Category: Technology

Facebook Folly

How many website do you subscribe to?

The say 800 million people have Facebook accounts. Those accounts are free. I am one of those subscribers and most likely so are you. I have never purchased anything as a result of having that account. I only go onto the account when I am bombarded by e-mail messages telling me that I have messages that require my response. Usually the messages are from people I do not know but want to be my friend. These are people who “maybe” did meet me somewhere but I can’t remember where and their faces are not familiar to me.

 I must agree with Betty White when she presented her monologue on SNL. “I really have to thank Facebook … I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite. People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I wanna connect with old friends, I need a Ouija Board. Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.”

Betty White Monologue

Apparently Mark Zuckerberg convinced himself and millions of others that his free social media site could be a marketing tool. Betty White is correct. He is trying to sell access to the telephone book.

Buy a share of Facebook? Why? How many people will reach their purchasing decision based upon the things they see on that site. Facebook’s number three advertiser, General Motors, has discontinued their advertising on the site.

Creative Destruction

The capitalist system is also the system of Creative Destruction.  It is industrial evolution driven by the rise of new innovations and the downfall of old technologies.  Kodak’s demise is a perfect example.  Kodak developed the first digital camera and then buried the development to protect its very existence.

Excerpt from Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

in 1589 William Lee, an Englishman, had perfected a knitting machine and presented it to Queen Elizabeth for a patent.  She refused to grant Lee a patent, instead observing, “Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Crushed, Lee moved to France to try his luck there; when he failed there, too, he returned to England, where he asked James I (1603-1625), Elizabeth’s successor, for a patent. James I also refused, on the same grounds as Elizabeth.

Both feared that the mechanization of stocking production would be politically destabilizing. It would throw people out of work, create unemployment and political instability, and threaten royal power. The stocking frame was an innovation that promised huge productivity increases, but it also promised Creative Destruction.

I don’t know the solution.  I do know that there aren’t many blacksmiths or candle makers anymore.

‘all robot’ Manufacturing

May 13, 2012 – LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Japan’s Canon Inc. (JP:7751)(US:CAJ) plans to fully automate its digital-camera production by 2015, becoming the first camera maker to swap out all its workers in favor of robots, the Nikkei business daily reported Monday without citing sources. Canon, the world’s No. 1 digital-camera maker by virtue of an approximately 20% global market share, plans to keep employees displaced by the robots by engaging them in production-control jobs or at “new divisions in growth fields,” the report said. The plants involved in the first phase of the move are located within Japan, but if the fully automated lines are successful, Canon will duplicate the move at three overseas facilities, the report said.

This topic brings up the question of employing the world in an era of automation.  Automobiles were welded by hand held machines but today they are fully automated.


Cisco’s commercial on CNN shows a fully automated factory.  There are no humans to be seen.  One robot breaks down and another says “I can fix that.”  It does and all the machines resume functioning.

So what will people be doing in this new high tech world?  I have not read a solution to that question.