Apple's new campus headquarters proves that Steve Jobs was from outer space

When Steve Jobs left us almost two years ago, comedians joked that he was from outer space because he gave us something so amazing, it's been described as magical. And "magical" isn't just a word I pulled out of thin air. It's from a quote I'm borrowing that originated with the NPR Podcast called This American Life, and about Mr. Daisy's visit to the Apple factory in Shenzhen, China. One of the workers who assembles the iPad gets to play with it for a while, and he uses the word "magical" to describe it.

What Mr. Jobs invented was so revolutionary that those who took the time to truly comprehend it were left speechless by his ability to envision it. Therefore, he must not be from our planet.

The joke goes even further in my own day-to-day life as I refer to the iPhone as "my miracle box." You might wonder why, and the answer is pretty simple. It's because my iPhone can do so much stuff that (a decade ago) I never could have imagined outside of Star Trek or in the least, J.J. Abrams' home. Hence, "miracle box" seems like a good nickname for such a device.

Well, it appears that if you share my thinking, the joke's on all of us now. The plans that Steve Jobs left behind for Apple's new campus headquarters to be built in Cupertino, California looks a lot like the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Seriously, if this thing doesn't lift off into space at the touch of the red button, I will be surprised.

Expected to open in 2016 (that's election year for you Republicans who are keeping track of such things), Apple's new 2.8-million square feet facility was brought to the Cupertino city council by none other than late CEO Steve Jobs himself. Catch this little factoid: its diameter is larger than that of the Pentagon. I've been to the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and it's frickin' huge. This thing is going to dwarf that building. Impressed? *Nods head.

The building is meant to incorporate and develop much of the surrounding green space. There's going to be a system of bike lanes put in for all the health conscious tech geniuses. There's going to be bio-fueled "green" buses to take people around and to go to and from work. The facility will also house its own natural gas-burning power plant. I have a friend that says natural gas is the "fuel of America's future." Well if Steve Jobs believed in it, I think it probably means it's the number one choice of space aliens too.

Here's one of the afore-mentioned healthy tech geniuses jogging along the path that probably goes around the huge mega-structure. I guess that's what $140 billion dollars and screwing the taxpayers of America out of billions of dollars in taxes can build for you. Did any of you watch Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, address Congress on CSPAN? Cook completely "owned" them, practically having our senators lapping the dirt off of his shoes. I think Yahoo Finance (which I read to stay on top of stocks) had an article that said, "Tim Cook should tell Congress to kiss his ass." Since Congress is comprised of elected officials, that means "Tim Cook should tell the American people to kiss his ass." Nice, right?

Apple's terms and conditions page 1 of 99 as seen on the iPhone. Remember
Tim Cook says that the United States tax code could take a cue from Apple.
"We like things simple."

When asked to defend his company's practice of holing billions of dollars in tax shelters in Ireland, Mr. Cook responded (more or less), "The tax code has not kept up with the digital age. Apple thrives on keeping things SIMPLE, and Congress should do the same with the tax code. Eliminate loopholes, reduce overall rates, and make it attractive to bring overseas cash back to the United States."

So it's all your fault people. Apple likes things simple. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THE NEXT TIME YOU READ THROUGH APPLE'S ITUNES TERMS & CONDITIONS, WHICH IS 56-PAGES LONG! Yeah, Apple wants things "Simple."

I gotcha Mr. Cook. Thanks for the advice.

Thinking About the American Dream

Tonight is the State of the Union address and because of that, I've been thinking about the American Dream. The New York Times recently featured an article with the title "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work". The complete article can be found online here. I read it completely through, and I wanted to talk about what I read because it's a rather bleak commentary on the disappearing middle class.  By way of Apple as an example of the ultimate capitalist paradigm, the author pretty much tells us why prosperity for the middle class (as was realized last century) is never coming back no matter what politicians want you to believe. If you don't have time to read it, here are my highlights:

1) Barack Obama asked Steve Jobs at a dinner, "What would it take to make iPhones in the United States." The late Mr. Jobs replied, "Those jobs aren't coming back."

2) Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. 

There's so much wrong with this picture and the intentional misspelling
of "America" that I don't even know where to begin.

3) Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to the White House, said “Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now." 

4) FoxConn in Shenzhen built a factory, stocked it with already cut glass to Apple's specifications, and had workers living in dormitories ready to work 12-hour shifts even before there was a contract to work with Apple. They did this to be more appealing to their potential customer, and it worked. This simply couldn't be done in America.

5) The facility employs 230,000 people working six-days a week making less than $17 a day. 

6) One of the selling points for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days. 

7) "[T]he challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said. 

8) “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

This is from the Global Competitiveness Report. It measures America's educational
system rank as compared to other countries. The criteria is education expenditure,
quality of math and science education, and quality of primary education.

9) In the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

So my question to you is, do you agree with Apple that the U.S. no longer produces a workforce with enough education to meet the demands of technology companies? If you agree, why? Are people just not motivated to go to school anymore?

In number 2 above, Apple basically calls Americans lazy. Would you agree? Are Americans fat cats sitting around waiting for a lot of money for a little work?

Does the item printed in number 4 at all surprise you? That they would stock and build a factory without any promise of money? Is that what it's going to take to be competitive?

These are workers submitting resumes for jobs at one of the factories at

 Shenzhen. There's such a huge pool of people just begging for a job

 that all the power rests with the employer. Basically, a single worker on his

own is completely disposable. It makes me wonder if the babies brought into

 this world will know a life better than us, or if in fact, we are bringing

them into a world where they will not be able to support themselves and will 

be doomed to live in poverty while the rich remain rich.

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

I listened to a podcast on This American Life. The link for it is here. I encourage all of you to take the time and listen to it. It's incredibly well written, funny in parts, and more or less gave me an insider's look through his eyes at what it takes to make these gadgets that you and I love.

Apple is undeniably cool. Wouldn't you agree? I'm sure you've seen the ads.

Mr. Daisey's fascination with Apple started when he got an iPhone out of a box that hadn't been wiped. It had pictures of people, conveyor belts, and other things in it and his curiosity became piqued. He asked Siri "Where are you made"? and Siri responded, "I'm not allowed to answer that." He states in the monologue that it was almost like Siri knew where and when and by whom she was created but that there was this thing that prevented her from speaking her mind.

Shenzhen by night. Doesn't it look incredible? Arcologies
and corporate super towers everywhere.

Because of the podcast, I now know that Apple products, namely the iPad and the iPhone are assembled in a place called Shenzhen near Hong Kong in China. Mike Daisey describes it as a city of the future and that it looks exactly what you'd expect a city to look like if Blade Runner were to throw up on itself. I think that's a great description and a great analogy.

This is a Sheraton Hotel

Around the tops of the skyscrapers, particularly at Foxconn, there are nets to catch workers because so many of them go up there to throw themselves to their deaths. In his time there, he talked with many under-aged workers (some as young as eleven) who worked a full-hour (not the American one filled with smoke breaks and slacking off). He clarifies that this is a full 60-minute shift with people standing behind them to monitor their work. And their shifts are back-breaking, some fall between 14- to 18-hour days. The work is so hard that it ruins the hands of many workers. They just get fired and have to go find work elsewhere.

This is the plan for a new corporate HQ in Shenzhen

He spoke with one worker that he found whose hands were ruined at Foxconn. This old man had a new job in a new factory. Mr. Daisey showed him the iPad and he'd never seen one turned on. All of these products (the iPad, iPhone, etc.) are manufactured and shipped back to the states. Imagine working back breaking shifts all day long for weeks and years on end, ruining your body, and never seeing one of them turned on so that you could play with it. To actually hold in your hands the thing that destroyed you.

The old guy in the podcast said, "It's like magic." I suppose it is so I agree with that statement. I play with my iPad and think "it's magic."

A nice cityscape photograph. This is the city where all of your tech comes from.

As writers, we really don't need to look very far to find inspiration for dystopian fiction. Maybe the reason dystopians are so popular is because they are more a reflection of how the world really works and how people really treat each other than utopias could ever possibly be. I will say this. Despite all my whining and bitching, I'm glad I'm not the worker class of Shenzhen. I think it sounds miserable, and I probably would have been one of the people that decided to check out early. Does this mean I'll stop buying Apple products?

Unfortunately no.

Workers in a Chinese factory.

I like the magic.

Does that make me a horrible person?

An iPad Love Story

You saw the iPad for the first time. It was all the things you weren't. It was shiny and thin. You thought if only Apple had made you, you'd be thin too. It was a look you can never forget.

Then you weaseled one out of your boss, husband, wife, brother, sister, mother...or even God forbid...you won one from a radio station contest. It made you feel like this:

You downloaded apps. You downloaded Angry Birds and made excuses that you were going to the bathroom at work when in fact you just wanted to get to the next level. Then someone else got a non-Apple product and they tried to show it to you. You pitied them.

You found a mutual friend who was confused. They asked you if Apple was better than the other tablets like Samsung or Toshiba. How could they ask this?!? So you stared at them until they got it.

But your friend was still confused. They didn't get it...

Should I even look at the other tablets? Are those other brands better? You answered the best you could while being professional about it.

So they took your advice. They bought the iPad. You thought it was over. But then they walked in with the iPad 2. They showed you all the new features. It was even slimmer, had a camera, and had a new case. Jealousy set-in. You tried to dismiss it...you clapped for your friend.

You knew what needed to be done. You were ready. You were now a master at Angry Birds and boy were you pissed! How could they do this? How could they usurp you with better technology. You had led them to the promised land and now...this?! You planned the perfect murder.

When someone told you that your mutual friend had been found dead. You tried to look sad. "How terrible," you said. "How could this happen?"

You offered to take their brand new iPad 2 to remember them by. Everyone agreed. It should be yours. It was the...

The END

Have a Great Weekend, See you Monday <3

Cool Stuff For Your iPad & Strange Kittens

I don't work for any technology place so what I say here is simply because I'm a geek and I love technology.

I love my iPad.  My first post about it is here.  Since then, I've attended an Assistive Technology conference that showed a bunch of other stuff out there available for autistic children and adults, many of them free. All you have to do is check the Apple store and type in "autism" and a bunch of apps will come up.

At my heart though, I like games and the new Joystick-IT arcade stick looks awesome.  In short, it suction cups down on your iPad screen and will allow you to play Pac-Man and other games without having to rely on finger swipes.

It's going to be on sale at ThinkGeek and I'm definitely snapping one up. Not to mention, it just looks cool.

Other cool stuff:

1) Penultimate.  Think of Penultimate as a notepad that you can write and scribble on and you’ve got the big idea. This app organizes your musings into notebooks so they’re easy to keep track of. When you’re done, you can email single pages or entire notebooks as PDFs. This app is for finger-written notes and drawings only. 

2) Portapoet. A great app for poets that is equipped with a built-in rhyming dictionary. You can search rhymes without being connected to the Internet. Portapoet also provides pronunciation for words and enables you to share your work via Facebook.

And here are some strange kittens related to Charlie's post on his blog.

I Heart Google Earth & the iPad

I have to say that the iPad is one of the best inventions and investments a writer could make. The applications allow you to proofread your manuscript in one hand as a .pdf file and you can make edits by just tapping the screen and highlighting the text or scribbling a note down for yourself. Additionally, there is the powerful application called Google Earth.

Do people actually use Google Earth?  Well, writers should if they are describing any kind of action in a place that is unknown to them.  Some authors can get away with not knowing (Stephanie Meyer is an example as she had no clue what Forks looked like but decided to write about it anyway).  I'd have issues with this if it were my text but I don't think fact-checking is the kind of thing romance writers worry about anyway.

You may have some familiarity with this already, having used it somewhat to spy on your own house. However, its power and gift to a writer go far beyond that. I used it to do a street-by-street description of a chase through St. Louis all the way to the Millennium Hotel (which I've never seen in real life). Admittedly, my work with it has mostly been removed from my final manuscript but it was still great practice.  And it came in really handy when I wanted to spy on Cornell's campus and learn all about where the Arts Quad lay in respect to the libraries, McGraw Tower (site of the great pumpkin caper), and where the synchotron was in respect to Lynah rink.

Furthermore, the Google Earth application allows you to zoom in on buildings to see cars or landmarks, it labels those landmarks and the streets, and even gives you links you can touch with your finger that open up a wikipedia article on what your viewing as well as several real life photographs. Wow...what a tool if you are crafting any kind of story. I imagine that it used to cost a lot of money and time for an author to drum up authentic research. This application allows you to stay in the flow of your writing without breaking stride and the details provided allow you to invest into your manuscript a deep level of authenticity.