Daily Archives: 17 September 2026

If He Won’t….

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An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?

The Price of Doing Business in the PRC

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Take Driscoll’s, a grower of fruit—blueberries in particular here—that chose to expand into the People’s Republic of China. Driscoll’s invested in the PRC in a big way, sending experts over to expose PRC farmers and consumers to blueberries, to help the farmers learn to grow them, and to set up Driscoll’s own growing facilities, based on a modern, technologically based hydroponics method.

The intellectual property underlying those techniques and Driscoll’s proprietary plants were bought under false pretenses, propagated, and spread across a plethora of PRC farmers for them to grow unlicensed blueberry bushes.

Even though PRC courts do often rule against domestic growers in many of the cases Driscoll’s, and others, have brought, the damage has been done, and it’s permanent. The intellectual property associated with the berries and with growing them has been stolen and cannot be given back. The proprietary berry plants have already been proliferated without licensing and cannot be eradicated.

Competing growers, both using stolen intellectual property and unlicensed plants and those using legally obtained technologies and plants, are heavily subsidized by the PRC government and by local governments. The artificially low prices resulting from those subsidies, driven even lower by that exploding competition, have begun crowding out foreign growers like Driscoll’s, even though the latter, in particular, still thinks it can successfully chase the chimera, now by growing off-season blueberries.

Until PRC growers start using inexpensive state-backed financing to scale up—and sometimes play fast-and-loose with intellectual property regulations in this off-season venue, too, to enter the game.

Count me entirely unsympathetic.

Other American businesses, large and small, need to take this lesson to heart. It’s a big world. There’s no need to do business with the PRC. Africa beckons. South America beckons. Non-PRC Asia beckons.