What I have learned today.

The problem with Pancreatic cancer is that it always spreads to the liver. Once that happens you are well and truly fucked. Jobs was told that he would live if he had his pancreas out before the cancer spread. He refused. He acknowledged later than this was a terrible mistake and that his ego had killed him because he thought he knew better. He didn't.

Anyway MRNA vaccines for cancer are being developed and should be available in most parts of the world. Not sure about the States because y'know Fuckwittery.

Chicago: Supercell.

The only knowledge I have of Jobs is that he was once the wealthiest or close to, men in the world. He started Apple which almost went bankrupt at one point until the realisation that if you make something look good then people will pay through the nose for it despite cheaper non-Apple products performing far better.
He refused to use his money for charity, preferring instead like most very wealthy people, to bestow gifts to places that would name buildings after him. I don't even recall that he did a Bezos or Zuckerberg and set up schools named after themselves that failed colossally instead of paying taxes towards public education.
Then, like every billionaire with perhaps the exception of Warren Buffet, he started believing his own aura and probably fucked around doing shit that billionaires do. As Chicago says, his cancer was caught early and could have been treated by removing his pancreas. He refused, instead following some hocus pocus billionaire style therapy which singularly failed to cure him. He did have conventional treatment eventually, which increased his lifespan.
He died, a movie was made about him which I have no intention of ever watching.

That would be my biography of Jobs.

He was a nob, in a lot of ways. But you don’t have to be an Apple fanboy to know this is bollocks.

He (and the people around him) figured out how to package together developing technologies in ways that made people want to use them. The people ‘doing it better’ were not, in fact, doing it better because nobody except Tricky wanted to use their products until Apple showed them the way.

It’s not really in dispute that Jobs, whilst by no means always a winner, was leading companies who revolutionised their industries multiple times.. original Apple.. Pixar… Modern Apple.. that wasn’t done by hiring some good product designers and marking up by 20%. He had a knack for understanding what people want, and the ability to make people deliver it despite him being an utter cunt about doing so.

(Also, Jobs was never one of the richest men in the world. He was very rich… but he stopped holding founder-scale equity in Apple in the 1980’s… he was nothing like the modern tech oligarchs and would have nowhere near their wealth today even though Apple is considerably more valuable than Facebook, Amazon etc)

Tell me you're an Apple fanboy without telling me you're an Apple fanboy!

Yep. He packaged nice looking products and sold them at a premium. People still wet their pants and squeal that they "just work". Guess what? Android phones also just work; do Apple fanboys believe anyone would actually use them if they didn't? On android I can have any phone from a multitude of competing suppliers. With Apple I can have variants of overpriced nice looking phones which, until recently, required "special" overpriced nice looking cables to charge.

He was only worth $11bn at his death. Certainly amongst the wealthiest in the world at the time.

Absolutely you can. I never mentioned Android and didn’t need to be told this.. but of course it’s true. But if the topic was the impact that Jobs’ products have had then you really need to be comparing all of the alternatives that were available to you when the iPhone launched, right?

Progress is mostly the result of iteration and people building on the work of others. Most of the steps are small but sometimes we take really big ones and I’d just say that Jobs was heavily involved in several of them.. which is either statistical insanity or evidence of a particular talent.

Optional fanboy section:

Who would have thought charging cables would make for such an interesting discussion.

Can I add that the EU legislating to mandate usb-c is an example of why government regulation is often bad? It means that if someone comes up with a new cable that transfers data twice as quickly and charges at four times the speed, it’s illegal to sell. So no one is going to be wasting any time trying to develop better charging connections.

Just be thankful they spent ten years talking about standardisation before they actually did it.. which gave USB-C time to happen.

There are trade-offs with this sort of thing. I dunno where charging cables would sit on my list of priorities but, overall, I think it turned out ok. I think a lot about EV batteries and how far behind we are where we need to be when it comes to having some regs and standards in place that account for the fact that these things are gonna need to be replaced if we’re not going to scrap every car after six years. How do you protect consumers without getting in the way of a product that is very much in it’s innovation phase?

My match stream is a minute behind my scores app.

That Garry Parker played more games for Leicester than he did for Forest.

Transfermarkt disagrees: www.transfermarkt.co.uk/garry-parker/leistungsdatenverein/spieler/107796

Wikipedia is pretty unreliable for appearance data.

Thecityground.com is good for Forest stats and has him on 151: www.thecityground.com/appearances.php

This appears to be authoritative and has him on 147 for Leicester www.foxestalk.co.uk/history/appearances/?page_no=2&sortby=9