Here’s a short blog post for tonight. Have you seen the new video released by Google five days ago? Here’s the link, watch it before reading on:
Google self-driving car: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE
I am a stoic person when I use the computer, usually. I wear my emotions on the inside, and usually only express myself with word choice and tone. Once in a blue moon will I laugh out loud at a video or get angry at something in the news. But this video made me swell with joy! I could not help but get excited at seeing this video unfold, and by the time they mentioned the man was blind I could feel my mind get blown. In Europe, everything you need is usually a few blocks down the street. Here in America, urban sprawl makes owning a car a necessity. Just ask my family in Appalachia, its a half hour that way to the grocery store, and a half hour the other way to the general store. Google has done it, we have officially given the blind, the old, the disabled their lives back.
Remember when Apple announced they had $100 billion cash on hand recently? The press ate it up with all kinds of headlines; ‘Apple has more cash than government’ ‘What should Apple do with its money?’ and ‘100 billion reasons to invest in Apple’ to name a few. Imagine what could be done with such large amounts of money. Here is a short list I prepared of historic things we’ve done and their cost in modern dollars:
- Apollo missions to the moon: $18 billion per landing, $109 billion total
- Civil war for the Confederacy: $20 billion, and for the Union: $59.6 billion
- Building the trans-continental railroad: $873 million
- Buying the Louisiana territory: $233 million
What did Apple do with it’s surplus? With that much cash, Apple could have probably made Jurassic Park a reality! Side note, the awesome 1993 Spielberg film slash 1990 Crichton novel featured self-driving, electric cars, which goes to show you the power of fiction and its influence on the future. Well, first Apple gave back $35 billion as dividends to stock owners, and then bought back $10 billions worth of its own stocks. And Apple isn’t even on the top of the most profitable companies list! I mean, Google doesn’t even appear on the list at all, and yet they have a “secret laboratory” known as the Google X Lab where they are working on a hundred ideas that will shape the future.
So here is what I want to know. In the past, only governments have been able to raise this much revenue, which they then use to do a variety of things such as everything in the list you just read. However, it seems that these days companies are collecting this much money, and they don’t feel the need to give back to the people like a government would. Why can’t more companies be like Google?