Yea and the slaves in the kitchen were happier then the ones in the field. So what? To try and justify the horrible treatment of these people so that we can feel better about having an iphone that is a few hundred dollars cheaper is absurd.
The CEO of Boeing can probably still afford to take a flight on a plane made by his company, and that probably is true of an average worker of a Boeing factory as well.
So let me rephrase: if people working in a factory can only afford the very basic necessities and the actual goods the factory produces get shipped to the other side of the globe (and waste gets left behind), something is not right.
But certainly in the case of the iPhone a lot of them do get bought locally. Perhaps not by Foxconn factory floor workers, but certainly by a lot of other people in China.
I mean I kind of get the point you are trying to make, but Foxconn and iPhones aren't really a good example of that.
Seems like there's a sub-thread going on in this discussion relating to zen/buddhism/enlightenment. Dream reality or "Maya" is the reality of concepts and ego. "Reality" is the real tangible experience of consciousness. Everything else is layered on top of that as projection or thought. However, I can tell you having had some experience in this area that using these doctrines to create a "good and evil" but just using more subtle language is also just another concept and layer (supermarkets are just as real and part of reality as anything else). The real goal is to see the perfection of things exactly as they are, and that also doesn't mean you don't have the potential to change it (because human growth and change is also part of it).
So, while some aspects of what we know from neuroscience and modern medicine map pretty closely to some eastern practices, those practices are embedded in superstitious religions that are no different from their counterparts in other regions.
The real goal is to procreate. There is no soul or divinity or whatever. While we can say that yes to a degree the world as experienced by my brain is like the concept of Maya and the synthesis of my inputs into consciousness are my subjective reality, that's really it. You can't get from there to "the real goal is to see the perfection of things".
The practices of meditation, visualization, etc do have benefits but they don't have to be rooted in the mysticism that spawned them. In fact, that's one of the things I like about zen. it rejects those notions because of the way that people assign baggage to them and start to worship the baggage instead of doing "the thing".
The iPhones and Supermarkets are of the dream reality.
A world without consequences, where the Foxconn Factory Workers (or the mines of Congo) do not exist.