Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative manner but he had just enough naivete to get through life happy. He talked about all the chips he redesigned as a teen and it did not sound like bragging at all. We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world.
It's not naive to try and be good and not exploit every situation to the best outcome for yourself, that's the whole point. How can people believe him to be so brilliant but also naive? Don't they see it? It doesn't take a smart man to see an apple and take it all for himself.
But what is the "best outcome" when you have your house paid off and ample savings? He got ripped off by Jobs early on, but Jobs also let him do the work he wanted -- it's rare to have someone as good as Woz was also understand marketing. Jobs is deified too much, but he did bring something to the table in their business relationship.
Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.
There's a pretty significant difference between the statements: "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because what Woz is ought to not be seen as naive" and "You shouldn't say Woz is naive, because most other people wouldn't understand him as naive" and it's unclear to me which of those to statements you mean.
I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
They're different dimensions. Naivety suggests a blindness (or maybe willingness to ignore) the true nature of people, hence why naive people are often taken advantage of, or seen as idealistic. You can be technologically brilliant and at the same time not dialled in to those kind of social/people dynamics.
I get what they mean by "naive". I think I would have used the word "child-like"? Even that is not right though. There is a kind of playground simplicity to his philosophy. I think Woz did though in fact bring enough for the whole class.
No its not naive, its called not being a sociopath. Some of biggest movers if not all were and are such. Utter pieces of shit as human beings, to the last one. I dont think I need to name current big names, all of them fit this.
I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset.
My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).
I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.
It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.
I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed
It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.
It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.
Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64
Woz is extraordinary lucky that he has a legacy (and a lot of money). Clearly the bulk of the credit goes to Jobs. And it seems more than likely that if not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.
Woz is one of my favorite people ever, a lifelong hero for me.
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult)
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
> most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward.
Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?
Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.
Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.
Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
this is the right take. the world clearly needs more Steve Jobses or the world wouldn't remember this one so singularly. and i don't know what the number would be before the world didn't need any more Wozniaks. the problem is that the Wozniaks of the world nowadays, if they're not getting paid 9 figures by Zuck, are probably in a random room somewhere doing absolutely brilliant work that will take a decade to appreciate. and the more Wozes in the world, the more advantageous it is to be a Jobs. kind of a funny dynamic equilibrium.
I tend to have a pretty open, kind, and respectful approach to others.
It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety.
I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues.
It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
When I was a student, we tried to get him to speak to at our school, but Woz wanted mucho $$$$ to speak. But it seems plenty people will pay what he asks. I guess if my job were to just go around talking about random shit I'm interested in, and I can make $10M doing that, I'd be the happiest person ever too. I don't think it's about naivete.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
it's a bit of work and effort to give a talk. And he is rich enough to not need to do it for the money. Time is important. If he'd be doing it for free he'd probably get too many requests. Adding a high $ can simply help filter down to a reasonable thing.to only the largest locations and highest number of people.
I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
A person whose every interest and opinion gets validated by the world would indeed be very happy. Imagine just talking about whatever the hell happens to interest you to people and everyone paying attention and even paying you good money for that.
It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
Actually the world needs more Jobs too. More Jobs, more Woz. Brilliant engineers and hackers need to partner with some super egotistic, charismatic, bullying asshole visionaries to make a dent.
Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.
Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.
by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year
You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.
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Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213
by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.
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Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172
by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars
You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...
I'm not familiar with his personality, what is he naive about? like the kind of person that ignores sort of political and business machinations and chases personal interests?
> we wouldn't be talking about Woz today if they had not paired up.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
Eh, there's no way to know for sure but I would bet that there are a lot more people who could have been swapped out for Jobs with similar success than the reverse. It's generally thought to be harder to find a brilliant innovative technical person for a startup than a business one. I also see a lot more passable Jobs imitators around the industry than I do Woz imitators.
What's actually "nice"? Is it creating an industry and livelihoods for millions of people (directly or indirectly)?
Or is it smiling and making people in the room feel comfortable?
He was flawed, like all of humanity. We just aren't allowed to acknowledge his accomplishments anymore because he didn't personally engineer every Apple product or similar stupidity that is also used eg to diminish Musk.
I really hate to say it, but I had a different experience. Woz came to the fintech company where I work for a lecture and Q&A. I was super excited to see him, like a Little Leaguer meeting his favorite baseball player. However, Woz came off kinda rude, like "Everyone else is wrong. I'm right about everything." Maybe he was just having a bad day, or he didn't really wanna speak at my lame fintech company but somehow got roped into it. Or, maybe it's a case of "Never meet your heroes", but I was kinda disappointed. Woz and Kevin Mitnick were my two heroes as a young nerd.
I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
>Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction
Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.
There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.
Disagree, almost of all the accomplishments in humanity are driven by people like Steve Jobs not Woz. Elon Musk could be said to be a second iteration, a technical person extremely good at sales that can pursue and sell a vision.
There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
Define "accomplishments". Based on Woz's message, I would say he's been the true achiever in the game of life. He found, what he genuinely believes, is happiness.
Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.
If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").
One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.
The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
I love seeing all the positive comments here on HN regarding Woz.
I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).
You're either talking about people who worked with him at least forty years ago and had a problem with him, or people who are talking out of their ass. No doubt about which this is, but I wonder why.
You must have worked in a very odd and isolated department. I never heard that rhetoric, even once, throughout my tenure. Nor have any of my old colleagues who still work there and are quite well known internally (notorious patents, features / tentpole DRI, etc).
Woz bought 2 Model 3s thinking he would be able to rent them out as robotaxis. I'm sure he's a nice guy but I have no idea why he's (still) held up as some kind of tech guru.
Many of us grew up in the PLD era, k-maps, etc. Woz pushed early HW to the limit, with SW APIs that delivered real value. Woz made astute design trade-offs based on full stack knowledge that his peers lacked. The world’s moved on to the GPU (low precision, accelerated parallel compute?) era, but the Woz view point still holds. You can see it in the AI kernel optimizations, or rematerialization methods to push GPU HW to the new limits, and trade-offs need to be made. GPU HW for 4-bit QAT or even 2-bit will dramatically affect the SW (AI) of this era. What trade-offs do you make?
I saw Woz on Northbound 280 “driving” his cherry red Model S, using FSD. He was looking down at the screen the whole time I watched him. Swear he had ssh’d into it.
> I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.
Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I'm of the "only way to win is not to play" mind with this exercise. I would peel off 10-20 million to eliminate lifetime financial concerns for my circle, and immediately go MacKenzie Scott on the rest, trying to put it towards maximum societal benefit.
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
I don't know if you intended this to be only spent selfishly. But if you look to how the old robber barons spent their money they did things like giving the US a large portion of it's public library system. I don't think it would be hard find things to do like this that make everyones lives better.
I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy
There was a movie from the 80s with this premise. When I mention this to people, I'm usually surprised to find out that I'm the only one in the group who's seen it:
This is crazy. I could easily spend a billion dollars without even thinking. That doesn't even get you a novel drug. Like, if I made $100b I have a shit ton of things I could attack with that.
Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.
The "number" is always part of a big debate. There's no right or wrong.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
> The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)
The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)
I mean, can I not just spend the money to buy a better society in which to live?
Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.
Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.
Parks.
Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.
Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?
Education. Adult education, too.
Science and research.
And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.
I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.
It seems like a lot then I think about how California’s EDD department gave 50 billion to criminals in 2020/2021 and then it feels less ginormous.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
The best part of this game is that it takes time to spend the money, if you can't manage to spend more than 4-5%/year then your wealth will actually be growing.
For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.
Coming up with a list of things to buy isn't an interesting use of the money. Starting companies, using that money to pay people to do things, for, say, 10 years, for all industries you want to get involved in. A billion dollars, over ten years, for 1,000 people, is 100k. Which is fairly decent salary.
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
It would seem that accumulating stuff is a waste of time at a point much lower than one billion. On the other hand, giving every Debian maintainer $500 a month is ~$5M a year. Add in Gentoo, Alpine, and other things I like and you're looking at probably double that total. Ivy admission for kids is a few million a year for 5-10 years... Retaking Artsakh would be north of $3 billion
That's only if you spend your money on stuff. I wouldn't spend it on stuff, I would fund things like ambitious art and architecture projects. If you can't think of ways to allocate $1B you're probably a very boring person, and if your first thought is "yachts" then you're definitely one.
The only real way to spend billions is to build many huge houses all over the world or ONE really big house. To spend hundreds of billions you would have to build something ridiculous like a mile high pyramid with a 1 square mile base.
There was a long Reddit thread[1] a while ago that describes what people in various wealth tranches spend their money on. It's very long, but the TLDR is: They don't buy "things" so much as they buy Experiences, Access, Influence, Time, Political Power, and so on.
or just look at how many big yatcht Gabe newell owns and try to calculate cost of maintaining them for a year. That alone easily requires $1billion invested in somewhere so returns can maintain the ownership + trips. Also now he now owns shipyard too.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but all that stuff is personal spending on luxury goods, which is probably the least useful thing money can do. If your goal is something like "solve supply-side housing in my city" then you might need to build hundreds of high-rise apartment blocks, at which point you'll be able to burn through $1bn pretty quickly. And yeah, you'll eventually make your money back, but that's a side benefit.
Posts like these seem a bit silly to me because it's incredibly easy to spend billions of dollars as soon as you get away from a consumer mindset. The value in a billion dollars comes from being able to shape the future in whichever direction you want. I'm not interested in spending money just to make my own life marginally more comfortable, but in elevating the quality of life and overall experience of everyone around me.
Here's a few random frustrations I have:
Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.
Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.
And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.
Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!
Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.
Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.
I hear what you are saying: consumables and normal luxury items are hard to spend a lot of money on (houses, cars, boats, planes, clothes, food, etc)... if you however were to choose to spend a lot of money on the R&D required to reducing human suffering you'll find that the money will go like its on fire. Build a new drug, create novel ai tech, driverless cars... $1B would feel like you need to clip coupons for the grocery store.
Yachts and houses are boring. Can't you think of anything you'd rather do with your life than live in a house and go sailing? You can do that without money!
A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.
For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.
That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.
I'd like to build something interesting so I want more. Some people want to buy homes, happiness, and family prosperity with their wealth. If that's the case then $10M is too much. That's multiple homes territory.
But if you want to build something for society and not die doing it then you might need more than $10M.
Isn’t that backwards? Most people need to build a business to make the $10M+ in the first place. Are you talking about a nonprofit or an airplane/movie business (both famous for turning large fortunes into small ones). Otherwise you probably should follow the advice from the “Producers”: never put your own money in the show.
You are exactly right. If you want to build something big from scratch you will likely need to control that thing, which in our system means ownership and wealth. If you don't own it, someone else will own/control it and you could lose your ability to execute on your vision.
> With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.
This isn't your point, but $400k puts you in a top tax bracket, so figure 30% of that goes to taxes. that brings your return down to 2.8%. The Fed wants to keep inflation at 2%, but it's usually a bit higher, leaving your real return at 0.3%. That's $30k per year.
> I think that $10 million is a great answer for "how much money is more than you'll ever need".
Years ago I lived on $40 per month, after building my own cabin in Oregon -- wood heat, kerosene lanterns. Then I bought an Apple II and things got more complicated (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...). But basically I agree with you. Most people will never have that much, or need it.
Citation needed, but also buying homes (that you don't intend to live in or actually use) is still hoarding, and is arguably even worse than hoarding wealth.
I would measure it in multiples of the median income. At 5-6x I imagine that you can buy anything you want but not everything. You are still somewhat price sensitive but rarely bothered by a setback or an expensive meal.
There's lots of things I'd like to do that would cost more than $10 million. Maybe if you're saying I personally only have $10m but control $1t?
Things I'd do if I didn't have to raise money, find investors, etc.
Bribe/payoff whoever I had to and then build a real transit system in LA,SF,Seattle as one example.
Consider making a museum/expo-center that's like the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org/) but centered around Video Games and/or Interactive Digital Art.
Would buying a good chunk of land make you a "hoarder"? Depending on where you are 20 acres can be more than $10 million even before you build a house etc.
Definitions of wealth often exclude primary residence for this reason, it depends a lot on where you live, and it's also not very liquid. There are poor people who own large houses (but can't sell for whatever reason), and there are rich people who don't own any house at all.
Spending $10m to buy 20 acres is hardly a "need". I think people here are missing the point of the quote by throwing out a bunch of absurd technicalities.
Having more money than that is not for your personal expenses and comfort, but to finance projects at a large scale.
That's why they need more than $10 million for space exploration, or for setting up giant factories to make any kind of goods, for developing massive infrastructure, for warfare, etc etc.
So when you create $10,000,000 of economic value you should be forced at gunpoint to stop contributing to society and creating jobs.
Jeff Bezos has created many, many millions of jobs while selling essential goods at margins sometimes below 1%. If his reward was stolen after $10m, why would he have bothered slaving away?
Aside the blatant jealousy factor, it's economic suicide and contains shadows of economic systems which have led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
It’s so disappointing to constantly see this type of evil envy driven nonsense posted on HN. Capitalism has delivered humanity unbelievable prosperity and improvements in living conditions.
Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.
Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
I agree. With $10 million I'd immediately buy a decent chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, build a modest home + a guest home or two, have a hobby farm, and retire with a solid $8 million or so left. Invest, live off interest, done.
I think the reason why so many of us look up to the Woz in the tech world is that he is genuine, in an industry where we see so much of the opposite regularly - and we want to be the same.
There's an interesting job interview question: do you want to be more like Woz or S. Jobs? Elon Musk's management style is very Jobs-like: Motivates via manipulation and wow-factor of cutting edge, has grand visions, yet knows what factories and the market can and can't handle, tries odd drugs, etc. However, Jobs rarely stuck his nose into politics; Jobs mostly just trolled about tech.
I'm definitely a Woz. I appreciate both Jobs and Musk despite their blemishes, but I must say where Musk has Jobs beat is vision. Jobs was content to give everyone a computer. Musk is trying to bring the optimistic future to life on all fronts.
As a younger millenial I am somewhat familiar with the legends of yore. But not as familiar as someone older that was around when the tech world was much smaller and more intimate. Where people casually met a wild Stallman at random conferences.
Given how much bigger the software and tech world has gotten, with how much time has passed, and how much things have changed, I wonder if people still see Wozniak as tech hero and as part of casual tech culture knowledge.
Dude. Yes we still see him that way 1000%. It's just that there are a lot of tech people on this planet and they all have different ages and experiences, so they don't all think the same.
You know, I there aren't many celebrities, especially in tech, that I think "It would be cool to have a beer with them". Not Gates, not Jobs, probably not Musk. But Woz seems like a cool guy with great stories to tell.
I think Steve Ballmer would be pretty fun to hang out with for a bit. Maybe not a beer but lunch with Bill Gates would be alright, I'd love to pick his brain about his charity work.
I think there's 2 kinds of psychodelic oneshot. Woz & Jobs. Woz became content with all he had and Jobs turned into a psycopath. Both geniuses, both gave us a lot. I'd rather have someone like Woz be a trillionare and e/alt using his wealth for good than a money hungry monster.
This is a slight tangent, but I have not been on slashdot since the early aughts. I'm surprised that it fell into obscurity since technical forums like HN and reddit CS subreddits are thriving. Or maybe it still vibrant and I'm making assumptions?
I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.
And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.
It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
> The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political
I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".
(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)
> And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.
I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.
I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.
Slashdot refused to moderate comments in an effective manner. Comment section was always full of bad memes that became stale:
* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.
* Frist post
* BSD is dying
* GNAA
* Nathalie Portman
* Robotic Overlord
* In Soviet Russia
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes
* etc.
Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...
However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.
> However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system
In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.
But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)
slashdot stopped allowing easy new user sign ups a while back. Now its the same folks over and over, very predictable. A number of those old memes have died out, mostly. They really limited ascii art which helped too. There do seem to be a lot of trolls/psyops in the comments.
I've never been on slashdot before. And what stands out to me is it's really hard to follow the UI. It's better than the classic forum layout but it's still just not easy to read, I just can't see myself using it. Though I have similar opinions on new reddit and it is pretty popular so I think I don't represent the possible new user.
What seems more relevant is that I didn't know about it at all which seems common with many older internet sites dying a slow dead of no new users as younger audiences are literally unable to discover the site.
Skimfeed, my entry point into HN, still indexes /. threads, so I still check it out from time to time. Definitely not what it was in the cmdrtaco days, but it has gems in there sometimes still.
Yeah, that was my take too. I used to be on it regularly 15-20 years ago, great nitty-gritty tech plus usually good-natured snarky techy humor; but haven't even visited in over a dozen years.
Readit News
Anyways, he seems to have protected himself well later on, was able to do good (stories of him giving stock to ppl left out early on, that kind of thing) -- people hyperfocus on one very specific thing (Jobs ripping him off in the atari days) when it's a small point in a much larger life.
I too have been lucky enough to hear him speak, and he very much does have this naivete of youth in the way he speaks. He has this very simple and straight forward way to view his contribution, along with a very simple motivation of "it makes me happy" that does feel naive.
I don't think he's nearly as naive as he comes off, but I think he wants to be seen as naive, because his personal philosophy is one that places naivete in high regard. He wants to follow happiness, and happiness can oftentimes be a little naive.
Deleted Comment
My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).
I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.
It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.
I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.
It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.
It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.
Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
Everything Jobs was though and the people around him and those that worked before him were important for the state of Apple as he left it.
But Woz is my fav also, and if there were many, many makers like Woz, and there are, that would be fantastic, and it is.
Woz, I love you, man.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?
Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.
To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.
False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.
Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.
Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3
It’s frequently interpreted as weakness and naivety.
I’m actually a pretty hardboiled and cynical person on the inside, but choose not to approach life in that manner. There’s reasons. Long story for other venues.
It’s always interesting to see the reactions from folks that think I’m an easy mark, when it dawns on them, that I’m not.
Kindness and generosity are not [necessarily] weakness.
I'll bite. Go ahead and list some recent examples of this actually happening please.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
I dont want to do contract work but people ask so I just quote an unreasonably high number and on occasion someone bites. I dont need the money so I need an easy filter.
It's a bit related to how billionaires tell everyone to "just work on whatever makes you happy and it's all going to be fine".
Dead Comment
Remember how Jobs single handedly bullied Adobe Flash into its graveyard? Bullied record labels into selling individual songs instead of the whole CD? Cannot imagine Woz doing that. Elon is the next Jobs only even harder to stomach. I wouldn't want to work for these people but they, along with those who can work along side them, change the world.
Woz was in the right place at the right time. Jobs would have found someone else and no one would ever have heard of Woz. Jobs gave us some of the most amazing products the world has ever seen.
https://www.slashdot.org/~SteveWoz
Comment Re:No Autonomy (Score 2) 125
by SteveWoz on Monday April 13, 2020 @09:13AM (#59940526) Attached to: Elon Musk Still Predicts 1 Million Tesla Robotaxis By the End of the Year
You might have missed that Musk made the same claim about 2016, with the 1-camera sensor system. The 2017 claim was with the newer 8-camera system, and the claim was made before Tesla even had software for the new sensors, and the Tesla then lacked adaptive cruise control, adaptive high beam, self parking, summon, and other things that the prior model did have. I'm embarrassed that I actually believed these claims.
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Comment Die in your sleep... (Score 1) 213
by SteveWoz on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:30PM (#58807154) Attached to: People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
At least Tesla respects our right to die in our sleep.
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Comment Re:Maybe they just realized (Score 1) 172
by SteveWoz on Friday June 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#54537213) Attached to: Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars
You meant to say 'great' cars with 'some' quality problems. Autocorrect can be a bitch...
He was a visionary and "got" tech -- Apple's success with him (both times) and the floundering in between demonstrate his value to their story.
Again, not a nice man and not worthy of worship but definitely of respect for what he delivered.
The exact same thing is true in reverse. Jobs was a phenomenal salesman, one of the greatest to ever live. But without someone to actually make the products (and Woz was phenomenal at that), he would've had nothing to sell. You need both the business guy and the product guy to have a successful partnership.
I think the net effect of people like Jobs is a huge positive in this world. Why do you judge people that did great things by the standards of everyday interaction. You think this could be related? Perhaps there is something unpleasant about the person that had some effect on his ability for greatness? Or do you think people are like a video game with knobs where you can turn down "don't be a jerk" without affecting anything else?
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
Because I don't want to live in a world of things built by socially maladjusted misanthropes, I want to live in a world build by kind and social people they made with their own hands.
There is something incredibly servile and pathetic in the psychology of people who latch onto perceived great men instead of looking to their neighbor. Like the kind of people who spend their day on twitter hoping that Elon retweets them and gives them attention.
We wouldn't even know who Woz was without Jobs. Sure Jobs had character flaws but everyone does.
Is there a world where you get get a person who has all of Jobs's positive traits without any of the negative? Maybe but not likely.
There are a lot of people who want to be happy. Let them be happy, but it's the relentless builders/dreamers who pushes through the entire journey of getting a product out there to the people.
Personally, I'd take that over being the creator of something valuable.
If Elon Musk is being held up as a pinnacle of achievement, I don't want that.
In this day and age, most people are attracted to "influencing". For better (giving back to society, educational) or worse (pranksters, grifters, "manosphere").
One notorious case is "Zara Dar", a PhD dropout to OF creator. Seemed to have high potential in the industry then something just flipped (money? too difficult? not fond of the grind?) and decided to go to OF.
The new world, with its hypercapitalistic tendencies, take advantage of the worst of us. It's one of the reasons for the rise of kakistocratic administration in the United States.
I worked at Apple for a good amount of time, and the general rhetoric from Apple folks still there is that Woz is “insane” and not to be trusted.
I personally always found that to be so far from the truth, and the root of it really was how much Apple people didn’t like him speaking open and freely about the company (failures, success, and everything between).
I saw Woz on Northbound 280 “driving” his cherry red Model S, using FSD. He was looking down at the screen the whole time I watched him. Swear he had ssh’d into it.
Are you sure they werent talking about the other Steve? Are there any stories or examples from your co-workers? I've also only ever heard good things about him as a human and engineer.
Significantly more than that, and you're a hoarder.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.
So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
Need to get that set up before the yacht brochures start arriving in the mail. Before the dark whispers take hold...
1. Do you have children, and if so, are they going to expensive private schools or have other expensive hobbies
2. Are you planning on stopping working, and how many years do you need to support at what lifestyle
3. Debt
4. Do you support others, like parents, etc
5. Do you have health issues, or will you, that will be expensive to support
There are more factors but these are just some that prevent 10M from being enough.
Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away
SRE: Can I use AWS?
Genie: There are 4 rules
https://neal.fun/spend/
I'll bite. Private island, superyacht, G7, prime mansions in LA, NYC, London, Singapore, collection of old masters, part owner in an NFL team, establish a foundation and trusts for the kids/grandkids, trip to space. Easy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
Even a trillion dollars I could probably spend. I like sailboats so a yacht sounds nice, but I cannot believe it even a fraction of the satisfaction of developing some research, or of having the fundamental research itself done.
Usually, they say that you can maintain your wealth (adjusted for inflation) indefinitely by using the so-called "safe withdrawal rate" [0], which people put between 1% and 4%.
So, say that you have $1M in wealth, and you pick your SWR at 2%. It means that you can use 2% of that, or $20,000, every year, knowing that your wealth will keep growing at least by the inflation rate, for a long time (30 years, or 100, or whatever).
If you have $10M, you can spend $200,000/year.
Clearly, it depends on your lifestyle how much you need to have saved in order to FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early).
All of this assumes that for the next 30, 40 years, we will not see any catastrophic or monumental changes in how the financial system works.
[0]: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates
Easy: The largest ship in the world by area. (Goal - either 500m x 500m, or at least 0.25km^2 with the breadth >= 300m)
The current status quo for bulk carriers are the Valemax ships (360m x 65m), with each one costing around $100 million. (actual figure wildly varies, but sticks around that number)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax#Sale_of_ships
https://www.tradewindsnews.com/containerships/evergreen-adds...
(500 * 500) / (360 * 65) = 10.683760683760683
10.68 * $100 million = $1.068 billion
Even just going with 5 Valemax ships side-by-side (360m x 325m) costs half a billion.
Museums. I love museums. They all need more support. Kids need more places to do field trips.
Libraries ... they are experiencing budget cuts everywhere now as cities prioritize police spending.
Parks.
Homes for people that can't afford them. Seriously, one of the most effective possible cures for homelessness is to set up a program that helps people cover their rent for a month or two if they get into trouble.
Health care. Like, there's got to be a pile of people that need urgent health care and can't afford it, right?
Education. Adult education, too.
Science and research.
And most, maybe all of these, aren't even things that necessarily need an entirely new organization to spearhead them, or some kind of dramatic social change. They are all things that exist right now and need more funding than anything else. You could hire a small team to just look up all kinds of programs all day long and write checks for them and it would be enormously impactful.
I just... the answer to this seems so blindingly obvious to me, and then I read the rest of the comments, and I really wonder when exactly the hacker ethos got co-opted by the crab mentality.
My answer because I don’t see it: climate change research. A billion isn’t much but if it can help save the planet that would be worth it to me personally.
For reference, on $1bn that's $40M/year or about $100k/day in earnings if you just have the cash in a money market account.
https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/
Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.
Of course, he wants even more…
Make it 500 people and give them housing.
What to use those people for is left as an exercise for the reader.
[1]: https://neal.fun/spend
> So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house)
You answered your own question. Very boring and selfish answer, and just serving yourself (ie, greed).
Your son has more creativity than you.
If you are given $1B in hard cash, and the first thing you do is spend it on yourself. You are probably the worst person to ever get a windfall.
Buy an election.
If not, buy a newspaper, a TV network or a media outlet with a good outreach.
Then you can get you 1B back tenfold.
Try to reduce stray animal suffering across a single city here in India. Or if you somehow are successful, extend that to the country.
If you think that leaves you with a lot of funds, maybe provide a few villages with healthcare checkups for a few days.
You want to buy a social network.
Or see if you can swing an election to your favor.
That's what you do with $Bs. It's usually not very good.
High end audio equipment. Done. Next!
https://neal.fun/spend/
The rest: charities.
That gets a lot easier to spend if you decide you want to explore space or something.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...
Here's a few random frustrations I have:
Most modern hardware appliances are not easily repaired or hackable. I'd love to manufacture and sell open hardware appliances which prioritize repairability and maintainability, including sharing the CAD models and opening up the firmware.
Despite the years of effort that have gone into the Linux Desktop Experience, it still often lacks polish in various areas. You could afford to hire world class engineers and designers to fix up every minor annoyance and really provide the most deluxe desktop experience possible without compromising on the slightest detail. Not only that, you could contract companies to add Linux support for any essential tools and applications which aren't already supported.
And that's not even getting into the ability to fund the creation of really outstanding media. Most modern kid's entertainment treats them like morons while slapping them in the face with basic lessons. You could create some truly delightful kid shows without having to skimp on any aspect, and really lay the foundations for creating a brighter future. Embed lessons of every major topic as part of the show without being hamfisted about it, and when they start to encounter those challenging topics in school they will have some foundational models on which to build upon. A basic example: you can teach a kid the fundamentals of calculus from an intuitive perspective, and when they actually learn proper calculus in school it'll be much easier to ramp up.
Heck, you could fund the modernization of a ton of college level educational content with enough money. Buy the rights to any important textbooks, rewrite as needed, then make them freely available. Hire a team of world class artists, animators, and builders to help create supporting materials / content that cover any topic. Pair that with world class educators and experts. You put that all together and create the most powerful repository of high quality educational content that the world has ever seen. By doing this you're laying the foundations for the development of future generations and setting them up for success!
Those are just some quick thoughts which I'm willing to write up here... If I thought about it longer I'd probably be able to come up with more significant quality of life improvements that could be spread out if someone was willing to spend a few billion dollars into making them into a reality.
Oh here's a final quick one: funding maker spaces across the country. It's not clear how much potential could be unlocked if we had widely available maker spaces where people can ask for help with their projects and ideas. Sometimes all it takes is having someone who can point you to the right tools or people.
A skyscraper. An eco-friendly village. A ship. A spacecraft.
A million dollars is, roughly speaking, a person-year of dedicated professional services from a world-class professional of almost any profession. There are a few exceptions, like stockbrokers, surgeons, and some kinds of lawyers. But a billion dollars buys you, say, 1000 person-years of the best professionals.
For millions of dollars, you could have your own vaccination program, your own particle accelerator, your own web browser, your own steel mill, your own religious cult, your own pyramid, your own AI research lab, your own permaculture experiment station, your own rare book collection (which you could digitize), and so on.
That's leaving aside personal consumption of things like a diplomatic passport from a foreign country, a private doctor, a comfortable apartment in a former missile silo, and a helicopter to get to it with. Your yacht isn't going to do you much good if you get arrested in a foreign country on trumped-up charges because you unintentionally insulted the wrong guy's daughter, or if your cancer goes undiagnosed until stage 4.
But if you want to build something for society and not die doing it then you might need more than $10M.
My dad built tents for diabetes research in Africa, I think that's pretty interesting and helpful. He's never had even a million dollars.
You need way less than you think.
If that's the case then it's no longer just for you, so I think that's fair
Whereas with $10 billion, you'll get $400 million a year, or about $7.5 million PER WEEK!
I think guys like Musk and Andreesen (&SBF) might have gone insane just trying to spend their money.
This isn't your point, but $400k puts you in a top tax bracket, so figure 30% of that goes to taxes. that brings your return down to 2.8%. The Fed wants to keep inflation at 2%, but it's usually a bit higher, leaving your real return at 0.3%. That's $30k per year.
Years ago I lived on $40 per month, after building my own cabin in Oregon -- wood heat, kerosene lanterns. Then I bought an Apple II and things got more complicated (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...). But basically I agree with you. Most people will never have that much, or need it.
1. Equity in companies or loans to the government.
2. Expensive food, homes, clothes, hotel stays, travel, child care, etc.
Things I'd do if I didn't have to raise money, find investors, etc.
Bribe/payoff whoever I had to and then build a real transit system in LA,SF,Seattle as one example.
Consider making a museum/expo-center that's like the Lucas Museum (https://www.lucasmuseum.org/) but centered around Video Games and/or Interactive Digital Art.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A33...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifiwonthelottery/comments/9qv4e1/po...
That's why they need more than $10 million for space exploration, or for setting up giant factories to make any kind of goods, for developing massive infrastructure, for warfare, etc etc.
Jeff Bezos has created many, many millions of jobs while selling essential goods at margins sometimes below 1%. If his reward was stolen after $10m, why would he have bothered slaving away?
Aside the blatant jealousy factor, it's economic suicide and contains shadows of economic systems which have led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.
Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
My English may not be enough to express it but above all else it exhudes a "clarity of purpose" that is remarkable
As a younger millenial I am somewhat familiar with the legends of yore. But not as familiar as someone older that was around when the tech world was much smaller and more intimate. Where people casually met a wild Stallman at random conferences.
Given how much bigger the software and tech world has gotten, with how much time has passed, and how much things have changed, I wonder if people still see Wozniak as tech hero and as part of casual tech culture knowledge.
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One of the nicest guys in the world. Humble, kind, gracious.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BHAeRQDGP/?mibextid=wwXIfr
And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.
It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.
I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".
(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)
I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.
I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.
* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.
* Frist post
* BSD is dying
* GNAA
* Nathalie Portman
* Robotic Overlord
* In Soviet Russia
* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes
* etc.
Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...
However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.
In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.
But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)
Their original owners also sold the site.
What seems more relevant is that I didn't know about it at all which seems common with many older internet sites dying a slow dead of no new users as younger audiences are literally unable to discover the site.
Not a lot of variety in content or community compared to the digs or reddits of the world.