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In his new book, Inside Apple, Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reveals a fact sure to shock anyone who views Apple as the quintessential Silicon Valley-culture company.

Apple employees have to pay for their own food.

What?!?!

At Google, Facebook, and other Valley icons, the free food and fun is legendary. What’s going on at Apple? What OTHER things don’t we know about the place? Well, for one thing, says Mr. Lashinsky, it’s not much fun to work there, and you don’t get paid all that much.

 

Produced by Robert Libetti & Daniel Goodman

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We love our iPhones and iPads.

We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads.

We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads.

And that’s why it’s disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads–and the super-high profit margins of Apple–are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.

And it’s also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don’t have iPhones and iPads (because they can’t afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.

This is a complex issue. But it’s also an important one. And it’s only going to get more important as the world’s economies continue to become more intertwined.

Last week, NPR’s This American Life did a special on Apple’s manufacturing. The show featured (among others) the reporting of Mike Daisey, the man who does the one-man stage show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, whose wife is from China.

You can read a transcript of the whole show here. Here are some details:

• The Chinese city of Shenzhen is where most of our “crap” is made. 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a little village on a river. Now it’s a city of 13 million people–bigger than New York.
• Foxconn, one of the companies that builds iPhones and iPads (and products for many other electronics companies), has a factory in Shenzhen that employs 430,000 people.
• There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn Shenzhen plant. They each serve 10,000 people.
• One Foxconn worker Mike Daisey interviewed, outside factory gates manned by guards with guns, was a 13-year old girl. She polished the glass of thousands of new iPhones a day.
• The 13-year old said Foxconn doesn’t really check ages. There are on-site inspections, from time to time, but Foxconn always knows when they’re happening. And before the inspectors arrive, Foxconn just replaces the young-looking workers with older ones.
• In the first two hours outside the factory gates, Daisey meets workers who say they are 14, 13, and 12 years old (along with plenty of older ones). Daisey estimates that about 5% of the workers he talked to were underage.
• Daisey assumes that Apple, obsessed as it is with details, must know this. Or, if they don’t, it’s because they don’t want to know.
• Daisey visits other Shenzhen factories, posing as a potential customer. He discovers that most of the factory floors are vast rooms filled with 20,000-30,000 workers apiece. The rooms are quiet: There’s no machinery, and there’s no talking allowed. When labor costs so little, there’s no reason to build anything other than by hand.
• A Chinese working “hour” is 60 minutes–unlike an American “hour,” which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there’s a hot new gadget to build. While Daisey is in Shenzhen, a Foxconn worker dies after working a 34-hour shift.
• Assembly lines can only move as fast as their slowest worker, so all the workers are watched (with cameras). Most people stand.
• The workers stay in dormitories. In a 12-by-12 cement cube of a room, Daisey counts 15 beds, stacked like drawers up to the ceiling. Normal-sized Americans would not fit in them.
• Unions are illegal in China. Anyone found trying to unionize is sent to prison.
• Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using “hexane,” an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.
• Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers’ hands no longer work, obviously, they’re canned.
• One former worker had asked her company to pay her overtime, and when her company refused, she went to the labor board. The labor board put her on a black list that was circulated to every company in the area. The workers on the black list are branded “troublemakers” and companies won’t hire them.
• One man got his hand crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not give him medical attention. When the man’s hand healed, it no longer worked. So they fired him. (Fortunately, the man was able to get a new job, at a wood-working plant. The hours are much better there, he says–only 70 hours a week).
• The man, by the way, made the metal casings of iPads at Foxconn. Daisey showed him his iPad. The man had never seen one before. He held it and played with it. He said it was “magic.”

Importantly, Shenzhen’s factories, as hellish as they are, have been a boon to the people of China. Liberal economist Paul Krugman says so. NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof says so. Kristof’s wife’s ancestors are from a village near Shenzhen. So he knows of what he speaks. The “grimness” of the factories, Kristof says, is actually better than the “grimness” of the rice paddies.

So, looked at that way, Apple is helping funnel money from rich American and European consumers to poor workers in China. Without Foxconn and other assembly plants, Chinese workers might still be working in rice paddies, making $50 a month instead of $250 a month (Kristof’s estimates. In 2010, Reuters says, Foxconn workers were given a raise to $298 per month, or $10 a day, or less than $1 an hour). With this money, they’re doing considerably better than they once were. Especially women, who had few other alternatives.

But, of course, the reason Apple assembles iPhones and iPads in China instead of America, is that assembling them here or Europe would cost much, much more–even with shipping and transportation. And it would cost much, much more because, in the United States and Europe, we have established minimum acceptable standards for the treatment and pay of workers like those who build the iPhones and iPads.

Foxconn, needless to say, doesn’t come anywhere near meeting these minimum standards.

If Apple decided to build iPhones and iPads for Americans using American labor rules, two things would likely happen:

• The prices of iPhones and iPads would go up
• Apple’s profit margins would go down

Neither of those things would be good for American consumers or Apple shareholders. But they might not be all that awful, either. Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple’s profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.

In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.

So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.

(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course–almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)

The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country–because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.

That’s not a value judgment. It’s a fact.

So, next time you pick up your iPhone or iPad, ask yourself how you feel about that.

SEE ALSO: The Shocking Conditions Inside Foxconn [PHOTOS]

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Oh, the hand-wringing and excoriation!

This week, the techo-chamber exploded with indignation when Google had the gall to “personalize” search results by adding a couple of social features.

“Worst mistake in the company’s history” screamed one observer. (Our Matt Rosoff, who is seriously smart, so his view is worth considering.)

“Google just made Bing the best search engine,” concluded Gawker’s Matt Honan, who’s also very smart and makes a reasonable observation.

“Outrageous!” yelled pretty much every other tech pundit, especially after Twitter, et al, began howling about how Google is abusing its monopoly yet again by promoting its own services (Google +) at the expense of theirs.

So in the wake of this apparently earth-shattering and obnoxious move, I have a simple question:

Has anyone who isn’t a tech pundit even noticed that Google has changed anything?

And, for those who have noticed a change, a follow-up question:

What’s your reaction to it?

If I hadn’t heard the screams of the techo-chamber all week, I’m not sure I’d have noticed the change. But I have now noticed it. And, so far anyway, here’s my reaction to it:

It’s a very minor positive improvement, one that could easily be made a lot better.

Here’s how the change has manifested itself in my search results: There are now a few avatar-photos and a little link at the top that invites me to look at “personal results”:

 

If I click the “personal results” link, I get some Google + postings on this topic:

 

Same for another search:

 

And the “personal” version of that one:

 

Would I have noticed this change if not for the screaming? Probably not. I’ve been dimly aware in the past year or so that little avatar pictures have started getting mixed into my Google search results and that people I know have “liked” or “plussed” or whatever certain results. That’s been curious and interesting, but it’s certainly not a big deal, and I’m not sure I’d call it an improvement.

So is this new personal results thing a positive improvement?

Yes, I guess. It gives me another sort of interesting option to check out, and it gives me this without totally cluttering the page or making it less useful.

Could the new option be made a lot better?

You bet it could.

It could be made a lot better if Google included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Gmail results in the “personal” tab. Because I actually don’t know many people who aggressively use Google +.

If Google mixed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Gmail results in the “personal” tab, and organized these results in a way that wasn’t too cluttered or cacophonous, I could see it actually being a pretty cool feature.

But I’m still not sure I’d ever click on it.

Why not?

Because there are very few Google searches I do in which I care about “personal” results.

The searches in which I care about “personal” results are the ones I do in my email box or Twitter feeds.

The broader searches, the ones I do on Google, work just fine without “personalization.”

I suppose if Google ever becomes expert at doing personalized product searches, this could be helpful. If I were searching for a product and I noticed that three friends had bought one version of it and three other friends had bought another version, and there were a super-simple way to ask them pros and cons, I might want to use that feature.

But otherwise, I’m not sure I care about “personalized” search results. The generic kind work perfectly well. And I’ve already got Twitter, Facebook, et al, to tell me what my friends are interested in.

So I ask again:

Has anyone who isn’t a tech pundit noticed this change? If so, do you care?

SEE ALSO: Google May Have Just Made The Worst Mistake In Its History

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Yesterday, I explained the truth about the “Ron Paul Media Blackout” — the conspiracy theory repeated endlessly by Ron Paul fans annoyed that their candidate isn’t given more coverage in the mainstream media.

I explained that, as far as I was concerned (as the editor of a major publication), we couldn’t write about Ron Paul enough–because Ron Paul’s ardent fans are so dedicated that they take everything we write and pass it around all over the place.

So there certainly isn’t a Ron Paul Media Blackout here at Business Insider.

I also explained why we and other publications don’t write about Ron Paul even more–namely,

1) Ron Paul can’t win the election, and

2) most mainstream voters think he is a nutbag.

Not surprisingly, Ron Paul fans were not happy about that explanation.

I instantly got lots of emails beginning with the dreaded “You, sir…” and lectures about how my job is just “to report the news.”

To which I responded:

What news is it that we are not reporting?

The news that Ron Paul finished third in Iowa? (We reported that.) The news that Ron Paul wants to chop $1 trillion of government spending next year and, thereby, temporarily destroy the economy? (We reported that.) The news that Ron Paul wants to abolish the Fed? (We reported that.) The news that Ron Paul wants to end most of our international interventions and take us back to an isolationist state? (We reported that.) The news that Ron Paul may have actually won the Iowa caucuses? (We reported that.) The news that Ron Paul has totally locked up the “youth vote”? (We reported that.)

And then I added another question:

Would Ron Paul fans be lecturing me about what my job is and starting their emails with the dreaded “You, sir…” if I were writing columns arguing that Ron Paul is going to somehow pull off a miracle and win the Presidency and arguing that his policies would, in fact, be great for the country?

I doubt it.

But I’ll go ahead and ask that question, in case any Ron Paul fans want to dispute it.

And then I’ll leave you buy reiterating the truth about Ron Paul, in case any folks out there think that my job is not to “just report the news” (whatever that is), but, rather, to tell the truth.

Ron Paul can’t win the Presidency because too many Americans think he’s a nutbag.

They think this mainly because of many of the Ron Paul policies articulated above. These policies are just too far from mainstream ideology for majority voters to take them–or any candidate who espouses them–seriously.

I understand that that might be annoying to some Ron Paul fans, who are sick of politics-as-usual, think the country has huge, intractable problems, and wish that everyone else in America saw the world the way they do.

And Lord knows there are plenty of reasons to be sick of politics as usual and that the country has huge, intractable problems. There are, and it does.

But Ron Paul fans who love Ron Paul because they think that he alone is telling them the truth should also recognize another truth when they hear it:

Unless/until Ron Paul seems more reasonable in his views, he can’t win the Presidency.

SEE ALSO: DEAR RON PAUL SUPPORTERS: Here’s The Truth About The “Media Blackout”

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The early results from Iowa are costing people money on Intrade.

Ron Paul contracts for an Iowa victory have soared in price in the past few hours, while Mitt Romney contracts have tanked:

Of course, Intrade gamblers haven’t completely lost their minds:

Romney’s odds of winning the overall nomination haven’t dropped much.

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