Author: Stagger Lee

Caterpillar, off the back of a record $4.9 BILLION in profits and even higher forecasts, is demanding a six YEAR wage and pension freeze from its employees.

Why? Presumably because they can. After all, in a down economy, who’s going to quit their job?

This is why I remain a steadfast supporter of unions. Say what you like about feather-bedding and corruption, the fact is that if your employer will not hesitate to screw you in the name of padding profits, you need somebody able to draw a line and say NO.

“I’m taking your raise, whatcha gonna do about it?” Bully capitalism. This is the future unless somebody punches them in the face, hard, repeatedly, until they stop.

…There is no one in charge in college football. There likely never will be. One lie leading to another forms the bridge the present takes to the future, and your steps don’t lie: it feels as solid as truth, and holds up for far longer in some cases.

The editing matters so much here. You can say the sport is rife with filth, and you would be right. The negligent policemen of the sport strike intermittently at thieves. One side makes up the law as they go while the other politiely ignores it. Bowl games grease the palms of venal public officials. Television networks buy off longtime allies and reconstruct the map as they fit, as drunken in their excesses as the mustachioed cartographers of any careless empire. Players steal what they can when they can. Coaches do the same, but to much greater effect.

We know this. This is not news. Please stop acting like it is. That’s very ingenious that in the bombed-out church of football, you have figured out that there is no God, and someone is running out the door with the coffers. The only intrigue is in the variation, not in the repeated exaggerated reminders that this is a sport of charlatans, sweathouse labor conditions, and a thousand dodges behind the shield of amateurism. 

You can also give us other news to use if you’re into creative editing. You will enter into a one-way contract upon birth. All goods are temporary, and your most personal property, you, will stop functioning completely without warning or refund. Your employer, despite what you believe, does not care about you, and is only interested in the capital you can help them accrue. Your home is a house, and is a good. Your organs can be sold for a certain dollar amount on the open market. The people in charge of the imaginary territory that someone made up to fill with saleable goods are, by all accounts, unqualified for their jobs and very much do not have your best interests at heart. Your wife or husband is under a chemical delusion that ends in six months, and likely continues for the convenience it provides in raising children.

There is always free cheddar in the mousetrap, and it is always a deal.

In this edit, Pinocchio is a story about bad firewood that ends with the whale, and George Teague’s play didn’t matter because it was cancelled by a penalty. 

There is another edit. The one between naivete and cynicism. It is a delicate one. You will first have to accept that this breaks your heart. You will have to accept that this is in some part a scam. You will have to accept that you are bad firewood walking: wooden, a puppet guided by strings pulling you in directions you can’t always understand or accept. You’ll have to accept, in one form or another, that God’s away on business, and you will have to take care of this yourself no matter how long you have to run. You have to accept that the only redemption for the large, cheap machinations of life is the redemption of experience, the only thing you can control…

Spencer Hall, the greatest living sportswriter and the author of the single best piece ever written about college football, has reacted to the NCAA’s neutron-bombing of Penn State precisely as I myself would have.

Read this, and know that I concur in every particular. There is something to be done here, but the NCAA is basically jumping on the pile and indulging the mob – and doing something I thought would be impossible; they’re actually making me feel pity for the football organization at Penn State.

This isn’t about punishing Penn State.  Penn State football was permanently damaged already.  This is the NCAA taking a shit on the corpse and seeking applause and approbation for doing so – and, much like the NFL, asserting that it is the great and powerful Oz and in no way whatsoever throwing stones from a glass house.

 

ETA: I don’t know what they’re doing down there at Florida that makes sportswriters, but this post at Alligator Alley also nails my thinking with accuracy and precision: the NCAA is trying to make this go away for themselves as quickly and loudly as possible, and in doing so is simultaneously shining their own ass, protecting themselves from any tangential connections, and setting a disturbing precedent for massive intervention with minimal process.

 

EATA: Jon F. Morse, stalwart Kansas State partisan and outstanding chronicler of college football at the less hype-ridden levels of the game, has the definitive breakdown.  

Not much to say. We’ve seen this show before, over and over, and we will continue to see it, because a dozen people shot dead in a movie theater, or a church, or a buffet line, or wherever – that’s apparently the price we as a society are willing to pay to avoid inconveniencing the people who want to need the guns.

At this point, there’s no other explanation.

So the President had a paragraph in a stump speech a couple of days ago where he discussed the interconnectedness of society, how we had to collectively build the road or run the power grid or educate the employees, and that nobody builds a business all by themselves.  Naturally, the Romney campaign sliced a big chunk out of the middle and made an ad out of the deceptively-edited speech, which Fox proceeded to flog relentlessly…honestly, at this point, I’m out of patience.  Make all the excuses you like, but if you’re voting GOP, the fact is you are objectively voting in favor of the United States of Alabama and you need to own it.  But I digress.

I think about this in terms of the current state of phones and tablets and the ongoing insistence that Android is somehow morally superior because it is “open.” Setting aside the fact that hardware makers slap on their own GUI and carriers lock the boot loader out and updates are released by Google only to make it to devices…eventually, if ever – ignore all that for the moment.  Say Android was, in fact, truly open and olly-olly-oxen-free.

So what?

For 90% of the people who buy these things, open avails them very little.  Remember our old friend Ed Earl Brown?  Ed Earl is not interested in writing his own apps, or drivers, or kernel, or what have you.  He’s not going to hack the operating system.  More to the point, he’s not going to write his own operating system.  And when he does, he’s not going to set up his own weather station wired to a GSM modem feeding back to his own server to monitor the weather, he’s not going to put together his own mail server and write his own implementation of sendmail and do his own push to his Android phone…which, in fairness, he didn’t build himself.

The question becomes, how open do you have to be?  Where is the bright line that separates the real true hacker technolibertarian from the Apple-dependent sheep-man?  Is it a question of writing your own apps? If you can do that, aren’t you still at the mercy of the OS developer’s APIs?  How much of that code are you willing to re-write yourself for the sake of not being dependent on somebody else?

And really, it goes beyond that.  This blog depends almost entirely on the tender mercies of somebody else: my brother-in-law who hosts it, WordPress for the underlying blog engine and iPad client, MarsEdit for the laptop client where I’m typing right now.  Hell, if I were typing this out, I wouldn’t be pressing my own paper from pulp and weaving my own typewriter ribbon inked with a concoction of berries and ground coal.

So what if, for you, the iPad (for instance) is just a big screwdriver?  A big complicated screwdriver, obviously, more along the lines of a power-drill with a Phillips bit, but at root just a tool?  Ultimately, I think that’s what Steve Jobs had in mind with the iPad (which we now know was in development as early as 2002) – a computer where the computing aspect of it just goes away, leaving you with whatever you’re doing.  Browser, email, weather, book, whatever – it’s there without any mucking about with file systems, contextual menus, none of that.  Just reach out with your finger and pick out what you want.  Hell, in some cases, it’s the Kramer Moviephone. “Why don’t you just tell me who you’d like to telephone today?”

In the end, ultimately, I think we lose a lot by wanking about the tool rather than what we do with it.  Sure, survivalists might want to be able to cast their own ammunition, and the guys that write the operating system should know how to do that, but for the vast majority of people – we’re going to be sitting on a lot of other people’s shoulders to do everything and anything we do.  That’s called society, it’s called civilization, and it’s not something we need to apologize for relying on.  Because the alternative is subsistence hunting-gathering and sheltering under rocks.

Which is something the privileged heir of George Romney should think long and hard about before deciding he’s the epitome of the self-made man.

1) SHE’S SEVEN MONTHS PREGNANT HOLY FUCKING SHIT.  If that ain’t a show I’ll kiss your ass.  Then again, if you’re trying to pull Yahoo out of its death spiral, popping out a kid on top of that is merely the parsley on the side of the plate.

2) I notice that the first instinct I had about her turnaround is “who can they buy?”  Which obviously reflects my lack of confidence in Yahoo’s ability to deliver a new product – they haven’t had a compelling offering since Flickr and I’m pretty sure they bought that too, and ages ago at that.  I don’t know what that says about my faith in Yahoo to innovate, but it says a lot about the way things have changed in the Valley – more and more, it feels like the exit strategy of choice is to get bought out and acquired by somebody bigger, whether it’s one of the Consumer Big Five that I cited earlier or by the likes of Cisco or another big player in the less-consumer-ish space.

3) I think that speaks to the extent to which the new wave of high-tech players wants to get rich instead of conquering the world.  Instagram going to Facebook is the example everyone points to, but look at the meltdown at Digg – they turned down a big-ticket acquisition and now, years later, they’re selling out for a pittance compared to what they were valued at originally.  That’s got to be a cautionary tale.  Friendster is probably the same way – they created the modern idea of social networking, spurned the Google offer, went on to get their lunch eaten by MySpace and Facebook, got big-ish in Southeast Asia and ultimately wound up a niche social game site.  At this point, if you get an offer from Apple or Microsoft or Facebook, you have to think long and hard about whether you a) think you can make it bigger on your own, b) not get swamped by some other Big Five offering, and c) live with the knowledge that you let it ride and busted out when you limp into obscurity in two years.

4) All of this makes me wonder whether Yahoo might not try to acquire somebody they want to be acquired by themselves – which sounds confusing as hell, but think Disney-Pixar.  Let’s be honest, Disney’s future is wholly owned and operated by their Emeryville “subsidiary”; if Yahoo were to latch onto Foursquare or Twitter or the like, it would give them something to aim for while still having their original portal-and-information business as a value-add for their location-based/social future.  I know it sounds nuts, but what else is going to turn Yahoo around?

In the biggest shock in the Valley since…well since I don’t know when, Marissa Mayer – aka Google employee #20, most recently Vice President for Location and before that for Search at the big G – is taking the Chief Executive Officer job at Yahoo, becoming by some counts the fifth CEO in a year (including interims).

Thought one: she’s 37.  FML.

Thought two: this is not another Carly or Meg.  In addition to being young, Mayer brings to the table two Stanford degrees in computer science.  She’s not an MBA or a marketing android (rimshot) or a business turnaround artist – she’s a geek.  More to the point: she is a technical individual taking over a company that has long lost its technical edge.  And this is important.

Contrary to what they might want you to think at B-school at Wharton or Harvard, an MBA is not a universally fungible guarantee of managerial acumen.  What Google became, Yahoo once was, but the big purple exclamation point has long stopped being the company that got an onstage slot at the iPhone launch – in the last five years, they’ve managed to botch the best photo-sharing site on the web in Flickr, throw half-a-dozen shit sandwiches at social networking and miss with all of them (Yahoo 360?  Yahoo Buzz?  Yahoo Meme!?).  A former Warner Brothers CEO was probably not the guy to have in charge in the post-boom era, and Jerry Yang proved that you can’t go home again unless your name rhymes with Sleeve Knobs.  Carol Bartz was entertaining for a while, but it appears that Yahoo could not, in fact, merely cut-and-cuss its way to viability.  More and more it looks like Scott Thompson – who famously didn’t have the claimed degree in CS –  was CEO just long enough to make the mass purge…and now?

It’s not for the money.  Mayer presumably has more money than she could burn through in a lifetime at this point.  Part of it may just be the challenge – between Bartz, Whitman and Fiorina, the strong female CEO has had a rough few years in Silicon Valley, and maybe Mayer just wants to be the one to break the cycle before Sheryl Sandberg stages a coup at Facebook or leaves to take over something else.  If Mayer can bring Yahoo back to relevance, that would be a turnaround for the ages, and not just for the Valley – it would be the biggest comeback since the 2004 Red Sox at a minimum.

Because let’s face it, there are five companies that matter in this industry right now: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, in order of significance.  You’d probably have to dig down another ten or twenty names before you hit Yahoo – hell, the CS department at Stanford probably beats Yahoo in terms of industry impact right this second.  Which then leads to the question: what’s Yahoo going to do?

They don’t do hardware, and they don’t do a mobile operating system, and they’re not selling anything in terms of digital media or even physical goods – which means they’re not playing against four of the five names on that list up there at all.  They are the old-school “pure Internet play” and the only thing like that right now on the list is Facebook, which is itself scrambling to adjust to the post-PC future (and starting by throwing way too much money at Instagram).  So the obvious question is: what’s out there for Yahoo to acquire/sponge from?

Well, there are some interesting independent players out there.  Foursquare is the industry leader in location-based social networking, and location was Mayer’s last billet at Google.  SAYMedia is out there, holding TypePad and MoveableType and a good bit of the blog infrastructure of the web.  For that matter, Automattic is still out there even if they’ve mostly given WordPress over to the eponymous foundation.  There are other smaller players in social networking, like Tumblr or the tech-hipster darling Path.  There’s Evernote, which I quite frankly find indispensable for cloud-based notetaking and general bit-bucketing.  There’s Loopt, there’s Smugmug, there’s all sorts of small companies doodling around Mountain View ripe for the picking if you think you could make something of them.

But that’s not a vision.  What Yahoo should probably be looking at is a future where they’re offering the sorts of things Google or Facebook do, albeit with more privacy, granularity and user control.  After all, most folks over 25 still have a Yahoo account, and there’s some equity in the brand.  And there’s one name that hasn’t come up yet, one which would place Yahoo right in the hot seat of social networking and mobility in one stroke.

Y!Tweets.

Dare to dream, Marissa.

This may be the only thing I write on the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky business, so pay attention and don’t skip bits.

The thing about Joe Paterno is that he was the symbol everyone pointed to for college football done right.  Longevity at one school, giving back to the school, graduating his players, never a whiff of NCAA trouble, and winning games (two national titles in the 80s and then a Rose Bowl berth in their first season in the Big Ten, the dawn of the modern age of expansion).  Penn State in the Paterno era was supposed to be proof that big time football and academic quality (Penn State’s an AAU member) were compatible and complimentary.

Except the lesson of the Sandusky affair is that Joe Paterno was bigger than Penn State University, and they suffered by it.  Most people in the football world thought Joe could have gone ten years ago, and probably should have – that the game had passed him by, that it wasn’t working anymore, that he was just too old to be effective as a head coach.  But when the legend becomes bigger than the team, you get what we had at Florida State as well – Bobby Bowden hanging on too long in pursuit of Bear Bryant, of Eddie Robinson, of Joe Paterno.

They said it about Bear Bryant in the late 60s, after a couple of 6-5 seasons, and he came back to win three more titles (and arguably should have been four), but he did retire after  two or three down years, when he famously wished out loud on television that he could get through to Linnie Patrick, when he lost to Tennessee in 1982 and told a drinking buddy in the hotel room after “I can’t coach ’em anymore.”  He put it just that bluntly at the presser: “There comes a time in life when you have to hang it up, and that time has come for me as football coach at the University of Alabama.”

Five weeks later he was dead.

He was friends with Paterno, was the Bear – they played one of the greatest bowl games ever on New Year’s Day 1979 and Alabama staged the goal-line stand that is perhaps the most iconic of all Alabama plays, and they made a deal for a ten-year home-and-home series that produced some epic matches. And I think Paterno knew deep down that if he ever gave up the game, he wouldn’t be alive to see his successor’s first game.  That’s why he stuck around too long.  He wouldn’t go, and nobody would make him go, and…

The word “cult” gets thrown around too casually in this sort of thing.  Every fan base has its fanatics – hell, if they caught James Franklin with a dead girl and a live boy I’d probably need the coroner’s report and the DNA evidence – and it’s not like Ol’ Joe was leading his followers to the big vat of Flavor-Aid.  The administration of Penn State chose to protect Paterno, and what he might have known, and what he might have done, because they willingly decided he was bigger than the school.  Maybe they looked down South and saw some of the nonsense at Auburn and Alabama and decided that University president vs football coach was a losing bet, I don’t know.  But irrespective of their reasons, they chose Paterno over Penn State.

Now they’ll pay.  They’ll have to.  Joe’s dead, Sandusky’s going to die quickly in prison – they are the only ones left with direct culpability to pay the price, to shed blood for the mobs, to be on the wrong side of what Spencer Hall deftly nails as “the Nancy Grace point.”  Their careers are done.  They will face civil and probably criminal liability.  The ones who looked the other way are going to get the wrath of the American gods – media, lawsuits and moral outrage.

So what happens to Penn State?

In a way it’s already happened.  Paterno’s dead and disgraced, the administration is done for, the very phrase “Penn State” now evokes something completely other than peach ice cream at the dairy and Linebacker U.  Now people are saying “the NCAA should do something!”  Other people are saying “you can’t punish the players for something the coaches did, especially when the coaching staff’s been replaced and the new guy took an absolutely thankless spot.” And still other people are saying “if SMU can get the death penalty for paying players they should shut down Penn State!”

First things first: SMU was a special case, the lowest of the low in a conference rife with corruption, and the application of the death penalty not only permanently crippled Mustang football, it effectively led to the destruction of the Southwest Conference (another step toward the modern era of expansion).  The NCAA Committee on Infractions has passed up the opportunity to apply it to USC, to Miami, they threatened Alabama with it for far less but didn’t pull the trigger – there is a growing sense that they’ll never do it again.

More to the point, most NCAA penalties revolve around paying players, recruiting infractions, cheating on the field – things that affect the integrity of the contest.  Which is more or less the role of a sanctioning body.  Major League Baseball couldn’t have banned Pete Rose for, say,  cheating on his wife – it’s completely orthogonal to the game on the field.  But if he’s gambling on baseball – which has the potential to impact the integrity of the game on the field – the hammer can be brought down, and twenty-plus years on Pete Rose is still banned from organized baseball.

The horrors visited by Jerry Sandusky on his victims, however outrageous, were orthogonal to the game on the field.  While this is a scandal made possible by football – thanks to the outsized presence of a legendary coach – it’s not, strictly speaking, a football scandal.  Now, if the NCAA wants to make a prima facie case for lack of institutional control, well, the infamous “LoIC” is a fact and it is indisputable.  But it’s not a lack of institutional control that affected what happened between the white lines, which means the NCAA is probably on thin ice to get involved here.

And it shouldn’t.  The NCAA is busybody enough without extending its reach to something like this.  If it does, it’s only because they too have slipped beyond the Nancy Grace point and are joining the baying pack of hounds.  Realistically, Penn State is going to be a radioactive for football purposes for quite a while – they’re going to have trouble recruiting anyone who isn’t a livelong fan, they’re not going to be attractive as a TV opponent, the Big Ten is not going to want them as the face of the conference.  And I think ultimately that means the Big Ten will be the one doing the sanctioning, as it’s always arrogated to itself authority over non-sports matters.  The Big Ten requires its members to all belong to the AAU.  They have academic and library consortia.  They view themselves, quite frankly, as a sort of Midwestern Ivy League – and as such, they probably have much firmer ground and precedent on which to lower the boom.

I suspect that you’ll see conference probation for a while, of some sort.  Penn State won’t be going to any Big Ten-affiliated bowls for a while, won’t be eligible for championships in football, will have some symbolic “probation” slapped on there, and will almost certainly turn over every single individual above “head football coach” in the line of command all the way up to the Board of Trustees.  And then, we wait.  Time has a way of inflicting its own punishment, and the Nittany Lion football program will be admitted into civilized company again when the public is good and ready to accept it.  Self-cleaning.

Oddly enough, the people I feel most bad for are those hardcore fans, the ones who put their trust and belief into a program and a legend for years and years.  I know how this works.  I’m from Alabama.  But as a wise man one said, “put not your faith in kings and princes, for three of a kind will beat both.”  When the legend is bigger than the program, both are doomed.

Andy Griffith, dead at 86.

Someone on Twitter said that Sheriff Andy Taylor and the residents of Mayberry showed television a Southern alternative to Bull Connor. That’s as may be, and inasmuch as it’s true, the South should be grateful. But as with Atticus Finch and George Wallace, the problem of Sheriff Andy vs Bull Connor is that one of them is a fictional character. And tragically for an entire region – maybe the entire nation – it was the wrong one.

I’m watching the original 2007 introduction of the iPhone – streamed via AppleTV from the upstairs iMac – and typing this post on my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. Which is where we’ve gotten to from what was introduced today. But a couple of things strike me:

1) Steve said the iPhone was five years ahead of every other phone out there. If you consider that Jellybean will finally clear up the touch-response UI issues on Android, he nailed it pretty good.

2) He quoted Alan Kay, who long ago said “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Within the last month, you’ve seen Google AND Microsoft introduce their own hardware to run their tablet operating systems, in both cases for the first time. Nailed it again.

3) Five years on it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary this was. There was no other phone, as far as I know, that had staked itself on one big screen. My old SonyEricsson P800 was technically capable of it, but shipped with a physically-attached keypad flip and a stylus dug into one side. And it was as thick as two iPhones stacked. Nobody had multitouch. Nobody had a viable browser that wasn’t a hodgepodge of WAP and proxy browsing. Nobody had visual voicemail.

4) Amazing in retrospect that Yahoo Mail was a big feature, especially since it was the only option at launch for push email. Exchange was only supported via IMAP. For that matter, it’s remarkable to see the top left corner read “cingular” – that was long gone by the time the thing actually arrived.

5) On further review, did that split-pane email view ever make it to the production device? I don’t remember ever seeing that at all. Then again, I was busy checking the stock and seeing if we had a winner in the “which rep will demand one of these before the keynote even ends” derby. I don’t recall the flashing phone icon either.

6) Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, part of the iPhone rollout. Times have changed. For that matter, Jerry Yang as Chief Yahoo…five years is an eternity in this valley.

7) “We’ve filed for over two hundred patents and we intend to protect them.” People who bitch about the lawsuits – it’s not like we weren’t warned. I think it’s proof of how important iOS devices were to Steve that he was bound and determined not to have a repeat of Macintosh – this time, the look and feel would be protected to the best of their ability. Which probably explains Steve’s incredible venom toward Android – Steve probably saw another cut-rate knockoff with the potential to take over because it was good enough. And it may yet happen, but not today.

8) Cingular went into contract with Apple without ever seeing the device. Given that they were the only viable carrier – the only GSM carrier in the US with dual-band coverage – Apple really didn’t have a choice without making a hell of a mess for themselves selling abroad. But then again, that’s Steve. We may never see that kind of sell-water-to-a-fish charisma again (although there’s a guy down in middle Tennessee who might just catch him).

9) That exclusivity deal lasted until…when? Late 2010? A three year deal sounds about right; we suspected as much as five at the time and were pretty sure it would be at least two.

10) And the infamous clicker cut-out, which produced about a minute of awkward before Steve went into the anecdote about Woz and the TV jammer. It always warmed my heart to have Woz show up or even be name-checked at an Apple event – respect your heritage.

11) Apple wanted 1% market share by the end of 2008. By 2011, they were making literally half the profit in the entire worldwide mobile phone handset industry.

12) And Apple Computer becomes just plain old Apple. Prophetic, because the iOS devices are the rocket this company rides on now. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.” If you wanted a mission statement for the last five years at Apple, you could hardly do better.

Steve said this product was going to change the industry. Five years on, every new phone is a smartphone, and you can pretty much split the history of mobile into Before iPhone and After iPhone. Again – nailed it. And I know it was on the backslope of my time there – by October I was gone – but it’s still awesome to know that I was there, and it was during my tenure that the game was changed for good.