A rather unfortunate, though doubtless algorithmically-generated, juxtaposition:

via flickr

A good, lengthy piece in the New York Times uses iPhone manufacturing as a window into the growth of Asian factories, and the relative decline of American manufacturing capabilities. Well worth a read.

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

The Telegraph:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn did not know he was sleeping with prostitutes 'because they were all naked'

...I was settling into Cambridge. Wow.

my road, via flickr

My brother, who's an acupuncturist in New York City, sent my kids an Atari game console for the iPad for Christmas. It's essentially a dock with a joystick and four buttons. Like many iPad games, the basic setup is free, and extra games are available as in-app purchases (i.e., not through the iTunes store, but through the app itself).

I downloaded Battlezone, and the kids spent some time playing it. I then gave them a little masterclass in how to play; put another way, I blew away all their high scores. Though I spent more of my college hours in front of one of those machines than I really want to recall.

via flickr

It's impressive how well the game plays on a completely different platform.

Via Meryl Streep:

If you want something spoken about, ask a man. If you want it done, ask a woman.

Conor:

Everything must be made into a sweeping analogy. And his instinct for grandiosity is so pronounced that only a small group of recurring subjects are fit for the comparisons that he offers. Would anyone other than Newt Gingrich respond to failing to get on a ballot by asking, "Okay, what's the historical analogy?" Even the "the" is perfect -- as if there is one definitive analogy that fits….

Knowing Gingrich regards Pearl Harbor as "the analogy" for effectively losing Virginia, what comparison will he think appropriate if he loses the entire campaign. The Bataan Death March? Lincoln's tragic night at the theater? The fall of Rome? Or maybe he'll win, and God help us if so. Has there ever been a politician more inclined to make history? In a president of the United States, that is a dangerous impulse.

There's actually a serious point here, as Conor observes. For all his love of history-- or his love of himself as an historian-- Gingrich's use of history is remarkably shallow, and really consists of a kind of Mad Libs consisting of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (how many people has Gingrich challenged to "a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates"?), and the Cold War; comparisons of himself to Washington, Reagan, and Thatcher; and apocalyptic language that would have warmed the hearts of Leo Strauss or Nostradamus.

He truly is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person is like.

Also, this handy flow chart.

A very good Vanity Fair piece on security theatre in our nation's airports. It features a walk through Dulles with security expert Bruce Schneier (who I once appeared with in an article)

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said…. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”...

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

James Fallows also has a Boxing Day roundup of security theatre. Beware terrorist cupcakes!

A fabulous recent Bloomberg piece quotes Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman on the unfairness of lower-income U.S. families, military retirees, pensioners, and others who pay no income tax: “You have to have skin in the game," he complains.

Matt Taibbi counters, if you're not paying federal income taxes because you're earning working-class wages,

you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck…. And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

I'll be only the billionth person to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens. I have mixed feelings about his work: I found his writing right after 9/11 to be brilliant, but also found some of his later political writing blustery and straining to convince.

On the other hand, he was an awesomely productive writer, something that as a fellow craftsman I have to admire.

Of the various remembrances that have come out, I think Christopher Buckley's is my favorite.

One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.

This piece by Ian McEwan is also pretty remarkable for its description of Hitchens in the hospital in his last days:

this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library....

The next morning, at Christopher's request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher's journalism, I will always think of this moment.