Capitalism. Don't blame the snake for being a snake.

Our kids are putting on warpaint and occupying everything except public restrooms. Good for them. May they speed the change we all need. We seem to have a hard time agreeing on what the change ought to be, though. 

I can't tell you what they think it's about, because they prefer hand signals to political manifestos. But I can tell you what it should be about: fences.

One could read news stories about the Occupants and conclude that they categorically hate capitalism, and indeed I'm sure that many of them do … while they snuggle in their North Face tents and download podcasts of the revolution on their iDevices, all made possible by the miracle of capitalism and corporate America.

These aren't stupid people. They know the irony. And they know that capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for all the others.

Capitalism is the rattlesnake in the garden. In the wild, it lives to kill. You cannot make pet of it. It will kill you. 

At the same time, there is no more efficient way of ridding your garden of gophers, rabbits, moles and rats, so you and the snake can grow fat and happy. If only you could keep it fenced in the garden, focused on killing rodents, and out of the house, where it will bite your baby.

You can't do this with snakes, but, good news, you can do it with banks, stock exchanges, corporations and all the other capitalist animals we live with and thrive upon. We used to know this, but we seem to have lost our way.

Unregulated, capitalism will do what it is programmed to do: turn resources into money, ruthlessly and efficiently.  And it is indeed the most efficient way in history to put food on our table, shiny cars in the driveway, big screen TVs on the wall and interesting stuff to watch when we're done working for the day.

If money were all there is to health and happiness, capitalism would always be a benign and useful process. But what the Occupants are saying is that we aren't made of money. We are human beings that need healthy food, shelter, clean air and water to thrive. For capitalism, those things are byproducts; the bait that's used to extract money from us and recycle into more capital. And the ruthless efficiency of the process can have unintended consequences, like cancer. Poisoned air and water. Climate damage. Toxic mortgages. 

Regulations are the fence we use to keep the process focused on protecting our health and welfare, instead of preying upon us. They put real price tags on activities like gas and oil drilling, so that when the shit happens, we can afford to clean it up. They keep activities like power generation from fouling the air and costing the rest of us billions in extra health care. And they keep banks from predatory activities like gambling with our pensions and loan sharking our home mortgages.

A few decades ago, the folks who had the most to gain from unfettered capitalism took down the fences. They rolled back the regulations that kept banks and investment firms from preying on a market of unsuspecting consumers. They made a fortune. And then you know what happened.

There are folks who want to blame consumers for letting themselves get bitten. Fair enough, but the problem is, if these folks don't recover, we all take the hit. Our jobs disappear, our homes lose value, our cities decline. We can't build a future without a healthy consumer class.

Don't blame them. And don't blame the system. 

Fix it.

Thank the Russians for your iPad. Without them there may not have been a Steve Jobs.

I can't wait to read the Steve Jobs biography coming out. I'm a slobbering fan. I still bleed in six colors, even though they changed the logo long ago.

But I'm looking for more than an Apple fix and some juicy details about the private life of an amazing innovator. I'm looking for some dots to connect, a back story, something that may just be between the lines, but should be there nevertheless. I'm looking for how Cupertino made Steve Jobs what he was.

Why should anyone care about that? Because that little town is the home of one of the world's great innovation stories. It's one place where there are jobs and growth. And boy, do we as a nation need to clone that formula for success.

Innovation may not be the magic cure for all of our problems right now, but it sure beats the hell out of whatever comes second. Innovation is the real job creator. Apple's innovations have created and changed entire markets. And in a world that can copy a new idea in six months and put it on the market for a dime on the dollar, Appe-style innovation is the best chance an American business has of staying ahead.

So what does that have to do with Cupertino?

I lived there in the late sixties, along with Steve, in the early days of Silicon Valley. It was just before the apricot and cherry orchards began to give way to microchip plants. During the packing season, the air before dawn would be thick with the smell of a million prunes cooking down at the Mariani plant not far from my house.

But even we kids knew this was changing. We learned it in school. Our school buildings were new and shiny. Our teachers were smart, engaging, competitive. Our science classes were off the charts. We had labs capable of cold fusion, even in junior high. The community was energized with math and science competitions, chess clubs, foreign language fairs, you name it. These things  were creating the culture of knowledge and innovation that have made Silicon Valley and Apple Computer icons of successful innovation in the decades since.

The reason? This is where the Russians come in.

Flash back ten years to 1958. In the midst of the Cold War, the Russians (or the Soviets, as we used to call them) put the first artifical satellite into space. It had the cute name Sputnik. It left the United States feeling stunned and whipped. And then galvanized … the space race was on.

The government poured money into communities around country to develop engineering centers to meet the Soviet challenge. Cupertino was lucky enough to have a huge naval air station, left over from the days of dirigibles, within its boundaries … land that the US Government decided would make for a great lab for testing spaceships. The NASA Ames Research Center was born.

The engineers and scientists who came to Cupertino brought families, and those families needed schools. And those schools had better be up to the standards of rocket scientist parents. So the community invested in eduction to make sure that they were.

Steve's parents weren't rocket scientists. Neither were mine. But kids like us thrived in the Cupertino schools. They went on to become scientists, engineers, mathmaticians, teachers and managers. The perfect workforce for an exploding technology industry.

So when Steve found himself innovating in Cupertino, he found himself surrounded by people like partner Steve Wozniak, who  knew how to turn big dreams into chips-and-wires reality. Cupertino in those days was a primordial soup for innovation. It provided the kind of synaptic connections that gave a dreamer like Steve Jobs arms, legs and wings.

Thanks to the eduation system. Thanks in turn to the educational money pumped in by the local, state and federal governments. And thanks to the kick in the ass from the Soviets.

Those are the dots I'll be looking to connect when I get my copy of the Jobs biography. My family moved from Cupertino after a few years there to another town, without the same urgency and the same educational spark. The difference was palpable, even to us kids.

Today, Apple is still innovating in Cupertino. But for how long? And how many others are there? And what Sputnik moments are there to inspire and challenge us to lead?

Today we argue about how much to spend on paying our teachers, equipping our schools, caring for and protecting our communities, as if those things were an expense, not an investment.

There was a time when we thought different. We should do so now.

Who needs a laptop. Take your iPhone!

Traveling with your iPhone is no big deal. Traveling with just your iPhone, and expecting it to fill in for a laptop, that's something else. I've just returned from a two-week vacation trip with my wife to France, Switzerland and Italy, and thought I'd see just how far the iPhone would go. I outfitted it with apps for writing, blogging, sightseeing, booking hotels and airplane flights and brought along a Bluetooth keyboard to speed up typing. What worked? What didn't? Here's a rundown.

AT&T Phone and Data Roaming -- works.
iPhones work in Europe. Period. They just do. Of course, if you don't protect yourself from roaming charges, they will burn a big hole in your bank account too. I bought an international phone roaming package for $5 a month that knocked the $1.29/minute airtime charge down to $.99. My phone worked flawlessly everywhere I went. I also bought a data roaming package -- $50 for 50 megabytes, which turned out to be too small by half (more about that below). Fortunately, AT&T will let you upgrade the package on the fly, saving you big bucks over the pay-as-you-go rate of $5 a meg. AT&T gives you instructions on how to control and monitor your data usage, using the 'Usage' and 'Network' menus of your Settings app. Wi-fi, of course, replaces data roaming where you can get it ... free in the better hotels, available at various charges in airports and other expected spots. Data roaming worked flawlessly everywhere I went.

Skype: Works and saves you money
In two weeks, I used 43 minutes of AT&T airtime. I would have used more, much more, but I used Skype instead for several calls that ran upwards of a half hour each. Skype worked as well as it does at home, even with incoming calls and voicemail. I have a Skype phone number in addition to my regular Skype name. It's a US phone number and it costs $2.95 a month. As far as I can tell, all my calls between this number and other US phones were free of Skype charges, just like they are at home. Skype calls from my phone to Euro numbers were billed at the Skype rates ... typically a few pennies a minute. Great way to beat AT&T's airtime charges, right? Well, yes, but Skype burns data. I couldn't measure this, but my gut tells me that even with data roaming charges included, Skype was the way to go for long calls to the US...or anywhere else.

Facebook app: Of course it works, and it's even more addicting when you're overseas
Who can resist the temptation to check in to the Bridge of Sighs or post a cool video or a picture of an Italian bidet and ask his FB friends what they think it is? I sure couldn't. The iPhone's Facebook made it all too easy to yield to temptation ... and burn through data roaming at an alarming rate. Next time, wi-fi only for Facebook! I promise!

iPhone Camera: There are better cameras, of course
We bought a new camera for this trip. My wife, the better photographer, used it most of the time and it took great photos ... much better than my iPhone 3GS. I'm sure it would have taken better videos too. But there's something about the ease and unobtrusiveness of the iPhone that allowed me to get some candid videos that wouldn't have happened any other way. Most of them uploaded either to this blog or directly to FaceBook (data burn!) with ease ... especially when we were on wi-fi.

Bluetooth keyboard: what a joy!
My Bluetooth keyboard (the light, low-profile aluminum Apple version) paired up with iPhone just fine, though not on the first go. And it was a kick to use it to type emails, blog posts and whatever .... I felt like I was getting away with something. And the keyboard takes up zero space in luggage. It's a great idea if you're going to use a phone (or an iPad, for that matter -- everyone on the road seems to be using one nowadays) as a laptop substitute.

iBooks app: Lifesaver
This was my first experience with an e-book app. I sampled four books for free, then bought complete versions of two crime novels to read. Bye-bye paperbacks ... at least as long as the batteries hold out.

BlogPress blogging app: perfect
Only two things kept me from using BlogPress day and night for insightful blog entries that included on-the-spot uploads of video and photos from my iPhone: the cost of data roaming (and/or wifi) and my own conscience (it's a vacation, stupid!) The program is almost flawless, and elegantly simple. It uploads your photos to its own server, your videos to YouTube, and it automatically puts out Facebook notices and Twitter tweets about your new blog entry. The only bug I found was the 'Location' feature ... I assume it pulls your current location and automatically enters it into the Location field of your blog entry. Never worked for me, and crashed the iPhone a few times. Just don't use it.

Kayak booking app -- too slow
Unless you're desperate to find something online and you have a lot of time, skip this one. So many of its listings have data that require you to leave the app and hit Safari to retrieve (data burn!). By the time you've gone through this awkward process to get info on three or four hotels, you've missed your train stop.

Map app -- it wasn't intended to help you find the Ponte Vecchio while running through the streets
You'd think this would be the perfect app to keep you from getting lost in a strange country, and it is. Or it would be, if it were an iPad, with lots of screen real estate. As it is, by they time you find the right pin on your map and scale it so that you can read the names of streets, your spouse, who has the paper map, has already checked in to the hotel. And since you're wandering the streets with this thing, you're on data roaming (burn!!), not wi-fi.

Dropbox: This is the future. Deal with it
I keep a spreadsheet with all my passwords on it. I thought I might need this while abroad, in case of emergency. So I uploaded it to DropBox from my Mac before the trip, and voila, accessed it when I needed to login to, uh, well, I think it might have been FaceBook. Never mind. The point is that this easy-to-use personal cloud server, or something like it, could mean that not too far in the future (like, maybe, next week) you would never need a laptop for the road again. You'd simply store all your files online and download them to your mobile phone or pad. Woohoo!

iPhone batteries: you can almost smell them dying.
Now that I'm back in the States, I keep looking at my iPhone's battery indicator, assuming that it's about ready to need a charge. That's a habit I picked up on the trip, where an overnight charge got me just about through the lunch hour. I think all this data roaming is energy-intensive. Or maybe it's just the air and the food. And my phone is a 3GS, not the new thrifty 4G.

Scrabble app: Works great, as far as I know
My wife and I get into Scrabble mode every once in a while. I bought this app just in case it happened on a train or plane, but no luck. We found other things to do. It does have a solitaire mode that I hope to get into one of these days.

Bottom line: Go for it!
iPhone from AT&T has covered the essentials: accessible (though not cheap) international rate plans; apps that keep you working on the phone and sync to your personal cloud, wi-fi and Bluetooth that connect you better to a changing world. The iPhone's tiny screen makes it an unlikely long term contender for laptop replacement; the Pad is the thing to watch.

Florence: Piazza Della Republican

Live gypsy jazz, lit-up carousel and the great vibe of this ancient city.

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Location:Florence

After the tour of the tower, it's 'down the hatch.'

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Location:Ambroise

Tours at night

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We are in Tours

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Location:Hotel Universe