Give Pfizer, et al, more money, dammit!

When we all started getting familiar with something called a "novel coronavirus," experts, who were way ahead of us and on top of a hill looking into the future, told us that eventually vaccines will be the only way out of the global pandemic.

A year ago, we knew that we will need vaccines to deliver us from the pandemic into some kind of normalcy.

Right?

Pharmaceutical companies also knew well about the money to be made from vaccines that could beat back COVID-19.  So, their scientists set out on the expedition, and amazed the world with the speed at which they developed, tested, and produced the vaccines.

What I don't understand is this: Why didn't governments, especially in affluent countries, offer all the needed dollars and euros in order to rush the production of billions of doses that can vaccinate the entire world?

Because big-pharma will make lots of money in the process?

Think about this: Isn't vaccinating the world worth the money?

Think about this also: The world's most profitable company is not a pharmaceutical giant.  Nor is it a fossil fuel company (if you set aside the strange monster that Saudi Aramco is.)  It is Apple.

Apple is one hell of a profit-generator:

Apple said on Wednesday that its profits more than doubled to $23.6 billion in the most recent quarter as people embraced its latest iPhones and bought more of its other products, striking results for what is already the world’s most valuable company.

Apple said its revenues soared by 54 percent to $89.6 billion, a record for the March quarter that meant Apple sold more than $1 billion on average each day.

Now, think about the massive profits earned by Apple versus the much lower profit rate that Pfizer earns from the Covid vaccine.  Which profit-maker is more important and valuable to humanity? (BTW, I have been complaining about Apple and its puke-inducing profits for a long time. Like this post from 2013)

We humans have a twisted relationship with vaccine development.  While we want to enjoy the benefits of vaccines, we don't want vaccine developers to profit from it.  Yet, we willingly fork over money to companies like Apple that don't deliver anything comparable to what vaccines do for our wellbeing.

On top of that, given the cost of vaccines, while we in the rich countries get the shots for free, without ever pausing to wonder who pays for the vaccine and its distribution, those in the poorer countries of the world are left to fend for themselves.

“It’s a moral issue,” said Boston Zimba, a doctor and vaccine expert in Malawi, which has vaccinated only 2 percent of its people. “This is something rich countries should be thinking about. It’s their conscience. It’s how they define themselves.”

To me, the solution is simple and is an expression of humanity: Pay the pharmaceutical companies that have already developed the COVID vaccines all the money they need in order to produce vaccines for humans everywhere.  And underwrite the expenses for the logistics of vaccine distribution.  Because, merely waiving patent protections doesn't do a damn thing to begin production at, say, Ghana!

Source

At the very least, do not complain about vaccine developers earning profits, even as big tech's profits dwarf other companies and even the economies of most countries!

I did it!

After years of a love-hate relationship, and asking myself whether I should stay or go, I did it.  It took some thinking. It was calculated. It was well-planned.

I quit Facebook ;)

It was a lengthy relationship, to which I dragged myself back in the summer of 2008.

But, two years is all it took for me to start worrying about Facebook.  I suspended my account.  As I noted in a post back in 2011, "There are moments when I worry about all this social media network and the internet ..."

That was the first of a few times when I suspended my account and then got back to Facebook after a while. It was a love-hate relationship.   I joked about that:

I feel like the heroine in the formulaic Bollywood movies who alternates between yelling "I hate you" to the hero and "I love you" a few minutes after that!

There are a gazillion posts with the label Facebook, which will demonstrate my worries not only about Facebook but about social media, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Technology, the internet, and social media all had good intentions in the beginning, of course.  But, it did not take long for them to become the evil forces of darkness.  As one of my go-to tech thinkers, Tristan Harris, puts it:

There was pressure from venture capital to grow really, really quickly. There’s a graph showing how many years it took different companies to get to 100 million users. It used to take ten years, but now you can do it in six months. So if you’re competing with other start-ups for funding, it depends on your ability to grow usage very quickly. Everyone in the tech industry is in denial. We think we’re making the world more open and connected, when in fact the game is just: How do I drive lots of engagement?

When it became all about the numbers, soon it was hell on earth:

Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a fucking cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

What drives this all?  The ability of the tech in social media to tap into our primal feelings of anger, rage, hate, and more.

They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. In 2008, when they put their first app on the iPhone, the whole ballgame changed. Suddenly Bernays’s dream of the universal platform reaching everybody through every medium at the same time was achieved by a single device. You marry the social triggers to personalized content on a device that most people check on their way to pee in the morning and as the last thing they do before they turn the light out at night. You literally have a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.

As I wrote in one of my recent posts, We are fucked, folks. But, there is no going back either.  Well, I know that I am not going back to Facebook.

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

Teenagers won't dream of cars anymore?

I was perhaps ten years old when my parents--ahem, my father, given that he made most of the budget decisions--decided that the old car would not work with the new sky-high petrol prices.  The family joke is that my younger brother refused to walk, having been spoiled by the car.

The car meant something back then.  I remember Holden Caulfield commenting in The catcher in the rye that people are always dreaming of their next cars--even when they drive out of the dealer in their new car!  And that continues even now.  I seem to make my own stories about people based on the type of cars they drive.  Even the car that I drive has a reputation for the owners being dull, boring, careful, and everything else along those lines.

In the future that is arriving, cars might not mean a damn thing.  Think about the science fiction movies that you may watched.  Not the science fiction of a gazillion years from now, but set in the near-future.  Recall how boring the transport mechanisms are in those movies?  They are boxy and utilitarian. That's it.  There is no art, there is no story, no life about those transport units.

This essay, by a chair-professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, argues that cars will never be sexy again.  With developments like Uber and self-driving cars, "the automotive logic of the 20th century—“cars as luxury, cars as freedom, cars as sex”" has been turned upside down.

cars are becoming leased appliances, made and sold with efficiency to suppliers intent on renting them out for minutes at a time to customers who would rather forget ever having been inside them. Nothing could be less sensual than the boring universe of business-to-business fleet sales—except, maybe, the boring universe of business-to-business fleet-sales component supply.

I suppose the boring future will be another version of Henry Ford's line that any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.

When that future arrives, there is one thing that I will miss most in this part of the world--the bumper stickers.  Some vehicles have awesome statements in their bumper stickers, including those that I disagree with, of course.  Once I saw one of those huge pick-up trucks with a bumper-sticker with an arrow pointing to the exhaust pipe.  The sticker read "Your Prius can suck on this."  The other day I saw a small car with stickers all over the bumper, the rear frame, and half of the sides as well.  That kind of a personalization won't be there in the future?  It will be a boring future even for this dull and boring guy!

My favorite bumper-sticker had truly my kind of humor.  What was in the sticker?  "I hate bumper stickers!" ;)

An apple a day ... will keep the profits away?

Mirror, mirror, mirror on the wall
Which is the evilest company of all?

It depends.

It depends on how one defines "evil."  You think it is easy?  Think again.

Seriously, you think you have defined "evil" in a way that everybody can agree with?  Let me give you a simpler task.  We eat sandwiches, right?  Go ahead, define a "sandwich."

If you think there is something tricky about me asking you to define a sandwich, yes, you are correct.  Click here to find out more about that problem.  If defining a sandwich will be that difficult, now do you agree with me that defining "evil" is not going to be easy?

I find Apple to be a creepy and evil corporation.

Yes, for a few years I have had an iPhone.  But, that does not change my opinion that there is something creepy and evil about Apple. Its profits are the main reason why I think that way about Apple.

How profitable is Apple?  You want to know how much cash the company has sitting around?  You ready for this?  Are you seated?  Are you holding on to something so that you won't easily keel over?  Ok, here it is:

 As of last month, Apple had $203 billion in cash reserves.

Yes, it is two hundred and three billion dollars.  Of cash reserves.  BTW, a billion is a thousand million, right?  Which means the cash reserves are 203,000 million dollars.  Here, let me put it this way; it is $203,000,000,000.  And you thought zero has no value! ;)

Of course, this is not the first time (like here) that I am beating up on the company that liberals love; the same liberals who otherwise hate corporations!

It gets even more interesting:

keep in mind that $181 billion of that total (roughly 89%) is held outside the U.S.

Yep, Apple has enough lawyers and accountants who know every hole in the taxation Swiss cheese to keep the money far, far away from taxpayers in the country in which the corporation is headquartered.  If there aren't enough holes, then the corporation's hired hands create them, of course.

You still think Apple is a saintly entity?  Well then, how about this comment:

But one thing Apple absolutely shouldn't do is bring that cash back to the United States -- at least not yet. Because in doing so, Apple would incur a massive repatriation tax bill at a rate of 35%, or more than $63 billion.
Thankfully for Apple shareholders, management has promised that this isn't an option as long as America's repatriation tax remains at such a high rate.

I know, some of you readers are so pro-corporations and are finance wizards that you will want to interject here that America's tax policies are why Apple plays these offshore shell games.  Tell you what. it all depends on your definitions, like what Bill Clinton famously said!  Using my definition, Apple is one heck of an evil corporation.

Source

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future

Yes, that was one of the classics from the one and only Yogi Berra.  If only many important aspects of life can be so easily articulated (even if it fails a formal grammar test.)

For years, I have heard enough and more left-leaning people, especially within academia, beat up on oil companies and their profits.  (Meanwhile, I was beating up on the company that makes the computers that the left-leaning people love to use--for the sheer audacity with which it earns gazillions while portraying a saintly image!)  The evil oil corporations, the story went, did everything possible to increase their profits.  Even launched wars, with the government as their proxies.  The bad oil companies did their best to stifle innovation with the development of the electric car, they argued, because the electric cars will not need oil (gasoline.)

I wonder what they will complain about now, with oil prices tumbling to levels that nobody predicted.  "Peak oil" and the evil corporations together means soon we will be looking at $200 per barrel, they warned us.  The cold, hard, news of today is this:

Brace for $40-a-barrel oil.

So, whatever happened to that framework of the evil oil corporations that want to earn those huge profits?  Why are they now practically giving away gasoline at the pump?

Meanwhile, the company that I love to beat up on is as busy as ever storing its gazillions at tax havens, far away from the taxman and gets a free pass from the left-leaning folks who continue to target the oil companies.  Oh well, a strange world this is!

So, about that oil price.  How come from the experts to the conspiracy nutcases, everybody got it so wrong?  Well, re-read the Yogi Berra quote in the subject line!

Of, if you want an oil-specific quote:

When contemplating the future of oil prices, one should always keep in mind U.S. foreign service officer James Akins’ observation, “Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and the prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.” Akins wrote that in 1973.

Isn't that a lot more words than the simple Yogism? ;)

Ron Bailey, whose note in Reason is where that quote is from, includes another quote there from a Saudi billionaire who claims that oil will never go back up above $100 a barrel.  Say what?

In a commentary at Project Syndicate, is another interesting question:

should we expect $50 to be the floor or the ceiling of the new trading range for oil?

Say what?  This commentator expects oil prices to go well below $50?  Whatever happened to greedy oil companies and their profits?

economics and history suggest that today’s price should be viewed as a probable ceiling for a much lower trading range, which may stretch all the way down toward $20. 

Are you kidding me?

the marginal cost of US shale oil would become a ceiling for global oil prices, whereas the costs of relatively remote and marginal conventional oilfields in OPEC and Russia would set a floor. As it happens, estimates of shale-oil production costs are mostly around $50, while marginal conventional oilfields generally break even at around $20. Thus, the trading range in the brave new world of competitive oil should be roughly $20 to $50. 

Don't bet your farm on this, as they say.  Why?  I refer you to the Yogi Berra quote in the title.

A couple of years ago, I received a snarky email from a former student.  In the email, she referred to the stepped up production in the US thanks to fracking up the Bakken oil as evidence that I was bullshitting in the class.  (Ok, she didn't use the BS word.)  I wrote back to her that my worry has never been about exhausting the oil supplies or the price, but about the continued and expanded use of carbon as the source of energy and its impacts on global climate.  Even now, though it is awesome to fill up a tank at a remarkably low price, I do worry about the long-term consequences of a delay in energiewende.

Maybe I should not worry about tomorrow and, instead, seek consolation in the Yogism, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Another screw comes loose

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

That profound paragraph is from Henry David Thoreau.

Men, and women, lead lives of quiet desperation to which they have resigned themselves.

What a profound paragraph!

But, no, I was not reading any of Thoreau's works.  In the contemporary hypertexted world, in which Google search is my most trusted helper, I came across that Thoreau passage in a most interesting, and very depressing route.

I will begin from the beginning.

On Facebook, a friend had posted a link to this Washington Post story about yet another Foxconn employee committing suicide.  (The byline, too, caught my attention; but, I don't want to digress at this point.)  The employee was only 24 years old when he jumped from his dorm room and died.  He was a poet, and,

A distraught friend and fellow Foxconn employee also wrote a poem. "Another screw comes loose/Another migrant worker brother jumps," Zhou Qizao writes, a day after Xu's death. The poem ends: "A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home."

It is from this that I borrowed the words for the title of this post.

I read the comments at the end of the story.  One comment quoted Thoreau:

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” -- Henry David Thoreau

The skeptic in me wondered whether that wonderfully sounding quote was for real--I have seen and read enough in this world to worry that something that seems too good to be true might not be true.  Which is when I put my able assistant, Google, to work.  At multiple sites, I then came across that complete passage, which I quoted at the beginning of this post. (The quote about "the song still in them" is, of course, a misquote!)

So, now, back to "quiet desperation."  I agree with the 24-year old who committed suicide that such a life is not worth living.  I wish he had not killed himself though.  

But, quietly desperate lives are what most people have resigned themselves to.  I tried that for a few months as an employed adult back in the old country.  I tried that quietly desperate life for nearly six years as a non-academic.  I then lucked out, and life is now good.

For quite some years now, it has been anything but a life of quiet desperation.  Quiet is not the word for this blogging/tweeting/Facebooking/op-ed_writing activist-faculty rich life that I lead that is far from desperation.  

The friend thinks that I am someone with "agency" that David Brooks writes about in his column.  Brooks notes about George Eliot:

After the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul and she was capable of that completely justified assertion of her own dignity. You might say that this moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she stopped being blown about by her voids and weaknesses and began to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.

I won't be surprised if it takes a while to get to that stage of living "according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life."  When I was a stressed out twenty-year old in an undergraduate program that was metaphorically killing me, there were plenty of moments when I felt that a literal death was a better option.  I can, therefore, relate to that 24-year old Chinese employee who killed himself. It took quite some time of sustained efforts to figure out my own inner criteria to live a life of enjoyment and fulfillment and not a life of quiet desperation.  As Brooks notes:

Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort. It’s not just the confidence and drive to act. It’s having engraved inner criteria to guide action. The agency moment can happen at any age, or never.

If only that 24-year old had some other outlet for his agency.  But, apparently he had tried:

Xu tried multiple times to leave his job at Foxconn. Applications for positions in libraries and book stores in Shenzhen proved unsuccessful. He also was turned down for a job at an internal library within Foxconn's compound. Xu moved away for a spell to be with his girlfriend in the city of Suzhou, but that relationship fell through, and he eventually made his way back to Shenzhen and Foxconn.

Sometimes, we are just unable to resign ourselves to that quiet desperation in which we are trapped.  It is terrible.  I will wrap this lengthy post with one of Xu's poems:

I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can't swallow any more
All that I've swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.

The best public relations company in the world: Apple!

Way back in graduate school, one of my first year apartment-mates was a doctoral student in marketing.  One of his favorite humorous takes on convincing people, which I later came to understand is a staple in the marketing and public relations realms, was about the wonderful job that Austrians did in making sure that the world knew Hitler as a German and Beethoven as an Austrian.

Over the years, it has been fascinating to observe the many, many variations of this Austrian job.  This post adds one more to that list!

There is a growing sense of anger and frustration, and rightfully so, at the inequality gap between those to whom a larger and larger share of income and wealth are accruing versus the millions who feel like they are working longer and longer hours that do not translate into wages that assure them of that "American Dream."

This frustration quickly reaches a bottom-line of "those greedy corporations and their CEOs."

In the populist narrative with the bottom-line of greedy corporations and their CEOs, rotten eggs are thrown at the likes of fast food restaurant chains like McDonald's, big box retailers like Walmart, oil corporations like Exxon.

One company is pretty much never, ever attacked. It is a multinational corporation that is the largest in the world.  This multinational corporation has profit margins like you won't believe.  This corporation employs very few people in its "home" country of the United States.  Stories abound about its shoddy treatment of workers and the environmental impacts of its factories.

Yet, this multinational corporation is rarely ever attacked compared to the daily assaults on WalMart or McDonald's or Exxon.

A masterful Austrian job of public relations, right?

Of course, the corporation that I speak of is Apple.

Here is a succinct comparison of the employment and profit aspects of the "good guy" Apple and the "bad guys":

Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar; a typical McDonald’s franchise restaurant earns around six cents on the dollar before taxes, according to an analysis from Janney Capital Markets. In fact, the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone. Yet Apple employs just seventy-six thousand people, while the retailers, supermarkets, and restaurant chains employ 5.6 million.

 Did you get that? Let me repeat:

the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone

Yet, the assault is on McDonald's and WalMart?  Aren't you convinced by now that Apple has done one heck of a Austrian-style PR job to market itself as the angelic corporation?

People protest outside fast-food establishment. Outside WalMart.  But not outside Apple.  For a simple reason: those working for Apple at Cupertino have nothing to complain about, when their work is handsomely rewarded.  (Apple's productions are offshore--but then, when did we Americans start caring for factory workers employed by American corporations in the rest of the world anyway!)

Those working at a McDonald's restaurant or at a WalMart, on the other hand, know all too well that they are barely earning the minimum wage.  Thus, the corporations that employ 5.6 million people and with paper-thin profit margins are attacked day in and day out, whereas very little is said about Apple.

What you see is not always what you see.

Doing good via the profit motive?

In what seems like eons ago, back in graduate school, when I began my formal intellectual exploration into the role of market and planning (government) in society, I read Amartya Sen's "The profit motive."  Since then, I have attempted to read Sen's works whenever he writes at levels much lower than he is capable of so that even blokes like me can pretend to understand.

The only book of Sen's that I ever purchased was The Argumentative Indian, which is right now on the bookshelf in my office.  A student, "Z," often jokes--yes, more than once it has been--that I should pretty much wear that book title as a name-tag so that strangers will immediately walk away from me.

Oh, I have digressed far away from the profit motive.  One of the challenges has always been with situations, which are in plenty, when the profit motive alone doesn't seem to work.  In fact, in quite a few contexts, the pursuit of profit generates a whole bunch of headaches too.  Troubling issues.

A couple of years ago, as we were struggling to recover from the Great Recession, Sen commented in this essay:

The economic difficulties of today do not, I would argue, call for some “new capitalism”, but they do demand an open-minded understanding of older ideas about the reach and limits of the market economy. What is needed above all is a clear-headed appreciation of how different institutions work, along with an understanding of how a variety of organisations – from the market to the institutions of state – can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.

In other words, there is a lot yet to be understood regarding the appropriate roles for the state and market in society.  It is ultimate job security in my intellectual interests then!

Thus, it was more than interesting to read in the Harvard Business Review about how a market-based approach can do good to society.  Especially in Africa.

(BTW, I notice that the latest issue of the Economist has a special section on the positive development in Africa.  Will read that through tomorrow.)

This HBR piece begins with: "If you knew how to help feed the hungry — would you?"  Yes.  Of course, yes!

In that essay, the CEO/Chairman of General Mills describes the partnership framework that GM has developed with the UN's bodies, the USAID, and NGOs, and writes:

Though some may see this work as philanthropy, we see it as creating shared value with local African businesses. For example, Nyirefami, in Tanzania, is a company that mills flour. General Mills knows flour. We've been in the milling business more than 140 years, and with Gold Medal, we're still America's leading flour brand. PFS volunteers were able to provide Nyirefami with the technical expertise needed to install a quality control lab, and improve washing and pre-drying operations. With that, Nyirefami increased their milling capacity five-fold, paving the way for the company to buy more grain from local farmers, while also earning the highest level of food certification available in Tanzania.

The fact that he is qualifying the venture with "though some may see this work as philanthropy" itself is a dead giveaway that while not without profits, it is not entirely with profit alone as the motive.  He then goes on to list a few  ways in which businesses can "apply what you do best to reduce poverty and increase economic activity in the developing world."

And then there was another piece in the HBR where the author writes that highly profitable companies like Apple and Google drank a whole lot of milk from the taxpayer teats and now they aren't willing to help the taxpayers.  Reminds me of the many stories I have heard in India of children not helping their aging parents; I suppose this behavior means that corporations are people after all!

Anyway, the author has some sharp words for these behemoths:

Many of the revolutionary technologies that make the iPhone and other products and services "smart" were funded by the U.S. government. Take, for instance, the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, as well as the latest voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. And Apple did not just benefit from government-funded research activities. It also received its early stage finance from the U.S. government's Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after government funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.
Other Silicon Valley companies, like Google, have profited in a similarly immense fashion: Google's algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Many of the "new economy" companies that like to portray themselves as the heart of U.S. "entrepreneurship" have very successfully surfed the wave of U.S. government-funded investments. Hence, one secret to Silicon Valley's success has been its active and visible hand, in stark contrast to the Ayn Rand/Adam Smith folklore often bandied about.

In other words, not merely a story of a man, a plan, and an angel investor.  The author raises an important question:

A crucial question to be answered is not just whether the present system is geared toward the government showing a lot of the entrepreneurial courage, but why it is systematically badmouthed, despite its many successes.

Let me remind you that this is in the Harvard Business Review and not Mother Jones!

We are a long way from figuring out the institutional arrangement.  All we know is that we cannot flourish without giving the profit motive the necessary opportunities.  We also know that an excess of that is a disaster.  We are equally aware that government is not all bad, but that too much of it is very bad.  Where does that magical line exist separating government activities from those of the private sector?

Even Amartya Sen can't figure that one out!

iPhone: Made by Apple or Samsung?

Adds The Economist, which is the source of this graphic:

This puts Samsung in the somewhat unusual position of supplying a significant proportion of one of its main rival's products, since Samsung also makes smartphones and tablet computers of its own. Apple is one of Samsung's largest customers, and Samsung is one of Apple's biggest suppliers. This is actually part of Samsung's business model: acting as a supplier of components for others gives it the scale to produce its own products more cheaply. For its part, Apple is happy to let other firms handle component production and assembly, because that leaves it free to concentrate on its strengths: designing elegant, easy-to-use combinations of hardware, software and services.

It is complicated!

The apple doesn't fall far from ... Kazakhstan?

A high school friend was on a business trip in, yes, Kazakhstan.  The women there are pretty, he adds.  Where are the women not pretty, right?  Another high school classmate puns (in Tamil) that the country should then be called Azhaghastan (Azhagu = beauty)

I wrote to them that he guy's alibi in going there is that he is checking out the apples :)

Why apples, you ask, to which I reply: it is the geographic home for all the apples of the world. 

Well, until yesterday, as Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"

Even in blogging, the only note I have had on Kazakhstan was on a completely different topic!

I was diving back home and listening to The World, when the show's host, Lisa Mullins, posed the geoquiz about the origin of apples. 

I would never have thought that apples originated from the mountains of Central Asia. 

Even more hilariously educational was the hypothesis on how perhaps the fruit spread: animals ate the best of the fruits, and then the seeds passed through their guts, which then led to new plants in new places.

And, of course, the roles of the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, the wanderers ... and then eventually to the US, and now we associate Washington with apples.  Who woulda thunk it was a story out of Central Asia!

I will add this to my repertoire of fun stories for my classes. 

This blog entry by itself will be a convincing answer to the student, "J," who asked me yesterday what I do for fun :)

Steve Jobs goes to heaven. Correction: is reincarnated as ...

The New Yorker cover was far from the original thinking that I expect from the cartoonists there.  Oh well, they can't deliver every time, I suppose.

Many cartoonists had played around with similar "i" themes ... except the following one that I came across:

Source

Now, that is some creative thinking.

Jobs, as many commentators duly noted, was a ruthless business guy as much as he was innovative. 

Last term, I think, I had my students watch a couple of video segments that were interviews with Mike Daisey, who in a serious and funny way makes us think about the ethical issues that we conveniently forget when we use an iPhone, or any smartphone, or any latest electronic gizmo for that matter.  Made students think, it seemed like.

We are all complicated mixed bags, but we seem to prefer clean and simple narratives like the nonexistent saintliness of Jobs.

Do Apple's iPhones add to the US trade deficit with China?

Add to, or subtract from?  That is a two-billion dollar question, isn't it?  This WSJ report says:

The value-added approach, in fact, shows that sales of the iPhone are adding to the U.S. economy—rather than subtracting from it, as the traditional approach would imply.
Based on U.S. sales of 11.3 million iPhones in 2009, the researchers estimate Chinese iPhone exports at $2.02 billion. After deducting $121.5 million in Chinese imports for parts produced by U.S. firms such as chip maker Broadcom Corp., they arrive at the figure of the $1.9 billion Chinese trade surplus—and U.S. trade deficit—in iPhones.
If China was credited with producing only its portion of the value of an iPhone, its exports to the U.S. for the same amount of iPhones would be a U.S. trade surplus of $48.1 million, after accounting for the parts U.S. firms contribute.

 

 

 Am sure trade economists will duke it out on this one.  But, it does seem like we might have to redefine how to measure trade data and deficits and surpluses

 

 

Steve Jobs' Software Dating Game. Flashback to 1983

Grabbed the following video that was embedded at this discussion on liberal education and/versus professional focus.

In the video it is neat to watch a very young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and their excitement for what they do is obvious.



I was left with a nagging thought on those two other guys who share the stage with Bill Gates: Mitch Kapor (of Lotus) and Fred Gibbons.  Gibbons?  Who the heck was that?  Turns out that one of the products that his company delivered was Harvard Graphics.  I remember using it, though the details are fuzzy.

Also, as you watch the clip from 1983, don't you think that Ashton Kutcher in "That 70s Show" looks so much like the early Steve Jobs?  :)

Conflict minerals

We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.

More from Nicholas Kristof here ... and the YouTube video he refers to:

iPad: packaging + marketing = $$$?

Outsourced

I'm sure you've heard about reverse engineering and industrial espionage -- they are the bread and butter of a competitive tech industry! -- but I had no idea there were firms, such as Chipworks, that specialize in the process. They've just released glorious, revealing details of the Apple iPad's hardware, and a complete breakdown of the new, top-secret A4 processor. For the less-technically-minded, iFixit has a walkthrough for the reverse engineering, too.

The pictures and details are juicy -- you can even order a bunch of die photos! -- but ultimately, there isn't anything exciting under the hood. The iPad is merely a large iPod Touch, with almost identical hardware in places. Chipworks calls the iPad 'a giant battery with a tiny [circuit] board attached to it' -- and looking at the picture above, you can see why!

So, no real news here I'm afraid, unless you're trying to mollify a Mac fanatic. What you're paying for is a large touch-screen and a giant battery -- you are not buying a piece of 'magic', but simply a large iPod Touch. The devil, as always, is in the software. It would not be the first time that Apple has shoehorned some fantastic software into a shiny, but otherwise lackluster hardware package.

In my opinion, the coolest part of this story is that Chipworks tears apart of bleeding-edge technology to produce full, reproducible schematics of a device's circuitry. Nothing is sacred!

iPad ... if you are planning to buy it, read this :)

The iPad goes on sale on April 3rd:

Apple plans initially to sell three iPad models, starting at $499, with built-in support for Wi-Fi wireless networking. Three additional models that can communicate over high-speed 3G wireless networks will go on sale later in April.
....
Apple may sell 2 million to 2.5 million iPads this year, according to Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros. David Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs (GS), says sales could reach 6 million units. Apple shares gained 4.35, or 1.9%, to close at 230.90 on Mar. 26. The stock has more than doubled in the past year.

 So, should you buy one, if you have not already pre-ordered it?  (I am not planning to.  The only "i" thing I ever owned was an iMac, way back when ... Here is a helpful (!) decision-making flowchart :)

Jobs, Jobs, and ... cartoon?

Steve JOBS is Apple's main man.  Apple started a trend with the iMac, and now the ubiquitous "i" for everything.
President Obama is concerned about JOBS.
So, naturally, it was only a matter of time before a cartoonist put the two together to give us this: :)

Has Microsoft become "soft" and is becoming "micro" as well?

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.
What happened?

That is what a former Microsoft VP discusses in this NY Times oped.

The Silicon Valley/Seattle rivalry seems to be tilting again in favor of California.  Meanwhile, Boeing is spreading its wings (ha, pun!) into South Carolina. So, it will be left to Amazon and Starbucks to prop things up?  

Bing. Chrome. OS. Who cares!

I used Google Chrome for a couple of months, until it crashed one day a few months ago and simply would not revive. Even re-installing a couple of times made no difference. There was no point using IE because of the time it took to even open the program. So, for now it is Firefox. I am so ready for a next generation of web browsers. I can't quite figure out what that might look like, but it cannot be minor variations of what we have.

After my experience with Chrome, I have pretty much given up on taking any Google product for a test drive--I use enough Google services already (blogger, YouTube, reader, groups.) I wasn't jumping up and down about Google's new operating system because none of these tinkerings excite me that much. But I just could not think about the common thread among all these to explain my ennui. Until I read Robert Cringely, who, with this op-ed, shows why he has a wonderful understanding of the big picture:

none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

To keep Microsoft on its toes.

I wonder who that next company will be--the real big one--that will dethrone Microsoft and Google and Apple. I can't wait, not because I want these corporations to fail, but because it will launch a whole new world :-)
Cringely writes:

I wish these companies had more guts, that either would make a true bet-the-company investment in changing the world, but they won’t. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time on new ideas — yet of those thousands of ideas, the company can really invest in only a dozen per year, leading to dissatisfaction and defections as the best nerds leave to pursue their dreams.

Maybe they’ll leave for the startup that finally topples Microsoft ... or Google. But until then these companies will posture, spend a little money on research and development, and keep each other in check, while reporters and publications pretend that it matters.