TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Utilitarianism, as explained to an alien.

(Via Greg Mankiw.)

Ross Douthat:

I am not particularly nostalgic for the Bush era either. But Obama’s Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty, this president is constantly examining his conscience in public — but if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of a performance. And there are ways in which it may be a more fundamentally dishonest one, because it perpetually promises harmonies that can’t be achieved and policy shifts that won’t actually be delivered.

Jamelle Bouie wasn’t satisfied with Star Trek: Into Darkness:

These aren’t as disjointed as they look, and they all point to my main problem with Into Darkness: I don’t mind that Abrams and Lindelof wanted to remake “Space Seed” and Wrath. What I mind is that it was half-assed, with hardly any thought given to the characters. The first movie could get away with what it was—a long sequence of action set-pieces strung together by a threadbare plot. But this needed to have an actual core, and Abrams couldn’t deliver.

Jamelle is dead-on. My biggest misgiving with J.J. Abrams’s style of filmmaking is that he likes to create the facade of substance in his films without much at all underneath. It’s a science fiction wrapper for little more than adventure blockbusters.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Chase Oliver:

If you’re selling a vacuum, don’t start by pitching its bells and whistles. Instead, sell a clean home. It’s the reason people look to buy a vacuum in the first place. Once you’ve established that you understand — or better yet, sympathize with — your customers’ needs it becomes easier to justify each feature by tracing it back to the product’s intent.

Yes, yes, yes.

I love that phrase—”sell a clean home, not a vacuum.” I might steal it to explain Design for Purpose.

(Via Marcelo Somers.)

The U.S. has a relatively large amount of highly-skilled people who come here to go to school and then find work. And after they do that, we put their life in limbo for years:

“I know this country better than my own country, and I still feel like an outsider,” said Mr. Sant, 35, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2006, and has been waiting for federal officials to approve his green card application for six years. “That’s the thing that bothers me.”

These are people we should not only accept with open arms, but should actively try to get to move to the U.S. And yet we are making it difficult for them to stay. We are not only hurting them, but we are hurting ourselves, too.

Megan McArdle, prompted by the concocted Apple controversy, addresses the corporate tax system:

To sum up, the best way to react to the fact that Apple shelters income abroad is to get rid of the corporate income tax and, at the same time, get rid of the special tax rates for dividends and capital gains. That would not only remove the incentive for these sorts of shenanigans, but also give other companies incentives to headquarter here. And as a bonus, it would collect more taxes from individuals, progressively, so that Warren Buffett doesn’t pay the same tax rate as the widow with a few utility shares.

The Xbox One sounds really nice, and the reason why has nothing to do with games:

“Xbox,” she says, and a small faint Xbox logo in the upper right-hand corner of the screen begins to glow; the Kinect is listening. “ESPN,” she finishes. The guide, which is currently highlighting Seattle’s local channel 4, switches to channel 206: ESPN. Because the Kinect’s voice control is already engaged, she doesn’t need to prompt it again, so she just says “watch.” There’s a flash as the connected DirecTV makes the change, and all of a sudden SportsCenter comes on the screen. The most shocking part about it is the ease; there’s no more hunting through your guide for FX or Travel Channel or whatever network or show you’re looking for. You can just say “Xbox, watch Travel Channel” or “Xbox, watch Sons of Anarchy,” and you’re there. If the show itself isn’t on, a global search will collate all of your options for watching it, from on-demand to streaming services.

Microsoft’s best asset for the post-PC future really is the Xbox, and I hope they start acting like it.

The people at FiftyThree have a terrific look at designing Paper’s new zoom feature:

In this case, however, it was one of those ideas that our co-founder Andrew Allen had stored in the back of his mind, and we knew it was right the first time we looked at it in design. And yet, the road to release is long, and paved with a thousand thorny details. Your attention to those details is what sculpts the experience of the product, and we pride ourselves on being careful sculptors.

Paper’s zoom is a case study in good design. They didn’t toss in an under-conceived feature after someone requested it. Instead, they thought through its purpose and implemented it for that. And the end result is a very natural, useful feature that’s better than most implementations because they considered its context.

I wanted to say, too, that the excerpt quoted above captures something I think all people who work on software and really care about the end result end up feeling: the real work is in those tiny little details that, if you do your job right, most people won’t ever notice, but will add up to an experience that’s absolutely discernible to users and makes your product functionally and viscerally superior to others.

Brian Levin on the concocted Apple tax controversy:

I’m angry because Apple not only engages in the questionable practice of stashing its cash in offshore tax havens, it has become the greatest offender, avoiding US taxes on $74 billion over the past four years. There’s something fundamentally wrong when the wealthiest company in America pays 12.6% in taxes, while my father’s small business, my grandfather’s store and the Korean Deli across the street pay a rate nearly three times higher. And it’s not just savvy accounting or a strategic maneuver—Apple’s tax avoidance has a profoundly damaging effect on our whole country.

(Via Marcelo Somers, who makes a nice response to this as well.)

There’s nothing “questionable” about Apple’s practices. U.S. corporations pay taxes on foreign income (income they earn for sales outside the U.S.) when that income is repatriated, or brought back into the U.S. If it stays outside the U.S., it isn’t taxed. That isn’t “questionable” or “abuse”—that’s how the system is designed. Is it any surprise that Apple, and nearly all companies, keep much of their foreign income outside the U.S. when repatriating it would mean facing a very large tax rate on it?

Minimizing the taxes you pay is neither morally nor legally wrong, or even “questionable.” It’s something we all do, because most people would like to pay only the amount of taxes they’re required to by law, and because it’s morally wrong to expect people to pay more than the law as designed demands. (And for anyone who feels bad for only paying what the tax code demands, feel free to give the Treasury donations. They accept them.)

Moreover, Apple doesn’t keep cash outside the U.S. simply to avoid taxes1; Apple requires capital to fund operations outside the U.S., such as building and operating new retail stores and purchasing capital equipment for manufacturing their products. But, of course, they do keep more cash outside the U.S. to avoid paying taxes on it, which means there is a distortion occurring due to our tax system’s structure—Apple, and most other multinational U.S. companies, avoid repatriating income to the U.S. due to a very high tax rate. This not only creates a more convoluted structure for corporations, but also limits potential investment in the U.S. by U.S. companies. This effect could be reduced by lowering the corporate tax rate or eliminating it altogether.

One other note: some have said that Apple’s done nothing wrong, and it’s the tax system that’s broken. That’s true, but what they seem to imply is that the federal government should simply force U.S. companies to pay corporate tax on all income, whether domestic or foreign, and be done with it. That isn’t precisely a desirable solution, however, since that would (1) encourage companies facing the full brunt of the top tax rate to move outside the U.S., since they have a responsibility to their shareholders; (2) encourage companies to take advantage of the rules to avoid such a high rate, and create more distorted operations and corporate structures as a result; and (3) if the tax system is effective across the entire economy, would then encourage Congress to do precisely what they’ve done all along, which is carve out breaks here and there for certain industries, and create an uneven mess of a tax system all over again.

1. Although they certainly could. Following the tax code’s rules to minimize your tax liability is not wrong, and it’s slightly disturbing to suggest otherwise. [↩]

David Axelrod:

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained.

President Obama in his inaugural address:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

Interesting.

Even if you’ve got zero need for an intranet, you’ve got to watch Igloo’s new videos. I mean, they’re made by Adam Lisagor’s Sandwich Video, and every video they make is awesome.

Igloo has some funny new Sandwich videos to lighten your day (and maybe convince your boss and/or IT to upgrade your intranet to something more human). Check them out:

• Intranet
• Updates
• Versions

(You can also get a free 30-day trial and bring back Cake Fridays here.)

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

A terrific retrospective from Marco Arment about his days working on Tumblr with David Karp:

David always had a vision for where he wanted to go next. I was never the “idea guy” — in addition to my coding and back-end duties, I often served as an idea editor. David would come in with a grand new feature idea, and I’d tell him which parts were infeasible or impossible, which tricky conditions and edge cases we’d need to consider, and which other little niceties and implementation details we should add. But the ideas were usually David’s, and the product roadmap was always David’s.

Conor Friedersdorf:

Obama has not, as Sullivan points out, traded arms for hostages with Iran, or started a war with no planning for the inevitable occupation that would follow. But there are different questions that could be asked about Obama that would perhaps be more relevant to his behavior.

Has he ordered the assassination of any American citizens in secret without due process? Did he kill any of their teenage kids without ever explaining how or why that happened? 

Has he refused to reveal even the legal reasoning he used to conclude his targeted killing program is lawful?

Has he waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers?

Nick Bolton reports on the development of robots to aide in elderly care:

Sherry Turkle, a professor of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” did a series of studies with Paro, a therapeutic robot that looks like a baby harp seal and is meant to have a calming effect on patients with dementia, Alzheimer’s and in health care facilities. The professor said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman share stories about her life with the robot.

“I felt like this isn’t amazing; this is sad. We have been reduced to spectators of a conversation that has no meaning,” she said. “Giving old people robots to talk to is a dystopian view that is being classified as utopian.” Professor Turkle said robots did not have a capacity to listen or understand something personal, and tricking patients to think they can is unethical.