The Washington Spectator

’Tech’ Is Misnomer for Internet Giants | Business
▻http://www.washingtonspectator.org/index.php/Economics/tech-is-a-misnomer-for-internet-giants.html

The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: "First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television." Finally, observed Adams, "with the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure."

They aren’t about math and science and building things. They are about acquiring, processing, and selling information to steer consumers toward a purchase.
Of course, the computer is all these things today, and now with ubiquitous wireless networks, the computer has become the all-in-one mobile device. It’s the phone-camera-computer-walkman-TV-gameboy-GPS all in one.

Je découvre ces « teleological sentences » de D. Adams et je les trouve belles.

With one #algorithm Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin built an advertising giant the likes of which the world has never seen. The first step, in classic Silicon Valley tech form, was to patent the invention in order to create an extremely valuable monopoly. Patent No. 6,285,999, a “method for node ranking in a linked database,” did the trick. Stanford University owned the rights and licensed the invention to Page and Brin (who conveniently put the president of the university on their company’s board of directors). The terms of that license remain undisclosed, but it has #Google paying #Stanford a pretty penny. That single patented equation allowed Google to offer a search engine that provided, on average, search results that were of seemingly higher quality, and more relevant to users.

Then in a flurry of activity that has never stopped, Google’s code writers proceeded to file 228 distinct #patents based directly on the original “method for node ranking in a linked database” invention. On top of this, the company filed another 3,079 patents, the majority of which are intended to monopolize infinitely more clever means of gathering and processing the personal and social information of web users so as to sell ads at higher and higher rates.

So why do we call Google a “tech” company if most of what it does is advertising? (...) Perhaps then #Silicon_Valley ’s finest should be called the new ad industry?

#tech_companies #publicité

How low can you get: the minimum wage scam | Heidi Moore | Comment is free | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/minimum-wage-scam

The low minimum wage is .. as costly for the government as it is cheap for companies. While McDonald’s or other fast food companies save pennies and boost their profitability by paying a low wage, their workers cannot survive on that amount and often end up taking welfare benefits. In 2012, 4.3 million people received welfare benefits and 47 million received food stamps. The number of Americans getting food stamps – a national hunger crisis – has risen in tandem with the number of people unemployed or out of the workforce.

...

Analyst Sarah Millar, of ConvergEx, points out that the US is among the worst nations in providing benefits for low-paid workers:

What the minimum wage debate seems to be missing … is the dialogue that focuses on benefits as the missing element of compensation rather than higher pay. The minimum wage debate is misdirected – among both the workers demanding higher wages and the politicians struggling to determine the minimum wage. Simply put, the problem is not wages: it’s total compensation – that is, wages and benefits.

Where we deviate from the norm is on directly-paid benefits: only 9% of US wages are paid out in the form of benefits, compared to a 16.2% average for the 30 countries surveyed by the BLS. We’re 29th out of 30. That puts us below developing countries like Brazil and Estonia, and far behind developed nations like Japan – which has very similar minimum and manufacturing wages.