Although Steve Jobs often comes off as an asshole and he’s a complete control freak there are times you just have to hand it to him fro doing awesome things. Recently Apple had to go to the Cupertino city council to get permission to build a gigantic new headquarters. Why permission needs to be sought out from city councils to construct a building on your own land is beyond me but like most government agents the council are a bunch of looters and saw this as an opportunity to extort something extra from Apple. Unfortunately for them Jobs would have none of that as demonstrated in this video:
For those of you who didn’t want to watch the video a member of the city council asked “What’s in it for us?” The question was a hope that the city could extort free Wi-Fi from Apple but Jobs did a beautiful job of pointing out what the city would get:
You see, I’m a simpleton. I’ve always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do those things. Now if we can get out of paying taxes, I’d be glad to put up Wi Fi.
Check and mate. I love of Jobs was willing to simply say, “Fuck you you looting bastards, we likely pay you more money each year than anybody else in the forsaken city.” As companies are fleeing California in droves members of city councils should be doing everything they can to attract businesses to help keep their unemployment down. Instead, as demonstrated in this case, many city councils seem to believe they need to extort as much as possible from business owners.
I applaud Jobs for denying the city council’s attempt at extortion. More people should be willing to stand up to government bureaucrats and tell them where to shove their attempts at looting.
I am not a huge Jobs fan in general, but I loved his responses to the council. Statists bastards, it is nice for him to call them out and say look we can take our tax dollars to the next city over, so go suck a nut, we are massively improving this place.