Are my eyes really blue?

So owing to a combination of circumstances, I came back into possession of an iPhone 4.  It’s the one my wife was using before I replaced it with my old 4S once I went to a 5, so it’s out of warranty and unlocked, and the test was to see whether it would work with some other SIMs and be a practical device.
 
It was an interesting experiment. You can see the limits of a phone almost 3 years old – no 3D on Apple Maps, no Siri, drags a bit here and there, the home button isn’t wildly responsive – and the screen definitely feels smaller. But it almost has the feel of one of those “mini pro” Android phones I was looking over in the mobile shops on the Rue Cler back in 2010. And if the battery is up to scratch, this wouldn’t be the worst thing to take abroad – given that I couldn’t afford to keep refreshing Twitter all day on prepaid international rates, it would only have to take pictures and maybe play some music all day.  The downside, though, is that my eight-year-old Virgin Mobile UK SIM didn’t work in it, and now I’ve cut the damn thing up and it won’t work in anything.  Shit.
 
Intrigued, though, I kept testing with my T-Mobile prepaid SIM.  I wiped the phone completely and started from scratch; my only configuration was to turn on iCloud and my office’s mobile configurator. In about 15 minutes, it was up to work spec and had all my iCloud data: mail, calendars, photo stream, notes, Passbook cards, weather locations, and Safari bookmarks.  Like the Iron Man 3 scenario I mentioned previously: pull the SIM, pop it in a new phone, start the sync, and pow, back on the horse in the time it takes to get back from the cell phone shop.  Of course, I don’t have data service – this SIM is the one that goes in the MOTOFONE I use on nights when I’m fasting from the Internet – but I can still use both home wi-fi networks (no YOU’RE a toolbag nerd) or avail myself of the wireless that’s still everywhere from the light rail to the McDonalds.  Essentially, what I have is a glorified iPod Touch that can also be used in a pinch to make actual phone calls or send and receive actual text messages.  

I only popped a few apps on there – the Google Maps app, of course, and Google Search (the voice search works, which is key given that the 4 doesn’t support Siri) and the Kindle and Economist apps so I have some reading material in a pinch. Flip off the Wi-Fi, and there’s my shutdown-night loadout in one device; reading, iPod and phone all in one.  Which makes for a nice sleek alternative (with easy bailout options in a pinch; just turn Wi-Fi back on) that fits in a pocket and looks much more sleek than carrying three things to the coffee shop.
 
And make no mistake, the iPhone 4 – unencumbered by case or bumper – is still a ridiculously sexy piece of kit. It’s a three year old design and yet I find I am still more drawn to it than the 5. It’s on a par with the likes of the T610 or K710 from SonyEricsson, or the PowerBook 1400, or the New Beetle, or the Carolina-color Air Jordan IX – long since superseded by newer or better tech, but still awesome and still enough to ping the “want” center in my adolescent mind.  I still wish I’d had it on the Europe trip in 2010, much like I wish I’d had the old iPad for the 2010 DC trip or the iPhone 4S for the Vandy game last year.  You want a new magical piece of technology in my hands, just send me on a trip without it and it’s sure to be invented or offered within a month…

Something to remember as we keep falling over ourselves to make nice to 1.3 billion potential customers: it’s still a communist dictatorship, no matter how rich they want to get.

And once again, remember both heroes: the guy who stood in front of the tank, and the guy who refused to run him down.  Neither probably lasted very long after.

“Why are so many people invested in keeping medical issues private? The answer is probably insurance. We should change it so they have to insure people. Maybe we have a safe place where people can go live in a world like that and see if it works.”

And just like that, in only four sentences, Larry Page made the best case ever for why nobody should ever put any information into a Google product…ever.  Honestly, where do you start?  The complete oblivion to the way health care works in this country? The utter ignorance of the knock-down drag-out year-long brawl in 2009 over how to get people insured?  The indifference to the entire notion of privacy?

Larry has absolutely stupid money.  Larry doesn’t have to worry a lick about where his health care is coming from for the rest of his life. “We should change it so they have to insure people” – guess what, genius, that’s called a “mandate,” and Barack Obama burned through every last atom of political capital he had to try to make it happen.  Larry Page can pay straight cash for anything medical, pretty much forever.  Meanwhile, the rest of us are at the mercy of whoever our employer is willing to contract with – in my case, Blue Shield of California, which appears to be run by feces-flinging monkeys unable to receive communication back from the providers whose records they request.  I don’t really have an alternative either – I could go to Kaiser and take the chances one takes with an HMO, even though Blue Shield’s steadfast refusal to cover anything is practically an HMO in and of itself.  Or I could pay cash, lose the discounts that come with negotiated group insurance, and go broke inside of a year.

So yeah.  How about I just quit my job and go live in the safe place where they have to insure people? Because remember what I said about working from home a while back? I’ll just buy a ticket to fly to this place.  And best of all, I’ll just tell everyone I’ve got major health issues requiring medication and possibly longer term care in my dotage, because guess what, that’s sure to make the people who have to insure me charge the least possible amount for the insurance.  Hint: not all insurance is created equal.  What you’re probably thinking of is universal CARE, not coverage, and it’s the thing that the GOP keeps waving as part of that hellish nightmare that is Britain. Or Canada.

There have been a couple of cutting articles in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker that sort of get at this, but I’ll sum it up quick: there are way too many people in this valley who live in their little bubble at the crossroads of Affluent and Asperger’s.  People who never had to get up at 5 AM to unload a truck.  People who never sat on a forklift.  People who never worked for minimum wage at a temp gig, doing the same work that staff were getting twice the money for plus benefits.  We’ve created a class of instant millionaires who think what they have is normal, and who don’t grasp – or care – why anyone else can’t just do the same. 

What we have done in Silicon Valley is this: we have normalized the absence of empathy.  It’s not a model to emulate.

…some of Iron Man 3 works slightly better. I guess the gimmick with Mk42 is that every individual piece of it can operate individually, and that’s the whole point. The power issues were more obvious to me and more consistent, and the prototype nature of the suit was played for effect – the only thing I really still object to is that every individual piece of the Mk42 somehow flew from Tennessee to Miami in FIVE MINUTES, which would be over twenty times the speed of sound. Then again, it’s possible the suit pieces trying to break out wasn’t actually happening at the same time as the shtick…okay, it’s a show, but it bugs me less now. Also, since AIM was heavily involved in the Iron Patriot rebrand and overhaul, the idea that the revised War Machine could be used as a remote kidnapping truck is slightly more believable.

You know, fuck it. It’s summer, it wasn’t as strong as the others but it’s more Tony Stark, I’ll have it. I’m on board. All the suits he was dodging between down the stretch reminds me HEAVILY of 2006 when I was flipping between 3 or 4 separate phones constantly. Horses for courses and all that. Maybe the early stages of “Every Man His Own Tony Stark.” I think there might be a couple of lessons in that picture for my current state of mind…

It started with the Cassidy brothers, of course. When we all met up in the courtyard of my old workplace in DC to load the van, one of them pulled the Serengeti drivers off his own face and put them on me, “for the look.” Brown gradient aviator-looking shades, half Elvis and half Delaware Avenue club-boy, but it was in the spirit of things. And my bachelor party went up to AC, and everybody cashed, and when I got back to California, I took my ill-gotten loot and bought a pair of Ray-Ban wire-frames with polarized amber lenses.

It wasn’t until I wore them on the honeymoon that I realized what a difference they made. The amber is for high-contrast and the polarizing reduces glare, and the result was that everything – especially green – just popped. The hills of the Cotswolds, the gardens of Bath, everything was in high-definition. When I got home, I went back to the blue Oakleys and saved the ambers for when I needed the rose-colored effect…life literally looked better through those.

Eventually I crunched the Oakleys in a moving accident, and went to the ambers full-time. I can never keep the special stuff special; it always turns into everyday wear eventually. And then, the following June, I sat on the ambers. Idiot. So they went somewhere safe, because I couldn’t well dispose of them. And it was hot as hell, no sign of fog, summer being typical depressing summer. And I finally threw my hands in the air, drove to Stanford Shopping Center, bought a pair of Wayfarers in tortoise with the polarized amber lenses, and then just drove up 280 until I could see fog again. I just needed hope. And within a day or two the heat broke and 2006 went on to be a great year.

I’m still wearing those glasses. I have the plain black Wayferers for color-neutral wear, bought when the ambers went missing for a couple of months, and they are the daily-wear ones. And I have a new pair of the tortoise-ambers, in a slightly larger size, which are for special occasions only. But the original tortoise amber Wayferers are on right now, out by the BBQ smoker. The trees are vibrant green and the world has that golden glow, and right now, everything is all right.

Called it. Kinda. I was mostly facetious about Twitter, but Tumblr makes a kind of sense for Yahoo’s acquisition. Words like ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ get tossed around for a microblogging service that was the hot thing in Brooklyn a few years back and is best known these days for its endless supply of animated GIFs. But the question is…is it worth $1.1 billion cash?

To Yahoo, maybe. Tumblr exists in a space between full-scale blogging and Twitter. It works well on mobile, both for reading and posting, and like Twitter bought a best-of-breed iPhone app to revise into its official client. It has a simple mechanism for reposting, favoriting and commenting. Lightweight and lean, it’s as much blogging client as most folks need, and I probably could have done all my blogging there as easily as on Moveable Type or WordPress. Little bit blog, little bit social network, little bit mobile – all things Yahoo could use some help with.

Meanwhile, Tumblr is just now starting to monetize itself – ads, sponsored posts that started cropping up around a month ago – but hasn’t made any kind of money yet. For Tumblr, this is the likeliest exit strategy they were liable to get. Probably not as much as the investors were hoping for, but Tumblr is a fairly mature company; if the big blowup was going to happen it would have happened by now. This is their big blowup, and it’s of a piece with the modern Silicon Valley: the endgame is less IPO than acquisition by somebody with plenty of cash. And Tumblr didn’t have an obvious suitor. Yahoo may not be the prettiest girl in the world, but she’s the prettiest girl in the bar and it’s getting late.

The obvious model is Facebook buying Instagram – they threw a quick billion to get right in mobile, and so far have largely left it alone. Rumblings are that Yahoo will do the same thing with Tumblr, leave it to its own devices for now and not try to force it into the Yahoo model. One tends to hope it doesn’t work out like last time – del.icio.us and Geocities and Flickr didn’t really flourish under the purple Y. But that was before Marissa came to Sunnyvale, and if the model is Google acquiring YouTube, then this might work. YouTube and Instagram were obvious goods, though – easy video and mobile photo sharing – and Yahoo’s going to need to make a bigger and better case for what Tumblr’s for if they’re going to realize $1.1B worth of value for their new toy.

If I’ve learned one thing from three seasons of Downton Abbey, it’s this: the only thing worse than a class-structured society is a class-structured society that thinks it’s a classless society.  Back in the day, the Earl of Grantham at least felt a responsibility toward the tenants, toward the staff, toward the greater good of the household. Now, certainly part of that responsibility was in the service of arcane values and obsolete ideas about how much shame would come on the house from the kitchen maid getting knocked up or from somebody taking tea with a women whose maid used to be a prostitute or whether the daughter ran away to marry the former chauffeur who’s all Irish and shit…but let’s face it, most of that could be sorted with a healthy dollop of second-wave feminism and a case or two of Tab and Virginia Slims.

But we got away from that!  We have a classless society!  Except we don’t. Lop off all the people who have crazy money, and then draw the line of demarcation between everyone with a college degree and everyone without.  Because somewhere back there, the executive decision was made that college should be for everyone.  Not in the sense that everyone needs a college education, but that everyone needs a college degree.  Try breaking into the white-collar workforce in 2013 with only your high school diploma.

Just like that, we have a line of demarcation that puts a fairly expensive toll gate in front of the middle-class lifestyle. You will go to the best, most impressive school you can get into, and hang the cost, you will take ALL THE STUDENT LOANS and then pay them back for twenty years afterward.  This sounds an awful lot like what we were taught in the early 90s about the Japanese education model: work your ass off through high school, go to the cram schools, take the high-stakes tests, get into one of THE six universities in Japan that you MUST get to in order to secure your future…and then coast.  Just ask any faculty at an American university about their students.  It’s difficult to shake the impression that we’ve got a bunch of kids mainly interested in finding new and interesting ways to get onto Texts From Last Night while helicoptering boomer parents demand to know why they only got a C in their class.

So there’s that.  But what happens once you’re in the middle class?  Or not?  Well, consider retirement…Social Security isn’t going to be there in its current form.  You can’t so much live off it now, and the Sabbath Gasbags will piously tell you it’s meant to be a safety net, not a hammock, and that your 401K empowers you to save for your own retirement!  Responsibility! Ownership society!

I don’t know if there’s a 401K option for those folks running the checkout stands at the Piggly Wiggly.  I know for a fact I didn’t have any sort of retirement plan to check boxes for during my days as Temporary Deputy Assistant Produce Manager (read: lettuce wrapper) in the summers back in the old days.  But let’s assume that yes, you have an employer who has a 401K match, and you’re going to put back the max amount and hope against hope that whatever mutual fund manager runs the service isn’t putting it all on mortgage-backed securities or PointCast or whatever.

Now. You’ve met some sweet young thing and gotten married and want to start a family.  But you can’t stay in this one-bedroom apartment forever.  So now to your student loan payback and your 401K savings, add a mortgage of your own AND child care expenses, because you’re only getting three months unpaid leave to pop out a kid.  Maternity leave?  Work from home?  How the hell are you going to work the produce cooler from home? Are you going to run that road grader from the comfort of your living room?  Nope.  Find child care.  Probably another thousand bucks a month on top of your student loan payback (let’s ballpark that around $300 per quick Google search) and your mortgage (let’s be kind and peg that at $1100, the national average in 2011, and just ignore those hot weeping tears in California) and look, you’re already shelling out $2700 a month.  Or over $32,000 a year.  And that’s before you put back for your retirement.  Or pay for a car. Or groceries. Or electricity. Or the GI Joe with the Kung Fu Grip for that kid we mentioned earlier.

As of 2006, the median annual gross income per household member was $24,672. GROSS income. So one half of that couple is working full time just to float the mortgage, the child care and the loans, and it’s still not enough.  The middle-class lifestyle itself – two kids, a house with a picket fence, you know, the American Dream – is a luxury good. So there you have it.  You’ve got a middle class that can afford to be middle class – as often as not by foregoing home ownership, or children, or having dodged student loans somehow – and a working class that consists of a bunch of people, blue-collar and white-collar alike, who are only one paycheck or two at most from having the music suddenly stop – and finding themselves without a chair.

And then, you have the upper class.  The seriously upper class.  The much-derided “one percent,” the people who don’t have to worry about whether they can go to Tahoe this year or whether the kids will be able to stay in their private school or where the new BMW X5 is coming from.  The problem doesn’t come when people earn that kind of money.  To some extent it’s what the market will bear – if it costs $50 million to put Robert Downey Jr in a movie that grosses $1 billion worldwide? Pay the man – but the market isn’t always perfect.  Especially when a CEO can get a crazy amount of money in bonus after a year where the company tanks.  Or when a bank has to be bailed out by the Feds – and a big chunk of taxpayer change goes toward paying out the bonuses of the traders and managers who wrecked it.

The problem isn’t people who earn crazy money, or even the ones who have crazy money.  But there are too many people who think they deserve crazy money – and once they have it, that they deserve it irrespective of market conditions, future performance or their own judgement.  These are the Ayn Rand devotees, the Mitt Romney base, the “job-creators” – the product of the great 80s realignment that changed the fundamentally respected element of American business from the man doing the work to the man he works for.

It’s part of the problem around here.  There are far too many people in Silicon Valley who thirty years ago would have been sucking down Perrier on Wall Street and bragging about their new Rolex and BMW.  Now they’re all in Northern California looking through their Google Glass as they don’t look where they’re going on their way back to the Google shuttle that will take them back to their place in San Francisco they bought with cash, while the average mortgage in the Valley rises back to a point that someone with a five-figure income simply can’t afford any longer.

We have spawned the 21st-century Masters of the Universe.  More on that later.

Apple: “We will sell you [AMAZING iTHING] which you can use to do X, Y and Z.”

Google: “We have [AMAZING GOOGLE SERVICE] which will let us do X, Y and Z for you.”

Thing is, to me, the problem of using all these services which are COMPLETELY FREE!!!!!11!!!!!11! as long as you push all your data through Google is oddly reminiscent of the guy who will give you a free bottle of wine every day for the rest of your life…so long as he can just pass it over his kidneys first.

More than ever, Google – and Facebook – are building their future around your willingness to let them hold all your personal information and social interactions.  The first company that can figure out a way to do this without actually keeping hold of your data – or providing sure and secure anonymizing and expiration of your data – has a real chance to get some traction in the marketplace.

But I say “real chance” because right now, so far as we can tell, Ed Earl Brown doesn’t really give a shit about privacy issues in Google/Facebook.  It’s going to take a major broad-based fuck-up, of the sort that gets coverage on the Today Show, for him and his to start to take this sort of thing seriously. 

What actually happened with the IRS: some employees began applying extra scrutiny to Tea Party applications for 501c4 status.  501c4 is tax-exempt status for political organizations that don’t actually support parties or candidates.  There are much bigger (and transparently fraudulent) examples like Karl Rove’s GPS Crossroads, but these were smaller groups chasing that status.  And the IRS apparently gave their applications more scrutiny and made them jump through a few more hoops.  It seems unclear how high and wide the process went, but one thing is known: the IRS commissioner at the time was the holdover Bush appointee, who has since resigned.  There is an acting commissioner, because the Obama appointee is lost among all the other unconfirmed cabinet positions.

There’s not a lot there.  But what is there has given Conservative Inc. a gift on a silver platter. Martyrdom, conspiracy theory, wild outrage, and a hook for a limp-dick mainstream media to be pushed into supporting the whole thing.  It’s Whitewater all over again – just start the ball rolling, throw everything else you can into it, and maybe you’ll turn up something.  I’m going on the record right now: there WILL be an attempt to impeach Obama ahead of the 2016 elections unless the Democrats somehow regain control of the House in 2014 and the GOP can’t slide it in by then.

Meanwhile, the Senate is still ground to a halt and tons of appointed positions sit empty, because the GOP has normalized an unconstitutional 60-vote requirement to pass anything.  Government is failing to work, simply because the Republican Party has figured out how to get away with preventing it working and blaming Obama for the resulting mess.  This is your new political normal.  The American political system is broken, the Republicans broke it, and we sat by and let them do it.

There’s not a solution.  The obvious thing to do would be to fix the filibuster unilaterally, but that won’t happen because 1) Harry Reid is an amoeba, not a man, and lacks the most fundamental spinal fortitude to stand up for his party and his country, and 2) a unilateral breaking of the filibuster would bring on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of teabaggers and their amen corner in the Village of Washington screaming about executive overreach on the Sunday talk shows and impending tyranny on the talk radio.  And that’s the easy solution – when the easy fix is impossible, you just have to accept that it’s not getting fixed.  You just have to start looking for the least painful fail case.

It says a lot about what people expect from Google Glass that the term “glasshole” has already passed into blogospheric jargon less than a month after the developer model reached the public. Not surprising; in a world where the default position of every transit commuter has become “head down over the smartphone” in a span of less than a decade, you have to think that the prospect of heads-up distraction will be an issue sooner than later. I’m sure it will lead to the continuing Aspergering of the Valley, and I say that as somebody with some pretty Asperger-ish tendencies myself, but the extent to which people around here tend toward truly oblivious of the world around them is reaching severely annoying proportions.