Apple Online Store

“Maybe you’ve heard. Cities, counties, schools are all scrambling to pay to bring you the services you expect. Mass transit is massively underfunded. Parks are going to seed. Buildings, bridges and roads are crumbling. Budgets are in worse shape than the infrastructure,” Cassidy writes. But there is hope. And it’s called Apple.”

“Did you hear that the Cupertino maker of all-things-hip opened a new store in Chicago on Oct. 23? And yeah, the store is gorgeous, because Apple is into gorgeous, but what is even more beautiful is the transformation of the subway station that leads to the Apple store’s door,” Cassidy writes. “The station was remade from a horrendous dump to a lovely public space on Apple’s dime. Well, Apple’s 40 million dimes. The company put up $4 million, give or take, to fix up the train stop and to build a comfy plaza (with wireless) out front where happy Apple customers and others can sit and contemplate a gurgling fountain.”

Cassidy writes, “And you know what this means, don’t you? Now everyone is going to want an Apple store. Yes, please, absolutely in my backyard.”

“Forget big government. This is Big Apple, which built a lovely plaza, with tables and such, in front of its Manhattan store in the Other Big Apple,” Cassidy writes. “It kicked in for a public plaza outside its new Shanghai store and it has preserved pieces of historic buildings in France and England as it opened stores there.”

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MacDailyNews Take: The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand. – Richard Feynman (What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, pages 90-91)