US labour watchdog halts Apple cases after group’s lawyer picked for top job

Faith what now? Yes, it's decent product but...

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...

> I hope Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple.

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.

>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 Americans still have the faith they used to regarding Apple

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_maximisation

^ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx

With tech and politics becoming more intermingled each day, it won't be long before we see articles like "[flagged]: The decline of Hacker News in the Era of Techno-Feudalism"

Did Cook, in the spirit of unity, make a similar donation in 2020?

Was super disappointing to see him up there at the inauguration. E-mailed tim.cook@apple.com and told him as much.

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_.

Amazon and Meta did too. Then Bezos changed the Washington Post editorial page policy that they could only write about personal liberties and free markets (subtext: not Trump). I wonder what Meta got in return. It seems like this relatively cheap $1M payoff was a subtle “kiss the ring” of the emperor. Good business. Shareholders would approve.

He was in a tough spot. I’m sure he doesn’t support the admin, but also he knows Apple needs tariff relief, and paying a “donation” to Trump is a good way to do that.

He basically paid $1M to try and save thousands of jobs at Apple (and of course increase Apple’s value)

Should we etch swastikas in all iPhones? Not sure how close we are to corporations working under government direction here (part of literal fascism iirc)

It's gotta be tough! When you've made that your entire personality, it's hard to drop it. You've made friends, and perhaps lost others, by being this person. To just admit "I was wrong" potentially means alienating all of their friends and family. I'd imagine it's why so many people are still so vehemently flat earthers.

My aunt shares AI-generated memes about hispanic and palestinian people crying as they are rounded up by ICE. Her key motivation above all others is making particular groups of people she hates suffer. Everything else is acceptable as long as she gets that.

It's a concerning vision for the country.

Consider how many people never realized that Jim Jones didn't have their best interests at heart and now consider that we've fully automated the process that brought those people to that point.

They don’t care. I sent someone a link about NIH cutting funding for the place that created the cancer killing treatment that saved his Wife last year.

“They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.

"I was wrong" is really hard to say at the best of times. I sometimes struggle with it when I make a little mistake at work.

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.

Consider that we're living in a post-truth world, so you may not like the answer.

With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.

I literally had a 90 year old woman approach me at the dentist yesterday, complementing my Model 3 and telling me "I just love Elon. I had a dream about him last night!" For these types, it's a cult of personality, not logic or policy.

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".

It’s really embarrassing to admit when you get worked over.

So, never.

Not trying to be hostile but while everywhere has corruption, and the US definitely has a history of things to be shameful of, it's been nowhere near the scope of what we're seeing now, at least in recent history.

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.

I've come to the conclusion though that I prefer that it is now out in the open. There's a better likelihood heads will eventually roll (as a figure of speech).

Why pretend any more? You go full mask off and half the country still cheers you. Trump could get on stage, say "there will be no more elections and I am now king" and half the country will be okay with it while the other half puts their hands in their pocket and feigns helplessness.

At this point I'm practically begging for corrupt-but-competent assholes over the total clowns that are actually running the show this administration.

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.

Increasingly it looks like there is a strata of the private-jet set that take care of one another, keep the rest of us under their thumb. I can't think this is going to end well for any of the parties.

Thank you for the clarification.

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.

Cases of Apples

> Apple has been the most antagonistic to Trump.

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...

Not meaning to be a dick or anything, but you and folks like you are too focused on the surface level culture war crap. Apple is not activist, it's a business. It's progressive by corporate standards I guess, in that it isn't outwardly rejecting its minority employees (yet) but they'll still circle the wagons for the actual holders of power.

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.

I'm confused how you came to this conclusion. Tim Cook donated millions of dollars to Trump personally, and Republican policies are extremely pro-big-tech so it makes sense that they would support each other. Anti-worker policies like this are exactly what I would have expected from this admin.

You don’t remember the dog and pony show Cook did with Trump about manufacturing Mac Pros in America - all ten of them that they sell in a year?