I can’t get away from the Steve Jobs articles that dominate the front pages of all the news sites I go to, so I read one. This made me laugh:
In the case of Obama, Jobs refused to meet with the president unless Obama called him personally to ask for the meeting. When the pair finally met, Jobs comes across like a version of Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons, suggesting, among other things, that the U.S. should be more like China when it came to regulating (or not regulating) companies as they built factories, that the president should get rid of teachers’ unions, and that schools should stay in session until 6 p.m. and operate 11 months out of the year.
What a country this would be if the Galtians had complete control instead of only 80% control.
A Farmer
The part that made me laugh was that the U.S. should be more like China.
Jewish Steel
Like, filled with Chinese workers building iphones?
4tehlulz
Y U H8 LORD STEVE HE IZ A VISSIONARIE
Violet
He sounds like a right jerk.
Joel
But but but, Jobs was a saint!
cleek
was Steve Jobs’ middle name “Chinese” ?
Amanda in the South Bay
I’m surprised you criticized Jobs like that. He always seemed to be the one CEO that even upper middle class white people could like. After all, he famously dropped acid, so he must not be Galtian.
clone12
Things I learn from Galtian econ 101: CEOs will not perform unless you pay them more money, but teachers will not perform unless you pay them less money.
Citizen Alan
Learning after his death what an abject raging Galtian douche-bag Steve Jobs was has made me intensely happy that I own an Android and am presently typing on an IBM laptop. Not that those clowns are any better but at least I can tell me self that they probably wouldn’t have arrogantly directed the President of the United States to turn the whole country into a laissez faire hell-hole.
John Cole
Watch the 60 Minutes piece on him- guy was a total douchebag. Parking in handicap spots, screwing employees, total tightwad, refused to have a license plate on his car, etc. The piece made me hate the guy.
Catsy
Steve Jobs had a genuine talent for selling ice to eskimos, but I still think his most effective long con was maintaining the myth of Apple as a “good neighbor” type of corporation and fooling countless liberals and progressives into helping perpetuate that myth.
EconWatcher
It seems fairly clear that Jobs was both (a) a genius who did great things for consumers and for his country, and (b) a complete jerk. In fairness, it may be difficult for someone as gifted as he was to relate well to other people–although Obama seems to do it just fine.
The Other Bob
Not to dance a a guys grave, but the SJ worship always seemed odd to me. He did great compared to other electronics companies, but, like other electornics companies, he also had scum companies buidling his products (FoxComm?) at the expense of workers.
The funniest one was everyone wishing Jobs would create a car company as if building cars is the same as calling up China Inc. to build electronic widgets.
Keith
Looks like the secret’s out: St. Stephen of Cupertino was an asshole.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Deregulate business!
But please, pay more for the education of our future workers and consumers.
Mino
Too easy, Maggie May.
And haven’t many, many innovators been drop-outs operating in the family garage, or its equivalent.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Catsy:
I think part of that is the general culture of Silicon Valley-the eclectic, somewhat progressive atmosphere you find in many Silicon Valley tech companies can lull many a liberal into thinking that just because tech workers have a bazillion fun perks and show up to work casually dressed in t-shirts and sandals, that somehow the corporate rot has bypassed Santa Clara County.
harlana
Nice! Wonder where Jobs would have ended up if we implemented such policies! Little factory boy, maybe?
Calouste
@Violet:
And this is the official biography.
BGinCHI
Oh no, the guy who made amazing things, and made amazing things better was not a nice person!
Get the fainting couches!!
Here’s the thing: the two don’t fucking go together. I dare you to start meeting musicians and writers and painters and see if they are lovely people. Prepare for disappointment.
The point is to separate the work from the individual. There is no reason for them to coincide. That’s one of the things that makes the human production of art great.
It would also be helpful to notice that all major capitalist innovators and rich guys/gals are assholes. It’s how they got to the top of that shitpile.
balconesfault
Yeah … we could significantly increase the number of hours per year that our schools operate without actually increasing spending on education?
Just when did Jobs think that teachers would actually work on grading papers, prepping lesson plans, undergoing continuing education and training …
In essence, all teachers should work the same hours as a 25 year old in a startup venture. With of course the lure of the massive payoffs for when their stock options break out as the school system IPO is floated…
WereBear (itouch)
Microsoft is no better; they hung onto market share by relentlessly squishing innovation and had to be dragged into improving their OS. If it weren’t for Jobs, you’d still be staring at a command line when you booted up from cassette.
Yes he was a jerk; everyone in the industry was aware of his arrogance and cement headedness. He was a computer geek, not Gandhi.
This isn’t a Fan Club situation. His partner was the sweet humanitarian.
Steeplejack
Glad to see that the reality distortion field surrounding Jobs at his death has started to fade a little bit. We seem to have an overpowering need to believe that genius in one field, or even competency, automatically transfers to other areas. “He’s a millionaire businessman, so he would be a great president.” “He’s a superstar athlete, so he’s automatically a great role model for your kids.”
Plus the whole sweatshop view of schools (11 months a year, open to 6:00 p.m.) is at odds with Jobs’s own background of dropping out and auditing only classes that he was interested in. Or maybe he means the schools should be open all those hours so budding geniuses will have more opportunities to drop in.
Subrant: all these businessmen (and Thomas Friedman) wanting us to be more like China, which is the poster child for unfettered capitalism. Melamine in your milk? Poisoned pet food? Industrial accidents hushed up and swept under the rug? Why, it’s a self-regulating paradise! Let’s be more like that.
Warren Terra
So, Jobs planned to take our school system from nine months of seven-hour school days to eleven months of ten-hour school days, a 75% increase in classroom time. Surely he had great plans to pay for this notion? I mean, the man was never known to have donated a thin dime to anybody, and while I don’t know his views on taxes he was no public advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy – surely he was saving up his massive bundle in order to fund a doubling of the public schools?
The other fun excerpt I’ve seen about this prick’s interaction with Obama was where he didn’t want to attend a dinner meeting with a half-dozen computer luminaries – people like the founders of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Because he was so much more goddamn special than those folks, or something.
kd bart
LSD is a helluva drug!!!
danimal
And where, exactly, are the funds going to come from to keep kids in school from 7:30am to 6:00pm. Or is the tax cut fairy going to grant a new golden age once we replicate the system of our new Chinese overlords?
Warren Terra
@clone12:
Well put, deserves repetition.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
My girlfriend has an old ipod and mac laptop which she bought used. She asked me to transfer the music from the ipod to her laptop so she could copy the music to a newer ipod and after banging my head against the wall I gave up and told her to take it to the apple store. On a pc, this would have been simple – just plug in the mp3 player, double-click on the drive and voila, all the music is right there to be selected, copied, pasted. Not so on a mac with an ipod. You have to go through itunes, which doesn’t want to let you do want you want to do. Selecting the manual music management check box did nothing, still couldn’t see the music in the ipod like I would be able to if I was using a pc.
I’m a pc for life.
Satanicpanic
So the wingnuts who have been trying to claim him as one of them finally have something other than “but he had lots of $$$!” to hang their theory on. They can have him for all I care.
TruthOfAngels
Heh. Picture John singing to Doug:
“All you did was wreck my blog,
And in the morning you bit my dog,
Oh Dougie, I couldn’t have tried
Any mooooore . . .”
ruemara
Look, I love my Apple products. I won’t apologize or feel like I’m not supposed to. But I also have known that he’s a douche. The first thing I ever posted on his death was forgiveness for being the sort of douchebag that made him this powerful rich man. Why the fuck you guys think that somehow feeling sorry for the end of a sort of cultural figure equates to loving him, I do not know. And the longer he’s dead, the more people are going to see what a giant raging asshole he truly was, in addition to being a workaholic with a genius for understanding how to make technology an emotionally accessible item.
MikeJ
Linus Torvolds once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Rafer Janders
@John Cole:
Yeah, it made me realize he was the classic “mean nerd.” Probably picked on a bit in grade school and junior high by people who were a lot dumber than him, and he then used that resentment, not to treat others better than he’d been treated, but to lash out, and he used his intelligence as a life-long excuse for such behavior, because he was supposedly “better” and so should be allowed to do whatever he wanted. It seems to have a subdued but lifelong temper tantrum of “I’ll show them, I’ll show them all how special I am and I’ll make them pay.”
(After I wrote the above but before I hit Submit, I found this quote which rather perfectly supports this theory):
“His way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that,” – Jon Ive, Apple’s head of design, on Steve Jobs.
Walker
Read a Thomas Edison biography. It is not that much different. Yet we still deify Edison.
The fact remains is that he was an innovator, and the fact that he was a jerk does not change this.
BGinCHI
@MikeJ: I hang my head and cry.
(cue the guitar)
Tlachtga
I’d be more shocked if a rich, successful person wasn’t a complete dick. That seems much more unusual, even impossible.
I’d venture that most famous, successful, or rich people got that way by being an asshole and taking advantage of a system they ultimately despise. Yeah, there may be exceptions, or you may have someone who assuages their guilt with charity, but that doesn’t change how they got there.
Catsy
@Amanda in the South Bay: You see the same thing in tech all over the place, I think. Nearly every tech company where I’ve ever worked has had a very similar patina of progressiveness, and I think a lot of that probably has to do with the hugely disproportionate numbers of tech workers who lean left to one degree or another.
Don’t get me wrong, I own at least two Apple products myself and use them with only nominal amounts of badmouthing directed at their limitations. But I’m not under any kind of illusions about what kind of company Apple is, and no one should be surprised to find out what kind of supreme douche Jobs was. Longtime Apple fans least of all.
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Check out SharePod. It’s a free program for managing your iPod’s content that consists of a single executable you can drop in the root folder of your iPod. Thereafter, whenever the device is attached to a Windows computer as a USB drive, you can open SharePod and use it to copy songs to or from the device, as well as (poorly) manage playlists.
It’s kind of clunky and I don’t know that I’d pay more than $5 for it, but it’s probably the best free program for managing iPods and for years now I haven’t used that piece of crap iTunes for anything other than updating the iPod’s software.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Tlachtga:
Yeah, I get ya, but people on the left need to stop idolizing him as someone he wasn’t. He’s just as much of a Galtian fuckhead as any Bankster.
Culture of Truth
I really wouldn’t mind if he were a personally a jerk, since certain successful often are, or are perceived to be, and it’s not like I have to hang with the guy to use or purchase or like his company’s products. Also, I’m a bit suspicious of such stories, since if you scrutize anyone’s life enough you can make them look bad.
But the labor conditions are a real problem. And don’t park in handicapped spots.
D. Mason
@EconWatcher:
Oh Jesus! The man is dead you can get off his jock already. From the contents of this he seems like a twisted fucker, who pined away for the days of American slaver proper, not gifted.
Tom Levenson
edited out because I don’t want to dwell on this story.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m not gonna cast my ipod into the sea because Jobs was a dick, but I was ready to pull an Elvis on all media receptors when he died. I hate the way we as a culture go all mourn-porn whenever somebody famous dies. I think it started with Diana, and that led to live coverage of the funerals of Sonny Bono and a Kennedy who had almost no public profile before his death. I remember a helicopter circling the Hyannis Port (sp) house. It was sick. And all the maudlin, lip-biting referenced to “Tim” on the NBCs during the ’08 elections, though at least from what I understand, Russert was a good a person in his private life as he was a useless, corrupt, incompetent douche in his professional life.
Tlachtga
@Amanda in the South Bay:
People on the left shouldn’t idolize anyone in business. I just don’t understand progessives who give in to branding, forgetting that business in 2011 is inherently opposed to things like fair pay or workers’ rights–that’s why everything gets outsourced to China.
I have an iMac, iPhone, and iPod because I like how they work, not because the company that produced them is somehow better or more moral than others. Apple is as shitty a company as Microsoft or HP or Dell–hell, they might be worse, I haven’t done a comparative study. But damn, I know just how awful my phone is when you look at it through the lens of things like environmentalism or human rights (rare earth mining in Africa, anyone?).
Culture of Truth
People have said similar things about Gandhi.
jibeaux
Ah yes, the quantity not quality model of education. That’s very…..Microsoft of him.
gelfling545
Yet another example of the folly of thinking that because a person is brilliant in one ares s/he will be equally brilliant elsewhere.
cleek
see also: Whole Foods
joes527
@Citizen Alan: Dunno about google, but IBM:
You can take that to the bank.
srv
You all want jobs and factories, exactly how does a creator do that if they’re tied up in red tape?
I think this was misquoted. I think it was unions and that the kids should stay in the factories until 6 p.m.
If it was good enough for your grandpa, it’s good enough for your kids.
KG
Two questions:
1. Didn’t Jobs drop out of college?
2. Didn’t he do just fine in the school system we have where it ends at like 2 and only goes about 8-9 months a year (when you factor in holidays, winter break, spring break, and my personal favorite “staff development days)?
Ok, third bonus questions:
3. So why would we listen to him on such a point?
The Other Chuck
@BGinCHI:
Musicians and writers and painters don’t generally organize for the purpose of systematically fucking over everyone else. Steve Jobs was one of those aristocrats who would happily dump dioxin in our water for an extra buck; he just happened to have a bit of the artist talent too (or at least had a good sense about whose works were worth buying or stealing)
Poopyman
@John Cole: Damn it! You got there ahead of me. I was sitting there watching that thinking “What a raging asshole”. Driving without a license plate, parking in handicapped spots, treating the help (Apple and everywhere) like shit. How’d he avoid getting beaten to shit his whole life?
Roger Moore
@EconWatcher:
No, just no. If very gifted people have trouble relating to others because of their gifts, it’s usually that they don’t understand how people around them can be so slow to understand their thoughts. It doesn’t make them into raging assholes who think it’s their right to look down on everyone else. That’s a result of being entitled, not being gifted.
Librarian
That’s not all: he also hated health and safety regulations and wanted American working conditions to be more like China’s. I wonder who he thought was going to buy his fucking products if everybody was making low wages?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20123670-503544/steve-jobs-obamas-focus-on-excuses-infuriated-him/
Culture of Truth
off topic, if it were fully paid for, is it really so Galtian for schools to be open for more months? One more month? If it were done to add more music or art class? Granted that’s not realistic, but I don’t reject the concept out of hand.
joes527
@KG: He didn’t want more thinkers. He wanted cogs. (Chinese cogs, evidently)
Corpsicle
I don’t get the hate for the comments about schools. You guys do realize that our education system is a pathetic joke, right? Most first world countries provide a far better education than we do. 8am-6pm eleven months a year seems like too much, but 6 hours a day for 8 months has not made sense for decades.
James K. Polk, Esq.
The fact that he was *working* his last day on the planet (literally) instead of spending time with his loved ones tells you everything you need to know about this man.
That and the story about him making Woz stay up for four nights in a row so that he could make a $5000 bonus from Atari (of which Woz got $300).
BGinCHI
@The Other Chuck: It was a broad, not a direct comparison. I wasn’t saying art is full of Galtians, but that it is/was/will be full of deeply flawed human beings.
The other way hagiography lies.
And hagiography always lies.
Cris (without an H)
I didn’t read a lot of the post-mortem “mourn porn” (love that term, Jim), but a person can be forgiven for thinking the glowing retrospectives in the wake of Jobs’ death suggest that everybody always worshiped the guy. But fact is, the world has known Steve Jobs is a dick for 30 years. I think even the most devoted mac acolytes have always acknowledged this.
Joel
Reading the linked article in long-from makes me want to buy that biography. It also makes me think that Jobs was more of a Howard Hughes type than the more familiar sort of corporate jerk that people are picturing him as. Not to say that Howard Hughes was a decent person, but he was… different.
Anyhow, I still like my Apple laptop. It’s a great product. I’ve had problems with my iPhones in the past, and they get replaced, gratis, no questions asked. Pretty easy to explain Apple’s popularity without considering their image.
Roger Moore
@Walker:
How much of an innovator was he, though? It’s not as if the Mac invented the GUI, or the iPod was the first portable music player, or the iPhone was the first smartphone. Apple has been much more of a refiner and popularizer than a true innovator. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, mind you. First implementations of new technology are often very rough around the edges and barely usable, and it’s the refiners and popularizers who take innovative ideas and convert them into usable products.
Mike in NC
Never paid any attention to this guy when he was alive. Never bought his products. Interesting to know he thought American public schools should be run like Chinese prison sweatshops.
Ohio Mom
@KG: Question 3 should be: Are Steve Jobs’ children presently enrolled in a school that is in session until 6 p.m. and that operates 11 months of the year? If not, are they being tutored during the hours their school is closed in order to make up the difference?
Then the bonus question could be number 4.
Howlin Wolfe
@BGinCHI: True dat. Miles Davis was, according to many accounts, an asshole extraordinaire. But I lurves his museek!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Corpsicle: like CoT, I’m all for a longer school day and year, but given his views on the teachers’ union and the need for Chinese laissez-faire, I don’t think we’re talking about good reforms in a hypothetical US of Jobs
Barbara
clone 12: fantastic observation. It won’t surprise you to find out that the same thing is true of doctors and nurses: if you don’t pay doctors enough, the “wrong people” will become doctors, but if you pay nurses too much, the “wrong people” will become nurses.
What do nurses and teachers have in common? Hmmm, let me think about it . . . notice how easily capitalist rent seeking co-exists with sexism?
GregB
@Mike in NC:
Supplied with Apple products.
MBunge
@Walker: “The fact remains is that he was an innovator, and the fact that he was a jerk does not change this.”
It’s not that he was a jerk. It’s that he apparently embraced Galtian bullshit. Not every corporate titan is Henry Ford, but most of them are just garden variety selfish.
Mike
Martin
@Joel: Oh, I don’t think anyone believes Jobs was a saint. It was called the ‘hero/asshole rollercoaster’ for a reason. Jobs was a supreme asshole. His insistance that Obama invite him personally certainly shows that. And yet, Jobs gave Obama a pre-release iPad 2 at that meeting – the first one
But its unfair to take Jobs statement out of context (we do that a lot here, to a lot of people, btw). Jobs was the corporate id at Apple. He knew that. He knew the employees were the ego, and the executive suite was the super-ego. His job was to push some idea out (absurd as it may be) and allow the other parts of the organization to push back. I’m not saying he wouldn’t also be an asshole about it, but that’s what he did.
Jobs would make statements like that to someone like Obama because Jobs knows that he as CEO can’t change public policy, but Obama can, and Obama can push back against that idea and explain why it’s unfeasible, etc. No harm comes from Jobs statement – it’s not as though policy would accidentally change due to it. It’s not like if he made such a statement about what Apple should do which the stock market might react to. The context in which the statement is made matters. If you think it’s a shitty idea, fine, demonstrate why it’s shitty, but ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ is the worst possible answer – because that’s the whole reason for tossing out this pie-in-the-sky what if idea – to challenge the status quo and force it to be defended. Fuck, that’s been Jobs M.O. since the mid-80s, to knock everyone out of their conventional wisdom mindset and to honestly assess the current state of things and question whether they should be done differently. Don’t knock the guy too hard for doing what he successfully, and almost uniquely did for 3 decades.
Further, you need to understand the statement in the context of where Jobs lives – CA really does need such an adjustment in their public school policy. We don’t have 9 months of 7 hour days. In high school, we sometimes have 8 months of 4 hour days. Students are not required here to take a full day – they only need to take as many classes as needed to meet graduation requirements, and in quite a lot of cases, even for college-bound students, they take 4 classes their senior year and maybe as few as 5 their junior year.
Further we do have quite a lot of year-round schools here. Rather than hewing to the quite archaic notion that kids need the summer off to go harvest the crops (not something commonly done here in OC, at least) we have schools that go 11 months out of the year, with 1-2 week breaks spread out all through the year. Same number of instruction days, but students don’t have that 3 month long brain purge that occurs between school years. Teachers like it because it’s less of a grind – there are regular breaks so that teachers can catch up or prepare for the next month of instruction and they get some downtime from students. A lot of parents like it because you have year-round opportunities to take vacations and because the students get more frequent opportunities to decompress without falling into the ‘in school’/’out of school’ modes and having to ramp kids back up at the start of a school year. So his call for 11 month schools looks perfectly normal to us here – and students in year-round schools do seem to do quite a bit better than students in traditional cycles. So, why aren’t they national? Why aren’t they the norm? There’s a lot of data already in place to support that they work better than 9 month schools.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Other Chuck: Never read Zevon’s bio did you?
General Stuck
OT
attention : this is a paid public announcement.
Politician Perv Alert
This one From GOP division.
Back to your regularly scheduled thread.
Spencer
For steve jobs, being around normal people felt the same way normal people would feel being around only people with IQ 75 and brain damage all day.
For steve jobs, being in school with normal students probably felt the same way a normal person would feel in a classroom full of monkeys led by a person with IQ 75 and brain damage.
maybe your fear of being an asshole is limiting you from reaching your potential. maybe life is to short to give so much of your potential away to stupid peoples slow thinking. there are 7 billion people on this little spaceship we call earth, maybe treating each one like a special flower instead of a stupid monkey means we can’t actually get the stuff done we need to do to make it work right.
if you are deciding on a brain surgeon, make sure to choose the asshole sociopath over the inclusive fuzzy nice guy.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Who cares? He’s dead.
Poopyman
@Spencer: You’re right Spence. Maybe if we all screamed at our waitresses the world would be a better place.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Jesus is there anything bad you can possibly say about Jobs and/or Apple? If Jobs was a Wall Street Bankster you’d gladly be his serf.
ETA: And POTUS is responsible for CA secondary education how?
FollowtheDough
Why is this a surprise? Everyone should wake up that both political parties are already using the terminologies leading us to this kind of grim world for America. “Productive” “competitive” “quarterly earnings”
We have drank the kool aid on what I call “Exhaust Fumes Economics” Where everyone and everything is running on “Fumes” And I hate to break it to the Obama supporters, it seems like he believes in this bullshit as well. This is the religion of “American Exceptionalism” on full tilt. Guess what? The outcome isn’t pretty if you aren’t part of “Captains of industry” The only question is, got a passport? lol
stormhit
@Spencer:
Hilarious comment considering the recent posts here on sociopaths.
Poopyman
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Hmmm. After some reflection I realize you’re right!
Ping me when the next post goes up….
(ETA – … and there it is already!)
Joel
@Spencer: Thanks to your screed, I now know how Steve Jobs’ must have felt. It really is how you imagined!
amk
Well, at least the koreans will be happy he is gone.
Chyron HR
@Spencer:
Yes, Howard Roark’s lot was a hard one indeed.
Warren Terra
@Spencer:
Where’s the evidence he’s such a genius, head and shoulders above all around him? He was a forceful person with a powerful vision and the determination to get it accomplished, but he has no history of great technical skill (that was Woz, who at times was doing his own job, doing Jobs’s job, and doing all the technology for Apple) and none of academic accomplishment. That you have trouble putting up with other people’s opinions doesn’t make you brilliant, it makes you a jerk. Being a jerk can be very useful, especially in the role of unique visionary, but let’s not mislabel it.
batgirl
@Corpsicle:
I think you have to look at Jobs’ comment about schools within the whole package–getting rid of unions, getting rid of regulations, etc.
Every single school district I know is struggling with money right now. The biggest cost (rightly so) is teachers’ salaries. So how does he propose to pay for the extended and longer school days? Maybe teachers should be paid like the factory workers in China that make his iPhones.
Ohio Mom
@Corpsicle: Re: the myth that most of the developed world has better education systems than ours.
What most of the developed world has is much lower levels of child poverty. Something like 20-25% of our kids are poor; contrast that with European countries, where the percents are in the single digits.
Our schools that have low numbers of kids in poverty do as well or better on international assessments. Our schools that have lots of poor kids do much worse and we have a lot of schools like that because we have a lot of poor kids.
See: http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
Corpsicle
It’s sort of amusing that in this post we have many people reflexively defending our education system, while the prior post is about the difficulty in explaining science to the public because they are so ignorant.
Shawn in ShowMe
Bill Hewlett and Ken Olsen(DEC) were known for their kindness. Decades later, Gates and Jobs were known for being raging assholes. What happened?
The Moar You Know
I have very carefully avoided saying anything about the death of Mr. Jobs publicly – a good many of my friends worked for him and would take what I’m about to say seriously amiss:
Jobs was a grade-A asshole, from the day he was born until the day he died. He made the world a shittier place. He felt like he was entitled to everything in the world and acted accordingly.
Maxwel
What a flaming mendacious asshole Jobs was.
Villago Delenda Est
If you’re one of the Borg queens, everything looks just peachy in the Collective.
Corpsicle
@Ohio Mom: Thank you, I didn’t know that.
jon
I think the work day and the school day should be more in line if we really want people with children to be able to work. Instead, there’s a hodgepodge of half-days and early-out days to accommodate teacher training and other things. There’s this idiotic industry that fills in the time, and it’s called “day care”. And its educational results make the public school system look like a combination of The Sorbonne, MIT, Harvard, Cal Tech, and Oxford combined, unless you think The Lion King on dvd for the hundredth time is the pinnacle of Western Civilization.
But the daycare industry is private, its employees are compensated according to the free market’s pimp hand, and it would be tantamount to treason to condemn it in any way because it’s so convenient to have a school system that doesn’t do a job well, a work market that doesn’t give a crap about parents, and a free market solution that solves everything. Right?
Amir Khalid
As a technology journalist, I never bought into the Saint Steve of Apple mythology. From his first hitch at Apple, he was famous throughout the industry for his massive ego and less-than-pleasant personality, in particular what was called his “reality distortion field” i.e. his ability to browbeat people until they saw things his way. He had, or usually knew how to pick, genuinely good ideas; it made him rich, powerful, and able to be a dick with impunity. Great for leading a large organization. Not so great if you had to deal with him personally; or when he was wrong, since a person like that doesn’t ever admit error if he can avoid it.
Cults do have a way of growing around people like that. To some extent that may have been part of his success in his second hitch at Apple: his fans and followers went where he pointed, tech-wise, and they were numerous enough to make Apple’s genuinely innovative products wildly successful.
PeakVT
@Corpsicle: It’s more like seven hours for most high schools now, and a lot of middle schools. And our [public] education system isn’t a pathetic joke. Parts of it fail miserably for reasons that aren’t entirely under their control, and the rest is about average for a developed country.
There’s plenty that can be improved, but let’s not condemn it wholesale.
Ohio Mom
I’m very skeptical about year-round schooling. Some kids do lose a lot over the summer, or need to catch up, and for them, there should be summer school or some sort of tutoring. I’m for enrichment classes too, and of course, the funding needed to provide summer school, tutoring and enrichment classes.
But to require schools to operate year-round would deprive kids of many opportunities, like going to camp, extended stays with relatives from other states, or for older kids, having a summer job. There’s more to life than academics.
Paul in KY
@Spencer: Professor Hawking seems to manuever around us untermenschen without resorting to shooting laser death rays from his chair.
Wonder how he does it? Must be medicated.
somegayname
@Roger Moore: This this this. The other Steve (Woz) was the computer geek and innovator. Jobs was a good salesman / marketer. The ipod design was borrowed from an old transistor radio, the ipod was patented in 1979 by an english inventor (not under iPod brand, obviously). Kane also described downloading music over the phone lines, which was a pretty good call when ARPANET was about 10 years old. The iphone was a clone of the LG Prada. One of the few good things about apple was their fanbase had a much higher pricepoint for products than the general population. Demonstrating the market for a $700 iphone likely contributed to efforts for handset makers to get sub $300 smartphones to market. Similarly with Tablets.
Ohio Mom
@Corpsicle: You’re welcome!
Warren Terra
@Corpsicle:
Show me someone inthis thread who greatly admires the American education system. Heck, show me someone who’s opposed in principle to longer school days or years. The question is how such a policy could fairly and responsibly be implemented if it were desirable – and especially of how Jobs, who was objectively in favor of child labor, opposed to protections for the rights of teachers and other workers, not generous with his money, and not obviously in favor of higher taxes (especially on the wealthy), and who hardly had the most strenuous education himself, feels entitled to propose doubling the time our kids spend in school. Back here in the real world, teachers burn out at a high rate and school districts are firing teachers to save money – and Jobs opines about how we need to double classroom time?
Martin
@batgirl:
Probably through higher taxes. Keep in mind that Apple and most tech companies remain in one of the higher tax markets because they feel they get good value there. They’ve publicly stated that the quality of CAs higher education system and infrastructure is why they stay here. I don’t think they’re going to suddenly disassociate K-12 funding and achievement with public university funding and achievement, particularly when they all have a personal stake in it having their kids attending school in those same markets.
FollowtheDough
Just because Steve Jobs changed the world doesn’t mean he didn’t have impractical ideas on how to properly run a functional society. Never take a genius like Steve Jobs seriously who redlined his system daily. Just not a good idea at all, basic common sense to ponder.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Apple employees don’t send their children to failing schools in East Palo Alto or East San Jose.
ETA: and how do you propose raising taxes in CA to do this?
somegayname
@Spencer: Someone failed logic. Just because many smart people are assholes does not imply that all assholes are smart. Jobs was a good marketer, and got in at the cusp of the home computing explosion. Had he not known Woz, he would have ended up a salesman for HP.
b-psycho
Sounds like a man who should’ve kept doing acid.
kindness
WTF is going on? I love Apple products. I buy all kinds of Apple products. That doesn’t mean I think Steve Jobs was Mother Theresa or Budda or something. Obviously he had some glaring dick problems.
Doesn’t make the Apple products I buy any worse and it certainly doesn’t mean I want anyone to emulate Job’s dickishness.
Corpsicle
When we are wondering how on earth to pay more teachers, lets keep in mind that we recently gave banks almost a trillion dollars, and the Iraq war cost what, 3-5 trillion? Our society is happy to blow vast amounts of wealth on stupid, pointless bullshit, but suddenly we’re broke when it comes to teachers.
YoohooCthulhu
@Spencer:
I don’t know why people say this. It’s a common misconception about people who have above-average intelligence interacting with others. There’s definitely a declining marginal impact curve to intelligence–once you get to about an IQ of 120, you’re capable of essentially performing every complicated job function (physician, engineer, etc), and at an IQ of 110 or so encompasses most college graduates and probably reflects an inflection point in language ability
The reason interacting with people with actual below-average intelligence (~75) is difficult is because they lack the mental facility to do lots of tasks other people do, and lack full use of expressive language. The same is not true of people with IQs of 140 interacting with someone with an IQ of 100-110. The former probably has more frequent insights and is quicker on the uptake, but most people around him can understand what he’s talking about. That’s even excluding the fact that language/communication ability is more trained than other aspects of intelligence.
YoohooCthulhu
@Spencer:
I don’t know why people say this. It’s a common misconception about people who have above-average intelligence interacting with others. There’s definitely a declining marginal impact curve to intelligence–once you get to about an IQ of 120, you’re capable of essentially performing every complicated job function (physician, engineer, etc), and at an IQ of 110 or so encompasses most college graduates and probably reflects an inflection point in language ability
The reason interacting with people with actual below-average intelligence (~75) is difficult is because they lack the mental facility to do lots of tasks other people do, and lack full use of expressive language. The same is not true of people with IQs of 140 interacting with someone with an IQ of 100-110. The former probably has more frequent insights and is quicker on the uptake, but most people around him can understand what he’s talking about. That’s even excluding the fact that language/communication ability is more easily trained than other aspects of intelligence.
Roger Moore
@Paul in KY:
True, but he does have a reputation for trying to run people over, or at least he did when I was an undergraduate and he was visiting campus every year.
Svensker
@BGinCHI:
I have to agree. Most geniuses (who aren’t in mental institutions) are assholes. There’s a certain level of ruthlessness that comes with the territory.
I mean, Gandhi was a complete asshole to his own family. There are trade-offs that people make.
Martin
@PeakVT: Most elementary schools in CA are typically 6 hours and change from 8:00-2:15PM, or some variant thereof. Middle school is about an hour longer, from 8:00-3:00. Kindergarden is about 4 hours with two overlapping sessions from 8:00-noon and from 10:15-2:15. There are variations, of course, but that’s probably the baseline for the state. High schools tend to be open, so students come and go as their classes determine and I’d say most students are there no more than 5 hours.
When I was in school in NY the school days were VASTLY longer than that. Kindergarden was all day. I remember getting out of elementary school just as it got dark. Middle school started at 7 and went until about 4. High school started at 7:30 and went until about 4:30 and was closed – everyone had 7 one-hour class periods plus lunch. CA schools are completely unlike what I experienced.
The Moar You Know
@Warren Terra: Right here. American schools, in general, do a heroic job of compensating for the two things that are destroying our students: American parents and an American culture that actively despises the educated and worships the mindset and exploits of the stupid and greedy.
Nothing wrong with American schools. The problem is, quite literally, at home.
smith
There was an article in Rolling Stone about how Jobs was bullied in school and up until he started Apple with Woz was actually seen as a fairly nice guy. Once he got a little bit of power he became the bully himself, it almost sounds as if he enjoyed being a douchebag. How someone didn’t knock the snot out of him when he was an adult will be one of the great mysteries.
Ironically, given his comments on teachers, one of the few people who Jobs liked as a child was his 5th grade teacher who he called one of his “heroes.”
I know people who own Apple products and I like them myself, but the Cult of Jobs and the deification some people have about him is utterly nauseating. While he was a visionary, he was primarily a marketer – making Apple products sound like the best thing ever. As others have said, Woz did all the heavy lifting in their early partnership, Jobs just came up with marketing ideas. I mean even Bill Gates knew how to write code, build computers, etc. Jobs had none of that expertise – he was basically a very good used car salesman.
PIGL
So let’s say Mr. Jobs was
1) A very successful technological entrepeneur who had the gumption to and luck to ride the greatest technical boom in history;
2) A total jerk;
3) Who advocated destructive social and economic policies based on flawed and self-serving over-generalisations of his own experiences.
I would prefer my tech heroes to be 1 .AND. (2 .XOR. 3). I accept that 1 .AND. .NOT. (2 .OR. 3) is impossible.
Ben Cisco
@Spencer:
There, fixified.
kc
Steve Jobs was a dickhead.
Otoh, I just got an iphone, and it is a thing of beauty.
Nutella
@Amanda in the South Bay:
But the closer you look you’ll see that mostly Silicon Valley is not liberal at all. It’s libertarian.
smith
Anyone have the new Android yet? I want to try it out.
Funny how Jobs wanted to “destroy” the Android when he himself ripped off Android ideas for the new iPhone. http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110606/13065514568/oh-look-apple-copies-android-thats-not-bad-thing.shtml
This is a guy who frequently stole others’ ideas and copied freely from other companies but threw a temper tantrum when he thought anyone stole from him.
Martin
@Amir Khalid:
You might be able to claim that with the old Apple (and the old Steve, who thankfully changed quite a bit before his return), but if you just look at iPhone/iPad sales, you’re talking about a cult of a quarter of a billion people, plus another quarter billion iPod people. When Steve returned to Apple, they were selling about 12 million devices per year, and Apple never sold more than about 20 million. If this was merely some cult resurgence, sales should never have exceeded those numbers. Apple instead is selling well over 100 million units per year. That’s not a cult. That’s an actual market.
People that don’t understand something typically resort to supernatural explanations for what they observe. To someone like me, who rejects supernatural explanations, that just seems lazy. If you don’t understand what you observe then you don’t understand what you observe – work harder. There’s likely a real reason why so many people buy and like (almost a 90% retention rate for subsequent purchases) their iDevices that you simply haven’t take the time or been willing to drop prejudices to understand.
Jon H
“The fact that he was working his last day on the planet (literally) instead of spending time with his loved ones tells you everything you need to know about this man.”
He was at home with family. He made a phone call. Big fucking deal.
“That and the story about him making Woz stay up for four nights in a row so that he could make a $5000 bonus from Atari (of which Woz got $300).”
He made woz a wealthy man. Woz couldn’t have launched the US concerts without Jobs’ commercial instincts. Woz would have been happy making incomplete computers for DIY hobbyists.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Nutella:
Yes. I’ve noticed that too. That’s also something that pisses me off about the people who glorify Silicon Valley. There’s an awfully large amount of money here, and I think that money just intrinsically corrupts. That, and the whole mentality of “I made it on my own” that is popular in IT.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay:
But a lot of them send their children to regular public schools (I know quite a few that do). The only problem with the US education system are the schools labeled as ‘failing’? Really?
Saying we should do something, and saying it’s achievable are two different things. I’d think this place should understand that in the context of politics better than anywhere. And let’s not forget that Jobs was talking to Obama. If the feds introduced a higher requirement for instruction hours, the states would be somewhat mandated to meet it (even though CA decided it was cheaper to forgo the fed subsidies and cut instruction hours below that point). I don’t think people realize that CA is one of the only, if not the only state in the country that doesn’t meet federal standards for instructional hours.
Comrade Dread
@balconesfault:
Actually, that might be a way to turn the Galtian logic against them.
I’m sure we could put together a system whereby we simply count any public resources and any public school time (including individual teacher hours) as long term investments in people, which entitle the teachers and the State to a percentage of the lifetime income of the citizen.
Oh wait, I just invented taxes, didn’t I?
Nutella
@ruemara:
Possibly because my Twitter feed on the day he died said (many times from many people) that he was like Gutenberg, Edison, Picasso, Carnegie, AND Einstein.
So, yeah, your idea of SJ is perfectly reasonable but there are a lot of people who have the idea that SJ, successful businessman, was also a great and wonderful human being who really cared about them personally.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
To me the question is less about Steve Jobs than the fetish of the American public, especially in the media, to see CEOs as knights on white horses who are going to take over our gov’t and save us from ourselves. From Ross Perot to Bloomberg, passing by (if memory serves) the 2000 boomlet to draft Steve Case as a presidential candidate, because AOLTimeWarner was the future of America!
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: Well, he’s on a tight schedule & you Cambridge dons are always puttering about ruminating on P.G. Wodehouse & baccarat strategy & whatnot.
Get out of the great man’s way, I say!
Edit: Look at this! I said ‘baccarat’ up there and WordPress didn’t put me in moderation. I guess only the poor man’s games of chance ever send spam email.
Dougerhead
@Walker:
I agree, he was still a great innovator which is all I care about as a user of his products. But this is a classic example of why we shouldn’t let the Galtians run everything no matter how smart they seem.
Naive and Sentimental
I never got much into Apple stuff and often found people’s worship of Jobs as a bit perplexing because my opinion of him was formed from watching the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. From what I remember he’s portrayed with the same flaws listed in the biography.
Jon H
“Musicians and writers and painters don’t generally organize for the purpose of systematically fucking over everyone else”
Oh? You think U2 and the Stones don’t dodge taxes? You think Clapton lives in the Caribbean for the weather and not to avoid uk tax?
And at least Jobs never drugged and raped a young girl like Polanski. He denied parentage of his first kid when she was quite young, but later reconciled and paid for her harvard education.
PeakVT
@Martin: My impression is (because there’s no easy way to get the data) is that the typical high school day across the country was 6 hours, 6 classes, from the 1950s until the early 2000s, when most places added a hour for another class. That’s not counting an optional or enforced 7th hour that most schools have always had. Maybe my impression is wrong.
But I have never heard of anyone having an 8.5 hour high school day before, that’s for sure. That’s excessive, IMHO.
MTiffany
@John Cole:
That’s what you’re entitled to when you’re a job creator.
gnomedad
@Spencer:
It’s also to short not to snicker about misspellings in rants about how stupid other people are.
Martin
@James K. Polk, Esq.:
Yes, Jobs was the only 19 year-old to ever shit on a friend. I’m sure nobody here ever did that as a teenager.
People forget how young Steve was through the whole rise of Apple. Of course he fucked so much of it up, we all would have at that age. And almost nobody had ever found themselves in that spot at such an age. Now its a bit more common for 22 year olds to be multi-millionaires, particularly in that area, and there’s a bit more advise and oversight in cases now because of it.
Shawn in ShowMe
@PeakVT:
I’m pretty sure Martin is the only one on this thread that used to go to classes from 7:30 until a half hour before the local news came on.
Martin
@kc:
I think there’s more causation between 1 and 2 than people are willing to acknowledge. They may feel that’s a bad tradeoff, and I won’t argue with them, but if I was God I’d gladly trade out all of the unproductive dickheads of the world for productive dickheads, because holy fuck are there are a lot of the former, and not many of the latter.
Barry
@Corpsicle: “It’s sort of amusing that in this post we have many people reflexively defending our education system, while the prior post is about the difficulty in explaining science to the public because they are so ignorant.”
In general the comments are defending our educational system against stupid and dishonest ideas.
Martin
@Shawn in ShowMe: Well, anyone else here go to school in NYC? What were your hours like?
There was a long stretch in elementary school where I went to a Waldorf school, so I might have their hours mixed in with the public schools, but as to the middle and high school hours, I’m pretty certain about those. My mom and I were discussing the school hours situation just a few months ago. She also noted that the CA school days were awfully short. She also went to NYC schools.
Cain
@Culture of Truth:
Gandhi has been a dick. I don’t know if you know Richard Stallman,but it’s somewhat the same thing. Completely uncompromising.
When asked if the jews should have fought back against the nazis, he said that it was better to die than to raise your hand in violence.
I believe in Satyagraha, but it doesn’t always apply if the person your struggling against doesn’t give a damn about you and is more than happy to exterminate you. Think Tutus.
Gandhi has many dimensions, and he was a very unique individuals. That he managed to get an entire nation to follow non-violence is a great accomplishment because it is very hard to fight against your own instinct.
geg6
@Poopyman:
Well, as karma would have it, he did get the life beaten out of him (or the equivalent) by a horrid cancer that even his “brilliance” and wads of cash could do nothing about. After watching that piece, I kept thinking that I hoped he suffered. A lot.
Terrible of me, I know, but I often get a frisson of joy when thinking about how people I hate may have suffered before passing this mortal coil. Terrible, but purely human. Unlike, perhaps, Mr. Jobs.
I once met Steve Wozniak, by the way. A really, really nice guy. Happy to meet everyone who came to the event. Somehow, I don’t think Jobs would have felt the same, if he’d have even deigned to lower himself to meet a bunch of proles.
JC
Didn’t we go through this 3 months ago or so?
Come on people – embrace the theory of multiple intelligences.
People can be brilliant in one skill, one modality of performance, or several, and yet be quite lacking in say moral or EQ intelligences.
It gets even more complicated, when you take the confidence and raging ego you NEED to ‘create the next thing’, plus one million people who are butt kissers who surround you when you are rich and famous.
It is no surprise, as has been said above, that Jobs was brilliant, disciplined, and at the same time, quite the raging narcissist. In many ways, he was rewarded for being that way, for 30 years.
Joel
Steve Jobs was the Larry Bird of technology.
ericblair
@Cain:
George Orwell wrote a very good essay on Gandhi and developed this point. He wasn’t a good person: he was a saint, and this sort of otherworldliness can shock, like the Nazi thing. Also, it worked in India because of the nature of the British colonizers. There were probably several Gandhi-like figures in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, and they died unknown in a cell somewhere. Gandhi really didn’t understand modern totalitarianism.
Anyways, Jobs was a dick. Most business leaders are, but it’s not a law of nature and he could have been a lot less of one without compromising his vision.
The Bobs
@Tlachtga: Woz is not a dick. Very nice person. So there is at least one.
cckids
@The Moar You Know: Agreed. Of course, there are some sub-par teachers & administrators, but overall, they are doing an heroic job, with little recompense financially or emotionally.
And how many other countries take all comers, kid-wise? My oldest is seriously handicapped; physically & mentally. The public school system took him in from age 1 year through age 21 & met most of his needs, in a compassionate & hopeful way. The special ed teachers I’ve met over the years are an amazing group of people. Do most countries take all kids? Or do they get shunted off & warehoused somewhere unless you are rich?
Gravenstone
Appropriate to the topic.
St. Jobs Gets His Comeuppance, or Karma is a Bitch
geg6
@Martin:
I don’t know about anywhere else, but I spend a lot of time in the local high schools and not a single one around here starts later than 7:45am or ends earlier than 3:30pm. And probably 50-60% of students are in programs/sports/activities until about 6-7pm in the evening. Even my youngest niece, at age 10, goes to elementary school at 8am and comes home at 4pm. That’s over 7 hours of instruction time a day (and not counting the days when she has to attend an enhancement program for her gifted program that usually has her doing something with freshman or sophomore level high school students, which means she has to arrive at their start time, but go back to her home school and end the day on her elementary schedule). And then she goes off to dance class, swim team practice, soccer practice, and CCD class until about 7pm every evening. She does homework and eats, watches tv for a total of an hour an evening. So, according to you and Jobs, she’s not doing enough time furthering her education. WTF is wrong with you people?
Silver Owl
Next Jobs will be known to have bitched because women do not birth full grown adults that can start work at 7am the next day. lol The world will consider it gospel.
Tlachtga
@The Bobs: Woz is not a dick. Very nice person. So there is at least one.
Because I’m a pessimist, I like when truth contradicts my instincts. I’m glad Woz is a good guy. There are few out there.
James K. Polk, Esq.
@Martin: Are you telling me, at age 19, you would have screwed your friend out of a small fortune after making him do ALL the work on a project? We ain’t talking a 50% share here. Actually, we aren’t even talking a 10% share. And Jobsie didn’t actually lift a finger.
Not a single person I would count among my friends (among whom are a series of misanthropic scientists) would even consider a stunt like that.
It’s ok to make mistakes, but the pattern of behavior speaks for itself.
Robert Sneddon
@Tlachtga: The Integrated Woz Machine (IWM) is a thing of beauty and a wonder to behold if you know something about digital electronics. It was also a knife-edge design that relied on the chips being hand-selected from the production line to make it work plus a lot of error-handling in the software when it went a little bit out of spec as it did quite often. Adding another ten bucks worth of chips would have made it a lot more reliable but then it would have cost ten bucks more…
The Other Steve is the sort of genius that can bankrupt a company if you let him. The First Steve (and he was always the First in his own mind which was to him the only one that mattered) was the sort of genius that could make one. And did.
As for the “down on Jobs” tirades that are coming out now he is safely six feet under I am reminded of Antony’s speech in Act III of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.”
MBunge
@Svensker: “Most geniuses (who aren’t in mental institutions) are assholes.”
Is there any actual evidence for this statement? Or is it just something accepted by people who secretly like the “license to be an asshole” that genius sometimes conveys?
Mike
The Spy Who Loved Me
If being an asshole is what it takes to get to the top, it’s a wonder that almost everyone in Balloon Juiceland isn’t rolling in dough. I guess it takes being more than an asshole to be successful. You have to actually have something someone is willing to pay for.
Dougerhead
Based on fundraising efforts here, I think that this is a reasonably well off group of readers, on average.
Mike G
@MTiffany:
It was not a sign of elitism or dickishness in this case.
Jobs had a custom license plate that read ‘Apple’ or somesuch, which was stolen multiple times by souveniring Apple fanboys who knew whose car it was. So eventually he went with the (California legal) option of having a barcode instead.
I read a couple of Jobs biographies back in the 80s and it was pretty consistent that he was a world-class dick to everyone from Woz to his pregnant girlfriend and was a tyrant to his employees.
Djur
@ruemara: People generally don’t do spontaneous candlelight vigils for influential people. They do it for people they revered. There were people passing around Steve Jobs quotes and constructing elaborate Steve Jobs tributes. That goes way, way beyond ‘being sorry’.
I mean, at the very least, I didn’t see the President making a personal statement about Dennis Ritchie’s death. So it’s not just a matter of influence, it’s about the person himself.
Sly
And acupuncture and psychics should cure pancreatic cancer.
Djur
@Corpsicle: I’ve yet to see any convincing data showing that our education system is “a pathetic joke”, especially once you factor in the effects of socioeconomic disparity and our principle of single-track, egalitarian primary education. Public schools in affluent areas of the United States perform on par with those in Europe. If we want to improve our national standing in education, we need to lessen economic disparity, not implement authoritarian school reform. That is largely what Europe’s experience has demonstrated.
Aside from that, as long as we choose to continue to educate all students with the same college-prep style curriculum, we’re going to lag behind countries which have multiple-track educational systems. (Please note: this is not intended as a statement either for or against American-style single-track schooling. That’s way out of the scope of this thread.)
ETA: Local control/funding of schools also plays a role.
Dream On
And yet I miss Warren Zevon, who may indeed have been a dick.
End justifies the means and all that. Both Jobs & Zevon created things I enjoy.
Martin
@geg6:
I didn’t say that. I said that 5-6 hours was too little. 7+ sounds more like what I had.
Dustin
Personally Job’s personality is the reason the only Apple product I own is an iPod touch I received as a gift. He was a grade-A asshole for as long as I’ve been following tech and not the sort of person I want my money going to. The fact that they employ a factory with freaking suicide catch nets only cements the notion that he was not only a dick, but in many ways a sociopath beyond redemption that I couldn’t in good conscience be a patron of.
Aside from that, I really can’t dis the idea of year-round schooling too much considering that’s what my parents did with me and what I plan to do with my son. We had our regular class time for so many months of the year and then filled the rest with directed study (usually science experiments/exploration or book reading ‘clubs’). If I could find a school district that integrated this sort of environment year-round with week long breaks every so often I’d be in heaven.
Students lose too much information during break and there’s far too much remedial study at the beginning of every year to convince me it’s an ideal system. Just because it produces OK results on average, and that and our current socioeconomic environment doesn’t support anything else, isn’t a reason to ignore alternatives.