The Power of Apple and Free Markets, Let's Not Be Nice To Each Other and The Death of The 5 Second Rule

What I like most about the story about Google and Apple taking on the wireless networks in North America is that it validates all the concept of a free market. Economic students and leftist socialist revolutionaries should all pay attention to this story. In a nutshell, the i-phone isn't available in Canada because Apple wants to have generous packages so users can use the Internet almost for free. Apple worked out a deal with AT&T that builds a more direct relationship between Apple and i-phone users and gives away, more or less, internet access and data packet transmissions. However the Canadian carriers have a 19th century robber baron mentality -- they are my networks and I'm going to make you pay for everything. Free is a four-letter word for the carriers but with the i-phone selling at that it is and the demand growing, it's bound to change the way Rogers, Bell and Telus do business. Demand trumps buisness plans and the world is set aright.

Which is a good thing, because everybody hates the phone company. Hating the phone company is a rite of passage for everyone born in the last 50 years, much the same way buying a car and learning to hate the Beatles is. (What I hate most about Rogers is that stupid voice answering system that controls the customer service line. I also hate how it prompts you to give your phone number and explain your problem, but when it finally connects you to real person you have to give your phone number and explain your problem all over again. I thought machines were supposed to make us more efficient, not add another layer of frustration. Haven't we learned anything from Max Headroom? Computer generated personalities are not to be trusted, even when they try to sell us Coca-cola and impersonate Ronald Regan)

It is one thing to be surpassed by Japan in the cell phone wars, a country where they had camera phones, video phone and phones that can get TV signals (for free mind you, but since Japan only has 10 channels not that big of a deal) years before Canada did (and rates so affordable it was like they were giving them away, and none of this 'long-term' contract horse shit) but it's quite another to learn that some countries in Africa have more competitive rates than we do. They don't have enough food, enough medicine or an infrastructure, but they can download Nelly ring tones cheaper than we do. Who said post-colonialism was a bad thing?
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Another good article from the Hitch, this time about offending Muslims. My favourite part:


No, I do not think for a moment that Mohammed took a "night journey" to Jerusalem on a winged horse. And I do not care if 10 billion people intone the contrary. Nor should I have to. But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for "respect."

There's been lots of chatter about the differences between Americans and Brits over the threat of terrorism, especially after that incident at the Glasgow airport where a baggage handler laid the boots to a terrorist. Most pundits argue that Americans would cower in fear in such an incident, condition as they have been over the last 6 years by the media and the US government, whereas here's proof that a Scot would take care of business. In Canada, no doubt, we would forgive any indiscretion by a terrorist in a similar condition as being part of the 'multicultural mosaic' and try to award him a government grant of some kind. The Hitch is having none of it, and refuses to respect a religion that threatens violence if you don't follow its taboos. You can expect people to respect religious beliefs and the right to have them, but you can't expect, or force, people to repsect and follow your religious taboos. (Mr. Fulford has an excellent article about the Danish cartoon protests last year that also treds into this territority.)

(The Hitch also dishes out the same amount of contempt for other religions as well, but the point he is making is that Hindus don't threaten a holy war if you draw a picture of a cow).

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Once again science has let me down. My wife and I have debated the validity of the 5 second rule for years, with me firmly in the corner of the side that says that is perfectly acceptable if you drop a cookie to eat it if you pick it up within 5 seconds. (Of course, you have to take in account of floor surface, location and general conditions. A cookie on the floor of your own kitchen = no problem. A cookie on the floor of a McDonald's men's room = forget man, it's gone.) I've even taught this rule to my daughter, a pure moment of one generation passing down knowledge to the next, much in the same way Inuit oral history has survived for thousands of years. (And this may be what remains of late 20th/early 21st century suburban middle-class existence, told to the wild tribes of nomads who clamber over the rotting hulls of skyscrapers and shopping malls in the far future - once there were a people that put an emphasis on khaki pants and celebrities who behaved badly, who expressed themselves in cliches from TV and ate food that fell on the floor, only if it had been down there no longer than 5 seconds. The wild children of the future will be lulled into a sense of wonder by these stories, just before the civilized gorillas raid their encampment and capture them for slave labour in the banana mines.)

Now some hoity-toight scientists have gone and ruined it for all of us by publishing a study that destroys that concept. Bastards. In a related study,

"the Connecticut research measured the likelihood of the slathering. Two biology majors spent a week dropping Skittles and apple slices in their cafeteria and concluded that it took an average of 30 to 60 seconds for bacteria to form on the food."

Now that's science.