Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Steve Jobs, former Apple & Pixard CEO, died on October 5th, 2011, at the age of 56 after a fight with cancer. His life and career was inspiring enough to Apple for them to put up a permanent online memorial of wishes shared by millions around the globe.

Among them:

• “One of my heros died today. Thank you Steve for changing my world in so many unbelievable and wonderful ways! The world lost so much today.”
• “Thank you for your life well lived. You was able to transform materials into masterpieces of design that help people to be more human.”
• “Dear Mr. Steve: You are the greatest man I never knew…”
• etc…

I want to challenge this post-mortal view of Steve Jobs as a saint. Jobs’ entire life is a relentess story of episode after episode where his immorality, crass capitalism, and greed shine through every moment. I debated writing a post titled “Steve Jobs: The Embodiment of the 7 Deadly Sins,” but felt that it would be better to simplify Jobs’ personal flaws into more simple categories. You all know what he did well, the companies that prospered under his unforgiving hand; now, perhaps after reading this article you can bring some balance to the other side of the scale of Steve Jobs’ life.

Selfish & Above the Law

Credit to Flickr user Acaben for the photo

Liver Transplant

Do you remember the liver transplant Steve Jobs received in April 2009? He flew 2,000 miles from Northern California to the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee, where the waitlist of organs is about 80% shorter. How did he get in line for a transplant organ in another state? He multiple-listed by buying homes to meet the residents requirements of the foreign states. The shady process has since been stopped, but was, at the time, legal:

Transplant centers cannot stop anyone from registering as a potential recipient at multiple locations, said UNOS’ Dr. Higgins. So long as patients meet the clinical evaluation criteria, can afford to pay and have access to follow-up care there is nothing in theory to stop the rich from listing themselves at many different centers.

Someomewhere in Tennessee, there’s was a sick/dying patient who had to wait longer for his new liver, because Steve Jobs bought his way to the top of the list. Topping it off, as he had terminal cancer, he should have been consider ineligible. However, due to different admission criteria in different states, Jobs could throw out money to find the state with lax enough criteria to put him on the list. And because he was terminally ill, of course, he found himself at the top of the list:

Transplant chief, Dr. James Eason said “He received a liver transplant because he was … the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available.”

Car Plates

Another great example of Steve Jobs’ willful contravention of the spirit of the law is with his “no-plates” Mercedes car, which he drove without license plates, legally under the rule of law which required plates to be affixed after the car was 6 months old. Jobs, of course, “made an arrangement with his Mercedes leasing company in which he would exchange cars every six months; trading for an identical Mercedes each time. As iTWire puts it: “At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.”

Such an arrangement would be unlikely to be offered or accepted from mere mortals like you or me, but Jobs could flaunt his wealth and status to secure the means to pursue an arbitrary loophole in the law to stroke his massive ego.

Poor Personal Judgement

Lisa

When Apple came out with the LISA computer system in 1976, Steve Jobs claimed it was named after the acronym “Local Integrated Software Architecture.” Years later, he recanted, saying “Obviously, it was named for my daughter.” But in her childhood years, fighting in courts to avoid paternity, Jobs claimed he was “sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child.” Does this make Jobs a psycopathic liar? Or does their subsequent reconciliation show his human side?

Alternative treatments

If you had treatable cancer, would you go to a doctor and have it cut out? Or would you complain, as Jobs did, “‘I really didn’t want them to open up my body” and wait 9 months. Steve Job’s insane decision to resort to alternative medicine to treat his pancreatic tumor because he “believed in alternative herbal treatments” shows absurd personal judgement. Among the “alternative treatments” he tried were “a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even a psychic.”

Hubris

SJ is god, right?

Apple’s censorship

I’ve written before about Apple’s arbitrary app censorship and once sent Steve Jobs the following email:

Reading your interchange with Gawker writer Ryan Tate, I have to comment on the closed-off app store approach, and the idea that some content/applications are inappropriate for public consumption. I appreciate fully the technical beauty of the iPhone/iPad approval process, vetting apps to make sure of their quality and trustworthiness. Better battery life, no malware, and an overall positive experience have made the iPhone/iPad platform what it is.

But, banning applications that challenge your particular sense of morality is wrong. Whether it’s political satire, crude tasteless humour, or porn, consumer and individuals deserve an open platform and the freedom of choice to determine what to watch, read, and play. Mark these apps as objectionable (like you mark “explicit” music in iTunes) and force users to prove they’re adults if you must.

Steve Jobs wanted to control the entire Apple user experience, so he mandated that the iPhone platform would be a walled garden–only his preferred applications would be allowed. In the classic greek definition of hubris, Jobs decided to play god of the playground, a petty move that artificially restricts the richness of the iOS platform.

Apple’s stolen apps

It’s well known that Jobs’ hubris extends to the level where he believes that no original idea can be conceived outside of the Apple ecosystem. As evidence, take a look at the long list of iPhone applications that Apple has ripped-off wholesale:

• WiFi syncing – Functionality and Icon stolen
• MobileNotifier – Ripped off into iOS5
• SnapTap’s volume-button-to-shoot feature
• Where Too’s interface was subsequently “patented” by Apple

I’m sure there’s a clause in the Apple/iPhone development agreement that says “If you develop for the iPhone platform and have a great idea that we like, Apple reserves exclusive rights to the intellectual property and to develop it in the future. In Steve Jobs’ mind, no true iOS/iPhone innovation can come from outside Apple–therefore, any applications developed in the iOS ecosystem whose features are subsequently ripped off and made iPhone/iOS features are merely the cobblestones paving the road to greatness.

Anti-environmentalist

Environmental waste

Apple came in nearly last place in the inaugural edition of Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics in 2006, scoring just 2.7/10:

For a company that claims to lead on product design, Apple scores badly on almost all criteria. The company fails to embrace the precautionary principle, withholds its full list of regulated substances and provides no timelines for eliminating toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and no commitment to phasing out all uses of brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Apple performs poorly on product take back and recycling, with the exception of reporting on the amounts of its electronic waste recycled.

Apple’s products, manufactured in China, have been criticized for using polluting supplies and plants. Some years later, Apple has improved their processes and now ranks 4.6/10 on the scale. Apple, prodded into compliance by public scrutiny and Greenpeace, has reduced the toxic chemicals used in their products, such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. Despite this, note that under Jobs, Apple got their start peddling products contaminated with toxic chemicals, doing an intense amount of damage to the environment.

Foxconn suicides

Apple’s assembler Foxconn is one of the world’s leading exploiters of human capital. Based in China, they work their employees so hard that one of them, Chen Long, died at the ripe old age of 23, having worked continuously for weeks under long hours and harsh conditions. Workers earn a few hundred dollars a month assembling iPhones and other Apple devices, but the conditions are so bleak that between January and November 2010, eighteen Foxconn employees committed suicide.

After getting poor press, Foxconn has improved their wages, invested in robotics, installed netting to prevent jumpers, and asked employees to sign “no suicide” pledges. Now they’re a right jolly place of employment!

Greed

Woz Programming

From the earliest, pre-Apple days, Steve Jobs was looking for an edge over his partners and associates. This story, courtesy of Wikipedia, sets the stage perfectly. Jobs was hired by Atari to produce a circuit-board layout for their arcade game Breakout:

Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak was capable of producing designs with a small number of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description. To save parts, he had “tricky little designs” difficult to understand for most engineers. In the end 50 chips were removed from Jobs’ original design. This equated to a US$5,000 bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375.

“Backdated” stock Options

Have you heard of options backdating? Basically, bigwigs wanted to grant their employees lucrative compensation while avoiding complicated tax issues–ie paying more corporate tax for the “in the money” options classification. So they backdated them to cherry-picked dates, taking advantage of vague wording in the compensation clauses to “spring load” their option grants. Under the newer SarbOX rules, companies have to declare such options grants within two days, vastly narrowing the window. According to the New York Times, “Apple has acknowledged that Mr. Jobs was aware of backdating but said he did not benefit financially from it and did not understand the accounting implications.”

Apple’s Charitable Giving

Steve Jobs’ attitude towards charity is unbelievable in an age where America’s leading CEOs and technologists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged to give their fortunes to improving the world. Walter Isaacson, Steve’s official biographer, refused to speak about his attitude to philanthropy, except to deflect that it was “unspeakable.” When he took over the helm of Apple as CEO, all charitable giving by the company ceased. Apple did not have a corporate donation-matching program until September, 2011. For an interesting look into the world’s most famous misanthrope, give Andrew Ross Sorkin’s The Mystery of Steve Jobs’s Public Giving a read.

As Richard Stallman said about Steve Jobs, “I’m glad he’s gone. [W]e all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.” On the other hand, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs just came out; you can read the other side of the story for yourself. Malcolm Gladwell has also written a hilarious troll THE TWEAKER: The real genius of Steve Jobs for the New Yorker.

My calves burned with a low throb, incomparable to the pain on the track, as I watched the muddy water–brown–spiral down the bathtub drain. Washing the mud off after Tough Mudder Tri-State 2011, 12 miles of mud, obstacles, and freezing water, was the real end of the race, the delineating point at which I could return to my regular home, body, and life.

The weather in Jersey when we ran was in the mid-50s, with a cold wind blowing hard. We kicked off around 11:30 and crossed the finish line at 3:15, after stopping for 30 minutes to drop of two injured teammates at the first-aid station at mile 6. Volunteers told us that at least four ankles had been broken already at the monkeybars obstacle, and we saw others who fell wrong mid course or fell to hypothermia being carted away by ambulances that were standing by. Signs along the way taunted our determination with “you signed your death waiver already” and “you just completed a Warrior Dash” (at mile 4).

The Course

The course map tells part of the story, but running the track is another experience entirely. After running and climbing through a rope obstacle (easy!) you are asked to take the Chernobyl Plunge a dive into a pool of icey water with food colouring added (you get a choice of green/red/purple), submersion under barbed wire, and them up the other side of the pool where you clamber out. The water is chest-deep, refrigerated, and has ice cubes literally floating in it:

See that ice? SEE IT?

This sets the stage for your upcoming hypothermia. After shimmying across ropes strung across a lake, then climbing over 9 foot walls–teamwork required–you hit another obstacle, a 20 drop into the cold lakewater, followed by a couple hundred foot swim to the other side. You get out cold, wet, with the sharp winding blowing through you. But what’s coming is why you joined Tough Mudder–THE MUD!!!

I haven’t ever jumped from this high before

They call it “the mile of mud”, where you slog through waist/chest high slippery mud. After that, there’s crawling under barbed wire through mud, crawling through muddy pipes, crawling under a heavy net in mud, slogging up and down a dirtbike track, then sliding down a mud mountain!

Some of my favourite obstacles were the hay piles you climbed over (reminds me of Alberta’s rural landscape), and the balance beam over frigid water. I was warm and dry from the sun by this time and was extremely motivated to avoid falling in. My teammate did, but I made it across without an unnecessary dousing! The fire obstacle was running between two sets of fires, and through the smoke, but not actually overtop of any fire, so I thought that was a bit lame. I also didn’t get electric shocked!

Tough Mudder Tips

• Dress for the event. Running leggings (like these CW-Xs) help immensely with the cold and sliding through mud. Wear a long sleeved shirt that doesn’t soak up moisture–not cotton. Bare skin is a no-no.
• It wouldn’t hurt to wear a swimming cap, but goggles are useless in mud
• Take the obstacles slowly and carefully, as your shoes are heavy with mud and slippery. You don’t want a nasty fall or scrape.
• Help others on course! They will help you too!

Cameraderie

One thing that struck me was the team spirit present. While people are there to push themselves hard, it’s not an individual event, it’s more of a team sport. At every obstacle, other racers are there helping people up the high walls, pulling them up the halfpipe, or lending a hand at the end of the inclined submerged tunnels:

I enjoyed helping others through some of the harder obstacles as much as I enjoyed completing the race on my own. The feeling is completely different than running a competitive pure-running race, for time, where everyone is only out for themselves. Tough Mudder brings out humanity’s cooperative and compassionate nature. I heard nothing but encourgement shouted out to myself and others the whole track, tips and muscle freely given.

Tough Mudder and Beyond

Tough Mudder will mark you for life. Even after you’ve washed off the superficial mud, cleaned and healed your scrapes and bruises, warmed up and changed into new clothes, even running other races, you won’t be able to forget that you once ran 12 miles on a cold windy day fearing the worst and made it. Now that I’ve run Tough Mudder, I’m no longer afraid to take the next challenge. I can do anything!

I bought a Seiko Men’s SKA201 Arctura Kinetic Watch from Amazon for ~$150 more than 5 years ago. It’s a great watch and lasted decently, but recently it’s worn down and no longer charges up when you wear it on your wrist.

So, I googled around and ending up sending my watch to a company in Denton, Texas called BestFix Watch Company, Inc.. The watch came back shiny, looking new, ticking, and charging up again–I don’t know if there are other good repair places out their, but this shop was really worth it.

(No, this is not an ad!)