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Comment by gorena | Hacker News Reader

Am I correct to assume this movie makes no mention of his systematic illegal wage suppression?

Maybe they include anecdotes like this one: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

>Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building.

>As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".

Wasn't that Steve's building in the first place to do anything he wanted with?

If he didn't take the last available such space or actually cut off some handicapped Apple employee wanting to park there, then it's more about "playing by the rules" than actually hurting anyone...

No, because handicap laws are for the benefit of society. Rich men shouldn't get to skip out on them because they're rich.

Well the parent comment doesn't say how many handicap spots were open. Giving Jobs the benefit of the doubt, he may have seen a pattern where there were always multiple spots available. And the spot locations don't come down from God either. They are decided (at least in the state where I live and have worked on this subject (a work parking lot)) in an arbitrary fashion in order to meet certain requirements. It's (once again where I am) a loose specification for placement. And you can always exceed the number required. For all we know Apple could have put in more spaces than required and Steve was simply taking advantage of that knowing that nothing would happen. And that he further didn't care about any fine he received assuming the Police even had normal access to that part of the parking lot when they were on patrol.

Edit: Further to my point it's easy to assume "arrogant big shot rich guy" just hearing a story like this.

No. It's not legal to park in handicapped spaces in California unless you're handicapped. California doesn't make an exception for rich assholes.

SJ had many admirable qualities. This was not one of them.

Is there anything in particular that makes handicap laws any different than, say, speeding or breaking any other law that won't land you in jail? People break speeding laws every day because a) they can and b) they feel they have a reason to and c) they don't feel the speed limit is just.

Have you noticed how many "not really handicapped" people use handicap spaces after getting a note from their Doctor? You seem to be indicating that there is something rare and special about handicapped spaces and that the entire idea of allocating them is fair to begin with. You know that's not the case, right? Also why the need to call Jobs "a rich asshole"?

It wasn't Steve's building. It was Apple's, or more likely Apple was leasing someone else's building.

Also, disabled parking spaces are regulated by local, state, and federal agencies; not Steve Jobs' whims.

>It wasn't Steve's building. It was Apple's, or more likely Apple was leasing someone else's building.

Not that different, since he created Apple and Apple leased that building.

I'm more annoyed by public companies throwing out their original founders than by this.

>Also, disabled parking spaces are regulated by local, state, and federal agencies; not Steve Jobs' whims.

Even ones belonging to a company? Can't they arrange their parking however they like?

Yes, even parking spaces belonging to a company.

Americans with Disabilities Act: https://adata.org/learn-about-ada

> I'm more annoyed by public companies throwing out their original founders than by this.

Apple's board had fairly decent reasons to through Jobs out. Look at his track record at the time. It was good for both parties.

If founders want to control their company they shouldn't sell their equity. It's 100% in their control.

Not if they sell equity!

My neighbor worked for Apple's real estate (facilities?) organization during this time. His only Steve Jobs story is that one day Steve came into the real-estate office extremely angry. Apparently SJ had received a parking ticket for parking in the handicapped space. He barreled into the office and slammed a stack of tickets on the desk and screamed at them that they needed to fix these tickets and stormed out.

That makes a pretty interesting personality triumverate of 1. Auto laws are for little people, 2. Manufacturing jobs are for sweat shops, and 3. Collusion is okay when I do it. All the makings of hubris.

>2. Manufacturing jobs are for sweat shops

You mean like any other tech company in the US and worldwide? Because this Taiwanese company called Foxconn builds stuff for nearly all of them, and in the same facilities in China, Taiwan and elsewhere...

Foxconn doesn't build Moog hardware, and that's a more exclusive tech company than most.

If it was his building, he should just put up a "Reserved for Steve Jobs" sign in one of the normal parking spots, not take one of the spots that are legally required to be reserved for handicapped people.

The practical answer to this is that the movie ends with the iMac introduction in May 1998, and Google was not founded as a company until September 1998, so the movie is not likely to cover the illegal "anti-poaching" deal between Apple and Google.

edit: intro'd in May, not August

The axe grinding machine is in another castle.

I don't think 'gorena's point should be rebuffed just like that, Steve Jobs was not the friend of us engineers, after all it was him who said things like: “If you hire a single one of these people, that means war”. Many of us might be getting paid were it not for him and his actions.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491016/it-personnel/st...

I do wish this was touched in the movie somehow. (I'm presuming it wasn't, as that's what it seems like... I haven't seen it yet so can't say for sure)

edit: I'm getting down-voted. Indeed, I think I went over the top. Steve Jobs did go on to create exceptional products that have heightened a lot of people's productivity, so he was net good. Sorry for the comment - I'll leave it there anyway though.

Also: the movie is real time across three scenes and those three scenes are just behind the curtain at "pivotal" keynotes.

It's not a life story. It's not an epic tale. It's three set pieces each operating in 30 minutes of character time in sync with 30 minutes of screen time per episode.

If American laborers (yes, engineers, you are laborers) still remembered how to sharpen axes, maybe that would happen less.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-work...

Haha wow, taking the shirt off their back to its literal conclusion.

What a terrible example to support a very valid point.

What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by the french government's weak response to this public humiliation.

Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore, France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a histoical mistake.

There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations' prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.

>Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore

It's still an era of neo-liberalism and employees return workplaces to medieval work practices (down to child labor and 14 hour workday) whenever they can get away with it.

And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.

This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked up this is for everyone?

>And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create havoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.

And why NOT (ocassionally) create havoc in the streets of Paris? Because it disrupts business as usual and results in some small scale damages and such?

France and Paris, especially, has a long history of championing people's rights with street protests. From the Bastille day, to the Commune all the way up to May 68 and beyond. Tons of things we take for granted would be illegal without such ocassional "havoc".

People that think that protests and demonstrations should be "a thing of the past" because now "we live in a full democracy" are just repeating what has been said all the way from the 19th century -- even if blacks had no rights, women had no rights, gays had no rights, there was no social security, immigrants had (and still don't) rights, etc.

Democracy is not some magic thing that solves from within the parliament. Especially the mockery of democracry we have (with representatives elected once every 4 or 5 years based on a platform that bundles all issues together - so if you agree with them on X and disagree on Y you can't get to vote individually on those things), with political influence bought by corporations and big players, and without being held accountable for not keeping on their promises (you just get not to vote for them at the end of their term).

Democracy needs active citizen participation, and protests and demonstrations are one such method of making people's opinions heard.

What plan did the executives produce that would see the worker's being laid-off being ok? I'd guess that France has some type of forced severance or decent unemployment insurance scheme, but did the executives pretty much just dump their (now former) employees onto the street with nothing?

How long had those employees worked there? Is management really so incompetent that they can't plan for and manage such a scenario without having to cut off life support to thousands of their former colleagues?

Compared the French famers? I seem to recall not that long ago as a result of secondary industrial action by farmers a town hall got burnt down.

There's a huge difference between not having internal recruiters call up employees in a company directory to try and poach them, and preventing those same employees from choosing to apply. The former doesn't affect wages, but the latter would. The latter didn't happen.

How do you know that employee-initiated applications & interviews weren't stopped by recruiters calling back & forth "OK to hire this guy?". The only reason the "no cold calling" agreement was made public was Ed Colligan spilling the beans & the D.O.J. making a half-assed attempt to investigate. Plenty of the disclosure docs are still sealed.

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