If Arthur Brisbane wants the Times to consider becoming factchecking 'truth vigilantes," this is hopefully not what he had in mind.

At last night's Republican debate (1/19/12), CNN host John King asked the candidates how they would convince a corporation like Apple to employ more workers in the United States:

It employs about 500,000 people in China. It is based in the United States, has some employees here, about 40-something thousand, I think 46,000. Most of them in retail stores and at the headquarters. 500,000 of them are in China.  As a president of the United States, what do you do about that?

The candidates gave the answers you might expect--Santorum advocated for cutting the corporate tax rate to zero, Ron Paul thought the this situation might be partly due to "the union problem."

It's the kind of exchange that's rather difficult to factcheck; it's a political argument more than anything else. But the Times thought a factcheck could be found in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, where the late Apple CEO explained his decision to manufacture in China:

At a dinner party in Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs told the president that the company needed 30,000 engineers to support those factory workers.

"You can't find that many in America to hire," Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Isaacson wrote: "These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them."

"If you could educate these engineers," Mr. Jobs said, "we could move more manufacturing plants here."

Not taxes. Not regulation. Education.

Of course the justification that a CEO uses to take advantage of much cheaper labor available in China is going to sound something like this. It's highly unlikely that Apple could not possibly find thousands of community college-trained workers in the United States.

If you really want to know why Steve Jobs liked manufacturing in China, the Huffington Post singled out a different answer from Isaacson's book

Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

If you want to know why Apple does what it does, Steve Jobs might not be the best source. You could ask one of the company's critics, like Mike Daisey. A recent Times review of Daisey's recent Steve Jobs monologue revealed this about Daisey's research into Apple's Chinese manufacturers:

While the official Chinese workday is eight hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

It doesn't sound like the substandard American educational system explains Apple's corporate philosophy. But it's apparently what the Times believes, because Steve Jobs once said so.

Media Detector, a New York Times blog, has a post today (6/14/10) about a comic book adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses that Apple is insisting be bowdlerized before it can be turned into an app for the iPad--replacing an image of a bare-breasted "milk lady" with a close-up of her face. While calling Apple's decision "disappointing," artist Robert Berry told Media Detector he

did not feel "remotely censored by Apple." "It's their rules," he said. "We’re coming to their dinner party at their house."

When you watch TV on your Sony television, you're not attending a dinner party at Sony's house, at which Sony gets to set the rules. Nor, when you surf the Web on your IBM PC, are you IBM's guests, subject to whatever arbitrary choices IBM wants to make about what you can and cannot see.

If the iPad does become one of the main ways by which people access information and art, as Apple surely hopes, and Apple is able to treat that medium as a private preserve in which free speech rules do not apply, this will distinguish the iPad as a technological advance that is also a democratic retreat.

I'm having trouble getting my mind around the legal case against Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, who purchased an iPhone prototype that was apparently mislaid in a bar, published photographs of it on the Gawker-affiliated blog, and then returned it to Apple when the company asked for its property back.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose you're out walking and a neighbor says to you: "Look at this cool dog I found.  I think I'm going to keep him."  You think you know who actually owns the dog--let's call him Steve--and so you offer the neighbor some money to give it to you instead.  You take a picture of the dog and make a flyer that says, "Steve, I think this is your dog."  When Steve sees your flyer and calls you, you give him his dog back.

Now, are you guilty of grand theft dog?  I'm no lawyer, but I have to think the answer is obviously no--because you have no intention of keeping Steve's dog.

The main difference between the dog situation and the iPhone case is that--even though in each case the stolen property is brought to the attention of and returned to the owner--the primary motivation for purchasing the property is not returning it, but publishing a news story about it. Does this journalistic intention really transform the action from a good deed into a potential felony?

It seems that what the 17 police agencies involved in this case are protecting is not Apple's physical property but its secrets. The spectacle of cops seizing computers from a journalist's home in defense of corporate secrecy is, as CJR's Ryan Chittum (4/26/10) suggests, more than a little creepy.

In a lengthy New Yorker piece (4/26/10) about the Amazon/Apple battle over e-books, Ken Auletta paints some familiar heroes and villains:

"The [publishing] industry's great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses--and help make them profitable. E-books are booming.... But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits." If Amazon gets away with selling e-books for $9.99, Auletta quotes one publishing CEO, "to my mind it's game over for this business." Amazon is depicted as controlling and mercenary:

Many publishers believe that Amazon looks upon books as just another commodity to sell as cheaply as possible, and that it sees publishers as dispensable.... Publishers maintain that digital companies don't understand the creative process of books. A major publisher said of Amazon: 'They don't know how authors think. It’s not in their DNA."

Publishers, on the other hand, are remarkably altruistic: "Publishers' real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy bookstores, which are their primary customers," Auletta writes. But they're equally concerned about the well-being of authors:

Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books....  Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.

It's a good story--but it belongs in the fiction section: The idea that publishers need to break Amazon's $9.99 pricing structure in order to be profitable is self-serving spin. As the New York Times' Motoko Rich reported in a story that bent over backwards to give the publishers' side (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), publishers make about as much from a $10 e-book as they do from a $26 hardcover: $3.51-$4.26 vs. $4.05, by Rich's estimates. The  higher prices that publishers claim are necessary to keep the industry alive will actually give profits a nice boost: to as much as $5.54 for a $12.99 e-book; Rich doesn't give figures for a $14.99 book, but much of that extra price would go to the publisher.

Although Auletta allows publishers to pat themselves on the back for their "author-oriented culture," they give themselves a much better deal than they give writers on e-book sales: While a traditional hardcover sale nets about the same amount of money for author and publisher,  with e-books the publisher takes almost twice as much in profits as they give out in royalties.

The publishers' goal is to get an e-price that gives them sharply higher profits per unit with far less investment--and isn't that every capitalist's dream?  It's a shame that Auletta feels the need to dress that up as some kind of salvation of literature, though.