Apple Operations International is registered in Cork, Ireland, but has “no physical presence at that or any other address,” according to the report. Indeed, the corporate entity has existed for 30 years and apparently never had a single employee. Of the three people on its board, all Apple employees, two live in California; 32 of its last 33 board meetings took place in Cupertino, and the Irish director participated in seven of them. Its assets are managed by a Nevada company, and held in bank accounts in New York.
Wonklife
Momma said wonk you out
My problem with the Great Gatsby
Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Great Gatsby. On the other hand, the book is 88-years-old. Perhaps it’s time to get on that.
I can’t go quite as far as Kathryn Schulz. I don’t “despise” the Great Gatsby. I don’t mind Fitzgerald’s moralism. I’m comfortable with the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy being something of a black box. I love the writing and, for that matter most of the book. What I can’t stand is the finale.
The book’s denouement is a series of ever-more insane coincidences. Gatsby and Daisy hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian proves to be Tom’s mistress. Tom persuades her husband that Gatsby was driving the car. The husband kills Gatsby then kills himself.
That’s fine for fiction. Dark Knight Rises wasn’t very believable, either. But it’s a problem for a book with Something To Say. The end of the Great Gatsby doesn’t feel inevitable. It feels unlikely. And thus its lessons don’t mean much.
Reenter the world of the book. Gatsby and Daisy are driving home after the confrontation with Tom. Imagine Myrtle doesn’t run into the street. Gatsby and Daisy just arrive after an emotional, but otherwise uneventful, car ride. Perhaps Gatsby apologizes for trying to persuade Daisy to say she never loved Tom. Perhaps he doesn’t. Maybe Daisy waffles for a few days and leaves Tom and all ends happily for Gatsby. Maybe she doesn’t leave Tom, but Gatsby gets some closure and moves on with his life, luxuriating in being an insanely rich dude who throws great parties. Maybe he meets someone he ends up loving more than Daisy. Maybe he ends up with Daisy but then he goes to jail for bootlegging.
All of these endings are vastly likelier than the ending we actually get. And so the ending we get actually doesn’t tell us that much about America in 1925, or about the conflict between old and new money, or about the decadence of wealth. The book is held up as saying something universal. For me, the unbelievable coincidences that drive the ending means it can only ever say something specific. All things being equal, it’s better to avoid being in the car when your love runs over a pedestrian who happens to be the mistress of the guy you’re cuckolding. That’s good life advice, but rarely applicable.
The counterargument here is obvious: Plenty of other famed books rely on coincidence, or deus ex machinas, to reach their inevitable conclusion. But that’s precisely my problem with the Great Gatsby: Absent its ending, its conclusion is very different. The ending doesn’t repeat the book. It contradicts it.
As Nick Gillespie writes, most of the Great Gatsby perceptively sketches a moment in which new money, new immigrants, a new economy, and new social mores were overwhelming the old order. The old order triumphs in the book, but only with the help of authorial providence. Absent that car ride, Gatsby’s story might have proven a happy one. And 88-years-later, when the film is being made by a guy named Baz Luhrmann in a country run by a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, we know who really won, and it isn’t Tom. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right, at least up until the end.
For Gary Bass, a Princeton professor who has written about humanitarian intervention, the remarkable thing about Clinton’s taking action in Bosnia was that he did it at all. Bass’s general rule is that every time a President sends troops to save lives overseas he risks political disaster; if he stays out, even in the face of calamity, there is little downside.
It’s not all bad news on guns. (via Chart of the day: Gun homicides are down 49 percent since 1993)
There is a bias in medicine against talking to people and for cutting, scanning and chopping into them. If this was a pill or or a machine with these results it would be front-page news in the Wall Street Journal. If we could get these results for your grandmother, you’d say, ‘Of course I want that.’ But then you’d say, what are the risks? Does she need to have chemotherapy? Does she need to be put in a scanner? Is it a surgery? And you’d say, no, you just have to have a nurse come visit her every week.
If this was a pill, you’d do anything to get it
I can’t stop thinking about my meal this morning at Big Star in Chicago. That is all.
Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley's Wannabe Obama
In 2003, having finished law school and moved to the Bay Area, Khanna, then 26, launched an impromptu challenge to the beloved local congressman, the late Tom Lantos, to protest the then 11-term Democrat’s support for the Iraq War. “It was completely unstrategic and probably the most idealistic thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says. Khanna lost the race but acquired a mentor.
Shrugging off Atlas
Now, I can correct in five minutes the 9.5 percent per year number that Eberstadt headlines down to the 1.2 percent per year number that gives a more accurate, more empirical, and less ideological picture of what is going on. But I know the numbers. Many people, Mitt Romney and his peers at the head of the Republican apparat included, do not. So when they see alarming numbers and charts like those that A Nation of Takers throws at them—increases from $24 billion to $2.3 trillion in annual entitlement spending; 100-fold growth; 9.5 percent a year, a doubling every eight years—is it any wonder that they deeply believe in their hearts of hearts that America has become a nation of moochers? (And one wonders: What share of their constituency not paying federal income tax this year understands that, in the eyes of their leaders, they are among the moochers?)
You might imagine that an administration preparing for a war of choice would be gripped by self-questioning and hot debate. There was certainly plenty to discuss: unlike the 1991 Gulf War, there was no immediate crisis demanding a rapid response; unlike Vietnam, the U.S. entered the war fully aware that it was commencing a major commitment.
Yet that discussion never really happened, not the way that most people would have imagined anyway. For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past.
In “Why Are There So Few Women Top Managers?,” Cristian L. Dezso of the University of Maryland and David Gaddis Ross and Jose Uribe of Columbia Business School look at the number of women in top management positions at Standard & Poor’s 1,500 firms over twenty years. They find that the presence of a woman in a top management position reduces, rather than increases, the probability that a woman will occupy another top position. This is particularly true when a woman is chief executive.
