Tag: Steve Jobs

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Not My Problem

CREDIT: Andrew Cline | Dreamstime.com

There’s a graphic that’s been making its way around social media for a while. It says something like, “I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, black, or white. If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you.” I’ve had many friends share it while patting themselves on the back for being so generous with their correctness. On the surface, it sounds great, but inside lurks the real evil: I’m not going to be nice to you until I see you’ve earned it. This tends to be shared by people who will also say they don’t see color. White people such as myself like to say this because it makes us feel like we’re doing a service to you by denying your ethnicity. After all, true equality means we’re all treated white, right?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of our new Cheeto-in-Chief. Some of my left-leaning friends have spoken up loudly to say, just as my right-leaning friends did when Obama was elected, that Trump is not their president.

Here’s the problem. He is.

The year 2016 was one of blame cloaked as personal responsibility. Don’t want to get raped? Don’t drink at frat parties. Don’t want to be beaten for being transgendered? Stop being transgendered. Don’t want to be stopped by the police? Don’t dress like a thug. Don’t want to be mocked for your religion? Don’t wear a hijab. Don’t blame me! I voted for Hillary. Can’t blame me! I didn’t vote at all.

A few years ago, Elizabeth Warren and President Obama both stirred a bit of controversy for pointing out that no one achieves anything by themselves. They noted that when you build a successful business you do so using roads we all paid for. Your business is protected by tax-paid police and fire departments. Your business used community-financed resources such as electricity and water. Your responsibility as a business is to help repay that.

Andrew Cline | Dreamstime.com

Elizabeth Warren

They were both castigated for pointing out these facts. Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple? This is what critics asked. Are you saying he didn’t build that? No, that wasn’t what either of them said. Steve Jobs hired programmers, designers, cafeteria workers, security guards. He wasn’t a one-man office. And even if he were, he’d have still had to buy office supplies somewhere. The point was that your success doesn’t mean that someone else can’t be successful because you won’t help pay for repairing the roads you used to haul your goods across country.

When we say Donald Trump isn’t our president, it says that we will not take responsibility for what comes next. It’s a convenient excuse to sit at home and stream Netflix and eat aerosol cheese because, hey, that dude is your problem. Well, hey. Those who voted for him don’t see that dude as a problem. So when the company who makes the computer you use to watch Netflix is the same company as the one that provides your internet service you use to watch that company’s movies, and the cheese you’re squirting on crackers is a subsidiary of that very same company, and you find out this all happened because someone else’s president created a climate in which there is now no place else for you to go for internet and cheese, and your service is now being throttled because you could no longer afford unlimited bandwidth because with no competition that one company could charge whatever it damn well pleases for service, what are you going to do? Now that other person’s president has made it personal, because NO ONE MESSES WITH YOUR MURDER, SHE WROTE MARATHON.

When you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. And that means you think you’re entitled to your opinion that climate change is real. And that being gay isn’t a choice. And that bathroom laws aren’t necessary to protect our children. We’ll agree to disagree. But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. You don’t get to deny what you don’t agree with or understand. You don’t get to deny your responsibility as a citizen because your candidate didn’t win. And you certainly don’t get to be a jackass because you think someone else might hurt your special snowflake feelings.

We wanted the swamp drained? It’s been drained and is filling up with corporate logos. With men who think they got there with no help from anyone. The 115th United States Congress will be brought to you by Exxon and Hardee’s. So you can get fries with that.

I cannot think of anyone more resistant to personal responsibility than a man who railed against a corrupt, rigged election that would put his opponent in power, but once he won, denied that same election was corrupted, despite proof a foreign power he lusts after was involved in corrupting it.

But hey, not my problem. I didn’t vote for him.

Susan Wilson writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband, Chuck, have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Obsolete Apples

There is an article this week in the venerable New York Times, in which the author, one of that paper’s high-tech scribes, suggests that the Apple Corporation, makers of the iPhone and so much else that is modish, are doing a number on us.

Wrote Catherine Rampell, a user of Apple products and a devoted one: “Around the time the iPhone 5S and 5C were released in September, I noticed that my sad old iPhone 4 was becoming a lot more sluggish. The battery was starting to run down much faster, too.”

Several lines later, having analyzed some of the technical reasons why her adoption of Apple’s new iOS7 mobile operating system seemed to be making serious demands of her not-so-vintage instrument, she mused, “It seemed like Apple was sending me a not-so-subtle message to upgrade.” Quoting others on the point that “breakdowns in older Apple products can often coincide with when upgrades come onto the market,” Rampell reports, “Many have taken this as evidence of ‘planned obsolescence.'”

That dreaded term dates from an earlier and ill-fated chapter in American commercial history, when it was applied to domestically manufactured automobiles from the 1950s and 1960s, widely known to have a pre-planned geriatric decline built in from the time the vehicles left the assembly line.

The idea, of course, was to force buyers of American cars to invest in new models every few years. It worked like a charm, right up to the time, roughly in the early 1970s, when Germans, Scandinavians, Japanese, and other East Asian manufacturers stumbled onto the idea that if they made motor vehicles that lasted for a while, they could break the monopolistic American auto industry.

To Detroit’s everlasting misery, this is exactly what they did. While, to some extent, the domestic car business is still playing catch-up to the interlopers, most manufacturers these days, foreign and domestic, create vehicles that can reliably be expected to drive well above 100,000 miles.

We admire Apple (especially now that the company has resumed manufacturing some of its staple products in the U.S.), and we honor the saga of the late Steve Jobs as much as anybody. But Jobs’ heirs have taken to emphasizing what are called “iterations” — relatively unspectacular technical upgrades — in their products rather than the innovations we used to look forward to. The same slide in market share is now befalling the Apple folks as it previously did the denizens of Detroit — and the makers of disposable razor blades, for that matter.

The moral of this story? We don’t have one, except to observe that there are recurrent cycles in the rise and fall of commercial prodigies as well as empires and that complacency, rather than pride, is what goeth before the fall.

But who are we to talk? News, the stuff of our business, has a shelf-life that has gone from days to hours to minutes. We didn’t exactly design it this way, but we spend most of our time rounding up new product to replace the old.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Inventing Tomorrow

CREDIT: © Nadiya Kravchenko | Dreamstime.com

A colleague showed me a column in The Wall Street Journal this week by former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz. It concerned a 2006 conversation he had had with Steve Jobs, in which the Apple CEO told Crovitz that by 2011 printed newspapers would be dead. “Whenever I have the time to pick up the printed version of the newspaper,” Jobs said, “I wish I could do this all the time, but our lives are not like that any more.”

Jobs, who died last week, was a visionary, this generation’s Thomas Edison, but he was human. He made mistakes. Remember the Apple Pippin? The Rokr phone? MacKeeper? The Apple Newton? Probably not. Those were but a few of Jobs’ visions that didn’t pan out.

The death of print newspapers is another instance where, in hindsight, Jobs was off the mark. Sure, daily newspapers have taken a financial hit and are still trying to figure out ways to make the economics of print journalism profitable, but lots of them are still around. The Commercial Appeal is pitching mobile apps and has set up a pay-wall on its website that encourages people to subscribe to the print product. The jury is still out on that experiment, I suspect, but I wish them well. Unlike Jobs, I do have time to pick up the printed product and hope to continue to be able to do so.

In fact, hundreds of print magazines, here and around the globe, are thriving. Weekly papers like the Flyer are still trucking along nicely, proving that there is a market for local newsprint.

But the Flyer has changed enormously in the past few years. We have a snappy website that offers fresh content daily. Our staff has had to adapt, as well, to the brave new world of digital content. That’s why you’ll see our veteran political editor tweeting live updates from school board meetings. It’s why our film and music editor also covers the Grizzlies and why our news editor blogs about gay issues and has a nationally popular vegan cooking blog. In fact, everyone on the editorial staff, from the interns to the editors, is blogging and reporting online, tweeting, getting the Flyer‘s content — and our brand — out there into the community on a daily basis.

There’s another Steve Jobs quote that I like better than his prediction about the death of print: “Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.” That works for me.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com