Apple's Cook

Tim Cook testified before Congress today to explain Apple's aggressive use of the 'opportunities' created by inconsistencies between different countries' tax codes to avoid paying US federal taxes. Much as Mitt Romney did before the election, he claimed that it would be irresponsible for Apple not to exploit them. But he also maintained that Apple "liked simple" which these arrangement were patently not, and that it hadn't contravened either the letter of the law (quite probably true) nor the spirit of the law (a patently absurd claim, since this implies that Congress intended for tax law to afford corporations the opportunity to pay less federal income tax). 

Of course, it is conceivable that the lobbyists and the proposers of tax legislation did indeed intend for the tax code to leave more money in corporate coffers while appearing, for the purposes of public relations, to do the opposite. 

Class struggle

The Economist described Margret Thatcher as "a clever girl and a hard worker", both qualities that are unspoken anathemas of the idle aristocracy. Toffs have historically use the world "clever" to condescend to the upwardly-mobile; like the grammar-school girl who was admitted to Oxford but who was never allowed into the club (the Oxford Union).  In aristocratic circles displays of intelligence are frowned upon as vulgar (as it hard work).

That the Economist described her in those terms in 2013 in tells us more about the Economist that it does about Margaret Thatcher.  So much for the abolition of class in Britain. Deeply held values, when no longer accepted by society at large, don't disappear; they simply go underground (rather like racism in the US).

Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Margaret Thatcher's passing from a stroke, and after a long battle with dementia, was not completely unexpected, but it does provide an opportunity for someone who lived in Britain in 1980s to reflect on the "Thatcher Years". In contrast to many American ex-presidents, she, like most ex-Prime Ministers, had been largely out of the spotlight since her ouster in 1990. Interestingly, like Al Stewart's 'old admirals', she had been hoping to be called back into service (or at least for some advice) in both the Iraq wars. A quarter century has now passed since her premiership, sufficient for a historical perspective. Commentators have of course been asking about her legacy. Some have called her the most influential Western leader of the 20th century. And there is a Churchillian grandeur, a larger than life quality that stemming from the strength of her convictions. Anticipating the Tea Party by more than 20 years, she remarked: "I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician”. Pre-emtion Her close friendship with Rupert Murdoch (of Fox News fame) says something about her views of those on the left. And chillingly one of her first actions on arriving at Number 10, was to triple (you you did read that correctly - a factor of 3) police salaries. This was just before she'd stockpiled enough coal to take on Arthur Scargill without risking a backlash in public opinion when the power went off (as it had done under Edward Heath and Jim Callahan a few years before). What I found deeply disturbing was the notion that she knew just how ugly things were going to get; as dictators the world over know, when you provoke civil unrest, you need to have law enforcement firmly on your side. Legacy "They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society." she said in an interview in Women's Own in 1987. A fan of the Austrian school of economics, she was the not just the first post-war embodiment of ideas we associate today with the Tea Party, but arguably she set a new tone, a shift in values, pithily summed up by Gordon Gekko in his one line condensation of Adam Smith's the Wealth of Nations: "greed is good". An unintended but not unwelcome consequence of her rise to power has been a diminution of the class divide in Britain. And although largely hated by feminists who were generally left of center, she has removed the perception that women aren't suited to positions of leadership. On balance, while she did improve the state of Britain's economy, one has to wonder at what cost to Britain in terms of its social cohesion and to the current world view regarding the role of government in regulating business. Influential, she was. But that alone isn't enough; one has to ask what was gained and what was sacrificed.

The Chinese Internet

For two decades we have talked about "the Internet" as if it were a thing, and it's properties necessarily those of its American manifestation. Yet China show that this is a fallacy. The Internet is simply the implementation of a set of packet transport protocols, and while those network protocols may well have been developed with network redundancy and resilience as one of the designer's top priorities, tat doesn't mean that those same technologies can't be used in other configurations in networks constructed by engineers following a different set of design parameters. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Chinese Internet is less about information democracy and more about monitoring and control.