Apple just posted spectacular holiday quarter results. Revenue of $46 billion blew away their previous record of $28 billion, and profit of $13 billion is larger than Google’s entire revenue.
More than half those revenues come from iPhones, too, with unit sales of 37 million way above the previous record of 20 million. So, no basis in that whole “The iPhone 4S is OK, but it’s no iPhone 5 - Apple must be losing their touch” idea.
Writers in The Australian continues to misinterpret scientific statements on climate change. A recent press release from the World Meteorological Organization reported on the temperature in 2011, noting that it continues the trend of years much warmer than the long-term average:
At present, 2011’s nominal value ranks as the equal 10th highest on record, and the 13 warmest years have all occurred in the 15 years between 1997 and 2011.
The WMO also noted that 2011 was the warmest La Niña year on record (La Niña years tend to have cooler global temperatures, in contrast to El Niño years).
Imre Salusinszky in The Australian managed to twist all this into something with the complete opposite meaning:
Last year was the sixth coldest since 1997, which shows the catastrophic scenarios of recent times are no longer looming over us.
You only have to look at the WMO graph to see that we’re hardly out of the woods.
It’s almost as if Salusinszky’s not actually interested in reporting on the science. Surely not?
(Source: scienceblogs.com)
The Motley Fool, an investing website, has some analysis of commonly-repeated statements about how the US is in economic thrall to China, which are actually not true. The key highlights:
Misconception: Most of what Americans spend their money on is made in China.
Fact: Just 2.7% of personal consumption expenditures go to Chinese-made goods and services. 88.5% of U.S. consumer spending is on American-made goods and services.
Misconception: We owe most of our debt to China.
Fact: China owns 7.8% of U.S. government debt outstanding.
Misconception: We get most of our oil from the Middle East.
Fact: Just 9.2% of oil consumed in the U.S. comes from the Middle East.
Going deeper, another interesting fact is that only half of that 2.7% actually goes to China in the form of import costs, while the other half is spent in the US on supply chain and retail tasks. The original Federal Reserve source says:
Goods and services from China accounted for only 2.7% of U.S. personal consumption expenditures in 2010, of which less than half reflected the actual costs of Chinese imports. The rest went to U.S. businesses and workers transporting, selling, and marketing goods carrying the “Made in China” label.
This is not to say that there are not serious issues with the US economy’s capacity to remain globally competitive, particularly when China and other countries are investing heavily in advanced technologies that are likely to drive a lot of growth. For example, see this piece from McKinsey on how the US has lost the lead it once had in many fields of technology, hindering its growth. But it’s important to keep these factors in perspective. With that in mind I’m looking forward to reading a book I just got, Advantage by Adam Segal (subtitled How American innovation can overcome the Asian challenge), which deals with these issues.
It’s not just conservatives who dismiss science that doesn’t suit them.
While there is a lot of evidence that people with conservative (“hierarchical individualist”) leanings are more likely to ignore science that conflicts with their worldview than liberals (“egalitarian communitaritarians”), a new study shows that the right context can reduce liberal support for science too. Because many liberals dislike the idea of geoengineering - deliberately manipulating the Earth’s climate to offset climate change - portraying climate science as supportive of geoengineering can result in them being more dismissive of the science, while it actually brings more conservatives on board.
This study is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s good to know ways that people might seek to undermine science. Seeing that geoengineering can touch a nerve amongst people who are usually science supporters prepares us to head off criticism by working for particularly good governance of any geoengineering efforts.
Second, it’s clear from the study that liberals are still much more trustful of climate science than conservatives, whether it’s framed in terms of geoengineering or not. While conservatives are slightly less distrustful in the geoengineering case, they’re still distrustful. So framing is not a silver bullet to bring people on board with the accuracy of peer-reviewed science.
Lastly, the study’s authors suggest that this approach of choosing the right cultural framing for scientific information can help reduce polarisation about science. Presumably the idea is to mention geoengineering when reporting about science to conservative audiences, and steer clear when reporting the same science to liberal audiences. This might work, but ultimately the audiences will still be very polarised when it comes to agreeing on what actions to take based on the science, and this might even be exacerbates if no attempt is made to engage them both on the same courses of action. Getting acceptance of the science is important, but it’s acceptance within a cultural context that enables action that’s really essential, and this approach might actually undermine that.
(Source: papers.ssrn.com)
Does Steve Jobs hate freedom - in forms beyond consumer choice?
This reflection on Steve Jobs and Apple by Gary Sternovitz is interesting but hyperbolic and quite misleading. Jobs has a reputation as a tyrant in person, and Sternovitz aims to tie that into a broader portrayal of Apple as an unfeeling company that ruthlessly exploits factory workers in its suppliers.
A few representative quotes:
Contemporary China has found a way to combine, for outcomes positive and devastating, some of the most abysmal features of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism and 20th century totalitarian dictatorships. This is a combination that would seem to have felt very comfortable for Steve Jobs, as long as he was in charge. Apple has long been infamous for opposing open access and more collaborative computing cultures.
Jobs’s legacy as the lovably jerky Edison of our time ignores that he wanted us to believe that there is an escape from life into cleanly designed and efficient technology, and that only a ruthless dictator could show it to us.
Better an iPhone than Il Duce, of course, to make the trains run on time—or at least to tell you how to get to Penn Station—but totalitarian shadows probably should not fall over the products we crave, in how they are made or why we love them.
Sternovitz is overreaching in claiming without evidence that outsourcing to China was an ideological decision for Steve Jobs. Think about the volume of outsourcing by all Western corporations, many of whom presumably don’t have CEOs that are visionaries/jerks in his mould. And on the computing culture issue, Apple works with closed, controlled systems because it enables them to provide a better consumer experience (compare iOS to Android), not because Steve Jobs hated freedom.
Sternovitz is also misrepresenting China as a place where a totalitarian government suppresses people to make cheap labour available to eager Western corporations. Wages in Chinese factories are on average three to four times higher than on Chinese farms, and assembly work is less dangerous than in heavy industry. Nobody is forcing anybody to work in a factory: the conditions are obviously worse than in the West, but so are most of the other jobs on offer, and factory jobs pay well enough that they offer a chance to work towards a better life in future. (Also, the Chinese government’s policy on the yuan actually helps manufacturing exporters, at the expense of Chinese consumers.)
Sternovitz argues that because of Apple’s high profit margins, it could afford to pay more to its workers in its foreign suppliers, like Foxconn. I don’t think it’s quite so simple. First, Apple’s profit margins are not solely the result of Foxconn paying people low wages, although they have pushed hard to cut costs in their supply chain. There are many other factors contributing to Apple’s dominance of several of the markets it operates in, so it’s not just a situation where they are getting rich by slashing the wages of its contract workers. But still, they do have a lot of money, so let’s think about what Sternovitz might suggest they do to help those workers.
Maybe Apple could play softball in its price negotiations for supply contracts, but then Foxconn could just retain the added revenue as profit if it’s already paying market wages and has such an oversupply of willing workers that it has no incentive to raise them. Maybe Apple could mandate that it will only buy components from suppliers that pay a particular wage - although typical factory wages are already well above the cost of living in China and most factory workers are able to save a large proportion of their pay. (Not to mention that Foxconn, for example, employs a million people; would all of them have to be paid the “Apple rate” for Foxconn to be eligible for Apple’s business? If not, is it really fair for workers doing the same work for different buyers to be paid differently?)
Maybe pay isn’t the issue and it’s more about poor conditions, like the extremely long hours that are definitely a negative of factory work. But Apple probably can’t mandate something like maximum working hours for factory workers, since many of them are content to work long hours, boosting their pay in order to save for the future. (I’m basing that assertion on a discussion in James Fallows’ book Postcards from Tomorrow Square - the relevant essay is available at the Atlantic). And beyond all of these, every Apple-mandated increase in pay or conditions for workers probably makes it more likely that Foxconn and other suppliers will relocate to Vietnam or another cheaper country, or cut jobs altogether by automating production - the Economist reported in August that Foxconn plans to install one million robots by 2013.
About all that Apple or any other Western company can do, as far as I can see, is ensure that suppliers do not put their workers in harm’s way. Sternovitz is correct in saying that more vigilance is needed in checking suppliers for things like dangerous chemicals. (His discussion of suicide is a bit off the mark - China’s number of suicides is only the world’s highest because it has so many people, although its suicide rate per capita is higher than the world average. The suicides at Foxconn, while undoubtedly tragic, happened at much a lower rate than the averages for Australia, China, or the world.)
Apple, like many companies that operate across borders in a global economy, has to deal with differing expectations in its suppliers and its markets. As Western consumers, afforded the relatively rare luxury to consider the ethical dimension of our purchases, it might seem obvious that we should avoid companies like Apple that use suppliers where workers labour for long hours for little pay. But I don’t think those Chinese workers, or farmers hoping to become factory workers, would thank us for doing so. We can pressure Western companies to maintain ethical standards and ensure that their suppliers do pay reasonable living wages and don’t require hazardous work - but we can’t require them to reshape the economies of entire countries to soothe our consciences.
And to then argue that Steve Jobs didn’t try to do that reshaping, not because it’s an immense task (which has not been tackled effectively by other multinational corporations), but because he was a “ruthless dictator” who enjoyed inflicting pain on others, is definitely a bridge too far.
