Andy Kessler

WSJ: Three Cheers for Internships

https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-cheers-for-internships-1524420970

It’s that time of year. Students hoping to land summer internships are flooding inboxes with their résumés. Managers should hire as many as possible. It’s good for the company but even better for the student—and for society. Pay them? Don’t pay them? It doesn’t matter. Just let them in the door.

In my junior year of college, I got an internship at Hewlett-Packard . It was way across the country in Cupertino, Calif., where Apple ’s spaceship headquarters is today. To save money, since I had little, I got an apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, used a shopping cart for a dresser, and borrowed a friend’s bike to get to work.

HP was a fun place, with a pretty loose work culture and beer bashes most Fridays. I coded math functions in what’s known as microcode for a future minicomputer, because they didn’t trust the guy designing the chip to do it. I learned a lot about deep technology but nothing about business, marketing or sales. It was a big company, so I also missed a peek into the startup culture then bubbling up in the Bay Area. A shame.

Still, I can’t think of anything better for college students than plopping them in the middle of some exciting enterprise. It almost doesn’t matter what the company does; good interns absorb it all. I call it learning by osmosis. Lessons about your industry, trends, pricing and profits can’t help but work their way into the pores and brains of hungry students bored from endless reading assignments and seminars.

Put them at the center of whatever a company does—not in the copy room. I can almost guarantee that they’ll be a net positive. The payback usually comes in the form of a single good idea, one productive change that fresh eyes will see while others, especially those sucking up for a promotion, won’t.

A few years ago a nasty controversy erupted over intern pay. The Atlantic ran a story, “Why Free Internships Are Immoral.” Unpaid interns for the movie “Black Swan” won a suit against Fox for back pay, later reversed and eventually settled. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In organization even caught flak when an editor put out a request for an editorial intern, “part-time, unpaid.”

WSJ: A Better Way to Make Facebook Pay

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-better-way-to-make-facebook-pay-1523209483

Facebook has been on fire lately—but not in the way it usually is. Its stock is melting and congressional grandstanding (i.e., hearings) about privacy and security begins Tuesday. Facebook is a threat to democracy and society, critics now argue. I’ve lost track of how many professors are demanding the feds regulate or even break up the social-media giant. Don’t they teach classes anymore?

Apple CEO Tim Cook joined the pile-on last month: “I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary.” Be careful what you wish for. Sure, no one wants Russian bots controlling their minds, but targeting consumers’ minds based on detailed demographic information isn’t new. Bud Light has perfected it. Dilly dilly.

Techies have an expression for Facebook’s model. It’s “free as in beer”—in the sense of costing no money. You pay in other ways. I propose a simple fix. Let’s flip the whole thing—make it about property rights, 21st-century style. America was built on property rights. Congress can deliberate for 90 seconds and then pass the Make the Internet Great Again Act. The bill would contain five words: “Users own their private data.” Finis.

Contrast this with the European Union, which adopted its General Data Protection Regulation in 2016. It is more than 250 pages of confusing rules, exceptions and fines. But it doesn’t change the flawed model of today. It only adds regulations that make the situation even more confusing.