Apple working with US energy company on North Carolina solar farm - Page 2

How about they use some of their excess money to pay living wages to their employees in the United States.

Yeah, but in Dallas the sensors would need to be aimed sideways (horizontally)...

...And in Huston they'd need to be aimed at the ground

Maybe the parabolic dish can concentrate/focus light rays as well as (or instead of) thermal rays


From the site:


SolarTron Energy Systems

and here:


SolarBeam Concentrator Parabolic Solar Concentrator Dish by Solartron Energy Systems Inc

This article seems to be confused about the difference between solar installers and panel manufacturers.

Leaf Solar Power appears to be an installer. Just because the installer is based in the US does not mean that they will not use solar panels manufactured in China. The local installer who put panels on my house certainly did not manufacture them.

One would not expect Apple to use an installer based outside the US.

In short, it's not clear that there is a story here.

About Siri as a home controller...

There are some missing pieces to the puzzle: how; what; with what would Siri control.

There may be an existing solution...

... a company named Echelon (ELON NASDAQ):

Echelon Corporation


Echelon Home Control


From the page detailing the board of directors at the echelon site:


Finally, Echelon even has a network technology named iLON.

Well...if there isn't a story here... that will certainly be a big story, now!

A bit too reactionary to be part of an intelligent conversation...but I will try, no one is blaming Walmart...the problem is the ethos...

Well said, especially the second paragraph...I think we could learn a lot from Germany.

Sorry, but what does that mean? What 'ethos' are you referring to?

The one that less well-off people might subscribe to?

Interesting. Nice work.

I don't have a 4S yet. What does Siri look like?

Two words: "Al Gore".

Funniest thing I've read on AI: "bolstering America's role in the push for renewable power", given the US's stance re global warming and how the military-industrial complex is allowed to pollute with impunity.

Nobody picked it up except GigaOm and Mac Observer.

Not even the media believes this stuff about Apple using American panel manufacturers. Especially since Leaf is not a panel manufacturer.


IMO, AI got snookered by a hopeful owner claiming to have a big deal with Apple.

IMO, AI knows it too, which is why they labeled the story a "feature", despite it being a hard news story. Calling it a feature implies that it is not Hard News.

I don't blame Mall*Wart. I blame the people who shop at Mall*Wart.

I had the original Siri app on the iPhones and iPads...

It was OK... but you couldn't do a whole lot -- and you had to go out of your way to use it.


Siri, on the 4S is imbedded in the OS (maybe even the hardware) and supported by many apps.

It can do more and does it much better than anything I've seen -- Even IBM's Watson can't do things!

On the 4S, Siri is the easiest thing to get to -- just press-hold the home button! No Tap Home then slide to unlock, no double-tap, no Tap-Pause-Tap, no Triple-Tap, no Tap Home then Tap Camera icon, no nuthin' -- just press-hold the home button! .

When Siri pops up you can do a lot of things that you normally would have work harder to do -- text, email, schedule, reminders, notes, quick questions... You do things that you wouldn't bother to do, otherwise.

The overall impression is similar to the first Mac or iPhone experience...

"Well, Of course... that's the way it should be!"


We are at the beginning! I expect that the next version of Siri will let you call up any app, and whenever user input is needed let the user opt to speak instead of type, gesture or press buttons.

I can see some kind of logo mashup for the collaboration between Leaf Solar & Apple Inc.

Stating the fact that working for union-busting Walmart for low wages is 'sad' is incredibly condescending? I don't think so at all. I've worked in some places like that and it IS a sad state of affairs. You're living on another planet if you actually think these are good places to work.

So...an American company want to take advantage of slave labor wages in places like China. The American government allows said company to shut down its American factory and move the jobs overseas, and the American unionized worker loses his/her job, benefits, maybe even his/her house. A Chinese worker gets that same job but has to pay the price of no union protection, fourteen hour shifts, lack of basic benefits, workers rights, etc.. The American unemployed factory worker now has to make ends meet and so takes a job where he can find it, often with a non-unionized service sector company such as Walmart or McDonalds, but his/her wages and benefits are now much lower, so he/she can no longer afford many goods except those which come from places like China, because they've been manufactured at a lower cost. Hence, this is somehow "good for America " because it's "more consumer surplus for America's less well-off"? What's truly sad here is your argument that settling for the lowest common denominator while watching American manufacturing being dismembered by a death of a thousand cuts is something we have no alternative but to resign ourselves to. What we need is to adopt the same cutthroat protectionism and hard-ball tactics as as the Chinese.

Re this being a great thing for Chinese workers. Ironically in "communist China" unions are basically powerless or illegal, and factory workers there now have much less security and fewer benefits now that their government has ditched things like health benefits for state enterprise workers.

Rather than employ a relatively few factory workers, and have relatively many consumers to pay more for goods, why can't we get cheap goods from China AND employ Americans at high value-added tasks too?

Is it inevitable that Americans will only be re-employed at lower skilled, lower-wage jobs? And that the only other choice is to have most Americans pay more for consumer goods, compared with sourcing them from places where capital can be deployed more efficiently?

Is it possible for us to get consumer goods cheaply from the third world, while employing Americans at high value occupations?

Weren't those same factory, mill and mining jobs seen as a step down for all the displaced farm workers who flooded the cities during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy?

ISTM that we are going through a disruptive period, similar in some ways to the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. We are entering a post-industrial economy. I don't pretend to have any answers, but I wonder if we are asking the right questions.

Well, yes and no. "Can you have cheap goods from the Third World (which China certainly is not) AND employ Americans at high value-added tasks, too? " Yes, but not in any great numbers to make a difference. Hence the vast majority of displaced Americans will remain relegated to affording only cheap Chinese imports.
Despite what the Right tell us daily, this isn't some 'disruptive period'. Disruption supposes a return to a previous state, which under the current willingness to ship jobs overseas, is simply not going to be the case. This is not a rehash of our competition with Japan in 1987. This is a new world where we've won the cold war and now face cutthroat foreign state-backed competition (actually, they don't want to compete, they want to drive us under) from the very nations we sought to convert to capitalism. Lesson: be very careful what you wish for.
Solution: play the same cut-throat version of protectionist capitalism before they finish us with a death of a thousand cuts. The question is really this simple: Is it them, or us?