Yesterday I tried to download an app from Apple and was met with one of those ghastly new security requirements that require you to answer pre packaged security questions. As they point out here, the questions are incredibly stupid, even stupider than those my bank makes me answer. Naturally, there’s no way you can be sure you will remember your answer to most of them, so you have to write them down and then frantically search for them when your way is barred in the future. I thought I could make it easier for myself by using three questions, all of which I could honestly answer with the same word, but Apple was having none of it. Totally infuriating, and as the linked article says, amazingly ineptly done. Given what Tim Cook is being paid, we should expect absolute perfection in everything Apple does. Why should we expect less from a guy that is “earning” enough to support about 10,000 families?
Speaking of Apple, the good folks of Prineville, Oregon have, for the sake of 35 jobs (that’s right folks, that’s 35 with no zeroes, and god only knows how many Prinevillians will get one), given Apple a sweetheart deal that makes the Groton Town Council look like a bunch of sharp operators. Apple will build a data center worth $250,000,000.00; pay no taxes for 15 years, except for fixed payments of $150,000.00 a year. Those 35 jobs are to pay at least 150% of the average wage in Crook County, in which Prineville is situated. That works out to the princely sum of about $24.00 per hour. That means the entire staff may make as much in a year as Tim Cook makes each time he draws a breath. It’s hard to see why the town bothered to get anything at all from the world’s biggest corporation, given the pittance it got. But who am I to complain? Surely Apple needed a tax break or it might have had to break into that pile of cash, drawn from the blood, sweat and tears of thousands of Chinese slaves, on which it is sitting. By the way, a modest prediction: 15 years from now, when the tax bill comes due, Apple will leave for some other Prineville. See, e.g., the way Pfizer shafted New London.
This is an insane country in an insane world. Were we sane, Congress would immediately outlaw the race to the bottom that results from this sort of thing.
All this being said, of course, I can’t wait to get my next Apple toy.
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