A Waste of Energy

This comes courtesy of Andy Only-the-Paranoid-Survive Grove, writing in Business Week about how to create jobs in America:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm
Some interesting info from Mr. Grove:

Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.
Apple has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. So for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones.
The cost of creating U.S. jobs in Silicon Valley grew from a few thousand dollars per position in the early years of the Valley to a hundred thousand dollars today.
IMHO, Grove makes more sense than all the politicians in Washington, D.C. when it comes to creating jobs.

Here is an example of a news item that never would have seen the light of day in the pre-Internet age.

Spain’s infamous Dr. Gabriel Calzada who authored a damning study that said Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure was mailed what was initially thought to be a dismantled bomb. The package came from a solar energy company called Thermotechnic. Calzada called the company before he opened the package and asked about its contents. He got some kind of ambiguous response which he initially took to be slightly hostile.

He had a security team open the box to find what was initially taken to be a crudely faked bomb. Calzada took this to mean that Thermotechnic was trying to send him a sinister message.

At least this is how the initial incident was reported. To make a long story short, it eventually emerged that there had been some kind of screw up in the Thermotechnic mail room and Calzada had been sent the wrong package. He was supposed to get some kind of report. Whoever he got on the phone when he called Thermotechnic didn’t know what in the world he was talking about and hence gave him an ambiguous answer.

You can read the breathtaking headlines here. Only much further down in the news item does it emerge that the whole thing was a misunderstanding: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/breaking-green-energy-company-threatens-economics-professor-with-package-of-dismantled-bomb-parts/

Only in our post-it-on-the-Internet-first-figure-it-out-later world does this “news item” even exist. In older less up-to-the-minute times, the situation would have been sorted out long before it made news headlines.