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Mac mini, iPod help drive Apple's profit higher (Net income up 530%)
Reuters | April 13, 2005

...but for the life of me I can't understand why [Steve Jobs is] still a liberal...

People who do "intellectual" work (I'm a software engineer, EE, BTW (NOT IT!)) and make it big, often haven't really struggled to survive or been through real hardships. I'm not talking about working overtime to meet a deadline. I mean using your back or brawn to do a boring job day-in and day-out to barely keep food on the table.
Thus, they haven't learned to appreciate the small things in life and be thankful to God for their life. Many will attribute the liberalism to guilt. IMO, it's not so much guilt per se, but as it is just having led a somewhat sheltered life and then getting rich for thinking up stuff (that other people have to actually build). Plus people like Steve get by by talking a good game. Getting by and getting rich on your social "skills" seems to me to be the prime reason for rich liberals. Look at Hollywood. They can't even produce an original movie anymore. And their lives are so phoney and fickle. Always looking for something to fill the void...
Beside, most of us engineers know that it was Steve Woznick who did most (if not all) of the work on the original Apple. Jobs was the salesman/businessman side of the partnership.
One last jab, although I haven't heard anything about her, I suspect Steve Woznick's ex-wife falls into this category as well. She made huge bank when her and W. divorced and she got half of his Apple shares. Compare this with Ta-Ray-Za Hines, who never really worked a day in her life: going from her father's house to a billionaire husband. She has no idea what it is to actually create your own destiny and wealth.
24 posted on 04/13/2005 11:23:18 PM EDT by Clock King
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Your interesting analysis is at least as related to this ongoing thread about the causes of "bias in the media" as it is to a thread about Apple Computer.

My basic thesis is that liberalism is (as Rush puts it) a "gutless choice" - because the incentives of the genre of nonfiction known as "journalism" produces a propaganda wind in favor of it. That is, if you don't have any principled beliefs about an issue, and are put on the spot to discuss the issue, the easy way to sound nice is what is called "liberalism."

Trouble is, journalism needs people to criticize because if everyone's a hero, then nobody can be a hero. And the easy, safe people to criticize are the responsible people; they have something to lose by striking back and - since they make decisions - they make mistakes and suboptimal decisions. So they are easy to second-guess.

So you would think that journalists are the businessman's natural enemy. And you'd be right, except that journalists tend to extract "protection money" in the form of having the businessman take on a liberal coloration - become either outright liberals or RINOs on the model of John McCain.

BTW, I'm an engineer myself (retired). One thing to say that Wozniak did all the heavy duty logic work on the Apple II, and another thing entirely to credit him with the whole thing. The example of Thomas Edison is very interesting: he is known as "the inventor of the electric light." But the crucial point is that he didn't just announce a scientific discovery, he founded General Electric Corporation to make the light bulbs and the Consolidated Edison company to provide power for them. It's really neat to invent something, but to really do the job you have to create the enterprises necessary to bring it to market.

But I like your point that a Steve Jobs - or a Hollywood type - can get rich without getting their hands dirty, and having done so can delude themselves the meaning of that. Most of us just have to run a "four yards and a cloud of dust offence" - if everyone tried to be a movie star who would make or service automobiles? Who would grow our food?