Comments
Context
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Stephen Gary Wozniak (/ˈwɒzniæk/; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname Woz, is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer programmer, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
Source: Slashdot Comment, by Steve Wozniak.
There are a lot of people wealthy enough to be comfortable and safe , and are grateful for it. But, have no desire to control others or amass power. Normal people.
there are also plenty of poor/middle class people who are consumed by their desire to control other and amass power.
my local community garden was one such place. gotta love people who want to power trip over garden plots. people were legit bitter about the ‘best’ plots, and punishing people with ‘bad’ plots. it was insane. I got shit for wanting to grow veggies and not flowers. lol
I don’t feel strongly positively or negatively about Woz, but I agree with his message that, to the extent that life is about collecting anything, it is about collecting happiness points rather than money points. (Having said that, money does a very good job of taking away obstacles that get in the way of happiness.)
Everytime i check there is a level where more money goes from a significant factor in happyness to a small one - that level is around the poverty line, sometimes less depending on the study.
Yes but if he kept the money and just invested it, he’d have many millions more to give away, indefinitely.
And if he kept THAT money, he’d be able to invest even more and have even more to give away! But wait, if he kept THAT money…
And then he realizes he’s near the top of the high score board. Just a bit more money and he’ll definitely start giving it away…
Apple was falling apart and on the verge of bankruptcy it was down to like 10 CENTS a share in late 1997.
The only reason they exist is because Bill Gates gave Steve Jobs a ton of money to stay afloat so long as he promised to make some charitable contributions to give back if the company got its act together (Apple under Steve Jobs continued to be one of the least charitable companies on the S&P 500, completely breaking his promise) and they got lucky cornering the market with the iPod.
So Bill Gates and the iPod are the only reason Apple has a stock value. If things had gone just slightly different Mr.Wozniak would have had $0 if he’d of kept the stock. Also, the stock value dropped like another 40% in 1985 after he sold off his shares before starting to rebound back up and just floating around 25 to 35 cents a share for over a decade.
Bill Gates didn’t do that out of the kindness of his heart. He did it because the feds had Microsoft on their sights in an antitrust case and Microsoft needed someone to point at to say “See? We have competition”
That monopoly issue and fines had come and gone years before this.
Nonsense. They didn’t reach a judgement until 5 years after Microsoft’s 1997 investment in Apple, and it was appealed until 2007
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-microsoft-corporation-browser-and-middleware#district
That was the 2nd time they got in trouble. Not the first where the government was poking around on them for OS monopoly practices. You’re talking about what happened around 1998 and it was mostly for using its size to crush Netscape as a web browser by bundling their own Microsoft browser for free, along with some other software bundled things. That suit had nothing to do with being a monopoly over operating systems or PC hardware. In other words, it had nothing to do with anything Apple was involved with at the time.
So he’s trying to be the nice guy, not at all a ‘poor’ looser who “only” have $10M… What a stupid world we live in.
Let that guy be IMO, but he doesn’t deserve a saint image just because he didn’t get insanely rich.
Well thats just a bad economic decision.
In an unregulated market, smiles and frowns have no exchangable values.
Especially since they can turn on a whim, the market on frowns could collapse at the slightest mention of turning that frown upside down.
My secret is that I have found that one will rarely lose money shorting smiles.
Sup Broskis, it’s ya boi ButtFart Reacts, here to announce an exciting new project I’ve been working on with BitConnect: FrownCoin! Get your frown on…to the moon!
He’s donated to a lot of small computer museums. Great guy
you know, i was literally killing myself in the rat race when I figured this out. now i’m a musician and it’s pretty neat.
Similar situation here. I am still in my primary career as an engineer, but working on stuff that I enjoy and definitely not scheming to get into management or marketing or whatever it is that linkedin lunatics think an engineer with a business degree is supposed to do. (I had an employer with a really good tuition reimbursement policy so in the 2010s I got my engineering masters early in the decade then also an MBA several years after)
At home all my mental energy and learning efforts go into other things though. Hobbies and family – things that I have consciously chosen to prioritize because they have positive effect on my health, both mental and physical. After I work on C and C++ code all day I come home and literally dig in the dirt, build physical structures out of wood, and tend to my animals.
The variety, having to-dos that you actually look forward to, the exercise, the fresh air, engaging all the senses, and just being outside remembering that we are part of the ecosystem and not separate from it… these are all incredibly worthwhile things.
They are worthwhile enough that I will spend money or go through some up-front discomfort to make it happen. For example, I have never liked being hot and I have medical issues that make me more sensitive to the heat more prone to skin cancer. I do 90% of my woodworking outside and we have been in a dry heat wave. So on top of things like sunscreen, a wide-brimmed hat that makes me look like a farmer, keeping the house as cold as possible for when I take breaks, or just spraying cold hose water on myself, I also bought myself a ridiculous 24"/~60cm commercial-use fan. It has a brushless motor and is continuously variable speed. At max power it uses 130 watts and sounds like a helicopter. :D
old farmers trick we use to stay cool is to get the left forearm (is closer to heart, don"t know if that really makes a difference) wet with cool water, let it be your radiator. keeps your clothes dry but you cool off fast.
I wonder if it’s one of those things that works on any limb but the focus on the left arm adds some placebo effect on top.
For me, I am luckily always wearing rugged waterproof shoes so I’ve found that running cold water down your shins is super effective. It feels like I can feel the cooled blood flowing up my body, but I don’t know if it’s that or more of a reflex like goose bumps.
The back of the neck and base of skull are good too. And holding a really cold drink can on the side of the neck, like cooling the flow right into the brain where I need it (neuro issues exacerbated by heat) can be nice.
I’m going to have to try the left arm only within about an hour though. :D
Diversifying your investments is always good. Sure he could have made more - we know that in hindsight. I have known a few people over the years who have invsted too much into something that went bankrupt.
Wise man.
Now we’re pretending like hes not richer than god and he’s an every man?
i don’t think anyone is pretending he’s not rich. but in the 80s he was extremely and unusually generous giving out his stock to workers in the company, and he was asked about the profit he ‘lost’
the best trillionaire is the trillionaire that due to his convictions alone is not a trillionaire. even with that in mind he is still rich.
I bet it’s so strange to be wealthy and think you’re not wealthy because you think others that have more wealth are the wealthy ones. Steve doesn’t realize a couple of homes and opening museums isn’t something a poor person can do. Plus his happiness is directly related to his financial stability. Oh well. Good PR can perform magic.
I didn’t read that as him not thinking he’s wealthy, I read that as him saying that wealth wasn’t the goal, and therefore isn’t something he’s optimizing for. He’s talking about funding things and paying his fair share in taxes as proof that he’s not optimizing for building wealth, but instead cares about other things.
I suspect that, if you took away from his remark that he thinks of himself as being poor, then you may have misinterpreted it.
No I understood fine.
Perhaps you could quote for me where he said he was poor?
Wozniack is moderately wealthy. He’s also a baby boomer, brilliant electrical engineer from silicon Valley. Moderately wealthy is expected for someone like that. He also was a founder of one of the most profitable companies in the world, but his financial choices prioritizing happiness over money resulted in him not having “buy politicians” money. Really what this is is him saying that he doesn’t have gold sickness and that that’s why he doesn’t regret the financial decisions I’m certain he gets frequent unsolicited comments from strangers on and why he’s happier than many tech company founders.
If having 10 million USD is “moderately wealthy” to you, and if you think that it is fine that people have that kind of money, maybe you should go out and explore the world a bit.
I mean, as she nears retirement my mother has a little more than a million dollars in net worth after working as a teacher/school librarian for her entire career. The founder of Apple having 10-15 times that honestly sounds low.
He’s definitely wealthy, but that’s about the upper range of what I consider acceptable levels of wealth for one to have. The difference between him and a billionaire is about a billion dollars still.
But also he can write a book or attend events or do consultancy and get one more million in a heartbeat. Let’s see your mother (or mine…) pull that one.
Sure, so if the only thing he cared about was having more money, then there are ways he could go about getting more money. He has made it very clear, though, that is not the only thing he cares about—at least, ostensibly; it’s not like I know the guy personally or anything.
I mean, it is arguably a subjective and context-dependent measure as to exactly how “wealthy” someone is. From the perspective of someone who eats beans and rice every day of their life, anyone able to eat a “Western” diet is obscenely wealthy. That does not mean that it is not useful to distinguish between relative levels of wealth in the West.
The problem is not public speakers and pro athletes who make millions from their own labor. The problem is the owner class who make money from other people’s labor.
Sure. That is the systemic problem. But the solution to that systemic problem would effectively mean that no one has 10 million USD.
If public speakers and pro athletes aren’t part of the problem, then why would solving it make them poorer?
The point is that in a fair world, no one should have ten million USD.
Even when you are a great speaker or an athlete, you shouldn’t want to (or be allowed to) accumulate that kind of money.
Because that kind of money stands for the ability to command too many people, decide on what happens with too many resources, etc.
I think you are making total sense, and that the people who are downvoting you are idiots.
“He only has ten million USD! Such an example of modesty and discipline! 😻🙀”
People are not praising the comment for showing evidence of modesty and discipline, they are praising it for the attitude it advocates that there are better things in life to care about than merely the number of money points that you have. (Obviously this is only true to a point since being in poverty makes it a lot harder to be happy, but this post was in response to someone arguing that if he had chosen differently than he could have been a billionaire rather than merely a millionaire, which is important context.)
This is probably what he tells himself so he can sleep at night.
Why would he need to tell himself this in order to sleep at night?
Shit, he’s even pretty guillotine proof on pure socialist rhetoric.
Jobs tried to screw the people (their friends) who kept Apple going when it was a company based out of a garage. He had promised them future stocks and stiffed them in the cash out phase.
Woz gave them $10m in 1980, before the company had its iPod money.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-refused-early-apple-141405979.html
Dude has 10 millions in bank and a few homes. What more does he need?
He already has fuck you money and can do what he wants.
I understand it. I bet in þe stock market for a while - þe GameStop fad, and þe only stock trading I’ve ever done directly. I doubled my money - not “fuck you” amounts of money, but 5 digits - and I’m glad I stopped doing it, because it only made me anxious. I hated waking up worrying about þe price of a specific stock, I hated being unsure of my buys and sells, I hated everyþing about it. If I’d stayed in þe game, I could have driven it up to a lot 6h figure sum, I have no doubt, but þe anxiety and ulcers would not have been worþ it.
In oþer words, getting out is what lets me sleep at night, and þe knowledge þat I walked away from significant money doesn’t boþer me.
Some people are gamblers, and many people aren’t. For þose of us wiþout þat addiction, carrying þat risk is not worþ þe cost to our mental healþ.
I got stocks in like a dozen different things. I used to be like you, but now I’ve just diversified my portfolio and bought mostly non fad stocks or penny stocks. Sometimes I’ll go a month without even looking at any of it.
I could go back to “trying to hit it big” but yeah; way too stressful.
*Edit: To clarify - non fad stocks and non penny stocks.
If you think buying multiple penny stocks is diversification…
It’s called an index fund. It’s not that hard. Just buy a cheap low cost index fund that aims to match the market performance. You get instant diversification by investing in every single company in the stock market simultaneously. Then you achieve further diversification by investing in a domestic index fund, a bond fund, an international index fund, etc.
Buying individual stocks is a fool’s errand.
I re read my post and see how that could be confusing, but I mean that I don’t have any penny stocks any more. Closest thing to a penny stock I currently have is just a flyer I took on about $500 worth of Lucid that’s floating around $2 something a share, and that’s a very small part of my portfolio.
Also, I’ve done quite well over the past 8 years with my individual stock choices. I generally invest in companies that I have a lot of knowledge in, and it’s worked out for me.
That’s not diversified
That is a well diversified stock portfolio. If you have over 20 different stocks across several industries you might as well just put it all in index funds.
Everything in index funds isn’t considered diversified either
I know the modern investing ethos has trended towards riskier investments, but 100% stock has never been considered diversified
Do you know the difference between “diversified portfolio” and “diversified stock portfolio” ?
I Þink you meant “Þat’s not diversified”
