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Too Many Smart People Chasing Too Many Dumb Ideas?
theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."
Smart people aren't doing what I want them to!!! Why aren't they making the world better the way I think it should be done?!
Many younger people are simply interested in innovative and original ideas?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Where does writing inane, self-centric books fit in Nnaemeka's weltanschlung?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
I think there are lots of smart people helping those that fewer people care about (there are no groups that need help that nobody does), you just don't hear about it because they don't get invited to the White House.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
the "best and brightest" will just go back to feed the money machine. After all, they are competent and they also need to eat when they`re bankrupt. VCs have money to spare and they will benefit either way.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
The smart people don't really want to help the lower class. Ugh, have you actually met any of them? Shudder. If anything they should be vexed even more than they are already.
What the smart people want is to be seen as helping the lower class. This gives you fantastic social status (among other smart people, naturally) and ensures that you will be invited to all the right parties. The lower class will themselves not be attending these parties. Again, a five minute conversation with any of them is quite enough.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Many younger people are simply interested in innovative and original ideas?
it's the vc's fault for giving money for dumb ideas. the young people just need the work, dumb or not.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It is very difficult to make money in discovering something new. The EU & USA governments have already spent themselves to the max, so they cannot provide, say, a trillion dollars per year for needed R&D. The VCs like to pursue something either narcissistic or advertising based (or preferably both), because that is what they understand the most and looks like easy money.
Skimmed through TFA, it doesn't seem like he has any suggestions on what to focus on, as long as it's not everyone dogpiling on one thing.
But the way things are going, maybe we should all be working on building these:
http://www.designboom.com/design/mobile-homeless-shelter/
Everyone's so quick to attack, but he has a point. Whatever the cause, the tech industry seems to want its best and brightest to become toymakers. There are a lot a problems that could be helped by new tech, but none of that seems to be as glorious as working on the new iPhone, a better Google Maps, or the next hit app.
In the USA, it is all about credit (the ability to go into debt for the purpose of buying things) and what you have bought. When we see each other, we assess largely on what they are wearing, driving or have in their possession. Additionally, every time we hear about rich people in trouble or otherwise doing something stupid, we instictively react with "I thought they were [better than us]!!" It's not the presumption that they are just like anyone else and often times dumber, it's the opposite because we pedestrians have been taught to succeed we must be smart or skilled and to work hard. Interestingly, those are the characteristics which keep those "valuable human capital assets" in the trenches where they belong.
All the money circulates around consumerism. That is where the money is. That is what people study to join in to get a share of.
Yes, this is NOT a sustainable model. This is why we are in trouble now.
The author seems quite intent on blaming individuals for what is a structural malaise.
There's money in the kinds of fields the author talks about, and it seems a bit harsh to criticize people for trying to make a living. Agreed, Angry Birds isn't pushing the boundaries of human evolution towards a fairer, more peaceful world, but this isn't the 50's - the teet of government research is drying up through constant cuts and marginalisation. Academia and the public sector doesn't seem to have the clout it used to, and as a result long term humanitarian projects are dying off. The death of the public sector is the real reason we've never gone back to the moon. That's neoliberalism for you.
As for the "underclass" (a word I despise), I've been wondering recently whether we're witnessing the technological trend futurists warned us about; persistently lowering labour requirements. Figures certainly seem to point that way.
Outside of tech and Wall Street, making a living is quickly becoming harder and harder. There simply isn't the amount of work there was forty years ago. We're looking at genuine human tragedy if the situation is not resolved.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
I thought those were called "travel trailers", or "mobile homes"?
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
It's about lack of real savings, it's about lack of investment, not abundance of 'dumb idea' chasers.
If there was much more savings in the system then there would be much more diversity in what businesses can get capital, but as is there same few investors are getting chased by a huge number of potential 'facebooks' or 'tumblers', etc.
So in reality what is happening is that smart people are choosing the most obvious path, they are simply chasing the very small amount of capital savings that exist and today the belief is that you need 'eyeballs' and that's it. Profits don't matter, as long as you can show revenues and eyeballs you can be the next billionaire.
But you can't be a billionaire if there is no investor willing to put a sizable chunk of money aside for your business to run debts for 5-10 years. The risk of losing that money is enormous in the system that basically punishes real capitalism and promotes socialism or fascism, whatever you want to call this system of collectivism and lack of individual rights. It's the freedoms that are the missing ingredient. Lack of freedom, huge collective that took over all the powers, enormous amount of regulation and extreme taxes and inflation. This is killing any business opportunity, carefully examine what happened to every real business in America (and Europe as well) since at least 1971, when the gold was no longer money and the entire world switched to fiat paper overnight.
The governments grew, so the spending grew, the taxes grew, the regulations grew, the number of various inspectors and regulators, the amount of legislation that businesses have to comply with, the new departments... all of this created enough barriers to businesses that they started looking for new ways to survive and they moved on to other, less regulated locations.
The inflation, the artificial unreal interest rates destroyed incentives to save, the entire policy of the modern Keynesian state is: spend, spend, spend, borrow, borrow, borrow, spend, spend, spend, print, print print what you can't borrow to spend.
There is NO PLACE there for: produce. Nothing about production, it's all about consumption, debt, spending and printing. There is nothing there that does NOT stand in the way of production.
With that in mind reassess the story here, the story here is not about smart people doing dumb things, the story here is that there are no savings, there are no investments to try something different. So people only try what they saw work the last time and they are very averse trying anything that did not already make money hand over fist for SOMEBODY, never mind how many failures this type of economy has produced trying to do the same thing over and over.
You can't handle the truth.
the less fortunate is that you can't make any money off of them. Guys like Bill Gates, with all the money in the world, can afford to focus on that portion of the human population because they don't have to make money off of them. The rest of us have to eat and feed our families and send our kids to school.
I have no patience with people who take it upon themselves to tell other people what they should be choosing to do with their lives and their businesses. If someone wants to write silly phone apps and there are enough people willing to shell out their own hard-earned money to buy them, then the existence of the customer base is enough justification for the existence of the apps. Apparently enough people find enough value in them to make them profitable. If not, well, then the "best and brightest" will go find something that more people do find valuable.
This argument about the "underclass" is particularly silly, because a large percentage of the American "underclass" has smartphones and buys the apps! Essentially, this guy isn't just telling the "best and brightest" what they should be doing with their time, he's also telling the "underclass" what they shouldn't be doing with their money. That sort of condescension is elitism of the worst order, because it allows elitists to feel they aren't being elitist, but rather "serving" the underprivileged -- who are clearly too stupid to make their own decisions.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
His entire rant is a string of strawmen, ad hominems, non sequiturs, and question-begging. The problems he mentioned are all either social or political in nature. Otherwise, he's piling a lot of abuse and loaded words on people doing what they want to do: write programs.
The weird thing is, he identified the sources of the problems right in his rant. Single mothers living at or below the poverty line? The jobs they have don't pay well, are inflexible, and provide no relief for raising kids while trying to earn a living. Veterans waiting 8 months for medical attention? A processing system that is out-of-date and understaffed, and a health care system that has been gutted of funding.
What bright ideas are young software entrepreneurs are going to solve this? The software exist to make the VA more efficient, and it's not like you can just write a new piece of software and expect the government to make use of it (just like you can't do that for a big company).
These Big Problems don't have a software solution. He certainly didn't provide any ideas on how software might solve these Big Problems -- he just insisted on judging the career decisions of a group of people based on his preferences.
Fuck. That.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping.
Mr. too-many-Ns: Smart people still need to eat. To put a roof over their heads. They may even hope to "get ahead" a bit, enjoy a life of reasonable comfort, and retire early with enough wealth to not end up a decrepit dependent of the state like most people.
Solving "important" problems doesn't accomplish those goals. Until you want to demonstrate the "importance" of your pet interests by paying me as much as industry does to work on inane, self-centric apps, GTFO.
That said - Come up with funding, and we can talk. Honestly, I believe virtually everyone would rather work on solving real problems than on building shoddy consumer crap to pad $CEO's bonus this quarter. But Einstein gots ta get paid, son.
From TFA: C.Z. Nnaemeka studied Philosophy at Wellesley; logically, she has spent most of her time in finance, beginning at Goldman Sachs. Born in Manhattan to Nigerian parents, she attended French schools, graduating from the Lycée FranÃais de New York. Since then she has alternated between writing, banking, and consulting to startups in Europe, Latin America, and Australia. Previously, she lived in Paris where she founded a political discussion group and was a foreign affairs commentator for the conservative newspaper, Le Figaro. She graduated from MIT in 2010, focusing on Entrepreneurship + Innovation.
Don't be stupid. If you don't bother to read, don't assume gender in your response.
I found this article courageous interesting, though it bogs down in examples it stands apart from a great many rants I see day after day.
The author is NOT just attacking "silly things"... but referring to a decline of interest in building, maintaining and improving physical infrastructure. That complacency is real, it is dangerous and ultimately fatal.
Physical infrastructure is the entirety of things that make a comfortable existence possible. Safe drinking water and the system that delivers it, affordable electricity, sufficient food with variety and the global transportation and trade that make them affordable.
The desire to deliver a modern comfortable standard of living, through innovation in the building of infrastructure, is a moral imperative. As things stand we do not seem to be equipped or even interested to deliver these things. Before long we might not even be able to deliver Frito-Lay products.
The United States is losing ground on these things because in great part, we have diverted from the path that leads to total self-sufficiency for energy. Energy is a key to all of this. Anyone who runs the numbers on wind power should realize it is a crap solution. An obscene amount of investment capital has and is being spent on it. And too many people (including these 20 and 30-somethings unfairly singled out in the article) are brushing across lone voices in the wilderness suggesting a directed focus to solve this problem and thinking maybe, gee that's interesting... and moving on... not feeling that there is any kind of existential threat.
Rumors of the planet melting and sea levels inundating the shore have been greatly exaggerated. This is part of the problem, for some of the dumbest ideas ever conceived have arisen from it. And some of the smartest ideas for providing us with enough baseload energy to --- among other things --- heal the planet or offset our impact (yes it takes additional energy!) have gone unheard.
It's time to "grow up" a little, and take some time to set in motion certain real-life initiatives that will tip the balance to lock in this modern way of life, until it is really sustainable.
Then back to the fun and games.
In other words, clean your room.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I realize this is a troll, but there is some truth to this... SOME.
Smart people do not have children they can't raise in a good healthy environment and can't properly give them all the things they need as they grow and graduate into adulthood.
Unfortunately, we have far too many non-smart people. Both rich and poor, they have children they can't or won't care for. Both end up spoiled and neglected and this has been going on for 2-3 generations now. Under these conditions, the results are more than predictable. And the poor become a drain on society.
Now if this notion were followed through and actually happened? Well, that'd be another problem entirely. We need a middle class and we don't have one. The rich send our jobs everywhere else but here and they are slowly running out of people they can sell their crap to. Do you know how poor people are getting their cell phones now? Government subsidized service. Seriously. Welfare mobile phones. And of course they are on welfare everything else as well.
Most of us here on slashdot don't really know what it's like to be poor and on welfare. I've had unfortunate times, though, and I know it all too well. To me it was a nightmare, but most of them were extremely comfortable in their misery. Extremely comfortable.
Shit lost a healthy balance long ago. There is no limit on greed and no limit on laziness. Why there is a dwindling middle-class is partly because they have lowered the measure of what middle-class is and largely because of wealth distribution problems. Like global warming, I think we've gone too far already.
"we live in interesting times."
The dumb ideas come from dumb people with money - politicians.
Hmmm....
Well, looks like that's not Nnaemeka's problem, given that it's an old dude making it, not some young guy. Still, I have some concerns. In no particular order
1. Many homeless people in the USA are homeless because of mental problems. Treating said problems is necessary because otherwise they can't take care of themselves, fancy rolling shelter or not. Many will DESTROY said shelter in days, if not hours.
2. Stove inside is just asking for fire.
3. Is water shortage really a problem for homeless people?
4. While it's technically mobile, it's far too heavy. I'm familiar with those castors, the system is far heavier than a shopping cart & a tent, sleeping bag, or even just a bunch of blankets.
I don't read AC A human right
That is complete bullshit, and you know it! There are many people who manage to eat, feed their families and send their kids to school, an in general make their living while helping what you call the less fortunate. It is hard work, it is often frustrating because it may often seem like it does not make any difference, but it is entirely possible. Of course, you may not be able to afford your huge house, new car, the newest TV and cable, but it is entirely possible to "make a living" that way.
AccountKiller
VC's want to invest in the next Angry Birds app... short term return, not 20 year return on the creation of a drug that'll cure XYZ disease.
So where do the 20somethings want to go? Do they want to spend their time sitting in a lab somewhere at Big Pharma researching a drug? Or working for Cisco trying to create 1Tb Ethernet? Nope. Not sexy. Nobody is going IPO there.
The startup industry has dramatically changed over the years.
In the 80s and before, the purpose of a startup was to build a successful, long term business.
In the dotcom era, the purpose was to go public (IPO).
Post dotcom era, now that it's become so far to go public, the startups now just want to get bought.
So in the past two generations of startups, nobody has cared about building a long term successful business. The VCs have investors behind them that want immediate returns and it's not about making a living for yourself and your employees but "striking it rich" for the investors behind the VCs. Note that those people that invest in the VC are already *rich* so adding another $100k to their portfolio is not worth it.
Also as a 30something year old, who was 20something in the dot com bubble, fun atmospheres driving by promises of "retiring by 30" are like a drug.
The smartest don't want to become Social Workers, they want to make a killing with Social Networking.
You mean companies are hiring smart people to design what other people want to buy?
Oh, the humanity! The humanity!
Infuriate left and right
People who went to university are not smart. They have some more education, and some of them are even brilliant in their distinct field, but beside that, they are morons like everyone else. If you want to help the lower and middle classes, first, you have to provide a decent social security system, like Danmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany and similar countries. Second, you have to train people in a way so that they can find a purpose in life. That purpose is more important, than above minimal-income income. Third, there are people who really are not able to decide what they want in life. They need guidance. SO we as a society have to deliver that. But most prominently, we have to change the primary attitude in society or at least in economy: ME FIRST!
The only "solution" is "every man for himself" and his politically active subgroup. As long as we are rich enough to feed the underclass, we'll have domestic peace. People revolt for lack of food, nothing else.
Please explain the American revolutionary war. Americans were better fed than the people of the British Isles, at the time.
"Every man for himself" isn't a solution. It's a problem with no solution.
Where have you been the last X years, when was the last time you saw something truely original or innovative?
NOTE: Windows 8 doesn't count.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I'd expect nothing less from a 1st world culture in general that says "do what YOU want to do," "find YOUR dream," "YOU're the most important to YOU." Reading the comments on this thread so far, it is evident that we'd rather remain blissfully ignorant and shift the burden elsewhere.
It's gruelling work to sort out the world's problems, and with no one-right-answer, fraught with the possibility of failure, as some commenters here can attest: one commenter demonstrates the core attitudinal problem - it takes effort to connect with someone from a different social background, with different concerns, priorities and fears for continued livelihood, to try and understand the problem, and formulate some answer, ANY answer, but at least to give a damn and TRY; some of us just aren't up to the task (though we can't necessarily be blamed for that much so long as we're not in denial). It's much easier to cater to the quick-wins, the plugged-in smart-phone-wielding, TV-watching, internet-addicted, money-squandering market and keep them happy. Fast money, cheap glory.
The first commenters demonstate the very sentiment under fire, that rather than recognizing that there are much more worthwhile questions to ponder than how to make the next best cheap app on the most expensive phones to date, or how to make their privileged lives even more privileged, they prefer to suggest that Nnaemeka is the whiny my-problems-aren't-solved person. Thing is, privileged netizen, YOUR problems ARE being solved.
Thankfully I too know the kind of people "O('_')O_Bush" points out, those who are toiling away, and even setting up locally successful ventures, to make communities, environments and the Environment better; though it's either an uneven distribution, in terms of attention gained vs actual work being done and achievements being made. I suspect we all know some such people. But we'd rather comment on the "celebrities" than focus on the great things happening on our own street.
We've riled as the 99% against the 1% and the sheer injustice of it all, but we forget that we're still part of the upper 20% that are still quite plumply sitting on another lowly 80%. We are the 20%, and we are unashamed.
-- "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." --Dijkstra
Smart people do not have children they can't raise in a good healthy environment and can't properly give them all the things they need as they grow and graduate into adulthood.
This is the normal excuse of "educated" people (have a look at Idiocrazy). What they really don't want, is to risk their careers. You could raise kids with less money. They still could get educated, as long as you support that. For example, in Germany the school system is highly selective. As long as your parents are educated well, you have a much higher chance to graduate from high school and go to university afterwards then children from less educated families. Even if you school system is not that bad, the same effect would still be existent.
A second cause for that imbalance is that educated people form partnerships and families later in life. They would be able to do that sooner if they would not constantly be taught to finish quickly. Otherwise some (more) women would consider have kids during their bachelor and master programs.
But most important. The "not-so-smart" people are not unintelligent. So educate them!
Meh. Ask me if I care.
Go on, ask.
We measure success with money and we assume that people are really smart because they figured out how to make money.
Despite the fact that the author is whining about people not doing what *he* thinks they should be doing, he is assuming that a person with the skill set to create a popular internet application of the year has the same skill set needed to solve real world problems.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Ah... if Windows 8 doesn't count...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Skimmed through TFA, it doesn't seem like he has any suggestions on what to focus on, as long as it's not everyone dogpiling on one thing.
But the way things are going, maybe we should all be working on building these:
http://www.designboom.com/design/mobile-homeless-shelter/
that's not a homeless shelter realistically. a true homeless person would sell it for booze.
to who? some guy who needs it for camping(stick to the back of a pickup) or as a rock festival sleeping area. for that it looks nice and you could make a mint renting those for that. the laptop area in the sketch is just funny - it's certainly meant for some different kind of nonexistant type of homeless person.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's interesting to see the Slashdot crowd going into defensive mode. Makes the author's point perfectly.
Money for nothing and their checks for free.
I wanted to be a rock star with hot and cold running chicks.
I became a technologist and I have hot and cold running robots.
I am happy.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Please check out my other comment about our consumerist society. Our self-esteem comes quite directly from our ability to buy things.
This is our society. We can't change it today or tomorrow. Now explain how you can raise a child with good moral strength and peace of mind without also having any level of financial security and stability. There is more to building a person than education. In fact, I have seen and known some extremely educated people who haven't a clue about how to live.
I actually have three sons. Each of them have had as much as I could give them. The first two graduated with honors under the IB program and on. My little one has even more of my attention. I'm very conscious of what it takes to raise a child. I don't do home schooling because I have to bring money home. But all homework and all in-class work is reviewed and discussed when he gets home and I am in very close contact with the teachers. I'm not making excuses -- I'm telling you what I'm doing because I do as much as I can. And I'm not consumerist personally and so far, neither are my children. But social skills and the ability to function in society is extremely important.
The alternative? It's hard to imagine without living on public assistance.
I have pursued both anti-problems and big problems.
"Anti-problems" are everywhere and discussed frequently because the public and press are familiar with the problems, solutions and rewards. Everyone knows the possible financial reward from Facebook/Yahoo buying your social networking website/app, developing the next great web technology at Google, or developing financial software on Wall Street. These "anti-problems" are very sexy too. Investors buy into the hype. I used to work in finance. I saw investors bringing $50 million investment utterly fail in their due diligence and believe total lies. So anti-problems can attract a ton of easy investment... if conning investors is your thing.
But anti-problems bring deep risks, which you don't generally hear about. I've seen great software engineers work for very low pay because their employer or partners are trapping, baiting and exploiting them with equity promises, shared ownership obligations, using financial pain and desire to own their IP as motivation. I have seen careers ruined due to unseen risks that only good (and expensive) legal counsel would have helped you avoid in advance. But you rarely hear about these risks because they're just not sexy enough to print or are deeply confidential.
I've developed solutions to anti-problems that generated millions in revenue. I'm not a millionaire today because of simple greed. I did not secure ownership in advance and faced a costly litigation to regain my ownership or fair compensation from a very large company. I learned from these experiences. I learned to walk away from lead engineering employment positions where I was planning to generate or advance IP worth millions or billions and my employer refused to compensate me fairly based on the value of the IP.
Nor do you hear about "big problems". Sometimes its because fewer understand the limits of physics. Fewer understand the deep math and technology expertise involved. But mostly its a matter of the general public and press not knowing a solution was even possible. Best example was the original iPhone which offered the first effective touchsceen on a cell phone. That simply wasn't on anyone's radar.
I work on one of these big problems. I am a technical lead on software that is currently saving the lives of US soldiers and improving their lethality... right now as we speak. Nearly every solider we demo our software to says to us "I need that NOW". We truly feel like Steve Jobs demonstrating the first iPhone. That's part of the reward when you pursue solutions to big problems. Yes we're also compensated very well.
Yet we struggle to recruit top engineering talent away from all the "anti-problems". I've been pursuing a few local software engineers for a few years. One is developing a social networking app and probably earning a small fraction of what we pay. I get the feeling certain engineers have pursued anti-problems for so long, they're afraid to abandon their hopes of a big buyout, switch to working on big problems and have to admit to themselves that pursuing anti-problems was a bad choice.
the laptop area in the sketch is just funny - it's certainly meant for some different kind of nonexistant type of homeless person.
Are you sure? Last time I volunteered to serve dinner at the homeless shelter I saw that approximately 15% of the residents had smartphones. Maybe that correlates to the residents who had nicer cars than my 12 year old vehicle.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to encounter homeless people with laptops.
i've seen quite a few homeless with phones, smart or not, in large part because it can be quite difficult to get a job without a phone number. For those that are actually trying to climb out of their situation, it is an essential tool, and in some cases, it is left over from before they were homeless as few are there after falling on hard times not too long ago. A laptop on the other hand seems to be a different story and I don't think I've encountered any homeless with a laptop (not counting the couch-crashing type of traveling friend...). While computer access is also important to getting many kinds of work, all of the homeless I've seen have used computers availible at shelters (including for training/educational courses) or at a library.
Perhaps smart people just realize that the progressive refrain of "the sky is falling" and "we so many problems" is bullshit.
The problems we do have are largely self-inflicted and within people's own control. For example, you can't fix single motherood with an app, entrepreneurship, or government programs. The only way you get fewer single mothers in poverty is if women stop having kids outside of marriage.
And entrepreneurs can't fix what's wrong with government benefits, retirement plans, or the medical system because those are increasingly transferred from entrepreneurs (i.e. corporations) to the government. I mean, why would entrepreneurs be attracted to starting businesses in areas that are being demonized and regulated to death by the president and a large part of Congress?
Lets look at two examples put forth by TFA: An app that provides restaurant recommendations based on your blood type. The Department of Veteransâ(TM) Affairs processes 97% of its claims by hand, stacking them in heaps on tables and in cabinets.
The first one is virgin territory, in development terms. Sure, it might be silly. But if it pays off (think Angry Birds) its all yours.
The second one is already someone's turf. Sure, I could go in with a team and clean up the VA. Or the IRS, FBI, whatever. But government contracting has already been staked out by the big players. And you don't operate in their town without giving them a piece of the action, see?
You want my help solving your big problems? Fine. But I'm going to need protection. When the big boys come to interfere and make threats, shoot them. No trial. Just like an errant US citizen in Yemen. Bang. Right between the eyes.
Have gnu, will travel.
Good question. That the question is good, is proved by the fact that I really, really had to think for some time before coming up with an answer. The last time I saw something truly original or innovative was around the end of 2007. Yes, that is sad.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Honestly, I not get my self-esteem from the things I can buy. I lived perfectly with 700 EUR a month and I would be able to live with that today or with social security system money, if there were no jobs out there for me. My mother was able to raise us with little money. So money alone is not the most important stuff, as long as you have some steady income.
If you want to raise kids in a way that they can be a productive part of society, you should teach them, that consumerism is not the solution for a healthy and fulfilled life. Worked pretty well with my siblings.
My point is, if you have kids, you are able to muddle through. However, if you have no money it might be hard to get them into university (well not everyone needs to go there, sometimes other types of education are better suited for them) if you have to pay for them.
That's why I think we should invest in the poor and uneducated, so they can get education. Actually in many countries, the universities are without fees for the students. And they can get money from the state during their studies. I know, it is different in the US. So I would recommend changing that.
just like everyone else, people with degrees are chasing jobs. Just an electrician or a plumber who has to take a job where their skills lie, so do graduates out of top schools. I hate to say this, but they need to make a living too.
So this entire article is like an article saying "too many skilled workers are working at wal-mart".
Also, when you talk about solving either social or political problems as a nerd with the only social status you have is dependant on whatever patronism you give to established players, and as little as they can give you, and they are always looking take it away, how are we expected to solve problems.
What do you think happens to the first nerd who solves a problem that someone in washington, or big business uses to either make money, or stay elected, or get them whatever extra-legal favors they want?
Don't blame us, blame pop culture, and the social latter, which has the best and brightest subserviant to the worst and dumbest.
I also like how the article has a bit of remorse for how they "use to shovel money for wall street", because I think what is going on now is still a vast improvement.
The writer of this thesis is self-centered. They think they know what is important. Evolution shows they're probably wrong.
And a cool name it is. Sounds like a man who knows his way round a set of nunchucks.
So, this is news?
There are still lots of greedy bastards looking to make a quick buck. Some of them are smart... smart enough to make a quick buck but maybe not smart enough to see the real potential of applying their efforts to something worthwhile.
I think this has always been the case... sad but true.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Not really relevant to the topic; just wanted to point this out since a lot of people are referring to the author as "he".
Visit the
1. It's interesting how many posts here assume that this well written and thoughtful article was written by a man. She's a woman. Oh, and you should read her OTHER article on the same website. It's interesting.
2. It's also interesting how many people didn't talk about the article and just used the basic idea to ramble on about their own pet peeves. It's the Government's fault! (we could argue about that, but that's not what the article is about). People today are selfish and they suck! (Volunteerism is at an all time high. People are awesome and caring. Also, people tend to see other people as being just like them, so I worry about all those people that assume everyone ELSE is selfish and greedy.)
3. It's also interesting how a lot of posts seem to say "well yeah, everyone just wants to make money!" I actually read the article, and you might notice she specifically says that lots of people are LEAVING Wall Street (and I'd assume their high paying jobs) to go be entrepreneurs. The problem is that they're focusing on the Wrong Areas.
So, basically... Pretty much all of the replies here missed the point and used the time and space to just rant about their own already concieved perceptions. That's kind of lame. This was a really neat read.
In response to her, I'd say that people tend to do what they know. When you're a programmer, you want to program away the problems, and you focus on the easily programmed problems... Perhaps a solution is to take all those entrepreneurs and have them sit down with Joe and Jane Shmoe and talk about what could help them. Bah. Who needs market research! ( I kid! I kid!)
As a budding entrepreneur, I found this( and her other article) to be very though provoking. Thanks Mrs? Nnaemeka!
Tony
Minecraft
Smart Phones
Self Driving Cars
Private space flight
Crowd funding
Growing body parts from stem cells
Mars exploration
Discovery of planets around other stars
I wonder how boring a life would be to not recognize these things as new and wonderful.
Interesting. Perspective on the problems is what frames it.
We tend to use profit generation as a metric for intelligence.
Mammon is the one true god; claiming to be otherwise is for suckers, actions speak louder than words.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No, I believe he meant it as written. It appears that progressivism is about how one wants to be seen by other "progressive" people. The "progressive" people I know (they all think they're smarter than non-progressive people) do all the meaningless "progressive" things that look good to other "progressives", like changing their facebook profile pictures to equal signs when asked to do so, and posting progressive rants on the internet, but they all seem to have ordered their lives around never encountering the people they champion, they spend their money on toys and entertainment, and they spend their time being entertained. And posting progressive rants on the internet.
I developed a very serious mobile app back way in the mid-90s for public health and disease surveillance. Let me tell you from experience why an app that people rely upon every day for critical work is no way to strike it rich. People *need* a lot of support for that kind of app. Support equals labor, and labor is expensive. Businesses with high expenses don't get rich unless they can command huge prices.
When smartphones came along, my partner used to gnash his teeth at stories of developers scoring windfalls with ringtones or stupid little games, and here we were doing *important* work and only making an OK living. I pointed out that if somebody pays $1.99 for something to amuse himself, he's never going to call tech support. When something represents a total investment of fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in hardware, software and system integration services, he damn well is going to call tech support. But 50K isn't really that much money if you include hardware, third party software licenses, QC'ing the client's existing data and converting it, training the administrators and end uses, and negotiating with IT gatekeepers. That's what you have to face when you do work that everyone agrees is important. Yes, people are willing to spend real money on important problems, but they also subject you to higher standards, intense scrutiny, and exacting ongoing demands, and those things eat into your profits. And the only way to get rich in business is to generate profits -- and salary you pay yourself for your labor IS AN EXPENSE.
That's why the $1.99 app somebody buys on a whim to amuse himself is bound to be more profitable than *important* software that somebody relies on to do something important -- no matter how much you charge for that software. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Software that is a cheaper, more convenient alternative to something someone already has (e.g. Skype) is practical because what it does may be important, but that software itself is at first dispensable.
Look at the vast amounts of cash going into develop "social media"; it is no accident that most of it goes to support is so trivia. Trivia is profitable. It's easier to try radical new things in the trivial. A lot more people have an early adopter stance towards a service like Facebook than they do to towards things they regard as critical. They take convincing and hand-holding. That's why something like Google Wave couldn't get off the ground, you have to approach something as important as collaboration much more conservatively, usually working around how people already do things (e.g. Sharepoint).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
MBAs, banks, VCs (who are MBAs, and lawyers) are exactly the wrong people to be holding the purse strings for entrepreneurship. They took the easiest, sleasiest route to money that exists and have solved no problems nor helped a single other human being along the way. They cannot imagine a world different than what they see in front of their eyes, so make poor predictors of the future. So they hand the capital to those who come along with the Bright, Shiny, Me-too apps that they know will sell for $$$ because the last Bright, Shiny, Me-too app did.
That, in a word, is why the big problems don't get solved.
If a big problem does get solved in the near future, it will be accomplished by real entrepreneurs, who do see the future, know how to solve real problems, and can figure out how to do it with zero support or encouragement from The Powers That Be. That is a tough trick to pull off, but it's probably more possible now, with all that we have, than it's ever been.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
People who will change society by orders of magnitude a few decades or centuries down the road are considered borderline insane today.
Actually, by the usual measure they often _are_ borderline insane. RMS is a great example. His ragging on about GNU/Linux instead of Linux etc., his appalling table manners (I've heard first hand that they are bound to make you throw up), etc. are mannerisms that cloud the greatness of the ideals he holds dearest. His deed of introducing the GPL and putting is power where his mouth is ang giving us the GPL and the GNU Toolkit will have more positive consequences for humanity further down the road than a Mark Zuckerberg could only dream of. And every expert knows this.
It's quite common that people really helping humanity move forward become famous only after they've died - if at all - and society gradually grows to see what they did for us all or what they saw coming (Ada Livingston, Tesla, ...). And if they do experience fame themselves, it's not unlikely that they are in trouble for their ideas and insights (Galilei, US founding fathers, founders of the German republic, etc.). ...
That all been said, I have to second the initial claim that there basically is a solid measure of decadence, especially in the field of IT, that is leading us nowhere. I've spent my recent years scrum mastering for browsergames, fiddling with FOSS CMSes (and we all agree that the world surely does not need any more of those) and now techleading the development of travel booking sites. With all the power as a developer and IT expert at my hands today nothing to brag about, really.
However, I *do* have a daughter and she needs to be put well on her way, and if assigning tickets to webdevs for the next generic webapp is what helps me follow through with my responsibility, I guess I'll have to swallow my pride until she's out of the house and on her own. Then I might actually finally drop IT as a main career all together and put my skills into action for some greater cause, such as protecting/defending the environment or pushing for some advancement in womans rights somewhere or something.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
TL;DR:
"IMO, the wealthy are spending too much time on things that make them more wealth and not enough time on things that help the poor"
How is this at all a new idea? Other that the obligatory bashing of the VC's, Wall Street and new media, there is nothing remotely interesting or insightful in this entire article.
To summarize the summary:
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr. Horrible
There are an awful lot of people who are homeless because the bank took their houses away, not because they're junkies or winos who live in the street. The annual Seattle census of homeless people for the last several years has found that the number of people living in their cars in the suburbs, away from the stereotypical urban shelter residents, has been rising dramatically.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The simple answer to all of this is choice, and the consequences of choice. I consider myself one of the "best and brightest" and why don't I go out and do what author is describing? Simple, myself subscribed to the philosophy that I needed to make a decent living (aka, I made a choice to live comfortably). I then chose to have a child with a woman who eventually split with me. I chose to get full custody of my son. Based on those choices, I was then told by society (a judge) that I had to live in central Indiana, and not in Washington, if I was to have my son live with me. Now Tell me how I can sit here with all those choices, and tell me how my life is going to work out.
I cannot work on the coasts, I cannot travel, I have to be home every night at 5-6pm, I want to live comfortably, I have to work in central Indiana. Tell me what a highly intelligent person is to do if they want to "change the world" or "help the underprivileged". Straw men such as the original author stated only work when things can work out for the person doing the work's favor.
Lets go with another example. Smart person wants to do a company which helps people. Great. They need money. They go out and they have to get into bed with VC or some angel will give them money for costs. This is great until said money giver now wants a return or worse yet, profit. So they have to find a way to make money. Giving things away does not make money (as poor, disadvantaged don't have a lot of excess cash to pay for things). So that means, companies who have altruistic intentions, must create a marketable application/device/item/widget and then sell that, make money, pay back the original shareholders, pay expenses/taxes, invest in R/D, and then finally with what ever is left, give money away for the original altruistic intentions were to begin with.
I cannot stamp my feet in the street and say "I want millions of dollars to create a company to help poor people, with no chance of paying back the original investors." The only way I can see that is if you hit the lottery.
If you read the thread attached to the link about the homeless shelter there's a guy in there claiming to be homeless and owns a laptop. He claims to be a free-range human so he might fall under the mentally ill category as he also claims homelessness is a choice.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
To add to that - clarify - he claims that homelessness is a choice like ALL homeless are choosing to be homeless, that's how they put it. Sorry, wanted to make it clear.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship
I wouldn't worry so much. Wall Street wasn't getting the really smart ones anyway...
Like string theory. Mods, do your worst.
Man we could use those brains elsewhere.
The author has a point. A shorter version is from Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." I've been to venture capital presentations, and too many of them are for incredibly banal applications. I've heard a pitch for a social network for cats. (It wasn't funded.) Even venture capitalists are unhappy with this situation.
As the social networking boom collapses (Facebook traffic and ad revenue peaked a year ago, and everybody else is in worse shape) we'll see a change in that. But it's not clear what comes next.
Instead of spending so much time writing about social needs and advancing their own "journalism" or "pundit" careers, they should put 80-100 hours/week into anti-problem entrepreneurship.
Any smart person who is not also a strong idealist is most likely going to go where the money is. This could be on Wall Street, in online advertising, in going to the Moon, or in curing cancer. It is not their responsibility to do something to better the world. The people spending their money in the economy and electing officials who directly or indirectly decide where the money is going to go.
All this talk about training more people in STEM misses the entire benefit of being in a capitalistic economy. Instead of funding schools, fund research. Students will throw money at engineering programs like they current throw money at law schools to get at that research funding. People don't go into MBA programs or law school because the classes or fun or because sitting in board rooms is fun. They do it because of the money at the end of the tunnel. You put that same amount of money at the end of the tunnel for engineering, and capitalism with fix everything for us.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
George Carlin said "You nail two pieces of wood together that have never been nailed together before and some schmuck will buy it from you." I usually follow that statement with "If you don't believe me, go to Bed, Bath & Beyond." That's where you find a lot of infomercial products. Wal-Mart has an aisle for it too and so does True Value and Ace Hardware.
People seem to be more willing to buy stupid stuff than they are well-designed, practical, truly useful stuff. One could argue that this speaks volumes about the intelligence of the buying public. The segment of the population that comes up with stupid products knows this. Their goal is simply to make a lot of money as quickly as possible with minimal effort. The people who fund development are of the same mindset. The same can be said of the entire entertainment industry.
Can this be changed? Maybe. I often wonder if we created the scientific equivalent of American Idol, how would that alter public perception of geeks. If you could have an annual or bi-annual competition with huge rewards (we're talking 8 figures here) and a ton of publicity e.g. touring the talk-show circuit, would you be able to give the winners rock-star status thus encouraging more people to go for it instead of cranking out noise that some people think is music.
the "Big Trick" to Changing the World is for each person to change what they can and then oh say use Social Media to get others to do the same.
enough folks keeping a few square meters of their area clean and fhelping a dozen folks will solve most problems today.
(and those gang bangers keeping things clean would work just fine)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Unfortunately most of the problems he suggests need solving involve the government bureaucracy rather heavily. That means that you can't just create an application in your spare time that would solve the problem; you have to support it with a huge raft of paperwork and test cases to prove to the government that it works. That doesn't take effort; it takes money, money that that those willing to do the work rarely have.
Take his example of disability processing for veterans. It's clear that this area could benefit from the latest in OCR technology to convert the hand-written forms into computer-readable text. Even better would be to convert the forms to online applications that can be printed out for one's records, but which are submitted electronically.
Once that's done, there is all sorts of interesting work that can be done to parse the data entered into those forms to categorize and sort the applications based on the type of disability being suffered so they can be prioritized.
In short, it's an area where there is tremendous opportunities for improvement.
But improving things would put hundreds if not thousands of government workers out of work. More importantly, it would mean those benefits become due now instead of in the form of back pay nine months later.
It's cruel, but I don't think the government wants the possible improvements. It rocks the boat of The System too much.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's the Libertarian "solution" for pretty much everything. That and the magical mystical Free Market. If greed and avarice are given free reign then everyone will get exactly what they deserve. Some of them actual pine for a return to the Victorian Era.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yes, very much this.
To add another George Carlin quote, "the problem isn't homelessness, it's houselessness."
There's no reason for houses to have the inflated cost they do these days, other than to serve as a mechanism to transfer more wealth to the wealthy through mortgage interest. People complain about paying 10% - 30% of their income in taxes... over the course of the typical 30-year mortgage, you'll end up paying twice your original loan (and effectively more if you keep selling your house and getting a new mortgage before you enter into your mortgage's "golden years"). It's pretty much nuts, and has pretty much inflated our national worth many times over with "imaginary" assets.
And it doesn't have to be this way. We could be building affordable houses. Maybe even on golf courses ;-)
It's more a change in the definition of what a smart person is so that it includes anyone who can get rich off creatingly silly things for the internet.
There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.
Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.
If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.
The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.
I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.
In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.
If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.
I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.
It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.
Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.
Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.
Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Life is boring.
Minecraft - Wasn't the first voxel based game. There was at least a WW2 FPS before it. You can build things out of Lego blocks. Doing it "on a computer" doesn't make it new.
Smart phones - the natural progression of shrinking computers and the want of people to have access to everything should they need it
Self-driving cars - something that's starting to be implemented, but not a new idea
Private space flight - we already had space flight
Crowd funding - I won't count asking people for donations on their web site as the same thing, so I think this may be new.
Growing body parts - an old idea that we're starting to figure out how to do
Mars exploration - similar to exploring the moon, just harder to get there
Discovery of planets around other starts - Only stupid people think other planets don't exist. Though we can detect them better. I don't know the tech behind that.
Something original and innovative as far as I know: Using a basic camera to detect skin color variation in order to calculate heart beats and changes in blood flow
The problems of poor education and inefficient military bureaucracy are not solvable by a clever program or a nifty piece of hardware. Entrepreneurship is not a welcome trait in many facets of our society. These are deep cultural differences.
Solving these types of problems takes a lot more than 2-3 years of work, no matter how inspired it may be. The young people getting into civil service today have 10 years before they're going to be able to make changes. It's going to take patience, stubbornness and a superhuman resistance to cynicism for these young staffers and bureaucrats to solve these problems.
It depends on your perspective. Almost all innovation builds on what we already know. That doesn't mean it's not innovative. It just that it might take several years to realize there is progress.
The Kepler space telescope could detect light pixels from stars. Over time scientists mapped the intensity of those pixels. If they see a drop in intensity at regular intervals, that indicates a planet passing in front of the star. The Kepler itself is now broken but there is still enough data to sort through for at least 2 years. And there is another telescope planned.
It's not very brilliant, but it's a matter of law that both drug abusers and the mentally ill have a right to refuse treatment, and unless you can pin a sufficient criminal act on the former, or demonstrate a danger to society of the latter, then there's no way to force treatment.
It's also one thing to take a mentally ill person and medicate them to the point that they are stable enough that you are required to release them, and entirely another to implant them with a Norplant-type device to continue to administer corrective drugs after they've been released from protective custody. The second one is illegal enforcement of treatment after termination of medical power of attorney.
Then perhaps what we need is to find better ways of curing mental illness—ways that don't depend on potentially very dangerous pharmaceuticals, discovered almost purely through trial and error, that have serious, unpleasant, well-known side effects, and require you to pay the pharmaceutical industry for the privilege of continuing to live a normal life, for the rest of your life.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Throwing away my mod points for this. George W. Bush started offering subsidized mobile phones to poor people because it's actually more expensive to give them a land-line. (Prepaid phone service is also priced cheaper than a land-line, something poor people get when they don't qualify for a free phone.) Also, would you rather have people who need to apply for work, and need emergency services, have no phone at all? I suspect the way that it keeps poor people from being unable to apply for jobs at all pays for itself program-wise. (A third of all welfare recipients get off of welfare within 3 years time, would you rather they be unable to apply for jobs because they can't afford a phone?)
How far are you from St Augustine, Fl. My friend and I will fix you up. We're old and slow, but we know how to get things done.
Yes. Yes, I do care.
English has rules for when letters can appear adjacent to one another. Although it may have some flexibility when it comes to one or two "n"s in a row, it unambiguously never has two leading "n"s.
If nothing more, I would call this a transliteration fail. Your native language has pointlessly duplicated consonants? Hey, I have no problem with that. But if you want to spell it with Latin characters rather than Nko? Well... "When in Rome..."
I thought the story was going to be about slashdot comments.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I find some of these conversations amazing. Innovation is always messy. At each major 'stall' point in Silicon Valley, some non-STEM 'expert', usually a PhD in Gender Studies, rants about how we are greedy and should be creating useful items for 'society'. Capitalism works just fine as it is. You waste massive resources getting to a point were there is a major breakthrough. Those breakthroughs benefit society as a whole far more than anyone could predict. It is always messy getting to that point. The bizarre business plans being thrown out now are the floatsam of third and four rate ideas from Facebook wannabes. That is fine. 99% will fail, which maps well into the 99% of PC companies, Windows 3.1 applications, Ethernet card vendors, CD-ROM content companies, ISPs, and MP3 player companies that also failed in their day. Social problems cannot be fixed by moving resources from Facebook for Cats. Change happens when both sides agree it is needed and work toward a common goal. Now, the only common issue is Looting'. One side wants to protect what it worked hard for, the other side wants it without working for it.
Why doesn't the "heaving underclass" fix its own problems, and not rely on the "smart people" fixing them for them? Isn't that condescending?
Here is my response that I also posted on the originating site:
Maybe you could fix that.
Right. Back. At. YOU.
For someone who has a degree focusing on Entrepreneurship and Innovation from MIT, you don’t seem to know the first rule of the startup: You find the problem, you fix the problem, because it is now *your* problem.
Now, here is some advice from someone who daily rubs elbows with all of those statistics you allude to in your article- the people you think can solve the problem will never solve the problem. They can’t, because they will never have the kind of empathy necessary to understand the problem. They can’t, because most of them have never had a welfare Christmas, they don’t have friends suffering from missing limbs, faces, or PTSD, and they simply never have to choose between gas to get to work or food for the baby. They have never had to consider divorce as a means of securing food and shelter for their wife and child.
There are people doing the things you think aren’t happening. Maybe you don’t value their efforts very much, because they don’t hail from the kinds of schools you think churn out “the right people” who solve problems. Maybe they don’t have the kind of solutions you would like to see. Have you ever considered that the 20-30 something graduates from top tier schools have simply been educated to perpetuate the very problems you are railing against? Do you really think that a rarified pedigree somehow confers better problem solving skills? You would be surprised how many of those people are remarkably average when it comes to solving problems they haven’t been educated to solve. And you are telling them to think out of the box really?
I’m a forty something miscegenated veteran, and son of a single working mother, who has been on the ground floor of launching two successful startups. I currently work to cut the IT overhead of state projects to that our tax dollars can go a little farther. I also work on small local projects because most of the problems you describe can only be solved at a local level. I do that because even with indiegogo, kickstarter, kiva, and other fiscal incubators, it is damned difficult to get funding off the ground for those kinds of projects. That problem is being solved, however, but not by MIT or Stanford. There are plenty of small tech incubators sprouting up all over the country, and a good part of their efforts are focused on solving these exact problems you bring up. Now, since you have expertise in finance and entrepreneurship, or so you claim, maybe *you* can solve the problem of getting cash into the hands of local developers who are working to resolve some of these issues.
I mean, in ways other than vilifying your peers and denigrating your target audience. You know, as in having some measurable results, from your direct action.
There are just too many stupid people in society today, so the smrt people feel they need to cater to them.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There's no reason for houses to have the inflated cost they do these days
Other than supply and demand. Houses cost a lot because they require a lot of material, labor, and exacting regulations. The land they're on is usually not cheap. Then add on to that the demand for the area -- if you have more people who want to buy houses than there are houses to sell, home prices will drift up until they meet.
Then perhaps what we need is to find better ways of curing mental illness—ways that don't depend on potentially very dangerous pharmaceuticals, discovered almost purely through trial and error, that have serious, unpleasant, well-known side effects, and require you to pay the pharmaceutical industry for the privilege of continuing to live a normal life, for the rest of your life.
Dan Aris
It's more or less in the best interests of the pharmacology industry to offer treatments, rather than cures. The diabetes model gives an ongoing revenue stream, compared to a cure, which immediately stops revenue.
If, for example, someone was to actually come out with a cure for AIDS, it would piss a lot of companies off.
If there's somebody who actually enjoys fart pianos, I think it's better that we keep them from doing anything that might have actual impact in the world. Fart piano devs create an invaluable service.