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Mark Zuckerberg Hits the Road To Meet Regular Folks -- With a Few Conditions (foxbusiness.com)

Mark Zuckerberg is trying to understand America, so he's embarked on a journey to meet people like hockey moms and steelworkers who don't typically cross his path. But there are rules to abide by if you are an ordinary person about to meet an extraordinary entrepreneur. From a report: Rule One: You probably won't know Mr. Zuckerberg is coming. Rule Two: If you do know he's coming, keep it to yourself. Rule Three: Be careful what you reveal about the meeting. While the Facebook CEO has built a social network that inspired people around the world to share the most intimate details about their personal lives, his team goes to extraordinary lengths to keep his movements under wraps and control how he is perceived. Midway through a "personal challenge" to travel to 30 states he'd never visited, the 33-year old aims "to talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future," he wrote in January on his Facebook page. Among those people was Kyle McKasson, manager of the Wilton Candy Kitchen, a century-old shop on the town square in Wilton, Iowa. He was at work one Monday afternoon in June when two men and a woman dressed in jeans and button-down shirts entered the store, which is a regular stop on Iowa's presidential campaign circuit.

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  1. Re:What a pompous ass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    rural American bubble

    The rural American bubble? What sort of imaginary nonsense is that? The rest of the planet has — as its mission — the duty to keep any such bubble from ever forming. There is no form of media from printed news to Facebook, foreign or domestic, broadcast or otherwise, that doesn't hesitate to shit on the deplorables of rural America. Nothing. It is simply impossible to come anywhere near any form of published or syndicated media and not immediately know what a irredeemable pile of excrement you are as a bitter, clinging rural American. To the extent that a "rural American bubble" could possibly be theorized to exist it must be as a manifestation of being the only class or strata of people in the nation that can be openly hated without consequence, and only group of people responsible for their own condition.

  2. why? by jm007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    some kid gets lucky with an app and becomes rich; sure, maybe he's a good programmer, dunno, but by far the majority of his financial success is from luck; good for him, no grudge on my end and maybe I could learn something from how it all happened

    so why does he get special air time for anything outside of that? our society has a strange way of giving folks who've done something of note in one area a free pass in other areas for which they have no credentials

    for example, asking an actor who they recommend for president..... really? someone who is good at pretending to be somebody else is now someone we should listen to about such weighty issues? sure, they *might* be a pundit of sorts but that credibility has to be earned outside of them being famous for acting

    similar to how we pedestalize sports and entertainment figures and report on their every mouth fart on topics far outside playing with a ball or singing and dancing

    if he had not become rich/famous at 20-ish and was just another programmer at some XYZ corp.... would he be listened to as intently by an eager reporter? has he enough life experience to run his mouth intelligently on anything? so since he DID get rich/successful while very young, and lived in a rich-guy bubble since then wherein his posse constantly cups his balls, do you think he's lived the kind of life to qualify as someone to be taken seriously outside of any of that?

    he's still a child, stunted by not having to live his critical 20's dealing with regular-guy shit like the rest of us; if he's got something important to say to me, it'll have to be done while NOT riding on the coat tails of his super-lucky app success