Tom Mullaney in the Chicago Tribune, examines the fact that Starbucks is closing 600 stores and concludes that it is because it has lost its way from an authentic Italian coffee house (as late as 1988), to eventually become a proto fast food chain.

For a long time, Starbucks has effectively been a store selling coffee flavored deserts. A Venti Chocolate Malt Frappuccino with whipped cream, at 760 calories is equivalent to a BigMac AND Fries.

Despite the best intentions of a CEO inspired by a trip to Milan, a Starbucks Latte is a type and size of milk laden drink that is hardly ever drunk in Italy. By combining fat, sugar and caffeine into a beverage that is part of the cultural ritual of an American morning, they had merged the cravings satisfied by both fast food and soda into a liquid package that therefore seemingly didn’t count as calories, and created a business that would naturally become most profitable as fast food in disguise, due to customer demand rather than corporate conspiracy.

In New York, where foot traffic is high, the main ingredient of Starbucks reveals itself by the sickly smell of accumulated fatty milk spills, rather than fresh coffee grounds.

But the reason why Starbucks is shedding premises and staff is simple: a $5 coffee is an easily dispensable luxury in a recession, period.

In case anyone else has had this problem, that was driving me nuts: seems that Macbook Airs have a serious overheating issue that causes the CPU to max out and disable.

The problem happens with CPU intensive applications like Video or Flash. In other words, ordinary web browsing can be difficult. Not all MacBook Airs seem to have the flaw, but a large number do (it may be to do with excessive thermal grease being factory applied to some, which messes up the airflow).

The solution is to throttle the maximum temperature at which your Air will run at 1600 MHz and to run the chip at a lower voltage (which reduces stability). This requires a $10 app called coolbook: downloadable here and using settings here.

Perhaps this causes warranty problems, and you may be asking yourself 1. why can’t Apple sort this out and 2. why do I have to do something like this anyhow, isn’t this a major design problem.

As regards 1, it looks like Apple don’t have a solution yet, so you will just end up wasting hours and hours dealing with them.

2. The Air is clearly a new and innovative machine. First generation, innovative design has a much higher chance of problems. This is why the Hubble runs a 386 Chip. When I was an architect, I worked for what is arguably the worlds most famous practice and at that time almost every building they had designed resulted in a law suit because the roof leaked. You would think that being able to design a building with a non-leaking roof would be a minimum level of competence required of an architect, but that misses the point. The architect was fully capable of designing an ordinary building with a non-leaky roof, but a truly innovative building increased the chances of problems.

Apple is capable of designing a computer that doesn’t overheat, but a laptop that fits in an envelope has increased the chance of problems. Of course, its a bit galling to be throttling your MacBook Air at a time when overclocking a MacBook Pro is making headlines.

With a share price that is, incredibly, at its lowest point since 1955, GM is worth around $6B, while Toyota is worth around $150B. The DOW is the same as in January 2000.

Many of the product press releases I’m emailed claim a ‘green’ angle which is often false. Today’s is for a July 4th Room and Board special, focusing on American made goods:

“As the 4th of July approaches, we thought it’d be a good time to remind you that more than 85 percent of Room & Board furniture is sourced and manufactured right here in the United States. Room & Board is thinking American-made for America’s birthday!”

“This means a smaller environmental impact as these pieces are shipped entirely within the boundaries of the U.S. Room & Board is committed to sustainability and this means high-quality construction, timeless design and the commitment to American-made as it stimulates local economies and helps to keep our suppliers in business and doing what they do best.”

This does make sense from a local perspective, but it is false to claim it to be ecologically sound. Aside from the fact that an American worker has a much higher carbon footprint that almost any other, and US manufacturing growth (rather than services growth) therefore usually has a negative global impact, there is a bigger problem. Transferring goods by land across the US has a higher energy cost than transferring by sea from Europe. If you live in New York, transportation costs mean it is more ‘green’ to by French wine than Californian. This is counterintuitive and uncomfortable, but its the truth.

Being green is fashionable these days, and unlike in the past, its profitable, so it isn’t merely an act of charity. But if you claim something is green that isn’t, you are benefiting as a result of the environment suffering.

The leftwing Huffington Post is now the world’s most authoritative blog, according to Technorati.

In the election runup, although publicly known, I wonder how many people realize that the Huffington Post is named after a power obsessed, failed Democrat who was actually a former Republican extremist .

The ‘Huffpo’ has a proprietor who once campaigned as a Republican to the religious right for the dismantlement of welfare because “big government cheats people out of the spiritual rewards of giving to the needy”; who made her fortune from a divorce settlement after marrying a man she knew was gay; who was a follower and financial supporter of a strange religious cult and who paid less than a thousand dollars in tax in a year she campaigned as a Democrat against ‘fat cat’ tax avoiders, while living in an ostentatiously kitsch 6,000 sq. ft. LA mansion.

(I have just finished updating her Wikipedia entry, should you want details)

Arianna Huffington’s political vacillation is statistically unlikely. To paraphrase Wilde, given that it has tended to be in her personal interest - it looks like carelessness.

It is ironic and sad that in an election year, the Left’s most prominent outlet in the Blogosphere is a site run by someone who represents exactly the same cynicism as the media outlet it rails against - Fox News.

Reading the comments thread on this Gizmodo post about iPhone 3G upgrade terms and the Anger is palpable. But the interesting thing is that there is absolutely nothing new here - subsidized phones linked to exorbitant line rental is the norm. The difference is that the world of computers and laptops is not like that, and the iPhone is part of that culture.

Apple is no longer a renegade company. With iPods and the iPhone, you are conservatively locked into all sorts of things, from being unable to backup, to having to run iTunes and upgrade it every few days, to being unable to roam with a different carrier and having to have double the unusual line rental contract. All this makes for a big opportunity for Google, who will not compromise with the carriers, just as Apple will not compromise with design.

An interesting piece in Science Daily on the evolutionary aspects of humor.

On a related but different note, I have always wondered whether there was more to the familiar movie cliche where someone challenges a king’s authority and the room goes silent, then suddenly the king laughs and everyone follows. The object of laughter is let off the hook, in exchange for looking like he or she was joking - making a fake challenge. The cost of this back down is partial humiliation.

Perhaps the origins of humor are a back down mechanism in potential conflict situations, where one party offers a lack of aggression signal in exchange for humiliation, i.e. being laughed at. In game theory terms, it allows for battles to be won or drawn without physical violence, with the same rules as for conflict, but a lesser cost/benefit of losing or winning.

Obviously, this may just be one facet of humor, but since fighting is such a fundamental behavior common to almost all species, whereas joking is not, I would suspect humor is built upon more ubiquitous traits further down the behavior tree.

I rarely disagree with OM, but Glassdoor.com is something that looked marginal at first, but really profound the more I examined it.

In case you missed what they are about, Glassdoor lets you see salary information as long as you let them know your salary info, anonymously.

Here’s what I like about it:

1. Its very strongly viral and symmetric (readers are publishers), since its based on ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’.
2. It does what the Internet does best - creates a flow of information that used to be proprietary and exclusive.
3. The information has an extremely high value-per-bit ratio.
4. The place where this information resides is extremely fragmented, so the anonymity genuinely covers people.
5. The concept could be extended to anything with a pseudo hidden price and tawdry haggling mechanism - from enterprise software to cars.

In short, I love it, the most elegantly simple startup I’ve seen in a while. The challenge, as with most internet ideas, will be to deal with useless data and spam.

As of June 5th you can buy an electronic machine that builds a copy of itself for $150
The fact that you have to buy a kit of electronic parts rather than some seeds and a watering can, means that there is some way to go.

However, its pretty interesting. Link.