Steve Jobs to Obama: “You’re headed for a one-term presidency”
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
(getting a little sick of the down votes without comment)
The pressure on our kids is pretty significant. To the point they WILL NOT miss school when they are sick. Can't miss this, can't miss that. It's better to go to school and get everyone else sick. It's out of control.
6PM would be a nightmare. The amount of homework my kids have is astonishing. I never experienced anything like it when I went to school. They are ALREADY working on it most of the night trying to get it all done.
Yes, they are in AP classes - maybe it's a little different than the normal classes, but it's an option to those who desire it. Shall we keep them in school from early hours of the day until late hours at night?
When do most of you eat dinner? 7PM? 8PM? 9PM? Anyone recall that "family dinner" - or did we all forget because we work 10, 12 or 15 hours a day trying to "do something." I can see how this is especially difficult in the midwest, and other parts of the U.S., where it is dark very early in the day in the winter.
Dunno...just don't agree with this plan.
Otherwise, that's a stupid idea. In Germany teachers are civil servants so they can't build unions, they can't get fired too, but they can pushed off their position when they are bad teachers.
One attempt to somewhat align the different European systems for higher education was the ECTS [1], but even that isn't quite perfect..
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Credit_Transfer_and_Ac...
I also recall seeing a talk about this exact topic, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/education/lear...
I strongly disagree. Finland leads the world in education because they provide individualised learning and teach critical thinking. The children start school there at a much later age too. They don't run a 9 hour a day, 11 month military camp for kids.
Importance of play: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland#Readiness_...
vs
"Children too busy for playtime": http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-05/13/content_871182...
How can anyone justify putting children in a school for 10+ hours a day for 11 months? You wouldn't work that job and neither would I. Heck, in many countries it would be illegal to have an adult work those hours. College & HS are pretty close in most states.
None of my circle of friends went to camp. We played outside, hung out with grandparents, etc. My parents weren't teachers, so they didn't have summers off.
Personally, I lived for summer vacation until I was like 14. If you took that away, it would have negatively affected me, and many others.
I honestly think this is a product of society and not some intrinsic driver for kids in school. Would a 14 year old me like it if someone told me summer vacation was canceled? No. But if I had been in a system with a shorter summer vacation from the beginning, I don't think I would care too much.
Maybe I'm biased, but my best times with friends were usually during school months. Summers were usually spent playing a lot of video games and going on boring camping trips with various relatives. At the time I loved the break, but I can hardly remember a summer where something really interesting and eventful happened.
I suppose it's like someone that lives in North Korea: They don't know the freedoms they are missing because they've never had them.
" Summers were usually spent playing a lot of video games and going on boring camping trips with various relatives. At the time I loved the break, but I can hardly remember a summer where something really interesting and eventful happened."
Most of my favorite childhood memories happened during summer vacation. The thing is, once you are older..you can't ever re-create that time of complete freedom because you have life responsibilities. I don't want to take that a way from kids.
Look at the Jews (not the Chinese, they go a bit overboard). They take education and achievement seriously. When my buddy Dave was in grade 11, his father was making him spend an hour a day studying for the SATs. He volunteered in research labs, got great grades, and got into a very good combined college/med school (rpi). He now does medical research, at 25.
Dave's parents placed a lot of emphasis on educational achievement, and it paid off. His brothers are similarly successful, and this attitude pervades Jewish culture in away that can't be said of society as a whole. Now, obviously, this is a value that individual families must hold, and something that Government can't just legislate. Still, there are ways of encouraging this behaviour that don't involve determining funding by standardized test scores. Most of it, however, needs to come from Americans themselves.
Personally I think the suggestion about union rules and hiring/firing based on merit is the most significant of the bunch. More of the same type of school environment is not going to help.
Working 11 months for 10+ hours a day is a nightmare for most parents. Add to that the inevitable homework and you get a "work" / life balance that is a nightmare. No time for friends, dance, music, or play. Wakeup, goto school, do "approved" activities then come home and eat, do homework, and go to bed. More hours are not the answer. We need creative workers in science, math, engineering, and vocational. Not a bunch of factory robots.
That additional time would be fantastic if used for athletics, self-study, club activities (with a lot of personal freedom for the students), and so on.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/car-company-us-loan-builds-car...
With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government stimulus loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work.
"There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."
In most US jurisdictions, dozens of entities have the ability to say "no" to a development project. In states that are actively hostile to business, like New York or California, there may be hundreds of people or groups that can slow down projects.
Examples: Local Zoning Board; Whomever controls permits for running utilities; State/local environmental boards (Lots and lots of $$$ permits); Land speculators ("building a factory in this industrial park will ruin the views from XXX piece of land that we own"); Historical preservation maniacs. ("That collapsing house was was rented by Richard Nixon's maid"); Local politicians ("Oh, you need to build a 200,000 square foot building? Our master plan was modified last week -- buildings are capped at 150,000 square feet.); Local politicians in neighboring municipalities. ("Your project will generate too much traffic"); Local real property tax boards.; State politicians; Local construction unions. (Who will sabotage your project if you don't play along.); State Labor Departments, acting as agents for the construction unions.; Environmental pressure groups. ("Your stormwater mitigation strategy is insufficient, you're getting sued"); Federal regulators.
In New York, things are so bad that any significant project is essentially done under the aegis of the state government, usually via a public authority. The government provides funding, and can cut through some of the red tape, since the State is not subject to local zoning law. But there are usually strings attached, and the process takes years.
In China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.
I really think you are severely underestimating what actually goes into building a factory. It's not handshake and 3 months later something magically springs out of the ground. Most modern factories are into the billions of dollars. For example Foxconn is opening a new factory in Brazil that won't be ready before 2013 and will cost $12 billion.
If you're just producing commodity items then you can buy commodity factory equipment. But high end manufacturing requires specialty equipment (usually from Germany, Japan or the US).
Anyway, after farming, manufacturing is the largest consumer of freshwater. I think the people have a right to know how the water is being collected and how its being disposed of since it is state money being used for the treatment. Unless you preferred the bad old days, before the Clean water Act, where factories would regularly dump toxic waste into the river, the Mississippi and the East River used to regularly catch on fire, and New Jersey literally stunk from all the pollution in its estuaries.
If you think things are easier in Finland, then you're wrong. Turns out this is a specific case looking for a specific type of factory that could make a specific car on a specific contract. Your right-wing screed is not as convincing as you think it is. I'm not even going to point out how huge NY and Cali economies are.
>n China or Brazil, you basically partner with a connected local, and build your factory in a few months.
Replace "regulatory bullshit" with just as much bullshit except involving bribes, shakedowns, and forced contributions to political parties and dealing with a level of corruption and labor conditions that are staggeringly awful and depressing. My gf does work with BRIC economies all the time and the lesson I want to somehow teach you is that civilization and labor/environmental protections are worth it. They are waaaay worth it. I'm afraid people like you purposely refuse to learn this basic lesson and are otherwise spoiled by the Western privilege you refuse to share.
I'm not an expert in California, but I happen to live in Upstate NY and pay careful attention to what is (or isn't) going on. The size of the New York economy is an illusion in many ways; New York lives and dies on the back of a single industry -- Finance. That wasn't true 30-40 years ago. The valleys and lakefront between Buffalo and Albany were industrial powerhouses well into the 70s. In the early 20th century, Buffalo was one of the nations great cities, today, it's more like Detroit.
I'd also suggest that you read about the major economic development project going on in New York right now, the construction of a multi-billion dollar chip fab for Global Foundries just outside of Saratoga Springs, NY. Total cost of that project is something like $7 billion, with just under $3 billion being provided by the State of New York under various guises. That's what it takes to do manufacturing in the US today -- even with high-end manufacturing which requires extremely skilled labor.
Don't look to China, look to Finland!
So not exactly a case of a ballsy decision from Fisker to build a new production plant in that corner of the world, but rather having exactly the right kind of factory be out of work right at the time Fisker needed it.
Slightly off topic, but Finland leads the world in junior and high-school education. They have only one universities in the top 300 of the Shanghai rankings and nothing indicates that the advantage Finish students have leaving high school gives them any advantage at University. One needs to be careful about idolizing the Finish school system. While they are no doubt awesome at producing students that can do really well on PISA tests, they don't seem to be producing students who can go on to achieving academic excellence in a post-high school setting.
The focus on arbitrary aggregate rankings and making "us" more "competitive" is a dangerous distraction.
"The ranking compares 1200 higher education institutions worldwide according to a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...
However, nice bit of selective statistics to only use the top 300 in your calculation. The shanghai list actually has 500 universities listed, which bumps the number of Finnish universities to 5. So on a per capita basis Finland comes out ahead of USA!*
* - Cherry picked and irrelevant
I don't think this was a dig at US factories just the fact that the type of factory they were looking for doesn't exist in the US. They want a factory to build cars on contract. Car factories are incredibly expensive, take years to build, and decades to recover the cost. But if someone asked you to build something and you know its going to cost millions in retooling you want a bigger guarantee than 3-5 years.
Tesla was lucky by the fact that the old Toyota plant was available and ready. And they didn't contract the work, they bought it which means they are committed for the long haul.
Sounds great, how do you fund it?
>keep school in session 11 months out of the year
Ditto.
>let principals hire/fire based on merit
Seems legit, do we really have to BREAK the unions to do that? The teacher unions have many legitimate reasons for their existence regardless of some of their negative attributes.
>relax regulations on building factories
Is that really what's holding manufacturing back here? It's not the cost of labor and providing benefits to workers? I can see how the additional costs of creating factories here might make it slightly harder to manufacture things in the U.S., but I find it highly dubious that Apple would suddenly start manufacturing its machines here even if all zoning/health/environmental laws were scrapped.
>turning Jobs down on making campaign ads
Crazy. Seriously. David Axelrod is a schmuck.
Reduce the "defense" budget. I wouldn't be surprised if you did the calculations and found out that schools could be open 24/7 with minor tweaks to the budget allocation.
It is not a matter of funding, it is only a matter of priorities. Education and research should be first on the list.
I believe Jobs was right, once again.
story: A couple of decades ago I used to work on grants and educational programs. One group came to ND to give a lecture on risk factors. In Minot ND, they told the crowd that "firearms" automatically means more violence. "It has been proven in studies" they said. One member of the crowd asked how many people in the room owned firearms. The poll came back at about 90% with many (40%) owning 3 or more. No history of violence in that crew. They were all social worker types who liked to hunt or in the case of one, target shoot. I got ahold of their source data for studies and found two things. A specific firearm study was never done and all the data came from CA or NY cities.
The USA is a large and diverse place, I am a little cynical of best practices taken from urban environments and applied to suburban and rural areas without add research and being a little more specific on why stuff seems to be working.
Its not the guns or any other object, its the conditions and attitudes that make a place dangerous. Dangerous people will use the weapons they have or improvise weapons (IED) if they have none.
Calling them prisons implies the entire population of students would commit said crimes.
Canadian schools also spend more than $3000 per student per year on average than American schools.
What American schools need is more quality, not more quantity.
I think the bigger problem is that teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse. Hard to experiment with new ideas in that environment.
Child from the 80s here. I've had just about every teaching method crammed down my throat through the 90s. This includes more homework, more lectures, socratic desk arrangements, independent study, peer review, group work, class review, and many others I care not to remember. I have never heard any teacher say, "my union asked me to do this." And, usually, it was some teacher or principal working on their MA or Ph.D that had to invent a new teaching method.
So far the only thing that works consistently is listening intently, sitting down quietly and banging out the work, and raising a hand for assistance when your stuck.
And that is how it's been done for 100 years. It may seem calcified to you but the rest of the world uses it while the US tried all types of new-age teaching methods.
I would wager the bigger problem with schools is bad, obnoxious students. The classroom bully that disrespects the teacher, disrupts the students and gums up the educational experience for everyone. They used to be kicked out of school but that became illegal, then they were put in detention, but a chaperone costs money. Now it's left to the teacher to be educator and babysitter to some asshole.
In fact if anything, my personal impression is that the teaching method itself is among the least important factors; if everything else is in order, kids are going to learn no matter what teaching method you employ.
Its a simplistic idea. Principals weren't hired because of their ability to build a successful team of teachers. They are administrators. Why does anybody think they can suddenly (successfully and equitably) cast judgement on teachers? If you want to transform how teachers are hired, managed, and evaluated, to be more similar to a private business, you have to start at the top.
I think it would be better to focus on making schools better rather than just telling students to spend more time at them.
Or have the students there for 40 hours a week, but ban homework. Use the extra time to get it done at school.
Then students will actually do it, and they don't have to worry about it at home anymore. Plus you don't have kids going to school for 40 hours then being expected to do an extra hour of homework at night.
While I also have various ideological preconceptions about the source of the economic problems in the US and elsewhere, I would observe that when someone like the CEO of Apple is expressing an opinion about what makes a factory easier to open in China than in the US, someone who has actually been the guy-who-can-say-yes to actual factories for which that decision was actually made, it's probably worth listening to that opinion. Even if you can somehow prove he's objectively wrong on the merits, his perception would still be a useful data point.
On the other hand I wouldn't expect any particular insight into our school problems from him, beyond what any reasonably skilled businessman could present.
There is a good reason regulation makes it more expensive to open factories in the US: our regulations force companies to internalize the negative externalities their businesses create. China effectively subsidizes industry by forcing its citizens to bear the costs of pollution, injuries, etc, inherent in such activities. US regulation forces companies to bear some of these costs (hardly all of them).
In its retrospective study on the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA estimated that the benefit of pollution control over the 20 year period was on the order of $22 trillion. Relative to the "so-called 'no-control' case, an additional 205,000 Americans would have died prematurely and millions more would have suffered illnesses ranging from mild respiratory symptoms to heart disease, chronic bronchitis, asthma attacks, and other severe respiratory problems... the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss and adult hypertension, heart disease, and stroke." Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits."
What's good for business isn't necessarily good for the economy. The things that businessmen push for: deregulation, limitations on tort liability, etc, create more in costs to society then they create in benefits to businesses. Indeed, our measurements of things like GDP are so fundamentally flawed that they encourage politicians to adopt such measures. If a factory's poisonous emissions causes you to have lung problems, that doesn't count against GDP, but when you seek medical attention for those problems GDP goes up!
$22T/20 years is over $1T/year. US GDP in 1990 was under $6T. US GDP in 1970 was just over $1T.
> the lack of Clean Air Act controls on the use of leaded gasoline would have resulted in major increases in child IQ loss
Oh really? Why would leaded gas in 1980 cause more problems than leaded gas in 1950?
> Meanwhile, "the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits."
Just as the benefits are not limited to the money not spent on medical care, the money spent on pollution controls are not the only costs.
Larger population and rising wages lead to more cars on the roads and hence more pollution?
Externality estimates and valuations are notorious for reflecting the biases of the estimators.
Estimates that are a large fraction of GDP are very suspicious.
Do you seriously believe that the clean air act "saved" 1/6th of the US economy?
But in practice the EPA is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to publishing studies on its own cost effectiveness. It exists to increase its budget and scope, just like all other agencies, but has no check on its behavior. Its officials are not elected, cannot be fired, and are effectively invisible to the public. Moreover, opposition to EPA malfeasance/corruption is often caricatured as opposition to clean air and clean water itself.
As an example of regulatory pathology, consider that the EPA is giving grants and instruction manuals to NGOs, telling them how to sue the agency into expanding its powers.
m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/epa-funds-greens-sue-221700941.html?orig_host_hdr=news.yahoo.com&.intl=us&.lang=en-us
The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so
far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that,
among other things, explains how to sue the agency
under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws.
The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute —
has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past
decade.
And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up
paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to
Justice Act.
What's going on? "The EPA isn't harmed by these suits,"
said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during
the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things
the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and
then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal
cover from political heat."
This sounds bad in a soundbite, but this is the way the system works.
Consider this loose example: suppose 2 people get into a fight. One guy really beats up another guy, and the cops are called. If the recipient refuses to press charges, the cops can't do anything.
Similarly, a lot of government agencies can't proactively do something, until someone sues them. By getting sued, they get to act on the complaint, and the legal opinion can be used to justify similar action elsewhere.
There is no nefarious purpose here; it is disingenuous to claim so. Yes, government agencies have issues galore; but by conflating the necessary with the rest, we fail to identify the real problems.
There's lots of resources available in school which could be useful; you can offer some activities (but please, not an additional 5 hours on top of 7 hours of school), or help with homework (dito), and generally offer an environment that's hopefully more conducive to learning in the broadest possible sense than some of the worst home/street environments.
You don't have to use what he makes, but if you want genius, and why else would you want Jobs and his team to design an ad, you ask politely and then get out of the way.
Edit: Somewhere online I read an article about Jobs getting Paul Rand (edited from Milton Glaser) to design the logo for NEXT. Can't find with a quick Google search, but it was a fascinating read.
Edit: the video has the quote I was thinking of, but what I read was an article. From the video (Jobs talking):
> I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’
FYI: Jobs had Paul Rand do the NeXT logo.
This article [1] provides a succinct explanation: "With Chinese wages rising at about 17 percent per year and the value of the yuan continuing to increase, the gap between U.S. and Chinese wages is narrowing rapidly… Products that require less labor and are churned out in modest volumes, such as household appliances and construction equipment, are most likely to shift to U.S. production...Support from state and local governments can tip the balance.”
[1]http://www.bcg.com/media/pressreleasedetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-...
I do like his idea about breaking up teacher unions, but I think the root cause of all of that is very low salaries for teachers.
If you want your schools open until six, take it up with your school board, not the freakin' president.
(That's not to say that I think this (good) idea could ever be implemented in the USA, though.)
The federal government has no policy-making authority w/r/t education in the United States. And if such authority did exist at the federal level, the appropriate place to start would be Congress, not the executive branch.
In reality, of course, you'd never be able to create a universal policy to reflect your particular vision of how education ought to work, and that's a good thing.
Bust unions! Remove regulations and cut workers' rates! Government needs to be more business-friendly! And what's more, I don't like the menu!
Hardly fresh thinking, let alone innovative and non-ideological.
Steve Jobs was infuriated by “[Obama’s] focus on the reasons that things can't get done.”
Perhaps I need another long break from HN.
* "Jobs suggested that Obama meet six or seven other CEOs who could express the needs of innovative businesses — but when White House aides added more names to the list, Jobs insisted that it was growing too big and that “he had no intention of coming.”"
* "Jobs even offered to help create Obama’s political ads for the 2012 campaign. “He had made the same offer in 2008, but he’d become annoyed when Obama’s strategist David Axelrod wasn’t totally deferential."
You gotta give Steve Jobs credit for chutzpah!
Now, I may respect a man for what he's _done_ ; but in Obama's case, that isn't much (ex Obama volunteer & donor here).
Attention to detail and a certain bluntness has been attributed as part of Steve Jobs' immense success, but this come across as plain rude. It doesn't matter if Jobs is right or not, it's bad etiquette to criticise another's work in this context.
Of course, I am assuming that his opinion wasn't asked, and I know nothing of the relationship that Jobs and Doerr shared.
"He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity."
If you want to send your children to boarding school so you don't have to educate them, more power to you.
But if you want the state to become your nanny and top-down micromanaging how children gets results I beg to differ, specially when the person that want to control it is a dropout and risk taker but wants anybody else to get into conformity.
It's super sad that will never happen. It's crazy imagining what a Jobs final product towards a political campaign may have looked like.
* white or blurred background, putting the focus on product or user * clean graphics and visuals * montage of products in use, in real situations * subtlely snarky towards the competition