Happy Owner Day from Eric Cantor!

“Yay for us, the job creators! Now the rest of you lazy schmucks get back to work.”

Actually, I think he just insulted Romney.

This moron better not fly on a commercial airline for a while, the flight attemdants being unionized and all. “Another cup of pee, sir?”

Hey, Eric Cantor – FUCK YOU.

@nojo: Donald Trump as well ….

@blogenfreude: I read “The New Industrial State” some dozen years ago, and Galbraith’s thesis — from the Sixties, mind you — has always stuck with me: Business hates Uncertainty. “Risk” is a four-letter word.

@nojo: Very few true risk takers come to mind – Branson, Howard Hughes, Preston Tucker …

@blogenfreude: Steve Jobs, but not Bill Gates…

(Ballmer? He’s a fool, but Windows 8 is nothing but risky.)

I was about to add that “Republicans are hung up on their myths and fantasies”, but of course that’s bullshit: They know damn well what they’re doing, and their cynicism is astonishing even for national politics.

As the proud member of 4 unions and 2 professional associations I would just like to say to Mr. Cantor, FUCK YOU, YOU ASSHOLE. Because your mother thought you a prince does not make you one.

There. That’s cleared the air.

@nojo: The 4 Products scene in that Jobs bio is one of the most interesting and instructive things I ever read. I thought it very brilliant. But then I know nothing about business and even less about life.

We do remember that the game we know as Monopoly was called by its creator Capitalism? He taught economics and intended the game to demonstrate to his students that all markets become monopolies unless corrected. Then Parker Bros. bought it.

@Benedick: If it’s the moment I’m thinking of, his point was that Apple had become a maze of niche products — what was the difference between a Performa and a Quadra? — which, instead of hitting rational price points, just confused the market and spread resources thin.

I rarely if ever see Jobs compared to Henry Ford, but there’s more than a bit of “You can have any computer you’d like, as long as it’s an iMac” to that. Even when he broke the original iMac into five colors, he insisted that dealers buy them in groups of five, so Apple wouldn’t have to worry about which colors to manufacture.

@nojo: My first Mac was a Performa. I remember agonizing over the choice not knowing why it was different from the other models. And there were plenty of them. The 4 quadrant idea is so simple and so brilliant that if I had a career I would most likely apply it.

@Benedick: My second, after the pizza-box LC.

I loved my Performa — outstanding speakers, especially when booting up. Also, looked like a breadmaker.

Is it a surprise that the GOP cannot reserve even one single solitary day to honor the folks who wake up every morning at 6:00 put their kids on the schoolbus at 8:00 then rush off to toil for 8 hours in someone else’s restaurant, or factory, or car dealership or office?

The 99% of Americans who do not own their own business are invisible to them.

@nojo: @Benedick: My first Mac was actually one of the clones. Yet another project that Steve Jobs put the kibosh on. It was probably for the best, given Apple’s vulnerability at the time.

I also wondered why he killed the Newton. At least I used to wonder, until the iPhone was released.

I didn’t buy a Mac anything until it was riding BSD. Unix with tits. Yeah, that’s a computer.

Jobs was at least smart enough to build an OS on something stable.

The other crap is overpriced assfuckware.

@matador1015: The clones were siphoning all the profit from Apple — which was ninety days from bankruptcy when Jobs returned.

But in buying off Power Computing, Jobs also bought Power’s Dell-like manufacturing process and Dell-like online ordering. Even before the iMac debuted, this was being regarded as Apple’s secret weapon.

The Newton? Noble failure, I guess. Some said Jobs killed it because it was a Sculley Thing, but Jobs killed off a lot when he returned. No room for science projects, he said at the time.

A friend and I were joking twelve years ago about buying Apple stock below $20. HAHAHAHAHA!!! But even if I did, I would have only risked $100 tops, so all those five shares would buy me today is a loaded up Retina MacBook Pro.

@nojo: Get me drunk sometime and I’ll tell you how my Apple stock is doing.

People like Cantor that have never worked a blue collar job, even for a day, are absolutely clueless. Many folks have suggested over the years that the draft should be re-instituted. I believe that time in a soup kitchen or on a Habitat for Humanity job site should be mandatory for all high school students. I am not thinking in terms of a few day days but more like a few weeks. It takes at least a week to gain some training.

My first desktop at work was an SE. When the entire site changed to win-tel 6 year later, it was very rough on me. I crushed my mouse in frustration within 48 hours. I almost broke my hand. I took a rubber mallet out of the tool drawer after that. It was not uncommon for me to wail on a filing cabinet a couple times a day to let off steam.

@nojo: Even though he killed the Newton, Apple still held all the patents on touch-screen technology. My guess is that he let PDAs thrive and then meld with cell phones, all while developing and evolving the iPod simultaneously.

If Jobs had all this in his head way back in 1998, then he was a fracking genius.

@matador1015: He was a genius, but not in that way. Woz was the geek genius; Jobs saw that you could build a business around Woz’s tinkering. Xerox was playing with the idea of a graphic interface; Jobs saw the future of computing. Jobs didn’t buy Pixar from Lucas to make movies; but when the idea was brought to him by Lasseter, he ran with it.

Jobs’s genius was in seeing and acting on potential, long before anyone else. The iPod was a happy accident: Rubinstein (I think) caught wind of mini-hard drives being developed by Toshiba, but lacking a market, and somebody else had developed what would be the iPod interface. Jobs grasped the gestalt.

And whether it shared any heritage with the Newton, Apple was indeed developing a tablet in the early Aughts. Rolling out the iPhone instead was a relatively late switch.

Bill Gates was always making grand proclamations about our technological future and not doing anything about it. Jobs just shut up and shipped.

@DElurker: My first job in high school in the mid 1950’s was working Saturdays during the school year and summers at the Cameron Station PX in Alexandria VA in the beverage store as “bottle boy”, hustling wooden cases of empty soft drinks and bringing back full cases at a run on weekends. I still have several scars from broken bottles. At least we got to drink our fill to stay hydrated, and I could easily put away a dozen to 18 a day in summer. Later I started bringing cases of beer to the front and ringing them up at age 16. The store was in a warehouse with a 25 foot flat roof that dripped strings of tar on the hottest days.

One slow summer day, another guy and I rearranged the stacks of beer, with him up top tossing me cases which I had to place and then be ready for the next one coming down. I estimated that we moved at least sixteen tons that day, and we had fun doing it. About a year later I was transferred to the warehouse, marking and stocking for the main PX, when the manager realized it probably wasn’t the best idea to have me selling beer under 18.

There was nothing else that influenced me to go to college more than those couple of years. I highly recommend that sort of thing for anyone who wants to motivate kids to achieve!

Of course, after well over 6.5 years in the army including the 101st Airborne and a year in Vietnam, teaching college chemistry, DEA retiring as a Senior Forensic Chemist, and teaching SCUBA, I myself am a Little Lebowski Urban Achiever, having won three Best Walter trophies; two in LA and one in NYC.

And proud we are of all of them.

There was nothing else that influenced me to go to college more than those couple of years. I highly recommend that sort of thing for anyone who wants to motivate kids to achieve! Not to mention other temp jobs like washing dishes and unloading freight cars of lumber.

But ya know what? I wouldn’t trade my life so far for any other. I’m still enjoying it, and having your kids work hard at hard jobs for a while won’t kill them. It might even make civilized human beings out of the spoiled little untamed animals.

And an actual program like this might help rid us of the Romney and Ryan privileged assholes who, like GW Bush, were born on third base and think they hit a homer.

@RevZafod: Is it safe to presume you’ve already seen the Dude documentary? If not, sit back and enjoy the ride.