Business – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Apple in China book: what China can do with everything it has learned from Tesla and Apple

June 19, 2025June 19, 2025 by philg

A third post about Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee… (see Apple in China book, Intro and Apple in China, the rise of iPod)

The book’s big theme is that Apple taught the Chinese everything that they now know about making high-end electronics. The author says that Tesla did something similar:

As The Economist later put it: “For all its manufacturing might, China never mastered internal-combustion engines, which have hundreds of moving parts and are tricky to assemble.” Electric vehicles changed the game. But more specifically, Tesla did. China’s ambition in electric vehicles goes back to around 2001, and with hefty government incentives, EVs became embedded in the public transportation system about a decade later. The sector had been so awash in incentives and subsidies that Shenzhen alone had 17,000 electric buses at a time when all of Europe and North America had practically none. Consumers who purchased EVs were often able to get a free license plate, which are otherwise tightly controlled and sold at auction. Despite all this support, EVs and plug-in hybrids together accounted for just 4.8 percent of the new car market in 2019. Tesla broke ground on the Shanghai Gigafactory in December 2018; by late 2019 China-made Model 3 vehicles were coming off the production line. Immediately they were a massive hit, and the Tesla Model 3 was China’s bestselling EV in 2020. Chinese consumers “didn’t want to buy anything being manufactured by Chinese brands; they all wanted Tesla,” says Parikh. “As soon as Tesla came, there was a paradigm shift from consumers, and that’s something the Chinese government saw. This was an opportunity to have the entire EV industry in China compete with, and learn from, Tesla.”

Tesla’s investment in China has worked out brilliantly for China’s EV sector, with quality improving across the board. The share of EVs and plug-ins soared from under 5 percent in 2019 to 38 percent in 2023. And the investment has certainly worked out well for Tesla: Shanghai now accounts for half of the company’s global production. But there are longer-term uncertainties and unanswered questions. “In this game, one American company—Tesla in cars and Apple in phones—gets to win,” says another former Tesla executive. “They don’t care if all their US competitors lose. It’s actually better for them. But on the other side, all the Chinese companies win. They all get to step up and create a massive market where none previously existed.”

What’s the potential downside?

Over the coming year, the onslaught from Huawei would be intense. China’s national champion increased its share of the local market from 20 percent in the first half of 2019 to 27 percent in the second half, and then to 29 percent in early 2020. It began outselling the iPhone three to one in China, particularly threatening because it was taking a bite out of Apple’s luxury dominance. In China’s “premium market”—phones priced between $600 and $800—Huawei share soared from 10 percent in early 2018 to 48 percent a year later, causing Apple’s share to fall from 82 percent to 37 percent. Apple’s hold in the “super premium” market—phones priced above $800—was still impressive, at 74 percent, but it had fallen from 90 percent a year earlier. If Huawei’s success had been confined to China, the damage would’ve been limited. But in 2019 the Chinese brand overtook Apple sales globally. It shipped 238.5 million phones—more phones than Apple had shipped even in its peak year of 2015. The student, as they say, had become the master.

Chinese brands had accounted for just 23 percent of global smartphone shipments in 2013, the year of Apple’s political awakening. But their share surpassed 50 percent in 2020. Brands led by Huawei, Xiaomi, and Vivo gave Chinese companies, in 2022, a cumulative market share in both China and Russia of 79 percent; in Indonesia, 73 percent; in India, 66 percent, per Counterpoint Research. In fact, Samsung and Apple were the only two sizable non-Chinese companies still making smartphones. Taiwan’s HTC, Korea’s LG, Canada’s BlackBerry, and Finland’s Nokia were all basically gone; Motorola was now owned by China’s Lenovo; and global sales of Google Pixel were so low as to be subsumed into the “other” category.

Who saved Apple and its 2SLGBTQQIA+ CEO? A purported threat to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

How Apple got out of this mess was a surprising twist, the stuff of novels. Donald Trump had ascended to the US presidency threatening Apple; instead, he saved it. In May 2019 the Trump administration alleged Huawei was a security threat, citing alleged ties with the Chinese government and the potential for its communications equipment to be used for espionage or cyberattacks. It soon imposed unprecedented sanctions, depriving Huawei of Google services, including the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, and other Android tools—a crippling blow for Huawei phones distributed outside of China. Washington also disallowed American companies from shipping fifth-generation cellular chips to the group.

Apple was suddenly the only game in town for premium 5G phones. Huawei’s share of the Chinese market plummeted from a peak of 29 percent to just 7 percent; Apple filled the void, its China share near doubling from 9 percent to 17 percent.

The book notes how helpful Apple has been to the Chinese government in maintaining the Great Firewall. It also describes how Tim Cook, a brave warrior in U.S. politics (see Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate from 2015, for example) knows when to say nothing:

Tim Cook’s mind in early December 2022 when he was confronted by a reporter on Capitol Hill, en route to meeting privately with senior lawmakers. “Do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest? Do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting COVID lockdowns?” asked Hillary Vaughn of Fox News as Cook walked through the building. “Do you think it’s problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights?” Cook ignored Vaughn, eyes cast downward as he changed direction to avoid her. One supply chain executive characterized the confrontation as “the worst forty-five seconds of Cook’s career.” But his biggest, most astute critic might have been… himself. In 2017, explaining why corporate executives should be more up-front about their values and “lead accordingly,” Cook had told journalist Megan Murphy that “silence is the ultimate consent.” He went on: “If you see something going on that’s not right, the most powerful form of consent is to say nothing. And I think that’s not acceptable to your company, to the team that works so hard for your company, for your customers, or for your country. Or for each country that you happen to be operating in.” The forty-five-second clip of Cook ignoring questions about China played repeatedly on US cable news. Cook’s silence—his ultimate consent—was highly indicative of just how beholden America’s most valuable company had become to an authoritarian state.

When in 2019 the company rolled out Apple TV+, its Netflix-style streaming service, software and services head Eddy Cue issued just two directives to Apple’s content partners: no hard-core nudity and “avoid portraying China in a poor light.” … Apple TV+ isn’t even available in China, but Cupertino understands the country well enough to know when and how to self-censor.

With Tim Cook and Apple doing whatever China wants, what risks remain for the company? According to the author, Huawei’s innovations in hardware and in building its own operating system (HarmonyOS) may enable Huawei to wipe out Apple in what is currently a huge and lucrative Chinese market.

This will be my last post about Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. I’ve left out a huge section regarding the rise of Apple’s business in China, e.g., the Apple Stores that it opened. It’s worth reading, but China is so different from the rest of the world that I can’t think of any practical value for knowing this history.

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Apple in China, the rise of iPod

June 18, 2025June 19, 2025 by philg

Second post regarding Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. This one is about Apple’s shift from making computers to making handheld devices. (See Apple in China book, Intro if you missed Post #1 about this book.)

… just a month after the launch of iTunes [January 2001], hardware chief Jon Rubinstein—aka Ruby—and procurement head Jeff Williams were in Japan and stopped by Toshiba. The Japanese supplier showed them a new hard drive, just 1.8 inches in diameter, with a massive 5 gigabytes of capacity. Toshiba didn’t really know what to do with it, but to Ruby, the implications were “obvious” immediately: this thing could hold a thousand MP3s! It was the enabling technology they needed. “Jeff,” Ruby quietly said, “we need to get all of these.” Williams negotiated an exclusive supply agreement as Ruby made sure the $10 million check they drew up wouldn’t bounce.

Rubinstein and Fadell would later dispute who the key figure was behind the hit MP3 player, but the truth is that its brilliance had multiple authors, reflecting how each domain in the pyramid structure (ID, PD, MD, and Ops) worked on their specialty simultaneously. Ruby had found Toshiba’s disk drive and realized its potential. Phil Schiller, of marketing, introduced the idea of the scroll wheel—probably the feature most loved by consumers, as it reacted to the velocity of each turn and enabled them to race through hundreds of songs in a matter of seconds. Fadell was the overall architect. He presented to Jobs a prototype made from foam core and stuffed with old fishing weights to give it some heft. Jony Ive’s team made it unapologetically white, with a polished, chrome-like stainless steel back, a remarkably sharp turn from the childlike colors of the iMac. It was an unusually high-end material for a mass-market product, giving it a feel unlike any other handheld device. It was also durable and could dissipate heat more effectively than plastic.

The MP3 player would remain nameless for months, until four people in branding tossed ideas back and forth with Jobs. Vinnie Chieco, a creative director, recalls how the team would write down every permutation and then sort them into three piles: the worst, the ones that suck, and the not horrible. He’d come up with one: Troubadour, named after French poets who went from town to town playing music. This thing, too, was mobile, could travel and play music. The metaphor worked. The name didn’t. Jobs had his own preferred moniker, which Chieco remembers but won’t share. Like MacMan—what Steve wanted to call the iMac—his idea wasn’t very good, and Chieco is hesitant to share something now that Jobs can’t defend. The other three people in the room told Jobs they loved his name for the device, perhaps trying to avoid his infamous wrath. But when Jobs asked Chieco for his opinion, the creative director said, “Well, I understand your name is novel, but…” Feeling as if he were putting his head in a guillotine, Chieco told Jobs the reasons he didn’t like it. Meanwhile, he kept thinking in metaphors. He was struck by the all-white design, which looked space-like. Riffing on Jobs’s idea that a Mac computer was the “hub for your digital life,” he considered how in the future, the ultimate hub would be the mother ship. The only way to escape would be in a pod that flies away for temporary adventures, returning to replenish and recharge. He got the idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hey—now it was 2001! It felt serendipitous, like when the Macintosh emerged in the Orwellian year, 1984. He proposed Pod. Jobs didn’t hate it, and over a few meetings it grew on him until it became the obvious name. It just needed one tweak, one letter, and then it was perfect: iPod.

Why did Apple make a phone? It was obvious to everyone that consumers wouldn’t want an iPod once reasonably capable smartphones were ubiquitous. Profits from Apple computers were insignificant compared to profits from the mass market iPod.

Around mid-2005, another project began to gain traction internally. The interfaces team had been toying with multi-touch technology for roughly two years, aided by a start-up Apple had purchased called FingerWorks. Senior engineers from Project Purple knew about it, but the original concept was about rethinking the Mac’s interface. When Steve Jobs first showed Fadell the technology, asking if it might work for a phone, it was far from obvious that the enormous contraption Jobs pointed to was the future of something that would sit on your desk, let alone be shoved in your pocket. “It filled the room,” Fadell recalled. “There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.”

Meanwhile, the fear that the iPod business would be cannibalized by the phone giants continued to fuel anxiety and innovation. “It was an existential crisis,” a senior engineer says. “[We were saying], ‘You realize what’s gonna happen here is this business we built on iPods is going to go away. We need to build a phone.’ ” Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”

(I don’t understand how “cannibalized by the phone giants” made it through the purported editing process of this book. In business, cannibalized refers to a reduction of sales of Product A after the company that makes Product A introduces Product B. In the context of Apple, the iPhone might cannibalize sales from the iPod or a notebook-format Macintosh might cut into sales of desktop Macs rather than take sales away from IBM PCs.)

The iPhone required a lot of new manufacturing techniques, mostly developed by vendors in China and Taiwan, often with significant help from Apple engineers who’d fly over from California.

Another important supplier was TPK, which placed a special coating on the Corning glass, enabling the user’s fingers to transmit electrical signals. The Taiwanese start-up had been founded just a few years earlier by Michael Chiang, an entrepreneur who in the PC era had reportedly made $30 million sourcing monitors and then lost it all on one strategic mistake. In 1997 he began working with resistive touch panels used by point-of-sale registers. When Palm was shipping PDAs that worked with a stylus, Chiang worked on improving the technology to enable finger-based touchscreens, even showing the technology to Nokia. But nobody was interested until 2004, when a glass supplier introduced TPK to Apple. An iPhone engineer calls Chiang “a classic Taiwanese cowboy [who] committed to moving heaven and earth” by turning fields into factories that could build touchscreens. The factory was in Xiamen, a coastal city directly across from Taiwan. “The first iPhones 100 percent would not have shipped without that vendor,” this person says. He recalls Chiang responding to Apple by saying, “ ‘We can totally do that!’—even though [what we were asking was something] nobody in the world had ever done before.” Among the techniques Apple codeveloped with suppliers was a way to pattern, or etch, two sides of a piece of glass to do the touch sensor, at a time when film lithography processes were being done on only one side. Another pioneering technique is called rigid-to-rigid lamination, a process for bonding two materials using heat and pressure, which Apple applied to tape a stack of LCD displays to touch sensors and cover elements to create one material. The process was performed in a clean-room environment with custom robotics.

Instead of selecting components off the shelf, Apple was designing custom parts, crafting the manufacturing behind them, and orchestrating their assembly into enormously complex systems at such scale and flexibility that it could respond to fluctuating customer demand with precision. Just half a decade earlier, these sorts of feats were not possible in China. The main thing that had changed, remarkably, was Apple’s presence itself. So many of its engineers were going into the factories to train workers that the suppliers were developing new forms of practical know-how. “All the tech competence China has now is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple,” O’Marah says. “It’s the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence.”

We might owe most of our current toys to Apple’s 2010 agreement with TSMC, motivated by a desire to reduce its dependence on Samsung:

In 2010, Apple operations chief Jeff Williams reached out to Morris Chang through his wife, Sophie Chang, a relative of Terry Gou. Dinner between them launched months of “intense” negotiations, according to Chang, as Williams pressed TSMC on prices and convinced the Taiwanese group to make a major investment. “The risk was very substantial,” Williams recalled at a gathering for TSMC’s thirtieth anniversary in 2017. “If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double-plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology… volumes.” Williams’s narrative leaves out some of the most interesting facts about the early partnership. One is that Chang wouldn’t commit to Apple’s demands. In a 2025 interview with the podcast Acquired, Chang said that TSMC would’ve had to raise substantial amounts of money, either by selling bonds or issuing more stock. Williams had another idea: “You can eliminate your dividend.” Morris balked at the aggressive suggestion. “If we do what Jeff Williams says, our stock to going to drop like hell,” he recounted. Chang agreed to take only half of Apple’s order. Even this partial commitment forced TSMC to borrow $7 billion, so it could invest $9 billion and devote 6,000 full-time employees working round the clock to bring up a new chips fab in eleven months, according to Williams. “In the end, the execution was flawless,” he said. The partial commitment forced Apple to toggle between Samsung and TSMC, which some in Cupertino saw as a plus—it meant that Apple wasn’t beholden to just one supplier for what serves as the brain within the iPhone. But Srouji’s team found it nightmarish to manage both suppliers. So Apple turned to TSMC on an exclusive basis, establishing over-the-top contract terms to protect itself. A person familiar with the contract characterized it as saying: “We need to make sure that you’re gonna go out of business—if you’re gonna put us at risk of going out of business.” It was a “mutually assured destruction” type of situation, this person says, because if TSMC didn’t perform in any given year, there’d be no iPhone. So the Apple decision was made: “We are going to put all of our eggs in one basket, and then we’re gonna guard the basket.” TSMC’s bet would prove critical for making it the world leader in semiconductor fabrication, with Apple as its

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Apple in China book, Intro

June 15, 2025June 19, 2025 by philg

I recently finished Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. What’s the scale of what Apple does in China?

The CHIPS and Science Act, which is designed to stimulate computer chip fabrication in America, will cost the US government $52 billion over four years—$3 billion shy of what Apple invested annually in China nearly a decade earlier. Let me underscore this point: Apple’s investments in China, every year for the past decade, are at least quadruple the amount the US commerce secretary considered a once-in-a-generation investment.

What’s the scale of Apple?

The number of Apple devices in active use surpassed 2.35 billion in 2025, led by 1.4 billion iPhone users who spend more than four hours a day immersed in their glowing screens. These users represent the richest quintile of people in the world, and Apple can advertise or promote features to them—wireless payment, television shows, music streaming, fitness offerings—for free. In fact, Google pays Apple close to $20 billion a year just to be the default search engine on the iPhone. The control Apple has over its ecosystem is extraordinary: When in 2021 Apple changed how third parties like Instagram and Facebook could “track users”—ostensibly a move to protect the privacy of iPhone owners—Meta estimated the new policy diminished its annual earnings by $10 billion. Meanwhile, revenue from Apple’s own privacy-first ad business was on a path to grow from $1 billion in 2020 to $30 billion by 2026. One advertising executive characterized the change as going “from playing in the minor leagues to winning the World Series in the span of half a year.” On average, Apple’s Services business earns margins north of 70 percent, double that of its hardware, and the business has been growing at nearly 20 percent a year for six years—all before potentially being supercharged by new artificial intelligence features. In short, the notion that Apple is at its peak is patent nonsense. But there is one Achilles’ heel: The fate of all the company’s hardware production relies on the good graces of America’s largest rival.

Don’t take the tech reporting here as gospel. The author has fallen in love with his subject:

The second force was the advanced nature of the Macintosh operating system (OS). It really was a decade ahead of its time when, in 1984, a boyish and handsome Steve Jobs, then just twenty-eight, unveiled the Mac with dramatic flair to a packed auditorium. When Jobs clicked the mouse—itself a novelty at the time—the computer took the air out of the room by speaking.

(The mouse, of course, was 16 years old in 1984. The graphical user interface, as embodied in the Xerox Alto, was 11 years old.)

The seeds of the App Store, in which Apple would take a cut of all sales, were sown circa 1980:

By the end of 1983, the Apple II “had the largest library of programs of any microcomputer on the market—just over two thousand—meaning that its users could interact with the fullest range of possibilities in the microcomputing world.” But Jobs resented third-party developers as freeloaders. In early 1980, he had a conversation with Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman, where the two expressed their frustration at the rise of hardware and software groups building businesses around the Apple II. They asked each other: “Why should we allow people to make money off of us? Off of our innovations?” An attendee of the meeting would recount, years later, that Apple began to “fight” all third-party development.

The book is strong on recounting the rise of contract manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s and on the history of Foxconn:

Foxconn had the humblest of origins. In 1974, two years before Apple was started out of a garage, twenty-three-year-old Terry Gou founded Hon Hai Plastics out of a shed. Gou, who’d just completed his duty in the Taiwanese army, founded the company with $7,500.

As the PC revolution took off in the early 1980s, Gou got in on the ground floor and created a name for himself making reliable sockets and connectors—small components that facilitate communication between different parts of a computer. The conn in Foxconn—Hon Hai’s international name—refers to connectors. “Fox” is just an animal he likes.

Employees were given a Little Red Book featuring the sayings of Terry Gou, some of which were also plastered on the otherwise bare walls. The aphorisms ranged from inspirational to threatening. “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow,” said one.

In 1999, it was a company with $1.8 billion of revenue, far smaller than Solectron, SCI, or Flextronics, its US rivals. By 2010, Foxconn revenues were $98 billion, more than those of its five biggest competitors combined. And Foxconn’s extraordinary growth in those eleven years is the consequence of one client more than any other: Apple.

How much did China grow along with Foxconn?

By the time Mao died in 1976, China was poorer than sub-Saharan Africa. … In just twenty-five years, Shenzhen’s population grew a hundredfold.

Europe is poor compared to the U.S. Why not assemble stuff in Europe?

Once the Shenzhen line for iMacs was up and running, Foxconn established sites on two other continents. In Europe, Foxconn executive Jim Chang found a Soviet-era electronics site in Pardubice, a city of 100,000 people sixty miles east of Prague. The site had previously been run by a state-owned company called Tesla, whose specialty was radar systems and whose biggest client had been the government of Iran. The site had an eerie feel to it, like it had been hit by a neutron bomb. Forklifts stood motionless on the floor and cups of tea, their contents long gone cold, had been left on the tables. In May 2000, Foxconn was able to buy the plant for just 102 million CSK (2.9 million), a fire-sale price because it was bringing in jobs. Foxconn also won from the government a ten-year tax holiday.

The experience in the Czech Republic was an important proving ground for Foxconn and its hub model, but what it really demonstrated was that producing hardware in China was cheaper, more efficient, and less subject to media scrutiny. In China, assembly got done at incredible speed and with few complaints. Workers did twelve-hour shifts and lived nearby in dorms. At the Czech site, workers put in fewer hours and were represented by a trade union; they protested conditions and spoke to the press. Plans to build dormitories met local criticism and were abandoned. Over the course of a decade, Foxconn expanded its work in the Czech Republic, continuing to build for Apple, adding another location, and taking on production for Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and Cisco.

At one point, according to an ex-worker named Andrea, workers making Apple products didn’t receive an annual bonus as they were promised, so they threatened a “strike emergency” just before the ramp-up ahead of Christmas. “Afraid,” the Foxconn managers deposited the bonuses within a week. The incident triggered an audit by Apple, which interviewed workers about their experience. Apple, Andrea said, advocated for better conditions, but “instead Foxconn closed the division within half a year and 330 people were dismissed.” Around the same time, in August 2009, Foxconn shut its Fullerton site, too. How Foxconn laid the Czech workers off is worth highlighting. Mass dismissals—defined as laying off more than thirty people—need to be reported to the Labor Office, but it was important for Foxconn to avoid scrutiny. “What Foxconn did is they dismissed twenty-nine workers every month,” Andrea said. “Each month, regularly, they fired twenty-nine people.” The threat of a single strike ended all large-scale Apple assembly in Europe.

China ended up being the only answer for Apple and pretty much everyone else in the electronics world.

… by 2005, Jobs grasped that there was no going back. That year, a subordinate suggested that a certain project be done in the United States, and Jobs responded curtly. “I tried it. It didn’t work.” The results—in volume, efficiency, and price—were unmatched.

I’ll write more about this book in subsequent posts (e.g., Apple in China, the rise of iPod).

Reminder of what was considered attractive at the time Apple moved manufacturing offshore (source):

Next: Apple in China, the rise of iPod

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Pride Prosecco at Target

June 1, 2025June 1, 2025 by philg

Way back in March of this year (i.e., not during Pride) we were driving from Coral Gables to Jupiter in a Biblical Florida rainstorm. It began to feel unsafe and we’d seen a few accidents so I pulled off the highway in Deerfield Beach to check radar, maybe switch drivers, and possibly simply wait out the rain. I spotted a Target and we decided to make that our rest stop. As we stretched our legs by strolling around the store, our 11-year-old old grabbed a Stella Rosa “Love Series” rainbow-flagged Prosecco bottle and said, “Hey, Dad, for you!”

(One offer rejected by the kids: watching the Disney live-action Snow White movie. In other words, they preferred to die on I-95 than to watch Rachel Zegler.)

I managed to find it on the Target web site later that evening:

Happy Pride, then, to all who celebrate!

Question for Tesla owners: How well does full self-driving work in rain that is heavy enough to force Interstate drivers to slow down to about 40 mph?

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LLMs combined with offshore and immigrant grifters make supervised bank accounts even more necessary

April 17, 2025April 7, 2025 by philg

I’ve written about this repeatedly based on my interactions with old people… the U.S. desperately needs a simple-to-establish bank account, with associated credit card, that can be supervised by a second person. This would be useful for some young people, but it would be primarily for the elderly to prevent them from being cheated out of their savings and Social Security. The idea is that they could enter into small transactions at reliable merchants without restriction, but if they try to buy something over a threshold amount or transfer funds over a threshold, an Account Protector’s approval is sought, e.g., via text message “Grandma is trying to pay $700 for diet pills advertised online. Press 1 to approve.”

‘Gold Grifters’: Inside the growing scam using couriers to pick up gold bars from victims is a recent ABC story:

Kris Owen, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran, had planned to spend his golden years in Indiana with his wife, Karen. They wanted to spend more time with his son and travel the world together.

Owen received a pop-up message on his computer in 2023 saying that his personal information was compromised — and was told to call a phone number.

When he did, an individual posing as a federal agent said they would safeguard his money and instructed him to convert some of his savings into gold bars, Owen told ABC News. After weeks of communications and after receiving what he thought was a letter from the FBI, Owen purchased $80,000 worth of gold bars.

“They told me to wrap it in a box … with Christmas wrap paper,” Owen said.

He then took his gold to a grocery store parking lot near his house, he said, expecting to hand it over to a federal agent so the gold could be kept in a secure location. A car soon pulled up next to Owen and he placed the gold in the back seat before the driver took off.

The FBI and a local Indiana police department had Owen go undercover to try to catch an individual who was supposed to receive $50,000 from him. Owen, wearing a wire, met with the individual at a parking lot and placed a box with fake cash in the individual’s back seat.

Law enforcement followed the individual, who they later identified as Abdul Mohammed, and took him in for questioning. He was charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud.

Mohammed, who later fled the country, was a courier — an individual recruited to pick up gold bars or cash from victims, according to law enforcement officials.

(Our government tortures airlines and private pilots with APIS and eAPIS manifests of who is on every outbound flight and all passengers’ passport details and yet Abdul Mohammed was able to easily leave after being arrested, charged, and then released by our revolving door justice system?)

In an exclusive phone interview, ABC News spoke to a suspected courier from jail as he faces charges in two states for his alleged involvement in gold bar schemes.

Yash Shah, 27, who was originally charged with multiple felonies in 2023 related to the scam, claims he does not know where the gold is going. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation, but he was arrested again last November for his alleged involvement in a Maryland case. He is currently being held without bond in a New York detention facility.

“I’m not a criminal or anything like that,” Shah told ABC News. “I’m just a normal person. They [were] just saying … if you wanna make a little more money, you have to go pick up the package, and you have to just drop it over there. That’s it.”

Shah claims he was hired by someone from India and was paid between $800 and $4,000 to pick up packages, some which contained gold bars. His attorney, Nicholas Ramcharitar, said Shah took between five and 10 trips traveling all over the Northeast as a courier.

Mr. Shah wasn’t suspicious when offered 50X what UPS charges for the same service because… he is not a criminal?

What’s the LLM angle?

“These tech support pop-ups that initiate the whole scam emanate from a call center in India,” Delzotto said. “So we have a lot of focus on India with [a lot of] these illegitimate call centers.”

LLMs will be a lot more successful at fooling us than Indian humans (they still say “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”), so the bleeding out of American wealth to scammers around the world is likely to intensify. Right now our banking system has only two modes: (1) you’re a fully capable adult who can distinguish Agent Abdul Mohammed from a real FBI agent, (2) you’re a mental vegetable who can’t buy socks at Amazon and all of your money is held in trust and the bank takes instructions from the trustee(s). But a typical 79-year-old doesn’t fit well into either of these modes. He/she/ze/they is, one hopes, nearly capable of Mode 1 banking, but some kind of second signature or text message approval or something should be required before $80,000 is withdrawn.

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Why does every “independent” bookstore have the same political point of view?

April 6, 2025April 6, 2025 by philg

Happy International Asexuality Day to those who celebrate (i.e., 50 percent of of people in heterosexual marriages (measured at or after four years)).

Below are some highlighted books from Books & Books, an independent bookstore that started in Coral Gables, Florida in 1982 and now has five locations around Miami.

In the window, Black Queer Dance:

(There were no Black customers or workers in the store when I visited. On March 31, the book was ranked #4,783,207 in sales among all books by Amazon.)

The front door:

(All of these “banned” books could be purchased within the store or checked out for free at the nearby Coral Gables branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library.)

A book about slavery that ended in 1865 is featured in a part of the country that wasn’t settled until 1891 (Coral Gables was incorporated in 1925; Miami in 1896):

Books to teach children about the miracle of open borders:

Coral Gable residents favored closing U.S. borders in 2024 by voting in a narrow majority for Donald Trump.

A book deploring climate change and wealth inequality:

A house right at sea level on the water in Coral Gables will cost $10-20 million. How many of those folks would like to see everyone’s wealth equalized so that we all live in 2BR apartments? Some additional private poolside reading:

Here’s a 4400-square-foot $8.5 million apartment one block away from the bookstore in which a person can read about the horrors inflicted by the privileged and the propertied:

More about Blackness in a store free of Blacks:

If the Black-White conflict isn’t large enough…

Since transwomen are women I can’t know if there were any in the store when I visited. None of the people getting in and out of the passenger seats of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, G-Wagens (“the new Corolla”), and similar cars were uttering feminist slogans or wearing T-shirts like this one from Target:

During my brief visit, nobody in the store either browsed or purchased any book like the above. A book featured in the window ranked #4,783,207 at Amazon and I don’t think that customers in Coral Gables are either more Black or more Queer than Amazon customers overall. The function of these displays, therefore, has to be something other than motivating people to buy the displayed books. What is the commercial function, then? Customers of independent bookstores like to think of themselves as part of the #Resistance during visits whose primary purpose is getting a sandwich and coffee or maybe a cookbook for their never-used dream kitchen?

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AI Product Idea: Alter Ego

March 26, 2025March 26, 2025 by philg

How about this use of artificial intelligence/LLMs… a complete personality upgrade.

Consider that in-person interaction is becoming increasingly rare. Most of what is known about someone’s personality is based on whatever he/she/ze/they has typed into a computer or a phone. There is a range of personality quality and some of us are near the bottom, e.g., gratuitously annoying or offending people. What if phone and desktop operating systems were modified to include an AI personality adjuster? The user’s emails, social media posts, text messages, etc. would all be edited to read like whatever a person with a great (kind, optimistic, non-sarcastic, non-sour) personality would have written.

“I paid $45,000 for this car and your incompetent mechanics haven’t fixed the A/C after three visits” becomes “Thank you and your team for working hard to get my A/C fixed on the last three service visits. I appreciate your diligence, especially since you sold me the car for only $45,000, which I know was an especially fair deal. I am wondering if I can schedule a fourth service on the A/C.”

Here’s a tweet from someone with a terrible personality:

Instead of “How is an organization with a white male leader equipped to demand that others stop being racist?” this comment would be rewritten to “Thank you and your tireless UN colleagues for all of the work that you do to make the world a better place. I hope that you can stay in your Secretary-General job until you’re 95, but if you choose to enjoy a well-earned retirement it would be interesting to see what a Secretary-General of color would do.”

(Note how my reply got only 28 views; X has an algorithm to keep people in echo chambers. It has learned that nothing I write is going to make people who follow the UN happy or interested and, therefore, suppresses views for any comment that I might make on a UN post. Similar replies on conservative users’ tweet have gotten at least a few hundred views.)

This could have saved James Damore, the Google Heretic. His entire manifesto would have been reduced to “Women are so much better at programming than men because they just love a job where they sit by themselves and stare at a screen all day. It would be wonderful if Google would hire more females even if their education and skills don’t appear to be sufficient for the jobs.”

If fed statistics from online dating markets and told to write for success, the AI would rewrite most messages from men to women to be variations on “I am 6’2″ tall and earn $750,000 per year.” (see “Income attraction: An online dating field experiment”, for example) “Rammstein is my favorite group” would become “$10,000 is not too much to spend on a Taylor Swift concert.” The political stuff would be trivial for an AI to handle. If a man wrote “I voted for Donald Trump” that would be tweaked to “I am inspired by Kamala Harris and all of the other amazing Democrat women.”

A social media comment on a post celebrating a female aviation achievement under the Are women the new children? standard would go from “Don’t forget Hanna Reitsch, the first woman to fly a helicopter, and a passionate advocate for her government and nation.” to “Great to see someone breaking barriers.”

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Alaska Airlines DEI

February 26, 2025February 20, 2025 by philg

Here’s the Alaska Airlines July 2024 DEI update:

Their commitments didn’t include committing to flying to Seattle from FLL on February 20, 2025 at 7:00 am. I got a text message from them about cancellation just as I was walking up to the gate shortly before 6:00 am. Note that their plan is a 30-hour delay (the substitute 3-leg flight is on February 21, a day later than the original 2-leg flight):

(A lot of other passengers got texts with the same itinerary and none of them complained to the gate agent because Alaska Airlines had wisely chosen not to send any personnel to the gate. Everyone gathered in a Fall of Saigon scene back at the ticket counter and then at a carousel to retrieve what would have been our checked bags.)

What was Alaska Airlines working on if not getting us to the destination that we’d paid for? The skin tone and gender ID of the pilots: “125 new students enrolled in the Ascend Pilot Academy (26% BIPOC, 36% Female). Surpassed commitment to increase Black female pilots at Air Group by nearly 33%.”

For those concerned about safety, the good news is that a DEI pilot hire can’t crash an airliner that never takes off.

My DEI day started hours earlier. If I’d wanted to do a slow three-leg trip to Fairbanks I could have done it starting at nearby PBI. Instead, I chose to fly from FLL, which is an hour’s drive away. Because it would be 4:15 am and I might want to snooze, I reserved “Uber Premier” at over $190 rather than Uber Comfort at $110. Initially a pavement-melting GMC Yukon was going to show up, but then either the driver canceled or Uber canceled him because he wasn’t expected to arrive by 4:15 am. A 2022 Tesla 3 was substituted. The driver was a nice guy and I learned a fair amount about Teslas (he’s test-driven the new Model 3 and says that it is noticeably quieter inside, the doors close more solidly, and FSD works great). However, I don’t think the Model 3 qualifies as “Premier”; it’s a “Comfort”-class car. Uber still charged the originally quoted $190+ price despite not delivering a “Premier” car. I’m surprised that they haven’t been sued for this by an energetic class action lawyer. Uber doesn’t have a customer service phone number (some sort of AI chatbot instead for questions about charges), which means Uber has pocketed the extra cash for all similar downgrades unless a customer has gone to the trouble of disputing the charge with his/her/zir/their credit card bank.

Here’s part of Uber’s site:

From their 2024 ESG report:

They weren’t committed to keeping the Uber Premier appointment that they’d made, but they say they are committed to “racial equity”.

Rationally I can accept that incompetence and indifference to the customer are both possible (even plausible given the concentration and lack of competition in both U.S. airlines and U.S. ride sharing) without a percentage of corporate focus being devoted to DEI. But it is tough to avoid the temptation to search for “Company X diversity” after a negative customer experience. That makes me a hater?

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Given how quickly Tesla and BYD were built, how could a Honda-Nissan merger ever make sense?

February 5, 2025February 4, 2025 by philg

Honda is in talks to merge with or purchase Nissan. I can’t figure out the rationale. In the old days maybe you’d say that it takes a long time to build factories, establish dealer networks, etc. and, therefore, Nissan’s assets might be valuable. But Tesla and BYD started from nothing and quickly built factories, company-owned stores (better than dealers), engineering, and everything else necessary for being in the car business. In any case, Honda doesn’t have to start from scratch in the car business because it is already well-established in the car business. If Nissan has some good people, Honda could try to hire them away and set them up within their proven-to-be-profitable structure.

What do we see below that Honda doesn’t make or couldn’t make?

The $120,000+ Nissan GT-R is kind of fun, but only about 1,000 are built each year.

More generally, given what Tesla and BYD have accomplished why would a car company ever want to buy another car company?

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