indefensible: john gruber

http://twitter.com/#!/daringfireball/status/180424385470021632

i like how he arbitrarily decides to refer to the new ipad as iPad (3)

ya that's awful

Why would he not call it "the 2012 iPad"

Why I ask you

(3)

srsly that shit has to stop. he doesn't call it the MacBook Air (3) or the iMac (14), does he? ffs. I bet he'd drive a Porsche 911, but he wouldn't call it a 911 (7), either.

Porsche 911 (Never Forget)

Get the feeling he'll be eating some serious Mike Daizey claim chowder after this weekend's This American Life.

we all will be, james. we all will be.

I guess the iPad (3) is made on a production line of robots and not hand-assembled by poorly-paid Chinese slaves, right?

i guess all chinese workers are 'slaves,' right?

john gruber is awful, i mean really just terrible, worse than paedophiles, but i feel like maybe james overdoes it a bit

all im saying.

what did br00ks do to his favicon

i have hacker news in google reader and the shade of orange they use is fine but whatever shade he picked doesn't look so great

what in the hell is wrong with you?

probably should be asking yourself that question

this american life mike daisey retraction transcript, p interesting, warning PDF http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retraction_Transcript.pdf

is there a transcript of the original show

the original show is just excerpts from his stage show and apparently you can download the script of that from his website

Love how all the Read & Trust bloggers are now flying over to China to investigate Foxconn for themselves.

wanted to say something re the tendency to criticize chinese factories as sweatshops, in that its not an accurate characterization of foxconn et al, which is not to say theyre great places to work, just that theyre un great places to work in somewhat different ways than a sweatshop, i found this description from mo tkaciks steve jobs piece compelling

When imagination is off the table, you get coverage like CNN’s Foxconn series, in which CNN interviews a disgruntled Foxconn employee complaining of “dehumanization” and, lacking anything terribly sensational or sordid, asks her if she might be able to quantify that. We learn that the job entails sticking more than 4,000 stickers onto iPads each day.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/02/22/the-book-of-steve-jobs-apple

kind of amazing this is a guy who makes his living via public speaking and has no idea how poorly hes coming off

Mike Daisey: Yes. And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes
people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the
theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so
that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of
truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true
elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it
isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that
when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for
what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in
the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal
truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian,
who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your
nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because
you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how
people see it -

and these are the things he said after ira grilled him once he had a chance to think abt it then asked to come back again!

third part is p cool where they tell you what they do know abt apple chinese manufactring irl

Ira Glass: One of the most interesting things and one of the newest things, that I
think you pointed out in this series, is that the cost of labor in an iPhone, if it were
made in the United States, would be only about $65 more per phone. I mean
that’s a lot of money if you’re manufacturing stuff, um, but with iPhones selling
with hundreds of dollars of profit in each phone, Apple could still make a profit if 24
it were manufacturing in the U.S., and you have an entire article where you lay
out that is not actually the main reason these are made overseas at this point.

Charles Duhigg: That's exactly right. And, and that $65, that's the high-end
estimate. Some people told us that you could, from a labor perspective you could
build the iPhone in the United States for just ten extra dollars a phone if you're
paying American wages. But wages, labor is such an enormously small part of
any electronic device, right?
Compared to the cost of buying chips or making sure that you have a plant that
can turn out thousands of these things a day or being able to get strengthened
glass cut exactly right within, you know, two days of this thing being due, that's
what's important. Labor is almost insignificant. What is really important are
supply chains and flexibility of factories. You want to be able to be located right
next to the plant that makes the screws so that when you need a small change to
that screw factory, you can go next door and say, "Give it to me in six hours," and
they can say, "Here you go." Because if that factory was in another state or on
another continent, it would take two weeks. It’s the flexibility within the Chinese
manufacturing system, that’s what you can do in Asia that you can’t do in the
United States.

Ira Glass: There's, there's a bunch of incredible stories you tell in that article, and
one of them is you talk about the number of industrial engineers needed to
oversee 200,000 assembly line, line workers. You say there's 8,700 industrial
engineers that you need. And so to get this plant going, to get this particular
operation going that you were writing about—I can't remember which one it is—
you said it would take nine months to find those 8,700 industrial engineers in the
United States, and in China, how long it took?

Charles Duhigg: 15 days. And that 15 day figure? The guy who told me that,
also told that that’s because they kind of drug their heels on it a little bit. They
probably could’ve done it faster.

yah it's not just labor it's the whole supply chain charles dugong wrote a nyt article about it you should check it out

yah he recommends it at the end of the show too

the story was always pretty unbelievable in that he'd get that much information about that many experiences from that many ppl (especially the dissidents and organizers and whatever) just by essentially hanging around a factory gate.

this is pretty hilarious: "Cathy says she’s never seen a gun in person, only in the movies and on tv, so she’d
remember it."

ha yeah that was an excellent america shaming moment

his mike daisey scoodenfroody is gross

don't want to get all james mitchell, but gruber really is going in hard on this foxconn/daisey story now that he can talk about journalism, having basically ignored it for the past three months.

i bet the daring fireball style guide says don't lie (and capitalize "Internet")

still waiting for him to explain how Apple can buy the company from the shareholders using their own money

lool

still waiting for him to explain how Apple can buy the company from the shareholders using their own money

Seriously?

That is a pretty normal thing! Are you wondering how they kept issuing stock to employees as bonuses?

Undiluting Apple stock is pretty hilarious at this point, though

Eh? No, wait, i'm not saying they can't do stock buybacks -- what they can't do is take the company private (eg a mgment buyout) using that money. Board members can't use the company's money to buy it from itself.

I thought what they are planning is a buyback?

you obviously don't read daring fireball

Apple can’t control its stock price; that’s in the hands of investors. But it can control how much cash it keeps in reserve. If investors sour (or the market crashes) and the stock price dips, Apple could take itself private. I’m very intrigued about what they’re going to announce tomorrow.

I mean, I get what you're saying -- buy back stock with the company's money, then give that stock to executives -- but I think what their strategy is tends to be more in the way of compensating executives or giving them stock incentives if they stick around, tying their monetary interest in the company to long-term goals rather than striving for bonuses at the end of the year and then bailing for another job.

oh jesus he really said that, I take all back, he's a moron

ha

There are many good reasons for Apple making this move, but the likelihood of it ever going private is less than zero.

I don't get how dude can post stuff like that! I mean, it's one thing to betray a complete lack of financial knowledge, but if you talk that through out loud it doesn't even make any sense.

he should go back to writing about what he knows best: mac os x 10.2-10.3 and perl

I kind of have doubts about dude's perl chops tbh

Have we addressed the controversy about the meltdown that happened when people confronted him about the fact he was refusing to allow changes to markdown, including bugfixes people submitted a year prior, and wouldn't give up control?

that was hilar. he wanted to keep it elegant, and keep focus by saying "no" to everything.

He was good at demonstrating his savvy understanding of the programming and web communities.

like the time he launched the effort to build a new Mail client? It was called Letters or something and was like the king of vaporware