Quentin’s right — Google Maps is terrific. Just type in your postcode and see what happens. Bad news for all those online services like StreetMapUk etc. The verb ‘to Google’ has just taken on a more sinister meaning: to have your business model undermined overnight!
Political photoshopping — audio
Google share price finally exceeds average employee IQ
Neat headline, eh? Not mine, alas, but from Good Morning Silicon Valley, reporting on Google’s extraordinary last quarter.
So what if 98 percent of Google’s business comes from advertising. So what if it has a limited track record and can’t be bothered to explain the dynamics of its business. The company is spitting out money like a runaway slot machine. After the market closed Thursday, Google reported first quarter sales and earnings that blew the doors off even the most optimistic of Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company reported a nearly six-fold increase in profit on revenue that nearly doubled from the comparable period a year ago. Net income for the quarter totaled $369 million, or $1.29 a share, compared with $64 million, or 24 cents a share, for the same period a year ago. Revenue for the quarter was $1.26 billion, a 93 percent increase from the previous year. Wow. The profit results in particular were well beyond The Street’s expectations, and giddy investors eagerly bid up Google shares in after-hours trading. By late Thursday Google’s shares had reached $223.97 — well more than twice the $85-a-share valuation of the company’s initial public offering only last August. “They basically made a mockery of our numbers and Street expectations,” Derek Brown, a senior analyst at Pacific Growth Equities, told the L.A. Times. “It was an extraordinary quarter.”
The glories of privatized medicine
From Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times…
In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending. Amazing, isn’t it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.
So the US spends more on health care. Is the population therefore healthier? Er, no.
Most Americans probably don’t know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries.
So why is the supposedly efficient private system so expensive? Answer: it’s hideously bureaucratic.
Above all, a large part of America’s health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.
But hang on… isn’t it the state systems that are supposed to be hideously bureaucratic?
My very own Tory election poster
There’s a lovely site for generating your own “handwritten” Tory poster. Here’s mine.
The world is flat
If you read nothing else today, read the excerpt from Tom Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat: a brief history of the 21st century in the Guardian. Friedman had the brilliant idea of asking Dell to describe the process by which the laptop on which he wrote the book was made. It’s such a good idea that one hates him for having it. And it makes a very profound point in the simplest, most unobtrusive way.
Years ago, Friedman proposed “the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”.
The Golden Arches Theory stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of McDonald’s, it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries didn’t like to fight wars any more. They preferred to wait in line for burgers.
He’s now come out with a new, updated, theory: the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, the essence of which is that the advent and spread of just-in-time global supply chains in the flat world are an even greater restraint on geopolitical adventurism than the more general rising standard of living that McDonald’s symbolised.
The Dell Theory stipulates: no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, such as Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain, because people embedded in major global supply chains don’t want to fight old-time wars any more.
En passant: imagine the chaos there would be in the electronics and computer industries if China ever invaded Taiwan.
Later…Not everyone thinks of highly of Tom F, however. Here, for example, is a splendidly dyspeptic rant by Matt Taibbi which positively oozes bile from every participle. Sample:
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.
The Sun shines on the Vatican
Apropos Joe Ratzinger’s elevation, the Sun has the best headline of the day: “From Hitler Youth to… PAPA RATZI!”
Holy Smoke!
Cardinals elect elderly reactionary as Pope. Whatever next!
Flash deal
Adobe has paid $3.4 billion for Macromedia, purveyors of Flash animation to a grateful world.
Moore’s Law at 40
Forty years ago yesterday, Electronics magazine published Gordon Moore’s celebrated article predicting that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would continue to double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future. Several years later, the physicist Carver Mead christened it “Moore’s Law”. I met Moore some years ago in Cambridge (where he has endowed a nice library for science and technology), and he was wearing the crappy digital watch which, he proudly declares, cost $15 million. (that’s what it cost Intel to get in and out of the digital watch business).
We met in the University Library and when we’d finished talking discovered that the limo the university had ordered to take him to his next appointment (lunch with the Duke of Edinburgh) had failed to arrive. So I offered him a lift in my chronically untidy car. He climbed in over the crisp packets and tennis rackets and all the other detritus deposited by the kids and nattered cheerfully all the way to Clarkson Road.
When I got home, I told Sue (who was temperamentally an extremely tidy and organised person, and regarded my car as an environmental hazard) about what had happened. She looked at me incredulously. “You did what? You took Gordon Moore in that vehicle!” “Yep”. She went off muttering in disapproval, looked up Moore’s Intel shareholding and calculated that, on that day, he was worth just over $7 billion!