Thursday, October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs - R.I.P.

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” - Robert Heinlein

“I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works. . . . That old Motorola cinderblock would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many. . . . I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.” - Kevin Williamson


4 comments:

Hot Sam said...

If they knew what a 1%er really is, they'd be too terrified to protest.

They don't realize that every breath they take and every bite of food they eat proves their fundamental thesis wrong.

Anonymous said...

When I google Steve Jobs Heinlein your blog pops up.

Perhaps this indicates my age, 50.

But Steve Jobs seems the embodiment of many of Heinlein's heroes to me.

The Whited Sepulchre said...

Anon,
I'm pleased that other people saw the connection between the two.
Hope you come back !!

Anonymous said...

Hey, just dropped by to say. I think you should put up a post for Dennis Ritchie. He was much more influential than Jobs, and he too died recently. Jobs didn't create the apple I or II, Ritchie did so much. He created UNIX, which is what Mac OS is based on, and he also developed C. (Which spawned C++, C#, and influenced countless computer languages.)