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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Im all for giving the dead their rest, but Steve was in my honest opinion more asshole than legend.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo...

Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.

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>Im all for giving the dead their rest, but Steve was in my honest opinion more asshole than legend.

Because he didn't pay registration fees? How well do you know people? The average person has done much worse than this.

Besides, "more asshole than legend" goes to some random asshole, not to a person that, asshole or not, still inspired millions, was several times "person of the year", and built the most valuable market cap company in history.

All that, and the worst that they say about him is that he was mean and petty sometimes, and didn't recognize his daughter at first. There are tons of major figures of history that have done way way worst things than that.

>Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education. Rolling around town as a tightwad billionaire who thinks hes too good to pay for public services is beyond the pale.

As if he did it to avoid paying registration funds. And as if his fortune haven't been used to pay tons of charity and public taxes and build jobs.

> Because he didn't pay registration fees?

Because he used his plates, or lack thereof, to park in disabled parking spaces [1]. That speaks volumes about what kind of person Steve Jobs was.

[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped.txt

Someone who sees through the "disabled parking spaces" BS in the US, where everyone can get their doctor to mark them as "disabled" and park there, mocking the actual disabled?

It's not doctors who are "mocking the actual disabled" here.

Why do you feel the need to defend him ?

I'm interested in accuracy, not in defending or offending.

That answered, why do you go into BS psychological questions instead of giving actual counter-arguments?

Is this considered an easy "winning strategy" / cheap cop out from actually discussing: painting the other commenter as having some kind of psychological need / personal issue for saying what they say?

Tightwads don't lease a new car every 6 months (and an expensive one at that). Also, the registration fees would have literally been a rounding error compared to state income+property taxes he was already paying. I think you could easily be right on the asshole vs legend thing but I'm having a hard time seeing how this example supports that opinion.

> Tightwads don't lease a new car every 6 months (and an expensive one at that).

He only did that because he wanted to drive around without a license plate. And tightwads can be tightwads when it comes to spending their money on other people but splurge on themselves.

This wasn't him being a tightwad. This was him proving to everyone that he had enough money to not have to play by the rules.

In my opinion, folks who say they're being "honest" about something are kind of begging the question. That said, I doubt he did it to save money, although I'm surprised he allowed a dealer plate frame on the car. I think he thought they looked ugly. It may even have been a bandwidth issue — he simply didn't want to decide _which_ license plate to get and it was easier to avoid the issue altogether.

He famously didn't own much furniture (at least when he was single) because he couldn't find any he liked, not because he was cheap.

Huh, when I first heard this story I assumed he was interested in added privacy, not (a very very small amount of) tax-dodging. The tax-dodging explanation doesn't make much sense here.

We live in a different time now, where people are professionally offended as a form of virtue signalling - like what you're doing now. Steve came from the 70s, a time where being a bit of a rebel, a misfit, anarchist - and sticking it to the man was considered cool.

His cars were registered, he paid the taxes, he just didn't put the license plate on.

Which allowed him to park on disabled parking spaces without being fined...

https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-h...

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...

That's a real arrogant assshole move.

This man who had advanced pancreatic cancer wouldn't have qualified for a real handicapped tag? People are getting bent out of shape over nothing here.

He did this when he was young and healthy.

You pay reg and taxes when you buy (or lease) the car. He just didn't want to run plates on the car. Many people I know go as long as possible without plates.

For all thinking along these lines I'd recommend to read the "The Steve we knew" section in Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." for a bit different perspective. Actually, read the whole book.

In comparison to Microsoft's behavior?

>seven years ago, Microsoft opened a small office in Reno, Nev., to collect the money it got from PC manufacturers that installed Windows and Office on the computers they sold. In the years since, Microsoft has sheltered more than $60 billion in royalty revenue in Nevada, a state with no corporate income tax, costing Washington an estimated $327 million in unrealized tax revenue.

http://archive.seattleweekly.com/2004-09-29/news/citizen-mic...

>Registration funds important things like police, fire, and public education

Jobs paid his taxes and registration, he just didn't put his plates on the car.

Microsoft has intentionally dodged paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to the state where they are located.

Steve Jobs is not dead and certainly not resting in peace aka RIP. The man was a Buddist believer. He is reborn as a bird or a stone or whatever. At least to me its inportant what after-life definition he believed in and gave it my respect.

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