It now appears that there was never any reason for the US Justice Department to pick any fight with Apple over the encryption of its iPhones. Things happen so quickly now that events from as far back as 2015 are chiefly forgotten, but I'm going to resurrect this one. On December 2 of that year, a married couple targeted a Christmas Party being held by the San Bernardino Health Department to commit a terrorist attack. They killed 14 people and seriously injured another 22. Authorities covered one of the conspirators' work phones (they successfully destroyed their personal phone.) It was an Apple. In the aftermath of that attack, the US Justice Department received several court orders requiring Apple to cooperate with it is unlocking that phone. Apple objected to and challenged all such orders. As it happens, it was not necessary, for national security or for law enforcement or for any other urgent purpose, that Apple put itself in the business of ratting out its cust...
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Every once in awhile we hear econo pundits telling us how evil deflation would be. Why? Well ... deflation is often a symptom of bad times. If a lot of people are out of work and have no purchasing power, demand for a wide range of products will drop and so will the general level of prices, i.e. there will be deflation. This is one way of getting to deflation, and the causes of that symptom are, to those directly affected, bad things indeed. BUT ... deflation there is only a symptom, not a cause of the trouble, and this doesn't rule out the possibility that deflation in other contexts may be harmless, or better-than-harmless. One often encounters a suspicion of deflation that goes beyond any real justification, and this is the background of an expectation that a central bank should program into an economy a mild level of price inflation, say 2 to 3%. Just to keep those deflationary demons away? These thoughts are motivated by Apple's product launching event on March 2...
I don't like the term "mobile wallet" in its digital-world significance. The term refers (and I'm quoting from a banking-industry website here) to a smartphone feature that is linked to a user's credit or debit cards "to make payments in person at a physical point of sale." Got it. Not a very complicated idea. What I don't like about it is the implication that wallets had to become digital in order to be "mobile." Haven't wallets always been mobile? Hasn't that always been the point? A wallet [an "analog wallet" if I need to say that -- a wallet sans phrase] is to be carried, in a woman's purse or a man's pocket. A mobile wallet is now "in" your phone, in some sense of that flexible preposition. I don't really see a significant gain in mobility there. Anyway, the reason for bringing it up is that Apple has now jumped on the mobile-wallet bandwagon. The iPay system, the new mobile phone a...