Published on 8 Feb 2015
In this video, we discuss how markets link people and places all over the world. We’ll take a look at production and consumption markets and, importantly, the role that prices play in it all. Following up on our example of a rose, we take a look at other global products such as the Apple iPhone. Where is the iPhone made? It’s produced by thousands of people all over the world, working in cooperation in order to make one product that many of us enjoy. Join us as we observe the invisible hand in action.
May 28, 2015
Markets Link the World
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January 21, 2015
Napping
James Lileks takes a nap. It therefore (of course) provides the basis of a “Bleat” posting:
Another item of no surprise to any readers of this site is my enjoyment of, and insistence upon, and devotion to, difficult sentence structures. Also naps. I love naps. Didn’t use to; then we had a child. At first I napped on the floor, thinking it Spartan and manly, but eventually I saw the case for sleeping on a surface that did not leave flat indentations on my skill if I slept for more than 20 minutes. I don’t believe in napping on the sofa, Dagwood style; I don’t believe in napping while reclining in a chair. There’s a reason we sleep in beds. No one ever says “I don’t know how much sleep I’ll get tonight, so maybe I’d better sit in a chair and see how it works.” Bed. The humidifier for white noise. Phone on Airplane Mode. Set the alarm, and see you later.
It’s never occurred to me to study my naps, or chart them, or pick them apart for quality. There are good naps and bad ones. There are short naps that leave you refreshed, and short ones that leave you groggy. Long ones that seem to add a year to your life, and long ones that make you feel as though you emerged from a bog of tar. To be fair, long naps never leave me logy. Short naps can make me feel angry, because they weren’t longer naps.
But. I read a review for an app called Power Nap HQ, and it seemed interesting: it took nap data, based on your movements. You entered how much time you wanted to sleep, set a backup alarm, chose a sequence of sounds, and laid it next to you. It would report back on your movements, indicating the depth of the nap, and it would also record any abrupt sounds you made. Nicely designed, too. A buck. Bought it.
Calibrated the device, set all the options, and pressed the button to start the nap. Laid it next to me.
Got itchy. Dry skin. Scratched a little, and wondered if this would register on the device. This was the signal for my upper lip to report in as “slightly chapped,” requiring more minor motion, and I thought I might be confusing the app, which thinks this is light sleep. Or perhaps it doesn’t take any motion seriously until I’m inert for a long period of time. So I laid still.
Then I thought: now it’s going to think I’m asleep.
This nap wasn’t working out very well. You start to think about napping, napping doesn’t happen. You start to wait for the between-two-worlds moment when you’re aware that you’re having a dream, or are thinking of something you certainly did start but grew out of something you’d already forgotten, then the moment never comes. But the next thing I knew I was awake.
Sort of. Half awake. The alarm had not gone off, so I had not reached the desired quantity of sleep. I was up because my body was done with the noon ration of Diet Lime Coke, and wished to offload it. This I did, wondering how the app would read my absence. It would detect the motion, then the absence of motion, then motion, then – providing I got back to sleep – the absence of motion. I did what a man’s gotta do, then returned to bed to complete the nap. Fell back asleep. No dreams.
Woke, and thought: damn, I beat the alarm. Must be close. If I have one superpower, it is the ability to gauge the passage of time; if I knew what time it was 35 minutes ago, I can tell you what time it is now within a minute or so. This extends to naps: if I wake before the alarm, I usually know what the time will be. I laid there, waking, considering how the rest of the day would play out, then realized that the app would interpret my motionlessness as sleep. THE DATA WOULD BE IMPRECISE.
So I picked up the phone to see how long I’d actually slept.
I had overslept by 40 minutes.
The alarm had not gone off. The backup alarm had not gone off. It had not collected data. Other than that, best dollar I ever spent. Now I can remove it from my phone and sleep without worries.
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January 15, 2015
Why the EFF can’t do an iPhone version of their mobile app
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Corynne McSherry had to break the sad news to Apple iPhone users that due to Apple’s incredibly restrictive developer rules, the EFF cannot produce an iPhone version of their mobile app:
As we have been saying for years now, the [Apple] Developer Agreement is bad for developers and users alike. Here are a few of the terms that we are worried about:
Ban on Public Statements: Section 10.4 prohibits developers from making any “public statements” about the terms of the Agreement. This is particularly strange, since the Agreement itself is not “Apple Confidential Information” as defined in Section 10.1. So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking “publicly” about them.
Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would “enable others” to reverse engineer, the software development kit (SDK) or iPhone OS.
App Store Only: Section 7.3 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you’re prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia.
No Tinkering with Any Apple Products: Section 3.2(e) is the “ban on jailbreaking” provision that appears to prohibit developers from tinkering with any Apple software or technology, not just the iPhone, or “enabling others to do so.”
Apple Owns Your Security: Section 6.1 explains that Apple has to approve any bug fixes or security releases. If Apple does not approve such updates very quickly, this requirement could put many people in jeopardy.
Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can “revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time.” Steve Jobs once confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.
We have some other concerns as well, but these top the list.
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November 12, 2014
An honest, unbiased review of the iPhone 6+ by a guy who owns Apple stock
Scott Adams relates his quasi-religious experience with the latest iPhone:
The experience of getting the iPhone 6 Plus was like getting a puppy. From my first touch of the sleek, sexy miracle of technology I was hooked. I loved it before I even charged it up.
It was large in my hand, and slippery to hold, but I didn’t mind. That would be like complaining that my newborn baby was too heavy. This phone is pure art and emotion frozen in a design genius so subtle that competitors probably can’t even duplicate it. It was pure beauty. Sometimes I found myself just staring at it on the desk because I loved it so. Oh, and it works well too.
But I needed a case. I tried to imagine my anguish if I accidentally dropped this new member of my family and cracked it. I needed protection.
So I went to the Verizon store and bought the only cover they had left that doesn’t look like a six-year old girl’s bedroom wall. The color of my new case could best be described as Colonoscopy Brown. It is deeply disturbing. But because I love my iPhone 6 Plus, and want to keep it safe, I put it on.
Now my phone is not so much a marvel of modern design. Nor would I say it is nourishing my soul with beauty and truth the way it did when naked.
Now it just looks like a Picasso that three hundred homeless people pooped on. You know there’s something good under there but it is hard to care. Now when I see my hideous phone on my desk I sometimes think I can hear Siri beg me “Look away! Look away!”
[…]
Beauty needs to be temporary to be appreciated. I think those magnificent bastards at Apple know that. I think they made the case slippery by design. They want you to know that if you keep your phone selfishly naked, and try to hoard the beauty that is designed to be temporary, that phone will respond by slipping out of your hand and flying to its crackly death on a sidewalk.
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November 6, 2014
Apple is working really hard to keep their customers
… but not necessarily in a good way:
Here is what they never tell you — Apple has devised a very clever way to make leaving the iOS world really, really painful. Specifically, when you send a text message on an iPhone, unless you fiddled with the default settings, it gets sent through iMessage and the Apple servers. If it is going to another iPhone, it can actually bypass the carrier text messaging system altogether, a nice perk back when texts were not unlimited but useful today mainly for international travel.
But here is the rub — when you switch you phone line away from an iPhone to an Android device, the Apple servers refuse to recognize this. They will think you still have an iPhone and will still try to send you messages via the iMessage servers. What this means in practice is that you can send messages from the new phone to other iPhones, but their texts back to you will not reach you. They just sort of disappear into the ether, and will try forever to be delivered to your now non-existent iPhone.
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May 27, 2014
Internet privacy advice for kids (who are not “Digital Natives”)
Cory Doctorow sympathizes with young people who have literally grown up with the internet:
The problem with being a “digital native” is that it transforms all of your screw-ups into revealed deep truths about how humans are supposed to use the Internet. So if you make mistakes with your Internet privacy, not only do the companies who set the stage for those mistakes (and profited from them) get off Scot-free, but everyone else who raises privacy concerns is dismissed out of hand. After all, if the “digital natives” supposedly don’t care about their privacy, then anyone who does is a laughable, dinosauric idiot, who isn’t Down With the Kids.
“Privacy” doesn’t mean that no one in the world knows about your business. It means that you get to choose who knows about your business.
It’s difficult to explain to people just how open their online “secrets” really are … and that’s not even covering the folks who are specifically targets of active surveillance … just being on Facebook or other social media sites hands over a lot of your personal details without your direct knowledge or (informed) consent. But you can start to take back some of your own privacy online:
If you start using computers when you’re a little kid, you’ll have a certain fluency with them that older people have to work harder to attain. As Douglas Adams wrote:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
If I was a kid today, I’d be all about the opsec — the operational security. I’d learn how to use tools that kept my business between me and the people I explicitly shared it with. I’d make it my habit, and get my friends into the habit too (after all, it doesn’t matter if all your email is encrypted if you send it to some dorkface who keeps it all on Google’s servers in unscrambled form where the NSA can snaffle it up).
Here’s some opsec links to get you started:
- First of all, get a copy of Tails, AKA “The Amnesic Incognito Live System.” This is an operating system that you can use to boot up your computer so that you don’t have to trust the OS it came with to be free from viruses and keyloggers and spyware. It comes with a ton of secure communications tools, as well as everything you need to make the media you want to send out into the world.
- Next, get a copy of The Tor Browser Bundle, a special version of Firefox that automatically sends your traffic through something called TOR (The Onion Router, not to be confused with Tor Books, who publish my novels). This lets you browse the Web with a much greater degree of privacy and anonymity than you would otherwise get.
- Learn to use GPG, which is a great way to encrypt (scramble) your emails. There’s a Chrome plugin for using GPG with Gmail, and another version for Firefox
- If you like chatting, get OTR, AKA “Off the Record,” a very secure private chat tool that has exciting features like “perfect forward secrecy” (this being a cool way of saying, even if someone breaks this tomorrow, they won’t be able to read the chats they captured today).
Once you’ve mastered that stuff, start to think about your phone. Android phones are much, much easier to secure than Apple’s iPhones (Apple tries to lock their phones so you can’t install software except through their store, and because of a 1998 law called the DMCA, it’s illegal to make a tool to unlock them). There are lots of alternative operating systems for Android, of varying degrees of security. The best place to start is Cyanogenmod, which makes it much easier to use privacy tools with your mobile device.
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December 4, 2013
Apple iPhone pricing in different markets
In Forbes, Tim Worstall explains a misunderstanding of Ricardo’s Iron Law of One Price on the part of the Guardian:
This is a fun little bit of data calculation and visualisation. It’s a database and then mapping of the global price list for Apple’s iPhone 5s. And there are two interesting ways of using it. The first is simply to look at how prices differ around the world:
You can do this in USD or GBP as you wish. And this can be used to explore the violations of Ricardo’s Iron Law of One Price. Which is where David Ricardo insisted that the prices of traded goods would inevitably move to being equal all over the world. Well, equal minus the transport costs of getting them around the world. And transport costs for an iPhone are trivial: it would be amazing if Apple were paying more than a couple of dollars to airfreight one to anywhere at all. So, we would expect prices to be the same everywhere: but they obviously are not.
[…]
However, when The Guardian reports on this something appears to go wrong. Not their fault I suppose, it’s about economics and lefties never really do get that subject. But here:
Similar to the way the Economist tracks the cost of the ubiquitous McDonalds burger across countries, nations and states, Mobile Unlocked tracked the price of the iPhone 5S across 47 countries in native currencies with native sales tax, and then converted those prices into US dollars (USD) or British pounds (GBP).
No … the Big Mac Index operates entirely and exactly the other way around. We need to make the distinction between traded goods and non-traded goods. The Iron Law only works on traded goods. What we’re trying to find out with PPP calculations is what are the price differentials of non-traded goods? Which is why the Big Mac is used. It is (supposedly at least) exactly the same all over the world. It is also made almost entirely from local produce bought at the local price in local markets. US Big Macs use American beef, Argentine ones Argentine and so on. So we get to see the impact of local prices on the same product worldwide. That’s what we’re actually attempting with that Big Mac Index. The Economist then goes on to compare the prices of this non-traded good with exchange rates and attempt to work out whether the exchange rates are correct or not.
This is entirely different from using the price of a traded good to measure local price variations. For what we’re going to be measuring here is what interventions there are into stopping the Iron Law working, not what local price levels are.
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September 20, 2013
A few setting changes for more annoying iOS 7 features
I haven’t yet upgraded my iPhone to the latest OS — I don’t want to be one of the doughty pioneers who discovers new bugs on my own phone — but many others have already made the plunge. While I’m sure some of the new features are great, there are bound to be some changes which are less-than-stellar. In the Telegraph, Richard Gray has a few things you might want to change:
Contacts names on text messages
On the locked screen, messages flash up with the contacts name and a fragment of their message. However, in the new iOS, the message no long displays their full name by default.
Instead it will only show their first name. While this may feel friendlier, for anyone with more than one David or John in their contacts book, it will be confusing.
To restore formality back to your world, access Settings, select Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Then under the Contacts section, select Short Name and then select the option you prefer — First & Last Name, First Initial & Last Name or just if you are the public school sort, pick Last Name Only.
Control Centre while using an App
The new look control centre is designed to be easy to access — simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the frosted-glass effect pane will appear.
Great. Unless of course you are using an app or playing a game that requires just such an action, like the hugely popular Temple Run — then up pops the control centre exactly when you don’t want it.
Fortunately it is possible to turn this off so the control centre will not open when you are using apps.
Access Settings and then select Control Centre. Turn off Access with Apps and no longer will the Control Centre intrude upon your App using experience.
H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.
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September 13, 2013
The fatal challenge facing Apple and Samsung – boredom
The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski speculates that we’ve hit PEAK SMARTPHONE:
Apple’s keynotes seem to command more mainstream front-page press attention than ever before — but each time, there’s less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?
Apple’s announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily predictable. Cupertino just doesn’t seem to be where the action is any more.
It is almost as if Apple and its arch-rival Samsung have exhausted themselves by suing each other around the world — and now look like two very knackered boxers agreeing to shuffle their way through the remaining rounds to the bell, rather than risk throwing big punches.
[…]
But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly held “crisis talks” this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and, well, “Peak Apple“.
Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking, simply because it could. Apple’s user-facing innovation (the A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a fingerprint scanner — a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the only “radical” moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or “Not F*cking Connecting”, as it’s known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.
The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means to an end — and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone itself became less … important. It didn’t really matter what access device you were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it doesn’t really matter what black rectangle you’re carrying — provided it accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches.
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July 29, 2013
Ten questions with Evernote CEO Phil Libin
Wired‘s Ryan Tate sat down to talk to Phil Libin of Evernote:
Evernote is known for its eponymous note-taking app, a seemingly modest piece of software that has brought in a heap of money. Evernote has topped 10 million downloads in the iOS and Android app stores and accumulated more than 65 million users across its mobile, web, and desktop versions.
CEO and serial tech entrepreneur Phil Libin used to bristle when people would refer to Evernote as a digital notebook. He sees the product as an extension of the mind, albeit one that’s only about 5 percent complete. These days, though, he’s learned to embrace the pigeonholing. After all, it was humble note-takers who brought Redwood City, California-based Evernote to profitability in 2011 by upgrading en masse to a premium version that includes optical character recognition (handy for pictures of business cards and receipts) and collaborative note editing (great for workgroups).
This year, Evernote is in the red again as the company scales up to reach Libin’s bigger ambition — becoming something like Microsoft Office for mobile devices. Or, as Libin put it in an hourlong interview with WIRED, “like Nike for your mind.”
Evernote’s staff of 330 is divided into teams of no more than eight members — small enough, as Libin sees it, to sit around a dinner table and have a single conversation. No team project can last more than nine months, and none of the teams share any code, which is something close to sacrilege among the software priests of Silicon Valley. One recent sunny Friday, while programmers behind him raced to rewrite the iPhone and iPad versions of Evernote from scratch, we pelted Libin with questions about the past, present, and future of his company.
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July 18, 2013
Firefly Online game announcement
Firefly Online (FFO) is a multi-user, social online role-playing game that will initially be available for smartphones and tablets, including those based on iOS and Android operating systems.
Check out updates and pre-register at www.keepflying.com
From the official site:
Firefly Online is a social role playing game (RPG) based on Firefly, Joss Whedon’s cult-hit television series. Firefly Online (FFO) is currently in development for iOS and Android, and may expand to include additional platforms.
In Firefly Online, players assume the role of a ship captain as they hire a crew and seek out adventures, all the while trading with and competing against the millions of other players to try to survive in the Verse: find a crew, find a job, keep flying.
FFO provides a variety of gameplay activities and systems so that players can fully experience life in the Verse.
- Assume the role of a ship captain — create a crew and customize a ship
- Aim to misbehave in space and planet-side adventures
- Cross-platform player experience across devices (pick-up and play from anywhere)
- Unique social features connecting Firefly fans
- Create a shiny ship and explore the Verse
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May 21, 2013
Apple and the question of profit shifting
Tim Worstall explains why both Apple and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations can both be correct on the question of profit shifting — because the term’s meaning isn’t consistent:
Apple divides itself, roughly speaking, into two segments. The Americas and everywhere else (not that unusual for a US company, actually). Apple’s point is that it makes profits in the US selling things to people in the US. All profits from doing this pay the full US corporate income tax minus the usual deductions and allowances that every company can take advantage of.
Apple also points out that it makes the majority of its profits selling things outside the US to people who are not Americans. The iPhones are made in China and sold in Europe, just as one example. These profits are made outside the US: and Apple does not bring them into the US. Thus such profits are not liable to US corporate taxation (it is more complex than this but that’s the gist of it).
However, the Senate doesn’t use that commonsense definition of the phrase:
The Subcommittee is agreeing that these are profits made in foreign countries. Profits made by buying something in China and selling it outside the US. These profits are then not repatriated to the US. This is then deemed to be profit shifting.
It’s worth noting what everyone does agree upon.
Apple makes large profits in the US. These pay full US corporate income tax.
Apple makes large profits outside the US. These are kept outside the US and do not pay US corporate income tax.
And so the question becomes, what is the definition of profit shifting? If we take Apple’s definition, that they do not move profits out of the US, then they’re not profit shifting. If we take the Subcommittee meaning then they are. For without the corporate structures that Apple has put in place then those foreign profits would be subject to the US corporate income tax (minus, of course, the foreign taxes already paid).
Update:
The company that built the iDevices you love so much MUST BE PUNISHED because that’s what government is all about, my children.
— etherbrian (@etherbrian) May 21, 2013
Update, the second: The Register‘s report on the Irish side of the “profit shifting” story:
Irish deputy PM: You want more tax from Apple? Your problem, not ours
Póg mo thóin, you crazy Yanks
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November 30, 2012
Can we bury iTunes yet?
In Slate, Farhad Manjoo calls for the abolition of the worst carbuncle on Apple’s escutcheon:
iTunes 11 did not arrive on time. Apple originally promised to deliver the next version of its ubiquitous music-management program in October. Last month, though, the company announced that the release would slip to November, because the company needed “a little extra time to get it right.” This week the Wall Street Journal, citing “people who have seen it,” reported that the real cause was “engineering issues that required parts to be rebuilt.”
I suspect both those explanations are euphemisms for what’s really happening in Cupertino. I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going on — why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him — he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.
Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient piston — something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of times — has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.
I use iTunes, but only because I need to back up my iPhone data … and nearly half the time, iTunes craps out on me and I have to go looking for fixes or work-arounds from Apple. Since I updated my iPhone to the most recent iOS version, I haven’t been able to sync with iTunes at all. Here’s hoping that the new version will fix that — and maybe, if we’re lucky, some other issues, too.
Update, 1 December: The update went well enough, but it still couldn’t contact the iTunes store or detect my iPhone. After a few minutes of looking through the Apple troubleshooting help pages, I reset the DNS cache and re-enabled iTunes to run in Administrator mode. That was enough to let it detect the iPhone and run a backup and re-synch.
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October 9, 2012
September 19, 2012
Just who does join the early queue for a new iPhone?
The Register‘s Anna Leach asks the folks in line at the Apple store in London:
The iPhone 5 doesn’t go on sale until 8am on Friday, 21 September – yet lines of fanbois, socio-averse hipsters, campaigners and self-promoting twits awaiting the new mobe are already clogging the pavements outside Apple Stores.
Yesterday on the steps of London’s flagship Regent Street pomaceous-product outlet, punters queueing to seize the slightly updated phone include an unemployed bloke, a very keen Apple enthusiast and his carer and some very recalcitrant bods who insisted that El Reg bring them coffees. No such luck, Popeye.
The fact that four of the first seven queuers were making films about why people queue for iPhones speaks volumes about pre-launch iPhone hype. Given the media circus surrounding those who shun more practical methods of shopping and instead queue in the British September air, it’s not surprising that all of the first six were representing interest groups on the lookout for publicity.
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