Steve Jobs To Take ‘Medical Leave Of Absence’, Stays On As CEO
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For example, breast cancer affects around 207K people (yes, even men get it, albeit rarely) and ends up killing around 40K people a year. Pancreatic cancer affects 43K people, and ends up killing 37K every year. [1]
All cancer research is important, but we should really step up as a society when it comes to cancers that happens to be a dead sentence over the course of 5 years or so.
I personally donate to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, and you can do the same here: http://www.pancan.org/
The damage will be in PR. He's an almost unrivalled corporate showman, and few companies are as associated with their CEO as Apple. Whoever gives keynotes in the future would be wise to develop their own style rather than copy his. There may also be collateral damage in ruthlessness and vision - we constantly hear how he drives new products, and kills off "failures" early. However, the more I read recent interviews with anonymous Apple employees, the more I see he seems to have reformed the company in his image. It's impossible to gauge how much actual presence he's had over the last few years, and it seems quite likely the press have over-egged his effect. As long as his successor is not a radical corporate reformer, and is willing for a few years to be seen as an "Heir to Jobs", it seems likely to me things will roll on quite successfully.
I suspect Jobs will "retire" either this or next year. When they replace him, if they don't promote from within, then any CEO should: absolutely not engage in a massive expansion/race to the bottom; introduce change slowly rather than play with Apple like a new toy and; rely on the corporate team that's been built until they deeply understand what's working and what's not.
In many ways, Job's eventual departure (hopefully based on choice, rather than necessity) could be good for Apple. I firmly believe a little of his control freak nature could be sanded off the company to their advantage. They should drop the "Control for control's sake" direction they've been taking recently, and stay focused on the core corporate ethics that have bought them success - a high degree of perfectionism, technical risk taking, user focused design through everything, and a great marketing team. It won't be exactly the Apple of today, but given some of the…hostile decisions over the last 3 years, it might actually be an improvement.
I certainly hope so.
I thunk Jobs is successful because the product sells itself in most cases, and he doesn't (have to) bullshit you. Of course he's also involved in making the product, which is a different matter.
“I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to hang out with some of the most talented, committed people around and together we get to play in this sandbox and build these cool products. Apple is an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We’re structured like a start-up. We’re the biggest start-up on the planet. And we all meet once a week to discuss our business… and there’s tremendous teamwork at the top and that filters down to the other employees… and so what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and new problems to come up with new products.”
I think there are two reasons for this. First off, he's a perfectionist when it comes to timing and arrangements. Apple execs in general are pretty good at knowing what the public cares about hearing and what they'll find boring; not so with other companies, whose executives are usually hilariously awful. But even among Apple's top presenters I think that Steve's timing is particularly terrific.
The bigger reason, however, is that Steve displays a really sincere love for almost all the things he shows off (and it's very obvious on the rare occasions he doesn't like what he has to say). It seems really clear that he genuinely thinks all the things he shows off are as terrific as he says they are. It's magnetic to see somebody talk about how much they love something. It's also rare to see it coming from a corporate event.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jan/05/newmedia.me...
Compare this to Zuckerberg, who tends to look a bit nervous and like he's trying to sell something a bit. (Note I'm not saying Zuckerberg isn't passionate about what he does, he is, but it tends not to show). Or Ballmer who looks like he's trying really hard to be passionate about his products.
Have you watched any other CEOs present their products? Even the other Apple CxOs.
It's all blather blather blather buzzword awkward brow wiping bullshit bullshit equivocate buzzword blather blather adjust suit cuffs blather bullshit buzzword crash landing.
But my point was more about the 'showman' part than about the 'corporate' part. When Jobs takes to the stage, he's almost invariably unveiling a ridiculously cool product with revolutionary/craze potential. One that he has personally worked on. It's no surprise that he seems so personal and sincere, or that that the enthusiasm is palpable. What other companies lack is not a great showman, but this great situation of having their leader demo a brilliant invention every 6 months. That requires a) a leader and b) a brilliant product.
It helps that Apple's products are cool and some of them practically sell themselves - but Jobs is able to bring a level of genuine sincerity to his presentations that few other CEOs can (despite their best efforts).
IMO the big thing about Steve Jobs and showmanship is that he feels sincere. We've all seen the keynotes and launches where the CEO is trying to express his/her enthusiasm about their new product in the most contrived, artificial, cringe-worthy way possible (Ballmer is a master at this). Jobs seems immune to this - he comes off as just as excited as you are.
The enthusiasm is infectious and helps the press (and in turn, the general public) get hyped up about the product.
If you're going to hop on stage and build buzz for your product, you better be pretty good at it. Ballmer gets brownie points for trying (most CEOs don't, and leave their marketing underlings to deliver equally boring keynotes).
I think a lot of that has to do with how he returned ($1 salary, etc). I've also got a bit of an attachment to him and Woz through growing up learning about computers and programming on a series of Apple ][ machines. When we switched to Macintosh at home, I had awful experiences with the pre-iStore Macintosh affiliates and to this day I instinctively cringe at the thought of purchasing Apple products.
I don't know how the younger generations see Apple. Probably they way we saw Sony. Honestly, I don't think any products Apple has made recently are as inspiring or enlightening as the Apple ][ line. The few Apple products I've used recently have always ended up being a hassle. I don't think the way MacOS X wants me to think and I hate iTunes. I bought an iPad and had to return it because we couldn't get along. Nevertheless, Apple still has a place in my heart even if its products do not and I hope Jobs is OK.
I have to disagree with you. I was at WWDC '09 and the keynote (http://movies.apple.com/datapub/us/podcasts/apple_keynotes/w...) was by far the worst part of the conference. I felt like a lot of the presenters of the individual sessions had a better stage presence than some of the execs.
A lot of CEOs pretend to be a Jack Welch or Steve Jobs but are often just glorified bus drivers for their corporations. Often they are more concerned with keeping the board happy than analyzing the company product line.
Jobs is unusual in appearing to be absolutely in charge of his company, many other CEOs don't have that luxury or confidence.
Yes, but how far would a bus drive without a driver?
Or is that supposed to be 'into'?
Non native English writer here, this one is subtle enough that I don't know if 'in to' is permitted or forbidden.
9.7 Million hits for 'in to the lake' and 23 Million or 'into the lake', if it is an error it seems to be at least a fairly common one.
I guess we've squeezed the life out of this one.
Calling a CEO a 'glorified bus driver' is an attempt at playing down the importance of bus drivers and CEOs at the same time when in fact in both professions the responsibilities are substantial and the price for fuck-ups is immense.
Buses and companies do not drive themselves and if there is nobody or a bad choice at the wheel the corporations, their shareholders, the buses and the passengers will suffer.
A bus driver doesn't decide where to drive. You don't want to have a CEO who doesn't decide what the goals of the company are.
Then, a CEO does not decde 'what the goals of the company are', that's something that will be decided usually in close cooperation with other managers.
CEOs that act as dictators usually do not last very long, typically they'll be the ones to maintain relationships with the outside world at the highest level but that's not reason enough think that they and they alone make the decisions as to what the goals of the company are. A CEO tries to get his people 'on board' with respect to the decision that are being made, and if as a CEO you do not do that you will either find yourself between jobs or you'll face a walk-out of your managers. In many cases the 'goals of the company' are codified either in a mission statement, in the articles of incorporation or in a separate agreement between the major shareholders of the company.
In a company where the CEO is also the largest stockholder it may well be the case that the CEO dictates what the 'goals of the company are', but in that case it is probably better to speak of him or her as the 'owner' of the company in that context rather than the CEO.
CEOs carry out the corporate vision, they do not define it by themselves.
We're writing this in a thread about Apple, and in the case of Apple it is probably right to say that Steve Jobs is the man with the vision who indeed does set the goals of his company but just as he receives only $1 in compensation for his work (he has substantial stock so that is where his real compensation is) he is something of a rarity in CEO land.
Really, the autonomy of CEOs is vastly overestimated here and I think that it is in part people like Steve Jobs that re-enforce that myth, but typically the CEO is not the person that decides like some kind of dictator how a company is run.
They do carry final responsibility but that's another story.
Please make a distinction between CEO/owners and CEO/minor shareholders, the difference is huge in this respect.
But it took them quite a while to fire Darl McBride, didn't it?
I think there's little doubt that Jobs is the top salesman of Apple.
Last time he was off on medical leave, they brought out a new Mac Pro that was massively more expensive than the model it replaced (to a Quadra level in the UK); they started going all MBA with the MBP, segmenting the MacBook with an aluminium MacBook and the polish on iPhone OS 3 took a nosedive into stripey-icon ugly land.
Weren't there also some awful app rejections in that period? Pretty sure there were, but either way, the impression Apple gave in those days might as well have been Apple 1992 all over again.
App rejections were silly pretty much right up until September of last year when they released more guidance - well over a year after he came back from medical leave.
Were he to quit tomorrow and never talk to an Apple employee again, we wouldn't see the damage done/advantage gained until at least 6 months, if not 12+. Product design and direction is set a long way before release, and though he might veto early products, I doubt anything hardware related within a 3/6 month window of release has ever been killed (nothing would have been allowed to get that far).
The MacBook that was a MacBook and then a Pro is a much more telling example, which you skipped over. A reverse-face like that after Jobs's return shows pretty clearly that they'd got it wrong in his absence.
iOS 3 brought the universally derided striped icons, which sounds like a minor point, but is actually the sort of attention to detail Jobs brings.
There's plenty more like that in there, but I don't think there's much value in such aesthetic quibbling. My overall point is that there was undoubtedly a difference in Apple's direction and approach during that time, and I don't think it was for the better.
EDIT: Cor, that's a lot of upvotes. The consequence is that Jobs now contributes so little to this perfectly humming Apple that he can leave abruptly amid a medical crisis and they don't make a mis-step? I don't buy it.
(I would also like to note that, on the grand scale of things, your examples are minor. Sure, they matter, but they are at least rectifiable at a minimal loss.)
Even if they were minor, I think they show a tendency that Apple has, and always has, that very few people can rein in -- or at least that there are very few people that Apple will allow to rein in.
More than anything, Jobs's return brought focus to Apple. With him gone, that will be the challenge more than any of the PR sizzle or attention to detail that he also brings.
That focus is something that must be brought to the table. After all, Apple keeps its staff a very long time. This is still, at some level, the company that loves to make new things but will channel that energy into OpenDocs and Dylans and Soups and MPWs and zillions of other cool things that don't get it where it needs to go.
Are any of the current leadership team the type to bring that focus that harnesses that energy? I haven't seen it yet.
I’m not disagreeing with you. I just don’t know how Apple would do without Steve Jobs and I don’t think Steve Job’s recent leave showed any clear or dramatic effects, I’m not even sure whether there were any changes at all.
Anything longer than six months might be different but I’m not sure about that.
Well, under Jobs, every damned official Apple icon is either a blue rectangle on iOS or a blue circle on Mac OS. Maybe Apple just suck at icons.
I'm sure there are lots of good people at Apple, who can come up with great ideas, same goes for Google. The difference between the 2 is that where Google has lots of separate small projects going on, Apple delivers one big product with lots of features and that's what makes it so great. Integration and simplicity.
Apple needs a strong leader with a vision in order to be as successful as it has been in the past.
Jobs recruits great people, and provides the right ingredients to enable them to work at their best. And he has his own very prescient ideas, as well.
When Jobs leaves, Apple will do fine... for a while. Then one of the people he recruited will leave, then another, and eventually Apple will revert to the mean, where it is no different from another company. Apple's products will become less special, and it's stock price will drop.
There is no reason whatsoever to make any other prediction. Jobs is at the heart of why Apple is what it is. He is unique. It's not a coincidence that the same person had the vision, smarts, and grit to be able to successfully found Apple, and also had what it took to bring it back from the dead after a succession of other CEO's failed.
Or, let's say... he may not be unique, but the odds that Apple will end up with a similar person at its center after Jobs leaves are low.
Again, it will do fine for a few years. But I wouldn't make a long-term bet on it after that.
The team Jobs has assembled that built the past decade of Apple knows and shares his vision for products. The real test will be retaining the culture through turnover.
True, Jobs has wizened up since then, but he also hasn’t been tested with a true replacement assignment since. (There is no obvious “heir apparent” in Apple at this time, AFAIK.)
Not sure if that was a fruedian typo, but it made me laugh.
wizened - shrivelled or wrinkled with age wised - become aware of or informed about something
That's not to say that Steve's absence isn't a big deal - it's just not a "Dump your stock, it's all over" level deal.
Leadership isn't just a procses...it's a vision. It may very well be that somewhere inside of Apple there is someone equal to Steve Jobs in terms of vision, determination, and smarts. That's not likely, however.
Companies like Apple fall off of their perch because you can't turn greatness into a process. It's much more innate than that. The grandparent is right. They'll be ok... for awhile. Soon they'll go the way of HP and IBM (and increasingly Microsoft). Not gone... just not what they once were.
I could be wrong, but in 17 years of this business, I've never heard of anyone being cured of pancreatic cancer with a liver transplant. It sounds very much like a "Hail Mary" cure. To start, organ transplants are very rarely a cure for anything. What they are is a devil's bargain where they exchange the disease that's killing you quickly and get rid of your immune system instead.
But, cancer patients usually gain weight after they are in remission. So, my guess is that Steve still has cancer, and he has no immune system now.
So, I believe that Steve is dying. And, I don't think that the company is being forthright about it. I also believe that lack of transparency and honesty is terribly irresponsible since their stock price has been skyrocketing the last couple of years[1].
I don't think that the damage will be solely in the PR department. The company has created a mythology of Steve Jobs being not only the public face of AAPL, but the soul of the company as well.
Couple that with AAPL's notorious secrecy/lack of transparency and you're going to have big problems with Steve gone. AAPL was able to manage the antenna issues of the iPhone 4 while eating a bit of crow. But, when Steve is gone, then next antenna type problem they have is going to be read by the media as "Steve is gone! AAPL is going down the drain!" in the media.
ref:
I dunno. We mythologize the guy, but, he's a human being. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a death sentence, and then learning that he had the super-rare kind that could be cured surgically, he... went on a special diet. He strikes me as maybe the kind of guy who doesn't want to be dying.
So put yourself in Apple's position. You've got Steve Jobs at the helm. Jobs can only make it in 2 days a week and can't make it to caf for lunch. But he doesn't want to be dying. What is the board going to tell him? It's not like "doctors" are the White Council of Middle Earth who will speak with one voice and say "the verdict is you are dying".
What you say about organ transplants and immune systems and a 55 year old guy with a history of cancer makes sense. And it made me kind of sad.
Meanwhile, the market priced Jobs health a long time ago.
I wrote a long post and then deleted it.
I just don't think this is the place for speculation of any kind.
There are tons of stats and bits of info out there ( http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/type/pancreatic-cancer/ http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/pancreas/... ). It's a hugely sensitive area anyway (the realities are bleak, a friend of mine passed last winter only 3 weeks after diagnosis) and where it affects a man like Steve Jobs and we all have a huge lack of information... well I just don't think we should be wildly speculating. Whatever happens, happens... so it goes.
Skyrocketing because of the CEO health, or because of the performance of the company? Don't forget, Jobs was also on medical leave for the good part of said couple of years.
Of course I am biased there, because for me, as outsider, all stock market stuff looks to be driven by most stupid things.
It takes a lot of drive to do that kind of work while having such major medical troubles. I really believe that what drives him is the desire to give the next great thing to users, and to take Apple to new heights. Money can't be the motivator - he's got plenty, and it's probably not at the top of his list anyway, during such life and death struggles.
Speaking for myself - I recently had some surgery which was nowhere near as complicated and life-threatening as what he went through - I know I wouldn't have the drive and commitment to return to work in such a big way, especially if my family was already taken care of financially. So - thanks to Steve Jobs and best wishes for his health, and no, I don't think it's right to wish for him to return to work soon - he will decide how to spend his energy, and he's already spent more of it at Apple than anybody had the right to ask.
As a society, we have become exceptionally good at treating pathological diseases. This is how we know we will eventually cure AIDS because we fundamentally know how to do this kind of medicine. (And it appears like an AIDS vaccine, and perhaps even a cure is closer than we think.)
Unfortunately we are terrible at treating any aging-related disease. Diseases such as those that relate to the fundamental breakdown of the metabolic process, cancer or Alzheimer's. We just simply don't have the research and experience to treat these diseases in anything less than a crude way.
For those unaware, Chemotherapy and Radiation are probably some of the least-precise medical treatments we apply on any broad scale today in modern medicine. We try to radiate or kill your cancer cells before we kill the rest of your body. Seriously.
Anyways, more research on aging-related disease is critical if we want people to keep living longer. If we don't, then we should just focus on pain management and let people die as they grow older.
AFAIK, it's actually true. If we live long enough, we'll all get cancer. In the case of men, it's a near certainty we'll get prostate cancer if we don't die of something else first.
Also, 85% of us have Cytomegalovirus, which basically executes a DOS attack on the memory of your immune system, eventually resulting in immune deficiency. However, the progression of CMV is so slow, we'll almost certainly die of cancer before this happens.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd042009s.gif gives a nice summary.
We should seriously research the possibility of transferring the human consciousness into a machine "body". Our organic bodies will fail us eventually.
Further, once you did the switch at least once and had the memory of "waking up" in a new body, you'd have a lot more confidence that "you" would still exist after the transfer.
I see no reason to presume that; if it worked at all, you'd expect people of all ages to upgrade immediately.
> Further, once you did the switch at least once and had the memory of "waking up" in a new body, you'd have a lot more confidence that "you" would still exist after the transfer.
That rather is the point of my question... You didn't wake up, a copy did, you got killed afterwards and knew you were about to die. The point was to question the idea that you could ever be uploaded in a meaningful sense.
What I personally see actually happening, is people being enhanced to the point where implants make up more of their consciousness than the real brain does and they feel so disabled without the implants on that they no longer see themselves as whole without them. At some point, our idea of consciousness will simply change and then it'll be no big deal killing off the biological part and going pure machine, gradually.
Replace a single neuron in the brain with an artificial one. Every time you go out drinking you lose plenty more cells, so clearly "you" are still "you". Now do another, and another, and another. At no point do you "break the pattern", but eventually you're left with a completely virtualized mind. Copying the pattern and destroying the original generally counts as "breaking the pattern", which is what you are describing.
It's not really a new topic, but is still debated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
If the transfer is successful, from your point of view you went to sleep in one body and woke up in another. If it failed, you'll fall asleep and then wake up a few days later.
Some people value the needs and well-being of others equally, or higher, than their own.
This is very true. I think the most exciting developments in cancer treatment in the past decade have all been targeted therapeutics: drugs that are designed to affect the function of just one particular protein in a cell rather than the "kill anything that moves" action of traditional chemotherapy. These targeted treatments are only effective against the subset of tumors that rely on that particular protein. For example, Trastuzumab and family only help about 10% of breast cancers that have highly amplified Erbb2, but you can test ahead of time to find out if it will likely help you.
I find great hope in this approach. It's possible that in a decade, with a much greater repretoire of anti-cancer chemical weaponry, much better genomic diagnostics, and much better understanding of how genes interact to cause cancer and evade treatments, we could squash a huge percentage of cancers, even pancreatic, brain, and ovarian cancers. Every tumor would have a custom-designed cocktail of off-the-shelf drugs.
There are some fascinating things to be learned, about ageing as an anti-cancer mechanism, and particularly about how much is being discovered right now. It seems that what we characterize as ageing is mainly a side effect of "cellular senescence" which may very well be treatable without increasing likelihood of cancer. There are people who say we basically have the means now to increase life spans by at least 15% but ...
another fascinating aspect is that a huge blockage to research on ageing is that it is not classified as a "disease", which means firstly that it fails to qualify for funding from most public sources and further that it is every very difficult to get drugs through the FDA since the FDA will reject things that don't have a proven clinical benefit (hard to prove for something that isn't a disease in the first place). As a result, even though we could have a huge impact on cancer by funding ageing research, we don't - instead we fund cancer research and some little bits of that trickle into knowledge about ageing.
"In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy."Whether this is a good thing is a separate issue.
In a way, I think this is similar to Google refusing to issue guidance (not sure if they still do that) and the shareholders just needing to deal with it.
After all, where would it stop? "Jonny Ive has had a break up with his other half and is really down, he's meant to be working on the new iPhone but he's really off his game...". "Inform the shareholders!"
It's similar to the difference between "in the public interest" and "the public are interested".
I would imagine everyone here agrees with his right to privacy on the details of his illness; however what some of the GPs are saying is simply that the overall status/summary of his health (i.e. he has cancer, or not) needs to be disclosed.
So that's useless to you (unless you're just being morbidly curious in which case you have no business here anyway) so you'd ask "well, what type?" and they'd usually say something pretty similar to the last answer so you'd go "what grade?" and they'd say something pretty similar again - probably narrower, but maybe not and certainly with very wide error bars which would cover both death in the short term and survival of 5 years plus (which for cancer is close to a cure).
So, still none the wiser, certainly in any way that would allow you to better judge Apple as a company, you'd say "how advanced is it?" and most of the time the answer would yet again be pretty similar but they'd say that different people respond to treatment very differently.
So then you'd need to ask "what the treatment protocol is he going to be on?" and they'd say the same and then you'd ask how's he's responding at which point you basically are asking for his white blood count (though I believe that's actually only used to judge whether a patient should have chemo at any given point in time rather than an indication of success / failure / health as far as the cancer goes).
He's clearly unwell enough to ask for an extended absence, it's not the flu. That's all you need to know.
Also, for better or worse, part of being a public figure is living with the fact that your wellbeing impacts a lot of people, and these people have a right to know what that impact will be.
If he resigned he should have absolutely privacy, but since he hasn't the thousands of people that rely on him have a right to know where they stand.
He has the obligation to release certain specific information mandated by the SEC in a timely manner (details of his health are not on the list - it's largely financial) and there are certain things a company can not say (which basically boils down to honesty).
The SEC also say he and the company have to communicate in a particular way when information is shared (for instance so it's available to the whole market - no selective disclosure, and again it has to be honest and truthful and so on) and projections are heavily caveated.
The on top of that he has a general legal obligation to act in the best interests of share holders.
But there's no blanket reveal all, and nothing that specifically covers his health and I'm not sure why you think there is or where it comes from. Could you quote the specific authority or law in question?
Given that the market is made up of humans, and that nobody can predict with certainty the public reaction to every move a company or person makes, it's absurd to think that insiders in a corporation are not entitled to privacy.
C'mon people. He's a goner. He's contributed immensely to the world. Let him go in peace and even with a little positive feeling. It'd be nice if he could turn to HN before his death and see a lot of people appreciate his work.
It’s safe to assume that he’s going to conquer this one as well.
On the other hand, generational turnover is very, very important. Maybe at some point, even a terrific figure like Jobs may be as bad as it is good for Apple. For instance, how much big role he played in the culture of closure of Apple?
So it is even possible that an Apple without Jobs could be, all in all, a better company.
Hopefully he will return because without him Apple really is not the same company, despite their ability to succesfully execute on their planned projects. A visionary has to plan for the future, and Steve Jobs isn't just the CEO of Apple, but kind of a new type of media mogul. He seat on Disneys board surely holds sway, and Apple is going to need his influence to further it's push into TV, movies and publications - he is the man, for example, Murdoch or Igor are going to want to speak to.
I do wish him a speedy recovery.
On a more personal note, good luck, Steve!
I know this goes against the ethos of HN, but life is really not about software. It's about people. Get out there and live life and meet people. A lot of exercise and playing loud angry music was also really good for me for a while.
Maybe this is not the best place to ask, but does anyone know about Steve's eating habits? I know he was a frutarian at a certain point and then changed to fish/vegan (particularly sushi), but would really like to know more.
The reason is that I am in need of drastic personal changes regarding diet/exercise and thus trying to incorporate a vegan/vegetarian diet, which has been very difficult for me. I know that cancer is a multi-factorial disease, but it still scares me that some apparently very healthy individuals (such as Jobs or Linda McCartney) have such tough health problems. I feel very well when I manage to stick to a vegan diet, but would like to know more about longterm effects.
If you're seriously interested in healthy eating habits, I would suggest to look at sources or studies on the subject, rather than trying to emulate the celebrities diets.
B12 and several other less prominent nutrients are not in great abundance in non-animal based foods, so you have to eat a lot of a certain subset of strange foods to guarantee your health, as you do need those nutrients
If you really are trying to make a lasting change, try vegan + fish (So no bird eggs, or milk based products), ovolacto (no meat or fish, but milk and egg based products), just lacto (no meat or fish, but milk based product), or just ovo(no meat or fish or milk based products). All of these additionally are much much much more easy order at a restaurant or to fix out of the rest of the stuff at a dinner party, both important social functions in human existence.
All of them are relatively easier to do than straight veganism (although pretty much any of them involving milk products leave you a huge channel for saturated fat intake, namely cheese, which may not help fix your issues).
I know for years I ate sushi occasionally until a bad experience the next day one time has made me leary to usually avoid it.
Best thing you can do is treat your body as a shrine. Follow a healthy diet - I think veganism is great if you can stick to it, meditate to keep your stress levels under control and engage in a moderate amount of exercise, you really don't need to do anything too excessive because that can take a toll over the years as well. And don't spend too much time thinking about it too, cause at the end of the day, you really should enjoy life.
Anyway, I wish him well.
Best of luck to him and his family.
Steve has the money to see the problem and take effective countermeasures. A lot of people don't and the way the current government is carrying on you would think some don't want the help.
It's funny my original comment must have been modded down several times and then modded back up again, it's almost as though there is some misinterpretation going on there.
If you disagree with it feel free to speak out :)
The idea behind it is a simple one: If rich people can use their money to 'jump the line' and buy the organs of poorer people that have died but left with a donor-codicil in their name then it would be good to limit the distribution of those organs to people that are roughly in the same income bracket.
By doing that there would be a drive for people that are wealthy to encourage research that would relieve the need for donor organs or there would be a push to reduce the income disparity so there would be more people available in the higher income brackets that could serve as donors.
Both would be beneficial in the long run. Having the rich be overrepresented as the consumers of donated organs and under represented as the donors (in absolute terms) is not good for society at all.
It's about a rich man in the US. If he was in another country than this would be a different conversation.
Organ transplant is already hard enough, adding another layer doesn't improve anything. Jobs didn't jump the line, just found a shorter one. Since organ transplants are compatibility and location dependent wouldn't you also attempt to find where you had the best chance at advancing in the list and having a better match.
It would make an interesting table if you could display organ phenotypes correlated by location. Maybe that is exactly what he has done that made him decide that Tennessee was the best place to be.
Poor people won't be able to get the organs of rich people.
This will favor people at the top of each income bracket, since they will have more money to move to where the waiting list is shortest. Or if you want to let people buy and sell organs, they'll have more money than their competitors.
Rich people can use financial instruments to change their income.
Since most people accumulate wealth over life, organ donors will usually be young and poor. Recipients will be older and richer. This disparity is large enough to ensure that some organs will go to waste.
Oh and this will never happen because politicians are rich and old and need organ transplants.
It's weird how people suddenly care what you do with your corpse when it can directly help others. Buried? Fine. Cremated? Sure. Donated to research? Go for it. Frozen in liquid nitrogen? Whatever floats your boat. Sold to the highest bidder so you can provide for your family after death? Eh, not so much.
So this will not favor those at the top of the income brackets because waiting lists are typically on a compatibility and first-come-first-served basis.
Right now for instance there is a big flap going between the Netherlands and Belgium, the dutch have voluntary codicis, the Belgians have mandatory ones. Because EuroTransplant matches up donors and organs from both countries the Dutch benefit from this arrangement disproportionally.
> Since most people accumulate wealth over life, organ donors will usually be young and poor. Recipients will be older and richer.
Yes, that's the current situation, pretty much. Poor people in need of organs that are older are not getting any because rich people in need of organs get to use their money to 'jump the line'.
> Oh and this will never happen because politicians are rich and old and need organ transplants.
Yes, I realize that, it underscores my point I think.
I have cystic fibrosis, which accounts for a really high percentage of lung transplants in the U.S. (something like 1/3 of adult and 1/2 of pediatric lung transplants, IIRC) and people with CF sometimes get other organ transplants as well. Transplant itself is really hard on the body and then you take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. Sometimes it doesn't go well and people die after transplant. The stories are pretty heart-wrenching. I can't help but feel it is Frankensteinian and I wish there was more research into preventing and reversing organ degeneration/failure. My feeling is transplant is kind of "glamorous" and glitzy for the medical world whereas preventive medicine is boring -- if you avert crisis, there isn't any real "news" to report: "These people didn't get gruesomely ill and didn't suffer horribly. Film at 11". It just doesn't sell.
I don't envy anyone facing transplant, money or no money.
I just don't like the fact that having money increases your odds.
There's also serious issues with the profit-driven industry surrounding conventional medicine, yet this is not unique to medicine.
I have pursued alternatives and gotten better results than conventional medicine can give. So I am afraid I can't agree with you on that one.
> Transplant itself is really hard on the body and then
> you take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life.
If conquering cancer is a while off, replacing someone's cancerous organs with healthy new organs that exactly match their own DNA is a good way to save more people as cancer research is ongoing. It also has myriad benefits beyond just cancer such as helping amputees, burn victims, and so on.
Peace.
I think he embodies a unique ability to see the heart of a new technology or aspect of technology and to focus in on the critical part or parts, ruthlessly getting to what he sees. It's not just a design sense (like Ive), nor a good sense of what consumers really "want." And there are plenty of downsides to this unique gift. (We can all cite plenty of examples.)
I don't think we've seen that from anyone else, even at Apple, over the years, so there's no real replacement possible.
I think it's even spilled over to Pixar's success, which is pretty amazing.
(Maybe Alan Kay rivals it, in a different world.)
v = (SteveJobs = immortal || TechCrunch = journalism);
print v
$> FALSEBut obviously that is not it.
Which is only going to happen if a post-Apple Jobs continues to excel. Might take a few years for the markets to be convinced.
It might not be a good thing, then.
> In California, my mother had raised me mostly alone. http://valleywag.gawker.com/357073/lisa-brennan+jobs-on-her-...
> She briefly raised their daughter on welfare when Jobs denied paternity, claiming that he was sterile; he later acknowledged paternity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Personal_life
to be candid, if it was a short-term situation I don't think it would have been announced, based on previous Apple practice.
thoughts are with them, as was mentioned above, tech things are more interesting when Steve is doing them.
stay hungry, stay foolish... (Steve's commencement address 2005)
Also, it wasn't clear at that point how bad it was. It was "just" an exploded platform.
I think after it all sorts itself out, it'll be fine.
Try this strategy on a historical price and news database:
1. Wait for the initial over reaction
2. Trade
3. Wait for a period
4. Reverse the tradeI hope he does. Like laujen pointed out, our world would be far less interesting without him.
Today is a holiday, so there is no trading... but it is a weekday so the press will have this thing over and done by the end of today. Tomorrow it is old news.
Tomorrow is also their earnings announcement. That will have a bigger impact on the stock than Steve taking time off.
Tomorrow they will talk about Mac App store results, 10 billion apps sold, Verizon estimates and drop hints about revenue from their new products in 2011 (iPad 2 etc).
This was well planned.