The passing scene – October 5, 2015

Parasites in the Body Economic: the Disasters of Neoliberalism, an interview of Michael Hudson, author of Kllling the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, on Counterpunch Radio.  Highly recommended.

More Leisure, Less Capitalism, Thanks to Tech, an interview of Jacobin contributing editor Peter Frase for Truthout.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

The 2016 Stump Speeches: Bernie’s Epistle to the Falwellites by Doug Muder for The Weekly Sift.

How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina by Steven Levy for BackChannel.  (Hat tip to my expatriate e-mail pen pal Jack)

The model minority is losing patience by The Economist.  (Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist)

The Second Amendment Is a Gun Control Amendment by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker.  (Hat tip to Bill Elwell)

Reviving Shinto: Prime Minister Abe tends a special place in Japan’s soul by Michael Holtz for The Christian Science Monitor.  (Hat tip to Jack)

AP Investigation: Are slaves catching the fish you buy? by Robin M. McDowell, Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza.  (Hat tip to Jack)

‘You need to think about death five minutes a day’

A writer named Eric Weiner visited the small Himalayan nation of Bhutan, and was suddenly overcome by shortness of breath, dizziness and numbness in the hands and feet.  Fearing a heart attack or worse, he visited a physician name Dr. Karma Ura, who told him he suffered a panic attack.

“You need to think about death for five minutes every day,” Ura replied. “It will cure you.”

“How?” I said, dumbfounded.

“It is this thing, this fear of death, this fear of dying before we have accomplished what we want or seen our children grow. This is what is troubling you.”

“But why would I want to think about something so depressing?”

“Rich people in the West, they have not touched dead bodies, fresh wounds, rotten things. This is a problem. This is the human condition. We have to be ready for the moment we cease to exist.”

via BBC

The passing scene: Links & comments 9/16/14

Ukraine Offers Amnesty to Rebels by Mike Shedlock on Mish’s Global Trend Analysis (via Naked Capitalism).

President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine made a peace offer to separatist rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk, consisting of amnesty to helps, help in rebuilding, free local elections Nov. 9, limited self-rule for at least three years and the right to use Russian in official documents.

To me, an outsider ignorant of internal Ukrainian politics, this looks like a reasonable offer.   But it is opposed by Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, who came to power with the backing of neo-conservatives in the U.S. State Department.

Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent by Nick Bilton for The New York Times.  (Via Mike the Mad Biologist)

Most CEOs of Silicon Valley companies set strict limits on how much time their children can spend in front of computer screens or use social media.  Instead they encourage their children to read printed books and engage in face-to-face conversation.   Consumers of their products should follow their example.

Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore for The New York Times. (Via Avedon’s Sideshow)

Non-profit research organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council are supposed to provide expert and objective advice.  But how objective can they be if they take money from foreign governments?

John Crawford Shooting: Open Carry for Whites, Open Season on Blacks by Albert L. Butler for The Root.

Doubts cast on witness’s account of black man killed by police in Walmart by Jon Swaine for The Guardian.

Police in Ohio shot and killed a black man in a Walmart store in Ohio because they thought the toy gun he was holding was real.  But Ohio is an “open carry” state.  If he had been carrying a real gun, it would have been perfectly legal under state law.

Top Silicon Valley CEOs accused of wage theft

I’d guess that if I interviewed a typical Silicon Valley CEO, he’d say he opposed labor unions because wages should be set by the law of supply and demand.  This is conjecture, because I don’t know the views of individual CEOs, but I’d bet it was true.

I’d also bet that many of them buy into the view of certain economists that growing inequality in wages is due to the fact that the most talented workers command more of a premium over average workers than they did in an earlier era.

Be that as it may, Silicon Valley’s top companies – Apple Computer, Google, Abobe, Pixar, Intuit and Intel – are the targets of a class action lawsuit, and Hewlett-Packard in a separate suit, alleging that their CEOs conspired to limit the salaries of their most talented employees.

They allegedly agreed among themselves to refrain from recruiting each others’ employees, to share wage information and to punish companies that wouldn’t co-operate. All this is illegal, of course

Are great geniuses above morality?

I recently posted a review of a biography of Steve Jobs, the founder Apple Computer, who was a brilliant entrepreneur and industrial designer, but who was a self-centered person who showed no consideration for anyone else, including his closest family, except to the degree that they helped him achieve his purposes.

Recently I finished reading a historical novel about the great German writer and thinker, Wolfgang von Goethe, another selfish genius who achieved great things, but treated other people only as means to his fulfillment as a creator of great works of literature.

Jobs and Goethe, through the force of their intellects and personalities, were able to create a circle of admirers to accepted that they were above the rules that bind ordinary people.

Is this true?  Do great genius or great achievement justify wrongdoing?  Many philosophers have thought so.  The great German philosopher Hegel, for example, thought that “world-historical” figures such as Napoleon set their own rules.

I don’t agree.  I don’t think that being born with great talents creates an entitlement to break laws and treat people badly, any more than does being born to great wealth.

I think great achievers deserve to be honored for their achievements, even though their personal behavior is reprehensible, but that does not excuse bad personal behavior.  I think, for example, that the filmmaker Roman Polanski deserves to be honored for making great movies such as “The Pianist,” but I don’t think his achievements as a filmmaker give him immunity for having committed rape. [1]

I don’t think there is any contradiction between being a genius and being a good person.  But very few people are geniuses, and genuinely good human beings (as opposed to “nice people) are not all that common, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there aren’t many who have both qualities.

Steve Jobs was a real-life Ayn Rand hero

Steve Jobs comes as close as anyone I know to being an Ayn Rand hero in real life.  As depicted by Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs, a semi-authorized biography, Jobs was utterly selfish and had no consideration of anyone or anything except his personal vision and obsessions.  At the same time he was a genius who created a great company and transformed the personal computer, digital animation, the telephone, photography and much else.

Many Occupy Wall Street protestors, who hated most of the “1 percent”, nevertheless mourned the death of Steve Jobs because, unlike crooked Wall Street financiers, he actually accomplished something.   Walter Isaacson wrote he was the most important American industrialist since Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

I find it easy to mock those who, as Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, once put it, were born on third base and thought they’d hit a triple.  A great many of our so-called meritocracy contribute little or nothing or mainly harmful things to society.  But it is more difficult to decide what I think a total egotist who accomplished great things.

This is nothing in Isaacson’s book to indicate that Steve Jobs ever read the works of Ayn Rand or gave a thought about her philosophy.  His intellectual interests, such as they were, were in Zen Buddhism, New Age teaching and rock and roll.

Buddhism contributed to his keen aesthetic sense, based on simplicity and elegance.  But he evidently did not take to heart the Buddhist teaching that the ego is an illusion and you should not make yourself unhappy if you don’t get your way.  Quite the contrary.

Steve Jobs’ great talent was in industrial design.   He brought art and technology together.  As has often been pointed out, all the basic features of the Macintosh computer – the mouse, clickable icons and so on – were developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Laboratory, and hijacked by Jobs.  But it was Jobs, not Xerox management, who understood what to do with these concepts.  The Macintosh was historic.  Xerox’s own Star computer is forgotten.

As an artist, he was a perfectionist.  He made big changes at the last minute rather than allow a flawed (in his eyes) product go on the market.  I can easily imagine him, like Ayn Rand’s fictional architect Howard Roark, destroying something he created rather than let someone else spoil it.

He was not easy to work with.  He had no patience with the merely adequate.  He was quick to classify people as geniuses or bozos, based on hasty impressions.  But at the same time he respected people who stood up to him—provided they proved to be right.  He was a charismatic personality, famous for his “reality distortion field,” who was able to impose his ideas on other people almost in spite of themselves.  His insistence on getting his own way drove his people to achieve more than they ever thought they could.

I use Apple products and I enjoy Pixar animation (which he did not create but fostered).  At the same time I am glad that I never met Steve Jobs, and I do not recommend him as a role model.  He treated those closest to him badly, including his loving and self-sacrificial foster parents, the mother of his first child and his loyal friend Steve Wozniak.  He cared little for anyone he did not regard as a fellow genius.  He did not practice nor believe in economic democracy.  When a visitor asked about working conditions in Apple factories, his reaction was anger and contempt.

I’m glad Steve Jobs lived.  I respect his achievement, and the passion that fueled his achievement.  I would not subtract anything from his wealth or honors.  At the same time I would not want to live in a society dominated by people like Steve Jobs or, worse still, people with Steve Jobs’ attitude toward life but not his talent.   The world benefits from obsessive hard-driving geniuses, but that does not mean that ordinary people, who do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, count for nothing.

§§§

For more, click on Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale by Ben Austen for Wired.

Steve Jobs on staying in focus

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.  But that’s not what it means at all.  It means saying no to the hundreds of good ideas that there are.  You have to pick carefully.  I’m actually as proud of the things I haven’t done as of the things I have done.  Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

I took this from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book, ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Steve Jobs in the afterlife

Click on Bors Blog | comics, politics and ridicule for more from cartoonist Matt Bors.

Hat tip to Jack Clontz.

Chinese flexibility and union rules

Last year President Barack Obama met with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley executives, and asked what it would take to have Apple’s iPhone manufactured in the United States.  Jobs said nothing could bring iPhone manufacturing back to the U.S.  The New York Times published a good article last month explaining why.

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 [Apple] 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.”

via NYTimes.com.

Thomas Friedman wrote a column saying American workers have no future unless they can compete with that Chinese awesomeness.  But I don’t know of any American workers who would get up at midnight for a 12-hour shift on a biscuit and cup of tea unless they were (1) slaves, (2) prisoners or (3) in the military, the latter of which was held up by President Obama in his State of the Union address as a role model for society.

Working conditions in China, in my opinion, are the result not so much of the invisible hand of competition as the iron fist of government suppression.  Workers aren’t free to join unions and bargain collectively for better conditions.  Complaining will get you blacklisted, and forming a union is against the law.  The only way of protest open is the traditional Chinese option of threatening or committing suicide.

In the United States, labor unions in their heyday had work rules.  They defined exactly what an individual worker could and couldn’t be required to do.  In return many of the unions took on the responsibility of training apprentices in the skills that employers now say are lacking.

I remember working on newspapers in the days of hot type, when composing rooms were ruled by the International Typographers Union, one of the strongest and also most democratically run U.S. unions.  One ITU rule was that nobody but a union member could touch type metal.  The compositors and typesetters would all watch any newcomer out of the corner of their eyes, and if he let his hand fall idly on a tray of type, all work in the composing room would instantly stop.  Good fun!

Like anything else, union work restrictions can be carried too far.  But the alternative is unscheduled 12-hour shifts on subsistence wages, and a biscuit and a cup of tea.

Click on Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class for the full New York Times article, which is excellent.

Click on Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China for another Times article on the same subject.

Click on Making It in America for a report in The Atlantic on a U.S. company’s struggle to keep manufacturing in the United States.

Click on Average Is Over for Thomas Friedman’s column.

Click on In Steve’s Time Machine, nobody rides clean for a good post on the left-libertarian Psychopolitik web log.

I use Apple products.  I don’t have any reason to think the late Steve Jobs or Apple Computer were or are worse than other Silicon Valley companies or executives, nor that electronics companies are worse in this respect than other kinds of companies. While I don’t think Jobs or Apple should be singled out, neither do I think “everybody does it” constitutes an excuse.

Siri, sweatshops and suicide

[Added 3/19/12.  Mike Daisey is not a reliable source of information about Apple Computer and its Chinese suppliers.  Click on Retracting “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” to understand why.]

Apple Computer’s new iPhone 4S has an artificial intelligence program called Siri that responds to the spoken word.  If you asked Siri Software where it was manufactured, you’d get an answer something like this.

Siri, where do you come from?

I, Siri, was designed by Apple in California.

Where were you manufactured?

I’m not allowed to say.

Why?

Good question.  Anything else I can do for you?

Actually there is no mystery.  Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in Shenzen, China, by Foxconn, in a huge complex employing 430,000 people, surrounded by huge nets to prevent employees from committing suicide by jumping off buildings.  Foxconn employs 1 million people worldwide, and makes about a third of the components used by Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and other electronics companies.

Shenzen was a small fishing village three decades ago when Deng Xiaoping designated it a special economic zone, where corporate enterprise would enjoy free rein.  Today it is a city of 14 million people, larger than New York City.

Mike Daisey

Mike Daisey, a stage performer, visited Foxconn last year.  He stood outside the factory gate and talked to workers, and then gained admittance by posing as a would-be purchaser of Foxconn products.  He talked to a young woman who turned out to be 13 years old.  She said she had many friends age 12, 13 and 14.  Child labor is illegal in China, but according to Daisey she said Foxconn doesn’t check ages, and makes sure that older workers are on duty whenever auditors come.

He saw factory floors with 20,000 to 30,000 workers in a single space.  They worked in absolute silence.  Not only was there no talking, there was no machinery noise because there was no machinery.  Everything was done by hand, including manipulation of components thinner than a single human hair.

Shifts were supposedly 12 hours a day, but he said workers told him 16-hour days were common when there was a rush order.  That is without a lavatory break, a coffee break or any other kind of break.  While Daisey was there in 2010, a Foxconn worker died from exhaustion working 34 hours without a break.  Everybody in the plant is under video surveillance on the factory floor, in the hallways and cafeterias and in their 12-by-12-foot dorm cubicles in which 12 to 15 bunks are stacked.

He saw workers in their mid-20s whose hands were disintegrated from making the same repetitive motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of time—like carpal tunnel syndrome, but orders of magnitude worse.  This could easily be fixed by rotating the job assignments each month, but this is not done.

Workers who are injured in industrial accidents receive no compensation.  He said he talked to a man whose hand was crushed in a machine.  The man was fortunate enough to find a job in a woodworking shop, where the employers are friendly and he only has to work a 70-hour week.

Steve Jobs is regarded as a kind of secular saint, but it was his decision that the wondrous new products he designed would be made not by Americans, but by stressed-out, low-paid workers in a company town.  Henry Ford paid Ford Motor Co. workers enough to afford to buy Ford cars.  None of the Foxconn workers in Shenzen can afford an iPhone or any of the other technological marvels they put together.  Of course Steve Jobs was no worse than Bill Gates, the great philanthropist, or any of the other electronics CEOs who use Third World sweatshop labor.