let's be honest. Foxconn went after the guy because they know we'll go after them. They told us about the missing prototype (which as I said before does not actually exist and never did exist) and we went apeshit on them. I mean really, really apeshit. Like the kind of apeshit that means this mistake is going to cost your fucked-up Third World manufacturing company billions and billions of dollars and ruin you and bankrupt you and drive you out of business.

Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them. We can't make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the quality would be about half what we get out of China. But these guys play rough. They really do. They are not nice people. And, though we talk a good game about how we insist on workers being treated with dignity, blah blah blah, well, I mean, come on. Have you ever been to China? We have. We've been to China. We know what goes on there. We know how they open your mail, and listen to your phone calls, and let their factories pollute like crazy and exploit workers, all in the name of progress. And we turn a blind eye to it. We let them know when we're coming to visit, and they give us a tour and put on a little show of how great things are, and how wonderful the dorm life is, and afterward we pretend to keep an eye on them -- but it's all theater. It is. We know it. What's more, you know it. Everyone knows it.