Michael:

Here is your opening sentence in response to my "sure": "There are too many
people here who seem to think that they can fantasize socialism into
existence."  Since you are responding to me,  I think it is fair to assume
that I am one of those who you think tries to fantasize socialism into
existence.  I can tell you I did not miss that point.

In brief. I am working with groups in the streets trying to change people's
minds.  My work work is with chemists in a university department, who  when
successful, think of themselves as inherently meritorious and look down on
others who are not.  I can actually play that game with them because I have
three major grants and they are impressed by money, but I try not to.  The
department staff members, however, are not infused with elitism and they are
worth working with on social change.

So, I don't know where you get the idea that I don't work on changing
people's minds and prefer platitudes, except that you presume it out of
ignorance.  I have been active in this way to the best of my time and
ability since the Vietnam war.

I will stop now.

Larry
  

From:  Michael Balter <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To:  Science for the People Discussion List
<[log in to unmask]>
Date:  Sat, 8 Oct 2011 10:59:21 -0400
To:  <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:  Re: How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity

Larry,

I'm afraid you've missed my point, even though I made it clearly. I don't
know either whether something like an iPod or MacBook could come out of a
socialist system, but it is not idle speculation to discuss it. The reason,
as I also made clear, is that to convince the "masses" that socialism would
be a better system than capitalism we have to convince the masses that
socialism would be a better system than capitalism across the board of human
activities. Those who argue that socialist societies would be stagnant and
unimaginative do so on the basis of the socialist experiments that have
already taken place (which have also suffered from severe human rights
abuses.)

I continue to be amazed at how little interest so many leftists (including
you) have in this central task for the socialist left--changing people's
minds--and how it could and should be carried out, rather than in platitudes
and abstract notions.

MB

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Larry Romsted <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Michael:
> 
> I am disappointed that you did not recognize that my "sure" lighthearted and
> that you then used it as a platform to rant a bit.  I suppose I should have
> known how you would respond by now.  My bad.
> 
> I obviously don't have the faintest idea if technological equivalent of an
> iPod could be produced under socialism, but then neither do you.  To me,
> discussing such a possibility is pure speculation, a kind of mental
> masturbation.   Also, I am no admirer of unfettered technological innovation.
> Lots of useless products are created and hyped to people.  There are also many
> dangerous products with DARPA working hard to create new ones.   I more
> concerned that governments will use all this new technology to produce a 1984
> type societies and I want resist that possibility by helping mobilize people
> in whatever small way I can.  I have no problem using available technologies
> to do that.
> 
> Perhaps some future socialism will produce incredible efficiencies by
> coordinating collective reuse of goods that sustains the environment for the
> billions still alive on the planet, but who knows.  Indeed, Levin's question
> about the future of human social structures is important here.
> 
> Larry
> 
> From:  Michael Balter <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To:  Science for the People Discussion List
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date:  Fri, 7 Oct 2011 18:50:29 -0400
> To:  <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject:  Re: How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity
> 
> There are too many people here who seem to think that they can fantasize
> socialism into existence. If we not concerned about overcoming the ideological
> obstacles to building socialism, then we are not serious about socialism no
> matter how much lip service we might give to it.
> 
> The argument raised by opponents or skeptics about socialism that only
> capitalist competition can generate the inventiveness and innovative spirit
> that created products like MacBooks, iPhones, etc and services like Google,
> gmail, hotmail (the service that Michel Beurre Sale uses) is one that needs to
> be addressed seriously if we are going to eventually convince people to
> overthrow capitalism. After all, that's how these things came about. Could
> they have come about under a socialist system, or would they have sunk under
> the weight of collective wisdom? I'd like to think not, but there's no
> guarantee, and socialists have to win these arguments, not smirk at them.
> 
> MB
> 
>   
> 
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 6:36 PM, Larry Romsted <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>> Sure.
>> 
>> Larry
>> 
>> From:  Michael Balter <[log in to unmask]>
>> Reply-To:  Science for the People Discussion List
>> <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date:  Fri, 7 Oct 2011 17:58:03 -0400
>> To:  <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject:  How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity
>> 
>> Could socialism have produced the MacBook? I hope so.
>> 
>> MB
>> 
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/business/how-steve-jobs-infused-passion-int
>> o-a-commodity.html?_r=1&hp
>> 
>> October 7, 2011
>> How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity
>> By JAMES B. STEWART
>> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/james_b_stewart
>> /index.html?inline=nyt-per>
>> In the early 1990s Compaq Computer was the technology darling of the day, and
>> PC sales were surging. Dell was promoting its build-on-demand model, Gateway
>> computer shipped its products in boxes with Holstein cow markings, and I.B.M.
>> had introduced the ThinkPad with its Little Tramp marketing campaign. Apple
>> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/apple_computer_inc/ind
>> ex.html?inline=nyt-org> ¹s Macintosh was introduced during the 1984 Super
>> Bowl 
>> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/in
>> dex.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , but was considered a marginal outlier with
>> its quirky proprietary operating system.
>> About this time I had lunch with Bill Gates, who dismissed PCs as nothing but
>> components held together by plastic and screws manufactured on low-cost
>> assembly lines, a commodity business with narrow profit margins. The future
>> belonged to software and semiconductor makers like Microsoft and Intel, where
>> the real innovation was going on.
>> This made sense to me, and as the years unfolded, Mr. Gates seemed prescient.
>> The PC makers were mostly reduced to commodity producers; I.B.M. sold off the
>> ThinkPad, Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq and may now abandon the business;
>> Gateway was sold off and the brand has all but vanished. Apple nearly went
>> under. But today, the exception is so glaring as to have stood Mr. Gates¹s
>> prediction on its head: Apple¹s operating profit margins have grown (to over
>> 33 percent), and Apple¹s market capitalization of $347.3 billion this week is
>> bigger than that of Microsoft and Intel combined.
>> Of all Steve Jobs
>> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/steven_p_jobs/i
>> ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> ¹s accomplishments, this, to me, remains both the
>> simplest and the most astonishing. How did he take a commodity ‹ to borrow
>> from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the ³veal gray² plastic boxes that once weighed
>> so heavily on both our desks and spirits ‹ and turn it into one of the most
>> iconic and desirable objects on the planet?
>> ³Steve Jobs and Apple never ‹ ever ‹ wanted to be a low-margin commodity
>> producer,² Donald Norman, a former vice president for advanced technology at
>> Apple and author of ³Living With Complexity,² told me this week. ³Even the
>> Apple II had some charm to it. It was the first personal computer that had
>> professional industrial designers. Before that they were designed strictly by
>> engineers, and they were ugly. Steve was always, if not an artist, then
>> someone who was charmed by style. He had this dream of something beautiful.
>> If it was going to cost more, it didn¹t matter. This was in his genes.²
>> Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of
>> Modern Art in New York, recalled buying a 1990 Macintosh Classic and taking
>> it back to Italy. ³When I got home, I took it out of that brown, padded
>> carrying case with the rainbow-colored Apple logo on it and put it on my desk
>> in Milan. It was like a little pug dog looking at me. It wasn¹t just
>> something I worked with; it kept me company. It had such personality and such
>> life.²
>> My own conversion came much later. When I came across the MacBook Air, I
>> thought it the single most elegant technology product I¹d ever encountered,
>> and not just because it looked good. Its light weight and paper-thin design
>> made it easy to carry while offering all the functions and keyboard of a
>> full-size PC. Even the packaging was so beautiful that I couldn¹t bring
>> myself to discard it. Now I refer to it as my third arm and can¹t imagine
>> life without it.
>> Mr. Jobs ³had an exceptional eye for design, and not just an eye, but an
>> intelligence for design,² Ms. Antonelli said. ³We don¹t talk just about the
>> looks, but how objects communicate: The specific shape, how it feels in the
>> hand, under the fingers, how you read it in the eye and the mind. This is
>> what Steve cared passionately about.²
>> MoMA has 25 Apple products in its permanent design collection. And like many
>> great artists, Mr. Jobs¹s near-dictatorial control of Apple made possible the
>> pursuit of perfection. ³If you¹re a visionary, and a dictator, you can take
>> risks and be consistent,² Ms. Antonelli said. ³NeXT was a risk and a
>> beautiful failure. It brought him back to Apple. The dynamics of Apple and
>> Steve¹s personality and the course of history made for this perfect alignment
>> of the stars.²
>> Also like many artists (Frank Lloyd Wright comes to mind), Mr. Jobs was
>> legendarily difficult at times. ³He has always been focused, driven,
>> demanding and, as a result, very difficult and abrasive,² Mr. Norman said.
>> ³This abrasiveness in the early days was too extreme and was destructive of
>> the company. John Sculley had to fire him. When Steve came back, he had
>> matured. He still had a demanding vision of perfection, but he brought focus.
>> He was slightly less abrasive. He was brilliant at understanding what a
>> product should be and he was a dictator.²
>> ²It takes a unique person to do this,² Mr. Norman continued. ³He
>> micromanaged, which goes against all conventional wisdom about management. He
>> went to product reviews every week. He¹d say, ŒMove that two pixels over.¹ A
>> C.E.O. telling you to move something a pixel? Then he¹d come back a month
>> later, and say, ŒI told you to move that. Why didn¹t you?¹ That¹s a unique
>> characteristic. He cared about details and he remembered.²
>> Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000,
>> interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an ³obsession² and whether it was
>> ³an inborn instinct or what?²
>> ³We don¹t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,² Mr. Jobs
>> replied. ³In most people¹s vocabularies, design means veneer. It¹s interior
>> decorating. It¹s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing
>> could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul
>> of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer
>> layers of the product or service. The iMac
>> <http://nytimes.com.com/desktops/apple-imac-core-2/4505-3118_7-32065020.html?
>> tag=api&part=nytimes&subj=re&inline=nyt-classifier>  is not just the color or
>> translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the
>> finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. ...
>> That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the
>> day we started. This is what customers pay us for ‹ to sweat all these
>> details so it¹s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We¹re
>> supposed to be really good at this. That doesn¹t mean we don¹t listen to
>> customers, but it¹s hard for them to tell you what they want when they¹ve
>> never seen anything remotely like it.²
>> For all his accolades, this aspect of Mr. Jobs was hard for many business
>> people to understand, or to copy. Go into a computer store today, and there¹s
>> a bland array of mostly indistinguishable keyboards and monitors ‹ and then
>> there¹s Apple. Ditto the cellphone stores.
>> ³Most people underestimate his grandeur and his greatness,² Gadi Amit,
>> founder and principal designer of New Deal Design in San Francisco, told me.
>> ³They think it¹s about design. It¹s beyond design. It¹s completely holistic,
>> and it¹s dogmatic. Things need to be high quality; they have to have poetry
>> and culture in each step. Steve was cut from completely different cloth from
>> most business leaders. He was not a number-crunching guy; he was not a
>> technologist. He was a cultural leader, and he drove Apple from that
>> perspective. He started with culture; then followed with technology and
>> design. No one seems to get that.²
>> It¹s hard to find parallels. Braun and Olivetti inEurope had beautiful
>> designs, but never had Apple¹s success. Mr. Amit mentioned Italy¹s Enzo
>> Ferrari, the racecar driver and founder of the Ferrari sports car
>> manufacturer. ³Apple has the status that Ferrari has in Italy,² Ms. Antonelli
>> said. ³It¹s a source of national pride and of pride for every employee. You
>> get to that stature only if you created something so fundamental that
>> everyone loves.²
>> Mr. Amit says he believes Mr. Jobs¹s legacy will be ³the blending of
>> technology and poetry. It¹s not about design per se; it¹s the poetic aspect
>> of the entire enterprise. Compared to Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, he¹s in a
>> different class. I think this is a revolutionary shift. Jobs is a
>> revolutionary character. He shifted the industry and changed our lives
>> through this amalgamation of culture and technology. If you¹re looking for
>> C.E.O.¹s of this caliber, you have to look outside the engineering and
>> business schools. That is truly revolutionary.²
>> Apple now faces competition on nearly every front, and whether it can
>> maintain its competitive edge without Mr. Jobs is a pressing question,
>> especially for Apple shareholders and customers. But everyone I spoke to
>> agreed that Mr. Jobs himself was irreplaceable.
>> ³He was really unique, brilliant, demanding and difficult,² Mr. Norman said.
>> ³Like him or not, it doesn¹t matter; he redefined the music industry, the
>> cellphone industry, computers and animation. You cannot deny the impact he
>> had on the company, the industry and our culture.²
>> 
>> -- 
>> ******************************************
>> Michael Balter
>> Contributing Correspondent, Science
>> Adjunct Professor of Journalism,
>> New York University
>> 
>> Email:  [log in to unmask]
>> Web:    michaelbalter.com <http://michaelbalter.com>
>> NYU:    journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/
>> <http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/>
>> ******************************************
>> 
>> ³Faced with the choice between changing one¹s mind and proving that there is
>> no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
>>                                                   --John Kenneth Galbraith
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ******************************************
> Michael Balter
> Contributing Correspondent, Science
> Adjunct Professor of Journalism,
> New York University
> 
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
> Web:    michaelbalter.com <http://michaelbalter.com>
> NYU:    journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/
> <http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/>
> ******************************************
> 
> ³Faced with the choice between changing one¹s mind and proving that there is
> no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
>                                                   --John Kenneth Galbraith
> 



-- 
******************************************
Michael Balter
Contributing Correspondent, Science
Adjunct Professor of Journalism,
New York University

Email:  [log in to unmask]
Web:    michaelbalter.com <http://michaelbalter.com>
NYU:    journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/
<http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/michael-balter/>
******************************************

³Faced with the choice between changing one¹s mind and proving that there is
no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
                                                  --John Kenneth Galbraith