I can't has cheezburger

I share a little bit of the bitterness that visiting space has transitioned from being something that countries did, to being a hobby of wealthy people with the funds to end world hunger but instead are like “nah, I want to spend billions on a rocket to send me up into space for a couple minutes.”

Of course, it’s important to watch for those rose colored glasses. Space exploration holds a special place in the heart of many a nerdy type (myself included), and indeed those who were around to see us set foot on the moon remember it as a point of national pride.

Of course, our interest in going to space was mostly a glorified dick measuring contest with the Soviets, and the nobility of our exploration kind of got retconned in there after the fact. And when the narrative we were taught in grade school was being put together, the history lessons left out the fact that it was a number of brilliant black women like Katherine Johnson who were performing important calculations to support NASA’s mission, even though they were treated like second class citizens and their work went unacknowledged for decades.

Exploring space is a worthwhile endeavor, and humankind should be doing it. It’s not inherently bad for someone to be really rich and have the cash to go into space for fun. It will never stop being sad to me that we culturally have set up capitalism so that it is wants so badly for billionaires to be able to exist and go on these adventures that we insist on letting people go without homes, healthcare, and food, and we do it largely on the principle that we want billionaires to become billionaires.

I often see tweets like this decrying wealth inequality:

Remember when Kroger closed stores in Seattle and Long Beach because the cities mandated $4/hour raises for grocery workers?

Kroger just announced a $1 billion buyback for shareholders.

They also raised the CEO's pay 45% to $20.7 millionhttps://t.co/3llHbpkWFr

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) July 16, 2021

It follows the formula of “big company keeps large chunk of money to itself, but workers don’t get raises.”

But this is just scratching the surface. Dig more into the math and it’ll start to really enrage you.

Kroger has upwards of 450,000 employees. Just doing some back of the napkin math, it would cost a lot of money to give all these workers a raise. With that $1 billion, they could give each worker roughly a $1/hr raise for a year and that would basically burn through all that money.

In other words, Kroger has about half a million employees, and they only were able to turn that into profits of $2.8 billion (source), and the best they can do to generate wealth is just give a third of that money to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks.

Walmart takes this to the absolute extreme. They made a profit of about $13 billion in FY ’21 on gross revenue of almost $560 billion. Sure, that sounds big, but factor in that Walmart has 2.3 million store associates, meaning that if Walmart wanted to raise wages from $11/hr to $15/hr, assuming their workers work an average of 30 hours a week (I think it’s actually more but let’s be conservative), that would cost $13.8 billion. Walmart’s working on very slim margins here. That $13 billion profit sounds great but it took minimizing pay for literally millions of people to scrape up that profit (and I’m just thinking of store associates, not even the employees of Walmart’s thousands of suppliers who they notoriously pressure for lower prices).

In fact, there have been past years where US taxpayers spent more money on assistance programs supporting Walmart employees than Walmart earned in profits for the same year.

This is the vicious cycle of pursuing scale. Walmart literally fueled their growth over the years with aggressive price reduction. You couldn’t run a small, independently-owned grocery store if you were only making about 5 grand in profit for each employee. But a behemoth like Walmart can because they can make it up in volume.

So in reality, scale isn’t really that good at generating wealth; it’s just good at generating wealth inequality. The amount of resources Walmart and Kroger need to earn their profits is massive.

These companies (Walmart especially) love to tout their low prices, and to their credit, they do work hard to keep prices low (again, Walmart is super good at this). But low prices, especially at scale, are bad at generating wealth. Maybe a few Walmart execs and shareholders might disagree, but millions of non-wealthy employees sure won’t.

This announcement is one of those things where I look at it and I’m just like:

It’s funny, it used to be that you’d have a browser tab open in Windows, and today, you can have Windows running in a browser tab!

This also comes at a perfect time for the people who have enjoyed using Intel Macs over the years to run occasional Windows apps and were wondering about their future of doing that in the world of Apple Silicon.

(Disclosure: my current employer is a subsidiary of Microsoft. I’m not a journalist or anything, and I don’t think that really influenced my writing, but it would have felt dishonest not to mention it.)

Daring Fireball, weighing in on a recent IBM executive shakeup:

I don’t offer this observation as an argument against any and all regulation and antitrust investigations of big tech companies. I’m simply arguing that regulation and antitrust lawsuits should be wielded with surgical precision, not broad strokes. Competition and progress work.

If you listen to his podcast Dithering you quickly pick up on the fact that John generally is in favor of letting the market do its thing, and his point is well taken that IBM spent decades being dominant only to have a much more diminished role in tech today. But the dominance of today’s tech companies feels substantially different from the dominance IBM had.

IBM Was Big When Tech Was Small

IBM was dominant in the world of tech when computers were something that only businesses owned and used. IBM did make some consumer tech in the 80s, 90s and early 00s, but their ability to be big was mostly due to the fact that they were big fish in a relatively small pond. That’s not true for the biggest tech companies today.

Entrenchment is Deeper

Social networks had relatively short lifespans before Facebook came along. They’d often fizzle out after a couple of years. Facebook has managed to reach an escape velocity that’s kept them from having that same issue. They were wildly popular in the aughts, and they’re even bigger today. They measure their users in billions, and they’ve been known to buy up companies achieving dominance in areas and markets they didn’t (see: Instagram and WhatsApp).

In a similar vein, there was a cottage industry of search engines before Google came along. Whereas Facebook got more powerful as a social network because social networks get more useful the more people are on them, Google largely earned their dominance by making a great search engine. But in doing this, they also became deeply entrenched in their position at the top and it’s structurally really difficult to unseat them.

Big Tech is Big With a Capital B

At press time, there are five companies with market caps above $1 trillion, and four of them are tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet; Saudi Aramco is squeezed in there at #3). Facebook is worth nearly a trillion.

Tech is big business now, and not only are tech companies now our biggest companies, they wield a massive amount of control over our daily lives in a way that IBM never came close to achieving.

If you participate in the modern world, you almost certainly are being served directly or indirectly by servers in a cloud run by one of these big tech companies. If you use a computing device, you almost certainly are using an OS made by one of those trillion dollar companies.

IBM’s unseating

Gruber’s right that IBM lost dominance, but let’s remember how that happened.

IBM’s downfall was in not anticipating the PC revolution. They falsely assumed that mainframes were where the big money was at, and when they made a PC, instead of buying exclusive rights to DOS from Microsoft, they licensed it. Dozens of other companies started making IBM-compatible PCs, and PCs sold like gangbusters, easily eclipsing IBM’s business selling mainframes to big companies.

But that only was possible in an age where there weren’t many computers. Today, most every person, home, and business has a computer, and often several. There’s not really any new category of device that can come along and eclipse the computers and mobile phones that Apple, Microsoft and Google power, or the servers that Amazon, Microsoft and Google power.

A side note: IBM didn’t really suffer a downfall so much as it ceded growth to other companies. Even in their diminished role, IBM continued growing throughout the 90s and aughts, with their market cap peaking in 2017 at just under $175 billion.

IBM missed out on a fundamental growth wave, but what fundamental growth wave is there for today’s tech companies to miss? Billions of people own a smartphone now, and Apple and Google have a technical head start of well over a decade of building mobile OSes. Even if you can imagine a newcomer coming along and taking over that market, there’s no longer much room for that market to grow a lot higher.

Assuming no major new policies that might shake things up, the big tech companies we know today are almost assuredly going to be the big tech companies we know in a decade or two. The last 20 years of tech have seen advancements comparable to the last 50 years of the 20th century. And not only that, the biggest tech companies are now in far more businesses than IBM ever was.

Competition is a powerful thing, but once your market cap is measured in trillions and you have almost no peers, it’s a lot less meaningful.

I haven’t posted a ton lately.

It’s not for a lack of writing! I’ve drafted a lot of things up, but even after rounds of edits, the posts aren’t something that sparks enough joy that I want to post it (and seeing all the posts that have made the cut, you probably can imagine how bad these are).

I write about a bunch of things, but I never really want to post something that feels like I was just going through the motions; for each thing I post, I want it to have a spark to it that I feel passionate about.

For my Apple-specific writing, I’ve been struggling to write stuff that’s worthwhile. I’ll either be too inside-baseball for a casual observer, but for the crowd that likes the Apple inside baseball, my stuff is way late to the game and I’m not really offering that many good or new insights. A lot of the Apple stuff in my Drafts app read like I breathlessly weighed in on a current Apple event without really having anything particularly interesting or novel to say.

I’m still challenging myself to get to 100 posts this year, but I’m not going to just grind my way to 100 joyless posts. I want to post 100 posts that each sparked some joy.

I kind of liked my Sweet Setup series earlier this year, not only because it was a steady source of new content, but also because I was sharing about a bunch of tools I’m passionate about.

I’d like to expand on my Case Against Scale talk from 2020 with a series of short essays this summer, making the case against massive tech companies through the lens of current events in the tech sphere.

I also wrote up something about Pride, which I should have posted during June, but it was kind of a busy month. I think it’s also subject to a total rewrite.

Ultimately, I think of writing on here the same way I think of cooking: it’s a really enjoyable hobby, but as an endeavor it’s only worth it if the end product is something really enjoyable. I suppose theoretically I could just be writing and posting into an echo chamber and that is somewhat therapeutic in itself, but that’s what my journal is for.

So a few days ago, the new owners of open-source audio editor Audacity pushed out a new privacy policy, and according to this policy, the app became permitted to collect enough data about users that people under 13 years old would no longer be legally able to use the app in the US.

This caused an uproar as you might expect, and Muse Group, Audacity’s new owner, is trying to walk it back.

“We believe concerns are due largely to unclear phrasing in the Privacy Policy, which we are now in the process of rectifying,” said Daniel Ray of Muse Group.

Why do tech companies have to be so predictable? Every time they get called out on doing something shitty, they never apologize for doing the shitty thing, they always apologize for how they communicated it, subtly implying that its customers’ opinions aren’t valued feedback from valuable stakeholders, but instead are just a reaction to be managed and herded. It’s a mentality that subtly robs people of their humanity.

And to really add insult to the dystopian injury here, look no further than some of the takes from people trying to downplay this: mocking people for what they considered an uproar, and the general sentiment that we need not panic because this is “pretty standard modern application telemetry” (source).

Maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, maybe the problem isn’t that FOSS enthusiasts are freaking out over standard practice, but that we’ve come to accept some relatively invasive surveillance as standard practice in the software we use and rely on every day?

My audio editor shouldn’t need to know my IP address to function normally.

There are lots of tools in place in most every app nowadays serving a variety of functions like this. Some are simple things like libraries to support easy automatic updating, and some tools will send up stuff like crash data to developers so that they can learn about bugs and fix them without even needing to interact with users. That’s potentially useful! But it’s very telling that when you actually tell users what you’re collecting about them, they are “freaking out”. Maybe if users are that uneasy about the level of surveillance they are living with, “this is standard telemetry!” isn’t the great defense you think it is.

Purveyors of surveillance capitalism love to lull themselves into these delusions that the surveillance is super common and that consumers are a-ok with it because they know that in exchange they get some free products on the web or sometimes interesting offers or even just relevant recommendations. Except when users are actually being told about the surveillance side of the deal, they aren’t that cool with it. In the case of iOS users who recently started getting the option to ask apps not to track them, most have opted out, and it’s causing changes in advertising spend between iOS and Android.