Relevant History

Gives a new meaning to the term "targeted advertising"

A rather unfortunate, though doubtless algorithmically-generated, juxtaposition:

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On the decline of American manufacturing

A good, lengthy piece in the New York Times uses iPhone manufacturing as a window into the growth of Asian factories, and the relative decline of American manufacturing capabilities. Well worth a read.

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

If corporations are people, then profits are a human right

At least that's the underlying argument behind a move being considered by hedge funds that have bought Greece's debt:

Hedge funds... [are considering] suing Greece in a human rights court to make good on its bond payments.

The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights, though that could be a multiyear project with no guarantee of a payoff.

You almost have to admire the absolute, graceless cynicism and depravity of a strategy like this. There's a refreshing honesty about a move this openly crass.

On the other hand, it IS a logical extension of the idea that corporations are people.

Best. Excuse. Ever.

The Telegraph:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not know he was sleeping with prostitutes 'because they were all naked'

A year ago...

...I was settling into Cambridge. Wow.

my road, via flickr

 

Light beams at Peninsula this morning

Nice light at school this morning.

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Peninsula School hallway

From today.

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How Newt Gingrich is like the History Channel

This is an excellent little essay:

The Republican candidate Newt Gingrich and the cable channel History have both followed the same formula for success, by elevating fantasy over actual history. The difference, however, is that Newt wants to carry his sensational vision of a bygone age into office.

As Dave Barry says, this is a thing that exists: Virtual Bikini Wrestling

Vannevar Bush's Memex, Ted Nelson's concept of hypertext, Paul Baran's invention of packet-switching, the TCP/IP protocol stack, Tim Berners-Lee's HTML... What do we do with all this? Do we create magnificent works of art? Finally achieve world peace and global happiness?

No, we create Virtual Bikini Wrestling.

Humans. Are. Doomed.

[Don't ask me how I got to it. Actually, I was buying an ebook about Twitter and churches, and the same online publisher was selling "pictures" from recent VBW matches. It's such a weird concept, I couldn't resist clicking through.]

Rockin' it old school: Atari Battlezone on the iPad

My brother, who's an acupuncturist in New York City, sent my kids an Atari game console for the iPad for Christmas. It's essentially a dock with a joystick and four buttons. Like many iPad games, the basic setup is free, and extra games are available as in-app purchases (i.e., not through the iTunes store, but through the app itself).

I downloaded Battlezone, and the kids spent some time playing it. I then gave them a little masterclass in how to play; put another way, I blew away all their high scores. Though I spent more of my college hours in front of one of those machines than I really want to recall.

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It's impressive how well the game plays on a completely different platform.

Quote of the day: Margaret Thatcher

Via Meryl Streep:

If you want something spoken about, ask a man. If you want it done, ask a woman.

On Gingrich's use of historical analogy: Was his failure to get on the VA ballot Pearl Harbor, Pickett's Charge, or 9/11?

Conor:

Everything must be made into a sweeping analogy. And his instinct for grandiosity is so pronounced that only a small group of recurring subjects are fit for the comparisons that he offers. Would anyone other than Newt Gingrich respond to failing to get on a ballot by asking, "Okay, what's the historical analogy?" Even the "the" is perfect -- as if there is one definitive analogy that fits….

Knowing Gingrich regards Pearl Harbor as "the analogy" for effectively losing Virginia, what comparison will he think appropriate if he loses the entire campaign. The Bataan Death March? Lincoln's tragic night at the theater? The fall of Rome? Or maybe he'll win, and God help us if so. Has there ever been a politician more inclined to make history? In a president of the United States, that is a dangerous impulse.

There's actually a serious point here, as Conor observes. For all his love of history-- or his love of himself as an historian-- Gingrich's use of history is remarkably shallow, and really consists of a kind of Mad Libs consisting of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (how many people has Gingrich challenged to "a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates"?), and the Cold War; comparisons of himself to Washington, Reagan, and Thatcher; and apocalyptic language that would have warmed the hearts of Leo Strauss or Nostradamus.

He truly is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person is like.

Also, this handy flow chart.

More on security theatre

A very good Vanity Fair piece on security theatre in our nation's airports. It features a walk through Dulles with security expert Bruce Schneier (who I once appeared with in an article)

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said…. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”...

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

James Fallows also has a Boxing Day roundup of security theatre. Beware terrorist cupcakes!

Homestead cat

I was out walking today, and passed the old home of Homestead, a Web site company that was bought by Intuit in 2007. It's not clear that there's anyone in the building now but the cat.

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A couple years ago I had the vague idea of doing a book of pictures of closed-down offices. If things don't pick up more, maybe there'll still be a reason to plan such a book.

Windy Hill Open Space Preserve

Yesterday we organized a Christmas Eve hike in Windy Hill Open Space Preserve.

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Windy Hill is a park bounded by Portola Road and Skyline Boulevard, and the hike we went on took us from the former to the latter. There are parking lots on Portola and Skyline. We followed the Ridge Trail to Spring Ridge, and hiked it to the top of the park.

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It's one of the few parks that allows both dogs and horses, so we saw a fair number of each.

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It also turned out to be rather kid-friendly, though it helped that there was a whole pack of kids. Of all the things you can take to keep kids from complaining during a hike, buddies are the most important.

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Unlike the ridge parks, where any trail will have lots of uphill and downhill, these are one way: either you're headed up to Skyline, or down to Portola Road.

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The view from the summit is really great, though there are lots of good views of the valley and East Bay as you go.

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Matt Taibbi on "skin in the game"

A fabulous recent Bloomberg piece quotes Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman on the unfairness of lower-income U.S. families, military retirees, pensioners, and others who pay no income tax: “You have to have skin in the game," he complains.

Matt Taibbi counters, if you're not paying federal income taxes because you're earning working-class wages,

you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck…. And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Best closing line in the history of marketing: "Want to learn a lot more? Read our CEO's dissertation"

Even Newt Gingrich couldn't do this, but Lytro, the makers of the new light field camera, (its very first production model was delivered last month) can.

The camera, incidentally, looks pretty amazing-- an appealing blend of retro (it looks like slide viewers my dad had from the 1970s)-- and hyper-modern.

Here's the dissertation, if you're really interested.

And seriously, check out the interactive picture gallery. It's pretty amazing.

Christopher Hitchens

I'll be only the billionth person to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens. I have mixed feelings about his work: I found his writing right after 9/11 to be brilliant, but also found some of his later political writing blustery and straining to convince.

On the other hand, he was an awesomely productive writer, something that as a fellow craftsman I have to admire.

Of the various remembrances that have come out, I think Christopher Buckley's is my favorite.

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

This piece by Ian McEwan is also pretty remarkable for its description of Hitchens in the hospital in his last days:

this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library....

The next morning, at Christopher's request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher's journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Top CEOs working 30-40% harder than in 2009

I mean, if compensation for CEOs is up, as a new survey reports, that's the logical explanation, right?

CEO pay packages have boomed: the top 10 earners took home more than $770m between them in 2010. As stock prices began to recover last year, the increase in CEO pay outstripped the rise in share value. The Russell 3000 measure of US stock prices was up by 16.93% in 2010, but CEO pay went up by 27.19% overall. For S&P 500 CEOs, the largest companies in the sample, total realised compensation – including perks and pensions and stock awards – increased by a median of 36.47%. Total pay at midcap companies, which are slightly smaller than the top firms, rose 40.2%.

Working that hard makes losing a top job that much more painful:

Four of the 10 highest paid CEOs were retired or departing executives. Ronald Williams, former head of Aetna, a health insurer, exercised 2.4m options for a profit of $50.4m. Aetna's stock price declined by 70% from when Williams assumed the role of CEO in February 2006 until his retirement. At pharmacy chain CVS, Thomas Ryan made a $28m profit on his options. During Ryan's 13-year tenure as CEO, CVS Caremark's stock price decreased almost 54%.

As the Guardian comments, "2010 was a great year to lose your job as a CEO." Finally, the survey explains why bankers are in such a bad mood:

Bosses won in every area, with dramatic increases in pensions, payoffs and perks – as well as salary.

Still, there are no bankers among this year's big winners.

James Murdoch needs the phrase "Blackberry Bites"...

...and to put John Hagel and John Seely Brown on retainer to help explain how people really read on their Blackberry.

(Read about Murdoch's "I read this critical email on my Blackberry, so hey how could I have read it all the way through?" excuse.)