a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 600-page report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture – and lying about it, and covering it up – in the wake of 9/11, was finally issued on Tuesday. Torture is a complete violation of human rights. But I guess one has to believe there is such a thing as human rights, and sadly – not everyone does.
Here’s what I read on the plane on the way to San Francisco today – to our perfectly bland cubicle farm in the Walnut Creek office. (It’s from a TIME magazine article about Mark Zuckerburg’s quest to connect the world with Facebook. Facebook now has 8,000 employees, 1.35 billion users, and generated $7.87 billion of revenue last year, a billion and a half of that in profit). Check the full story out here.
When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.
The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard criss-crossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word ‘hack’ appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants—Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria—that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.
You’re not even in the first world anymore, you’re beyond that. This is like the zeroth world. And it’s just the shadow of things to come: a brand-new campus, designed by Frank Gehry, natch, is under construction across the expressway. It’s slated to open next year.
Check out the spectacular graphics that came with this week’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. They chronicled 85 disruptive ideas or technologies, to celebrate the magazine’s 85-year history.
The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November. 
The economy has now added at least 200,000 jobs for 10 straight months, the longest such stretch in more than 30 years. In Oklahoma City a gallon of gas goes for $1.99 .. the first time in the US that has happened since July 2010. Finally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to go higher and almost got to 18,000 this week. I had to look it up and remind myself that it was at 6,626 in March 2009 ! Yikes .. so starting to look a little scary, quite frankly. The rest of the industrial world is still not doing great.
It’s finally raining in California – and how! Check out these rainfall totals from tonight’s local news here. Not that one rain storm is going to end the drought, but hey, it seems like a great start. San Francisco Airport got more rain in the last five days than in all of 2013.
So .. as I was adding detailed tasks to our project plan on Tuesday, I thought wryly : which one of the six (cynical) phases of the project would we find ourselves in?
These are –
1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I made my ‘feathered friends’ collection in my study pose for a picture.
I had a classic little kitchen accident today : dropped a glass on the floor, shattering it into big and small pieces. So I thought : man! glass is terrible, the way it shatters when you drop it.
Well, there’s plastic cups (no, those will not do), and melamine, which is a resin. I have some melamine serving trays, but I still prefer glass over melamine for dinnerware and well, a drinking glass.
For flat surfaces and touch-screen devices, there’s ‘gorilla glass’, the patented sheet glass from Corning Inc. It is manufactured through immersion of the glass sheet in a molten alkaline salt bath. An ion exchange in the chemical process produces a stronger surface that also prevents cracks from propagating. On November 20, Corning introduced Gorilla Glass 4, which was a significant improvement over Gorilla Glass 3 and also most other competing cover glass in the market.
Apple ‘s market capitalization is at about US$700 billion : a very, very large number. (Google is at $US 369 billion). Will its market cap hit $1 trillion at some time in the future? It certainly looks possible – or probable – would some analysts say. But it will technically not be the first company with a trillion-dollar market cap.
[From Investopedia] ExxonMobil’s market value topped $500 billion in late 2007 amid surging energy and commodity prices. It was during this energy boom that a relatively lesser-known entity – and a non-U.S. company at that – achieved the distinction of becoming the first-ever company to be valued at $1 trillion. PetroChina (PTR), China’s biggest energy producer, achieved this feat on Nov. 5, 2007, when its shares almost tripled on the first day of trading following its IPO on the Shanghai exchange. But the stock could not stay at those lofty levels for long, and by June 2014, it had a market cap of less than $250 billion, which was still enough to make it the world’s 15th-biggest company.
The decision of the grand jury in St Louis, MO was issued tonight : no indictment of the police officer that shot and killed Michael Brown. Yes, the 18-year old should not have been killed. And did the policeman really have to use deadly force? But then the young man should also not have been involved in an altercation with a store clerk (over buying cigars) and then blocked traffic by walking in the middle of the street and then engaged the policeman in hand-to-hand combat after he was pursued and told to stop.
So as I was sitting in my kitchen here, the TV turned off since every single station seemed to cover the event, I heard a helicopter hovering close by. What’s going on? I wondered, and then drew the connection : we are having a protest over the Michael Brown announcement even here in downtown Seattle.
I keep telling myself it’s time for a new DSLR* Canon or Nikon camera – but do I ‘deserve’ one? It’s been five years since I bought a new camera, so time for a new one, no? I did an on-line survey, and here is the result (one of four outcomes).
Awesome! You don’t spend money too easily on gear. You know your style of photography and what equipment is needed to achieve your goals. You have every right to spoil yourself once in a while with a nice new toy. Because you’re making good use of it. And anyone who buys your used gear is fortunate because you take good care of things. The top-of-the-range mirrorless will do for you. You’ll even deliver with a point-and-shoot. And give full-frame a try!
*Digital Single Lens Reflex
I couldn’t resist posting
these animal pictures I found on-line. (The puma one is a little cruder .. my apologies if it offends! .. but what a cool cat).
I did get caught up with the week’s serious news here in the USA on Friday as well, courtesy of NBC News, here.
1. Obama unveils deportation relief for immigrants. It affects 5 million immigrants that are in the US illegally. The Republicans have no substantive response. After issuing all kinds of impeachment and legal threats over immigration, they sue Obama over the Affordable Care Act* and go home early for the Thanksgiving break. *Obama’s signature health-care law. Nothing to do with immigration. Last year the Supreme Court ruled in favor of it.
2. Seven feet of snow fell this week in Buffalo, NY. A dozen people have now died in the massive snowstorm that has brought some 7 feet of snow since Tuesday in the Buffalo, New York, area.
3. Florida State University gunman that wounded 3 was paranoid of government: cops. Yet another mentally ill person with a gun going into a school/ university and shooting people.
4. Michael Brown’s father calls for calm. A grand jury in St Louis, MO is about to issue their decision as to whether the policeman killing Michael Brown should be indicted.
6. Bill Cosby quiet as another accuser surfaces. Bill Cosby is accused by several women of him drugging them (this was decades ago) and molesting or raping them. Cosby’s lawyer says he is being villified.(Which is true, but still leaves the question as to whether he is a villain?).
Our Saturday night movie
was ‘Maleficent*’. Borrowing a description of the movie from Wikipedia : it is a 2014 American dark fantasy film .. starring Angelina Jolie as the eponymous Disney villainess character, the film is a live-action re-imagining of Walt Disney’s 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty.
We liked it, and Angelina Jolie makes for a powerful presence in the movie. It got mixed reviews from critics, but did very well at the box office.
*Should this be a new word? Meaning neither malevolent (with intentions of evil) nor magnificent – or both at the same time?
.. after 10 years and 317 million miles. Check out this set of incredible images, published in today’s on-line issue of the New York Times. Keep scrolling down ! Here is the link.
I sat with our project manager on Wednesday, adding in tasks and milestones that stretched into January and February. We are at that the time of the current year that those 2-0-1-5 digits look unreal. They make one look back and ask : where did 2014 go? We had all better jump at it if we need to do anything big and bold .. before it’s gone !
Bloomberg Businessweek projects that the US economy will grow at about 3% – not bad – and that Fed chair Janet Yellen will finally raise the federal funds rate from the zero it has been sitting on ever since 2008. Europe and Japan will continue to struggle. China will grow at 7% : a high rate but still a slow-down from recent years.
San Francisco has Sister City relationships with 18 partner cities. A Sister City relationship is a broad-based, officially approved, long-term partnership between two communities in two countries. A Sister City relationship becomes official with a signing ceremony of the top-elected officials of the two local jurisdictions. Sister City partnerships have the potential to carry out the widest possible diversity of activities of any international program, including every type of municipal, business, professional, educational and cultural exchange or project. Is 18 a lot of Sister Cities to have? Maybe so, but I see Seattle boasts 21 sister cities.
Here are just emblems from the International Terminal at San Francisco airport for Cork, Ireland and for Paris, France.
The Lego Movie that I saw a few weeks ago inspired me to dig up an old Lego set that I had in the closet, and build the house in the instruction booklet that came with it. So all in all not a very original work of art from me, and I am a long, long way into the ‘+’ of the ‘Age 6+’ on the box. But so what? – it was fun, a 3D puzzle, and happily there were no blocks missing.
Here are my two shirts I bought at the Uniqlo store in San Francisco.
I work for a firm (PwC, and it’s actually a network of global PwC firms) that has almost 200,000 employees in 157 countries. So at Friday’s workshop that I attended – about a new method to help employees grow in their careers – there was a lot of discussion about cultural differences, and that it means to work in the USA for a global consulting services company. ‘Are we sure the framework and the methods discussed here take into account a multi-cultural workforce?’ was a very good question from the floor. In a way, with so many different cultures already present in large cities (and in our firm), the answer is yes .. but then again there is still a long way to go even in the USA, to appreciate and be aware of cultural diversity.
A few weeks ago Charles Mudede wrote in an article in the weekly newspaper The Stranger (as advice to new students coming to the city) in ‘How to Adjust to Multicultural Seattle if You’re from a Small Town’ (brace yourself) .. I understand you spent your life in the middle of nowhere. There were cows and chickens and not that many people. And if there were people, they were pretty much the same kind of people. They looked and talked the same way, they had the same religious beliefs, and they ate the same foods in the same way. Life was bleak in the small town. But now you are in a big city that has more diversity than you’ve ever been exposed to. How do you handle this new and colorful state of affairs? What should you do to avoid making a fool of yourself by revealing your provincialism? I’m here to lower a rope down into the dark cultural hole you’re in and pull you up to the light of big-city life. The advice I have to offer will not solve all of your problems, but it will make things a little bit easier.
