by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

The lament is that we should “stop treating tech jerks like gods”, they say....

When fans worship people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and aspire to be like them, they’re not saying that they’d like to make a device that the world uses. They’re not even saying that they’d like to be very wealthy. They’re saying that they’d like to achieve a level of wealth and power where no one can judge them and they can behave as horribly as they like — just as Jobs and Musk have done.

Gee, I wonder why that happened?

Maybe it’s due to not having the rule of law any more, eh?

I think so.

Isn’t the standard that the law is supposed to apply even to the King?

So why doesn’t it?

Jobs, if you remember, likely used his money and influence to “jump the line” with a transplant.  He probably killed someone doing it too, because he got a liver someone else would have received otherwise.  Only about 1/3rd of the people who need one in a given year get it; the rest do not.

There is no argument to be made for giving someone with pancreatic cancer a transplant of anything, say much less a liver.  The reason is that pancreatic cancer nearly always kills the person who has it, so you’re giving someone a liver who may live another year or two (as Jobs did) while denying that liver to someone who may live 20 years.

Now it’s illegal for you to actually buy a liver — or any other organ — in the United States.  But money and power can get you on multiple lists at once through the simple process of being able to fly anywhere, be evaluated multiple times in multiple regions and pay for that, along with being able to go where the organ is on zero notice whenever your name comes up.

The average person cannot do any of that.  They lack the resources, so they get evaluated once (usually where they live) because if you come up you better get there right now or the organ goes to the next person on the list.  Therefore registering in a bunch of places and paying for the evaluation is pointless since you can’t get there on zero notice even if you do come up on the list.

Jobs preferentially registered in the Tennessee region where the wait time is typically four months; in other regions (where he was presumably also registered) the wait time is frequently over a year.  Of course if you die first while waiting then tough cookies for you.

But the point is that yes, he did buy a liver with money and power and someone else was denied it — and he gamed the system to do it using money and influence.  Never mind the cost — half a million bucks — and ability to pay, either through insurance or a big fat wallet, is a precondition to registration — especially if you register in more than one place.  Do you really think the place doing the transplant will eat it if you have no assets or insurance when someone else has a billion dollars and they can give the liver to them?  Yeah, right.

Why do we allow this crap?  Good question.  A better one is why you’d allow someone on a waitlist in the first place when they have an underlying condition that kills damn near everyone who has it.  Oh by the way, it did kill him so those who claim “oh he had a good prognosis” — how’d that work out?

REMEMBER — THERE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY SOMEONE ELSE WHO IS NOW A DEAD BODY OUT THERE THAT WAS CAUSED BY JOBS GETTING THAT LIVER.

The bottom line is that both of these people are/were insufferable *******s.  To lionize either is not so much an act of foolishness, however — it’s a reflection of our generally lawless society when you have money and power.

This crap doesn’t only extend to tech giants either — it also extends to politicians.

Read More @ Market-Ticker.org