The use of "race science" in this headline has been bugging me and I only just realized why. Questionable race science would be claiming that e.g. asian women think in some particularly useful way, or any other specific claim about race that is hard to prove. But it's actually quite easy to show asian women have small hands, I assume -- at least, it seems to me like asian women do tend to have much smaller hands than men of other races. This is not the dubious claim. The dubious claim is whether those smaller hands are useful or not.

I am not really sure what to make of this, I'm still grappling with this one. Just thought I'd share my scattered thoughts.

I wipe my ass with NYT these days. All they've been publishing is straight garbage

Wait a second:

it’s hard for apple to manufacture devices in a country with robust labor rights.

Robust labor rights? The US?

We have child labor making a comeback here. It’s not that far fetched to imagine children working in hypothetical US factories if things keep going the way they’re going.

The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I'm getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.

A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I'm making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I'm finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?

Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I'd take: none.

Before that final interview I'd already had a few red flags:

1. Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I'd imagined I'd ever find in Texas, of all places. But ... there's still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
2. The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I'm not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
3. As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.

None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the "minus" column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the "plus" column.

But that final job interview... Yeah.

I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn't see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.

"Oh, that? That's the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this."

And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can't get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he'd taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he'd placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.

And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.

In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.

That by itself would have been a hard "no" for accepting any kind of a job. I didn't need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was "sorry, I've decided I'm never setting foot on US soil ever again". And I've stuck with it ever since.

¹ de Bono's "Plus/Minus/Interesting" technique.

This is not the dubious claim.

It is dubious.

To be clear, you're saying that asian women typically having smaller hands is dubious? I have to double-check because I'm astonished anyone doubts this.

From the article :

For one thing, it's not even clear that the claim that Chinese women have small fingers is even true. Research on global hand size is lacking, but one study found that the average Chinese person has a hand size approximately equal to that of the average German. An analysis of hand size around the world, though it didn't include China, found that even the largest average differences in women's hand size between countries was negligible.

It's all about the roboblox these days. The kids yearn for robots.

That’s it. That’s the only reason.

Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren't available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn't have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.