Another scam from my (least) favorite company

How is this for misleading advertizing, from my favorite company? (See graphics below). It is not an iPad or iPhone, but and !Pad and !Phone. In other words, not Apple products, but Nokia and HP.  Maybe Hong Kong IS becoming like China. It is hard to believe that Hong Kong's major phone and internet and internet TV provider would stoop so low.  On the other hand, I'm not sure why I'm surprised, after their record for the past decade.  Here is the link to the original online ad, though it may not last long. I've copied the images below, but the layout is not quite right. But you get the idea.

Today's SCMP has an article about a Shenzhen company that has opened four "Apple Store" outlets in Kunming. The stores have the same look, logo, and staff uniforms as the real Apple stores. Apple has been unable to register the trademark "Apple Store" because, authorities say, there are too many other "apple" vendors, including fruit companies. Neither "apple" nor "store" are specific enough. Astonishingly, a lawyer interviewed in the story argues that Apple (the CA company) should not complain because this other company (which sells its own cheaper products, but in the same Apple colors) is actually helping to promote the Apple brand. That may be true, but it is also possible that it is destroying the Apple brand's reputation for high quality, and in any case, only the fake "Apple Store" is benefiting from selling the fakes.

Economists discover "No Man Is An Island"!

This is one of NPR's "Most E-Mailed Stories" of a few days ago.

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/04/137526401/the-key-to-disaster-survival-friends-and-neighbors

The Key To Disaster Survival? Friends And Neighbors

by Shankar Vedantam

 ...

“The problem isn't that experts are dumb. It's that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together.”

Those "experts" are economists and political scientists, not anthropologists. This is not new for anthropologists. Notice how the story quotes economists (who begin their theorizing assuming a “rational economic man”) and political scientists (whose work has also been dominated by the rational actor approach) and it becomes “news” that they’ve discovered the importance of relationships. Well, duh!!  This is what anthropologists and sociologists have been saying since Durkheim (1858-1917)! Yan Yunxiang argued in the 1990s that the victims of the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) were those who had no social network (guanxi), many of them cadres who had cut gift-giving ties with relatives in their belief in the universalism and openness of the Party. They had not one to turn to and so starved. That this story is "news" and "most e-mailed" shows how after being thoroughly dominated by models that focus on the individual, economics and maybe the general public are ready to re-discover a more sociological perspective (similar to what David Brooks has done in The Social Animal.)

On Tasteless Tomatoes

There is finally a book that explains why our tomatoes are tasteless: Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook, who discussed his book in a very good interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.  It has been my long-running (and not very funny) joke that tasteless tomatoes were a government plot (because of Dept. of Ag funding for transportable varieties), but now I learn that it is actually Florida's fault.  Good news is that more tomatoes are being grown in northern greenhouses, and coming from Mexico, so may be a bit tastier, but consumers need to choose based on taste, which they have not do so far (maybe because there was not much choice!). So, why are Hong Kong tomatoes (and many fruits) tasteless?

Business Anthropology

Another example that some of the best ethnography appears in the business sections of major papers.  This NY Times article by Steven Davidoff contrasts the values and modus operandi of venture capitalists with those of private equity. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, the difference can be important. The VC are Silicon Valley based, and form a community, so share the spoils. The PE are typically NY based and take over companies to restructure them, or make them run better, before they re-sell them. Often they sell them highly leveraged, or the profit comes out of tax breaks and other accounting shenanigans, which is why many are critical of PE. In the case of Silver Lake selling Skype that is discussed in the article, Silver Lake as a PE could not care less whether they are liked or not, so will not spend the $1 million it would take to allow employees who have left Skype to cash in their options.  On a $4 billion deal, they could afford to make this problem go away. But they are PEs, so they don't care; VCs would have, since you never know who you'll have to work with again in Silicon Valley. Great article.

Rugby t-shirts

Someone should collect pictures of humorous rugby t-shirts.  Here is a start.
 

Women's rugby: Aggressive by nature, rugby by choice.

Rugby: If it wasn't a game, the police would be called out to stop it.

 

Fairport Rugby

Fullback

Maul

Pitch

Ruck

Prop

Lock

Flanker

Center

Hooker

Scrumhalf

Winger

Number 8

Flyhalf

Excesses of Capitalism

The idea that corporations are real persons continues to grew. Now a mutual fund that is an empty shell because it is owned by another entity has been declared the only "person" that can be sued (but since it has no money...). See the NY Times' incredulous editorial here.

Money as Gifts

Princeton sociologist Viviana Zeilizer has an interesting Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes in which she argues that "Nostalgic traditionalists and hard-nosed realists" are both wrong when they argue that money is or is not suitable for gifts. "For over a century, Americans have been demonstrating remarkable ingenuity in turning money into meaningful personal gifts." She has interesting examples from the early 20th century issues of The Ladies' Home Journal of ways that people hide money in cards, artwork, or in boxes and small gifts. Very interesting, but she this tension is strictly American, or "Western." Chinese have no problem giving money as gifts. It is the major form of gifts at the Lunar New Year holiday. There is something about money being dirty, be it from religious or feudal traditions, that still requires it to be hidden or laundered in the West, while it can be used "rationally" or "realistically" in China.