You could argue that Steve Jobs was a product of very Californian circumstances: Born to parents of very different cultural backgrounds, raised in a hotbed of electronics development (and new age spirituality), started a company in an area full of enthusiasts and venture capitalists…
Jobs did a lot of useful things, but he was not an inventor and so has nothing to show. He was really good at forcing people to perfect the inventions of others which is a useful thing. Cray-1 is an invention, and better known than the inventor. So it is the right decision for both.
You can of course debate which is better and there are hundreds of other choices that could be put on either coin - both humans and inventions. I would probably pick different things (not people) for both - but this is a reflection of my biases and not some universal truth.
Jobs was arguably the first product manager in personal computing - meaning he had a clear vision for the consumer and product and worked to carry that out.
The intent here is to get people's attention, and an arguement over "which is best" is exactly the outcome desired. I won't step into it except to say regardless of the subject and reasoning, the design of the Jobs one is pretty dumb. It looks like the gave a prompt focused on hippy-spirtual-big-thinker to AI and said "design a coin".
bc theyre going for the aspect of the innovation that the most people in the relevant political constituencies will recognize. in some cases the inventor, in others the invention.
Saying "no" to off-topic / dumb ideas in a consistent way is an amazing product development skill.
It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David.
Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack about art and how it's the end product of many small decisions. That's exactly what Jobs did on the hardware he worked on.
Far enough, because I will even concede that after Jobs died, Apple has never been the same. Cook has been serviceable, but I haven't really been comparatively thrilled with anything to come out during his tenure.
Technically inept is acceptable as long as he could communicate well. The man consistently had clear vision and the ability to communicate that vision to those who were around him.
Products? I mean at the end of the day (as long as you consistently pick the right people/tools for the job) technical part is just an implementation detail.
I'd love to see Wozniak up there. From Al Alcorn, a pivotal computer scientist and electrical engineer employed in the early days of Atari:
"So, meanwhile, Steve’s friend Wozniak comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these Tank games were on the production line, and he’d play Tank forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.
I found that what really had happened was that Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign Breakout].
Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable… a tour de force.
It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab."
Not so much an exception but a work around according to the guardian newspaper [1]:
[...] the law specifically says “no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin “created to mark the US anniversary”.
The proposed design features a wider illustration of Trump on the reverse side, a move that legal experts said would fall outside the ban on a “head and shoulders portrait or bust”.
On the US Mint Site I was just looking at the 'Medals', where you CAN have a living person minted onto what they call a medal. Unsure of if it's the same size as a coin, but if it is, you could conceivably try and circulate the medals of living ex-presidents (to great cost to yourself).
There is a law but there have been plenty of exceptions including President Calvin Coolidge on a 1926 half-dollar and Alabama Governor Thomas Kilby on a 1921 commemorative coin and Carter Glass on the 1936 Lynchburg Half Dollar.
Oh no way? TVA is great. I went to college down the road from their HQ, and they were the main source of internships for my comp sci program. My university had a strong cybersecurity program that was partly DoD funded, in which many graduates went on to perform cybersecurity roles for TVA. After all, power plants are often juicy targets.
One neighbors growing up used to tell people to not believe any of the conspiracy theories about Elvis still being alive. He knew Elvis was dead because he was one of the paramedics to carry his body out of Graceland.
The KKK was founded in Pulaski, TN, which is about an hour from where I was raised. It wasn't until July, 2021 that the bust of the founder of the KKK (Nathan Bedford Forrest) was removed from the state capitol building. It's now been relocated to the 'TN State Museum' which was magically opened mere days after the bust was removed.
I could provide countless more examples of things I have heard, read, and witnessed, but I am certain you do not need any more examples, and honestly, even thinking about it all really depresses me.
If you had some of knowledge and experiences I have had, I would hope you would agree with me. Things have gotten better over the years, but there is a lot of dark and grim history.
I don’t want to psychologize too much but when people have tough upbringing and then find a community in adulthood they tend to invert the morals and values of their upbringing.
> Shall we forget that Steve Jobs conspired with other companies to pay developers less?
Forgetting bad actions is an essential part of the process of deification, and since ancient times, rulers who sought to be equated with gods would put their or their ancestors images on coins with a deity on the reverse side.
Several coins in the US display slave owners because they are founding fathers, and the practice of putting presidents on coins in the US only began in the early 1900s, with the Lincoln penny, and their portraits on paper money only began 50 years earlier.
In our current era of tech industrialist worship, is it surprising that we do the same for Steve Jobs?
That said, you are absolutely right to bring it up, as a push back against that deification process.
This is one reason I support not putting humans on money. We used to put mythological figures on our coinage (liberty, justice, etc), because the are symbols and are uncomplicated by substance.
Humans are flawed. Putting humans on money -- as symbols -- is going to make us go in circles about their imperfection. From Washington as a slave owner to Steve Jobs suppressing wages.
This is not an issue if we just put the symbols on the money instead of using people as proxies. If we want a coin for innovators, but Providentia on the coin.
Guess when you put it that way, it's much better to have a clanker on a coin than a person.
Sadly, with that mentality we wouldn't have celebrities or perhaps even that many leaders. Fests like this are what drive some of the most driven people, and our biology makes us want to follow and admire other people as a former pack hunting species. The best we got is thst we can't put any living person on a coin (though, guess what the rumors are trying to say?)
This is an evolved view. Let’s put achievements on currency, not humans. Of course, this is no panacea - “achievement” is ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation, and therefore political capture. But it’s a step forward.
If you can't handle that people have flaws, you're just immature. Washington and Jobs are both hugely important historical figures, and the bad parts don't invalidate their legacies.
I don't want people on the money exactly because hero worship is stupid. We should care about our principles, so we should put our principles on the money, not our heroes.
I was using the examples as examples. I agree with you about people who can't handle nuance and imperfection. My point is only that putting people on the money is just dumb to begin with, because it misses the point of what people are trying to do.
Mature thinkers can realize that humans are simultaneously good and bad. It’s perfectly fine to celebrate the good side while acknowledging their flaws.z
> Shall we forget that Steve Jobs conspired with other companies to pay developers less?
What could be a more fitting placement than on a dollar coin? He'll be used to pay employees using an inflating dollar currency, where he can continue to pay employees less in perpetuity.
On the other hand what's more American than eroding workers rights through coordination between rich business owners? Granted there's fewer machine guns on trains involved than in some periods. [0]
I am currently unaware of anyone who has accomplished anything considered historically important over any significant time period to judge, that didn’t have obvious ethical gaps.
Probably nobody lives without ethical gaps.
and the impact of ethical gaps of someone who has been able to achieve a lot, and are more visible to judge, are likely to both be and seem to be, proportionally greater.
Could it be enough to simply honor people who, overall, have done inspiring, positive things, while not giving them a pass for their mistakes and deficiencies, assuming they are legitimately smaller in scale?
I am not a fan of “purity” viewpoints.
so much easier to be severely critical, than open oneself up for judgement.
I am a fan of realism in both accomplishments and failures. The good impact and the bad. And taking inspiration and warning, from those whose accomplishments weigh more heavily to the former.
Being realistic has another advantage.
it doesn’t strongly imply, without actual evidence, that the speaker is somehow less prone to mistakes.
Would ha e 100% taken Woz, but he still seems to be kicking.
That is the interesting thing about tech. So many pioneers that transformed society are still around. It's a relatively young field that exploded over the last few decades.
He was an absolutely brilliant visionary who was able to bring his way of thinking to life through others, in the most brutal way possible. This included business (successes and failures) and his treatment of people (including his own family and ultimately himself).
What he did was literally change the shape and direction of the entire human race through his ability to level up existing products (directly and indirectly) to a level that no one would have thought possible, including his own employees.
That said, he was absolute piece of shit human being and all of his successes came at great expense of himself and others. I think there are a great number of people who are far more well-rounded and, if we aren't focused on fascist ideals, we should elevate those folks instead of Jobs.
He wansn't any kind of visionary. He didn't invent or design a single thing. He was a ruthless manager and marketer, abusing people and taking credit for their work.
Sometimes half the battle of making a product is to get the right people in the right room at the right time.
He managed to do that quite frequently. How much credit to give him for it is something I'm not quite sure of myself, but you really can't argue with the results.
Hot take, but I'm not sure if "salesman" is what I want represented in history.
Then again, that's probably what most represent America of the last 50 yearss. Selling off all its talent overseas and then trying to sell off the idea of labor afterwards.
> Ok? That doesn’t diminish in any way his technological and industrial accomplishments.
Why are those the criteria for being on a coin? Neither Henry Ford nor John D Rockefeller are on coins.
Jobs was dismissive of concerns about US technology manufacturing jobs being offshored to China, famously saying "Those jobs aren't coming back" [1].
He was right of course, and he seems to have consciously avoided involvement in discussions about the economic impacts of the manufacturing exodus on US workers - he was a requisite globalist.
It took Obama pressing him to get him to even make the statement I referenced above.
No, just in 2025 of you really crank out the storage. Much better time to invest i premium products.
Tangent: I won't understand people hesitant to put down as much money on a phone as a desktop. Especially when considering that we know it costs more to shrink technology. If that's too much, oh well. I tend to buy 1-2 years previous when upgrading. Easily halves the price and the old flagship specs are still competitive.
> I'm personally glad that Steve Jobs wasn't a protectionist
Me also. What does that have to do with Jobs being represented on currency?
Why not do the same for the pharmaceutical CEOs who have set up generic drug supply chains overseas, or the leaders of apparel companies who set up overseas sweatshops to enable us to have disposable clothing?
Arguably, affordable antibiotics and underwear have made a vastly bigger positive impact on standard of living than iPhones.
Many people don't even know the Syrian ancestry of Jobs, as per WikiPedia.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي)
...
His cousin Bassma Al Jandaly has claimed that Jobs' birth name (prior to adoption) was Abdul Lateef Jandali (Arabic: عبد اللطيف الجندلي).
Perhaps also a good moment to remember this Banksy art
In a rare statement accompanying the work, Banksy said: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple ... only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”
I think even if the price was set high it would have devolved into enshitification and ad-infestation. With expensive televisions amd fridges pushing ads, it is not too far fetched. Expensive software is also going down the path of enshitification.
If we’re doing “deserve” then I have some other, more pressing suggestions for who might deserve less, than the people doing the actual work.
If we’re not doing “deserve” then no, they should have had more money if illegal wage suppression hadn’t been happening. Else the illegal wage suppression wouldn’t have been needed.
The difference between a highlh paid specialist worker and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. They are still working class, they can still be screwed over.
Times are hard, but don't confuse the person with a bowl of rice with the people who own thr rice factory. Even if that is a lot compared to the scraps you have.
A book on the subject came out earlier this year that I've been wanting to read, "Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves" by Nicola Twilley
check out Bill Bryson’s “at home” if you’re looking for something a little less specific to refrigeration and more fun narration of similar novel life/home inventions. To give a sense of depth, refrigeration is probably a few pages. It’s very high level but a fun read about things you’ve forgotten to think about around the house
They said these innovations are what the state is known for, but I've been a Minnesota resident my entire life and didn't know refrigerated trucking was invented here.
Same! This coin would be a cool little Minnesota artifact to own. I guess they'll be available to purchase here some time ($~35 for a set of 25 of them, or $~14 for a single "proof coin", whatever that is): https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/american-innovati...
"Proof coins" are extra shiny coins made for collectors. They polish the blank, polish the die, and then stamp it more than once. Blank areas of the coin have a practically mirror shine finish.
Unlike California, MN is not good at promoting all the things they do and so people never think of them despite all the cool/useful inventions that come from there. (I now live in Iowa which is even worse about promoting).
Probably should - California has a lions share of all the innovations. I would guess that it would be even more concentrated than just the correlation to population given the research institution / market structures.
Other states should most certainly promote their successes.
I just decided to pull mine up... I live in Florida, and I had no idea of the following:
* Air conditioning: In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie invented a machine to cool air, which laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning and refrigeration
* Gatorade: The sports drink was developed at the University of Florida to help the football team rehydrate.
* Sunscreen: Benjamin Green invented the first commercial sunscreen in 1944.
* IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC): A team in Boca Raton developed the first IBM PC in 1981.
* Supercapacitor: A new type of supercapacitor was invented in Florida. (2013)
There's a bunch more, seems like a number of them have to do with the weather ;) I knew about Gatorade, but had no idea about the rest.
This makes me kind of wish I had this when I was in public school as part of one of our courses, it's kind of nice to learn about the innovation around you, especially when you don't exactly live in a place known for it. I think its inspiring to a younger mind to know you can be creative and innovative living just about anywhere.
> Air conditioning: In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie invented a machine to cool air, which laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning and refrigeration
And modern cooling was invented by Carrier, with the original use case to actually control humidity to help the publishing/newspaper industry:
> On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning – Rational Psychrometric Formulae – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the "Magna Carta of Psychrometrics."[8][9] This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.
The idea of temperature (first in cinemas and theatres) came later. People under-estimate how much humidity control is needed for comfort: many building codes are adding language to have a standalone whole house dehumidifier.
Its funny because in Florida you kinda need the dehumidifier, it makes a major difference, I have small ones all around the house, but for years I didn't know this. I actually believe wholeheartedly I get sick way less because of it. In other places / states you need a humidifier instead.
During the pandemic there was controversy about who received Moderna/Phizer vs who received J&J's vaccine. They were giving black neighborhoods J&J because it didn't have as strict refrigeration requirements, and a lot of black neighborhoods don't have a nearby pharmacy which can store the vaccines. J&J was thought to be less effective and had a higher rate of vaccine injury though.
J&J was very effective. They came later and turned out to be less effective than Moderna/Phizer - but their vaccine was still very good when viewed in isolation - they just were unfortunate to have an amazingly great competitor to compare against.
Given the most common vaccine injury is caused by improper administration, I wonder if that could be related? ie. less trained staff would potentially be administering vaccines in black neighbourhoods? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_injury_related_to_vac...
Side effects of the vaccine basically. I guess technically headaches or fatigue would be a vaccine injury
But I use the phrase "thought to" intentionally: I don't know what the science says now, but at the time there were reported cases of myocarditis in people who took the JnJ vaccine. This was like May of 2021, so I don't know if the science ever panned out on that, but it definitely drove discussions around health equity with the vaccine
- Denon TU-750s tuner (Sitting atop Threshold pre amp)
- Threshold FET-One pre amp
- Threshold STASIS-1 amp (Not in photo, seems to be an educated guess. Some debate whether the speakers are powered and maybe an external amp wasn't needed.)
weird design for steve jobs.. without context it looks like the depiction of some spiritual leader (which maybe is a bit funny given the early apple fanbase). I get he was a bit of a hippie, but that's not exactly his claim-to-fame
> His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection
i dont associate "reflection" with him. not to disparage him in the slightest, but its just not in the top ten of things i associate with him.
I then made myself laugh by trying to imagine a depiction of Bill Gates in the same pose
If you scroll down there is a description explaining the pose:
> This design presents a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills. His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection, show how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself. Inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “CALIFORNIA.” Additional inscriptions are “STEVE JOBS” and “MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL.”
sometimes I'm really flabbergasted by the replies and reading comprehension on HN. I'm genuinely curious what's going on. Are you a last-gen AI or something? Did you read the first sentence and hit reply?
I'm literally quoting the passage you're citing and talking directly about it. And then you quote it back to me.
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
yeah, i don't wanna shit of steve jobs. I'm sure he reflects on stuff. (though this thing seems to suggest.. he needs to reflect on some real basic human stuff..) I'm sure you can find some cute quotes from Bill Gates too. It's just not really what he's known for
just out of pure curiosity.. what's the context of this?
He wrote a poem.. to email to himself?
and.. how did he get access to his private emails?
I can't think of any other example of people writing and mailing poems to themselves
The “over 1 TFLOPS” claim for the M1 appears to be for single precision floats whereas FLOPS performance figures for supercomputers, including the one given for the CRAY-1, are almost always based on double precision (FP64) floats. The double precision FLOPS performance of the M1 would be lower, perhaps half of the single precision performance.
I had just gone down this rabbit hole for unrelated reasons (looking into yields). Nvidia's 5090 die is 750 mm^2, managing 419 TFLOPS on the FP16 benchmark.
Presumably some, although HPE don’t use the old Cray logo, and the name is a bit downplayed when they talk about their supercomputer stuff, although it is still used (like most old computer companies, naturally they’ve ended up owned by HPE, who seem to collect them).
Ah, I noticed they had been acquired by HPE, but their Wikipedia article still listed revenue so I assumed they were a subsidiary. Looking again, the revenue is from the year before the acquisition. My mistake.
if the intent is to bring attention to technological innovations, Jobs was not a technological innovator, despite what the decades of PR would lead you to believe. If we want to argue that he was a promoter of tech innovations, in his capacity as a businessman, I would find that less objectionable but I still don't think Jobs is the guy we should be highlighting, given his track record of screwing over the people doing the actual work and innovating. (though depending on how cynical you are, that is perhaps exactly the type of person that the Powers That Be would want to push as the face of innovation)
He created Apple, and then came back to save them from bankruptcy and made them profitable within months which none of their other CEOs leading up to his return could.
The way he got the notoriously staunch record labels on board with their $1/song plan to make iTunes possible and make music infinitely more convenient and accessible overnight was unforeseen.
Not many people have repeatedly proven themselves many times over like he did. I do believe he was one of the greatest business men of all time, and for all the things you can complain about with Apple, I'm glad they exist to inject some sense of taste into computing, and a standard for every other computing device to be compared to (cue examples of bad design decisions that came from Apple. Don't bother, doesn't disprove my point)
Innovator has a broader meaning than the individual who wrote the program or built the circuit. Setting the direction and vision for technology is a big deal.
The engineers were very smart but it’s hard to see us knowing their name or having such an impact on technology without Steve. Woz was destined for a comfortable 30 year career at HP.
I’d say these celebrate entrepreneurship more than innovation. Nothing wrong with that, but it does bother me that the true innovators often don’t get credit outside academia and enthusiasts well versed in the history.
Apple II was not the first usable by mere mortals PC. There’s a lot of contenders but one of the earliest came from Georgia:
Cray was not the first multiprocessor wide vector supercomputer, but it did innovate on it. I’d say Cray broke more fundamental innovation ground than Apple.
Woz is awesome and as an engineer I understand the urge to say he’s the main one who should be honored but we have to be realistic. Jobs ushered in 2 eras, only 1 with Woz. The personal computer and the computer in everyone’s pocket.
That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.
Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
Jobs was a celebrity who was good at branding himself as a genius.
I don't consider a clever UI idea like a touch screen to be a work of brilliance, especially since he did zero engineering work, both for early and later Apple devices. Touch screen handheld devices would've come around with or without him, just maybe a few years later.
Woz was one of many people who designed microprocessor based computers in the 1970s (I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01_201710, and the variety is astounding), and far from the first one, though he was very good at what he did.
What really set apart the Apple II from many of its peers is that it came preassembled, in a neatly designed case (though the Commodore PET and TRS-80 were pretty much released at the same time), and those esthetics were due more to Jobs than Wozniak.
Jobs did not write product code, or design boards, but he had a constant presence in the design of Apple's products and many (though by no means all) of his inputs changed the products for the better.
This is much more true than the parent comment, but nobody invented the concept of an integrated system in a case with keyboard and screen. That's because said concept is called a "video terminal" and had existed for at least a decade prior to the mid-70s. In fact one of the prime target markets for the first generation 8-bit CPUs was...video terminals. A late-70s personal computer is really just a video terminal that has been made programmable by the user. The hardware is pretty much identical.
> Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
History being written by the victors here, I believe.
He designed some clever things for example bit-banging the floppy interface which allowed the Apple 2 to have floppies at a lower price point than competitors. Another innovation of the Apple 2 at the time was its use of a switched-mode PSU. It was almost certainly the first personal computer to have that, but designed by Rod Holt not Woz. He didn't invent the switching PSU -- they were commonly used in portable test equipment at the time.
Having been alive at the time and paying attention, I disagree that Woz invented anything very significant. Definitely an important figure, and a clever guy though.
After looking more closely at the release dates of the earliest home computers, I found you're right. Three major home computers, all preassembled, with keyboard and video display and BASIC launched in 1977. Seems Apple II was not the first, only the most forward-looking of the three.
I still don't credit Steve Jobs with starting any computing revolutions, in 1977 or 2008.
At the time it seemed that the advantage Apple had over the Pet and TRS-80 was the lower price-point for floppies and color, and over time much more software becoming available. Obviously those advantages weren't entirely due to luck -- Woz designed the low-cost floppy interface and someone specified the color modulator and enough memory for color graphics. Someone decided to use a switched mode PSU which made the Apple much lighter and therefore easier to lug around than a Pet. The general idea of "having a computer at home" had existed since the 1960s so I wouldn't credit Jobs with any amazing breakthrough in that regard.
Also worth noting that the Apple 2 was really a US/North America phenomenon. For example although they were sold in the UK (my school, unusually, had one), they were not popular and pretty much nobody had one in their home. So you might as well say that the person at the BBC who decided to commission the BBC Micro was the pioneer of personal computing. Or Clive Sinclair.
I mean we're talking about a country which boils down to "What would happen if we maximized capitalism with no regard for other things?", and while I both admire and despise Steve Jobs, he feels like the perfect individual to put on a US coin.
Maybe its simply my personally opinion, but I agree with @tylerflick with the opinion that why not Dennis Ritchie. Sure, Jobs was a ridiculously effective *promoter*, and there is without a doubt a place for that role in the world...But i guess when i think *innovation* i think Ritchie, Woz, Cray, Admiral Hopper, etc...not, like, the business folks...but maybe i'm being too harsh?
Before Steve Jobs, UX was an afterthought in much of software development.
It was he and Apple that really drove the tech industry to recognize that User Experience and developing simplified products for non-specialists matter.
Even the Mint gives that explaination for why he's included as an "innovator".
Respectfully, i disagree. But, then when i really probe why i feel that, i think i simply have personally negative feelings against Jobs, and that of course isn't fair to fans of Jobs. It might sound like i'm discounting the good things that jobs indeed did accomplish, and which directly did help society...I'm not! I just feel like Jobs is that kid who - yes, does help - but others do LOTS of the work, but because he is the loudest kid, tends to get all the attention...clearly the issue is on my side; my personal feelings towards Jobs, and its not a fair assessment for whether he should or should not be considered an innovator...So i think i will respectfully stop commenting on this thread since i am of course not adding value, other than to express: i never liked Jobs...Which isn't helpful for this dialogue. So...Sorry, and thanks all!
Norman Borlaug's story is amazing. He brought modern farming practices to Mexico and created a new strain of high yield disease resistant dwarf wheat at quadrupled wheat production in the country. Did the same in India, Pakistan, and Africa. Saved a billion lives as a result. Solved food as a limited resource for the first time in human history. We've now gotten to transcend food scarcity as a society.
It's super cool that the US Mint is commemorating his work.
They are "designed" for circulation, but only ever get sold as collectors items. Banks won't stock them but you can order rolls or bags of them from the US mint for a little over face value (I ordered a roll of the space shuttle ones to the UK)
I'm not sure what stops the USA using dollar coins in circulation, I assume there's no legal requirement for banks to stock them?
(The fact that's there's currently at least three different sizes of US dollar coin that is legal tender probably doesn't help either)
My intuition is that if there’s no 2 dollar coin to go with it, there’s no way for it to gain practical traction.
In the US, change is already an annoying factor because sales tax is rarely included in eg, 4.99. So no one is jumping up and down to go from five slices of paper to five rattling coins.
You remind me of the time (probably around 2002) I used a 20 to pay for some transit card/ticket somewhere and ended up with something like 15 dollar coins in change. I want to say it was a metro card in NYC.
That's exactly what I felt at the time too. To me it was always three-quarters delight and one-quarter dismay. A jangling rain of dancing gold coins is a delightful thing. Sure, now I have to go to the bank; but until that time I will walk around as a pirate, pockets full of doubloons.
USPS stamp vending machines around that time period were a great source of dollar coins. Didn’t commonly see them otherwise. Never had an issue spending them afterwards. Unlike the time I was in line at a fast food restaurant when the employee at the register was yelling at a customer about fake money. Turned out the “forgery” was a $2 bill.
The $1 dollar notes are very economically inefficient (they don't last all that long, haven't had enough value to justify notes for a long time), and the mint has been trying to get people to stop using them and switch to coins for a long time. However, there is significant popular opposition to that, people seem to massively prefer notes.
At one point you could order $1 coins from the mint at face value and with free shipping, and they were really happy when they thought that lots of people were starting to use them. They were less happy when they realized just a few people were purchasing them on credit card with cashback, and just instantly depositing them back at the nearest bank to pay their credit card bill.
>However, there is significant popular opposition to that, people seem to massively prefer notes.
One of the most important features for cash is that it actually be accepted widely, and if I recall, that is a significant problem for $1 coins. I expect the majority machines that accept cash don't accept them, and trying to use them with a cashier is likely to result in amusement or confusion at best, rejection as a very possible outcome, or even accusations of fraud. That there were few instances where an individual would ever get these in normal activities probably made recognition and use even worse, especially as the instances I cam remember often seemed like attempts to push them inconveniently; I seem to remember that some government machines, I think in post offices, would insist on giving change with enormous numbers of one dollar coins, which would likely generate some resentment for users expecting change that would actually be accepted elsewhere.
It likely doesn't help that the design is rather large, eg, it is wider than a two euro coin and almost as heavy, and that one dollar notes are still being produced. For some reason, the US seems far less willing to be decisive in these changes.
> I expect the majority machines that accept cash don't accept them,
Worse. What wound up happening was that the feds encouraged (probably grant funded, IDK) support for it and the only implementers were other governments and the easiest way to check the box was to make all your mass transit ticket machines and the like spit them out as change despite often times not supporting them as payment so a machine would eat your $20, give you a $2 ticket and spit out 18 items about as useful as Chuck E Cheese tokens.
This has mostly gone away as those machines have mostly switched over to cashless.
Most machines (except those that literally only take quarters) take dollar coins, as these are designed to be the same as susan b anything dollars, which have been around since 1979.
The real key is they don’t stop making the dollar bill and force the issue.
There are 1 dollar coins and 50 cent coins. The issue is that they've never had consistent designs/sizes so machines don't take them and people don't recognize them. To my mind, this is the primary reason they haven't caught on
I had someone pocket a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin and put their own money in the register to replace it, but that was because it was a rare coin, not because they thought it was fake.
Meanwhile, in my 25 years of living in the US (NJ, SoCal, and NorCal), I can count on one hand the number of times I've come across them "in the wild".
I started collecting them in 2004 by keeping every one I ran into in person and I now have: 3.
Caltrain stations' automated machines used to famously give $1 coins as change when buying tickets as well. Getting like 10 $1 coins as change for a $20 bill really weighed your pants down.
The Cray-1 supercomputer icon looks like the outline of burning man's black rock city. Wonder if there was any inspiration from Cray-1 supercomputer's design.
I'm writing this from a Mac when I ask this. Has Apple actually created anything that could arguably have changed the world? Resistant crops, the Cray, mobile refrigeration all changed the world. My iPhone's nice, but it's not exactly on the same level. Is there anything from Apple that I'm missing?
The iPhone absolutely changed the world. I agree - it is not on the level of the green revolution or refrigeration. It still led to one of the largest paradigm shifts in end user computing, taking it from the desk or table at work or home into the hand, everywhere, for everyone.
The iPhone changed the world through sheer scale. This even trickled back upstream to its components.
For example, VECSEL lasers were added to the iPhone in 2017 to power FaceID. At the time, they were a low volume, high cost component (used primarily in fiber transceivers) with generally poor yields.
Today, thanks in large part to the sheer number demanded by iPhones, they are a cheap, near commodity component with >90% yields.
I'm honestly still trying to wrap my head around in what way exactly the iPhone was innovative. It wasn't the first phone that could run programs, nor the first phone that could use the Internet (the "i" in "iPhone"). Perhaps it was the first phone that did both of those and also had a touchscreen, however that seems like an odd thing that would "take end-user computing from the desk to the hand, everywhere". I would argue the iPhone itself is not the innovation, but rather the ecosystem around it: the app store. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone else was doing that in 2006.
The major innovation of the original iPhone was its ability to be both $800 (no carrier subsidies) and be an iconic sought after product that didn’t have much function outside of what was already available in the phone market.
The irony of all of this is of course not only that effectively no one has used any of the $1 coins since the introduction of the Sacagawea, when their value had basically halved since then, just based on official inflation fraud numbers; so it is unlikely anyone will ever see these coins either, unless you make a deliberate point to acquire and use them.
The government is clearly trying to do away with the freedom of coinage and bills, intentionally and unintentionally through its inflation fraud, and that decline of America is rather ironically encapsulated in this kind of cheapening of the currency in several literal and figurative forms.
And these coins are not even made of any durable metals that could survive history until another civilization can collectively wonder about how America could have ruined itself so quickly, after rising so rapidly.
They could have at least made these coins at least silver or gold, so some future intelligence could at least find them. But here we are, the government creating tokens with cheap iconography made of cheap materials and a face value that literally cannot even buy you a cup of colored sugar water anymore.
Frankly, who cares? Beyond saying “that’s nifty” while looking at the images of the designs; who here expects to ever see one of these “in the wild”?
Have you seen any of the 40 presidential dollar coins in the wild? How about the 29 “American innovation” coins that precede this set? Heck, how often have you seen a Sacagawea in the wild, considering there were probably about 2+ billion of them minted by now?
When Steve Job died all major newspapers, magazines and television news shows dedicated major space and time to report his death.
One week after someone far more important died: the co-creator of the most influential computer program in history (Unix) and the most influential programming language in history (C). Very few news media outlet reported the death of Dennis M. Ritchie.
I argue that Ritchie's legacy runs deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost all CPUs and microprocessors existing today run code that was implemented using technologies created by Ritchie, from ABS breaks to satellites. But, even in this forum, many people don't know about him.
What happened to Trump promising to cancel the penny? It was a genuinely good idea that should have carried on to the nickel and dime. (I’m divided on $1 and $2 coins.)
Treasury stopped minting it reportedly back in May of this year. It’s officially still valid denomination and with tons in circulation, it’s doubtful it will be going away anytime soon.
Yes, the US Mint sells all of the coins in the American Innovation set to the public. Previous years’ coins can still be bought if they are not sold out.
Not an American but I wouldn't mind having some of these. Actually, coin collecting is a pretty neat hobby, especially for commemorative coins which depict a story like these. I wouldn't go in it for their possible future financial value though.
I used to be a coin-collector as a kid. Kinda outgrew the hobby as I grew older. But I still love new/old/unusual coins (among other things). I think I might get my hands on some of these.
> Yes, I think this is an insult to our profession.
I don't think the Mint's goal is to celebrate developers and computer scientists with the new coins. They're celebrating famous innovators and innovations from each state.
HR 1923 ("Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020") [0]: "No head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of specified coins"
Well... the reverse certainly isn't a head-and-shoulders portrait or bust...
As someone living in Europe, I know it’s perfectly normal to have living monarchs on coins. It’s only normal people who have to be dead before getting on them.
What I wonder is, if ever the Trump lineage of emperors should come to an end, (God forbid, all hail Trump and all that) and we have a Republic again, could staff be prosecuted for breaking Federal law during this term?
(not a lawyer / legal expert but) Yes, the law and constitution take precedence over an individual's order. "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense.
Of course, many people get away with stuff because the decision to prosecute and the effort needed is not universal. And new presidents have often pardoned previous administration's criminals.
Thing is though, for people like e.g. the national guard that is illegallly being deployed to bring peace to toad-infested Portland it's either follow orders or get fired and lose their income, benefits, and pension - at least temporarily, but they'll need to file a long and expensive civil suit under a hopefully better future administration to get their back payment and / or job/honor reinstated. But they don't have the financial reserves or plan B to do so, thanks to decades of reducing the population's spending power, using pverty as a means to control people.
Alternatively why not Seymour Cray instead of the Cray-1?
Or why not use one side for the inventor and the other side for the invention?
Jobs sitting there in an empty field just throws the whole set for me.