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.
There was a great project debuted at the Cleanweb Hackathon (part of NYC BigApps) this past weekend. It helped coordinate in-kind contributions, needs identification, volunteer distribution, and every other disaster-related necessity on the ground.
I've been participating in the NYC BigApps string of hackathons this Spring. They really shouldn't be called "hackathons" because, as the submitter said, they're really just pitch-a-thons. Three weeks ago we showed up to the first, came up with an idea on the fly, banged it out in two days; then, when it came time to present the app we had done every other team stood up and presented apps they had been working on for years.
Naturally, something that has been in development for years is going to be more complete and polished than something that was born 48 hours before. And that long-term project is more likely to win, and win they did. In the subsequent two hackathons we also presented stuff we had been developing for a long time and won both times. But it felt wrong. It felt like it was violating the spirit of what a hackathon should be.
What hackathons should be is a crazy all-night code fest of how quickly techs can move ideas from conception to reality. 48 hours is an absurdly short period of time to create. All of us who develop for a living know that. But that intensifies the design/scope decisions you have to make, the team collaboration you have to effect on the fly, and the exhiliration of a win if you can pull something off.
Finally, the panel of judges should be diverse, cutting across generations and disciplines, because young 20-something techs are perhaps not always the best positioned to see the potential of an app in the bigger societal context.
Train travel far exceeds air travel in the experience, especially if you get a sleeper compartment. You get your own TV, outlets, desk, toilet in your compartment, complimentary drinks, and access to all the first-class amenities. It's like travelling around in your little apartment or office. And there's something about working while the scenery flashes by that is mentally and creatively stimulating. When you get tired, you can lay down on a real bed. When you want to stretch your legs, you can walk the whole length of train if you want, without squeezing through the forest of elbows on the cattle cars they call "jumbo" jets.
You also get to go from city center to city center, so the connections to the train station are always easier and cheaper than getting to the airport and getting your anal probe from the TSA. Japan and Europe have had high speed train travel forever, on land masses roughly the scale of the US (Japan, for example, is longer that California, Europe is bigger than the continental US), so it can be done.
I'd rather cultivate and eat spirulina. It's a perfect food, grows quickly, and doesn't have near the same yuck factor, especially if you add it to soups and smoothies and such. And it gives you a boost of energy better and smoother than that from energy drinks.
Check out AlgaeLab. They sell live culture to start your own algae setup and also offer online classes on how to cultivate it.
I've eaten scorpions in Northern China. Crunchy, salty, oily, mostly flavorless like a pork rind. So, yeah, you can eat them but apart from the initial Fear Factor aspect, why?
boy these things have been a long time coming. my brother worked non this as an engineering student in 1998. I remember seeing it when I visited his lab at Carnegie Mellon, along with the spider robot they sent into Mt. Erebus. at that time it had no means of locomotion.
electrical engineers have incredibly valuable and useful skills. might I suggest that those who have those skills and yet find themselves unemployed apply their energies to as many disruptive technologies as they can? we all know what the problem is: rich, talentless parasites are destroying democracy, humanity, and the world. electrical engineers have unique insights into ways to solve that problem. now, go do so. we software engineers shall do likewise.
I developed software for a one-click process to make your house a green home, calculating the sweet spots in tens of thousands of combinations of energy efficiency retrofits for your house, identifying which incentives you qualify for and filling out the paperwork for you, finding qualified contractors in your area to do the work, and connecting you to green lenders if you need it. Built the prototype without a dime in investment or savings. Then I submitted the project to Kickstarter to raise capital to market it, and the snarky hipsters rejected it saying "we don't allow home improvement projects.". Apparently any variety of accessory for their iPhones is fine, but a tool that would save homeowners thousands of dollars per year, boost the value of their homes and reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint is not.
my sister owns a water quality lab that tests drinking water for most of the state of Montana. she gets her samples by USPS. FedEx and UPS either don't deliver to most of her customers or are prohibitively expensive. note, these are many of the small farming and ranching towns that grow the wheat you eat and raise the cattle that turn into the juicy steak on your plate. if the USPS vanished tomorrow those places would not be able to certify their drinking water safe to drink, which they must do by law. that means fines they can't pay and the knock-on effects that brings for communities that teeter on the edge all the time anyway.
CmdrTaco, a/. account was the first one I created on the Web proper when i returned from China. I lost that 4 digit userID then due to economic & geographic dislocations, to my ongoing regret now. But in the ensuing years I came to feel like you were a brother I had never met. When you left Slashdot, it felt like a death in the family.
I don't say that to be maudlin, but to mean your time at Slashdot was not just a chapter in your life and its, but in the lives of many. May we all do so well in life.
I agree with the other person who replied to you: it must be highly variable. I speak passable French and Parisians have always been jerks to me. On the other hand people elsewhere in France are normal. If anyone else out there has had the same experience with Paris we have and needs a rec for a place where people are friendly, I vote for Turkey. Kindest. People. On. Earth.
Can we relocate this guy's mouth to 1 inch above sea level? If sea level remains the same, he has nothing to worry about. If not, well, the world will be less one asshole.
In beijing. The sparkly, new main train station was built in half the time normally required. 6 months later you could see daylight through the cracks in the ceiling. This is the real maoist legacy: make ridiculous claims, pretend you accomplished them, then blame running dog capitalists and rightists when it al blows up.
And to Ray Bradbury I credit my lifelong fascination with the Red Planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs helped, sure, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and others too, but the saga of human colonization and pathos of the dying Martian civilization with their crystal cities and sandships, well, it leads me to hope that someday we'll settle there.
That sucking sound is all my productivity flying out the window when this goes live. The last few years since the dvd drive on the family Wii console died I have gotten so much done. After all, on linux we all know the fun is in the coding and productivity tools (albeit a rarified kind of fun that you gotta immerse yourself in). If steam goes live with good games, well, I could see the 15 minute break I take when stumped by a coding challenge stretching into a week...
Ah yes, that old canard, "linux is fine for hobbyists and geeks, but serious grown-ups use Windows." Serious grown-ups look at the bottom line and metrics like productivity and decide accordingly. I run my company exclusively on FLOSS and I guarantee you we are serious grown-ups and have greater productivity because we aren't spending large chunks of every day keeping our systems patched or losing half our cycles to anti-virus software or spyware/adware etc.
I had thought linux had long ago buried that FUD among serious grown-ups, but I guess some memes never die.
I would agree, but more car models are coming out with built-in wifi. Along some roads the traffic is so constant to permit ad-hoc mesh networks across the country. That does allow for other possibilities like real real-time traffic monitoring or crash/stoppage reporting, but that's not material to this discussion. What is is that citizens will shortly, if not now, have the ability to talk to each other regularly via a means that the government cannot shut down by simply flipping a switch. That is not only important, but revolutionary.
your sentiment, but not its suggested implementation. 60's style mass movements have been rendered irrelevant by today's authorities, because they refuse to acknowledge them or allow them to be covered by the media. Thus, 3.5 million people can show up to protest the invasion of Iraq in New York alone, and the rest of the country can be barely aware of it because the media does not cover it.
But action does make a ton of sense, if focused effectively. I claim that giving elected officials a personalized version of citizen activism does far more to change their behavior than mass action. That renders them more, not less, susceptible to the actions of informed citizens such as populate/.
Elected officials still think they get to visit laws and rules upon the populace to which they are personally immune. They think they get to take dumps on the public and still go home to their mansions at the end of the day. If we teach them that in fact the citizens know where they live, and will stop at nothing to make *them* live the reality they would force upon the rest of us, that even the sociopaths who comprise our government at all levels will get the message.
*That* will produce change. The other, mass movements, will not.
but I'm not talking about a standard political movement. And I'm also not talking about the average person. Over the years we've all seen that it's nearly impossible to get the "average person" to give a crap about anything, unless it be the statement, "Satan is about to return to Earth and eat your children. Do you support or oppose this fact?"
No, I'm talking about geeks. I am talking to the people who read Slashdot, because it is a self-selected community of people who care more about freedom and common sense than the average.
I have taken the "organizational" approach you describe in the past. It is a fool's errand. You always attract the whiniest members of society who avidly work to undermine your organization unless it feeds their own, very personal dysfunctions. And it does not matter how clearly you articulate your intentions to work for general issues--they will always try to get everything to be about their own niche dementias.
Change does not come from mass movements. Change comes from a very few highly motivated, highly skilled people who are able to act effectively and subsequently explain things to the "average person" in such a way that they can blandly acquiesce. That's it.
That's why I post this sort of sentiment on/., and not on, say, Digg, because the latter would be a total waste of my time.
Geeks, such as are still found on/., do have the ability to take the reins of the world and guide it to a better place. I urge them to do so, and not to give in the Surrender Monkey thinking.
to do. Who cares about a website? Websites are superfluous. But hack their Blackberries and you will get their attention. Hack their family's accounts, and you will get their attention. The politicians of the world need to know that their very lives are at the mercy of geeks, and that the geeks are not pleased.
If geeks would work together, this kind of BS would nearly instantly stop because modern life would be impossible without the active or passive participation of geeks.
It does not make sense to play whack-a-mole with pirate vessels on the high seas. It does make sense to conduct operations against their bases on land. In fact, that's precisely what the US did in the First Barbary War. If India were to do likewise, it would herald a new geopolitical era for that country.
At any rate, I'd rather it were India, as a democracy, than China. I'm sure Indians would rather it were them instead of China, too.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
There was a great project debuted at the Cleanweb Hackathon (part of NYC BigApps) this past weekend. It helped coordinate in-kind contributions, needs identification, volunteer distribution, and every other disaster-related necessity on the ground.
I've been participating in the NYC BigApps string of hackathons this Spring. They really shouldn't be called "hackathons" because, as the submitter said, they're really just pitch-a-thons. Three weeks ago we showed up to the first, came up with an idea on the fly, banged it out in two days; then, when it came time to present the app we had done every other team stood up and presented apps they had been working on for years.
Naturally, something that has been in development for years is going to be more complete and polished than something that was born 48 hours before. And that long-term project is more likely to win, and win they did. In the subsequent two hackathons we also presented stuff we had been developing for a long time and won both times. But it felt wrong. It felt like it was violating the spirit of what a hackathon should be.
What hackathons should be is a crazy all-night code fest of how quickly techs can move ideas from conception to reality. 48 hours is an absurdly short period of time to create. All of us who develop for a living know that. But that intensifies the design/scope decisions you have to make, the team collaboration you have to effect on the fly, and the exhiliration of a win if you can pull something off.
Finally, the panel of judges should be diverse, cutting across generations and disciplines, because young 20-something techs are perhaps not always the best positioned to see the potential of an app in the bigger societal context.
Train travel far exceeds air travel in the experience, especially if you get a sleeper compartment. You get your own TV, outlets, desk, toilet in your compartment, complimentary drinks, and access to all the first-class amenities. It's like travelling around in your little apartment or office. And there's something about working while the scenery flashes by that is mentally and creatively stimulating. When you get tired, you can lay down on a real bed. When you want to stretch your legs, you can walk the whole length of train if you want, without squeezing through the forest of elbows on the cattle cars they call "jumbo" jets.
You also get to go from city center to city center, so the connections to the train station are always easier and cheaper than getting to the airport and getting your anal probe from the TSA. Japan and Europe have had high speed train travel forever, on land masses roughly the scale of the US (Japan, for example, is longer that California, Europe is bigger than the continental US), so it can be done.
I'd rather cultivate and eat spirulina. It's a perfect food, grows quickly, and doesn't have near the same yuck factor, especially if you add it to soups and smoothies and such. And it gives you a boost of energy better and smoother than that from energy drinks.
Check out AlgaeLab. They sell live culture to start your own algae setup and also offer online classes on how to cultivate it.
I've eaten scorpions in Northern China. Crunchy, salty, oily, mostly flavorless like a pork rind. So, yeah, you can eat them but apart from the initial Fear Factor aspect, why?
boy these things have been a long time coming. my brother worked non this as an engineering student in 1998. I remember seeing it when I visited his lab at Carnegie Mellon, along with the spider robot they sent into Mt. Erebus. at that time it had no means of locomotion.
electrical engineers have incredibly valuable and useful skills. might I suggest that those who have those skills and yet find themselves unemployed apply their energies to as many disruptive technologies as they can? we all know what the problem is: rich, talentless parasites are destroying democracy, humanity, and the world. electrical engineers have unique insights into ways to solve that problem. now, go do so. we software engineers shall do likewise.
fantastic summary of our society's modern dilemma. thank you for writing this.
I developed software for a one-click process to make your house a green home, calculating the sweet spots in tens of thousands of combinations of energy efficiency retrofits for your house, identifying which incentives you qualify for and filling out the paperwork for you, finding qualified contractors in your area to do the work, and connecting you to green lenders if you need it. Built the prototype without a dime in investment or savings. Then I submitted the project to Kickstarter to raise capital to market it, and the snarky hipsters rejected it saying "we don't allow home improvement projects.". Apparently any variety of accessory for their iPhones is fine, but a tool that would save homeowners thousands of dollars per year, boost the value of their homes and reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint is not.
Kickstarter? Kickstopper.
my sister owns a water quality lab that tests drinking water for most of the state of Montana. she gets her samples by USPS. FedEx and UPS either don't deliver to most of her customers or are prohibitively expensive. note, these are many of the small farming and ranching towns that grow the wheat you eat and raise the cattle that turn into the juicy steak on your plate. if the USPS vanished tomorrow those places would not be able to certify their drinking water safe to drink, which they must do by law. that means fines they can't pay and the knock-on effects that brings for communities that teeter on the edge all the time anyway.
does it have square wheels?
Now I can drive my ICE in good conscience knowing that perpetual slavery to oil companies really is the best possible future any of us could hope for.
CmdrTaco, a /. account was the first one I created on the Web proper when i returned from China. I lost that 4 digit userID then due to economic & geographic dislocations, to my ongoing regret now. But in the ensuing years I came to feel like you were a brother I had never met. When you left Slashdot, it felt like a death in the family.
I don't say that to be maudlin, but to mean your time at Slashdot was not just a chapter in your life and its, but in the lives of many. May we all do so well in life.
I agree with the other person who replied to you: it must be highly variable. I speak passable French and Parisians have always been jerks to me. On the other hand people elsewhere in France are normal. If anyone else out there has had the same experience with Paris we have and needs a rec for a place where people are friendly, I vote for Turkey. Kindest. People. On. Earth.
Can we relocate this guy's mouth to 1 inch above sea level? If sea level remains the same, he has nothing to worry about. If not, well, the world will be less one asshole.
In beijing. The sparkly, new main train station was built in half the time normally required. 6 months later you could see daylight through the cracks in the ceiling. This is the real maoist legacy: make ridiculous claims, pretend you accomplished them, then blame running dog capitalists and rightists when it al blows up.
And to Ray Bradbury I credit my lifelong fascination with the Red Planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs helped, sure, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and others too, but the saga of human colonization and pathos of the dying Martian civilization with their crystal cities and sandships, well, it leads me to hope that someday we'll settle there.
That sucking sound is all my productivity flying out the window when this goes live. The last few years since the dvd drive on the family Wii console died I have gotten so much done. After all, on linux we all know the fun is in the coding and productivity tools (albeit a rarified kind of fun that you gotta immerse yourself in). If steam goes live with good games, well, I could see the 15 minute break I take when stumped by a coding challenge stretching into a week...
Ah yes, that old canard, "linux is fine for hobbyists and geeks, but serious grown-ups use Windows." Serious grown-ups look at the bottom line and metrics like productivity and decide accordingly. I run my company exclusively on FLOSS and I guarantee you we are serious grown-ups and have greater productivity because we aren't spending large chunks of every day keeping our systems patched or losing half our cycles to anti-virus software or spyware/adware etc.
I had thought linux had long ago buried that FUD among serious grown-ups, but I guess some memes never die.
I would agree, but more car models are coming out with built-in wifi. Along some roads the traffic is so constant to permit ad-hoc mesh networks across the country. That does allow for other possibilities like real real-time traffic monitoring or crash/stoppage reporting, but that's not material to this discussion. What is is that citizens will shortly, if not now, have the ability to talk to each other regularly via a means that the government cannot shut down by simply flipping a switch. That is not only important, but revolutionary.
your sentiment, but not its suggested implementation. 60's style mass movements have been rendered irrelevant by today's authorities, because they refuse to acknowledge them or allow them to be covered by the media. Thus, 3.5 million people can show up to protest the invasion of Iraq in New York alone, and the rest of the country can be barely aware of it because the media does not cover it.
But action does make a ton of sense, if focused effectively. I claim that giving elected officials a personalized version of citizen activism does far more to change their behavior than mass action. That renders them more, not less, susceptible to the actions of informed citizens such as populate /.
Elected officials still think they get to visit laws and rules upon the populace to which they are personally immune. They think they get to take dumps on the public and still go home to their mansions at the end of the day. If we teach them that in fact the citizens know where they live, and will stop at nothing to make *them* live the reality they would force upon the rest of us, that even the sociopaths who comprise our government at all levels will get the message.
*That* will produce change. The other, mass movements, will not.
but I'm not talking about a standard political movement. And I'm also not talking about the average person. Over the years we've all seen that it's nearly impossible to get the "average person" to give a crap about anything, unless it be the statement, "Satan is about to return to Earth and eat your children. Do you support or oppose this fact?"
No, I'm talking about geeks. I am talking to the people who read Slashdot, because it is a self-selected community of people who care more about freedom and common sense than the average.
I have taken the "organizational" approach you describe in the past. It is a fool's errand. You always attract the whiniest members of society who avidly work to undermine your organization unless it feeds their own, very personal dysfunctions. And it does not matter how clearly you articulate your intentions to work for general issues--they will always try to get everything to be about their own niche dementias.
Change does not come from mass movements. Change comes from a very few highly motivated, highly skilled people who are able to act effectively and subsequently explain things to the "average person" in such a way that they can blandly acquiesce. That's it.
That's why I post this sort of sentiment on /., and not on, say, Digg, because the latter would be a total waste of my time.
Geeks, such as are still found on /., do have the ability to take the reins of the world and guide it to a better place. I urge them to do so, and not to give in the Surrender Monkey thinking.
to do. Who cares about a website? Websites are superfluous. But hack their Blackberries and you will get their attention. Hack their family's accounts, and you will get their attention. The politicians of the world need to know that their very lives are at the mercy of geeks, and that the geeks are not pleased.
If geeks would work together, this kind of BS would nearly instantly stop because modern life would be impossible without the active or passive participation of geeks.
It does not make sense to play whack-a-mole with pirate vessels on the high seas. It does make sense to conduct operations against their bases on land. In fact, that's precisely what the US did in the First Barbary War. If India were to do likewise, it would herald a new geopolitical era for that country.
At any rate, I'd rather it were India, as a democracy, than China. I'm sure Indians would rather it were them instead of China, too.