Paul Krugman finds the bottom line: “Ah, Paris! You walk for miles and miles — it’s still, after all these years, a spectacularly beautiful city. Then you have as traditional a meal as possible at an old-fashioned bistro, washed down with lots of wine. And you feel like hell the next morning.”
Hell can be a relaxation one needs. Speaking of hell, on the other side of the planet, I met a professional economist brandishing an iphone. He told me Steve Jobs was a genius, he deserved more money. I replied that iphones were made with lasers. Did he know who discovered the laser? Would not that person be the real genius?
The learned economist had no idea iphones’ chips were built with lasers. He had no idea electronic circuits are printed with light. Lasers exists thanks to OPTICAL PUMPING, invented here:
Nobler Motivations, Deeper Thoughts
[Pierre de Corneille welcomes you; Clovis Tower behind right; it’s 15 centuries old. Descartes is buried below in a copper coffin.]
The Kastler Brossel lab at the École normale supérieure (ENS) located in Paris’ Latin Quarter, invented Optical Pumping in 1953. (500 meters right of the picture above.)
Alfred Kastler, head of the project, got the Nobel Prize later. Kastler’s Nobel was attributed to him alone; this indicates that Optical Pumping was from the ENS alone; by contrast the famous Feynman shared his Nobel with two co-inventors of that particular portion of QED.
Genius: Not Market Supported
Now that same ENS lab got the latest Nobel Prize in physics (2012). What was the deep discovery this time? Well, seeing light, without perturbing it. How can one see the light without seeing the light? Is not that endangering one of the main metaphors? The deep new idea was to see light with atoms. An inversion of conventional expectations. That was what the Kastler-Brossel lab succeeded to do. Very enlightening. Even philosophically enlightening, as the method painstakingly devised shows that waves can be more subtle than official scientific thinking ever guessed before. (An anecdote: part of the experiment necessitated the most reflecting mirrors ever made, by a very long shot.)
Seeing single photons going back and forth, without intercepting them. Now this is real genius. It’s what real genius means: completely new ideas or techniques, never imagined before.
In truth, far from being a “genius”, Steve Job was just an ignorant, greedy boy playing with toys real men had invented. Nothing wrong with that. The economy needs little hands to bring technology to market. What’s wrong is to conflate business and the most fabulous edge of human creativity. What’s wrong is to confuse the little hand with the biggest minds.
The iphone was not really invented by Jobs. It was invented thanks to the idea of a scientist, Kastler, working hard in a lab in a locale, Paris, where civilization has shined for more than 2,000 years. Kastler’s lab was paid by government money. And still is, 60 years later. This money came from taxes. It could not come from anywhere else.
Thus, refusing to pay enough taxes is refusing to invest in new science and technology, just so that completely ignorant people, such as this (austerian) economist, an admirer of Hayek and Friedman, can keep on spewing absurdities. Is that a world we can afford? No, our civilization hitting the global ecological and energetic lower bounds.
There is no easing out of that. Only hard work, the work of real genius. Not the “work” of those who sell stuff real minds invented. What we need to do is to see the light, whether with atoms or not.
A world where money changers, tax dodgers and salesmen are viewed as geniuses, we cannot afford. And is it what we want, anyway? No. Civilization is also about beauty. This is what Paris say. And what Very Serious Plutocrats, and their obsequious servants, cannot understand.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Notes: Paris was renamed in the 4 C in honor of the Parisii, the Celtic-German nation that thrived there prior to the brutal unification of Gallia by Caesar. Contrarily to their reputation, the Celts were advanced in many important ways. They had Senates, Greek gods (Mercury was big), world class ocean going ships. Celtic metallurgy was the world’s most advanced (Celtic forges had equipped the Roman army, for generations, with special weapons, including swords, and the characteristic light metallic helmets). Logically, it’s Frankish steel that cut through Damascus steel, when the Damascus Caliphate invaded Europe in the 8C. It’s also in France that hydraulic hammers to forge enormous steel were devised in the 12C (to hold cathedrals together). Even recently only a forge in France and one in Japan made the steel for nuclear reactors’ vessels.
*
LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Computer chips are currently made with a lithographic process using ultraviolet light. Literally, the circuits are printed with light, down to 22 nanometers. Companies such as Cymer and ASML are working on shrinking the ultraviolet laser beam down to just 13.5 nanometers, which will allow in turn companies like Intel to squeeze four times more transistors on chips, making them faster (as the signal travels at the speed of light, the smaller, the faster). By contrast, a hair is a gargantuan 40,000 to 60,000 nanometers wide.
*
Einstein did some theoretical work on Simulated Emission of Radiation in the 1920s. Work on computers go all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. Transistors were invented in Germany in the 1930s. Completely electronic computers were made secretly for the first time in WWII, thanks to the work of an army of geniuses (such as Alan Turing and john Von Neumann). A prominent idea was to mimic the way the brain worked (as elucidated by a dozen generations of biologists, from Volta to Ramon Y Cajal, Golgi, etc…). Genius can neither be sold, nor bought. True genius can only thrive in the tender care and spirit of the noblest civilization, sustained by taxing more primitive animal impulses. Motivation deep, mountain high. Motivation trivial, mountain flat.
*
Tags: Kastler, Optical Pumping, Real Genius, Steve Jobs
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
June 20, 2013 at 3:05 am |
Nicely done, Patrice. As always, I love your stuff.
I really think that most people either believe that hustlers like Jobs and Bill Gates “create” the stuff they peddle [an aside: is there any software that’s worse than a Microsoft product?], or that it all somehow just spontaneously appears out of the ether via some magic Santa Claus principle. And anyway everything ever invented was invented by Americans, because God loves us more than he does everybody else.
The American Empire’s Dämmerung is not going to be pretty.
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June 20, 2013 at 3:50 am |
Thanks bowtiejack for loving my stuff! I am not sure that the American Empire’s Dämmerung will happen. It’s still a big empty, but very rich country-continent. With the largest maritime empire (France is second). and the military ability to defend it all. (Although the corruption around the F35 is a strong warning sign that plutocracy is starting to impact the military.)
The way things will evolve, even proximally, WORLDWIDE, is not clear. Several things could come to a head in unexpected ways. My next essay should be about that.
Because, worlwide, indeed, there is plenty of opportunity for a huge, very ugly, Dämmerung… We are hitting the ecological and energy stops. Last time this happened was around 1300 CE. Within a generation, Europe had lost more than 1/2 of its population, and Franco-Britannia would start a five centuries civil war… (All of Europe would be convulsed by wars until 1945, actually…)
PA
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June 20, 2013 at 3:23 am |
Brilliant.
No, really, yours is an important point, very much in the vein of the product of those who few any longer remember who have done the really important work of civilization while most citizens believe it is Goldman Sachs or Donald Trump or Sarah Palin or …
Thanks
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June 20, 2013 at 3:40 am |
Dear John McBride::
Thanks. Yes, it’s important to remember that our world is about deep ideas, all of it.
And that a crucial subset of these core ideas are generated by a part of the economy fed by taxes, and otherwise not just independent of the free market of commercial goods, but even motivationally transverse (in the differential topology sense), if not outright adverse.
There is even a crucial part of the commercial market (aerospace, defense) that is officially not free (even Milton Friedman advocated that!)
So the deep question then becomes: it seems that the most vital inner core of the economy is not really about the free market. So could not the troubles we presently experience be related to the starvation, or corruption of that deep inner economic core?
PA
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June 20, 2013 at 12:41 pm |
“Thus, refusing to pay enough taxes is refusing to invest in new science and technology, just so that completely ignorant people, such as this (austerian) economist, an admirer of Hayek and Friedman, can keep on spewing absurdities. Is that a world we can afford? No, our civilization hitting the global ecological and energetic lower bounds”.
Too early to start a screaming screed on these austerian idiots, more coffee, much more coffee.
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June 20, 2013 at 2:46 pm |
Thanks Mike! I see there is a typo! Somehow “is” disappear in the sentence above (it’s not just that I need much more coffee than is physically possible, but those auto-corrective software are expert at introducing the weirdest variations…)
The austerians are idiots, but louder than ever. They don’t get it in Europe, and now they are starting to invade the minds in Washington, gun slinger style (“sequestration”). I was stunned by the laser like mind of the iphone brandishing economist. I have never met such self satisfied uni-dimensionality in a professional.
PA
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June 20, 2013 at 4:36 pm |
Dear Patrice, This time you hit the nail directly on its head. As it is well known the scientific research is divided into theoretical science and technical implementable science. The greatest scientists are of course the theoretical scientists and less the practical once, yet sometime the passage from the theory to practice my be very demanding and highly prized. Steeven Job was non of that. He was not even an inventor just a very successful market manipulator, viz citation from my book;
….Sophisticated marketing experts work very hard to create a feeling of scarcity around a newly lunched Product. Apple has done it very successfully with I-Phones and I-Pads, and created long lines of fans, who sometimes even sleep in front of the I-Pad and I-Phone shop doorsteps to make sure they are among the very first to own the new Product. In a Market Economy nothing is better than consumers queuing up for a new product, not because it is scarce but because the producer has successfully created the illusion that it is scarce. On the other hand, the queuing consumers in a Centrally Managed Economy are proof of the failure of the system. In the Market Economy the scarce product is relatively expensive, while on the other hand products that are abundant are relatively cheap……
As to your i-phone brandishing professional economist friend, he is probably one who claims that economics is a science comparable to physics, chemistry, biology etc. Probably he also believes, that marketing techniques, which basically became ever more sophisticated systems of brain washing and deceiving potential consumers, create some positive add value to the economy.
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June 21, 2013 at 12:50 am |
The iphone brandishing economist actually has on his iphone a picture of a two million dollar banknote with Ben Bernanke picture on it! (Meaning that Bernanke was going to create hyperinflation.)
A pic is worth a thousand words… Funny thing is that I have bought Jobs’ products ever since he got fired from Apple the first time!
He indeed knew no engineering whatsoever. Even Wozniak (the tech guy) took his BA in computer science, with lots of difficulty… When he was 40 something…. Same degree that one my spouse got, same department…
PA
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June 21, 2013 at 7:46 am |
Dear Patrice, you should ask your economist friend whats worse, a dollar bill with million number on its face or communist-fascistic revolution.
By the way if, and it is a big IF, inflation pressures ever erupts, it can be treated as i explained in my previous comment on your blog with manipulating the minimum reserve rate requirement.
This people hate this idea, because it would increase the share of government activity on account of the private sector, or what you call plutocratic sector.
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June 20, 2013 at 8:47 pm |
Hi Patrice,
We are indeed standing on the shoulders of giants, great men and women of science who came before us. Knowledge – mastering the secrets of nature and the universe – is the true generator of wealth.
One minor quibble though:
There was a time when France had its own currency, the franc. As such, it was a monetarily sovereign Republic where taxes need not necessarily pay for gov’t spending like the one it made to subsidize Kastler’s scientific research.
When it gave up the franc in favor of the euro, it gave up its own monetary sovereignty and relegated itself to nothing more than the state of Florida or California dependent on central government’s monetary and fiscal policies such that, yes you are right, it is now revenue and tax constrained in its spending programs.
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June 21, 2013 at 1:10 am |
Dear Lovell: Thank you for allowing me to adress that point. The European Union is pretty much a French idea, and so is the Euro. Charlemagne, Napoleon had good shots at establishing a pan-European state, but they failed… In part from lack of sturdy institutions (& rabid self personality cult of the tyranical sort in the case of Nap).
Europe was progressing like a constrictor snake, until English plutocrats interfered.
The heart and soul of the European project is THE UNIFICATION OF FRANCE & GERMANY. I approve this message. And it’s high time to get back on message.
The EU is the ultimate trick for the reconquest of Germany by France (last time it happened was 5C to 8C). BTW, when the “100 year war” was settled before the fanatical Jehanne d’Arc puppet appeared on the scene, the regent queen of France was “Isabeau de Baviere“.
http://patriceayme.mensnewsdaily.com/joan-of-arc-roasted-too-late/
(OK, better comment on the original essay on this site, here!)
France always had a strong currency cult (except during the fierce growth of 1945-1975). Germany lapsed into inflation twice between the wars, and so inflation is associated with fascism there. France did a Franc Fort policy in the 1990s, and Trichet, ex-head of the French central bank in the 1990s, & first (real) head of the ECB has been abominable with the strong Euro policy.
Heads of the European central banks of the Euro group still exist. So the situation is not comparable to that of the USA. The case of the Confederation Helvetique is revealing: the Franc cannot climb as high as it wants relative to the Euro.
The real problem is that we have a European Commission, unelected, and rabidly austerian and pro-plutocratic. Plus Merkel is constrained by her elections in September.
Plus, right now the consensus in France is that France has to become more like Germany, or more like her booming aerospace sector. But how to reduce the number of civil servants? The last referendum that way, in Alsace (!) was a resounding NON!
… Just on the other side of the Rhine is the German industrial heartland, insolently selling the best products in the world… At whatever price… The real question in France is why can’t we be as good? Why is France just condemned to be the headquarters of the best aerospace, worldwide?
PA
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June 21, 2013 at 2:59 pm |
Dear Patrice, To put the “European Unification crisis” in historical proportion, i would like to publish once again the comment i already once gave on the subject in one of the back pages of your blog.
1. Europe is rather Continent than a State (or this is how the Europeans perceive themselves) that happened to be created some 1000 years ago out of the ashes of Roman Empire and barbarian invasions. Its history is full of bloodshed sometime for understandable reasons but mostly out of very peculiar reasons. Some like to call the bloodshed civil wars, some revolutions and other national wars, but all of them were the result of political system that put the wrong guys in the head of the decision hierarchy. They were called kings, dictators, fuhrers, presidents, chairman, you name it, but all of them had one thing in common, they felt they are destined and have the right to murder the OTHERS as much as they like. (As contrary to them the founder father of US were the right man in the right position and look what a wonder they created, that makes US relatively a well managed country in spite of all the following inappropriate leaders that followed them). The peak of this bloody tradition was World War II, that ended in some kind of draw between the “Liberal democratic” politician and despotic rulers, who continued the usual state of European history for another 50 years until the despotism collapsed under the burden of their own economic mismanagement.
2. After WWII the “liberal democratic” politicians, who happened to run the western part of Europe (probably because it is closer to US and not for any other reason), felt threatened buy the despotic part of Europe and concluded that something has to be done, but couldn’t figure out what. Luckily from somewhere appeared a man called Jean Monnet, have you ever heard his name? If not it is not surprising, not like De Gaul or Adenauer, he was just an unimportant figure who happened to establish the European Union. To make it short he successfully persuaded the mentioned above to create an economic union. Nothing was said about national sovereignty in this union, it was all about customs duties and creation of a common market for goods and services. (just a thought, I wonder if not the Soviet threat, would these two Egos agree to do anything of this kind?).
3. This European Union surprisingly became a great success. Surprisingly, since i would expect that the politicians will spoil the party (As it happened in an other economic unification the Comecon, that was initiated by Soviet politician and its aim as contrary to its misleading name “Council for Mutual Economic Assistance” was to achieve only political goals).
Luckily the “Liberal-Democratic” politicians were still in state of shock after what happened in WWII and what’s more important they felt threatened by the despotic Soviets, who did not stop to try to penetrate Western Europe through their agents the members of the communistic parties, so they made their best to be successful with this experiment.
4. The result was a great success, and all the countries of Europe, surprisingly even “Great Brittany” (even if they always felt to be above the rest) joined the club. The members of the other club, the “Comecon”, could only watch with envy (if they were let to watch) what’s going on in the EU. So when the Soviet Union and with it the Comecon finally collapsed, all the East European countries rushed to join the club.
5. After the great success the leaders of European Union were persuaded to do the next obvious step to create a common currency. Just don’t think it was a easy task to persuade them. Not at all, all kinds of compromises had to be made on the way, where the different states kept most of the symbols and tools of sovereignty while joining a process that ended with a common currency, the Euro.
Since in the process a political compromise had to be done, it was voluntary for each country to join or not. Guess who joined the Euro club? Of course the founders of EU; France, Germany, Italy and their related neighbours, and all the economically weak countries like Spain, Portugal, Greece and some others. Forget the solidarity, non of the Scandinavians and not the British joined, after all why to join a club into which they have more to contribute than gain. The only one who was ready to pay the price to create the Euro were the Germans, who are still under the spell of shame for their historical crimes, that just recently with the unification of Germany were released a bit.
As it happened the southern countries politician immediately realized that being in the Euro club gives them almost unlimited possibilities to take loans. They like vultures immediately jumped on the novelty, that wouldn’t have to be so bad, if they would use the borrowed money for investments. But they, as these failure politicians know best to do, used the loans to maintain their corrupt political system and with the left over they corrupted their electorates.
6. At 2009 finally all this came to the end, after the banks together with the rating agencies, who beforehand were part of the game, suddenly changed their skin and stop to support this process. The crisis that followed, be it as severe as it may be, is a correcting process. No more transfer of finances to the waste. No more transfer of resources to those who are not doing for themselves, what from adult people is expected to do, to earn honestly for their living. No more solidarity from the strong and capable, to those who don’t take responsibility to their doing. And even more than that, many political obstruction for real unification of Europe were removed. As a prove just try to remember how the proud Irish people, enriched out of bank speculations, rejected the Lisbon Treaty at 2008, to ratify it a year later, after they lost their national dignity together with the collapse of their casino economy.
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June 21, 2013 at 1:31 pm |
Hi Patrice,
That makes the case for full integration even more compelling and necessary as monetary union alone won’t solve many of the challenges facing each individual Euro state.
I’d like to be optimistic and proffer that this just might be your usual growing up pains towards a more mature and full political union. The question is, will the voters in Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain, and all the rest be as optimistic and gung-ho for full integration?
On that regard I will defer to your vibe and comprehensive knowledge of everything Euro.
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June 22, 2013 at 3:21 am |
dear Lowell: There is no choice, but greater and greater integration. It all depends upon Franco-Germania, and that, in turn, rests on the German election. The (French) Socialistes have understood that Angela is highly likely to trounce the SPD, so they are not trying to interfere anymore.
Anyway, as I said serious countries such as France or Switzerland understand that Germany is not the problem, but that, they, themselves, are the problem. Swiss Socialistes are leading reforms… of the Swiss social system (they just rose retirement to 65, and made women equal to men…).
Britain is not a serious country at this point: even PM Cameron is getting exasperated by the rabidly anti-Europeans in his own party, and by the rabidly pro-plutocratic. Mostly what’s coming out of Britain is the venting of steam.
So we will see. But it takes lots of time to make 28 countries move together… Especially when they don’t know what to do…
Thus, Europe is not the problem. It is the solution. To whatever the problems turn out to be.
That’s why Krugman used to bark up the wrong tree. Now he is changing his music, though…
I will be deep in the mountains in the next few days, travelling incognito among the woman eating bears…
PA
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June 21, 2013 at 9:15 am |
As I think you are a little unkind to the late Steve Jobs, I have decided not to “Like” this post. However, since I had not even heard of him before he died, I do not say this because I hold him in some great esteem. I say this is because, in life, we all have a choice to make, we can either learn from history (and climb in to the shoulders of giants) – or we can fail to learn from history (and fall in to pit of our own making). Where would the creator of the laser have been without the work of Sir Isaac Newton deducing that white light was not what it seemed? …Science is collaborative journey.
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June 22, 2013 at 3:02 am |
Dear Martin: My celebration of Kastler was no attack against Newton! Newton’s prism work was revolutionary. (Strange it was not found earlier! Newton’s First Law was found, three centuries earlier…)
too bad you did not *like* my essay. I put a lot of work in these things, and i am a bit resentful sometimes, from the lack of sympathetic environment! ;-)! But that’s the story of life, esp. my scientific life. when I meet colleadues, in science, who say they will look at my stuff in 50 years (!!! as I was told last week, i am not amused).
I do appreciate Steve Jobs my way; I have owned Jobs computers for decades (!!!!). Not only I have a (second) Mac Air, but I still have a “Next” (the extremely expensive computer Jobs made after Apple fired him). BTW, his anti-science stance may have caused his death. He refused normal medical treatment initially, prefering “new age” silliness, and recognized later that was a huge mistake.
Of course, science and all top human intellectual endeavors are collaborative. And I do not disparage Jobs when I refuse to call him a genius. Certainly he was a genius of design and marketting, and that’s important to interest the Plebs. But the Plebs has also to know that marketting and genius have no genius… in the deepest sense of the term.
I will be visiting the woods in the huge mountains in the next few days, so lack of answer does not mean contempt, it just mean that I am standing on the shoulders of giant bears… In my journey towards the most fundamental meaning.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 10:26 am |
At the end of the day (as we Brits often say), I know you are just being controversial in order to get a reaction. I often do the same. I hope you enjoy the big game (in the woods and of life). 🙂
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June 22, 2013 at 2:07 pm |
Dear Martin: It’s not just about getting a reaction.
My own mother was horrified and condemning when she saw:
So she refused to read it.
However, the argument was serious. Or, rather the arguments: they were several. Joan of Arc is basically the opposite of what she was made up to be, and caused the Franco-English rift to become permanent… After restarting a huge war, that then lasted another four (!) centuries…
To be e-motional means one will get a motion out of it. It’s not controversial, in my mind, that plutocracy international is acting as, potentially the greatest criminal organization that ever was. (And I have not forgotten abou the USSR, Nazis, etc.) It’s fact. That Steve Jobs, while becoming a multi billionaire, paid basically no taxes, for decades is a crime accomplished with the complicity of the USA government, and renewed all across the economic and decisional landscape.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 2:12 pm
I seem to have upset Paul again (or is it that he is just being too protective of other people’s feelings?)
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June 22, 2013 at 3:32 am |
Along similar lines about the inintelligence of the Commoners I was thinking to reply to a piece in the NYT, stumbling around about why warming from CO2 was going the way it was.
I anticipated that this would happen, years ago in 2 essays at least. One on energy equipartition, the other on the Sun. OK, will see what tomorrow brings…
The bottom line is that people don’t even know what ideas are anymore, it seems.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 3:34 am |
Just read your essay above. You do know you are very good at bringing on feelings of inferiority!
Paul Handover
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June 22, 2013 at 3:36 am |
Ah Paul, very good! thanks! I think thinking is not just about ideas, but also about moods.
Communicating the mood that one should have the proper mood, relative to one’s mental grasp is fundamental for futuristic morality.
Bringing feelings of inferiority in situation where one does not get it, whatever “it” is, is central to getting to truly understand “it”, whatever “it” is. More generally it’s safer that those who are mental inferiors feel that way, instead of feeling superior. Feeling extremely superior when one is actually extremely inferior, one could call that the Hitler syndrome.
Not being afraid to feel inferior: a necessary step on the path to wisdom. Something Socrates tried to say.
P A
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June 22, 2013 at 3:36 am |
That’s one of the nicest things that has been written about me for a long time. I might go on to reflect that the huge life changes of the last 5 years, and the unsettling consequences of those changes, have ‘opened my eyes’ in many wonderful ways. Paul
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June 22, 2013 at 4:04 am |
“Feeling extremely superior when one is actually extremely inferior, one could call that the Hitler syndrome.”
Or the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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June 22, 2013 at 4:36 am |
Thanks bowtiejack! I had forgotten that. Hmmm… If I had five minutes (I don’t) I would amend the Wikipedia article by pointing out that the fact that he knew nothing was central to Socrates’ teaching.
A point of mine, though, is that one should not overdo it! Experts exist. Common opinion on uncommon subjects is one day always revealed to be foolish. And try as he may, Socrates was still oozing with self assured contempt… Actually too much so.
I chose Hitler because, never in history was such an influential idiot of such incredible idiocy believed he was so smart. Morally, though, the grand prize of self contradiction probably goes to Saint Louis, a first class monster, who viewed himself as a saint. The fact he is still viewed as a saint shows the Church is itself monstrous…
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 4:19 am |
Another thing, Martin: Steve Jobs and his family paid basically NO tax for decades. I view this as theft. All the more as I had to pay up to around 75% tax (in France) on money I had earned by working very hard for (don’t ask for the details, I’m infuriated). Yes, I also paid tax in the good old USA. Up to well above 50%. And yes i’m not rich (although I’m not poor either).
As far as I am concerned, although, like the guy in the Sopranos soap opera (good actor, bless his soul!) Jobs was a good guy, in the sense he made good computers, still, he was a GANGSTER.
Like a member of a gang, plutocracy international.
OK, Jobs is dead. I am sorry for that. I liked him as punching ball, and designer. Also, truth be told, he did not have a nice death. Truly pathetic. His house in Palo Alto is rather modest (I have an aunt and cousins living a block away). Nothing like L. Elison’s mania.
But why should I respect everybody dead? That gang, plutocracy international, deserves our contempt, and nothing but. BTW, they are causing the greenhouse/CO2 catastrophe. And deliberately so.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 2:38 pm |
Never thought I would be defending Steve Jobs, but HEY, give him the credit he is due.
To quote John Scully, the Pepsi CEO whom Jobs recruited to run Apple like they teach at Harvard B School (and who subsequently fired Jobs) – “When you go to consumer trade shows and you look around, all the other companies are showing product; Jobs is showing magic.”
A sincere complement from an unimaginative person.
Sure Apple is built on the work of others. Who isn’t?
But Apple stuff is not just marketing hype- you want to hold it in your hand.
Good work, Mr, Jobs.
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June 22, 2013 at 2:55 pm |
dear OGP: I still own a NEXT computer, made by Jobs after he was fired by Apple. I have owned TWO Mac Airs already. I am NOT anti-Apple, I have Apple warranties, I regret Jobs died. Jobs was the best consummer electronic designer, fine. He deserved millions, not billions, tax free.
Jobs was his own worst enemy: he admitted so himself. He started to believe in medecine too far into his disease. Before that, he refused treatment. So what was treatable, became lethal.
Jobs, thus, was an idiot, as far as treating disease was concerned. People like that have made civilization sick, and, so far, they refuse treatment as quaint and obsolete. Not just in the USA. Also in the EU.
Yet, I know Silicon Valley well (I have worked there for years), and many down there think they are geniuses, whereas they are just civilization class opportunists. Necessary ones, no doubt, but basically government leeches.
See the “i-spy” scandal… Which I had talked about this conspiracy for years. Now it’s becoming public.(I have actually known “engineers”, who worked worldwide… with special forces background revealed, to their american friends, once one knows them well…)
All these big time geniuses in Silicon Valley are just glorified spies-government agents… Whereas they pose as “Atlas Shrugged”. Even Hayek may have been disgusted. Watch Musk.
Not that I hate Elon Musk, nor that I resent all what he is trying to do. But he is a government sponsored South African multibillionaire… if there was just one, and the money was not recycled through the demoncratic party, OK. But it is! Massively. And now the corruption is getting astronomical.
I will be confronting the bears and the splendors of the wild high mountains in the next few days, it’s not that I have run out of venom… And I will strike back once I slither back down…
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 3:18 pm |
To those who are crying because they feel their god, “genius” Jobs was unfairly treated:
The point of the essay above was not to attack Jobs. It was to laud Optical Pumping and government financed research. The latter being what the neofascists have succeeded to cut, with the “sequester” (suggested by a multimillionaire young bank employee inside the Obama adminstration, now treasury sec., Lew!)
Jobs was just a hook. It was to attack those so ignorant that they have no idea what’s inside their gadgets, and who really invented what’s inside them.
And worst, of all, the fact that they have become so completely idiotic that they call an ignorant person such as Jobs a genius, not knowing anything else, but for “Atlas Shrugged”.
PA
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June 23, 2013 at 3:32 am |
Hey, Patrice, i got your point. And back in the days of Newton and Leibniz, they were probably all fluttering around whoever was the current court favorite and not dumb math stuff.
Jobs was a brilliant marketer, but that makes him sound like just a salesman which is sort of tacky and not what we Americans want. He made a lot of money, therefore he was a genius!
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June 25, 2013 at 10:52 pm |
Bowtiejack: Sorry for the delayed answer, I was up in the mountains, far from civilization, another world entirely… Interesting to mention Newton and Leinbitz: They both rose to important government position.
Voltaire, who also did so, sneered that it was because Newton’s niece was so pretty.
In any case having first class intellectuals as advisers happened in the past, all the way back to ancient Greece. With crucial impact.
Even in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne had picked up the best philosophers (Alcuin, etc.) Buridan, who discovered “Newton’s first law”, three centuries before Newton was born, and the heliocentric system, more than 2 centuries before Copernic plagiarized him, was adviser to several French kings…
Conclusion: who real intellectual heavyweights were was often perceived better in the past. So much for our intellectual age. That someone such as Jobs, so bright that he could not go to the doctor after having diagnosed with cancer is viewed as a genius, is, by itself, IMHO, the diagnostic of a pretty sick society.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 4:06 pm |
Gregory Mankiw shills for the Plutos:
Click to access defending_the_one_percent_0.pdf
It’s getting uglier in the American frontier. He is using Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Spielberg as his John Galt figures.
Could it be just coincidence that Mankiw shares a name with Gregory Rasputin, the quack doctor who gained access in the imperial palace of Tsarist Russia, alienating the royals from the masses and paving the way for revolution?
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June 22, 2013 at 4:19 pm |
dear Lowell: Rushing in the mountains here, last contact for a while. Yes, I commented on that on my facebook/NYT (Krugman published it within 3 seconds!). Although I did not read the Gregory Rasputin-from-Harvard piece…
To be noted: Russia was fully democratizing, & Rasputin (finally assassinated, with lots of difficulty, by a prince) played an important role to slow that down. It was a tragedy the (Prussian) fascists attacked and destroyed Russia. But that’s what they had planned PRECISELY (they said it themselves!) because the democratization program (with full participation of France first, and UK distant second) was progressing apace.
PA
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June 22, 2013 at 11:32 pm |
Of course Mankiw had deliberately chosen Jobs, Rowling, and Spielberg as his Galt models because these are relatively benign public figures. Had he decided to chose anyone from the Wall Street mafia, the Koch brothers, or the Walton heirs (the real object and recipient of his essay), his defensive maneuver would have readily fallen face-flat on his Harvard canvass.
Shilling for the dark side needs a little sleigh of hand to at least be superficially palatable.
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June 25, 2013 at 10:57 pm |
Even the Dark Side needs shades of grey to depict something one can claim is worth having. Humanizing the Dark Side has always been Satan’s number one trick.
PA
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July 6, 2013 at 1:19 pm |
J.K Rowling was unemployed, recieving state benefits, when she wrote the first Harry Potter novel. Another example of how the Galts depend on the state. I doubt she ever gave the momey back to the taxpayers who subsidised her.
Sometimes I can see the appeal of the ‘meritocracy’ espoused by the Randians. But a few moments rational thought is enough to see what a pile of deranged nonsense it is. Civilisation is a team effort. No human would last long as a true individual. The appeal of Rand remains for narcissists, which are now at empidemic proportions.
Why aren’t scientists busy hunting the ‘narcissism’ and ‘greed’ genes so we can weed these flawed people out before birth?
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July 6, 2013 at 7:33 pm |
BTW Even the first couple of paragraphs of the “Defence…” article show the suspension of critical faculties needed to take in the Randian nonsense.
For one, since when have the “rich” all been entrepreneurs and “designers” like Jobs? Most rich are in finance and renting out resources. Never designed or created a single thing. Where are the “significant economic contributions” of the millionaire financiers who invented the instruments that wrecked the western economy?
Where is the “voluntary exchange” in property and energy prices? Why are all rents and fuel prices the same in an area? Has the idiot Mankiv ever heard the words “cartel” or “profiteering”? Or how much is he being paid to forget they exist?
To me, a key flaw in Randian thinking is that the “thought leaders” could not exist without some surplus that puts food on their table. Without the poor, there is no rich. If the world only consisted of “driven thought leaders”, who would empty the drains, build the walls and do the dirty work? Basic fact is that the rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich. If the top 1% disappeared tomorrow….the world would only be a better place. Sure, some financial dealings would go a bit odd for a while, but nothing of significance would not get done.
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July 6, 2013 at 9:16 pm |
Hazxan: Agreed. BTW, I will support one of your points in another comments on “GASSING EARTH…”. It has to do with health/AIDS, and the USA plutocracy’s conspiracy to sell drugs at high rates.
PA
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December 1, 2013 at 6:15 am |
[…] today’s economics originated in government. Look at, say lasers. They were made possible by Kastler’s discovery of Optical Pumping in the Normale Sup lab 100% financed by the French […]
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March 23, 2014 at 7:43 pm |
[…] Now that’s real genius. Now, that’s what create entire new possibilities for humanity, and, in particular, jobs. […]
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July 14, 2014 at 10:15 am |
[…] More recently, the Minitel was a highly successful precursor of the internet. Astoundingly, and little known, the transistor, the integrated circuits and the PC were all invented in France (and quickly stolen by Silicon Valley and other USA propagandists). Optical pumping, a necessary precursor to the maser and laser, was also discovered in France. […]
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February 13, 2015 at 7:01 pm |
[…] https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/genius-irreplaceable-jobs-follow/ […]
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