> There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
> And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.
The world can feel superficial & shallow, results are so often murky. Being a person who gets themselves into a position where you can be making wonderful high-quality things, where you can invest care & end up with something robust & Real... it's a "sacrement" to being people, to goodness. It matters.
These kinds of lessons I feel like have to be learned really hard ways. Trying to find & calibrate your values is so hard. Packets of wisdom like this don't show up, don't have the apparent worth that experience latter makes one appreciate. It's nice to have a couple good waymarkers, good pointers, towards this value system I recognize out there.
It's about showing intention and thought through your work whatever that work may be.
I think Rob Siltanen said it better:
“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
The one thing you couldn't do was ignore Steve Jobs.
The Steve Jobs Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32760695 - Sept 2022 (31 comments)
> "And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow... something’s transmitted there."
While these numbers are not that widely reported in US media at present, in 2012 Apple was employing 47,000 workers domestically, but ~700,000 foreign subcontractors for the production of over 100 million phones, tablets and laptops. Source: Duhigg and Bradsher (2012)
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
The message seems to be, "We're going to maximize shareholder dividends and executive bonuses by replacing well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs with cheap sweatshop labor in other countries. Yes, this will reduce average wages across parts of the USA that once enjoyed middle-class prosperity, leading to increased homelessness and poverty, but our legal responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits and anyway, everyone else is doing it, so quit whining. It's not like you have to talk to the poors or the cheap sweatshop laborers, is it?"
Of course, socioeconomic conditions today are so bad that iPhone owners now have to negotiate sidewalks littered with tents and opiate addicts all across Apple's origin region in the California Bay Area. That's what neoliberal capitalist fundamentalism has created.