this happened to a real person.
During a routine abdominal scan, doctors had discovered a tumor growing in [Steve Jobs's] pancreas. While a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is often tantamount to a swiftly executed death sentence, a biopsy revealed that Jobs had a rare — and treatable — form of the disease. If the tumor were surgically removed, Jobs’ prognosis would be promising: The vast majority of those who underwent the operation survived at least ten years.
Yet to the horror of the tiny circle of intimates in whom he’d confided, Jobs was considering not having the surgery at all. A Buddhist and vegetarian, the Apple CEO was skeptical of mainstream medicine. Jobs decided to employ alternative methods to treat his pancreatic cancer, hoping to avoid the operation through a special diet — a course of action that hasn’t been disclosed until now.
For nine months Jobs pursued this approach, as Apple’s board of directors and executive team secretly agonized over the situation — and whether the company needed to disclose anything about its CEO’s health to investors.… News of his illness, especially with an uncertain outcome, would surely send the company’s stock reeling. The board decided to say nothing, after seeking advice on its obligations from two outside lawyers, who agreed it could remain silent.
the stock market would like the rest of you to know that homeopathic cures work and you should definitely try them before entering that whole western medicinal rigmarole with the insurance and the waiting and all that beige.…
ps. the real show is this powerpoint-y interview which i think has some real meat for wider purposes.
pps. for instance,
We’ve had one of these [economic downturns] before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.
and like i was saying, there’s some infrastructure work that would make a good economic stimulus.
ring ring ring