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NYT: IBM PC Division Sold To Advance China's Goals
theodp writes "Back in 2005, Wharton's Michael Useem speculated that IBM's sale of its PC Division to Lenovo was more about ingratiating Big Blue with the Chinese government than getting top dollar for the assets. 'Government relationships are key in China,' Useem explained. Now, a NY Times article on outgoing IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano seems to confirm that Useem's analysis was spot-on. From the NYT article: 'In 2004, I.B.M. sold its PC business to Lenovo of China. Mr. Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.'"
There's a book by Roger L. Martin called Fixing The Game which argues that the problem with large businesses today is that they are focused on the expectation market--maximizing shareholder value--as opposed to the real market--making good products and increasing customer satisfaction. For example, Enron was so focused on shareholder value that they manipulated revenues to increase stock price, while Apple was so focused on products that Steve Jobs was infamously dismissive the importance of his company's shareholders and joked that the one thing that kept him up at night was shareholder meetings.
For once, a CEO thought beyond the next quarterly report. Be careful what you complain about.
Hey, he's only following the example set by the US government.
The only difference is that the US government is selling the entire nation to the Chinese in the form of borrowing/debt to finance out of control spending on programs designed to produce citizens dependent on government for survival in order to help insure election/reelection with promises of more "free stuff", while simultaneously increasing their power over the populace in general through increasing control of ever more aspects of everyday life with ever-more intrusive and choice-limiting laws & regulations, government control of entire sectors of the economy, and the constant threat of removal of the "free stuff".
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm glad the ThinkPad T line hasn't been changed much except for upgrades. The other product lines on the other hand, have suffered enormously.
In my last laptop upgraded I decided to go with a Dell XPS because the ThinkPad T was overpriced here.
none
Gerstner and Palmisano transformed IBM from a lumbering, confused giant into a lithe dancer. I admire them for that. They also taught me to never put my trust in a multinational corporation. You'd think that, by the 1990s, I would have learned that, but, no, I needed further negative reinforcement before the lesson would stick. OS/2 was a very special object lesson -- abandoned by one vendor, then the other. Both vendors had been deliriously enthusiastic, hyping it to levels that were only topped by the Amiga. Unsurprisingly, I also bought into that, as well. Yes, I really know how to pick a winner. After the slow, agonizing deaths of the Amiga and OS/2, I had an epiphany and switched to Linux. My resolve has not been resolute over the years (being a gamer under Linux sucks), but I can credit IBM with driving home the lesson that I should have learned 10 years prior to that: never, ever trust a multinational corporation. It's unsurprising that a corporation willing to treat its customers poorly would also treat its employees poorly. It's just business, though. Business as usual.
The lesson is not such an easy one to learn. Everyone hates Sony, Microsoft, Intel, and other Slashdot whipping boys, but how many people implicitly trust Apple or Google? Well, I don't trust any of them. Multinational corporations exist to make money, not to follow through on promises made to customers. That doesn't necessarily mean you should boycott every multinational corporation, if you're already happy with their products and services -- just be realistic enough to recognize that if they can make more money by screwing you over than by providing good service, most of them will.
Fiscal policy is one way to direct growth in the economy. Infrastructure projects, especially, provide the most bang for the buck in terms of value for money. The only problem is that infrastructure tend to require maintenance which means future funding is in essence commited. Social programs are also useful to ensure what is most fairly termed as equality of opportunity, to help alieviate the inherent unfairness of wealth distribution. It is not fair, as a matter of fact, to deny opportunity of advancement due to ones situation at birth. This is why we spend money on things like education so that we have a more inclusive society where advancement is based on merit, and not solely on whether you have the means to pay for advancement.
Monetary policy is another way to direct growth although it tends to result in bubbles when the interest rates are very low levels to spur investments mainly fueled by debt. When money is essentially cheap, banks and investers tend to do stupid things with all this surplus cash flowing around - like making mortgages to people who they know can't afford it (and then selling the mortgages off at a profit to relieve themselves of any risk), or private equity making leveraged buyouts incurring a large debt on the target company which brings on unsustainable interest payments when the money markets dry up.
Back to fiscal policy, the problem with the US is not that it is spending too much (compared to other advanced economies). It is mosty because public spending in the US is notoriously poor value. For example, the US spends ~8% of GDP on just Medicare and Medicaid, covering only a small proportion of the population. In total the US spends nearly 16% of GDP on heathcare. The UK for example, spends only 8% on its healthcare system that covers everybody, at all ages.
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Actually I'd say that's true of all "isms" including capitalism as we see what a corrupt mess we have in DC now. The problem with scaling an ism to nation size is it lets power concentrate and where power is concentrated its more easily purchased. I do find it kinda funny though that the right uses the word socialist like kiddie fiddler when we've had socialism for the rich in this country for decades. just look at how the banks can treat Wall Street like Las Vegas and keep their profits win they win (using tricks like double dutch and Irish whip tax dodges) and pass the "losses" onto the American people with a too big to fail bailout. Being able to never lose money must be nice, too bad it doesn't work for the peasants.
As for TFA since every company that can is either sending jobs overseas as fast as they can close the factories, to the tune of 21,000 factories in a single decade or using the "how NOT to hire an American" as a how to video I really don't think it matters whether the Chinese bought it directly or they got it from Dell do you? Nearly 10% of the Chinese farmland is so poisoned by heavy metals the food coming from them is toxic, their rivers are so filled with toxins I'm waiting for one to catch fire, and 9 out of the 10 most cancerous places to live on the planet are in China, that last one on the list an abandoned Soviet chemical factory town. Ain't capitalism grand? Kinda hard to compete with those that will drink cancer straight from the tap and send their kids out to play wearing gas masks while taking $200 a month wages for the top workers isn't it? Welcome to the race to the bottom folks, enjoy your place in the unemployment line.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
China is the natural master of Asia. The US has meddled there for no reason except missionary zeal.
Natural master my big brown stnking ass...
Regards,
Rest of Asia (South, South east, south west (including but not limited to india, japan, korea etc.))
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
There is a school of thought which holds that not only will advance in computer technology render communism practical, they'll also render it the only option by destroying the labor market that forms the foundation of a market economy - as computers and automation take over more and more jobs, there may come a point where unemployment becomes so high that a positive feedback effect destroys the economy completly. All it needs is advances in robotics enough to get them out of the factory and behind the till at McDonalds.
Ah, this old piece of copypasta. I've seen this one before. It's been circulating on conservative blogs for years, and sometimes even making its way to a news site. There is a small problem though: It's utterly false. Nothing but a piece of self-serving propaganda written to tell a target audience exactly what they want to hear: Communism makes people so lazy they'll starve, while a free market fixes all. The story actually originated in a publication called 'The Free Market' in 1985.
For one thing, it fails the common-sense test. In a colony on the edge of starvation, so you really think people are going to just laze around and not bother raising crops just because someone else might get to share them too? People are not that stupid, and most of them dislike starving to death. Like all really good pieces of propaganda, it is half true. The Plymouth colony was indeed founded on an initial seven-year collective-property system - that was a standard practice at the time, a simple practical way to deal with the extreme supply shortages in a new colony. After all, you can't run a farm if the owner of the plough refuses to let another use it, and you can't hope to build individual houses for every colonist before winter sets in and kills everyone. It was usual to share all non-trivial property long enough to get everyone settled in, houses built, tools made and industry established. Similarily, there was an initial food shortage. The mistake is in attributing the latter to the former. The actual reason was rather less interesting: European farmers, most of them not even very experienced, with unfamiliar crops and weather far worse than anticipated.
Look at the numbers. The great die-off was in the winter of 1620-1621, during which 45 died from a population of 102. That is the event of which your account speaks. Yet the ship only arrived in december 1620 - if, as you claim, the problems were caused by the use of a temporary collective ownership leading to a lack of hard work than the effects should not have been felt until the following harvest, rather then immediatly upon arrival. Unless you wish to suggest that people were standing around in the snow refusing to build housing because they wouldn't fully own it afterwards, which strikes me as unrealistic.
And of later events? Wikipedia has some figures on the growth of the colony:
December 1620, 99
April 1621, 50 (The first winter of which we spoke)
November 1621, 85
July 1623, 180
May 1627, 156
As you can see, once that first winter passed the colony florished - growth was rapid, and no food shortage around. In fact, this was a florishing economy: In november 1921, almost exactly one year after the arrival of the Mayflower, the Fortune arrived with more settlers - and departed with a trade goods exported to pay off the investors who funded the settlement. Doesn't sound like a communist nightmare to me.
The final damning line comes from your own testament: "The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years." Several years. Yet the colony was already passed the intitial winter deaths and running successful exports after only a single year from the arrival of the mayflower - which means that, by the account you use, that great success was achieved *before* the abolition of collective ownership!
So while socialism may not have been the perfect solution for Plymouth, it wasn't an utter disaster either. It worked, for a time, well enough to get them established, growing and exporting.
Forgot to answer your other question. The amount of waiting for GP consultations is honestly down to your medical centre or surgery (doctors office, usually staffed by a few GPs). Two of my previous GP practices (I moved around a bit) had walk-in sessions to see a GP everyday so you are almost certain to see a GP on the same day, which was great, and if you wanted to see your dedicated GP, you just had to check her walk-in schedule. Those that require appointments usually take urgent matters on the same day, and book you in depending on workload and whether you want to see your dedicated GP or not. In my experience, this was usually in 1-2 days. The most I have waited on to see a doctor for a minor ailment was 5 days, which I found acceptable. On the other hand, some surgeries are terrible at schedeling consultations, especially some of the bigger ones, which means it's probably a good idea to change to another surgery who will give you a good service (In the UK, the GPs are usually private practices that are paid by the NHS through a contract framework and you can choose your GP yourself).
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