RIP

[y66]

 

The praise this week for Andy Grove, who died on Monday at age 79, has been wrapped up in praise for Silicon Valley, where he was a towering figure in the semiconductor revolution and the longtime leader of Intel, the world’s biggest supplier of microprocessors.

 

Lost in the lore is Mr. Grove’s critique of Silicon Valley in an essay he wrote in 2010 in Bloomberg Businessweek. According to Mr. Grove, Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by failing to propel strong job growth in the United States.

 

Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”

 

Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”

 

And yet, an all-out commitment to American-based manufacturing has not been on the business agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, that belief was flawed.

 

The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, he said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable. There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”

 

When Mr. Grove wrote his critique, he was concerned about the corrosive social and economic effects of high unemployment, then 9.7 percent nationally. Unemployment has dropped considerably since then, but problems persist. Insecure, low-paying, part-time and dead-end jobs are prevalent. On the campaign trail, large groups of Americans are motivated and manipulated on the basis of real and perceived social and economic inequities.

 

Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs, many now do so by shifting profits overseas through tax-avoidance maneuvers.

 

The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.” Silicon Valley and much of corporate America have yet to live up to that principle. Teresa Tritch NYT

[Flem72]

Jim Harrison.

[y66]

Merle Haggard

 

[Phil]

Merle Haggard

 

 

I think his birthday was yesterday.

[Phil]

Lost a great showman today :(

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/legendary-artist-prince-found-dead-57-172005660.html?nhp=1

[jjbrr]

Good night, sweet Prince

.

[Cyberyeti]

One of the sounds of my youth, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/03/dave-swarbrick-dies-at-75-fiddler-fairport-convention

 

Somebody I saw live many times

[mike777]

Muhammed Ali 74

 

AKING: Boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 'the greatest of all time,' has died at 74 nbcnews.to/1VCRMf8

 

Truly a great man

[y66]

Farewell champ.

[phoenix214]

Viktor Korchnoi 85:

One of the strogest chess players never to become world champion

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/world/europe/viktor-korchnoi-chess-giant-who-drew-soviet-ire-dies-at-85.html

[ggwhiz]

Muhammed Ali 74

 

AKING: Boxing legend Muhammad Ali, 'the greatest of all time,' has died at 74 nbcnews.to/1VCRMf8

 

Truly a great man

 

I listened to the Thrilla in Manilla on radio and loved the guy.

[Cyberyeti]

Viktor Korchnoi 85:

One of the strogest chess players never to become world champion

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/world/europe/viktor-korchnoi-chess-giant-who-drew-soviet-ire-dies-at-85.html

 

I've a funny feeling I played bridge with Korchnoi in the evening during one of the Hastings chess tournaments, maybe 1988, the chess players used to relax playing bridge fairly regularly in the evenings.

[PassedOut]

Jo Cox

[y66]

Michael Herr, Author of a Vietnam Classic, Dies at 76

 

In an interview on Thursday, the novelist Richard Ford, who was a friend of Mr. Herr’s, said: “‘Dispatches’ gave an emotional, verbal and aural account of the war for a whole generation — of which I am a member — particularly for those who didn’t go. His nose was right in the middle of it, and he wrote exactly what it was like to be in that place and to be that young.”

From Wikipedia:

 

John le Carré described Dispatches as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time" and it featured in the journalism section of The Guardian's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011.

[Fluffy]

My childhood hero is gone. Farewell Carlo. http://iv1.lisimg.com/image/1957484/310full-bud-spencer.jpg

[Winstonm]

Pat Summit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pat-summitt-dead-basketball-lady-vols_us_57704801e4b017b379f64c31?section=

[PassedOut]

Sydney H. Schanberg

[Trinidad]

Jean "Toots" Thielemans, great musician and gentleman.

 

Rik

[paulg]

Gene Wilder - although Willy Wonka will dominate the news, I always preferred his performance in Young Frankenstein.

[barmar]

I think I first noticed him in Blazing Saddles. That movie came out just when my best friend got cable TV, and we watched it over and over -- I was about 13, the perfect age to enjoy all the scatalogical humor.

[Winstonm]

Gene Wilder - although Willy Wonka will dominate the news, I always preferred his performance in Young Frankenstein.

 

It's Frankensteen :)

[mycroft]

Yeth, Mathter.

 

(and I prefer the ex-Waco Kid)

[jjbrr]

RIP Arnold Palmer

[onoway]

Bill Mollison co founder of the permaculture movement which is responsible for remarkable successes in restoring severely damaged and sterile habitat to productive and resilient health, as well as teaching people around the world how to create productive gardens in virtually any conditions. He also was largely responsible for helping farmers in Australia and elsewhere successfully design their farms so as to be able to withstand both flood and drought by water management techniques all based on observation and adoption of natural systems.

[onoway]

just heard that Leonard Cohen is dead. A Canadian icon...a huge loss to the world of poet singer/songwriters. a perhaps timely poem (not song) he is reading here: Democracy