Carl from Chicago

Business executive interested in history, economics, taxation and energy policy.

Blackberry’s Fall… and Apple Watch Part II

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As I watched the movie “the Big Short” (which I highly recommend) one item I noted was the ubiquitous nature of the Blackberry. Everyone on Wall Street lived on their Blackberry, and much of the action took place via a Blackberry (phone conversations, updates via email, watching stock prices remotely, etc…). A book was written called “Losing the Signal” that covers the rise and fall of Blackberry.

While I haven’t read the book I am intimately familiar with Blackberry, having owned one for many years and waking every morning to see the blinking red light which indicated that I had new emails outstanding. I had an early version with the combined numeric / letter keyboard, which meant you had to hit the button multiple times (with delays) to type a “C” for instance. Like everyone else I was soon able to type at a rapid clip in this insane method and it seemed like an enormous relief when this was replaced by a “full” keyboard.

Blackberry also was a pioneer in instant messaging, another technology whose power I underestimated when I initially encountered it. A co-worker tried to connect to me by messenger and I just didn’t see the use – why not just send an email? Of course nowadays it is completely obvious why messages are useful and email is mainly “just for work” and overtaken by reams of spam. And initially when texts were expensive (remember when your phone plan limited the number of texts?) this enabled text messaging that was essentially “free” (if you owned a phone already). But when you watch the complete and utter fall of Blackberry it must be remembered that not only did they invent and perfect the phone / email hybrid but they also had a head start on messaging, another multi-billion dollar technology.

My Blackberry was more reliable than my iPhone – I received email quickly and with more certainty, especially when compared with the wonky iPhone connections to outlook. However, with the lack of an “App Store” and no touch screen, the Blackberry was doomed by both iOS and Android. Reliability and a keyboard lost to an open system, a touch screen, and a seemingly infinite number of apps from third party programmers. You could look to a Blackberry as a lesson for Apple and their iPhone dominance, but Apple does a lot of things well that Blackberry never did, such as let vast numbers of third parties program for their platform, and continually evolve their platform with new tactile features (touch, GPS, etc…).

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Crazy Chicago Weather

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Earlier this year when I was laid up I bought an indoor / outdoor weather station called Netatmo and wrote about it here. It is a lot of fun and I recommend it highly. It is likely that some of these temperatures are impacted by the sun (although I went to a lot of trouble to keep it out of direct sunlight) although this shouldn’t impact the lows which generally occur at night.

I was struck when I looked at the temperature for October – December. I have lived in the midwest my whole life (traveled a lot) and have never seen this many typically cold months so unseasonably warm. We haven’t had any days below 20 degrees (or at least not on my balcony). This aligns with my experience at the Bears games, which have almost all been nice and warm (and home losses).

We had one day recently with high winds and blowing sleet that was terrible – it felt like I was being sandblasted. We still have snow and big chunks of rock-hard ice on the ground that haven’t melted yet. But that was the exception, and it is likely to all melt away this week.

Not to say that the weather hasn’t been rough in other ways – Illinois and the whole midwest faces flooding from continuous rainfall and my parents’ basement has been inundated numerous times after being mostly dry for decades.

Cross posted at LITGM

Electricity and Ethics and Europe

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When I was a young auditor I was on an airplane heading out to a utility client in Iowa. I sat next to a woman and her grade school aged child. I was making small talk with them and the kid asked me what I did. I said I worked with the electric utility. And he said

Are you the guy who comes over and turns off the power?

The child’s mom was embarrassed and the conversation was muted after that but I never forgot that exchange – the reality that, for the poor, electricity was a bill that had to be paid, and frequently it came ahead of other key necessities which then was brutally enforced by pulling the plug. Electricity is a big bill for the poor.

This discussion is completely relevant to what is occurring in Europe today, as these countries move to wind and solar renewable energy instead of economically efficient coal, natural gas and nuclear power. This great article from Forbes summarizes the current debacle:

To illustrate, Denmark and Germany are the proud wind capitals of Europe, but they also have the highest home electricity prices on Earth, 42 and 40 cents per kWh, respectively, against just 12.5 cents in the U.S…. Undeniably non-sensically, Germany has been paying over $26 billion per year for electricity that has a wholesale market value of just $5 billion

This sort of mass economic distortion (possibly suicide) has a real, human toll:

higher cost electricity (and energy) is horrible for our health. That’s because, since electricity is so indispensable, meaning that it “cannot not be used,” higher cost power drastically erodes our disposable income, which is the very basis of our health – while also disproportionately hurting the poor most. As a percentage of income, poor families pay 5-9 times more for electricity than rich families do. Predictably silently, higher cost electricity in Europe is killing tens of thousands of people a year, ”Excess Winter Deaths,” where older residents on fixed budgets in particular are forced to turn their heat down to avoid overly expensive utility bills. For example, there were 44,000 Excess Winter Deaths in England and Wales in 2014-2015

It is amazing that while Europe is able to penalize the poor and elderly on fixed income in the name of clean energy, their same economic champions, the car companies, ran elaborate schemes to defeat emissions limits on diesel cars in a massive scandal that we’ve all heard about. The cost of remediation and penalties will be in the billions.

Finally, in perhaps the bitterest pill, moving to expensive and unreliable energy sources means that the reliable blood-money energy available from Putin and Russia becomes even more important to maintaining their grid. While Western Europe has been making a (relatively feeble) effort to punish Putin for his atrocities in the skies and in Ukraine, they ignore the obvious morality issues linked to filling his coffers so that he can buy weapons and pay his soldiers that are used for repression and dictatorship in the east. It is amazing that there will be sit-ins for climate change and animal rights but the rights of Ukrainians and fellow European citizens apparently count for nothing if it enables their energy fantasies to be supported.

The Europeans are breathtaking in their ability to unilaterally punish the poor and the elderly and increase their payments to Putin while cheating on emissions testing and pursuing their odd goals of “clean” power. These issues apparently do not keep them up at night despite their real-world effects.

Cross posted at LITGM

Apple Watch Review

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I do enjoy gadgets and for some time I have been eyeing an Apple Watch. Recently a friend of mine pointed out a special at Target where a $499 watch was reduced to $399 with a $100 target gift card (meaning it effectively is $299, since it is easy to spend $100 on target for items you need around your house and groceries). At $299, I decided to “take the plunge” and it effectively is my XMAS gift to myself.

This is what the watch looks like in the box. The box is very long and it contains an extra watch band in case your band gets mangled from over-use. The watch bands also are replaceable – I picked the white one because it was the last watch available at the target that was walking distance from my condo.

Here’s what the watch looks like on your wrist. This is one of the more basic faces, with the time, the weather, calendar notifications, and the “universal” time which apparently is Cupertino. The multiple circle image is their sort of fitness tracker, and the red dot on the top means that I have notifications waiting.

It took me a little while to figure out how to use the watch, and I am still learning. At this point Apple basically includes no useful documentation – they just have a few pictorial pull-outs and then you figure out the rest by going to the web or watching videos on Youtube. When I turned on the watch it needed to be charged, which occurs when a magnetic disk is attached to the bottom of the watch face. It seems to take an hour or two to fully charge the watch. I also upgraded the watch to the version 2+ operating system which took a while (a few hours).

It is important to understand that the watch is of marginal use without your iPhone being nearby. Your watch is basically receiving all of its information and connectivity from your iPhone – it can still tell time and function as a fitness tracker, but it can’t do much else on its own.

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