1980s: The Arrogance of Apple
After waiting weeks—or months, when you’re young there’s very little difference—for his turn to “Test Drive a Macintosh” my father just bought the damn thing. Everything else we’d ever owned had a command prompt. We watched the demos together as a family. We ducked the first time we ejected a disk, since there was no door on the drive. And this is true: the first night I had feverish dreams about building folder hierarchies. I was ten.
Back then what we heard from folks was that the Mac wasn’t a real computer. It was overpriced, impossible to modify, difficult to program. Real programmers used DOS (Linux wasn’t available until I graduated from high school). We demonstrated MacPaint to one of my uncles and he sneered at it; he knew how to draw a circle on the screen using BASIC.
No, the Mac wasn’t computing, it was just moving pictures around. And Mac people weren’t real computer users, they were people too stupid and lazy to learn how to use a real machine.
When I hear people talk about the arrogance and ego of Apple users, that’s what I think about.
It’s also what I’ve been thinking since the iPad announcement. More on that later.
The “Test Drive” ad above was found—along with a scary amount of other archived Apple ephemera—at The Mac Mothership.
Better Democrats, Please
A coworker noticed his paycheck was a few dollars short this month. And yes, more taxes are being withheld than they were a couple of months ago. When Obama took office, he provided a “tax cut” to a large swath of the population, but he did it by changing tax withholding rules, which meant everyone got a few dollars more in their paycheck. Most of us maybe got enough to pay for an extra movie ticket—two if you’re paid monthly. Raise your hand if you noticed.
Thought so.
So, along comes January and the tax cut expires so people’s tax withholding goes up, and that some people notice. There are lots of reasons, some of them trenchant and sarcastic, but mostly I think people will just tend to notice when they get less when they may not notice just a little more.
The net effect, though, is that no one knows they got a tax cut but the first thought many people had when they opened the first pay package of the year was: damn. Obama snuck in a tax hike.
No credit for a tax cut. But full blame for a tax hike which did not happen. What brain trust did that amateur-hour policy come out of?
The Democratic party. Of course.
Perhaps this should be a post about health care reform instead. But if you’re wondering to yourself how a party with the strongest political majority in generations—even after Tuesday night’s shameful loss in Massachusetts—can fail to pass any substantive legislation, turn that story over in your head. See if the light doesn’t dawn.
A vert short argument for polytheism
I find it impossible to to reconcile the Christian god as envisioned by people like Pat Robertson with the far more compassionate Christian god worshipped by, for example, Martin Luther King.
Ultimately I came to the conclusion that Robertson and King worshipped different gods, and that made religion much easier to understand.
Apple Transforms an Industry
There are a lot of things Apple could do better in the iPhone app store, both for open standards and open platforms. But let’s not lose sight of what they’ve already accomplished: breaking open a market that had been strangled by poor platforms and short-sighted cell phone providers.
Pop hooks, existential angst
I listen to a lot of music, and while my tastes are varied my favorite artists are singer/songwriters with touch of melancholy around the edges. Aimee Mann and her urban sarcasm. James McMurtry and his rural ironic pessimism. Pink Floyd and their obsession with madness. Paul Simon and his fog of nostalgia. But for my money there’s only one song that perfectly captures existential angst: Johnny Mandel’s “Suicide is Painless,” better known as the theme from M*A*S*H.
The sword of time will pierce our skins—
It doesn’t hurt when it begins.
But as it works its way on in,
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin.
Well, OK. It’s really the music that makes the song. But man, what a hook in the chorus. And when it gets stuck in my head I tend to go around singing it under my breath. Which has to freak anyone out who hears me.
So just to let you know if you’re around me the next few days—I’m not depressed and I’m not suicidal, I’m just under the influence of an unfortunate earworm. Plus it’s January, and that brings just about everyone down.
Stagnant wages, increased standard of living
Overall wages have been stagnant for a good long time, but Scott Sumner suggests that doesn’t matter because our standards of living are so much better than it used to be. He compares now to 1973:
1. Houses are bigger and have more baths.
2. Electronics are so much better it is ridiculous. 100 times as many TV channels.
3. We take jet vacations to Disney World or Europe, not car trips to a state park.
4. Granite counter-tops vs. Formica.
5. Thai or sushi restaurants vs. meat and potatoes “supper clubs.”
6. Better medical care and longer life expectancy.
7. Cars with paint that doesn’t rust out in three years.
8. For the lower middle class: Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart.
9. No more purple shag carpets.
10. U2/Radiohead vs. Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones.
I think in large part he has a point—growth of wages does not represent growth of riches. But you know, I don’t know too many people taking jet vacations instead of going to closer locations. I took a “staycation” this year and so did several of my friends and coworkers. My countertops are still formica. My television isn’t so large-screen. And I don’t even know what to make of the Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart issue; the prices may be great, but as an employer I hear they are misery.
Sumner talks as though we all crossed from one economic class to the other—as though granite countertops are now commonplace for the middle and lower-middle class. And perhaps they have; but I haven’t seen many.
Two other things Sumner misses is what we’ve traded for this increase in standard of living: more two-income households—out of necessity, not choice—and crushing debt. Sumner makes the point that college dorms are a lot nicer than they used to be, and that’s true. But students are also graduating with a lot more college debt than they used to have. And just as student debt has funded the luxurification of college dorms, our collective debt provided the capital needed for the explosion in consumer electronics, fancy houses, and jet vacations. If people weren’t running up their credit cards and working more, then we wouldn’t be here now.
In other words, wages have been stagnant but our spending has increased. That’s not sustainable—a lesson we learned a few months ago when a credit crunch put the brakes on large segments of the consumer culture. Realistically speaking our standard of living is better than it was nearly four decades ago. But how much of that improvement relies on us fooling ourselves into thinking things are better than they are?
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