If you had any doubt in your mind about whether Mike Daisey was an absolutely bald-faced lying cuntweasel, do yourself a favor and download the transcript or listen to the broadcast. The sheer volume of lies, and the unabashed level of self-righteous equivocation Daisey had with Ira Glass made me laugh out loud at several points. One of my favorite exchanges comes toward the end of the piece, with Glass trying to get Daisey to admit to lying about material facts in his work:

Mike Daisey: All I can tell you is that I stand by what I told you before – that I stand by those things.

Ira Glass: That those things happened – those specific things.

Mike Daisey: Yes. And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how people see it -

Ira Glass: I find this to be a really hedgy answer. I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would  react differently to it.

Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.

Ira Glass: That label – fiction?

What a fucking asshole.

You have to wonder how far people will go to make a buck. Mike Daisey made a nice living blowing up Apple’s supply chain labor practices in China, and the Times no doubt sold a couple of papers off the name of the most valuable company on the planet. There’s now a whole cottage industry built up around complaining about Apple, some people protesting, some delivering “demands” to Apple Stores. It’d really be quite entertaining if it didn’t nauseate me to my core. But the truth – that’s not so clear.

When Apple brought in the FLA, the organization used by companies like Nike to audit their plants’ working conditions, their head called the facilities at Foxconn “first class” with ”conditions (that) are way, way above average of the norm”. When Apple opened up Foxconn to ABC News for their killshot expose, the best they could muster was someone complaining about the pay.

Now comes another report from The Street that paints a picture of Foxconn that frankly I find too rosy to believe. After interviewing a random sample of 22 employees – which I assume means they didn’t stand in front of Foxconn’s gates in loud Hawaiian shirts soliciting complaints like some people – they found that overtime was sparse (in fact its unavailability was one of the chief complaints), people liked their managers and works area were clean and safe.

Is it possible that the public is being duped by people looking to make a name force-feeding Apple schadenfreude? If you have any doubt that it can be a profitable venture, you don’t read very many tech blogs.

Even though Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich debuted in October, manufacturers have been a little slow on the uptake. You see, between the bloat features that carriers and manufacturers have to re-inject upon every iteration of Google’s core OS to differentiate themselves from each other, it takes time.

Many of those using Android’s most popular shartphone, the Galaxy S II (The Quickening), are looking forward to the official update for their devices, with some countries already reporting having access to it. The Verge has a brief overview of what users can expect from the latest and greatest Android build. The verdict? Not much.

Despite Andy Rubin’s strong words for manufacturers and Matais Duarte’s enticing introduction of Design Principles, Samsung’s devices still sport the TouchWiz UI overlay. And the new version of TouchWiz hasn’t been released yet, so users are finding their devices have the same familiar feel they had when they bought their Gingerbread phones last year. No rip-off of Helvetica new Android system font, no resizable widgets. The browser doesn’t stammer like my cousin when you scroll anymore, so I guess there’s that.

The fact is that no matter what Google does with its release schedule for Android, they’re still beholden to the whims of manufacturers who feel the need for consumers to be able to tell their devices apart. New release? Has to be carrier and manufacturer tested. And if the new version’s release doesn’t line up with the manufacturer’s lipstick? You get a device with new bones slathered in old lipstick.

But the Android fragmentation issue is totally overblown.