Jerry Seinfeld on why coffee is so central to our culture

I think the answer is we all need a little help, and the coffee’s a little help with everything — social, energy, don’t know what to do next, don’t know how to start my day, don’t know how to get through this afternoon, don’t know how to stay alert. We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

Google Fiber review: Nobody knows what to do with the world’s fastest Internet service.

Emblematic of why I wouldn’t invest in Google today. I am very glad they exist. They should exist. But in a sense it is strange that Google exists as a for profit company. (I think a strong argument can be made that it is in fact an anomaly.) They are doing things that used to be done by government. (Inventing things that will have no commercial use for years or even decades.)

Verizon CFO talks iPhone

This caught my eye. The CFO of Verizon flat out denied that they incentivize retail salespeople to push a particular phone. And my understanding is that as an officer of a publicly traded company he could be the target of shareholder lawsuits if he were to be caught lying. So, does this mean the practice is over? Or is it semantics, that this sort of thing is just done at the store level and not corporate wide, so the practice can be denied? (Either way, it also doesn’t speak to the now open secret that Samsung pays spiffs to reward sales of their smartphones.)

“The answer is, no, we don’t and it is critical that we don’t do that. The reason for that is because what is more important for us is when a customer walks into a store that customer walks out with a phone that they will be happy with and not return under our 30-day guarantee. Because the worst thing that can happen for us is for me to incentivize a salesperson to get you into a phone that you walk out the door with thinking you are going to like and in three days you come back because you don’t like it. Therefore, now I’ve just subsidized two smartphones because that phone you used I can’t resell as a new phone.”

Apple TV 2013 (A1469) Short Review: Analysis of a New A5

I doubt they would silently update the Apple TV to reduce cost if they didn’t intend to be selling it for a while longer.

New Hampshire police taser Chinese woman for trying to buy too many Galaxy S3's

In a story that’s bound to be widely picked up, local TV news stations in New England were having a field day Wednesday with blurry cellphone video of a tiny 44-year-old Chinese woman being held to the ground and tasered outside an Apple Store by a pair of Nashua, N.H., police.

Oh wait, I meant iPhones. For trying to buy too many iPhones.

Intel's Broadwell Goes BGA Only

It has been widely reported that Intel will not be offering the next generation Broadwell architecture as a LGA based product. Broadwell is a 14 nm product that will integrate southbridge functions into the chip, making it essentially a SOC. It will be offered only as a BGA only product, which means that it will be soldered onto a motherboard with no chance of being able to be swapped out.

Holy crap, the nerd world gonna lose they mind over this. I can’t wait to see how the iFixit guys blame Apple.

Skills Don'€™t Pay the Bills

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

A very interesting article to inform your BS meter. It seems big business has been feeding politicians all the way up to the President the bogus line that we have a “skills gap” holding back the American manufacturing industry. And the politicians are buying it when in reality, it’s more like, ‘We don’t have enough people willing to do more work for less pay.’

Innovation is a Fight

While I’d continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that’s how business was done at Apple - it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.