Saturday afternoon quickie
October 8, 2011
Two things.
- If I see another fucking article about how the world is going to miss Steve Jobs I’m going to puke. He made and sold overpriced gadgets for fucks sake! It’s hero worship plain and simple, maybe even a sick cult.
- I am happy that I’ve been invited to give a “teach-in” at Occupy Wall Street next Wednesday at 5:30 (tentative date and time). I’ve promised an overview of the 5 top corrupt things in the financial system. I’d really appreciate your thoughts: what is your top 5 list? I want them to be both important and relatively actionable. So far I’ve got:
- Volcker rule (i.e. reinstating something like Glass-Steagall); it’s being watered down as you read this.
- Ratings agencies in collusion with their clients
- SEC and other regulators in collusion with the industry
- Rampant buying of politicians and influence of lobbyists from the financial industry
- Incredibly poor incentives for the individuals in the industry, both in terms of salary and whistleblowing
mathbabe 
The lobbying one, though it’d be great for the audience, is not exactly an idiosyncratic corruption of finance. How about a bit on how badly most of us misunderstand returns: reporting is not net of fees or inflation; the huge impact of commissions on the small investor; returns or other statistics are easily overestimated (when you choose to mark, and how granular your marks are); how the size of the fund affects the achievable return; mean reversion. This hits a lot of individual people in their 401Ks and IRAs, and for the policy side, although public pension plans are managed by people who know all about these issues, they suffer from political pressure – by politicians who *don’t* understand – to raise their return targets to ease state and city budget forecasts.
I would call this absolutely an issue of corruption because the very subtlety of the problem makes it too easy for politicians to let themselves be mislead to optimism by people with agendas – yet the power of compounding makes laziness here disastrous for governance. You could probably spend an entire session on just this problem.
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Perhaps you haven’t looked close enough at what Steve Jobs’ accomplishments were that gained him so much admiration.
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Steve Jobs was in the 1% in every way. No wonder you hate hearing about him. Doomed to mediocrity, with the other 99%.
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Oh Cathy, the Steve Jobs quip was in such bad taste! You of all people should be able to spot a real and true innovator from a mile away. And to dismiss his many achievements and sum up his entire life’s work as “sold overpriced gadgets” is mean and dishonest and you know it. Can you maybe elaborate on why you don’t think he deserves a tribute that befits one of the greatest innovators and CEOs in recent history ?
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Let’s not forget that:
1) after Steve Jobs had founded apple and was rich he fathered a child with a woman and refused to acknowledge paternity. The mother and child only survived by living on food stamps.
2) One of his early ventures with Steve Wozniak was to build some circuits for Atari. The deal was they would split the profits equally. Atari paid jobs $5000 but Jobs told Wozniak that it was only $700 and only gave Wozniak $350.
3) Jobs had little technological knowledge and crediting him with inviting anything is pure BS. (I’d love to see all those Iphone patents with him listed as the inventor litigated!)
4) Despite being an admitted drug user, he finagled a organ transplant (bumping all of those who didn’t go crazy on drugs in their youth).
5) Despite amassing a large fortune he had almost no philanthropic presence. Compare that to Bill Gates who has conservatively been singly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
The guy was a self-centered arrogant prick, and the world is a better place without him.
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Ok ‘Reality’, items (1), (2), (4) and (5) on your list are complete red herrings. Steve Jobs is being lionized in the media for his achievements in technology and business, not for his morality or ethics. I defy you to find one person of Jobs’ stature that the description “self-centered arrogant prick” does not describe to a tee. I think you’ll find a disproportionate number of successful, ambitious people with that exact personality type. It’s hard to become that successful without being a bit arrogant and prick-y. Go read up on Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Meg Whitman, and Mark Zuckerberg if you want to see some real “self-centered arrogant pricks”.
You’re right that Jobs did not have a high degree of technical aptitude but you don’t need that to be a successful innovator. The point is that he was a technological visionary, an original thinker who could come up with a brilliant concept for a gadget and mobilize his engineering team to turn that vision into a reality. Every team of engineers needs a visionary to lead them, someone who can visualize a project on a grand scale, sketch out a rough idea and then have the technical wizards fill in the gaps and work on the tiny details. And Jobs played that role extremely well, perhaps better than anyone in recent history.
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I think the point people here are making is that his actual talent and achievements were in business and in promoting technology. Compare that to the typical tribute to Jobs which seems to give him credit for inventing the technology they love. Then consider how many hundreds of thousands of people are giving him this same tribute. Can you explain how it isn’t all a little bit much?
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Of course, during the week of his death, (at a relatively young age for this society) it is all, a bit much. Individual people can sometimes make correct judgements. People, collectively always overshoot (or undershoot) the mark.
I remember once seeing an interview with Steve Wozniak in which ‘Woz’ described Jobs’ recruitment pitch to John Scully then CEO of Pepsico. “Well if you want to sell sugar water all your life, you can, but if you work with me, you might change the world”
This illustrates Steve Jobs’ understanding of the critical point where society, business and technology interact. Nevertheless, he was a Matthew Boulton rather than a James Watt.
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Sorry to harp on about Steve Jobs – but don’t think about the individual gadgets, think about them and their influence. The apple II, the apple mac, the apple iphone and the pixar launches all changed the world.
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Like him or not, your Steve comment has harpooned your teach-in question. You might want to repost that separately.
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True, and good advice, thanks.
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I would also like to add that the devices Apple puts out serve more than just the standard consumer of music and internet. They have also dramatically reduced the cost of assistive and augmentive communications devices for the disabled:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/steve-jobs-disability/
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Regarding Steve Jobs, you might enjoy http://mattbors.com/archives/807.html
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