It wasn’t enough for Steve Jobs to creatively destroy the major label recording industry with iKit and funnel a portion of all the profits in pop music through Apple.
He imposed the same model on book publishing and, yesterday, the news of the US government pushing back at Apple for it was everywhere.
Completely blown off the wrestling mat in operating system software and networking by Bill Gates, Steve was saved, now to the regret of many. It was his special genius to create coveted consumer goods that made Apple the collecting funnel for big money from artistic and literary talent.
Even though it invests in no infrastructure — like artists & repertoire, agents or development for acquiring, growing and nurturing the talent its shiny hardware and software baubles guarantees it gets pie from.
Eventually even the Beatles were compelled to tithe to Apple and Steve.
The Justice Department’s complaint quoted Steve Jobs telling publishing executives how Apple’s iPad strategy would work.
“We’ll go to [an] agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway,” Jobs said, according to the complaint.
A group of chief executive officers of the publishers mapped out their collective actions during quarterly meetings “in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants,” including at The Chef’s Wine Cellar at Picholine, according to the complaint, which also cites phone calls and e-mails.
[Apple] struck a “most-favored-nation??? deal with the publishers that effectively prevented them from selling their product for less through other retails outlets like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Newly emboldened by the launch of the iPad, the publishers gave Amazon a stark choice: adopt the agency model, with higher prices, or lose the ability to sell new e-book bestsellers. Amazon initially balked, but quickly capitulated, publicly announcing that it had no choice but to accept the agency model.
Apple will fight. Maybe the company will even win.
And you may not like this song but the shoe fits. Apple technology is all about instant self-gratification for assholes at the expense of those who provide the broadcast material for its iKit.
Pop music has always been dispensable. Increasingly, books are, too. There’s paradoxical irony in the iKit of Steve becoming the only part in the pipe to the consumer that inspires customer loyalty.
Once again the Internet recipe for ricin takes down some fools.
Today wire news informed two members of the George Ricin Beans Gang copped guilty pleas to the lesser charges of “conspiring to get explosives and silencers.”
Two Georgia men pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to get an unregistered explosive and an illegal gun silencer in what prosecutors describe as a plot to attack government targets.
The suspected ringleader of the group, Frederick Thomas, and Dan Roberts entered their pleas at a hearing in federal court in Gainesville, about 55 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Thomas, 73, and Roberts, 67, could face up to five years in prison …
Readers may recall the ricin beans gang comprised four old men, mostly talkers, who were angry with the government’s alleged desecration of the Constitution. To make things right, they mused at a Cracker Barrel restaurant and other places, people would have to be killed.
One of the ways this was to be done was an absurd plan to grind up castor seeds and dispense the powder from a car speeding along the highway. It would never have worked and the men had no capability. I and others were quoted as saying so in newspapers.
“There’s no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal: murder,??? Thomas said during a meeting in March, according to the affidavit. “When it comes to saving the constitution, that means some people gotta die,” he was quoted as saying.
Roberts’ attorney, Michael Trost, said after the hearing that the plea was the best “rough justice” he and his client could hope for. The plea is “close to what represents the facts,” he said, since it is not an admission of terrorism.
“We will resolutely deny that it is terrorism” during the sentencing hearing, he said …
“Prosecutors said those two men brought [two other defendants who have not issued pleas, Sam Crump and Ray Adams] into the mix after Roberts talked of obtaining a ‘silent killer’ — the toxin ricin, which can be lethal in small doses,” added AP. “Crump had memorized the recipe for making the poison from castor beans, prosecutors said, and Adams had the know-how to make it as a former government lab technician.”
Adams did not have the know-how, as a “lab technician,” to make ricin.
He was a pesticide mixer, at best. However, this is unlikely to matter in the final reckoning.
There is no defense lawyer who can mitigate charges when ricin is part of the courtroom discussion. Juries, judges and prosecutors simply won’t have it.
“This is about an old man talking big,” said one of the defendant’s lawyers. It was an accurate statement. But the justice system during the war on terror makes no allowance for such things.
Everyone knows that frequently the press is your enemy.
In the desperate quest for eyeballs on the web its writers develop idiotic essays, wrap them up in pseudo-authority, and publish because they know it will get under a lot of skin.
So it was a recent blog entry at the WaPost’s WonkBlog, where Barry Plumer, an expert on zip, mused that divestiture of pink slime comes at a cost.
Of course, Plumer had no way of knowing such things or even making an educated guess.
[A] ban on pink slime could, potentially, require the slaughter of another 1.5 million cows to maintain current levels of beef consumption. And, because cows are a major source of heat-trapping methane (all that burping), that could have a serious climate impact.
How much impact? We can do a rough calculation. The average cow emits the equivalent of about four tons of carbon dioxide per year. To put that in perspective, the average automobile emits about five tons per year. So, in the worst case, a total ban on pink slime would be like adding 1.2 million cars to the road, from a global-warming perspective.
The fact of the matter is Plumer can’t do a rough calculation of such a complex affair as the beef industry, absolute contribution to global warming, methane produced by cows, energy expended in all facets of meat agribusiness, and on and on. And certainly not in two paragraphs.
However, the object of the exercise was to get a lot of readers and, in this, it was successful. The Google News tab had it as a most-cited selection.
Worse, Brad Plumer — the Post journalist turned pseudo-scientist for ten minutes, inspires Kevin Drum, blogger at Mother Jones to out pseudo the pseudo-scientist for another five minute calculation:
Brad Plumer brings us news that maybe it was all a big mistake. After all, the pink slime processors recover an extra ten pounds of edible beef from each cow, which means we need fewer cows to feed us all. And fewer cows means less global warming …
I am now going to embarrass myself by playing amateur economist. What follows might be totally off base, so real economists are welcome to scoff and tell me what I’ve done wrong.
Here goes: According to [a] paper, the price elasticity of beef is -0.61. So a 1% increase in the price of beef produces a .61% decrease in the demand for beef.
According to this report, pink slime reduces the price of ground beef by about 3 cents per pound. Roughly speaking, that’s a decrease of 1%.
An average cow produces about 500 pounds of edible meat.
Harvesting pink slime increases that by about 10-12 pounds or so. Let’s call it 11 pounds.
Total beef consumption in the U.S. amounts to about 34 million cows per year, or 17 billion pounds of beef.
So here’s what we get:
Banning pink slime raises the price of beef 1% and therefore reduces demand by .61%.
In my experience, a lot of scientists would no more bother to explain to journalists why they’re wrong than they would spend time talking to a plate of singing maggots. Sometimes the world is worse off for it.
But, in this case, it’s unproductive to explain to the fool why he hasn’t come up with a great equation of truth in a couple minutes.
How much greenhouse gas emission is curtailed if all the plants that produce pink slime 24 hours a day go off-line permanently?
I have no idea. However, they produced a lot of material and Beef Products has already been forced to stop production at a number of them.
“Canadians needn’t worry – nothing has slimed its way across the border, nor will it, because Health Canada bans the importation and sale of meat products treated with ammonia,” reads an editorial from a big Canadian newspaper
If one uses the elementary reasoning of the tallywhackers, one might have to entertain the idea that Canada is contributing more to global warming than it ought because it doesn”t maximize use of the cow through pink slime processing. Why not get more for less? What’s wrong with them?
How much global warming would be added or subtracted if the US didn’t have a mass animal meat food processing system producing such mountains of excrement that potential disease mitigation through unusually tortured band-aid technology like pink slime production becomes a profit-source?
The next day Plumer acknowledged his reasoning had inspired some
disagreeable mail. (I sent him a comment.)
“Spraying beef trimmings with ammonia gas was an ingenious way to suppress [the] E. coli outburst,” he writes, oddly. Outburst is not really a word one might use to describe the amount of microbial life that generally comes in excrement. Animals needs their intestinal flora.
But toxic E. coli in cows is now perpetuated because of the use of manure on feedstocks consumed by the animals. As life does, it has found a niche even as a stranger in the environment.
Not ingenious is coming up the equivalent of stop-gap security patches for the problem, like pink slime, an E. coli vaccine for cows, or different antibiotics to stuff into the animals.
Plumer doesn’t really show that he understood much, if any, of this while concocting his columns.
“But phasing out pink slime won’t get rid of the underlying bacterial factories,” he continues. Finally, some truth.
Here’s an earlier post on whether a ban on “lean, finely textured beef??? would be bad for greenhouse-gas emissions — if it meant that more cows would need to be raised and slaughtered as a result. A lot of readers took that post as a defense of pink slime, though it was more a way of illustrating how meat-consumption habits contribute to climate change …
But there are many ways to do that, none involving making up stories about how pink slime production maybe reduced greenhouse gas. However, such stories wouldn’t have stuck out so well in the crowd.
Everyday, someone somewhere spreads rubbish in an effort to get you to think the reality in the robot novels and short stories of Isaac Asimov are just years away.
Often they come from the military. Along with the military robot research stories come emphases that projects are all for good Samaritan work — like wanting fire-fighters, this rather odd at a time when state governments have fired workers that do these essential jobs. Due to economic collapse.
From MSNBC:
Uncle Sam wants you to make a military robot capable of walking on two legs, handling power tools and even driving vehicles. Luckily, the U.S. military’s new robotics challenge aims to save lives rather than hunt down human warriors …
[Yeah, luckily.]
The $2 million challenge by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency appeared in an official online solicitation Tuesday. DARPA wants a humanoid robot to replace humans doing dangerous work in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, industrial accidents or natural disasters … the U.S. Navy already has plans to build its own robotic firefighter capable of doing humanoid tasks such as climbing ladders and throwing extinguisher grenades.
The Government anticipated receiving approximately $11.5M of FY04-07 funds for this program. The Government expected TO 1 costs would not exceed $500K, TO 2 costs would not exceed $3M, and TO 3 would not exceed $8M. It was anticipated that an IDIQ contract would be awarded with a maximum ceiling of $20M since it was impossible to accurately estimate all requirements during the five year period of performance. This funding profile was an estimate only and is not a promise of funding, as all funding is subject to changes/availability and Government discretion. It was desired that contract expenditures be managed and billed so as to maximize FY05 expenditure of FY04 and FY05 funding.
It weighs as much as the bell in Big Ben; it’s capable of plunging through 60 feet of reinforced concrete and has the most ridiculously sexual name imaginable for a deadly weapon – but the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is THE bomb, says the Pentagon.
Talk of beefing the bomb up with a hardened case and further advancements has been ongoing since the Air Force took delivery of it in September 2011. But Bloomberg reported that, in response to “an urgent request??? from the Pentagon, immediate approval was given to shift $81.6 million to the so-called MOP program.
The urgency is not explained – but it can be speculated that the Pentagon does not want to mop up a potential mess if (or when) it goes to war with Iran. So they’re putting a rush on something that can easily destroy things like underground labs, or secret nuclear facilities.
Two million puts life-saving clean-up after terrorist attack robots as posh hobby/corporate welfare money for relatively small business and/or vanity projects.
Here is an interesting interview with Tom Werman. He produced many straight hard rock acts who turned into big sellers and arena draws, mostly by dint of singles which charted off the projects he did with them.
Werman says he fell into the work, never having a career plan. He also tells the interviewer he saw himself as a pop guy, making records he liked to hear. The industry, because he worked with Ted Nugent, saw him as a hard rock producer.
This served those he worked with well. When Werman stopped producing Ted Nugent, Howard stopped getting on the radio.
Indeed, the only stuff from Howard’s back catalog that gets played today is the material produced by Tom Werman.
Werman also did the big sellers for Cheap Trick, Twisted Sister, Poison and Molly Hatchet.
“A mostly black rock ‘n’ roll band with two white guys – people didn’t know what to think of them. They were tight, rocked hard, and man, did they love Led Zeppelin, which is what they sounded like – a very funky version of Zeppelin.
“I tried to bring a commercial sensibility to them, a pop side to go with their funk and hard rock. But the record stiffed. Radio just didn’t take to it. The official line I was given from the label was, ‘It slipped through the cracks,??? which meant it was too white for black radio and too black for white radio.
“Even so, I think they were ahead of their time. I’m very proud of this album.???
One of the tracks produced by Werman, surely a hoot to do, was “Mickey’s Monkey,” a conversion of the Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ hit into Led Zeppelin’s “Custard Pie.” It’s here.
Funny as hell with the rip of LZ, it shoulda been huge.
Catering to the American love of technology expressed as mountains of computer servers, wires and really big numbers, this CNN story on how Watson — the IBM supercomputer celebrity — could be a game-changer in cancer diagnosis.
In the case of my deceased friend, no number of suggested diagnoses, arranged in a prioritized list, would have made a difference. And so that would be with many, many cancers, often discovered too late to cure. Unfortunately, that’s frequently the nature of it.
The partnership here is between Sloan-Kettering cancer hospital in New York and IBM. The hospital will turn over all its cancer case histories to Watson’s brain.
One of those will be my father’s. He was diagnosed early. It didn’t save him although he lasted five years through a succession of agonizingly difficult treatments. He did not actually die at Sloan-Kettering.
His last trip involved a suggestion that he undergo a round of chemotherapy but that the prospects were not good. He left the hospital for a quack cure in the Bahamas and died a few weeks later.
Today I wonder what’s in his file at Sloan-Kettering and how that kind of thing makes much of a difference lost in the ocean of Watson’s data storage media.
Here we are, a year after General Electric made big news on avoidance of corporate income tax — even getting a bribe from Uncle Sam — and nothing has changed.
Last year, Citizens for Tax Justice found that 30 major corporations had made billions of dollars in profits while paying no federal income tax between 2008 and 2010. Today, CTJ updated that report to reflect the 2011 tax bill of those 30 companies, and 26 of them have still managed to pay absolutely nothing over that four year period …
“26 of the 30 companies continued to enjoy negative federal income tax rates. That means they still made more money after tax than before tax over the four years!”
Amongst the 30 are corporate titans such as General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Mattel …
Which makes this piece in Salon, with a picture of GE’s Jeff Immelt at the top of the page, claiming greed is a force for good, a real howler.
Capitalism can transform from a model of greed is good to greed for good. Incentives and purpose matter, and enlightened corporations that take a long-term view will find taking on some of the world’s difficult global problems can be profitable. That does not mean that the role for government or the individual is diminished. Companies can’t solve all of society’s problems. But increasingly, enlightened firms will realize that by investing for the long term they can find profitable ways of meeting society’s greatest challenges. This change in mindset is best captured by GE’s current chairman, Jeff Immelt, who sums things up this way: “The era of free capitalism without consequences is over.??? Gordon Gekko never saw that coming.
The one year old tune about GE, Jeff and corporate tax avoidance is still here.
You don’t see the nauseating boot-scooting GE workers and merry elephant on tv for GE anymore — maybe I had a little to do with that — but the message is still true.
Today, however, some snapshots from Sunday. I did not honor Easter but it didn’t stop a friend and I from having a nice afternoon in a green Pasadena backyard.
Here’s a picture of Lily, the household’s top cat. Unlike some, she is
unequivocally a fan of my guitar playing.
This is Tigey, now a bit football shaped, five years after being a rescued kitten. He’s a timid fellow and bolts at a glance. If he thinks you’re not looking, though, he’ll rub against you.
The house’s garden is also a hummingbird restaurant. These, all taken just before dusk, show the birds at their most active. There were four of them, tweeting and bumping each other over what was more than enough for all just before disappearing into the trees for the night.
Among the Arizonans who lost their checks was Tamika Shelby, who first sought cash aid at 29 after fast-food jobs and a stint as a waitress in a Phoenix strip club. The state gave her $176 a month and sent her to work part time at a food bank. Though she was effectively working for $2 an hour, she scarcely missed a day in more than a year.
“I loved it,??? she said.
Her supervisor, Michael Cox, said Ms. Shelby “was just wonderful??? and “would even come up here on her days off.???
Then the reduced time limit left Ms. Shelby with neither welfare nor work. She still gets about $250 a month in food stamps for herself and her 3-year-old son, Dejon …
Part time or full time, and no matter how low skill the “job” is, paying someone a measly two dollars an hour — or the equivalent of sixteen bucks for a full day of labor — is clear evidence of deeply ingrained and systemic immorality.
It teaches nothing about becoming independent. And it imparts nothing in the way of worthy experience to be valued so poorly.
That this gentle soul hardly missed a day and sometimes even worked for free … words fail.
The now bog standard GOP view:
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the top House Republican on budget issues, calls the current welfare program “an unprecedented success.??? Mitt Romney, who leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would place similar restrictions on “all these federal programs.??? One of his rivals, Rick Santorum, calls the welfare law a source of spiritual rejuvenation.
“It didn’t just cut the rolls, but it saved lives,??? Mr. Santorum said, giving the poor “something dependency doesn’t give: hope.???
How do you get hope and spiritual rejuvenation from two dollars an hour part-time work?
