Tom Friedman’s answer to everything that’s wrong in the economy is to explain it away as inferiority in the face of the rest of the world.
The only answer is for all Americans to become inventor/entrepreneurs, since they can’t compete with no protections labor in other countries.
These columns forgive all corporate malfeasance in leveraging desperate conditions in foreign places for making shiny goods to sell to the haves.
So Friedman entirely misses the central point of the Apple exposures done on the news side in his own paper — that the company has built its huge fortune being abominable.
Think of all the people you pass in the supermarket or on the sidewalk every week. How many are capable of designing premium goods to sell to the rest of the world?
What should those who can’t do?
In Tom Friedman’s world, nothing really. Giant corporations shouldn’t be encumbered by them. Neither should the government. And they only themselves to blame, anyway, for being sub-mediocre.
The news furnished this week is that they can be deliverymen. There will always be a need for deliverymen to deliver the premium goods of the “innovators” to the rest of the haves. But there’s an eat-your-peas warning embedded in it. You may not even be good enough as a deliveryman if you make multi-corporation world mad and don’t get the proper skills fast.
This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate??? in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.
And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.
In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America
In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.
Alert readers will have noticed last week’s Friedman wonderfulness was also labeled as from the loins of MIT. It was the MIT app-making engineers of Presto, the way to program iKit to get rid of minimum or sub-minimum wage workers in food service.
This week the wonderfulness is in the expert-minted knowledge of someone named Yossi: If you can’t make Presto things at least you might be able to carry boxes for FedEx or U.P.S.
Often it seems like I’ve made a song for every bit of cheer-leading for corporate predation and the excellence of using global sweat-shopping to find the biggest profit margin that comes out of Tom Friedman. Take, for instance, “That’s Logistics” song from a year or so ago.
It’s an accident.
Friedman’s columns are chapters for books that explain how the merciless corporate destruction of any social order devoted to economic justice and a good functioning nation is really only progress, the pursuit of innovation and serving the global appetite for consumer electronics and social networking software.
It’s purely coincidental that I hate all that stuff.
From the content/word cloup app at GlobalSecurity.Org, in working over copy mirrored there.
Unless, maybe, you’re a fanboi of The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer blog, you can smile at the accidental poetry software makes of a collection of DD-minted slurs and pejoratives used to more accurately describe the world of national security.
Moe is dead, of course. Persecuting Paupers, Maim People and National Security Business sound like good names for indie bands in some college town.
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell/We won’t bomb you straight to hell. — The National Anthem
No one will say it in formal circles: Use of drones outside the US is all about bombing paupers or — ahem — the impoverished places of the world, if something less blunt sounding is needed. That’s the US strategic plan coupled to the story on budget cuts. It’s a strategic triad with two of legs — drones and special forces — aimed at going after people who largely cannot defend themselves in any serious way, always poorer, weaker, and generally of different color and religion in desperate regions. And the third leg of the triad — the Navy — is aimed at people who definitely can shoot back, the Chinese. But whom we won’t get into a war with for the obvious reason that they make all our pipe and wires and telephones and computers and underwear and everything else except drones and most of the kit that the special forces use.
Here’s a thought question: Do you really think those places where drones now operate freely threaten the existence of the civilian populace of the US in any meaningful way?
Exclude incitements to commit violence against Americans from Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.
Exclude kidnappings by pauper/pirates unless you actually believe such things may eventually threaten people in, say, Pasadena, CA. These are bad but people get shot near my neighborhood by gang members about once a year and you don’t see the governor going off and demanding pinpoint assassinations from the air in retaliation now, do you?
What are the ramifications, not internally but worldwide, of being seen as using remote-control technology to erase handfuls of paupers (and civilians who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) in places where people don’t have a chance of shooting them down? Because, like, they have no money to afford a modern military for national defense.
On a scale, with 1 being an image as a villain and 10 that of someone someone riding to the rescue, where do you think the current usage and future trending of drones falls?
Discuss where domestic drone operations are necessary but only where they aren’t already used.
Exclude use on the Mexican border which also falls under chasing paupers. However, do discuss how deep into Mexican airspace drones operate or should be allowed to go.
Do you think drones are necessary, for example, over southern California highways, to monitor traffic? If so, how would a drone alleviate bumper to bumper traffic during hours of peak congestion?
If there was a natural disaster, how are drones superior to a helicopter or manned plane, for example, if looking for people stranded by rising levels of water?
Are drones necessary to hunt down meth labs in abandoned shacks and barns in the hinterlands? Is this a new innovation/application or just using a more expensive technology to chase paupers?
On a scale, 1 being “it’s just chasing/persecuting paupers??? and 10 being it’s “a new way to keep everyone safe???, rate what you think the increasing domestic use of drones means.
On a scale, 1 being “it’s just wealth preservation for arms manufacturers??? and 10 being “it’s a cutting edge of innovation and technology and needs to be supported,??? rate what you think the desire for more drones means.
Remember what I said about nobody in formal circles coming right out and saying the strategy is to bomb paupers? It’s true. Over ten years they’ve come up with another way to describe it.
Here’s an example from what you’ve come to know as the Empire’s Dog Feces beat, from the famous Internet magazine/blog, The Dangerous Room of Examining US Tech for Killing Other People, All Smaller and Poorer (no link):
When Adm. Eric Olson, the former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, wanted to explain where his forces were going, he would show audiences a photo that NASA took, titled “The World at Night.??? The lit areas showed the governed, stable, orderly parts of the planet. The areas without lights were the danger zones — the impoverished, the power vacuums, the places overrun with militants that prompted the attention of elite U.S. troops. And few places were darker, in Olson’s eyes, than East Africa.
Instead of “The World at Night,” it calls out for an acronym, something national security staffers, wonks and military men could grab onto.
First I thought of Defending Against Those Who Hate Us For Our Freedom (to Bomb Them). But it has too many consonants to acronym-ize. And it doesn’t quite cover all the people who don’t know we’re coming for them yet because they’re not having money and electricity are markers for America-threatening terrorism.
Instead, here’s an alternative: the GWOP, or Global War on Paupers. It had a neatness to it, superseding — as it does, the Global War on Terror.
Or you can work for free on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah, really, there are tons of “human intelligence tasks” on Amazon/MTurk that pay $0.00. Presumably, you’re encouraged to do them so you learn how to not fuck up and can build your HIT number so that your qualifications and experience are enough to get you into the rarefied environs of those that pay 2 – 17 cents per job.
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.
And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte??? that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. … You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. … Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. … Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.???
Since this was invented by boffins from MIT it’s already much better than the elimination of polio in the United States. I mean, creating an app to rid restaurants of people who already earn crap is a whole lot more cool than giving away a cure to save people from iron lungs and crutches.
Anyway, I can imagine tens of thousands of people who would really like this all the time. All with iKit.
None of whom I ever want to meet. Although I may have actually met a couple in the last ten years. But we knew how to avoid each other from then on.
Which just goes to show Friedman is absolutely right. Eating unencumbered by others with your face down in multiple computing devices is common in lotsa places now. More fool you if you find such people complete boors.
From Mitch Daniels, another of the GOP”s querulous old men, so white and wispy you could almost see through him, last night: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”
From the New York Times, re the special on iKit manufacturing in China:
“Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas …Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.”
A few months before Jobs died he, along with Mark Zuckerberg — another potential God appointee — were invited to dinner with the President. To talk about how to make jobs.
Fresh off the news, President Obama is bowing before consulting the two smartest men in the world today, Nobel laureate/Pulitzer prize winner Mark Zuckerberg and King of All Music, Steve Jobs.
The goal: How to create more jobs.
Jobs, whose name is most appropriate because he has made many many jobs in China, will probably tell the President the problem is the large number of no-skill sitting around people in the US.
“Stop counting them, Mr. President!??? he may advise. Future growth lies in more Harmonica or You’re Fired! apps and what not, particularly now that one of the rival cell phones brags it has 60,000 of them. Sixty thousand!
Nobel laureate/Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg may tell the President that to create jobs … we must unleash the creative power of every American to make more social networking sites.
Neither of these guys are interested in making jobs for all these baggy and lumpy no-skill sitting around people.
I feel fine despising everything Apple. However, the urge to deify and mythologize those who don’t quite deserve it, anything that employs bad examples to further the culture of lickspittle, has always been strong in the American majority. Of which I’m distinctly not a part.
Mitch Daniels wasn’t alone last night.
The President invoked iGod iSteve, if in a slightly different context:
“It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.”
Hmmm, wanting to become the next person to take advantage of mass sweatshop-contracting for consumer electronics manufacturing in China, the next person to destroy an industry for the sake of purchasing a small piece of white plastic kit, the next person with an idea of progress that means writing millions of trivial software applications for instant gratification on hand-held networked computing devices …
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, believes the judge’s ruling, although “commensurate with the times we live in,” not only infringes on people’s rights, but also sets a very dangerous precedent, one that extends government intrusion well into a person’s private life …
“There is now a long history of governments using and misusing private digital materials against citizens,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “Because this is a small-time criminal case is not an even half decent reason to attempt to nullify that.”
Presented with the hypothesis that an ecrypted hard drive might be analogous to a wall safe containing incriminating documents, Smith dismissed it.
“You can keep a lot of your life, or at least a very good description of your years of personal communications, hobbies, work, loves, vices, likes, dislikes and activities from start to finish, etc., on your hard disk and removable drives these days,” he said. “You can’t keep your life in a wall safe.”
For clarification, some law-and-order desire for a conviction in what amounts to a trivial criminal case, the defendant is accused of being a small town mortgage scam artist, is no reason to take chip away everyone’s right to privacy as enforced by personal encryption.
“If you ever worry about the future of America, there is no need: it is in good hands,” reads the lede of a piece from CBS News yesterday.
It’s the beginning of a particularly excessive and aggrandizing feel good “cancer cured” story.
These have always been a feature of the US newsmedia and the care and feeding of our culture of lickspittle. Evidence to the contrary, cancer definitely not being cured in tech-mighty western civilization, is not an antidote or harsh cold shower.
As a result, the sum of the journalistic work is simultaneously heartless, cruel and intelligence-insulting. And it always comes wrapped in shiny packaging, asking you to clap in awe and admire the wonder of something — in this case, the precocious child enrolled at an upper class school in Cupertino, CA. (Its presence in the story serves to underline only how stunning opportunities, spoil and resources are mostly only in those places now in the high end of our economic ecosystem.)
Born to Chinese immigrants, 17-year-old Angela Zhang of Cupertino, California is a typical American teenager. She’s really into shoes and is just learning how to drive.
But there is one thing that separates her from every other student at Monta Vista High School, something she first shared with her chemistry teacher, Kavita Gupta.
It’s a research paper Angela wrote in her spare time — and it is advanced, to say the least. Gupta says all she knows is its recipe — for curing cancer.
“Cure for cancer — a high school student,” said Gupta. “It’s just so mind-boggling. I just cannot even begin to comprehend how she even thought about it or did this.”
News of cancer cured, delivered in five to six hundred words, courtesy of the wealth and genius of the human DNA in the Silicon Valley.
Where humble or circumspect are not words found in the dictionary.
Of course, the young girl is cute as a button. There simply would be no other way to present it.
And it is certainly newsworthy that she has won a remarkable prize of $100,000 from the Siemens corporation for her science project.
“Angela’s idea was to mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles — nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on an MRI so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are,” the piece informs.
“Then she thought shat if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine, thus killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.”
Attaching dyes, poisons and other reagents to malignant cells has been a vigorously pursued avenue of research since … I graduated from Lehigh University in the mid-Eighties.
However, while conceptually simple, the complexities of the genesis and biochemistry of cancer cells and how they spread in the human system remains unconquered.
Infrared light? And how does one get that and the chemotherapeutic agents into a place where there are multiple sites of malignancy, like deep inside the skull?
Or what if the particular cancer being treated just doesn’t care much if bathed in even the most toxic agents because, somehow, it’s aggressively self-repairing?
Well, one could write a book about such things and cancer would still not be finished. In fact, I recall walls of bookshelves upon walls of bookshelves on the matter in the library at the Penn State School of Medicine many years ago.
“It’ll take years to know if it works in humans — but in mice — the tumors almost completely disappeared,” adds the CBS newsman.
General Electric, the largest US industrial group by market capitalisation, reported a 3 per cent rise in earnings per share from continuing operations in the fourth quarter, thanks to another strong performance at GE Capital, its finance division …
Jeff Immelt, the chief executive, warned of “continued volatility in 2012???, but said the company was preparing for it by investing in new products and technology, expanding in emerging economies and strengthening risk management.
He said GE Capital, which provided 46 per cent of last year’s post-tax earnings from continuing operations, was “safe and secure and rebounding sharply???, and the group overall was “positioned for a strong 2012???.
GE has been widely criticised for its low corporate tax rate, which has benefited from writing off losses at GE Capital, its finance division. The tax rate is rising as those losses are exhausted …
Earlier this week, the President praised his jobs council for their recommendations on how to improve employment in the US.
About the opposite of the populist stance the President has been taking since starting his re-election campaign. Perhaps coincidentally, later in the week the President gave an initial thumbs down on the Keystone Canadian oil sands pipeline project, one that was billed as an allegedly big jobs creator.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, also a member of the jobs council, avoided the meeting at which it handed in its report this week.
Instead, he wrote a dissent, part of which is excerpted here:
Perhaps most profoundly, the [jobs council report] does not ask the critical question: why is our country suffering a manufacturing crisis, complete with massive job loss and a structural trade deficit, when countries with higher overall taxes, higher wages, and more robust health, safety and environmental regulations are enjoying trade surpluses?
The answer lies in the view that we share with so many of our fellow Americans: that our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1% at the expense of the remaining 99%. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1% systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers, and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99%.
GE & Jeff, best corporate song and advert, ever. Not like the one where the fake cancer patient wants to thank the token employees who bolted the GE CAT scan machine together.
GE over the land, they made a real good plan
Pay no taxes to the man, no cash money for Uncle Sam.
Fire all that labor now, they’re all just real fat cows
Gonna implement a real good plan, no money to the man
Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer winner for news articles on an Ebola virus outbreak, did a question and answer with herself concerning the scientific publication (or censorship) of experimental genetic alteration to bird flu virus, on a a New York Times blog recently
It spawns a ridiculous quote, a cliched and shopworn idea that’s long been passed off as gospel by those pushing fear of imminent, or easily done, bioterrorism:
A biological weapon can be made in a high school biology lab …
It’s a brief trash emission by someone who established a reputation writing material that was distinctly not trash.
In 1995 I bought a copy of Garrett’s The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.
It’s a detailed scholarly book, fascinating to laymen and specialists alike.
However, a Pulitzer is a journalism prize. It is not at all the same thing as a Nobel. It is not an indication of excellence in lab research. And a Pulitzer is not a magic ticket that substitutes for getting the full union card in hard science.
Garrett graduated with honors in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at University of California, Berkeley and did research at Stanford University … During her PhD studies, Garrett started reporting on science news for radio station KPFA. The hobby soon became far more interesting than graduate school and she took a leave of absence to explore journalism. Garrett never completed her PhD.
Maybe Laurie Garrett knows first-hand about the ease, or lack of it, of working with human pathogens. And maybe not. I don’t know.
My perspective has always been very different. Microbial and biochemical preparations, which are what biological weapons are, never seemed high-school lab easy to me. (And if you have ever seen new students, in high school or college, struggle with introductory methods …)
Garrett works out of the Council on Foreign Relations, which like many high-button think tanks, isn’t nearly what it used to be, rep wise. The age of Internet and abuse of argument from authority have taken a toll on all such institutions.
Neither of these places were high school labs. And since then there has been no bioterrorism generated by rogue science from such humble environs.
Interestingly, Garrett mentions another earlier example of bioterrorism research in which censorship came up during the war on terror.
She writes:
[In July 2005], The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper by Lawrence Wein, of Stanford, and Yifan Liu, of Harvard, that amounted to a recipe for concocting botulism-laced milk. Bruce Alberts, who was then the editor of the journal, resisted suggestions that he censor the paper, writing in an accompanying editorial that “protecting ourselves optimally against terrorist acts will require that both national and state governments, as well as the public, be cognizant of the real dangers.
We argued that the claims made about botulinum toxin in the Proceedings paper, which was a statistical analysis and not based on any wet work anyway, were not a roadmap to terrorism. With respect to that, it didn’t matter if the paper was published.
However, often we’re seen to live in a fiendishly curious and complicated world.
The authors of the botox bioterror paper had cited the laboratory in the Bay Area that was selling the deadly poison to anyone who called for it. Those sales would eventually result in criminal prosecutions, convictions and people on slabs, kept alive by ventilators, after they were overdosed by botox produced in a US research lab.
However, the scientists publishing through Proceedings, it seemed, did not know this at the time. Instead, in the same paper, they suggested that one of the laboratory’s other research formulations could be useful in securing against the potential threat of large-scale botox poisoning.
The authors had further posited terrorists might buy a biological weapon from a “black market” lab or make it from some document downloaded from the Internet. In real life in 2005 there were no such black market labs and the document was not useful. However, there was a US free market-based fully licensed and very sophisticated biochemical fine products lab selling it to greedy people.
Again, to reiterate, the anthrax and botox did not come from high school biology labs.
From time to time I like to point out, first-hand, how stilted the mainstream press is. Everyone now believes the system is rigged for a certain outcome but not everyone gets to regularly experience it.
Over the holidays I was buttonholed by two reporters wishing to do stories on cyberwar.
One was from a medium-sized newspaper in New Jersey. The other was a Wall Street reporter from Die Zeit, the big German weekly newspaper.
Both wanted to go over the matter of turning off the US remotely via cyberattack. In the case of Die Zeit’s reporter, it was the oft repeated idea that a cyberattack could destroy the US financial system that needed scrutiny.
In both cases I told the journalists these claims were well over ten years old. And these are assertions the sellers of the cyberwar story have always used because they get lots of attention and can be reliably counted upon to be passed on unskeptically simply by dint of delivery by authority.
The claims do not adhere to any reasonable standard of proof in the scientific sense. That is, extraordinary statements can be made in the absence of any extraordinary evidence to support them.
When taken over the history of the matter the reporters, at least on the phone, found my telling of it compelling. The Die Zeit reporter was interested because she had been covering Wall Street for many years and couldn’t figure out how any such thing could be done.
Wall Street is fiendishly complex.
In fact, she indicated, the American, and by extension, the world financial system, is now so complicated she doubted anyone on the inside even fully understood it.
So I asked her to tell me what proof she had been given that the US financial market could be destroyed by cyberattack. And there really wasn’t anything convincing to it, we seemed to agree.
There was, however, some mumbo jumbo about stealth or malicious hedge funds and such.
To which I wryly remarked something to the effect that that, in effect, was part of the industry’s action in the economic collapse.
Americans don’t feel the cyberattack on the US financial system story. They have, instead, lived through a time when the financial system attacked them, repeatedly. And it continues to do so.
After the holiday season interviews, which were long, no stories resulted.
Contrast this with the number of repetitive drivel pieces asserting the coming of some manner of cyberwar every day.
Having worked at a newspaper and written for an alternative news weekly I can tell you why this works the way it does.
The short version (a long version would take a couple book chapters) is this: Editors just don’t like stories that don’t deliver some claim of imminent catastrophe, delivered by argument from on hight.
But there is certainly a story in the hard fact that what I’ve described has been peddled so invariantly for so long. If the names have changed, simply because people have aged out of the endeavor — it’s been over a decade, the nature of the sources and predictions have remained static.
There is rock solid proof in the historical record. But it is a tale too complicated, lacking in a titillating sense of looming danger, and self-impeaching for most to tell.
