Elect Steve Jobs President of the United States 888
Will Foster writes "There is a groundswell of support for electing Steve Jobs President of the United States." I'll vote for him if I can write in my vote -- with a Newton stylus!
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Elect Steve Jobs President of the United States
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He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
Stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong Steve (Score:4, Insightful)
Harmony? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is obviously one who doesn't compromise/deal well with others.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:5, Insightful)
Woz would make a great technical or education advisor, but probably a lousy president.
slashdotted (Score:1, Insightful)
San Francisco, CA
In a stunning move, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer INC, announced his intention to run for presidency of the United States of America. The announcement was greeted with overwhelming support by the large macintosh community in the united states, and veiled reproach from Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft Corp.
"We here at Microsoft are more concerned with somebody addressing the fact that the editors of slashdot are pulling shit over on moderators they don't like" said Gates. We question whether Jobs will be up for the diffiucult task of getting the editors to stop Taco-snorting for long enough to run a decent news blog, like Rusty over at kuro5hin.org"
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:4, Insightful)
Plutocracy has one advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
What I mean is.. Suppose Bill Gates really did buy an election. Would he need to pay anyone back for the campaign expense? Or would he be free to act on his own will?
He could theoretically run on issues and voters could predict his behavior by what he says, rather than who is funding him.
Hrm... (Score:5, Insightful)
a) he's someone who made something of himself, and wasn't just from a wealthy, powerful family
b) he's someone that has Vision and can seek it out (even if we might not agree with his Vision, he's definitely got it!)
c) he's arguably of above-average intelligence... try and say THAT of any of the other candidates!
If Nader wasn't running, I'd vote for Jobs just because I know that if Jobs won, he would make a decent go of it and maybe even get something real done.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Bugger that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
The platform, however, is beautifully open. IBM makes a PowerPC proccessor call the Power4, and (today) has revealed a reference model PDA based on the PowerPC architecture.
Apple is extremely strict with their trademark rights, but they rarely overstep the intent, let alone the letter, of the law.
Jobs has my vote just for his insight that DRM will fail, and his strong resolution to never integrate it into MacOS.
nut with a website == groundswell? (Score:5, Insightful)
John Cusak [cusackforpresident.com]
Pete Rose" [peteforpresident.com]
They Might Be Giants [dementia.org]
Cthulu [cthulhu.org]
And that's who I found in just a few minutes search.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:2, Insightful)
Reagan Without a Cause (Score:5, Insightful)
Later after watching "back to the future" there is a scene where marty tries to prove he's fromt he future. The professor asks "okay future boy, whos president." MArty answeres "ronald reagan" thus assuring the professor he's a lunatic: "Oh and who's the treasury secratary 'jack benny?'.
Later in the same movie, the professor is amazed by the video camera "a portable movie production studio....Great scott! no wonder your politicians have to be actors!". A banal observation unless you think of in the context of it dawning on a person from the 1950's.
So will we all be thinkng "great scott, no wonder all your presidents have to be CEO's of consumer products" when a visitor from the future comes back and tells us about president Jobs?
Don't discount this type of thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that at this point, our government is so corrupt and broken, that appointing government officials by lottery would yield something better.
Re:before y'all laugh too much (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I would agree that Gore's supposed statement that he "Invented the Internet" was taken out of context. Despite being so seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin in public speaches, I would tend to credit the man with enough intelligence to *NOT* have made that claim.
What I supposed that Gore could have been referring to was his support of the Boucher Bill [ibiblio.org] which was solely (AFAIK) responsible for opening up the internet to general use by the public. Up until the point of this bill being signed, the internet was supposed to be used solely for "official" government use. Of course, by this time many private citizens were already using it to buy and sell things to one another, proposition one another, display ASCII Art and whatnot. But this bill was the official nod that the internet wasn't just for breakfast anymore and was ripe for the picking to anyone interested. Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
So, while Gore of course was not "responsible for the invention of the internet", he can with a straight face lay claim to being a key supporter of the bill that brought it to the masses.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Lawrence Lessig (Score:2, Insightful)
Jobs over Nader (Score:5, Insightful)
Leadership requires the right mix of idealism and pragmatism, and Nader badly fails that test. If he actually WON the presidency, he'd be disasterous at it. And since even he knows that he isn't going to win, running mainly makes him just the Perot-of-the-left, working as a spoiler to get Bush reelected.
Apple users continue to amaze me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:before y'all laugh too much (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:4, Insightful)
And then there's
I would never be a member of a club that would have me as a member - Groucho Marx
Screw Steve Jobs... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:before y'all laugh too much (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it was completely obvious as you have so perspicaciously pointed out. However, it is useful to note how small the technology community was in the early 90's vs. the size it is today. Did you read Slashdot back in '93? Why, of course not! It didn't bloody well exist yet, genius!
Add to that how technologically clueless most politicians are even in this day and age, let alone way back then, I believe that Gore does indeed deserve credit for his vote on this issue.By the way, how have your elected officials voted on the DMCA?
To reiterate, it was completely obvious at that point, but only to a select few. It was a day when the internet (nee, arpanet!) was in use only by UNIX die-hards and nary a Windows user (unless she was already a Unix user).
Re:Stupid. (Score:1, Insightful)
Because that's not the way American politics works. The general population never votes on issues, just representatives. At least on the federal level.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because Douglas Adams wrote it? I see a lot of wisdom in that. Don't give power to those hungry for it, give it to someone who will treat it with the appropriate level of respect.
If they are capable of getting themselves made President, they already have too much power. They need to have the trust of the people, if they have control of the people then it is a dictatorship.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reasons Jobs for Pres. isn't a sound idea.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re 1: Actually, this shows an ability to say "I was wrong" and closing the chapter. And the Lisa wasn't entirely landfilled, as it came back as the deluxe "big brother" to the Macintosh (Macintosh XL, IIRC).
Re 2: You make is sound as if the Lisa was the reason Jobs left Apple, instead of the failed coup against John Sculley. That incident has left him with a lot of experience. As for NeXT, it let him develop the technologies that would let him "reconquor" Apple. His more recent history shows that he does learn from mistakes, despite what people say.
Re 3: This is different from the current administration how? Fleischer, Rove, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld are all great lovers of secret dealings. I think a President Jobs would deliver his State of the Union address in a black mock turtleneck with "Just one more thing"...
Re 4: No matter what you call it, it's effective marketing, and no different than what goes on in Washington almost every day. That, and your example is easily rebutted: how fast was the connection? How many bottlenects did you experience? Did you test loading loacal files to check the rendering engine speeds? You get my drift.
Still, I don't think Jobs is right for the job--at least not yet. I don't subscribe to the PHB philosophy that a good manager can manage everything. Managing a public office is a lot different from managing a company. If Steve really were interested, he'd run for a governor's post first.
The Only Chance Of Getting Jobs Elected . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's a quote from an article I came across not too long ago on voting theory:
In some elections, any candidate can win, depending on which voting system is used, says Donald Saari of the University of California, Irvine. Consider 15 people deciding what beverage to serve at a party. Six prefer milk first, wine second, and beer third; five prefer beer first, wine second, and milk third; and four prefer wine first, beer second, and milk third. In a plurality vote, milk is the clear winner. But if the group decides instead to hold a runoff election between the two top contenders--milk and beer--then beer wins, since nine people prefer it over milk. And if the group awards two points to a drink each time a voter ranks it first and one point each time a voter ranks it second, suddenly wine is the winner. Although this is a concocted example, it's not an anomaly, Saari insists.
You can get the whole article, which gives a fair overview of various voting systems, at Science News [sciencenews.org], or if you prefer: http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp
Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better.
--Pierre S. du Pont
Got to better than the current one. (Score:1, Insightful)
Does anyone outside of the US actually respect Dubya?
Has any other president of any other country had an email circulated soon after coming to power comparing him to a monkey?
What other leader has had a word coined after him/her for stupid things they have said? (And not just one or two stupid things but a whole books published of them.)
Has any other countries leader come to power in an undemocratic way and then gone on to proclaim he/she is defending democracy?
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think so. Sure, it may only be a side effect, but I think it will happen, and I think that it is actually in the West's long-term strategic interest to do so. The whole Middle East is full of disenfranchised people held in line by a combination of propaganda blaming infidels (the carrot) and secret police (the stick). It's a powder keg waiting to go off. A truly democratic regime in the region will bleed off a lot of the pressure.
And clamping the international price of petroleum forever has nothing to do with it, right?
I got news for you: jacking up the price of oil is the economic equivalent of sending the Navy to blockade a port. Both are forms of economic warfare, and both are a threat.
And funneling several hundred billion dollars through the defense industry while ignoring the growing crowds of unemployed has nothing to do with it, right?
So, let's see what you're saying here, Dubya is bad because he's ignoring the economy, and Dubya is bad because he's trying to see off a far worse economic threat. Which is it to be? Or have you made up your mind that anything he does is wrong by definition?
Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on a way to make the West independent of the Middle East for energy (like fusion research), but even you cannot deny that defense spending creates jobs. That's a historical fact.
And giving the top 5% income bracket lots of new tax breaks and only giving the rest of us a few hundred bucks has nothing to do with it, right?
I read in the Washington Post that the top 5% of earners pay 41% of the total Federal tax collected annually. That's an awful lot. I think those folks have been carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden for a long time. BTW, those on $30k/year or less effectively pay no Federal tax at all.
And imposing the Christian version of the Taliban on us has nothing to do with it, right? And suspending our rights to privacy and due process so we don't get in their way has nothing to do with it, right?
Yeah, I agree with you here. The moral of the story: if you want to be critical of someone, and be taken seriously yourself, criticise them for what they actually have done, don't go off on an unsubstantiated rant about irrelevant issues.
Re:Don't discount this type of thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, I'm not an American, but...
Bush's election was, seen from here, curious. It was 'won' in a state where the election officials were appointed by his own brother, and some very odd decisions were made about eligible voters and how votes should be counted. It doesn't, to an ignorant foreigner, look like a proper democratic procedure.
The Enron business was, to put it mildly, also interesting. From a foreign perspective, the fact that Bush was obiously quite close to the Enron people is troubling, particularly seeing how much the former senior people of Enrond have been allowed to get away with.
The relationship between Iraq's oil fields and the business interests of the Bush family also looks a bit odd.
You may say you had more corrupt governments in the 19th Century. I can't say, because I'm not that familiar with US history. But a situation in which a family can put a member into power by other members manipulating the electoral process, and then lead the whole nation into a war in order to bolster that family's commercial interests while simultaneously allowing friends and supporters to get away with the largest single theft in human history, seems to this foreigner to be corruption on a truly epic scale.
Re:Flat tax? (Score:4, Insightful)
Complaining that a flat tax affects you more adversely than somebody else is as misguided as complaining that you were always called last in school because everything was done alphabetically and your name happens to begin with a Z. It's a fair system, but some people get better breaks than others. Equality of effects is impossible. You see what has happened in the U.S. with an attempt to create a perfect tax code. Endless opportunities to exploit loopholes. Nobody can understand it. Get 100 CPAs to do your taxes, and you'll get 100 different sets of results. No joke, this is true. It's far better to aim for a simple, easily understandable, reasonably fair system like a low flat tax.
There's no sense in getting upset that somebody's got it better than you. If you are not satisfied with what you have now, you will never be satisfied. If you desire to be rich, rich will never be quite rich enough. Don't believe me? Ask a rich person who always wanted to be rich, and you will find a miserable person (assuming they could be intimate and honest with you). Also, look at the people who are always lobbying for equality of effects. 140 years after emancipation, the "civil rights" industry is bigger than it's ever been. The more civil rights they attain, the more civil rights they demand. Jesse Jackson and his ilk are never satisfied. That is the destructive nature of envy. It will destroy your happiness, and you will never be satisfied. Don't be angry that the world isn't fair. Sure, we should fight obvious injustices and wrongful discrimination, but we shouldn't try to micromanage every aspect of life.
Re:Wrong Steve (Score:3, Insightful)
Feel free to substitute neo-imperialism for imperialism if that makes you feel better. Quibbling over semantics is boring, so I won't stand on the word.
Conceptually the US holds most of the world's nations in thrall. US law supercedes the laws of Guam and the US Virgin Islands even though those nations have no vote in the US. US law reaches into most of the world's countries -- from countries that would fail without being propped up by US military support, to indictment of foreign citizens who have no business interactions with the US over violations of US law, to coercion through fear and threats of force to stances on foreign policy, the US interferes with other countries sovereignty. In the sense that empires remove from their occupied countries the right to self determination, there are very few countries in the world that aren't subjugated to US neo-imperialism.
If I call that imperialism, rather than neo-imperialism, then it is only because the latter is more difficult to write.