next »

[Nix]

A thread on the protests would be good. I'll share my quick opinion (and not respond to any responses because I don't want to derail the thread):

I think that it's far too easy to hold on to money in the United States. I also think it's far too difficult to start making money from nothing, but too easy to make more money once you have some. I'm not an economist, so I wouldn't know how this would actually work, but my layman's opinion is that in a good economy, wealth is defined by flow of capital rather than stores of capital. A wealthy person should have to continue doing what makes him wealthy, rather than getting wealthy once then sitting on it. A person in poverty should not have a harder time of getting wealth (assuming similar mental and physical faculties and motivation) than for a wealthy person to maintain or grow his wealth. Inequality isn't a problem in that there are wealthy people and poor people, but in that a poor person has a much much much harder time earning money than a wealthy person by mere virtue of his/her economic standing and birth.

[Gimym TILBERT]

Wages slave = how to make money on hardworking poor. It's a slippery slope mechanics.

[Derek]

My friends at Panic built their entire company/ethos around Apple. Because of [Apple] they've become quite successful.

Pilot fish benefit from following sharks and picking up the leftover bits of their meals. The environment created by the shark leaves a niche for the pilot fish to fill. Does this make the shark a philanthropist?

No, but I wasn't arguing that that made him a philanthropist, I was just showing how his work positively influenced part of my world. Not just the tools that he helped proliferate, but his entire ethos based around simple-to-use and elegant designs. It's a biased view, of course, but most of the people around me who use Macs a lot are not assholes who want to show off that they have money - they're people who are genuinely inspired by the design of the tools and the design of the company.

If you think Steve Jobs was only in it for the money and didn't care at all about creating, then we have very different impressions of him.

It's also possible that he gave money anonymously (which would be more noble than making a big show of it, wouldn't it?).

It's also possible that god exists; we merely have no evidence or basis for believing it. You see where I'm going with this. You've made atheist arguments in previous threads that come down to weighing evidence. Same arguments hold up against you here.

There is some basis, at least:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2011/08/30/on-charity-steve-jobs-has-a-right-to-remain-silent/

It's not much, I just raised the possibility because it hadn't been brought up yet. But if you think about it, it makes him an exception to the rule not to give anything to charity. I believe most millionaires/billionaires do at least a little, even if it's only out of obligation or to impress others.

In general, I admire anyone who gives to charity, especially the super-rich that get rich first and then do a ton (like Bill Gates). But irrespective of whether Steve Jobs gave to charity or not, I still respect him for building a company like Apple and seeing his unique vision through until his death.

[C.A. Sinner]

@rinku and nix: why not make a thread about the wall street protests?

[Noah!]

Do you really think that Steve Jobs planned to die at age 55? Like he was writing up his 10-year plan one day and decided to schedule "pancreatic cancer" somewhere in there? All I'm saying is, who knows, maybe he planned to implement some wonderful philanthropic plan later, when he had the funds to implement them. But fate would not wait for that day to come.

This is a standard argument a wife makes about an abusive husband. "Surely, in the future they may intend to change."

Yeah, probably. Really, my post was more of an attempt to wring some sort of moral take-home from this situation than anything else. It's kind of like in the cartoons, when at the end of the show everyone just suddenly stops fighting giant robots, and then they all turn toward the viewer and remind them that drugs are bad. I tried to do this in real life. I failed.

[Derek]

in other words, i would not consider it an achievement if, say, someone brought mcdonalds from making 1 billion a year to making 10 billion a year. they'd just be making more money from selling larger amounts of bad food. apple is a similar case

I kind of don't get your guys's analogies, like... comparing Apple products to fast food, calling them "toys", equating Jobs with Dick Cheney, etc.

You have never encountered anyone who did any kind of good work on a Mac product? Small example:

http://usesthis.com/interviews/mac/

Also, that charity you mentioned, Kiva, has an app that I'm sure many people have used to give loans.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ikiva-for-kiva.org/id431378735?mt=8

So, I have a hard time taking your arguments seriously because of these comparisons.

(EDIT: Oops, I typed "Kiva" into Google and mistakenly thought that one of their founders worked at Apple. Wrong Kiva!)

[Paul Eres]

@rinku and nix: why not make a thread about the wall street protests?

mainly because i hate starting new threads unless i'm sure there's enough demand to warrant them (i see short threads that get 1 or 2 replies and then fade off the bottom as just cluttering up the forum)

@derek -

the mac was not created by steve jobs. he just marketed it and took the profits from its sales. so saying that steve jobs is in any way responsible for what people create on or for the mac or iphone is like saying that yoyo games (the company) and sandy duncan (the individual) should be given credit for good games made in game maker. mark overmars? yes. sandy duncan? no

and for the record i own a macbook (as well as a pc), and an iphone (i didn't buy one, it was given to me as a gift by someone on these forums, but i've never used it except once or twice to try it out), and i own and like their 'magic mouse' (even if it's a bit gimmicky it's very fun to use); i think they're mostly good products, if way overpriced (the magic mouse was $80 for instance), but i would not credit steve jobs for anything i create using them, just as i wouldn't credit bill gates for the games people make on windows (although one difference is that bill gates knows how to program, and programmed in the very early years, so he did some real work once, even if he hasn't directly coded anything since the first versions of dos; so perhaps the microsoft version of steve jobs is steve ballmer rather than bill gates)

so to extend your analogy: should we praise dick cheney because he "kept us safe" for 8 years and i didn't die of a terrorist attack? should we praise mcdonalds because it feeds lots of kids more cheaply than the alternatives? should we praise walmart because they sell things more cheaply than their competitors? sure, we can praise them for those things in isolation. everything has good and bad effects

[im9today]

.  .. ~!>>mm0tt\/tt0mm<<!~ ..  .
STEVE JOP
1990 - 2011
Curator of iPod
"Live long and prosper."

[Derek]

Paul-

No, I meant that they're useful and elegantly-designed tools and not anything like cheap fast food or even expensive toys (which implies that they're entertaining but ultimately useless).

Also, I think running a successful company and being a designer is a lot of "real work". Why don't you think it's work?

[Paul Eres]

i feel i didn't fully answer derek's question: i pointed out why jobs shouldn't be given credit for things made on the mac, but didn't point out why i feel the modern apple corporation has had, overall, a negative impact on the world. so to answer a bit more fully, basically, apple is a corporation and is not and should not be immune to the criticisms of corporations in general:

- insane ceo net worth relative to the workers (sometimes they earn tens of thousands of times as much as their average worker, and nobody is worth as much as tens of thousands of people)

- sweatshops in china which worked people so hard that many committed suicide

- enormous amounts of pollution; apple for a long time resisted efforts to recycle its products (which are pretty toxic) until the public forced them to do so

- products which people could easily do without and often buy for vanity or as status symbols; they do their job, but at a much higher cost than the competition

none of which are worse than many other corporations of course, but it is a corporation, and it does have the problems that many other corporations do. as smithy mentioned, many of the people who are against the corporate state in general (such as the occupy wallstreet protesters) seem to make an exception where apple is concerned for some reason. if this were any other corporate figure dying, like, say, the ceo of kraft foods, or rupert murdock of fox news / news corp, people wouldn't be as sympathetic. but because he made something they identify with, they are

edit: i wrote this reply before seeing derek's newest post, i'll reply to his post soon

[Golds]

he mac was not created by steve jobs. he just marketed it and took the profits from its sales

This is incredibly naive and wrong. Sorry Paul, but you don't understand how big projects work.  Saying Steve didn't create the Mac is like saying that Miyamoto didn't create Mario.

[Nix]

It would have been great if a documentary had been made (before he died) about a day in the life of Steve Jobs. There's far too much speculation about what he actually did in his role as CEO, including how much influence he had over Apple product development.

[Golds]

There's far too much speculation about what he actually did in his role as CEO, including how much influence he had over Apple product development.

No there's not.  He worked with actual people, and there's reams of documentation about how he worked and what his roles were at Apple and NeXT.

[Nix]

This is speculation in this thread, clearly. Whether or not there is evidence to dispel that speculation is another matter.

[Derek]

There's far too much speculation about what he actually did in his role as CEO, including how much influence he had over Apple product development.

No there's not.  He worked with actual people, and there's reams of documentation about how he worked and what his roles were at Apple and NeXT.

PROTIP: links to sources are persuasive and informative.

so to answer a bit more fully, basically, apple is a corporation and is not and should not be immune to the criticisms of corporations in general:

I think your feelings about corporations has caused you to severely downplay the usefulness of Mac products as well as Steve's hand in designing them. I'm not saying Apple shouldn't be held accountable for their pollution and how they treat their workers.

- insane ceo net worth relative to the workers (sometimes they earn tens of thousands of times as much as their average worker, and nobody is worth as much as tens of thousands of people)

Your parenthetical here is kind of strange... it implies that you think such a value exists that's less than tens of thousands. In any case, maybe Steve Jobs is actually worth tens of thousands more dollars to Apple than one of the Chinese guys that pops the buttons into the iPhones?