avocado8

Bay Area Bullet Points

Greetings from the Apple store in Palo Alto, CA. Al is getting his hair cut, and I came over here to check e-mail, but the Apple store employees seem to have gotten wise to that ploy—they've stuffed and encrypted the Terminal program. Drat!

I wanted to record a couple of random observations that came up yesterday:

• During a discussion about outsourcing and the jobless recovery, Al noted that back in the 80s, when Japan seemed to own everything, Honda opened a plant in the U.S. Lots of folks boycotted Honda, despite the fact that they were creating jobs for U.S. workers. The reason? The profits were going to Japanese companies. Nowadays there's anger that jobs are being shifted overseas to generate profits for American companies. Which would you rather have in the U.S. if you had to choose, the jobs or the profits? I'm thinking jobs, but that's me.
• While driving back from dinner with our friends John and Kathy, we listened to election coverage on KQED. It was a good 40-minute ride from Palo Alto, where we'd eaten, to San Francisco, where we're staying, so we got to hear lots of news and analysis about the Super Tuesday results, as well as the results of ballot measures and Senate races in California. "See?" said Al. "We don't get this in Philly. I miss good election coverage and analysis." "It's not that Philly doesn't offer it," I replied. "It's that we don't drive in Philly." I'd been touting that as one of the benefits of living in the city—that Al's commute is a 10-minute walk, and I don't have one at all. Now I'm realizing that a small commute could be a good thing...

There was one other bullet point I wanted to share, courtesy of our friend John, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was now. I wish I'd followed my instinct and jotted down a note on my placemat at dinner last night. With any luck, John will remember what it was that made me say, "I need to blog about this" and comment on this post send me an e-mail. :)