Economics

[Booslum31]

My feeling is wearing women's underwear is the best way to goose a gander!

I rarely wear underwear...and when I do it's something pretty unusual.

 

[Ndaccountant]

Co-worker emailed me this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/o...0150607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=42717332&_r=1

First off, my initial response was......what a dickhead. He took out a contract, to which one party fulfilled his end, and boastfully is unwilling to comply with his end of the deal.

Then I looked up his bio.

He is 57 years old. So 40(!) years ago he began his collegiate schooling per the article. According to his biography, he has graduated with several degrees from Columbia. Again, based on the BIO, he has been working for quite some time, which means he at least started accumulating debt at a point when tuition was no where near what it is today. He certainly could have gone back to school later, but his article doesn't mention that and is focused on when he was 17 and the next few years thereafter. Something leads me to believe he is full of shit w/r/t why he chose to default. Also, will full default is akin to stealing in this case. Not only is he apparently thrilled his decision, he is advocating others to do so. He clearly is the victim in his mind and will do anything it takes to make it right.

I am sure many will agree with his message that college is becoming harder for those from more modest means to attend. No argument there and something needs to be done to ensure tuition and value are better aligned. But what he is suggesting is plain wrong.

After more thought, he just isn't a dickhead, he's a fucking dickhead.

 

[wizards8507]

I am sure many will agree with his message that college is becoming harder for those from more modest means to attend. No argument there and something needs to be done to ensure tuition and value are better aligned. But what he is suggesting is plain wrong.

That argument is BS. I went to Notre Dame with zero out-of-pocket costs and that was 100% need-based. I graduated and paid off $65,000 in debt in three years (student loans, my car, wife's car). My starting salary was right in line with where the average MCoB student can expect to be. There are loads of options for college education regardless of what your family's income level is. Idiots who pursue advanced degrees in music performance or journalism without ever earning anything along the way are digging their own holes. The problem isn't a lack of options, it's stupid kids picking the WRONG options.

That's when happens when the narrative we give our children is about "dreaming" and "self-actualization" at the expense of "stability" and "being able to afford your own damn groceries."

 

[GowerND11]

That argument is BS. I went to Notre Dame with zero out-of-pocket costs and that was 100% need-based. I graduated and paid off $65,000 in debt in three years (student loans, my car, wife's car). My starting salary was right in line with where the average MCoB student can expect to be. There are loads of options for college education regardless of what your family's income level is. Idiots who pursue advanced degrees in music performance or journalism without ever earning anything along the way are digging their own holes. The problem isn't a lack of options, it's stupid kids picking the WRONG options.

That's when happens when the narrative we give our children is about "dreaming" and "self-actualization" at the expense of "stability" and "being able to afford your own damn groceries."

So what about this idiot who went into teaching? I got little financial aid and with the economic crisis couldn't find work in education for almost 3 years? Guess I'm a stupid kid too huh?

 

[EddytoNow]

So what about this idiot who went into teaching? I got little financial aid and with the economic crisis couldn't find work in education for almost 3 years? Guess I'm a stupid kid too huh?

As a teacher, I would not advise anyone to go into teaching at the present time. If you do find a job (and that's a big if) your wages will not support you, let alone a family of any kind. Couple that with the fact the many states have gone to merit pay, which is nothing more than a scam to pay teachers less for doing more, and you have a dead end career.

 

[GowerND11]

As a teacher, I would not advise anyone to go into teaching at the present time. If you do find a job (and that's a big if) your wages will not support you, let alone a family of any kind. Couple that with the fact the many states have gone to merit pay, which is nothing more than a scam to pay teachers less for doing more, and you have a dead end career.

Isn't that sad? Isn't it horrible that we, as teachers, the people who are entrusted with educating our youth and future are treated this way, especially in the public eye? I could never imagine doing anything other than teacher, except for coaching but that's something I am fortunate enough to do as well as teach. That old saying of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" is engrained in a lot of peoples heads. Instead of trying to recruit the best and brightest into the education field, government and society claim that we don't do anything, have it easy, and collect a pension.

I got lucky this year finally finding a full time teaching job that I love. It pays above average for my area. The problem is because I received no aid in college I'm forced to pay a good amount of my paycheck every month towards my loans. I understand some will say, that's on me, or I shouldn't have gone to college, or I should have picked a more profitable career, but isn't it horrible that we, as a society, take such a fulfilling career like being a teacher and cast it off like we do?

 

[wizards8507]

So what about this idiot who went into teaching? I got little financial aid and with the economic crisis couldn't find work in education for almost 3 years? Guess I'm a stupid kid too huh?

You're from Pennsylvania it looks like. Penn State Abington has an education program for $14,000 per year for in-state residents. That's easily achievable with part-time work, full-time work in the summer, and maybe a small student loan.

Isn't that sad? Isn't it horrible that we, as teachers, the people who are entrusted with educating our youth and future are treated this way, especially in the public eye? I could never imagine doing anything other than teacher, except for coaching but that's something I am fortunate enough to do as well as teach. That old saying of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" is engrained in a lot of peoples heads. Instead of trying to recruit the best and brightest into the education field, government and society claim that we don't do anything, have it easy, and collect a pension.

I got lucky this year finally finding a full time teaching job that I love. It pays above average for my area. The problem is because I received no aid in college I'm forced to pay a good amount of my paycheck every month towards my loans. I understand some will say, that's on me, or I shouldn't have gone to college, or I should have picked a more profitable career, but isn't it horrible that we, as a society, take such a fulfilling career like being a teacher and cast it off like we do?

No, it isn't horrible that you have to pay back the money that you borrowed in the first place. Your appeal to emotion can be manipulated to make any point you want. "I'm a father. As a father, there's nothing more important to me than the safety and well-being of my daughter. To achieve that end, I need a safe and reliable vehicle. So I leased a brand new Ford Fusion. I'm forced to pay a good amount of my paycheck every month towards my car payment. Isn't it sad that society forces me to pay Ford every month just because I want my child to be safe?"

 

[GowerND11]

You're from Pennsylvania it looks like. Penn State Abington has an education program for $14,000 per year for in-state residents. That's easily achievable with part-time work, full-time work in the summer, and maybe a small student loan.


No, it isn't horrible that you have to pay back the money that you borrowed in the first place. Your appeal to emotion can be manipulated to make any point you want. "I'm a father. As a father, there's nothing more important to me than the safety and well-being of my daughter. To achieve that end, I need a safe and reliable vehicle. So I leased a brand new Ford Fusion. I'm forced to pay a good amount of my paycheck every month towards my car payment. Isn't it sad that society forces me to pay Ford every month just because I want my child to be safe?"

I worked through college. However, that money went to rent, not tuition. I went to a state school, but as I said, I got next to no financial aid. I did spend a year at Holy Cross in South Bend, and that is actually where a lot of my loans come from. I made the financial decision to transfer back home to a cheaper (albeit a better school for my major) university for my future.

My appeal to emotion comes off as I believe society owes me, but that wasn't my intention. My intention was more about how it unfortunately sucks as a teacher in America today because of the pressures and stigmas associated with the job, but make no mistake, as I said, I wouldn't want to do anything else. I'm not asking for someone to pay off my loans for me. What I'm saying is that in a lot of other Western countries there is an emphasis on education that includes paying teachers a fair salary, and not throwing money on the wall and seeing what sticks. They don't bloat the budget with massive administration salaries, etc. It just seems so ass backwards here that we want such an importance on education then wonder why we, the teachers, are paid little in comparison to our peers, and on and on.

 

[wizards8507]

My appeal to emotion comes off as I believe society owes me, but that wasn't my intention. My intention was more about how it unfortunately sucks as a teacher in America today because of the pressures and stigmas associated with the job, but make no mistake, as I said, I wouldn't want to do anything else. I'm not asking for someone to pay off my loans for me. What I'm saying is that in a lot of other Western countries there is an emphasis on education that includes paying teachers a fair salary, and not throwing money on the wall and seeing what sticks. They don't bloat the budget with massive administration salaries, etc. It just seems so ass backwards here that we want such an importance on education then wonder why we, the teachers, are paid little in comparison to our peers, and on and on.

Teachers separate themselves from their peers, not the other way around. Teachers don't want to contribute to their own retirement plans. They don't want to contribute to their own health insurance. They don't want to be compensated based on performance. They want to retire at age 55. They don't want to feel any impact from challenging economic times. That's on teachers, not the rest of us. (No, not all teachers. But the loudest ones.)

But the biggest problem comes from the lack of good-faith negotiating that many towns and states have with their teachers' unions. School boards are populated by former teachers and refuse to act in the best interest of the taxpayers, whom they're supposed to be representing. Thus, teachers often get exactly what they want with municipal governments and their taxpayers footing the bill even though they had no say in the negotiation. That's why unions work in the private sector but not in the public sector. Two opposing sides negotiating against one another can reach a mutually acceptable solution. Two colluding sides negotiating against the taxpayer do not yield market-based outcomes.

 

[Ndaccountant]

That argument is BS. I went to Notre Dame with zero out-of-pocket costs and that was 100% need-based. I graduated and paid off $65,000 in debt in three years (student loans, my car, wife's car). My starting salary was right in line with where the average MCoB student can expect to be. There are loads of options for college education regardless of what your family's income level is. Idiots who pursue advanced degrees in music performance or journalism without ever earning anything along the way are digging their own holes. The problem isn't a lack of options, it's stupid kids picking the WRONG options.

That's when happens when the narrative we give our children is about "dreaming" and "self-actualization" at the expense of "stability" and "being able to afford your own damn groceries."

Yes and no.

Some kids have no idea what they want to do when they get to college. I was one of them. I thought about zoology (vet), history (law school), finance and declared accountancy Sophomore year after a few business school classes. So, expecting a kid to know what they are going to do when they take out loans is a bit much.

I do think tuition for studies that typically pay less (teaching, social services, etc) should have a lower tuition to ensure a more proportional ROI across a given school. I also think student loan amounts after Freshman year should be based on what major you decide. Couple this and tuition value normalization, people's actions may change.

 

[wizards8507]

Yes and no.

Some kids have no idea what they want to do when they get to college. I was one of them. I thought about zoology (vet), history (law school), finance and declared accountancy Sophomore year after a few business school classes. So, expecting a kid to know what they are going to do when they take out loans is a bit much.

I do think tuition for studies that typically pay less (teaching, social services, etc) should have a lower tuition to ensure a more proportional ROI across a given school. I also think student loan amounts after Freshman year should be based on what major you decide. Couple this and tuition value normalization, people's actions may change.

If you really want people's actions to change, you eliminate federally-subsidized student loans all together. The market interest rate for an unsecured note for a 17 year old kid majoring in philosophy with no assets or income should be like 45%. Shift the demand curve left by eliminating the artificial availability of funds and prices will drop in a hurry as people start "shopping" for higher education and schools need to compete on price.

Easy Credit Is Inflating a Massive Student-Loan Bubble - Reason.com

The Reason Why College Is So Expensive Is Actually Dead Obvious - Forbes

 

[MNIrishman]

You're from Pennsylvania it looks like. Penn State Abington has an education program for $14,000 per year for in-state residents. That's easily achievable with part-time work, full-time work in the summer, and maybe a small student loan.


No, it isn't horrible that you have to pay back the money that you borrowed in the first place. Your appeal to emotion can be manipulated to make any point you want. "I'm a father. As a father, there's nothing more important to me than the safety and well-being of my daughter. To achieve that end, I need a safe and reliable vehicle. So I leased a brand new Ford Fusion. I'm forced to pay a good amount of my paycheck every month towards my car payment. Isn't it sad that society forces me to pay Ford every month just because I want my child to be safe?"

Except, for the most part, programs for teachers are very unaffordable relative to the potential salary. That's kind of bad for society, even though you dismiss it with the idea that "they should have made a more responsible career choice." Yes, there are some programs that are more affordable than others, but I somehow doubt that those programs alone can meet the demand for new teachers. I also doubt that they can provide the same education as, say, Notre Dame can. Having well-educated educators is good for society, and most superstars out of high school aren't shooting for Penn State branch campuses---nor should we expect them to.

I'm not dismissing your idea that there's personal responsibility in educational choices and financing options. I'm not happy about large quantities of state school MAs complaining about student loans either. However, I do object to your notion that education must be strictly utilitarian in order to be responsible. If everyone studied accounting, it would be a very boring world.

 

[wizards8507]

Having well-educated educators is good for society, and most superstars out of high school aren't shooting for Penn State branch campuses---nor should we expect them to.

I don't know where you went to high school, but I don't think a single one of my teachers was a "superstar out of high school." I just don't. It's a noble profession to be sure, but doesn't require the same level of intellectual heft as bio-mechanical engineering. Compensation isn't based on how righteous a profession is, but how easily someone can be trained/educated to do what you do.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Teachers separate themselves from their peers, not the other way around. Teachers don't want to contribute to their own retirement plans. They don't want to contribute to their own health insurance. They don't want to be compensated based on performance. They want to retire at age 55. They don't want to feel any impact from challenging economic times. That's on teachers, not the rest of us. (No, not all teachers. But the loudest ones.)

But the biggest problem comes from the lack of good-faith negotiating that many towns and states have with their teachers' unions. School boards are populated by former teachers and refuse to act in the best interest of the taxpayers, whom they're supposed to be representing. Thus, teachers often get exactly what they want with municipal governments and their taxpayers footing the bill even though they had no say in the negotiation. That's why unions work in the private sector but not in the public sector. Two opposing sides negotiating against one another can reach a mutually acceptable solution. Two colluding sides negotiating against the taxpayer do not yield market-based outcomes.

Teachers do contribute to their retirement. Depending on the state, they may pay around 10% of their salary toward the pension system. Many also pay a good portion of their insurance premium, though that varies widely.

The biggest fallacy in all of this is that education is market-based in nature. It's not. It can't be in a society that chooses to educate all of its citizens. For example, businesses can fire their employees when they don't produce. I cannot fire my students when they don't produce. Nor should I be able to. It's my job to teach them...no matter that they might be hungry, have debilitating anxiety issues, face physical abuse at home, or any other of a litany of issues. Then those same students' test scores are used to determine my "merit."

Most people making policy decisions about education have no idea what educators face on a daily basis. That's not on teachers.

The most depressing part for me is how you characterize teachers. Having spent the better part of 15 years in public schools, I can tell you that teachers are some of the hardest working, caring, and generous people I know. They are not wealthy (many that I know are working side jobs to make ends meet) and they did not get into teaching in order to game the system. They are being asked to do more and more for less and less. Politicians continue to disincentivize the field all while gnashing their teeth about the quality of education in the United States. You can't have it both ways.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I don't know where you went to high school, but I don't think a single one of my teachers was a "superstar out of high school." I just don't. It's a noble profession to be sure, but doesn't require the same level of intellectual heft as bio-mechanical engineering. Compensation isn't based on how righteous a profession is, but how easily someone can be trained/educated to do what you do.

Teaching is an acquired skill. A skilled teacher makes it look relatively easy. But it's not all "O Captain, My Captain."

 

[wizards8507]

Teachers do contribute to their retirement. Depending on the state, they may pay around 10% of their salary toward the pension system. Many also pay a good portion of their insurance premium, though that varies widely.

As you said, it varies by state.

The biggest fallacy in all of this is that education is market-based in nature. It's not. It can't be in a society that chooses to educate all of its citizens. For example, businesses can fire their employees when they don't produce. I cannot fire my students when they don't produce. Nor should I be able to. It's my job to teach them...no matter that they might be hungry, have debilitating anxiety issues, face physical abuse at home, or any other of a litany of issues. Then those same students' test scores are used to determine my "merit."

I never suggested that students' test scores be the metric by which merit-based compensation is measured. My boss evaluates my performance twice a year, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything so tangible as a test score. She just knows how I perform.

The most depressing part for me is how you characterize teachers. Having spent the better part of 15 years in public schools, I can tell you that teachers are some of the hardest working, caring, and generous people I know. They are not wealthy (many that I know are working side jobs to make ends meet) and they did not get into teaching in order to game the system. They are being asked to do more and more for less and less. Politicians continue to disincentivize the field all while gnashing their teeth about the quality of education in the United States. You can't have it both ways.

I get it, and have no animosity towards teachers as individuals. But all sentiment aside, being hard working, caring, and generous is not how compensation is determined. My wife is a full time mom. She's much harder working, more caring, and more generous than I am and her salary is zero dollars a year (plus benefits). Prior to that she was a zookeeper, making $20,000 per year.

Teaching is an acquired skill. A skilled teacher makes it look relatively easy. But it's not all "O Captain, My Captain."

Understood. And, to your earlier point about incentive-based compensation, a good principal or department head can identify those teachers without relying on test scores.

 

[MNIrishman]

I don't know where you went to high school, but I don't think a single one of my teachers was a "superstar out of high school." I just don't. It's a noble profession to be sure, but doesn't require the same level of intellectual heft as bio-mechanical engineering. Compensation isn't based on how righteous a profession is, but how easily someone can be trained/educated to do what you do.

I meant that, at present, most of our teachers come from more modest academic backgrounds largely because the profession generally doesn't pay that well and lacks professional clout. There is definitely a societal benefit in having educators that are a cut above the rest, especially at the high school level. But to earn that societal benefit, we must incentivize people to enter such fields.

Prior to the mid-19th century, doctors were considered to belong to a modest profession. Intelligent people didn't usually aspire to become doctors, who were generally on the order of barbers on the professional ladder. It just didn't require the same level of intellectual heft as, say, law did. Changes in society and the profession since then have dramatically lifted medicine both in prestige and effectiveness, and as a result, we have all benefited.

You can pick anyone do any job. They just might suck at it and then your profession has a low bar. If you make it more desirable, or at the very least more financially feasible so the choice to enter it isn't a vow of poverty, you'll increase the quality of work in that field. The argument "The most intelligent people don't choose education," is very circular. If we keep a system where we pay teachers less than garbagemen (true in many areas), and expect them to pay a great deal in tuition/debt for the opportunity, we can expect trashy results (puns, motherfucker).

Other developed countries have a different outlook on education as a career field, and it's a big part of why our students don't match up well to their foreign peers.

 

[Ndaccountant]

After publication, Siegel told Yahoo! News, “I had my full tuition paid all my years at Columbia,” and implied that he was borrowing for living expenses while at the school. “If I had worked full-time, I never would have finished," he said. So, while it seems accurate to say that he took out loans in order to attend grad school, it's not fair to suggest that he paid out for one of the world’s most expensive universities.

This Siegel is one massive douche. So now, after being pressed for his crappy opinion piece, he admits that it wasn't tuition that was the problem, but rather the fact that he had living expenses. Not just for four years, but also during the time acquiring his two graduate degrees. So for all those people that worked while going to school, well, that was too hard for poor Lee.

Also....this is great.

Astoundingly, Siegel never mentions, nor demonstrates that he understands, the fact that in most cases of default the government can simply start garnishing up to 15 percent of borrowers’ disposable wages directly from their paychecks. That’s more than the 10 percent they would owe if they simply signed up for the newest income-based repayment plan that the Department of Education offers. In other words, unless you’re making a political statement like the debt strikers, there is virtually no rational reason to default. And telling anybody that they should consider doing so is gross journalistic malpractice, even in an opinion piece. If anybody actually takes Siegel’s advice for a road test, the Times will have succeeded at making the world a slightly crappier place, and nothing more.

I’m not sure why Siegel doesn’t seem to recognize these issues—the word “garnish” appears nowhere in his piece—but I assume it may be because, since he’s a freelance writer, the government may have a harder time tracking down his employers and taking his pay. If so, lucky him. He found a loophole.

Anyway, according to the Times, Siegel is “writing a memoir about money.” Presumably, it will include an even lengthier rationalization of why he’s entitled to yours.

Lee Siegel New York Times op-ed: Is this the worst op-ed ever written about student loans?

 

[Wild Bill]

If you really want people's actions to change, you eliminate federally-subsidized student loans all together. The market interest rate for an unsecured note for a 17 year old kid majoring in philosophy with no assets or income should be like 45%. Shift the demand curve left by eliminating the artificial availability of funds and prices will drop in a hurry as people start "shopping" for higher education and schools need to compete on price.

I agree with you for the most part but keep in mind that student loans aren't dischargeable in a bankruptcy (generally speaking), so they enjoy far less risk than an ordinary unsecured note.

Rates are my biggest issue with student loans. Given the protection they enjoy, rates should be no more than prime plus 1%-1.5%. What are the risks? Death or the debtor somehow remains judgment proof for sixty years.

This Siegel is one massive douche. So now, after being pressed for his crappy opinion piece, he admits that it wasn't tuition that was the problem, but rather the fact that he had living expenses. Not just for four years, but also during the time acquiring his two graduate degrees. So for all those people that worked while going to school, well, that was too hard for poor Lee.

Astoundingly, Siegel never mentions, nor demonstrates that he understands, the fact that in most cases of default the government can simply start garnishing up to 15 percent of borrowers’ disposable wages directly from their paychecks. That’s more than the 10 percent they would owe if they simply signed up for the newest income-based repayment plan that the Department of Education offers. In other words, unless you’re making a political statement like the debt strikers, there is virtually no rational reason to default. And telling anybody that they should consider doing so is gross journalistic malpractice, even in an opinion piece. If anybody actually takes Siegel’s advice for a road test, the Times will have succeeded at making the world a slightly crappier place, and nothing more.

I’m not sure why Siegel doesn’t seem to recognize these issues—the word “garnish” appears nowhere in his piece—but I assume it may be because, since he’s a freelance writer, the government may have a harder time tracking down his employers and taking his pay. If so, lucky him. He found a loophole.

Anyway, according to the Times, Siegel is “writing a memoir about money.” Presumably, it will include an even lengthier rationalization of why he’s entitled to yours.

The income sensitive repayment, in my estimation, is only being used by lenders to avoid potential dischargeability in a bankruptcy. For now, in order to discharge a student loan, a debtor must prove they'd face an undue hardship if they were required to repay the debt (a very high threshold). I think they anticipated many debtors would argue repaying a large portion of their net income, let's say 20%, may be deemed an undue hardship. If you have one jurisdiction, let's say the 9th Circuit, that is making it fairly easy to discharge student loans, I think you could see a movement across the country that may prompt congress to amend the Bankruptcy Code and remove their protections altogether. They'd lose billions if it happened so this is nothing more than a smart business decision.

This Siegel is a loser, no doubt, but I'd be lying if I told you I didn't think about doing the same.

I've paid in excess of $13k a year for the last 7 years and still have about 15 years left to pay. Instead of working seven days a week as a W2 employee to earn enough income to pay for these fucking loans and all other expenses, I could simply start my own small business, manipulate my income to report next to nothing and avoid paying them a penny going forward. Hell, I'd qualify for obamacare subsidies too. Consider this, over 50% of my work day is spent earning income to pay income taxes, healthcare and student loans. All things I could avoid with smart business planning and creative accounting. The working man is a sucker.

 

[Wild Bill]

Report: Most For-Profit Colleges Started In Effort To Pay Off Own Student Debt - The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Explaining that it was one of the most lucrative options available, a report published Tuesday by the National Education Association found that most for-profit colleges were started by people in an effort to pay off their own student debt. “Many individuals who find themselves struggling to keep up with their loan payments soon discover that opening a private, revenue-driven institution of higher education is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to stay afloat,”

right on cue.

 

[Ndaccountant]

From an equity research report issued to investors by global investment banking and wealth management firm William Blair on Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE: CMG) – “Price Increases Have Begun Early in Third Quarter” (received privately):

• In our weekly survey of ten of Chipotle’s markets, we found the company implemented price increases in half of the surveyed markets this week—San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Orlando. In most markets, the price increases have been limited to beef and average about 4% on barbacoa and steak, toward the lower end of management’s expectation for a 4% to 6% price increase on beef.

• San Francisco, however, saw across-the-board price increases averaging over 10%, including 10% increases on chicken, carnitas (pork), sofritas (tofu), and vegetarian entrees along with a 14% increase on steak and barbacoa.We believe the outsized San Francisco price hike was likely because of increased minimum wages (which rose by 14% from $10.74 per hour to $12.25 on May 1) as well as scheduled minimum wage increases in future years (to $13 next year, $14 in 2017, and $15 in 2018).

Economic Lesson: TANSTAAFMWH, — “there ain’t no such thing as a free minimum wage hike.” Or to paraphrase David French, vice-president of the National Retail Federation, “There simply isn’t any magic pot of money that lets employers pay higher wages just because the government says so, without making adjustments elsewhere like cutting workers’ hours, reducing their non-cash fringe benefits, and/or passing the higher wages along to consumers in the form of higher prices.” After all, the minimum wage is not really a political problem, it’s a math problem. And the 10-14% price increases at Chipotles in San Francisco are just the new math problem now facing the restaurant chain’s customers, who’ll now be paying about $1 extra for each burrito bowl….

Who-d a-thunk it? SF minimum wage increased 14% and local Chipotles just raised prices by 10-14%? - AEI | Carpe Diem Blog » AEIdeas

 

[RDU Irish]

Chipotle is also going super organic nuts recently, might have some bearing on their rising prices. Give me a cage raised, antibiotic laden, pesticide soaked burrito joint at 20% lower prices and Chipotle is dead to me.

But yes, raising minimum wages is a fools errand.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The best thing I've read today is titled "Web Design - The First 100 Years":

Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace!

I would like to start with a parable about airplanes.

In 1981, my mother and I flew from Warsaw to New York City in this airplane, an Ilyushin-62.

The Il-62 exemplifies a Soviet design approach I like to think of as "add engines until airborne".

Soviet engineers lacked the computers to calculate all the bending and wiggling the wings would do if you hung the engines under them, so they just strapped engines on the back.

This plane actually used a little kickstand when it was parked empty, to keep it from tipping over and pointing up like a rocket.

In those days, Warsaw had maybe ten flights a day. It was a big deal to spot a plane in the sky. The airport itself was a tiny concrete building not much bigger than this conference room, so my mom and I were completely overwhelmed on arrival at JFK airport, with its maze of gates. To top it off, neither of us spoke English.

We ran around the airport, out of breath, until we finally found our way to a waiting room where other passengers were sitting and waiting for the Pan Am flight to Houston. We sat down to wait, too. And then, without warning, the waiting room took off.

That was my introduction to the Boeing 747.

The 747 is a masterpiece of industrial design. Everything we think of as normal about air travel, for better or worse, was invented for this airplane and its immediate predecessor, the 707. That includes seats on rails, overhead bins, drink trolleys, sliding window shades, the little fan above your seat—you name it.

There are so many wonderful stories about the 747. It was two and a half times bigger than the largest passenger jet ever built. They had to make a special factory to assemble it, and they were still building the factory as the first planes came off the line. They were also still tinkering with the design. Engineers would run out onto the shop floor waving amended drawings, and annoyed foremen on the production line would cuss them out.

The 747 required over 75,000 technical drawings. All of them were done by hand. There was no computer aided design to help engineers figure out how to put everything together, just a massive filing system.

Boeing had to build a full-scale plywood model of the plane from these drawings to make sure everything fit together, and that multiple systems weren't trying to occupy the same space.

My favorite fact about the 747 is that it was built by the company's B team, Boeing's version of the Bad News Bears. All the top engineers, and the ambitious up and comers, had gotten themselves assigned to Boeing's prestige project, a plane called the 2707, or supersonic transport.

The SST was going to fly at almost three times the speed of sound, about 2900 kilometers an hour. It had swing wings. And it was the first-ever widebody design. Everyone believed that the SST was the future of jet travel.

The 747 was meant to be a stopgap. It was supposed to serve the airlines until the SST entered service in the 1970's, at which point it would be demoted to a freighter.
This is a Pan Am advertisement from the period, showcasing the 'planes of tomorrow' that were 'just over the horizon'.

In fact, that famous hump on the 747 is there specifically to make it easier to load freight. This was not a plane with a glamorous future.

It wasn't just Boeing working to build an SST. The Europeans were developing the Concorde, and the Soviet Union was hard at work on their own version.

This was a giddy time for aviation. Pan Am even started taking reservations for commercial flights to the Moon! They had a waiting list with over 90,000 names.

The point of my parable is this: imagine if you could travel back in time and offer to show one of those Boeing engineers what air travel would look like in 2014, fifty years on.

What might he have expected to see?

Keep in mind that in 1965, the Gemini project had just started. Astronauts were in earth orbit, testing the technology and procedures needed for getting to the Moon. The Space Race was in full swing.

The Soviets and Europeans were both developing a giant supersonic airliner.

As this period chart shows, transportation speed was increasing at an exponential rate, and we were just about to head up that steep slope towards interstellar travel. Though the underlying technologies kept changing, the overall trend was as clear as it was unstoppable.

One thing the engineer might have expected to see in 2014 was a radioactive wasteland. The Cold War was a grim reality, and many people expected it to end in disaster.

But if we had not killed ourselves, he would have expected moon bases, maybe a Mars base. He wouldn't be surprised to see flying cars everywhere, or atomic airplanes with unlimited range.

Without question there would be routine supersonic travel at unimaginable speed and comfort between any two cities in the world.

Consider what that engineer had seen happen in his own lifetime. The first attempts at powered flight took place right around the time he was born.

In the twenties, when he was a boy, airliners like the Junkers G-24 could fly 14 passengers at 170 kph.

The 1930's brought the all-metal DC-3. It could fly 30 people at 333 kph.

That was also the era of the famous Boeing Clippers. They had luxurious sleeper berths and took six days to get from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

In the 1940's, Boeing introduced the Stratocruiser, a pressurized plane that could fly at 480 kph.

Finally, in the 50's, Boeing ushered in the Jet Age with the Boeing 707, which could cross the Atlantic ocean at nearly 1,000 kph.

I submit to you that the last thing that Boeing engineer would expect to see in 2014 is what actually happened. Here is today's most advanced passenger aircraft, the Boeing 787.

Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather.

And in fact, this revolutionary new plane flies slower than the 707.

The basic configuration of an airliner has not changed in sixty years. You have a long tube, swept wings with multiple engines mounted underneath, and a top speed of around 900 kph.

So what happened to the future?

It's not that the technology failed. We built, tested and flew giant planes that could cruise at over three times the speed of sound.

This is the Valkyrie, a massive strategic bomber painted white so that it won't catch fire from the flash of its own nuclear bombs. This plane was test flown in 1965 and nearly made it into production.

The SR-71 Blackbird, another Mach 3 plane, did make it into production, and flew for decades. It still holds all the speed records.

We even got supersonic airliners! The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across the Atlantic for 25 years. If you're my age, you may remember seeing one taxi past you at the airport.

The Russians got in on it too, with a plane derisively called the Concordeski. This proved too loud and unreliable for passenger service, so it ended up being a transport jet. It carried fruits and vegetables from Central Asia at twice the speed of sound.

My favorite line from the Wikipedia article is that the plane was so loud, "you couldn't hear the passenger two seats away from you screaming". He had to pass you a note saying "aaaaaaugh".

The first time they took journalists up on this thing, there were so many alarms going off that the pilot had to borrow a pillow from the passengers to stuff into the alarm klaxon. But it flew!

And it's not like the space program was a failure. We landed men on the Moon not once, but six times.

Because we're Americans, we didn't just put men on the moon—we put cars on the Moon, three of them.

We even had a dude play golf up there.

Our poor engineer had every right to assume that the breakthroughs he'd seen over his entire working life were on track to continue. He lived at a time of accelerating technological change, where in ten years we had gone from propeller planes to lunar exploration.

The next generation of technology was not just a dream; it was already in the prototype stage.

But it all just kind of stopped.

We have a space station in 2014, but it's too embarrassing to talk about. Sometimes we send Canadians up there.

Never mind the Moon—we can't even launch astronauts into orbit anymore. If we want to go to our sad-sack space station, we have to ask the Russians, and they're mean to us.

Can you imagine the look in that engineer's eyes?

The technology was pointing in one direction, the future was clear and inevitable. And then it never happened. Why?

First, we ran into diminishing returns. As these planes got faster, they got more expensive to design and operate. Pushing all that air out of the way required exotic materials and vast amounts of fuel.

The space program was even worse. Those rockets used a lot of public money that could be better spent on bombing Vietnam.

Second, there were unexpected drawbacks. Economists have that great word, "externalities", for anything they find doesn't fit their model of the world. One externality of supersonic planes was the sonic boom. The Air Force spent six months flying supersonic over Oklahoma City to convince itself that the constant noise bothered people.

Another externality was that exhaust from SSTs damaged the ozone layer.

Boeing was genuinely surprised that people cared about this stuff. What does it matter if the sun is coming through your shattered window and burning your skin, if you can have a supersonic airliner? But it wasn't worth it!

Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!

Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight.

The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”

Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic.

But we're running into physical and economic barriers that aren't worth crossing.

We're starting to see that putting everything online has real and troubling social costs.

And the devices we use are becoming 'good enough', to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.

So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.

Unless we screw it up.

And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.

The defining feature of our industry since the invention of the transistor has been exponential growth.

Exponential growth is one of those buzzwords that has an exact technical meaning. It just means that something keeps doubling, over and over again. Pop science authors never get tired of telling us that we have poor intuitions for exponential growth.

For example, here is Britney Gallivan posing with a sheet of paper folded 11 times.

If she could fold that sheet 50 times, the paper stack would reach nearly to the Sun. And it would be half a proton in diameter.

(It's folding that last proton that's really hard.)

This example illustrates the two things you need to know about exponential growth: it lets you get to large numbers very quickly. And it always runs into physical barriers.

I'm sure you have heard of Moore's Law. In its original form, it says "the number of transistors we can mass-produce on a silicon wafer doubles" every year or two. Moore made this observation in 1965, and it's held up ever since.
There's a popular understanding of Moore's Law, too, which says that "computers always get faster and more capable".

For fifty years we've ridden that wave. If you were active in the 1990's or 2000's, you may remember the feeling. You would buy a new computer, and a few months later there would be a better model, twice as fast, for the same price.

In those days there was an arms race between Intel and AMD, the main consumer chip manufacturers. Intel would release a 1 GHz processor, and AMD would follow with a 1.1 GHz rival.
CPUs were defined by clock speed. The speeds kept going up. Until suddenly, around 2005, there was a hitch.

Intel had been working on a monster 7 GHz chip. The problem was how much heat this chip generated, 150 watts, or as much as an E-Z Bake oven.

150 watts is the kind of light bulb that you get in trouble for having in college, because it threatens to set your Bob Marley poster on fire.

Deterred by all this heat, Intel changed strategy. Instead of making the CPUs smaller, hotter, and faster, they would just start putting more of them on each wafer.

Suddenly we had 'cores'. Your software didn't just automatically get faster with each generation anymore. Now it had to be written in a way that could use these 'cores', which programmers are still grappling with.

So while Moore's Law still technically holds—the number of transistors on a chip keeps increasing—its spirit is broken. Computers don't necessarily get faster with time. In fact, they're getting slower!

This is because we're moving from desktops to laptops, and from laptops to smartphones. Some people are threatening to move us to wristwatches.

In terms of capability, these devices are a step into the past. Compared to their desktop brethren, they have limited memory, weak processors, and barely adequate storage.

And nobody cares, because the advantages of having a portable, lightweight connected device are so great. And for the purposes of taking pictures, making calls, and surfing the internet, they've crossed the threshold of 'good enough'.

What people want from computers now is better displays, better battery life and above all, a better Internet connection.

Something similar happened with storage, where the growth rate was even faster than Moore's Law. I remember the state-of-the-art 1MB hard drive in our computer room in high school. It cost a thousand dollars.

Here's a photo of a multi-megabyte hard drive from the seventies. I like to think that the guy in the picture didn't have to put on the bunny suit, it was just what he liked to wear.

Modern hard drives are a hundred times smaller, with a hundred times the capacity, and they cost a pittance. Seagate recently released an 8TB consumer hard drive.

But again, we've chosen to go backwards by moving to solid state storage, like you find in smartphones and newer laptops. Flash storage sacrifices capacity for speed, efficiency and durability.

Or else we put our data in 'the cloud', which has vast capacity but is orders of magnitude slower.

These are the victories of good enough. This stuff is fast enough.

Intel could probably build a 20 GHz processor, just like Boeing can make a Mach 3 airliner. But they won't. There's a corrollary to Moore's law, that every time you double the number of transistors, your production costs go up. Every two years, Intel has to build a completely new factory and production line for this stuff. And the industry is turning away from super high performance, because most people don't need it.

The hardware is still improving, but it's improving along other dimensions, ones where we are already up against hard physical limits and can't use the trick of miniaturization that won us all that exponential growth.

Battery life, for example. The limits on energy density are much more severe than on processor speed. And it's really hard to make progress. So far our advances have come from making processors more efficient, not from any breakthrough in battery chemistry.

Another limit that doesn't grow exponentially is our ability to move information. There's no point in having an 8 TB hard drive if you're trying to fill it over an AT&T network. Data constraints hit us on multiple levels. There are limits on how fast cores can talk to memory, how fast the computer can talk to its peripherals, and above all how quickly computers can talk to the Internet. We can store incredible amounts of information, but we can't really move it around.

So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It's very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.

And as designers, you should be jumping up and down with relief, because hard constraints are the midwife to good design. The past couple of decades have left us with what I call an exponential hangover.

Our industry is in complete denial that the exponential sleigh ride is over. Please, we'll do anything! Optical computing, quantum computers, whatever it takes. We'll switch from silicon to whatever you want. Just don't take our toys away.
But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.

When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you're not working on the next big thing, you're nothing.

This leads to a contempt for the past. Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.

Since I run a bookmarking site for a living, I've done a little research on link rot myself. Bookmarks are different from regular URLs, because presumably anything you've bookmarked was once worth keeping. What I've learned is, about 5% of this disappears every year, at a pretty steady rate. A customer of mine just posted how 90% of what he saved in 1997 is gone. This is unfortunately typical.

We have heroic efforts like the Internet Archive to preserve stuff, but that's like burning down houses and then cheering on the fire department when it comes to save what's left inside. It's no way to run a culture. We take better care of scrap paper than we do of the early Internet, because at least we look at scrap paper before we throw it away.

This contempt for the past also ignores the reality of our industry, which is that we work almost exclusively with legacy technologies.

The operating system that runs the Internet is 45 years old.

The protocols for how devices talk to each other are 40 years old.

Even what we think of as the web is nearing its 25th birthday.

Some of what we use is downright ancient—flat panel displays were invented in 1964, the keyboard is 150 years old.

The processor that's the model for modern CPUs dates from 1976.

Even email, which everyone keeps trying to reinvent, is nearing retirement age.

I cheated by calling this talk 'Web Design: The First 100 years' because we're already nearly halfway there. However dismissive we are of this stuff, however much we insist that it will get swept away by a new generation of better technology, it stubbornly refuses to go. Our industry has deep roots in the past that we should celebrate and acknowledge.

The flip side of our disregard for the past is a love of gratuitous change. Any office worker who uses Microsoft products knows this pain. At some point fairly early on, Microsoft Office became good enough. Windows became good enough.

But that hasn't stopped Microsoft from constantly releasing new versions, and forcing people to upgrade. I pick on Microsoft because so many of us have experience with their software, but this holds true for any software vendor.

Consider the war Microsoft is waging against XP users. After years of patching, XP became a stable, beloved, and useful operating system. A quarter of desktops still run it.
This is considered a national crisis.

Rather than offer users persuasive reasons to upgrade software, vendors insist we look on upgrading as our moral duty. The idea that something might work fine the way it is has no place in tech culture.

A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat. As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable. Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. Developers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes.

We complained for years that browsers couldn't do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.

It's 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.

The web is full of these abuses, extravagant animations and so on, forever a step ahead of the hardware, waiting for it to catch up.

This exponential hangover leads to a feeling of exponential despair.

What's the point of pouring real effort into something that is going to disappear or transform in just a few months? The restless sense of excitement we feel that something new may be around the corner also brings with it a hopelessness about whatever we are working on now, and a dread that we are missing out on the next big thing.

The other part of our exponential hangover is how we build our businesses. The cult of growth denies the idea that you can build anything useful or helpful unless you're prepared to bring it to so-called "Internet scale". There's no point in opening a lemonade stand unless you're prepared to take on PepsiCo.

I always thought that things should go the other way. Once you remove the barriers of distance, there's room for all sorts of crazy niche products to find a little market online. People can eke out a living that would not be possible in the physical world. Venture capital has its place, as a useful way to fund long-shot projects, but not everything fits in that mold.

The cult of growth has led us to a sterile, centralized web. And having burned through all the easy ideas within our industry, we're convinced that it's our manifest destiny to start disrupting everyone else.

I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?"

I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive.

Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.

This is the correct vision.

The Web erases the barrier of distance between people, and it puts all of human knowledge at our fingertips. It also allows us to look at still images and videos of millions of cats, basically all of it for free, from our homes or a small device we carry in our pocket.

No one person owns it, no one person controls it, you don't need permission to use it. And the best part is, you are encouraged to contribute right back. You can post your own cat pictures.

Why is this not enough?

The feline vision of the Internet is fundamentally a humble one, because it does not presume that developers and designers know what they are doing. There are no limits on what people (and cats) can get up to once you link them together. On a planet of seven billion people and millions of cats, the chance that you are going to be able to think of all the best ideas is zero. Someone is always going to come up with something you never expected. A web that connects people in a way where they can contribute gives its authors a chance to be surprised.

We've seen this play out time and again, in that the most productive and revolutionary aspects of web culture came out of left field. The idea of a free, universally editable encyclopedia sounded insane. The idea that a free operating system could run half the Internet was insane. That volunteers in blog comments could write collaborative math papers with some of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world sounded insane.

A currency based entirely on cryptographic hashing still sounds insane, but it sure is interesting.

Even the world wide web itself is the product of a physics nerd winging it, and convincing his colleagues to try out something new.

The Internet is full of projects big and small whose defining trait is that they came out of nowhere and captured people's imaginations. It's also full of awesome cat videos. The key part of this vision is that the Internet succeeds by remaining open and participatory. No one acts as gatekeeper, and it is not just a channel for mindless consumption.

Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE

This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.

The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.

If you have spent any time using software, you might recognize this as an appalling idea. Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.

This vision holds that the Web is only a necessary first step to a brighter future. In order to fix the world with software, we have to put software hooks into people's lives. Everything must be instrumented, quantified, and networked. All devices, buildings, objects, and even our bodies must become "smart" and net-accessible.

Then we can get working on optimizing the hell out of life.

Marc Andreessen has this arresting quote, that ‘software is eating the world.’ He is happy about it. The idea is that industry after industry is going to fall at the hands of programmers who automate and rationalize it.

We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently doing taxis. We're going to move a succession of industries into the cloud, and figure out how to do them better. Whether we have the right to do this, or whether it's a good idea, are academic questions that will be rendered moot by the unstoppable forces of Progress. It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny.

To achieve this vision, we must have software intermediaries in every human interaction, and in our physical environment.

But what if after software eats the world, it turns the world to shit?

Consider how fundamentally undemocratic this vision of the Web is. Because the Web started as a technical achievement, technical people are the ones who get to call the shots. We decide how to change the world, and the rest of you have to adapt.

There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden.

Technological Utopianism has been tried before and led to some pretty bad results. There's no excuse for not studying the history of positivism, scientific Marxism and other attempts to rationalize the world, before making similar promises about what you will do with software.

Like everything in tech, there is prior art!

And then there's the third vision of the Internet:

Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION

This is the insane vision. I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. But circumstances compel me.

In this vision, the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear and are replaced, presumably, with problems beyond our current understanding.

This is the vision of 'accelerating returns', very reminiscent to that hockey stick graph I showed earlier, where we were supposed to have interstellar travel by 2010.

This Apocalyptic vision of the Internet and technical progress has captured the imaginations of some of the most influential people in our industry.

Grown adults, people who can tie their own shoes and are allowed to walk in traffic, seriously believe that we're walking a tightrope between existential risk and immortality.

Some of them are the most powerful figures in our industry, people who can call up Barack Obama about the dangers of nanotechnology, and Obama has to say “Michelle, I need to take this.”

“Barack, it is three o'clock in the morning."

“I know, but this guy is scared of sentient artificial intelligence and he's a huge contributor.”

And then Obama just has to sit there and listen to this shit.

So because powerful people in our industry read bad scifi as children, we now confront a stupid vision of the web as gateway to robot paradise.

Here's Ray Kurzweil, a man who honestly and sincerely believes he is never going to die. He works at Google. Presumably he stays at Google because he feels it advances his agenda.

Google works on some loopy stuff in between plastering the Internet with ads.

And here is Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, builder of rockets and electric cars. Musk has his suitcase packed for the robot rebellion:

“The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most.”

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

“We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

“Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

Let me give you a little context here. This little fellow is Caenorhabditis elegans , a nematode worm that has 302 neurons. The absolute state of the art in simulating intelligence is this worm. We can simulate its brain on supercomputers and get it to wiggle and react, althogh not with full fidelity.
And here I'm talking just about our ability to simulate. We don't even know where to start when it comes to teaching this virtual c. elegans to bootstrap itself into being a smarter, better nematode worm.

In fact, forget about worms—we barely have computers powerful enough to emulate the hardware of a Super Nintendo.

If you talk to anyone who does serious work in artificial intelligence (and it's significant that the people most afraid of AI and nanotech have the least experience with it) they will tell you that progress is slow and linear, just like in other scientific fields.

But since unreasonably fearful people helm our industry and have the ear of government, we have to seriously engage their stupid vision.

I've taken the liberty of illustrating Musk's greatest fear.

At best, having the the top tiers of our industry include figures who believe in fairy tales is a distraction. At worst, it promotes a kind of messianic thinking and apocalyptic Utopianism that can make people do dangerous things with all their money.

These three visions lead to radically different worlds.

If you think the Web is a way to CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS, then your job is to get the people and cats online, put a decent font on the knowledge, and then stand back and watch the magic happen.

If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There's a lot of work left to do. Really you're going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents. You promise to hook up all this stuff up for us, and in return, we give you the full details of our private lives. And we don't need to worry about people doing bad things with it, because your policy is for that not to happen.

And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go.
The future needs to get here as fast as possible, because your biological clock is ticking!

The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.

The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.

And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.

These visions are not compatible.

I realize this all sounds a little grandiose.You came here to hear about media selectors, not aviation and eschatology.

But you all need to pick a side.

Right now there's a profound sense of irreality in the tech industry. All problems are to be solved with technology, especially the ones that have been caused with previous technology. The new technologies will fix it.

We see businesses that don't produce anything and run at an astonishing loss valued in the billions of dollars.

We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other, or the needs of very busy and very rich tech workers in a tiny sliver of our world.

At the same time, we hear grandiose promises about how technology will fundamentally improve the lives of every person on Earth, even though that contradicts our own experience of the last thirty years.

There is something fishy about all this promised progress. The engine is revving faster and faster, we can see that the accelerator is pegged, but somehow the view out the window never changes.

When we point out that Silicon Valley doesn't seem to be engaging the real world, that wages have been flat for thirty years, that Utopia seems further away than it's been in a generation, we get impatient excuses.

Tech culture is like a deadbeat who lives on your basement sofa. You ask him:

“When are you going to do all those things you promised?”

“Oh, wait until everyone has a computer.”

“They do.”

“Okay, I mean wait until they're all online. ”

“They are. Why isn't the world better?”

“Well, wait until they all have smartphones... and wearable devices,” and the excuses continue.

The real answer is, technology hasn't changed the world because we haven't cared enough to change it.

There's a William Gibson quote that Tim O'Reilly likes to repeat: "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
O'Reilly takes this to mean that if we surround ourselves with the right people, it can give us a sneak peek at coming attractions.

I like to interpret this quote differently, as a call to action. Rather than waiting passively for technology to change the world, let's see how much we can do with what we already have.

Let's reclaim the web from technologists who tell us that the future they've imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.

The Web belongs to us all, and those of us in this room are going to spend the rest of our lives working there. So we need to make it our home.

We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow's technology, we used today's technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?

When I talk about a hundred years of web design, I mean it as a challenge. There's no law that says that things are guaranteed to keep getting better.

The web we have right now is beautiful. It shatters the tyranny of distance. It opens the libraries of the world to you. It gives you a way to bear witness to people half a world away, in your own words. It is full of cats. We built it by accident, yet already we're taking it for granted. We should fight to keep it!

TUMULTUOUS, SUSTAINED APPLAUSE

The formatting is odd because I copied this from what is essentially a power point presentation replete with graphics. Click through if you'd like to see some of the cool planes he refers to.

Oh, and Marc Andreesen is a real life super villain.

 

[Bogtrotter07]

I am going to re-read this for a couple of days before I try to say anything else!

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The New Atlantis' James Poulos just published an article titled "Competing to Conform":

Friedrich Nietzsche gets a bad rap, for celebrating the will to power and leaving good morals by the wayside; in growing numbers, Americans are beginning to feel the same uneasy skepticism toward the Silicon Valley moguls who have come to thoroughly dominate our economy and imagination. For critics on the left as well as the right, today’s tech titans are uncomfortably squishy, or indifferent, when it comes to partisan, ideological matters. Elon Musk sees no problem in exploiting subsidies to create transformative innovations. Jeff Bezos brings freshness to the media but uniformity to the market. Mark Zuckerberg seems as comfortable currying favor with Barack Obama as with Chris Christie.

In the age of Uber there is something about Nietzsche’s Übermensch in them all — unnerving and annoying precisely in the peculiarly American cast to their sovereign individuality. They’re not fascistic Aryan superheroes; to borrow a line from America’s first movie sequel to broach the topic, “they’re nerds, but they’re men too, sort of.” As Nietzsche knew, a democratic society like ours is supremely unlikely to produce any bona fide supermen. But supernerds? They’re multiplying like rabbits, and they’ve got an open field. Nothing can stop them; certainly not the rest of us.

According to Peter Thiel, however, that scary conclusion is false, for an even scarier reason. In interviews, speeches, and his new book of adapted college lectures, Zero to One, Thiel — the most political and theoretical of the supernerds — raises the prospect of a remarkably comprehensive failure among our best and brightest.

Nietzsche lamented that the theory of evolution idealized biological and social progress through competition, producing nothing but a mediocre majority. For Thiel, the conceptual distortions of Darwinism are deeply engrained also in today’s tech-business ethos:

Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success.

Unfortunately, says Thiel, that process doesn’t create anything really new; in fact, it plays to our most destructive instincts: “arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.” We’re banking everything on what we secretly know is an empty hope that the future will just work out on its own. Instead of focusing on how to create specific futures, we create a frantic festival of iterative progress, just adding to what’s come before. This inane competitive frenzy is more than an economy. It’s a way of life. And, says Thiel, it’s unsustainable — in ways we don’t want to admit to ourselves. Thiel’s critique, it turns out, has much in common with Nietzsche’s: Nietzsche worries that Darwinian competition breeds mediocre humans, while Thiel complains that commercial competition breeds mediocre companies. The principle of incremental success produces no true success at all; instead, it suppresses creative genius.

Zero to One is mainly “about how to build companies that create new things,” as Thiel writes in the preface. But it also contains a sharp critique of the reigning ideology of Silicon Valley that pervades the wider culture of entrepreneurs, and all the rest of us. The book thoroughly interweaves these themes: Thiel often pits his vision for startups against conventional business wisdom, and picks apart the conventional wisdom with a combination of personal experience, business analysis, and something approaching Kulturkritik. Thiel believes that America faces nothing less than a crisis in innovation — and he aims to show the way out.

Thiel begins by distinguishing between two kinds of technological progress: horizontal progress, which means “copying things that work — going from 1 to n,” and vertical progress, which means “doing new things — going from 0 to 1.” The modern world, says Thiel, “experienced relentless [vertical] technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970.” Since then, the only significant innovation has been in the realm of computers and communications. Other longed-for fruits of technology — Thiel mentions dirt-cheap energy, vacations to the moon, and four-day workweeks — have remained beyond our reach, and now we barely even desire them, constantly hunched over our smartphones as we are.

For Thiel, the crisis did not arise merely from economic causes, but also from changes in our attitudes toward innovation. An outlook that he labels “indefinite optimism” has “dominated American thinking ever since 1982, when a long bull market began and finance eclipsed engineering as the way to approach the future.” The indefinite optimist is hopeful about the future but does not make any decisive plans to get there. In the business world, this corresponds to bankers who profit from sophisticated rearrangements of capital, management consultants who grease the wheels of established companies, and startups that devise slight improvements to existing technologies. Thiel points out that many of our brightest and most ambitious college graduates flock to these industries, partly because they don’t know what to do with their lives and partly because our society lacks compelling alternatives. Indefinite optimism suffuses even the most gleaming corporate campuses of Silicon Valley, where Hewlett-Packard a few years ago shed its outdated “Invent” slogan for the ironically honest “Make it Matter,” and where Facebook now tries to devise marginally better ways to commodify its users’ private lives, though Thiel doesn’t say as much explicitly.

The problem with indefinite optimism, according to Thiel, is that no amount of it can bring meaningful technological progress. “Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum,” he writes, “but it won’t help you find the global maximum.” And with limited resources in a global economy, nothing less than the world is at stake. To find the global maximum, entrepreneurs must “transcend the daily brute struggle for survival” by building “creative monopolies” — creating markets where none exist, rather than dumping their energies into wringing the last marginal dollar of value from markets choked with belligerent competitors. For example, Google, as Thiel points out, has basically held a monopoly over Internet search since the early 2000s. For Thiel, the benefits of creative monopolies extend far beyond the companies themselves. While we typically think of monopolies as exploitative and domineering, “creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.”

Creative monopolies require what Thiel calls “definite optimism,” which involves making bold, specific plans for the future, and taking risks to fulfill them. In Thiel’s analysis, Steve Jobs, NASA’s Apollo program, and even thinkers like Karl Marx exemplify this frame of mind. Zero to One can be seen as an argument and blueprint for a definitely optimistic world at a time when people have “long since lost faith” in a better future.

Thiel’s claim that startups should try to be monopolies may be hard for some to swallow. For observers obsessed with economic inequality, it sounds like a teaching of evil. Even for casual readers, the idea seems to cut too hard against the grain of our shared intuitions.

But, Thiel suggests, perhaps that is because there is something fundamentally misleading about the intuitions we tend to develop as a group. “Madness is rare in individuals,” Thiel quotes Nietzsche near the outset of Zero to One, “but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Maybe we have been thinking wrongly about competition and monopolies for a long time. Step by step, Thiel begins to teach how to found startups capable of building the future. Although any close reader will find points of contention — Thiel will not, for instance, concede that human mortality will always define our future — the significance of his theory should overwhelm, for now, any smaller criticisms.

His views and insights are not the random harvest of a life spent at the forefront of innovation. Nor are they merely the hard-won lessons of practical business experience. As useful as those sources of commercial knowledge may be for many American careerists, Thiel offers something altogether different. Though perfectly comfortable with anecdotes and case studies, Thiel’s arguments are framed in Zero to One by his confrontation with the central problems of human nature and politics of our times. Despite the superficial dominance of the supernerds, Thiel warns, we and they labor in the debilitating glow of a new kind of cultural kryptonite. Overtly, we’re increasingly at the mercy of our technological overlords. Covertly, our social life has become crippled by something so powerful that it can render even the most promising supernerd all but powerless, to say nothing of you and me. Our kryptonite is a cosmic idea, one with which Nietzsche was all too familiar: “the people have won — or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd’ or whatever you like to call them,” Nietzsche said about the self-styled democratic free spirits. “‘The masters’ have been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won.” Nietzsche despised this mob-ification of morals. We democrats, however, fear that the supernerds are breaking free of the mob — namely, us — and our egalitarian ethos. As Francis Fukuyama put it in Our Posthuman Future (2002), “This would inevitably mean the liberation of the strong from the constraints that a belief in either God or Nature had placed on them. On the other hand, it would lead the rest of mankind to demand health and safety as the only possible goods, since all the higher goals that had once been set for them were now debunked.” Supernerds above, and what Nietzsche called “last men” below; capitalism for the best, socialism for the rest.

Fukuyama warns that this sharp a division between the metaphorical 1 and 99 percent might come about through a biotechnological revolution — something about which even the most assertive of our supernerds at Google are still cagey. Nietzsche, for his part, would add that even our most divisive institutions are all still peddling one form or another of egalitarianism: “It is the church, and not its poison, that repels us”; through it, everyone becomes a mere herd animal, and one animal is as good or bad as the other. Similarly, we could add, through the market, money is used to make everything, in theory and increasingly in practice, completely interchangeable; everything is for sale. And through the state, that “coldest of all cold monsters,” as Nietzsche called it, administrative power is used to do the same to people rather than things. Crony capitalism, on this reading, is America’s true church, the one that still holds out some hope for the meaning of individual achievement, and the one with secret attractions even for those on the outside looking resentfully in.

In a controversial 2009 essay for the website Cato Unbound, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel recounted how, in 1990s Manhattan, surrounded by supernerd colleagues in law and finance, he lived the experience Fukuyama would theorize shortly thereafter. “I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd.”

Here are the makings of an insight about democratic life that is only implicit in Tocqueville. On the one hand, Democracy in America warns of the risk of an industrial aristocracy — that is, the effective rule of supernerds through the technological mastery of commerce and business. On the other hand, it calls forth a troubling vision of each circle of close family and friends — and, eventually, each individual — relationally and psychologically delinking from strangers and neighbors alike. What Thiel seems to intuit is that these phenomena are deeply intertwined, and indeed they share a common root. Ultimately, the undoing of equal freedom and shared association cannot be blamed on greed, money, ego, or the socioeconomic system. Instead, Thiel seems to suggest that the problem is a nihilistic distemper brought on by our perceived insignificance and interchangeability. When, in real life and in theory, we see one another as hopelessly identical, our life force is channeled not into creative intentionality but a kind of competitive conformity — a well-nigh Hobbesian scramble to become a just slightly more credential-able version of everyone else. The pattern set in our earliest education continues unto death: “in exchange for doing exactly what’s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you’ll get an A,” Thiel observes in Zero to One.

Amid the literal low-grade panic this system creates, the present tyrannizes our sense of agency. We seek actionable knowledge that gives us the best chance to edge out anyone by hedging against everyone. “At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills,” Thiel writes. Convinced that our overwhelming equality in the marketplace means we have no choice but “the unjust tyranny of Chance,” we begin to see ourselves the same way we see all economic opportunities — as infinitesimal data points in an impersonal, inscrutable lottery. “And once you think that you’re playing the lottery,” writes Thiel, “you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose.” Unable to see ourselves as capable of anything more than a radically evanescent kind of human agency, the future disappears, leaving us prisoners in the present.

For those at the top of the socioeconomic food chain, this open secret inspires a silent, cynical retreat from the buffeting madness of the many who sense the problem but cannot articulate it. Why struggle in the public square to convince the world it has a future? Such things cannot be argued into effect, the way an attorney can force assent with an onslaught of rational spin. “Politics always drives one to despair, the other side of identity,” Philip Rieff once surmised. But rather than seeking refuge in a sheltering sacred order, the temptation for today’s supernerds is to pull up the ladders on their secular walled gardens. For disillusioned princes promoting means of escape from our soul-destroying edging and hedging, the cloister has given way to the VIP section, the private jet, and the yacht.

“In the face of these realities,” Thiel wrote in his 2009 Cato Unbound essay, “one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”

Escaping politics has been a dream of philosophers and hermits for millennia, and nowadays for some of the cognitive elite tempted to disappear into private utopias. But as the theorists of politics have long shown, there is no true escape from the unending struggle for power that animates politics, which may well be the ultimate form of competitive conformity. So the gospel of individual agency that Thiel preaches calls for a kind of authenticity that is beyond the reach of politics but that can never fully free itself from it. Rather than simply increasing income inequality or social immobility, the retreat of the elite accomplishes what Nietzsche called “an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.” To escape the burdens of political involvement is not to escape the rule of politics. Supernerds who suppose they have merely left the 99 percent to a political fate soon discover they have ceded the world.

It is a paradox that Nietzsche foresaw: giving the world to politics gives to politicians the chance to achieve the ultimate political ambition — “sovereign and universal [rule], not as a means in a struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general.” Beneath the frenzy of competitive conformity is a secret longing for coercive uniformity.

Thiel also steps into one of the biggest controversies of the day: the nature and consequences of “political correctness.” His comments on this subject extend directly from some of his most discerning insights about how startups can build the future by going from 0 to 1. When exploring “what kind of company to build,” he writes in the book, one key question to ask is “What secrets are people not telling you?” The secret of people with monopolies, for instance, is that “competition and capitalism are opposites.” The secret of politically correct people, he implies, is that experience in democratic life teaches almost all of us to not really want to be free.

Like most real secrets, this one is powerful — and dangerous. “Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.” That’s why, he suggests, you tell only the people that you need to, and no one else. “In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody — and that’s a company.” It might be possible to share the secret of democratic life only within a great company, which after all is “a conspiracy to change the world,” but the temptation not to be free runs so deep, and the tyranny of Chance feels so ingrained, that not even revolutionary companies appear to be enough. To reveal the secret of the politically correct, we have no choice but to risk the political.

Thiel chose to make this case in a keynote address delivered at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2014 Dinner for Western Civilization. “Properly understood,” he announced, “political correctness is an unwillingness to think for oneself, a fear of stepping outside the bounds, this incredible pressure to conform in one way or another. And this is, I think, the core problem in our universities and the core problem in our society at large.” Rather than an “enchanted forest” where time stands still, the egalitarian politics of conformity has turned society into a “desert” where we’ve been “wandering” for decades — victims of a futile quest for a future we cannot win because it never arrives.

In this, Thiel sounds more than a bit like Benjamin Constant, the nineteenth-century French liberal who decried coerced uniformity. But Constant placed more romantic faith in individuality than perhaps Nietzsche or Thiel would. Mob-ification has advanced to the point where “just being yourself” is now practically a content-free proposition. Today, Katy Perry can freely inhabit the authentic identities of motivational pop starlet and shill for Citigroup, a feat that requires endless talk of self-empowerment but zero acts of bravery.

Thiel, by contrast, insists that to be yourself requires concerted, disciplined effort, exercised over time in pursuit of greatness, not happiness. That is why he wants to debunk the narcissism coughed up by the politics of conformity as humanity’s highest goal. Cannily, Thiel refrains from explicitly describing conformism as but a means to narcissism. (In 2010, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg leveled just that accusation at Thiel himself for trying to “clone” entrepreneurs who don’t worship at the altar of a university education.) But the charge shimmers just below the surface of Thiel’s sharpest provocations. Take his unflattering comparison of hipsters to the Unabomber. With a cheeky illustration in Zero to One putting a stereotypical hipster’s hoodie and glasses beside Theodore Kaczynski’s own, Thiel’s chapter on pessimism about the future implies that self-obsession is the psychological consequence of competitive conformity. The sense of futility ingrained by hostile imitation leads us to seek significance by pretending we don’t really want to succeed. “If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista,” Thiel mockingly counsels. The politics of conformity imposes painful contradictions: its egalitarianism cannot satisfy our envy, and its individualism cannot satisfy our pride.

To escape the weight of these paradoxes, the performance of indifference becomes essential to the illusion of a distinctive identity. The self-creation promised by competitive conformity, we come to believe, can actually be found only in giving up the fight. As competition imprisons us in the uniform “now,” our agency is reduced to the agency of the actor, who creates a false present instead of a true future.

“It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge,” Nietzsche writes, “when the ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; above all, the great ‘architects’: The strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged; those with a genius for organization become scarce.”

Similarly, for Thiel, the culture and consequences of startups carry inescapable and decisive political implications. “If you get the founding moment right,” he hints, “you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distant future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success. You might even extend its founding indefinitely.” Nietzsche praised medieval Christian society for its colossal “durability (and duration is a first-rate value on earth).” Thiel observes how “companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more ‘modern.’”

Look to those of-the-moment enterprises, and their nihilistic evanescence becomes dismayingly apparent. Thiel warns that the comfortable artisanization of everything can sink quickly into custom-built conformity. Call it the Hipster Problem: a powerful culture that turns acting therapy into shopping therapy is poised to usurp the market. Today, in the one kind of perversity lost on our society of narcissists, competition breeds conformity. “We live in a world where we’re always told to compete intensely,” Thiel said in a 2014 interview with Ezra Klein. “It’s how we’re educated. It’s how so much of our system is organized. I think that if you want to compete super intensely, you should open a restaurant in D.C. There’ll be competition — but you won’t make any money or do anything.” Though it makes us “better at that which we’re competing on,” competition also “narrows our focus to beating the people around us. It distracts us from things that are more valuable or more important or more meaningful.” And in a culture where the performance of individuality is the one luxury experience accessible to all, even the most modest of artisanal toast entrepreneurs is sucked into a system where the sampling of all tastes destroys the great taste of the future.

“For what is dying out,” whispers Nietzsche, “is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them — namely, the faith that man has value and meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end he must be solid first of all, a ‘stone’ — and above all not an actor!”

Can we, in a democratic age, still be stones, not actors? Can we be individuals any longer, or are we condemned merely to perform individuality? For Thiel, the question is what it would mean today to be part of a great edifice. We have been searching since before Nietzsche’s time for the right way to (as the saying goes) “be a part of something bigger than ourselves.” And for every competing answer — conforming in accordance with race, nation, class, or History — people have died by the millions. Such is the price of man’s search for meaning.

Thiel wants better. He suggested to Klein that peaceful, productive meaning can come “from a counterfactual sense that if we weren’t working on something, this problem would not get solved.” Social entrepreneurship, suggests Thiel, is pretty good at spreading conventional goods. But “mission-oriented companies,” in addition to “doing something that transcends making money,” are “often defined by a unique mission” others may not celebrate. Instead of “copycats doing relatively similar things,” no matter how laudable, socially conscious supernerds liberated from the paradoxical cult of individuality can disappear down the boutique rabbit hole of their niche missions.

This experience is not for everyone. There are only so many unique missions to go around at any given time, no matter how many geniuses people the earth. Meanwhile, the cult of individuality fuels the essential cowardice behind the politics of conformity. “We live in a world,” Thiel told the Dinner for Western Civilization, “in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius.” As he puts it in Zero to One: “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply.”

Courage, Nietzsche knew, is inherently harder to democratize than genius. “Genius is perhaps not so rare after all,” he wrote, “but the five hundred hands it requires to tyrannize the kairos, ‘the right time,’ seizing chance by its forelock.” Rule out the twentieth century’s bloody variations on unique missions, and what do you get? A focus as narrowed as the one that competition foists equally upon us — but one that looks up and out toward a future more peaceful and more productive than competition itself can supply.

That is why Thiel’s model economy is one of serial monopolies. Rather than a plutocrat at heart, he is a theorist of courage in a democratic age. The only way to overcome competitive conformity and the cult of individuality is through bravery, directed with precision at distinct yet often unspoken human problems. To take on that task is to risk the consequences of being individually, not merely aping individuals. “Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities,” he admonishes in Zero to One, “and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.” As Shakespeare showed in Romeo and Juliet, families, companies, and people are “sure to clash on account of their sameness,” Thiel explains. Yet our combat takes the form of trying to out-imitate one another. Thiel ridicules the competitive conformity that seized the market for mobile credit card readers opened up by the startup called Square and then followed by half-moons, cylinders, and triangles. He ruefully jokes that “this Shakespearean saga won’t end until the apes run out of shapes.” (The triangle is from PayPal, the company that Thiel and Elon Musk each had a hand in creating. Evidently, it is now falling short of greatness.) To avoid the nihilistic experience of exhausting possibility, we must resist the temptation to locate our identity in imitation. For Thiel, this is the key to unlocking the sterile prison that Western civilization has far too often become for far too many.

At the dawn of Western civilization, in ancient Greece, kairos referred to a number of things, for instance, to the right time to heal a patient who would otherwise die. In Christian theology, kairos is divine time, marked by propitious but grave moments where salvation is on the line. For Nietzsche, secularized, the idea became “the great noon” — the reckoning wherein, with a shock of realization, we could either work to overcome our all-too-human frailties or assassinate our future.

Thiel, too, has his sense of kairos. Revisit his comments on our barren present. “If we are going to find a way back to the future ... the first step is to realize that we’ve been wandering in a desert for the last forty years, and the first step to get out of the desert is to realize that we’re in a desert, and not in some sort of enchanted forest.” Today’s great noon, Thiel suggests, has its fullest sense in an analogy of Biblical proportions. Without courage, we will mistake our competitive genius for a Garden of Eden. In truth, we have forgotten our destiny — and wandered, as if compelled by a punishing force, into a wilderness of our own making.

 

[Cackalacky]

You are double posting there big guy

 

[Old Man Mike]

Sort of related to this: futurists have seen for quite some time that there are few longterm scenarios possible.

1]. continue the status quo and dance our heads off until some geniuses find a way to save the elite few of us by squeezing the last juices out of the Earth and then retrieving space resources, all the while abandoning those who cannot keep up;

2]. continue the status quo without the geniuses being able to bail any of us out, thus leaving a continually shrinking quality-of-life for fewer and fewer numbers of humans protected by stronger and stronger legal and police powers;

3]. continue the status quo without the geniuses being able to bail us out and not having enough police or legal power to protect even the wealthy, leading to ubiquitous violence and unproductive destruction;

4]. an awakening of decision-makers capable of taking strong actions whether the dancers want those actions or not, creating a forced change of direction in profoundly different ways [half-@ssed action won't work well enough];

..... all these scenarios assume that the majority of the American consumer-oriented population will continue to be incapable of assessing what true peace and accomplishment and happiness and the value of community, friendships, wholeness-in-nature are all about, and cannot feel anything but the noise and speed of the Dance.

There has been a fifth scenario about in futurist literature for a long time also. It is called The Green Rain. It admits that the majority of manipulated Americans will continue to dance the destructive Dance, but that pockets of individuals, some driven by necessity and some by spiritual/moral insight, will slowly extract themselves as much as possible from The Dance and begin to live based upon a new-but-old set of values.

As the escalator of the Dance rolls "upwards" to whatever end awaits the people on it, the people of the Green Rain step off the escalator --- raining a green mist of alternate sustainable and much more locally-sufficient living. THIS is the "New" way of living that the writer above should be calling for, not just some zero-to-one novelty for the sake of genuinely new toys that the dancers "must have."

The people of the Green Rain hope that their example inspires a harder rain, but are not usually too optimistic about that. Other than that, they hope that the Masters of power and economy [same thing] find a way to slowly [literally] let their dancer-consumers down, so as to create as little chaos and confusion violence as possible. ... at least for a while then the people of the Green Rain can fade mysteriously into a semi-hidden local if not totally-alternative economy and go about their peaceful, community-oriented, and spiritual lives.

Their 'innovations" will be mental-spiritual realizations about what it means to live a purposeful worthy life.

 

[wizards8507]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/29/opinion/show-some-spine-federal-reserve.html

The case for raising rates is straightforward: Like any commodity, the price of borrowing money — interest rates — should be determined by supply and demand, not by manipulation by a market behemoth. Essentially, the clever Q.E. program caused a widespread mispricing of risk, deluding investors into underestimating the risk of various financial assets they were buying.

 

[wizards8507]

The upper middle class is ruining all that is great about America.