>> look for these titles and bookstores this coming week and watch for men at the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2.

>> hello, everyone. good evening and welcome to politics and prose. my name is codel be introducing tonight guest speaker. before we get started i have a few notes to cover. first it would be great if everyone could silence any cell phones and other electronic devices they may have on them we will be recording audio for two nights event and you can see our friends from c-span here are recording. great. love to have you. we will be doing a q&a following the presentation so we ask any questions you may have, use the microphone provided so you can pick up the audio and the whole world would be able to see. i know, right, the future. one final thing of course with plenty of copies of trend that at the front register it like a purchase a copy after the event. adam minter is a columnist from

the bloomberg opinion has been covering the global recycling interest for over two tickets. his new book, "secondhand: travels in the new global garage sale" is everything investigation of what's happened to all the items we cleaned out of our homes. once they're donated they might end up anywhere from thrift stores in the us to think he stops in tokyo, for the markets in southeast asia and use good businesses in ghana. he examines all facets of this multi-billion dollars global industry including the marketing practices that cause us to keep loading up again after each purge of her household items. please join me in giving him a warm welcome. [applause] >> thanks to everyone for being here. there's a little bit of my professional history in the room including a personal commission my first article back in 2001 with scrap magazine so it's quite a thrill to have him here

at this reading. when you finish a book you get two questions typically. the first question is, a very unwelcome one which is what's the next book about? i still have an answer for that, not even close. the second question that you get which is more interesting because it makes me think is how long did it take you to write that book? there are several answers to that question. if i were to give just the physical set down and write that book answer, it's four months. if it was a question of how long was it from the time i signed the contract to the publication it was about three and half years. if i really tell you the truth about this book and how long it took me, it dates back to the time i was a toddler wandering around my grandmothers house. my grandparents lived in st. louis park minnesota in-house the phone for almost 50 years. they finally moved out a bit about 2000 but if you're in

think about that generation you know that house is going to be filled with stuff. some of the best stuff and some of the not quite best stuff. but if you are a toddler wandering around him like that which i was, it's all the best stuff and it was a real treasure hunt, a global treasure hunt. we may have been in the living room watching tv or in the kitchen having get up at any opportunity that he had to sneak out into the basement and run which do things to buy whatever was down there was the greatest tree. treat. member find in my grandfathers photographic equipment which is horrified by we realized i got into our member finding the dartboard with the pointed poi. all kinds of great stuff and as you get older you begin to appreciate more things. the furniture, the furniture was wonderful. the classes i broke on one occasion were wonderful. there were the 40-year-old pickles that have been eaten. those were wonderful. it's true, family lore. that house was wonderful but as

you get older and you start page out of being a toddler in start looking at this from the point of view of who's going to get this stuff, it's still fun but at a certain what we all know it becomes a little less fun to have a house like that. it's a particularly uncountable subject and a particularly kind of 21st 21st century sort of america dread but we've reached the point with our inquisitiveness that in no part of the mourning process for our relatives is not just morning the fact they are gone but there's also the morning of what to do with all of the stuff that's been left behind. and i remember when my grandmother indicated to me that she was turned to think of it, it was in the 1990s and she said we need to start having some garage sales. at this point you could barely get into the garage much less have sale in there. we know what this house looks like, yes? but we did and it was for three straight years, and they were

great garage stairs with all the best stuff if they didn't do particularly well but maybe he did but i was remember when we finally packed up the garage it felt like there's more stuff after the sale and before it. i don't know, to this day i'm not quite sure how that happened but it was very much the case. the second year of the great epic grandmother garage sale, one of her sisters showed up and asked her, why are you doing this? it's a lot of trouble. i'll never forget the response she said and in retrospect it's an important point for the book. she said to her sister, well, if i don't do it, my to make sensible and they will not get the foul the out of it. that of course is true. we all know that. nobody values our stuff like we do. as i write in the book the hard facts are your stuff, you become the george carlin term of your stuff is a a value really almot entirely to nobody but you.

after my grandmother passed, a few years later we did have the great cleanup and i wasn't in charge of it. her children were. there was an estate sale they came in and, of course, the value was and got out of it. at least the value that she had ascribed to it and this was a woman who spent time running a thrift store. she spent time in junkyards and scrap yards. which is what i have spent time because that was the family business. she had a keen sense of what this stuff was worth but, of course, it's not what it's worth to you. it's what it's worth to someone who buys it. at the time she passed away prefiling up house cleaned out, i started thinking maybe this would be an interesting subject for an essay in this particularly 21st century form of greeting but i was already underway with my first book which was about the global recycling industry. i decided this is something i would need to pass on. as things happened, a couple weeks after my book came out my but the past when this time it was my sisters turn in my turn

to figure out what to do with my parents stuff. my mother had never acquired what my grandmother did. she lit in a very small apartment but we still had a painful choice to make up what to do with certain things such as her letters to people we didn't know. what do you do with the dishes? what do you do with that desktop computer that's old? it took us time, initially things went to a few relatives who wanted it, her favorite chair went to a brother i believe but it still took over the course of year to get rid of the stuff. i remember quite clearly driving her china which nobody wanted, who needs another set of china? i don't know about folks here but i know people who not only have their own wedding china but the parents wedding china and grandparents wedding china in the basement. none of it ever gets used because who uses fine china anymore? i remember very clearly with fine china in the backseat of

the car isis are driving to a goodwill in hopkins minnesota and waiting in line it's a drive-through goodwill. i don't know if you've ever seen this but you can we have drive-through mcdonald's and drive-through goodwill because we have so much stuff. we were the next person light and members looking straight ahead and saying i'm supposed to write a book about this. i followed the recycling trade around the world. i'm interested in what happens to thinks of the people don't want. where does it go? i snapped a photo of the moment, i'm going to need this for the book. this is what you do. i posted it to twitter and i posted it to twitter again the other day on publication date. it started to occur to me there's a book there. i wasn't sure what the book would be about. i don't think it's enough to do just about what happened but has too much stuff and does not how to get rid of it. i'm interested how the stuff is globalized and i traveled enough to know there were markets all over the world for american

stuff, stuff americans didn't want and i was thinking maybe i can follow some of the stuff around the world. a few months later i went on assignment for scrap magazine. kent gave me this assignment and they sent me down to texas to dell computer which had a program for recycling computers. i was in austin, texas, and as part of the tour it took me to a goodwill. it was the central office of the goodwill i believe in central texas and have what's called an outlet center. what the outlet center is, it's where all the stuff goes when it fails to sell in the stores. that's a lot of stuff because on average an american thrift store only one-third of the stuff that goes on the shelves cells. it's not enough for people to want. so the outlet center, they've outlet centers all over the country.

the outlet center take that step, puts it on cards, doesn't differentiate at all and they sell it by the pound. at the goodwill of central texas they put it on a card and these cards circle around the room i believe in a 15 minute cycle and once the cyclist then, that cart goes back into the warehouse and some of it is dumped come briefly sort, some will go to the landfill or the incinerator or whatever they use in texas, and of the stuff, especially the textiles more often than not be packed for export to export markets typically in west africa, east africa and also in india. and i watch is an interesting to see this cart circling but also interested see who the customers were, who was buying it. it was not anglo texans. it was folks come up from the border. most of the clientele at the outlet center were mexican traders. as was explained to be at the time they were spent all day. that's their job nine to five

watching the cards holding the stuff, loading the truck and sending it down to the border. i thought that's interesting. it became my quest to figure out how i could dive into this, how i could not only find a goodwill that would let me spend time there, and that's the easy. i'm not embarrassed to say goodwill is one of the most difficult organizations to penetrate out of ever tried to report on. i reported in china for a lot of years. i know i have at least one china colleague who can come how difficult it can be to penetrate organizations in china, but goodwill was on that level. my hope had been to go to central texas. they were not interested and i kept basically calling along the border because i want to go somewhere where they had this border trade. southern arizona, tucson, there were not reluctant at all. this will be a 50th anniversary in 2019.

if you can't please publish the book in 2019 so can be part of our celebration. best friends ever. so we arranged, i went down there and spent about a month basically embedded within a goodwill in southern arizona. within a goodwill what i mean is goodwill is up of, it's a federation and international headquarters is outside of d.c. here but each of the federations in the various towns goodwill of southern arizona for example, has defined territory in southern arizona. basic from tucson to south of the border. there's a few dozen of these around the united states. they have 16 stores, and midsize goodwill. i said i'm going to come and i will never forget when i showed up they were ready for me i could tell they were skeptical if you really going to show up and spent this much time and a goodwill? coming from malaysia which is once coming from. why would you fly from malaysia to tucson to hang out in 16 goodwill stores? because is going to write this book no matter what.

it's an interesting place to spend time. more sophisticated, far more sophisticated than any traditional retailer you have ever spent time around. there's a quote in the book, there's a cabin calming hamp, director of retail at the goodwill of southern arizona. -- there's a kevin cunningham. he could imagine you are at walmart but instead of knowing what your inventory would be, you might get catalogs and what it will be every week, you don't know what is going to be. you'll get a new truck of inventory every day. you don't know what ended. you are responsible for sorting it, pricing it and selling it. and by the way, we'll do it again tomorrow. that's the easy if you've ever worked in retail. that's the level of sophistication that goes into one of these places. i was also interested in the cross-border trade. the interesting thing but tucson is 90% of their customers they told the are coming up from the border. it's all border trade. that has some pretty interesting consequences because if you're going to cut off that trade,

what happens to all the secondhand stuff it tucson? tucson throws off a lot of secondhand stuff. it's a military camp so people move in and out and it's a retirement community so people are moving in and out. if there's nobody polling that stuff over the border, it's not moving. .. that's a pupil called him. shoe guy. he would go to all the good wills every day and by their shoes. you take them back to mexico and he was very picky, there's a lot of shoes and goodwill.

he said he should talk to him and i said yeah, how do i meet shoe guy? they said you sort of just have to hang out and wait and wait for shoe rack. about five minutes later, kathy comes running in said shoe guy is here! i talked to them on a store, he's a very friendly guy. he asked me not to use his name in the book so i will continue to call him shoe guy. very friendly guy. he is very surprised that anybody would be interested in this and especially a white journalist. he thought it was crazy. he says well, you want to see what i do in mexico x he said come down next saturday, cross the border and i'll be waiting for you at 10:00 a.m. okay. so i did. my wife and son came with me.

i didn't even know his name at that time. i just had his whatsapp number. it wasn't shoe guy was in his actual name either. i would like to read just a little bit from the book. give you a sense of what it's like to hang out with shoe guy. and who he was. this is from that saturday. i subsequently spent more time with him but in some ways, the first visit is kind of a favorite. i'm just going to review a little bit here. back in his pickup, we had to the port of entry. in 2017, more than 3 million personal vehicles across the end shoe guy counted several hundred of those trips. i'll tell you why "secondhand" is big. in mexico, people make like 1000

pesos a day. say you want a mattress. the mattress is 10000 pesos in mexico. you will end up spending three times that. at the border, agents waive us. tucson, you get a mattress for free and use top mattresses? bugs and all that, kind of disgusting. mattresses are the biggest money. mattresses, appliances". shoe guy doesn't do big volume in any of them. he does shoes. mostly used once. if you can find good deals, often using coupons, he'll get those two. he's considered a big buyer in tucson. that's saying something. on the other side of the border, he has a network out of buyers. some take as many as 100 pairs of shoes at a time.

he said he pushed his phone at me, a star wars film, i bought it for $2. the x-rays complete and the customs agents waive dozen. how did you get started parts he was a fruit and vegetable cellar. they had enough money for a television at home. he says his favorite shows with a 1950s american comedy. when he started spending time on the american side swap meet, that tv time paid off. koreans. i spoke english and they hired me for $4 a day. you speak korean? a bit. he spent years hustling and perfecting his business skills and knowledge of the "secondhand" market. he and his family were always looking for a break. he loved cocaine and was in the shoe business. the korean two guys winning

money and proceeded to blow it. my father didn't want them so he gave us all his shoes. that was the start. he pulled up the truck to the gate of the facility and opens his window and pushes it in. the gate opens and he drives up to a unit. like the other 54000 or so locations, this one is largely devoted to the stuff from american homes. but it differs in one respect. everybody who writes here, uses it to store the stuff they buy up north. shoe guy loads the mini fridge and tv into the back of his truck along with the two bags of shoes and we drive back into mexico. customer faces growing and that's a good thing. competition is also growing in the small-scale "secondhand" traders are becoming more professional. 1991, swap meets were a joke. people thought they were colonies or something. now everybody is doing it.

why? big money. in 2000, there is a crackdown on the marquess of people jumped from "secondhand" to drugs. sensitively to fascinating. $10000 at a time unused good. they went clean, it's funny. what we do is not legal but it's legal somehow. he turks a right turn into the largest swap meet. there isn't open gravel area in front of us. it's connected to other areas which was founded in 1990 with dirty dealers. today, hundreds have spread over the area. tennis balls, baseballs and baseball bats and a nativity scene, a dollhouse, stock of

tires, several large endured turtles on a shelf, pots, pans, a leaf blower, baby walker and a box of action figures. i also found jesus. i laughed, he's not joking. he reaches behind moses and grabs the jesus action figure. i will leave it at that but that's a little sense of what shoe guy is all about. we spent time bouncing back and forth like that. he has an extraordinary business and he asked me not to talk about the money that he spends or makes but he does okay. it's certainly a living and he's able to do a lot for his family and i think that's really cool. when i started this book, one of the things i wanted to do was figure out where my mother's stuff was ending up. it's something i talked to him about and i feel like he shows me and goodwill shows me and to an extent, that's the story i outlined in "secondhand". where's the stuff moving? it doesn't matter to us anymore but perhaps, it means something

to somebody else. i will leave it up and open up to questions. [applause] >> just a reminder, please use the microphone to ask your questions. >> i'm going to go back to your earlier book because it really laid out my book credit. robin was there and that helped. the book emphasized how important the free market was to the scrap business. i get that because it seems to work a lot of times but in another way, it doesn't work because it doesn't really address the environment, it doesn't save the planet. it helps the shoe guys of the world make a living.

what would be the appropriate role for government to deal with beyond putting up the blueprints for us? >> i would argue recycling still does have a very positive environmental -- the stuff goes to people who want it most. they're going to make something from it. if you look at the lifecycle assessment, environmental assessments carefully done, the best thing you can do from an environmental standpoint is use it for as long as possible. every day you use it, the carbon emissions associated with that product decline. it's stretching it out. that's one of the beautiful things about the "secondhand" market shoe guy infiltrated. he's not bringing that stuff, he's not the only one by any stretch, he's not even close to the biggest one. they will have shorter lifespans in that movement is really about the free market. it's supply and demand.

if there's a demand from mexico, he's not going to supply it. a role for government, right now i would say, i would especially with that cross-border trade, i would like to see government stay out of it because the free market down there is going to handle this much better than any government well. i voice said in her organization like goodwill, which does extraordinary things, it's about one third of revenues and if they only handle about 3% of the waste but they do a lot of good, it didn't exist as a nonprofit, i think governments would want to invent it because everything it does -- >> they provide a demand. >> yeah, google is incredible. it's basically an incubator for businesses. if you go to any goodwill in the u.s. and spend an hour or two, you will see the people making their living buying stuff there. to re- list it on ebay or put in a shipping container and take

it to west africa. one thing i saw quite a lot of our japanese vintage traders, going to goodwill and buying large volumes of what they consider vintage, we may not but they do shipping it back to tokyo. there's a huge industry there of resale shops that sell that stuff. if they are not doing that kind of thing, it doesn't move. >> very good. i thought shoe guy, was a chinese name. >> you have any funny or eye-opening experiences that you'd like to share? >> that's really putting me on the spot. well, i think a lot of it comes

back to doing the queen out. the first two chapters, i don't know that is necessarily funny but when i think about this book, i spent quite a bit of time in japan and minnesota going to home cleanouts. these are literally what they sound out, their businesses in the u.s. and japan and contractor to help families downsize their relatives or a relative who paste passed on, clean out what's left behind. i had one moment, i described in the book, in a town not so far from tokyo, it was a woman cleaning out the house that her parents lived in and she had lived in for quite a while. she was walking through and showing me what was left behind. there is this beautiful cabinet and she opened up the drawers and inside were handmade kimonos her grandmother made. she started going through them and it was extraordinary. she started tearing up and i quote her in the book, she said,

grandmother makes these and passes them on to a daughter who passes them on to a daughter but i don't have room for them so she was selling them off. it was very emotional. i had the experience over and over and over in japan and the u.s. and not long after, i was in a neighborhood of tokyo, it's famous for its vintage shops in this market there on the corner next to a bank that kimono work. there is used kimonos. of the quality i was seeing in that drawer, carefully stored and what struck me is it wasn't japanese people buying this

stuff, it was americans. that was who valued it. the funny thing about that, if you went into the vintage shop, if you've ever shopped in a tokyo vintage shop, they are interesting. it's american vintage stuff and it's the kind of stuff i would think wouldn't make it through the goodwill door. the one thing i described in the book, a champion lecture from the 1980s, i describe and those are being sold and it sa says, champion set shirt. sixty dollars. it's going to be japanese and it was a great lesson for me clear this is all happening. we want their stuff, they want our stuff. it is a great lesson in the free market and what it can create. and certainly what it can destroy in terms of who cares about these things. this is one editor after another. >> with the growth of cheaply manufactured products, the quality i don't think will hold up for multiple uses so what's

going to happen to this whole industry as the quality declines in the long life is shorter? >> this is a topic i get into in the book. goodwill, goodwill is on the front lines. when stuff goes to the door at goodwill, very quickly within days, it's sorted. if you spend time with such orders, and i recommend everybody do it. it will change how you consume for the rest of your life. they will tell you the quality of the stuff is declining precipitously. you'll be specific brands, i'm not going to get up here and tell you which brands, they were name checking brands two years ago, you can watch this better. now it's coming through the doors, fabric is thinner and is not going to hold up. the practical effect for goodwill is that they cannot put that stuff out on the back because it will not self. they have to dispose of it. usually by landfill.

they won't send overseas neither because the buyers, people who buy use quotes overseas, they don't want your garbage either. they are smart buyers. i spend time in the commercial capital, some of the sorters there and you can see they are more savvy than the sorters at goodwill in judging what will work. that's a dangerous situation for the "secondhand" clothing industry because costs are going up. they get the same amount of stuff on the shelves and they need to acquire so much more so they can go through the drawer and get the good stuff out. it's a threat to undermine the whole economy. >> how did writing this book changing your own buying habits? >> it impacted my wife and i profoundly. i remember being in japan, i was in japan and at a warehouse, a

book off company, the largest "secondhand" goods company in japan. they have around 700 outlets, it's enormous. they bring an a male in-service. they can mail in their books and they will price them and send them a check or a wire. they will judge what stays and they price them and then triaged them. the triage is perhaps three quarters sent off to the paper mill, nobody will buy them. there's no market for most of your books. especially in japan where you have so much disposable literature. comments are manufactured so much, they are just not marketed. a small amount is priced and put onto the shelves and sold by e-commerce. as an author, that was not fun to see. [laughter]

the irony of being there as an author and seeing all these books heading to the paper mill is not lost but it also made a profound impression. we both start of stopped buying books. you can pretty much get anything you want on the "secondhand" book. this led to my wife becoming a bookseller herself. when she decided to do when i saw all these books, she showed pictures and said look at some of these books. it's really tough on books. boxing, she said i need to get rid of these, somebody else needs to enjoy them. she said it's hard to give away books but the moment she started pricing them, they started moving. then someone forsaken you give me this title? anyway, that's at the end of the book but for us, we stop buying a lot of books. the environmental concern comes into it but when you start

spending time around home cleanup and seeing the impact on the families, it really does affect you. >> can you expand more on the e-commerce and free cycle and economies scaling now of eva ebay? >> in short, i think all of these apps are really exciting. the posh works, a quarry which is japanese, let go all of these are very exciting. it's important to keep in mind what the limits are. they tend to be stemming off the top of the market. it's the good stuff. people don't know posh mark, it's a clothing trading site. look at the most wanted brands,

patagonia, very expensive, very durable stuff. mid market labels, stuff you might find at a mass retailer like target. it's just not considered a durable quality and it's declining. you have this exciting thing happening at the top of the market but the real issue is what's left behind. the cake, not so much the frosting. it's great but the overall market isn't that impacted by it. >> i've been thinking about this my whole life because i come from a family of women where we are all the same size. i've been wearing old clothing for my family because before it was called. i'm wondering in your book, what

you discover in a linguistic fear, usage of the word vintage, "secondhand", used and which context the word is used in. when i think japan, i think very cool. i'm wondering what you encountered about the words we use to describe things. >> the term vintage in relationship to japan is fascinating. you go into vintage shops and look at some of the stuff there, i've seen heavy metal t-shirts from 80s with gaping holes. stuff that should not be sold at a garage sale and they're going from $150. we describe this to stuff that we value. vintage means something very different in different

circumstances. the use of "secondhand", used, i thought about this, a lot of people when i say "secondhand", they treated like an archaic term. it's not a term that gets used much anymore which i kind of like the term. people want to just say used stuff. there's something a little more media about that. but i didn't encounter that much difference with fat. >> i was wondering about, i think it was mentioned of marketing practice that us reacquire this, once we de- clutter everything. >> there's a passage in the bo book, i looked at expiration dates on child safety seat, phase are interesting. there are parents here, if you

continue using your child safety seat after your six, your child is suddenly in imminent danger. i was very curious because i've seen a lot of "secondhand" car seat floating around the international market. i thought there must be something to this. somebody has done these studies to show the car seats expire, polymers breakdown from a there's something wrong with the seatbelts and i spent a lot of time trying to find the data. i contacted the big car seat manufacturers and only two who responded. they basically responded, they declined to comment. or they gave me information that was completely irrelevant to the questions i was asking. i contacted target which has the child safety takeback program, you have to get the seats off the road when they expire. i contacted them and asked where the data came from. they started changing the

website language and they did it three times. i described this in the book, i have screen grabs, the reporters always screen grab everything. i got a list. it turns out they may very well expire but there's no data. i went to sweden, they have some of the rest safety practices in the world, a few years back, she was writing in favor of using "secondhand" car seats on our blog from this is class, not safety issues. we use things like this to sophomore. expiration dates are a great means of selling more. i can't tell you i know precisely that's why the child safety seat companies are doing this, it could be a liability concern as well. and that's possible. somebody said that to me that it

might be a concern but in the meantime, it certainly the case. it's a great way to encourage people to buy more seats. >> similar to the question we had about the fashion, a lot of times when we think about "secondhand" stuff, we are talking about books or clothes or shoes, what about toys and how have cheap plastic toys and products affected "secondhand" materials? >> spending time at goodwill, you see a lot of toys come through. as a piece of advice, if you have something broken, don't give it to goodwill. just asking them to pay for the disposal of it. even toys that seemed like are in good shape, oftentimes they are not and there is no recycling option for the plastic toys. i have a son, outside of legos, plastic toys, you learn quickly don't last very long and maybe

become a cost for whoever acquires them. i pay a trash bill or whoever you donate it to, there's no sustainable option for getting rid of that stuff. i'm familiar for my recycling, a company that receives a lot of toys, they will shred them and before china imposed blockages on export of recycling, they were importing some toy scrap and that was a commodity but i don't think that exists anymore. >> back to the cake clothes. i know what to do with my boot boots", i don't have a lot of the fancy stuff. what we do with t-shirts or workout clothes we know nobody else wants but they could be used as textile, dry throw them

away or give them to sell for textile? >> if it's a decent quality garment and give it to a charity or bring it to savers, it's going to make its way into the recycling economy. there's a massive rags industry in the united states and it dates back 200 years and one third of the used clothing in the united states cut up into rags. i visited one of the planes in ohio and the rags are sold to everybody from hotels, to wipe down the restroom to oil and gas companies to use them to wipe up oil. painters need to wipe their precious and that's what will happen with their stuff. that's the final sort of single use but that's where a lot of that stuff will go.

>> we are doing is signing in the books are available at the counter. you can form a line up here. a round of applause for our author. [applause] >> here's a look at the event book tv will be covering this week. on tuesday, at quail ridge books in north carolina, david will talk about the wilmington riots in 1898. on wednesday, he'll be in new york city at the museum of jewish heritage for a talk by holocaust survivor, max. also on wednesday, look for us at politics and prose in washington d.c. her sarah wagner's report from

continued search for the bodies of the nearly 1600 american soldiers who were killed in action during the vietnam war. all these events are open to the public. if you're in attendance, take a picture and take us at book tv on facebook, twitter an instagram. >> here's a look at authors who have recently appeared or will appear soon on "afterwards". our weekly interview program that includes best-selling nonfiction books guest interviewers. last week, they examined the role of sex and the lives of young men. coming up, andrea chronicle the christian families. this weekend on "afterwards", financial times columnist and cnn analyst, argues that companies are feeling it. >> silicon valley has a real problem there taking credit for

the wonderful things they do. they given up all this terrific technology, entertaining, productivity enhancing but they are not so good at taking responsibly the downside. they're not great at admitting they didn't do it all themselves. ...