"You shall not bear hatred for your brother in your heart. Though you may have to reprove your fellow man, do not incur sin because of him. Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your fellow countryman. You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

- Leviticus 19:17-18

"He said to Jesus, 'and who is my neighbor?' Jesus replied, 'A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down that road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. Likewise a Levite came to the place, and when he saw him, he passed by on the opposite side. But a Samaritan traveler who came upon him was moved with compassion at the sight. He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, «Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.» Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robber's victim?' He answered, 'The one who treated him with mercy.' Jesus said to him, 'Go and do likewise.'"

- Luke, 10:29-37

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect."

- Matthew 5:43-48

Construction at Ground Zero, New York City, Summer 2010.
Photo © 2010 Antonio Rosario, Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License 2.0

The September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington were acts of hatred. The perpetrators died by their deed. Their supporters and financiers have since been hunted down and cornered or killed. I am sorry for them: sorry that they gave their lives for hatred, sorry that they took others' lives in hatred, sorry that they fell to violence instead of reaching for the rewards of peace and love.

It is crucial to remember the human victims of tragedy. Some had no time to choose what befell them. Some chose to risk their lives in love to save others. I am grateful to them all: grateful for the good that came of their lives, grateful for their good intentions cut short that day, grateful to those who survived and pressed through trauma and injury to keep on in our world. I look up to the families of every victim for bearing hardships that I have never known. We might rebuild a fallen tower, but we can never replace the people who were lost that day.

In a world of six billion people, it took only a tiny band of extremists to unleash the horror that took place nine years ago this day. I regret that their act of hatred has drawn more people around the globe towards malice, anger, and division. I regret that so many people today, as the terrorists did on 9/11, direct their outrage at the innocent. I cannot stop them, but I know that there is time to change, and I know that love is stronger than hate. For the sake of those who died, we can make a better world.

Apple iPhone 3GS.
Photo © 2009 Renato Mitra, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License 2.0.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs spoke in California today and briefly defended working conditions at the Chinese factories that manufacture Apple's high end consumer electronics. Here, though, are the numbers:

The U.S. retail price of Apple's iPhone 3GS, 16GB:

$199.00¹

The starting monthly salary of the workers who build the iPhone and iPad for Apple at a Foxconn manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, China:

$131.77 (¥900)²

That salary expressed as an hourly wage for Foxconn employees who work six twelve-hour shifts a week:

$0.46 (¥3.13)³

Number of suicides and suicide attempts at Foxconn factories so far this year:

13⁴

Amount by which Foxconn has now pledged to increase wages for assembly line workers:

30%⁵ (at the base rate, that is ¥270 or $39.53/month)

Price of stock in Apple Inc. on NASDAQ at the close of trading on June 2, 2010:

$263.95⁶

Amount by which the stock price in Apple Inc. has risen so far this year:

$49.94⁷

Date when Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world's largest technology company by market capitalization:

May 27, 2010⁸

Apple is not the only client of the Taiwan based Foxconn Technology Group. Devices sold by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and others are also built at the very same Foxconn plants. It is Apple, however, that makes the greatest pretense at exclusivity — exacting the highest prices from American consumers, dispersing the wealth to Wall Street traders, and remaining content with the abysmal wages at its Chinese assembly lines. It is just one more reminder of who bears the burden for our cozy material lifestyle.

UPDATE (June 7, 2010): Under increased pressure, Foxconn has announced a 70% wage increase for its production line workers, on top of the aforementioned 30% increase — if workers can pass a three month performance review. Investors seem to dislike the idea of boosting employee wages, and shares in Foxconn's parent company have fallen swiftly at the news. Read more: BBC News.

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Demonstrators assembled outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on February 16 to urge action against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which recently struck down restrictions on the corporate financing of political advertisements. Wisconsin Public Radio reported that the rally participants made speeches and rang "liberty bells," hoping to draw attention to their issue and gather support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the court's decision.

The Supreme Court's ruling, announced on January 21, marks a major change in the rules of electoral politics in America. It makes it possible for private corporations — whether for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, or unions — to use their money to air political advertisements in favor of or against specific candidates in the days before an election. This kind of direct corporate involvement in politics had previously been illegal, banned by legislation going back to the Tillman Act of 1907 and including most recently the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Their bill passed 59-41 in the Senate, but part of the act has now been voided by the 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision.

Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke for the court's majority by arguing that any law restricting corporations from airing political advertisements was an infringement on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Kennedy wrote:

By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. ... We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead us to this conclusion.

Meanwhile, dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed with the premise that a corporation constituted a "disadvantaged person." Speaking for the court's minority, he wrote:

The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it. ... It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

Madison's demonstrators agreed with those words. Some carried signs with slogans like "Abolish Corporate Personhood" and "Overrule the Court!" I applaud their position. Corporations are not humans. They exist only on paper as tools created by people to achieve some goal. The individual rights of the people involved in corporations — shareholders, directors and employees — were never in question. They have always held the right to speak as individual citizens. The Supreme Court's ruling, as I see it, now gives corporate executives twice the rights that other people hold: their own unalienable right to speak as individuals, plus the right to speak through the corporations they control using those corporations' money and power. Corporations hold immense concentrations of wealth, and because they are often structured simply to generate more, their interests are self-serving. Wealthy multinational corporations can easily outspend real individuals in a race to promote their profit-driven political agendas. Far from enhancing free speech, the court's ruling will help powerful corporations drown out the voices of actual people with real human needs.

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I learned a few weeks ago that PC Magazine, a periodical to which I have long subscribed, will no longer be delivered to my door. The magazine has ceased printing. It will still be published, but only online. I'm not especially bothered. It's certainly a bit sad to lose a magazine that shaped my attitude towards computers to the extent that I'm blogging at my own website today. Still, I'm subscribed to other magazines; my mailbox won't be empty. Besides, I have to acknowledge that I get most of my computing knowledge online now anyway.

The cause of PC Magazine's transformation is simple, and though it might seem appropriate for a magazine about computers to go all-digital, the real reason has less to do with innovation than it does with cost. A digital publication is far less expensive to produce than an ink and paper one, and PC Magazine's parent company, Ziff Davis Media, declared bankruptcy last spring. The reasons cited were declining subscriptions and lost advertising revenue. This isn't just one isolated magazine publisher falling to the wayside, however. The whole print media industry seems to be in the midst of a dramatic transformation.

Take the Christian Science Monitor, a paper well known for its independent focus on international issues. The Monitor reached its one hundredth anniversary last year only to announce in October that is planning to cease daily publication this spring. A weekly edition of the newspaper will still be printed, but daily reports will only be available online after April 2009.

Consider also the Detroit Free Press, the nation's twentieth largest newspaper by circulation, which declared in December that it will cease home-delivery of its daily papers early this year. The daily will still be available at newsstands and online, but home deliveries will only be made on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Why is this happening? "Economics," answers a FAQ page at the paper's website. "Advertising, including classified, is down. Costs are up. We are changing our model in order to survive in a world that has changed."

A look at newspaper publishers' share prices shows how dire their economic situation is. The Detroit Free Press is published by Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper company, which also owns the USA Today and Wisconsin papers like the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Appleton Post-Crescent. It's share price was $59.63 on January 9, 2007. Two years later, on January 9, 2009, it stood at $8.59—an 85.6% decline.

Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based national conglomerate whose local papers include the Wisconsin State Journal and La Crosse Tribune, has seen its shares fall from $30.32 to $0.53 over the same time frame. That's a decline of 98.3%.

Similarly, shares in the McClatchy Company have dropped from $41.09 to $1.47 during this two-year span, a decline of 96.4%. McClatchy's newspapers around the country include the Miami Herald and Sacremento Bee.

Most strikingly, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy this December. Only one year before, it had been purchased by investor Sam Zell for $34.00 per share—a total price tag then of $8.2 billion.

What's killing print media?

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All New, Coming This January...

Today is New Year's Eve. People in cities around the world will soon be gathering outdoors in great masses, talking, partying, and mostly just waiting, watching their watches as the twelve o'clock hour draws near. When eleven fifty-nine arrives, the counting begins. Someone shouts a number over here, another integer is mumbled over there, and soon everybody's joined in the chant. The excitement grows. Three... Two... One... Euphoria! The ball drops, the fireworks explode, the champagne flies, and everybody screams, "Happy New Year!" The crowd temporarily loses itself in swirling clouds of confetti.

When I think of this scene, I can't help but imagine that there must be a person standing still in the midst of it all, a look of bewilderment on his face, questions stirring in his mind. He starts to ask his neighbors, "Did I miss something? Why are we cheering? What just happened?" After a time, he finds someone to answer his questions. When the explanation is given, he pauses, then asks in disbelief, "That's it? You mean, just that little nine now where the eight used to be? That's the only thing that's changed? Why ever did I come all the way out here for this?"

I confess, I've long thought this holiday was a tad odd. I mean, I realize it's the beginning of another year. But so what? When the sun dawns on January 1, 2009; December 31 will still only have been a day ago. The fact that January 1, 2009, is the start of a new year is true only in the sense that it will have been a year since January 1, 2008. And, in that sense, isn't every day a new year's day? December 31, 2008, marks the beginning of a new year since December 31, 2007. So oughtn't I be celebrating already? The only difference about January 1 is that we've all agreed that this should be the date when we start using the next number in our yearly sequence. What the parties really must boil down to, then, is a celebration of our ability to count.

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