Macs are $535 less expensive than PCs

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“In 2015, IBM let their employees decide – Windows or Mac. “The goal was to deliver a great employee choice program and strive to achieve the best Mac program,” Previn said. An emerging favorite meant the deployment of 30,000 Macs over the course of the year. But that number has grown. With more employees choosing Mac than ever before, the company now has 90,000 deployed (with only five admins supporting them), making it the largest Mac deployment on earth.”

“But isn’t it expensive, and doesn’t it overload IT? No. IBM found that not only do PCs drive twice the amount of support calls, they’re also three times more expensive. That’s right, depending on the model, IBM is saving anywhere from $273 – $543 per Mac compared to a PC, over a four-year lifespan. “And this reflects the best pricing we’ve ever gotten from Microsoft,” Previn said. Multiply that number by the 100,000+ Macs IBM expects to have deployed by the end of the year, and we’re talking some serious savings.”

JAMF

Michael Moore in TrumpLand

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michaelmooreI enjoyed this hour-long stand-up/one-man-show. I’ve seen several of Mr. Moore’s documentaries and liked some better than others. But none of them prepared me for this. If I had to pick one word to describe this… (I really don’t know what to call it. It didn’t feel like a documentary) I guess I go with “personal.” It felt like he was trying to speak “from the heart” as the expression goes to everyone in America. And to Hillary Clinton. Fuck it, there’s no way to describe this and I’d say just watch it but I’m guessing most folks have made up their mind about Michael Moore just as they have everything else (myself included).

I’m a little unclear on his objective. Can’t believe that many people will see this before election day. I watched it on iTunes. I’ll tell you what this reminded me of (a little), a Louis C. K. stand-up special. It was an hour of Moore standing in front of a theater full of people just talking to them. Some jokes, sure, but he really put himself out there. Left me feeling better and it only cost me five bucks.

Tao is just a name for whatever happens

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“The Tao is the pattern of things, but not the enforced law. […] The universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other.”

“You can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao.”

“The vague, void-seeming, and indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our understanding.”

I’m at the point in my life when I occasionally stop, turn and look back down the path, marveling at how I got from there to here. I’ve pretty much decided it’s mostly random. Luck. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong place/wrong time). You’ve seen all the same movies I have so I don’t have to explain what I’m talking about here but I made a short list of those moments that didn’t seem momentous at the time but, in retrospect, made a big difference. Perhaps a few personal examples?

Sometime during college I drove to Columbia, Missouri to take the Law School Admissions Test. I had no interest in law schools but it was a road trip and the girl I was dating knew some people and we wound up partying all night and sleeping on the floor. Next morning I took the test and forgot about it. A couple of years later I graduated and was about to lose my draft deferment. I had applied to a couple of law schools somewhere along the way and got accepted. That kept me out of Viet Nam until Richard Nixon stopped drafting people into that loser of a war and the next day I dropped out of law school. No planning here (at least not conscious planning), just luck.

Couple of years later I applied for a job with the Memphis Police Department. Didn’t get hired so I went to work at hometown radio station. That’s where I met the guy that later hired me and changed my life big time.

What if I hadn’t gone to that honky-tonk on the night that Barb was there with friends? Easy to imagine we would have never met.

I could go on but you get the idea. All these little forks in the road. Few of them seem important and most probably aren’t but I’m only here because I was there. The randomness of this horrifying. Unless things work out well, I guess. Some will argue we are the masters of our fate. Prepare, work hard, make good decisions, etc etc. And let’s not get into Free Will.

I cannot escape the memories of those (seemingly) meaningless decisions or events that changed the course of my life. Is this wisdom? A curse? A better question is: Will I be able to spot the next LCFITR (life changing fork in the road) and would I want to if I could?

Life gets real when the TV goes off

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David Cain says things come into sharper focus when the TV is off:

“For some reason just having the TV on seemed to soften the reality of those mornings, and turning it off seemed to intensify my problems. It was like life finally had room to square up and confront me directly, whereas with the TV on it could only make glancing contact.”

Yes. Everything seems to come into sharper focus when the TV is off. I can go days without turning it on when Barb is out of town. As Mr. Cain points out, nothing wrong with watching something on TV, but it’s so often used as mindless background noise. (I confess I tend to use my smaller screens in a similar manner.)

“One of the least-acknowledged peculiarities about human beings is that we can scarcely bear being in the moment we’re already in. It’s rare for us to truly be at ease in an ordinary present moment, if we’re not being entertained, gratified or otherwise occupied by something. We’re always planning better moments than this current one, or at least trying to soften or improve it with entertainment or food, or anything else that delivers some predictability to our experience.”

Planning better moments. There you have it. How many moments have I missed because I was somewhere back in my head planning a better one?

Is the Self-Driving Car Un-American?

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I don’t know which is more difficult for me to believe: That humans will be on Mars within my lifetime… or that cars will drive themselves. Apparently, both of those things are going to happen and I’m fine with that. “Our republic of drivers is poised to become a nation of passengers,” writes Robert Moor in New York Magazine. Mr. Moor provides a most thoughtful look at where we’ve been and where we’re headed. A few excerpts:

Will middle-aged men still splurge on outlandishly fast (or, at least, fast-looking) self-driving vehicles? Will young men still buy cheap ones and then blow their paychecks tricking them out? If we are no longer forced to steer our way through a traffic jam, will it become less existentially frustrating, or more? What will become of the cinematic car chase? What about the hackneyed country song where driving is a metaphor for life? Will race-car drivers one day seem as remotely seraphic to us as stunt pilots? Will we all one day assume the entitled air of the habitually chauffeured?

Many readers currently blanch at the news that the roads will one day be filled with cars hurtling brainlessly along at high speed. But those people fail to realize one thing: They already are.

Driving correlates with obesity rates, which, separate studies have shown, correlate with poverty rates. Heavy street traffic lowers real-estate values, and the people who live on those streets tend to spend less time outside and have worse relationships with neighbors. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people ages 15 to 29. Emissions have a disproportionate effect on the health of communities of color, and nearly 90 percent of air-pollution deaths occur in poorer countries. A quarter of America’s greenhouse gases are released by our transportation, imposing a future climate cost that will be paid mostly by the nation’s, and the world’s, least fortunate. Meanwhile, 80 percent of car capacity goes unused, which means that most cars on the road, which can seat at least five people, carry only one.

For those of us who see driving as a kind of imprisonment — which, spatially speaking, it quite literally is — an extra hour to work or play (or eat, or read, or meditate, or fix our hair and do our makeup) will be cherished. But for those who see driving as a physical expression of freedom — which, spatially speaking, it also quite literally is — the end of driving will feel like confinement.

 

The Age of Scrutiny

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“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”

“We are (now) in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond.”

— Interface by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (1994)