Household Excitement…and Mebbe Somebody Can ‘Splain This to Me

So…we had some excitement yesterday. Let me set the scene for ya’.

Connie had found this great looking recipe for Lemon Chicken Francaise…basically you pound the breast thin, dip in flour and then egg (no breadcrumbs though) and saute so you get a thin crispy coating. Then you set those aside and make sauce out of wine, lemon juice, parsley, and capers.

Well…everything was going great. Chicken was done and crispy, noodle side dish was done and Neil was making the sauce. He pulled the pan off the burner and waited a couple minutes for it to cool off…Connie says it was less than that but they’ve agreed to disagree. Anyways…he thought it was cool enough to deglaze the pan…so with it off the burner but still on the stove with the burner on under the noodles he poured a teaspoon or so of wine into the pan to check if it was cool enough to deglaze. Unfortunately…the wine boiled…which means the alcohol in it boiled as well…and the vapor was ignited by the burner that was on. So the pan caught on fire for a few seconds. Neil’s probably deglazed 100s of pans with wine over the years and never had that happen before. The pan went out pretty quickly…but as fate would have it…the filters under the microwave for the vent fan were almost due for their monthly cleaning…which meant that they had some grease up in them…so the filters caught on fire.

Neil quickly grabbed a pot holder and pulled the filters out…dumping them into the sink where Connie put some water on them and they went out. With the filters gone…the fire in the bottom of the microwave also went out.

So a lot of excitement…but not much beyond that other than the fact that the microwave is toast. Naturally…since the rig is going on 5 years old…that model is discontinued so we’ll have to find some replacement and then Neil and our friend Jeff will install it. Depending on the exact dimensions of the replacement we’ll have to…maybe…cover up part of the hole in our tile where the old one mounted but we’ll figger out something.

Jeff came down last evening and we removed and carried the burned up one outside…otherwise the smell would never, never get out of the rig.

The recipe…by the way…was pretty decent but we over-lemoned it just a tad.

Ok, let’s move on to where I’m just the tiniest bit confused.

Now there are two different kinds of phones you can buy…iOS devices from Apple and Android devices from a variety of makers. Yes, I know there’s Windows Mobile and a couple of other minor players…but basically it’s iOS and Android. Over the 9+ years since the iPhone’s introduction…market share for Apple has varied back and forth between about 10% and about 20%. Now we’re an Apple household…but that’s beside the point for the purposes of me not understanding.

Last week…an “industry expert” posted the market share for Apple vs Android for the Jul-Sep quarter and Apple’s share had declined from the previous quarter to 12%. Immediately the Apple is Doomed naysayers came out all over the twitters and blogosphere and all I saw for a couple of days was that Apple was doomed and Tim Cook who replaced Steve Jobs as CEO was a complete moron. Never mind that they have going on $250 BILLION dollars of cash on hand. Never mind that they’ve been Doomed since 1984 when the Macintosh was first introduced. They’re doomed I tell ya…doomed.

So day before yesterday the website investorsreport.com reports the profits for the same quarter when Apple’s market share was 12% and it turns out that Apple’s share of the total smartphone industry profit for the quarter was 104%. Yes…Apple’s smartphone profits were more individually than the industry as a whole. Samsung was the second most profitable company of the quarter with 0.9% of the total profit and every other smartphone maker lost money in the quarter.

This…of course…bears out the old fallacy…at least to me…that market share is what counts. It’s not…it’s profit that counts. The reason that Apple has low market share compared to Android is that they’re the only maker of iPhones and the “Android” market share is divided among a dozen or more companies…none of which are making any money. This bears out the fact that Apple makes money simply because they choose not to try to compete in the low end, no profit segment of the market. iPhones are premium products priced accordingly…although not any more expensive than comparable Samsung or HTC models…but those builders profits on high end models are wiped out by the cheap junk they also sell.

Turns out that this thing about Apple taking the lion’s share of profits isn’t a one time thing. Here’s a graph I found of the global smartphone profits going back to 2010…and they’ve pretty much always had most of the profits. Doomed they say though.

SmartphoneProfits

So what I’m confused about is just why is Apple doomed. Largest (or second largest depending on the day) capitalization in the stock market, a quarter billion dollars cash in the bank, making all the profit in the global smartphone industry…but they’re doomed. How come BMW…which has a single digit market share…isn’t doomed? Seems simple to me…Apple, like BMW…isn’t interested in bottom feeding market share…they’re interested in profits…which is after all what a corporation is supposed to do.

I dunno…doesn’t make sense to me but mebbe I just don’t understand.

Speaking of elections…we’re so glad that we’re almost out of political season.

Here’s another thing I don’t understand. There’s this guy named Mike Rowe who you may know from the shows Dirty Jobs, Somebody’s Got To Do It, and the voice over guy for Deadliest Catch.

Anyways…he writes this blog…it’s a lot of commentary very similar in vein to Paul Harvey from days gone by…and last week he posted a column entitled Off the Wall, How The Universe Works is Constantly Changing where he wrote about how we went a couple of weeks before from knowing absolutely that there were about 100 billion galaxies in the universe but that a new estimate put it at at least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. The thrust of his column was that science constantly gets better and we’re ‘smarter’ than we were 50 years ago…and that this would continue in the future. In the article he says that anybody that says anything is “settled science” is clearly not a scientist but either a politician or a salesman for a particular point of view. His point wasn’t about climate change or not…but about the futility of saying that anything is settled science. In fact…he didn’t even mention climate change.

Naturally though…he got lots of negative comments…which he knew he would…claiming he was a climate change denier and that clearly climate change was a proven fact and that burning fossil fuels was the single cause of this change. Never mind that those claims are based on limited data…after all…we’ve only been able to measure temperature for about 210 years total and the scientists have drawn world temperature curves for the world going back 10 or 20 million years. Trouble is though…those curves may or may not be scientifically valid. They’re all based on ice samples from Antarctica…and aren’t based on temperature at all but rather the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide in the ice…and it assumes that the carbon dioxide doesn’t move which we know isn’t true. If you go up to the Arctic all of the ice was frozen from sea water…so it obviously contains salt, right? Turns out that ice that’s more than about 20 or so years old doesn’t have any salt in it because the salt…being heavier than water…gradually falls through the ice to the bottom leaving the ice at the top fresh water ice. This is how Neil drank water when he was up on the ice pack shooting torpedoes back in the late 80s. So since the ice cores from Antarctica were vertical and since carbon dioxide is a gas and lighter than water would tend to drift to the top of the ice which is the newer ice. Since more carbon dioxide equals higher temperatures…obviously the temperature at more recent times is higher than it was 10 million years ago…right? And let’s not even get into the fact that there is no such animal as a single number for “global temperature”.

Our opinion is…and has been for years…that it’s definitely getting warmer over the past 100 years or so…but it’s not proven…or not proven…that the variation is anything more than random climate fluctuation…and even if it is there’s no real proof that it’s due to burning coal, cow farts, volcano emissions, or changes in solar flux…all of which also vary over time.

So anyway…after the blast o’ crap that Mr. Rowe got he wrote another column titled The Worst Place In The Universe which attempted to address the…in his opinion unwarranted…criticism of his prior column. In it he talks about a potential planet much larger than Earth somewhere outside the orbit of the object formerly known as the planet Pluto…anyway this planet apparently simply has to be there because we can observe the effects of it’s gravity even though it’s been there along and we’ve simply never found it. He reports that he was in a bar named Grumpy’s listening to two scientists debating the inevitable consequences of ignoring climate change. They asked him for his opinion and he answered “Beats me.” He was then accused of being a “denier”. The thrust of this column was that he just can’t understand why people with skepticism are called deniers if it’s about climate when skepticism is the basis of what scientists are supposed to do.

Anyways…go and read the columns. In fact…you should read Mike regularly as well as listen to his podcast “The Way I Heard It. He encourages free thinking and making up your own mind…he’s a really good read and listen.

Ok, on to interesting stuff of the week.

I think you can definitely trust Ajani here. The human kid Bryan had a similar problem when he was at Longwood University…his username and email were bnlauben…go ahead and sound it out and you’ll get it.