iDon't Need an iPhone That Badly

I'm so over Apple products.  I was once their biggest fan, too. I guess if I thought the people of China had any chance whatsoever of leveling the field, I'd feel slightly less guilty for my decades of being a groupie. But they don't.

It's weird that with all the modern technology, we don't have webcams available where we can watch the workers on their 12 hour shifts, or monitor the goings-on in the dormitories. We could have parimutuel wagering on which worker will off himself next. The technology is there-- and the market is there, I have no doubt.

Anyway, the world is just going to hell. Last night, I was re-reading parts of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, and the Buddhist idea that desire causes suffering is right underneath every story. It makes me think of all the online salivating over every new gadget that is the hallmark of the educational Twitterverse. We have so many new things, but it seems to spark only the desire for more new things and the discussion of how the new things are hotter than the old things. It's like we live in a world where there's only cause but no effect, like there are no consequences to anything beyond our immediate gratification.

I think the iPhone is the modern embodiment of what the Buddha was talking about. Someone should really invent an app that beeps loudly every twelve hours six days a week, at the minimum. It shouldn't even be optional.

This is my favorite graf out of the entire article:

At dinner, for instance, the executives had suggested that the government should reform visa programs to help companies hire foreign engineers. Some had urged the president to give companies a “tax holiday” so they could bring back overseas profits which, they argued, would be used to create work. Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

 There isn't a phenomenon that exists that isn't a reason for corporate tax holidays. Truly, it was out of the blue. Nothing in the article had anything whatsoever to do with tax burdens.

By the way, Steve Jobs was wrong about some things:

Jobs also criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules," noted Isaacson. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

 Actually, competent principals can do exactly what he suggested, and in the successful schools I've worked in, no, work rules didn't seem to hobble anyone. "Work rule" seems to have been a Jobs code word for "the right to work from home after an 8 hour shift."

Whatever. It doesn't surprise me that a guy with those misinformed opinions would be running sweatshops in a dictatorship.

Anyway, I definitely need a phone soon. This Blackberry works only in certain weather conditions, none of which exist in Chicago in the winter. Is there a phone out there that isn't produced by volunteer slaves?