As the wealth of America went to the top 1%, the rest of us just stagnated

Off-the-charts income gains for super-rich – Yahoo! News
[Via Yahoo]

In recent years, we’ve been hit with a barrage of statistics, charts, and even full-length books, documenting how inequality is on the rise in America. But very few of them capture what’s happened over the last 30 years or so as well as this image:

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I’ve shown this data in different ways before.  The economy for the generation before about 1980 grew well and the distribution of the wealth created in that economy was balanced. For the generation after, the overall economy grew fine but all that wealth created was concentrated in the top. The rest of us saw very little change.

Between 1946 and 2008,  the rate of productivity growth – as measured by GDP per capita – did not change. In fact, this rate of increase has held pretty steady for over 200 years. Go to Gapminder and you can see this displayed very nicely. There has been little or no change in the productivity over that 50 year timeframe yet the wealth produced by this productivity has not been shared as it was before 1980.

Here is another way to visualize this:

Before 1980, increases in productivity got spread around to everyone, resulting inan increase in incomes. But starting in the mid 70s or so, there was a shift. Now productivity gos up at the same rate but overall incomes no longer follows the same curve.

Unless you were in the top 1%. If the economic wealth had been distributed similarly since 1946, the median income today would be close to $90,000 for a family instead of about $65,000.

The economy got richer, there was more wealth created but little of it made it to the general population.

The management style of Steve Jobs

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

by bizmac

How Mac OS X Came To Be [Exclusive 10th Anniversary Story] | Cult of Mac
[Via Cult of Mac]

Mac OS X celebrates its tenth birthday today. The groundbreaking operating system was introduced to the public on March 24, 2001. Mac OS X helped reverse Apple’s fortunes in the desktop PC market, and has underpinned a lot of Apple’s subsequent success. Most importantly, it spawned iOS, which runs today’s iPads and iPhones.

Below is the story of how OS X’s game-changing interface came about. The story gives some insight into corporate creativity at Apple. OS X’s interface started as a side project. But as soon as Steve Jobs got wind of it, it was fast-tracked. Jobs became intimately involved in its development — a scary prospect for the programmers working on it.

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There are some great insights throughout the article. One is his abrasive manner, something like a drill sergeant. It seems that he is really interested in how people respond to really withering criticism. In one, the interface designer had provided some mockups for a new Mac interface at a retreat where he was pretty much laughed at because the work would be too hard.

Two weeks later [after a presentation on some of his interface ideas] Ratzlaff got a call from Steve Jobs’s assistant. Jobs hadn’t seen the mockups at the off-site—he hadn’t attended—but now he wanted a peek. At the time, Jobs was still conducting his survey of all the product groups. Ratzlaff and his designers were sitting in a conference room waiting for Jobs, when he walked in and immediately called them “a bunch of amateurs.”

“You’re the guys who designed Mac OS, right?” he asked them. They sheepishly nodded yes. “Well, you’re a bunch of idiots.”

 

Think about that. The head of the company calls a meeting with your group, walks in and calls you names. How would you you respond?

Jobs reeled off all the things he did not like in the about the interface, mostly things that he did not like about Ratzlaff’s area. But Ratzlaff had a key insight: “I figure he’s not going to fire us, because that would’ve happened already,.”

They picked themselves up and began to figure out how to succeed. They stood their ground and fought for their ideas. Jobs had seen the mockups so he knew what these guys could come up with interesting ideas. But he had to know if they would be capable of actually implementing them. How hard would they fight for them, especially if he provided his support? If he gave them a lead, would they fight to get these ideas implements – which would take a huge amount of work – or fall back into the safety of committees, as so often happens. That is what this meeting was about.

And Jobs was satisfied. For the moment. All the guys knew that they now needed to implement these ideas. They worked for three weeks, at all hours, to make mockups of what they could do. When Jobs looked at the work, he gave them the whole afternoon with him. That is simply a huge amount of time for a head of a company to give to a project that was so young. Jobs’ insight was to realize the huge importance for the company if they got the interface right. This is what people would actually see, not all the great stuff under the hood. Instead of grafting on the old interface – which is what Apple had been doing – he wanted a whole new one.

After an afternoon, he knew it could be done. During this meeting, he told Ratzlaff, “This is the first evidence of three-digit intelligence at Apple I’ve seen yet.”

From idiots to geniuses in 3 short weeks. That is how you respond to the demands of a leader like Jobs.

Not all leadership styles could be the same as Jobs’, not should they be. But the underlying point for really creative people is this: Nothing less than the very best should be acceptable. How you motivated creative talent to do that may differ but that motivation needs to be there.

I wrote about this when I discussed Edward Tufte. He was talking about the Macintosh and Windows interfaces. He revealed why the design of the Mac was so much better than Windows. I wrote:

Tufte was discussing the different interfaces between the Mac OS and Windows. After going through a lot of the pluses he saw in the Mac and a lot of the minuses in Windows, he stated that the Mac looked like it had been created by one or a small group of people with a single purpose, a single view of how the information should be presented, while Windows looked like it had been done by a committee.

He then said that all the best presentations were this way – a single point of view forcefully pushed onto everyone. Someone in the audience then asked but what happens if your single point of view turns out to be wrong, to not work.

Tufte replied, simply, “You should be fired.” You could almost audibly hear the intake of everyone’s breath. That is exactly what they feared and why they would always want to retreat into committee decisions – they can’t be fired if the committee made the decision.

The creative, the innovative do not really fear failure, often because they are adaptable enough to ‘route around the damage’ quickly enough. They do not usually doubt the mission they are on and are certainly not uncertain about the effects. Read about the development of the Mac. They were going to change the world, no doubt about it. While you can see that there really was a focus of vision, there are also lots of ‘failures’ that had to be fixed. The key was to fail quickly, leaving time to find success.

And permitting committed individuals to find their own way to success rather than rely on committees to fix them.

Jobs’ methods may be abrasive but there is a point. The types of individuals that Jobs is looking for – those who can creatively connected to the single vision needed for success and who are adaptable enough to make that vision a reality –  do not respond to his manner by trying to hide in committees. They stand right up, against all outside pressure, and try to find a solution.

And that is why they succeed.

 

The Japan nuclear power plant – The No. 1 plant was considered a “learning experience.”

asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：Fukushima No. 1 plant designed on ‘trial-and-error’ basis – English
[Via Asahi]

While changes improved safety at the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, overconfidence, complacency and high costs stymied such action at the now-crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant, according to people familiar with the situation.The difference in the safety designs was the main reason why the crisis continues to unfold at the Fukushima No. 1 plant–one of the oldest in Japan–while the No. 2 plant a few kilometers south remains relatively unscathed by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

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The plant that failed had 5 reactors built from first-generation plans bought from GE. The sixth and last reactor was a Mark II version, as was an entire plant built a few miles away. Both were hit with 14 foot waves that were much higher than anyone ever expected.

The Mark II versions were all able to be put into cold shutdown and were safe. Four of the five Mark I versions failed.

One difference between the Mark I and MArk II versions – in the MArk II version, the emergency generators for the Mark II were placed INSIDE the reactor buildings instead of being outside open to the elements.

In addition, the Mark II reactors had pipes to allow direct insertion of sea water if needed. he Mark I reactors did not. The inability to easily inject water into the reactors here has been the main cause of the problems.

The reactors that are having problems are the oldest ones, built on old designs. Why not upgrade them? It would have cost money for something that they really did not see the need for.

I guess they have learned something here. Kind of a bad way to have a learning experience. I also loved this last quote:

Other TEPCO officials said that changing the anti-tsunami design or moving the location of the emergency generators would have been an acknowledgment that previous decisions were insufficient.

Kiyoshi Sakurai, a commentator on technology issues, said that relying on a GE design also put the Fukushima No. 1 plant at a disadvantage because U.S. designers were not as cautious about earthquakes and tsunami as those working in Japan.

So, fixing the plants would have admitted that they were not perfect the first time. But that is undercut by the next sentence. They could have easily saved face for the corrections by saying the original plans had not taken into account sufficient Japanese knowledge about earthquakes and tsunamis.

It was the money.

Some people don’t think much of Android’s ‘Openess’

Skyhook Wireless on Android’s Openness
[Via Daring Fireball]

Keep Skyhook Wireless’s lawsuit against Google in mind when considering Andy Rubin’s protestations regarding Android’s openness:

In complete disregard of its common-law and statutory obligations, and in direct opposition to its public messaging encouraging open innovation, Google wielded its control over the Android operating system, as well as other Google mobile applications such as Google Maps, to force device manufacturers to use its technology rather than that of Skyhook, to terminate contractual obligations with Skyhook, and to otherwise force device manufacturers to sacrifice superior end user experience with Skyhook by threatening directly or indirectly to deny timely and equal access to evolving versions of the Android operating system and other Google mobile applications.

Put another way, there is something called “Android” that truly is open source, in the “take this and do what you want with it under this standard open source license” way. But that “Android” doesn’t include all sorts of things that we, as users, think of as being part of Android — things like Google Maps, Gmail, Android Market, etc. (and you can’t even call something based on this “Android” unless Google permits you to). None of those things are open in any sense of the word, but all of them are essential aspects of any consumer phone or tablet running Android.

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Android is open except when Google says it is not. Applications can be made for this open system, except when they conflict with Google’s.

Perhaps Apple would do the same thing. Oh wait, Apple actually licensed Sjyhook’s technology for its early iPhones. And since it makes its own phone, it did not have to strongarm makers to uses its proprietary apps, in lieu of other better ones.

Maybe some people are right – that the Apple-Google war will become like the Apple-MS wars. It look like here Google is adopting MS’s propensity to leverage its OS for its own software with hardware manufacturers.

Perhaps that explains why so many handset makers are  starting to look at other OS or creating their own. Motorola may be making its own. Samsung has its own. HTC and Nokia are moving to have Windows as an alternative to Android.

The different needs and business models for the software company – Google – and the hardware companies  – the handset makers – create real problems here not seen with Apple, which combines both entities into one.

When does the investigation into investment fraud happen?

Apple’s crunch: Was there a leak?
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

There’s something fishy about the trading two days before NASDAQ released the news

 

Click to enlarge. Source: Yahoo Finance

The gap in the blue line on April 5 in the chart at right reflects the $4.2 (1.2%) traders knocked off Apple’s share price at the opening bell Tuesday — the first opportunity money managers had to rebalance their portfolios after NASDAQ announced in the middle of the night that it was reducing Apple’s weight in the closely followed NASDAQ-100.

This was to be expected.

What was not expected was the $6.55 (1.9%) hit Apple’s shares took on April 1 — most of it after 2 p.m. — followed by another $3.37 (1%) loss on Monday, a day when the Dow was up and a couple analysts raised their Apple target prices.

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Look at that huge drop a couple of days before the announcement. No other news at all to explain that. Who were these people who were doing the selling? Will any sort of investigation be made?

I highly doubt it. When it comes to Wall Street, the fraudulent are the winders and the rest of us are just rubes and suckers.

And it does have more cowbell!!

Beastie Boys’ star-studded, hilarious trailer: Fight For Your Right-Revisited
[Via Boing Boing]

The Beastie Boys’ trailer for “Fight For Your Right-Revisited” is a star-studded hilarity of a thing, as silly as you can imagine, funny and just plain great. It’s to promote their next CD, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, which comes out on May 3. I never met a Beastie Boys album I didn’t like, and from the sounds of things, this will be no exception.

(via Waxy)

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Wait for the end for the cowbell. I’m trying to figure out which trio of made-up Beastie Boys is best.

The usual crew of actors is here but whoa – Ted Danson, Stanley Tucci, Susan Surandon. Very fun video.

Insect sex is so much more bizarre than ours

by John Tann

Insects with Rickettsia infection produce twice as many offspring
[Via Ars Technica]

Endosymbiotic bacteria, which take up residence inside their hosts’ bodies, aren’t particularly rare in insects; in fact, the majority of insect species likely harbor one or more symbionts. However, scientists don’t really know how these microbes become entrenched in new host populations. A case study in Science this week uncovers the novel ways that a bacterial endosymbiont can take over by manipulating reproduction in a new host.

Bacterial endosymbionts are passed vertically from mother to daughter, and can be benign, neutral, or extremely maladaptive. Rickettsia, the genus of bacteria examined in this study, can cause typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans, but its effects on insect hosts—such as the sweet potato whitefly—are largely unknown.

In 2000, less than one percent of sweet potato whitefly populations in Arizona, New Mexico, and California were infected with a particular type of Rickettsia. In 2003, the infection rate was already 51 percent and, by 2006, it had risen to 97 percent. In less than 80 generations, the microbe had exploded to near-fixation in these whitefly populations. But how had Rickettsia established itself so quickly?

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It turns out that the insects infected with the bacteria had many more offspring and those offspring developed more rapidly, having more offspring sooner than non-infected insects.

So, just imagine what it would be like for a bacterial infection to result in higher fertility with children that developed more rapidly? We’d have quite a population explosion very fast. Well for us. It took 80 generations for this change to happen in insects to it would have taken 2000 years or so for us.

Except there is a hitch. Most of the offspring would be female.

This infection is great for the bacteria – it has expanded its range, resulting in many more bacteria than existed before. And while it may appear good for the fly, there is a catch – the sex ratios also get messed up.

Infected insects produce about twice as many offspring which are 80% female. Based on the numbers from the Science paper, in a single generation, uninfected female flies would produce about 9 females and 6 males. Infected flies would produce 24 females and 6 males. Quite a difference.

In this case, it looks like the same number of males is being produced each generation. There are just 2.67 times more females. And both infected males and females develop faster. When 100% of the infected flies are mature, only 50% of the uninfected are. So the infected insects can begin mating much sooner than the uninfected.

At some point, this might be bad for the insect. Few males could mean a dead end. Well for most things. Some insects can produce viable offspring without male sperm. In fact, it might be due to another type of bacterial infection that permits this sort of pathogenesis to occur.

While all this could be viewed as some sort of ‘macromutation’ since it spreads throughout a population much faster than normal gene-derived mutation, the thing to remember is that the pressure is really on the bacteria to produce more copies of itself in the new host it has found. Usually, the bacteria provides a selective advantage to the host but in the end, the bacteria is out for itself.

Speculation mixed with rumor: Best buy vs. Apple

by epSos.de

Rumor: Best Buy’s iPad 2 sales strategy gets it ‘blacklisted’ by Apple
[Via AppleInsider]

Numerous rumors have claimed that Best Buy is in hot water with Apple over its alleged policy to stop iPad 2 sales once it meets its quota for the day, leaving the retailer “blacklisted” from further iPad sales.

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This rumor sounds like such a stupid thing on Best Buy’s part. Purposefully withholding sales on an item?

What may be happening here may not be a company policy but an emergent property of how sales quotas may be made.

If a sales manager has a daily quota to reach on  an item they know they have in stock but might not tomorrow, and can sell day in and day out, why not simply ration them? Say they have a quota of $2000 (about 4 iPads) and a stock of 12. Why not sell four and then declare them sold out for the day? Knowing they can always sell 4 the next day, they know they can meet their quota for at least 3 days. That would overcome any days when there might not be any new incoming iPads.

Perhaps they have had times when they sold all 12 and then got no new iPads the next day. So they get credit for meeting their quota one day but then get no credit for the next 2.

As long as there are lines at other outlets, they know they will get walk-ins looking for an iPad. Thus by rationing them, the sales people can meet what the company tells them to sell without having to worry about supply constraints.

That would be smart thinking for the sales people even while it makes poor business sense. The incentives BB uses could actually reduces the sales. That does not sound very smart.

But then I am speculating on a rumor so it may not be anything at all. It would explain the very poor sales job I have seen at many BB stores I’ve visited. It is very obvious to me that they are pushing sales that benefit themselves rather than benefit me.

What happens when we can not even count on a Democratic President to protect our Constitutional rights?

from Wired because it so aptly shows the problem

Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us | Threat Level | Wired.com
[Via Wired]

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

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So, a law written almost 20 years ago, that does not adequately describe the world we live in now, allows the executive branch to read emails without a warrant, as long as they are older than 6 months and in the cloud. And while some Democrats in Congress want to change it, the Executive and the GOP in Congress love the ability of the President to subvert the Constitution.

It just shows how broken the Executive branch is and how far we are to an Imperial Presidency. It seems that when it comes to our rights, it does not matter which party is in the Executive office. Now, anyone who is President just, as a part of the office, wants to be able to get a hold of our private matters without having to involve another branch of the government.

I expect the judiciary is out best hope, even though it has been noticeable corrupted in recent years.

No oversight is a path to ruin. But then, if we had effective oversight, then there would have been some consequences to the myriad of abuses during the previous 10 years.

I’d go see this movie

The Internet allows these sorts of things to be created, giving us all some pleasure on a Friday. The creativity of people around us is so abundantly observed.