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There is virtually no debate about the best treatment. “It has long been held that surgery can lead to very long-term survival,” says Kim. (…) Despite the expert consensus on the value of surgery, Jobs did not elect it right away. He reportedly spent nine months on “alternative therapies,” including what Fortune called “a special diet.” Daily Beast
It occurs to me that Steve Jobs is not only the most admired American of his generation, he is also a perfect metaphor to describe the era we live in.
He is universally acknowledged to be the undisputed master of our epoch’s dominating and defining skill, which is turning science into money.
The creator of some of history’s most seductive tools and toys.
Jobs was a visionary in this area, shrewd, obsessive with detail and a master of integrated systems, strategy and communication.
The lord of all he surveyed.
But as we can see from text quoted above, he was also a fool, sensu strictu.
This combination of technical and commercial perfection combined with a lack of elementary common sense is what makes him the perfect metaphor for America today… with the rest of the world tagging along.
40 Comments
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> But as we can see from text quoted above, he was also a fool
You’re saying he has a lot in common with President Obama?
¿*?
Did I say that?
> Did I say that?
No, and you didn’t say quite a few other things which are true, such as 2 + 2 = 4.
Any other questions occur to you?
Not really. He was just a computer salesman. He took 500,000 jobs from Americans. And he used offshore accounts and tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. He did turn technology into money, money for a few people.
To be honest, the Apple hardware is quite good. Those Chinese workers make good products, which is why they are so highly paid.
> Not really. He was just a computer salesman.
You are ignorant on this subject, Frank.
> To be honest, the Apple hardware is quite good.
To be honest, the software is better.
I like both actually.
> I like both actually.
Oops, guess I should have said “even better.”
Yes, Unix is a decent OS. But Steve Jobs was no visionary. That would be Linus Torvalds.
At least I do not consider Steve Jobs to be the World Class Villain that Bill Gates is. Gates, is similar to the Koch Brothers, using his tax exempt organization to carry out criminal activities.
I do. And there are children in China who would agree with me.
As for the post itself, I have only this to say.
> Yes, Unix is a decent OS.
I am referring to the Mac OS of the past and to the interface layer which now sits atop its unix base.
> But Steve Jobs was no visionary.
“Bicycle of the mind.”
> That would be Linus Torvalds.
“If you still don’t like it, that’s OK: that’s why I’m boss. I simply know better than you do.”
Look, there’s no reason to minimize the impact of Macintosh on general computing, or to oversell the impact of Linux.
> At least I do not consider Steve Jobs to be the World Class Villain
> that Bill Gates is.
We do certainly agree on Gates.
> I do. And there are children in China who would agree with me.
Your — and their — beef is not particularly with Jobs or Gates or Dell. It is with the global system of exploitation allowed and fostered by governments and corporations.
The men who hold the strings know what is happening and allow it to continue for the sake of higher profit margins. Steve Jobs was one of those men. My beef is with him.
Sorry, sounded to me like you were giving Bill Gates a bye.
Bill Gates is just as guilty, as are most of the 1%. It just makes me particularly sick that people fawn over Jobs like he was some sort of Prophet. The man was a baseless criminal and a fucking fiend. He just happened to be more intelligent than most.
You cannot oversell or undersell Linux. It is Free! Get the latest Ubuntu, or Debian or Fedora or PuppyLinux, without paying a billionaire for inferior closed software.
> people fawn over Jobs like he was some sort of Prophet
I don’t agree with the fawning either. However, his life’s work was not the accumulation of money or political power. Comparatively speaking, he was a tech visionary.
> The man was a baseless criminal and a fucking fiend
That’s quite a bit over the top. I don’t think he was a nice guy, either, and I wouldn’t have put up with his personal management style, but a “fucking fiend”? You’re diluting the descriptive power of these words.
Have you read Orac’s pieces on Steve Jobs’ tragic decision to delay conventional medical treatment? Here’s a good example of one.
> You cannot oversell or undersell Linux. It is Free!
You have to buy or acquire some hardware to use it, just like any other software.
> without paying a billionaire for inferior closed software
Or superior closed software, with the same caveat above.
Yeah. I don’t get why suddenly people are all “Apple’s China factories are awful!” when Microsoft and other tech companies use the same companies.
In fact, a lot of the “Jobs Sux!” screaming is being pushed by (drum roll) Microsoft apologists who conveniently Microsoft’s many and intimate ties to ALEC — ties Apple doesn’t have. (Much of the ‘philanthropy’ of Bill Gates is spent on ALEC and ALEC-related causes such as privatization of schools and breaking teachers’ unions.)
I don’t like that Gates guy either. Gates isn’t adored and gushed about by the entire populous of America like Jobs is, though. See the authors post body, for example. Disgusting idolatry of someone who just happened to be more computer savvy than most.
I’m not going to get into any finger-pointing arguments about what software, hardware or OS is “better.” There are pros and cons all around on that one, and I’ve been in the IT “biz” for many many years.
Whatever.
Pretty much I loathe Gates & Jobs equally and for similar reasons. Both off-shored US jobs to third world countries in the name of “being competitive” but really to enhance their own personal fortunes and power. Gates remains alive and heavily invested with other criminals at Monsanto to wreak havoc on the planet in the name of “philanthropy” and “ending malaria,” but mainly to make himself even richer and more powerful.
I don’t see Jobs as much better, but now that he’s gone, he, personally, cannot do anything more either for good or bad, although I don’t know what terms are in his estate or business plans for his company.
Whatever. Both are men who are very smart, had great ideas, but leveraged themselves and their companies into dominate positions – often in nefarious ways that had negative impacts on citizens across the globe.
I venerate neither, and frankly all the hokum about being “visionaries” is just that: hokum. Bah humbug.
Neither were original. Gates stole DOS from CPM and both stole their windows software from Xerox.
Yes, that is true. They were both smart, though, and figured out how to leverage ideas – whether their own or from others – into making a boatload of money… for themselves.
They also took the lion’s share of the credit for work which was accomplished by teams of employees. Some of those employees were handsomely rewarded, at least in earlier years, but they rarely get the credit owed for actually doing the work involved to produce products.
Like most everything else these days, undue credit is often given to the Titans at the top of the ladder, when, in fact, the Titans couldn’t have made it to where they did without all the hard work accomplished by others.
Well noted. Yes, there are certain realities their fields cannot sufficiently distort and then they self-destroy.
To sum up, one can’t buy a “whole wheat” or evil-free computer. That’s the system that exists. Everyone involved, from manufacturers to users, are in some way morally compromised just by participating. So please spare us the hypocritical Jobs bashing. It’s not about hating on a single guy, it’s about changing the system. But if it is about hating on a single guy, then Jobs is not the best target, as any broad and informed analysis of the tech sector would demonstrate.
They don’t have the markup that Apple enjoys. The iPhone is made for only $188 and sells for $649. Apple could make it in the US for only an estimated $65-$150 more. They could make them in the US for 50 % profit which is still outrageous but instead exploit workers as to make 70 % profit. Computer OEMs, by contrast, have to deal with much tighter margins.
Moreover, when Jobs was asked about this by Obama, he bluntly said “Those jobs aren’t coming back”, citing a bunch of neoliberal crapola about the Chinese producing so many scientific/engineer types (hey, I could have shown Jobs plenty of un- and under-employed scientists and engineers here in the US).
*That’s* why a lot of people are upset. Apple has the economic luxury NOT to be the way that they are.
-stewartm
Jobs was no more the computer geek at Apple than Gates was it at Microsoft. They are both about on-par on the geek scale. Even back in the early days, it was Woz not Jobs who was the tech genius.
-stewartm
We used to have people who did the work themselves, who came up with their own ideas. Wonder what ever happened to them ?
Oh ya…they did no make boat loads of money for themselves or investors. Never mind.
Bingo! No one pretends that Microsoft and Gates aren’t anything but the Evil Empire and Darth Vader, respectively. Apple tries to pretend it is different but heck now it’s profit margin outdistances Microsoft.
However, Apple’s greed will once again end up with it shooting itself in the foot. The iProduct line isn’t selling in Asia and other developing countries (ahem! because as any other exploitative industry, they don’t pay their workers enough to buy their own products).
http://news.techeye.net/mobile/apple-cant-make-it-work-in-india-and-in-china
Not coming down on price is why Apple lost the desktop market to MS even though they had the superior product.
-stewartm
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Berating employees for taking off work to take care of a sick child comes close.
As for his politics, this is supposedly what he advised Obama:
Jobs was a Democrat, apparently, by his contributions. But a Third-Way DLC-type one.
-stewartm
The comment stream seems to have veered way off your post, but to return to the theme you present that Jobs was a genius, but so stupid he chose alternatives to surgery: is seriously fucked up belief, imo.
The degree to which our conventional approaches to ‘health’ are really all about ‘disease’ instead is counter-productive to actual ‘health’, meaning all the means at our disposal to keeping ourselves as healthy as we can without the medical establishment, BigPharma, the many iatrogenic illnesses that come with both surgery and hospitalization, staph infections and MRSA bugs as two quick examples.
And that’s not counting surgical error, double-shifts for interns, sadly out-of-date record-keeping, over-burdened nurses making zilch, and making mistakes; the list is vast.
But since Jobs’ ‘alternative’ approach failed (and diet alone may have offered no true alternative, imo’ we don’t know what it was), AND he regretted not having the surgery, in your reflexive narrow thinking, you call him stupid for making a choice beyond conventional, AMA-*proven as efficacious* intervention.
If conventional allopathic medicine (US-style) is so bloody wonderful, why are half of the dollars in this country spent on non-traditional alternatives? Do you really think half us are stupid? I’ve been to a doctor once in the past thirty years, and it was for emergency joint surgery, which surgery was irreplaceable. Oh: except that my brain died during the surgery from some complication, which fuck-up I’ve bee trying to work around for the past ten years.
So phooey on your premise, and phooey on your ignorance concerning the many ways we can, and should, imo, stay away from doctors if we can.
I loathe many things Jobs and Gates stand for, but he made an informed choice, as do many diagnosed with various cancers who are unwilling to go through the death-dealing chemo and radiation protocols. One day medical historians will be incredulous at the ‘cures’ in use today.
True, that.
Don’t know if half of the dollars go to alt-med, though a large amount does. Why? Mainly because people can’t afford conventional medicine, even if they have what passes for quality health insurance in this country.
Here’s an example: Somebody in his sixties has a messed-up knee joint. He/she could a) get a knee replaced for around, say, $35,000, or b) he/she could spend $60 a month on glucosamine, which, though two separate NIH studies have shown it doesn’t work, is quite popular among the running set.
Most of us don’t have thirty-five grand lying around in petty cash, and even if we did, at age sixty and above we might figure that $60 a month times twelve times the number of years we think we have left – say, twenty – will still cost a lot less than a knee replacement over one’s lifetime.
Thanks Phoenix, that is very good. My idea is that a lot of what we are living through right now is due to supposedly brilliant people, who are, in fact, idiots in the most fundamental things, running the world.
Wendy, do you read the news?
Neither were original. Gates stole DOS from CPM and both stole their windows software from Xerox.
Gates bought DOS (originally 86-DOS) from Seattle Computer Products after IBM approached MS for an operating system, which they did not at that time have. Note the irony: Gates didn’t create the product that made him rich.
Although there are certainly many dark sides to both Gates and Jobs, we have to thank them for making personal computers ubiquitous and cheap, just as we have to thank Tim Berners-Lee for creating the WWW and IBM for allowing the PC to be cloned. They have created this world of ours.