I Interrupt My Blogging Hiatus to Bring You iPhone News
I just wrote this in an email to a friend, and figured I’d share it:
My iPhone is utterly busted, which is problematic. Hilariously, the thing that isn’t working: a narrow strip of the touchscreen that happens to be where all numbers and the first letter of the keyboard are permanently located.
Please try composing a message without the aid of the letters Q W E R T Y U I O P. I really wish there were a Dvorak setting on the iPhone.
Seriously, I’m switching to Dvorak somehow. I was seriously contemplating a gPhone. But then it occurred to me that I’d have to carry my music in a separate pocket. I haven’t got time for the pain. Apple has me in its clutches. So I think I’ll have to cave and buy the iPhone 3G today, and thus be enslaved to this malfunctioning monstrosity for another 2 years. I have to assume there’s a better way. Worse yet, I’m eagerly anticipating the new products that will be announced today. Reihan Salam: glutton for punishment.
Speaking of which, I’d like to note that we are going to live with a nuclear Iran because we have no choice. Turning Afghanistan around is going to be a formidable enough challenge. And so all kinds of bad guys will be emboldened. The “good news” is that our relative power might actually be enhanced by the crisis — we have pneumonia, many other countries are about to hit by a bad case of dengue fever, including some that have adhered to pretty strict macroeconomic discipline. Chavez’s Venezuela is kind of mini-rogue state. It is also suffering from all kinds of severe economic problems, despite being a petrostate. The same goes for Iran, which is awash in all of the heavier crudes the world used to think it didn’t want, though that might change to some extent. I’m hoping Brazil makes it through. What happens to the exporters? Bangladesh, for example, exports huge amounts of apparel — it is the bright spot in their economy. But even discount retailers are cutting back orders, which never happens, even in recessions.
I’m thinking a lot about China. I ordered this amazing-sound book that will take a million years to arrive — Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which I read about in last week’s Economist.
As the state reversed course, taxing the countryside to finance urban development, growth in average household income and poverty eradication slowed while income differences and social tensions widened. Rural schools and hospitals were closed, with the result that between 2000 and 2005 the number of illiterate adults increased by 30m. According to Mr Huang, the worst weaknesses of China’s state-led capitalism—a reliance on creaking state companies rather than more efficient private ones, a weak financial sector, pollution and rampant corruption—are increasingly distorting the economy.
The shell game depends on a flourishing export sector — and what happens when the bottom falls out? My friend Ben always says China is the country in the world most likely to experience a classic Marxist revolution. I think he’s right.
An economic downturn could also mean that some vulnerable states will seek other ways to enhance their legitimacy — delivering prosperity is the best and most constructive way to build legitimacy, but there are others as well, like demonizing “market dominant minorities” or picking fights with weak neighbors.
All of this is to say that the world is about to get a lot more interesting, and not necessarily in a good way. My friends have been joking about the new ’70s, and my line has been that, basically, the movies will be much better and everyone will be having more sex and taking more drugs. (I don’t endorse this approach to life, rest assured, not least because I like terrible movies.) Also, the world will be poorer and somewhat more strife-prone. Oh man, this is going to be rough.
Enjoy Earth, next president!
Honestly, all I can think about is my crush on Kat Dennings, how hungry I am right now, and the Canadian federal election. Peace in the Middle East, yo.
You know you don’t need an iphone to play music. Just about every smart phone out there has a music player and many non-smart phones also have music players. Some of them actually better than the iphone. I know that isn’t the point of the blog post, but just wanted you to know.
— Adam S · Oct 14, 04:16 PM · #
I think at this point we should admit that American capitalism is as much of a shell game as China’s command economy. I keep hearing people scared about the loss of money from the economy. But it hasn’t been lost. It was never there. A huge part of the growth of the last decade was just 100% invented wealth, capital that has never existed. And, you know, if you read your Marx, that’s what the man said. There’s prescriptive Marx— what Karl thinks we should do instead of capitalism— and descriptive Marx— what Karl though capitalism was about. I’ve never had much use for prescriptive Marx, and neither, it seems, will the world of the 21st century. But prescriptive Marx? Essential. Essential. Sadly, the (necessary but immorally implemented) pushback against the former has demonized the latter. But Karl was fascinated by capitalism, it haunted him, and he knew it a damn sight better than Adam Smith, or Milton Friedman.
As for Iran… yeah. I’ve always felt a nuclear Iran is inevitable. I mean, a nuclear any country is inevitable, along a big enough timeline. We’re going to prevent Iran from getting the bomb… perpetually? Look there have traditionally been two big impediments to countries getting the bomb, technological difficulty and access to fissionable materials. Well the tech is 60 years old, and globalism ensures that people who want something enough, and can pay for it, will get it. It is an inevitability, I’m afraid, that we will live in a nuclear armed world, unless drastic action is taken.
Which is why humanity’s card was punched on August 6th, 1945.
— Freddie · Oct 14, 04:27 PM · #
descriptive is essential.
Proofread, Freddie
— Freddie · Oct 14, 04:28 PM · #
Freddie:
Do you really believe that? If you walk around and look at all the houses, gardens, electronics, roads, skyscrapers, jets, parks, hospitals, universities, restaurants and cars, you’d really say that?
— Jim Manzi · Oct 14, 04:39 PM · #
If they’ve been bought with money that doesn’t exist? If currency has become an entirely postmodern enterprise, where value is a function of whether the right people pretend things have value?
I would. yes, I would.
— Freddie · Oct 14, 04:46 PM · #
In any event… this is going to be interesting.
— Freddie · Oct 14, 04:51 PM · #
Freddie rather remarkably misses Jim’s point. He apparently sees all the things Jim lists as sinkholes of “value,” ignoring that they all create value as well. Unless the market collapses utterly (which I doubt), those hospitals are still treating diseases, those cars and electronics still work.
It’s also worth observing that in non-capitalist countries like China, or Venezuela, or Iran, they don’t have those things, or they don’t work as well.
— Blar · Oct 14, 05:27 PM · #
I’d like to hedge Freddie’s thought to emphasize that the ‘growth’ of the past 8 years has been a shell game. I think there’s an argument there.
I can’t even imagine being a petrostate with the USA about to go into the economic situation we are in.
— rortybomb · Oct 14, 05:49 PM · #
Wait, are you talking about China or the US?
— zerstuckelung · Oct 14, 07:04 PM · #
If they’ve been bought with money that doesn’t exist? If currency has become an entirely postmodern enterprise, where value is a function of whether the right people pretend things have value?
Value is a function of conversion.
The first currencies were “grounded” only in the sense that they caused the same reactions in almost all human psychologies. Envy, shiny, tasty, trippy, sexy, et cetera.
A problem arose, however. How do you convert shiny into trippy, or sexy into envy? Individual men and even cultures prioritize differently. How can we reach a mutually satisfactory trade when we’re starting from different first principles, from different aesthetic “languages” (as it were)?
These conversational problems created a monetary confusion of the tongues, and woe was the world.
And then we happened across a liquid metalanguage, an economic Rosetta stone, a universal tongue that could be converted into any of the primitive dialects that existed in human trade — including food, shelter, women and power. So complete was its conversion potential that men came to pursue this currency as an end in itself, forgetting or misremembering its Actual Valuelessness. It had no real practical use; its only value derived from an unspoken agreement that it stand in, that it substitute for, other things which did have immanent value for a self-centered, ravenous animal like homo economicus.
I am, of course, referring to gold.
— JA · Oct 14, 07:09 PM · #
I was too glib, for neither the first nor last time.
I do think that if we are in the business of complaining about economic shell games… we should recognize that a disturbingly large amount of the growth of recent years has been based on imaginary movements of debt that has never had a good chance of being repaid.
— Freddie · Oct 14, 08:47 PM · #