This article, while somewhat old, does a great job of discussing just how shallow that 100-year "achievement" really is. We may live near each other, but that doesn't mean we interact in non-superficial ways.
My guess is the lack of adequate revenues that lead to real profits. Last I read, Facebook was breaking even. As they grow toward a billion users, I imagine those costs will rise. This is fine if ad revenues can keep up, but last I checked their average CTR was less than half a percent.
Facebook is odd in that it improves on a previous solution (communication tools: mail, phone, cellphones), but doesn't charge for the utility it brings.
While this isn't the first time wikileaks has been in the news, am I the only one that sees a problem with people's seeming interest in awarding this to whatever person is in the news closest to the time of the reveal?
Wikileaks has been in the public conscious for maybe a month (combined) this entire year. Regardless of your politics, you have to admit the Tea Party has been ever-present and incredibly effective at changing the makeup of our government and getting their message out. I don't see how wikileaks has that same (perceived) effect on everyday Americans' lives.
Sounds nice at first but if Google can afford to hire the most experienced, why would they do something that goes against their bottom line?
From what I've seen, you've got a lot of developers commanding 60-80k salaries. From a startup perspective, I don't really understand why this is the only acceptable path.
It just seems smarter to locate near some technical colleges in cities that have a lower cost of living, and pay entry level developers a salary between 35-45k to start. As they improve their skills, you up their salary... assuming that improvement comes with an increase in revenues/profits.
Google actually hires a large number of junior-to-midrange engineers and trains them up. Average age at Google is something like 28; a large number of Google engineers have never worked anywhere but Google.
At that level, they hire for aptitude, not experience. The $60-80K that Google pays for beginning hires is on the anticipation that after training, they'll be worth at least that much, and Google can retain them long enough for them to make it back. It's fairly common knowledge that a new Google engineer won't be productive for 6-8 months at least.
The risk that a startup runs by paying $35-45K is that they'll get people with lower aptitude who'll never turn into experienced engineers. That's a pretty big financial risk to take, particularly for a startup with much less runway than Google.
So your choice is pay 80-90k salary to somebody who will contribute $M to your bottom line (Google earnings/employee are incredible) or pay $35-45K for sombody who will just tie up your other programmers fixing their bugs
Raising children can be tough, but 60 hours of housework per week? In my house there's maybe 1-2 hours of cooking for dinner everyday and maybe 5 hours of cleanup on Saturday morning (this includes cleaning bathrooms, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, etc.). Laundry takes 10 minutes to separate, then the machines pretty much do the rest of the job. Laundry gets done once a week for a family of four here for another 2-3 hours.
Maxing all those values, that's what, 22 hours? Where are the other 38 coming from?
ETA: I'm not being facetious here, I genuinely want to know what those hours are being spent on. When you have very young children, sure, but by 6/7 kids in my family are expected to start being self-sufficient (in the ways they can, such as picking up their toys, brushing their own teeth). By the time you hit 10, you've been doing some serious work around the house. I also got my first job at 14...
Depends on the age of the child. With an infant you're changing 7 diapers per day, feeding 6 times per day. Also you forgot making breakfast (7 days/week), lunch on the weekends (although many husbands take a bag lunch, so the wife makes that too) and 7 days/week for the kids. Dishes (and if you have kids you probably know that a lot of stuff needs to be handwashed).
Additionally there is bathing the child. Once they get teeth and hair, brushing their hair, and brushing their teeth twice per day.
Also grocery shopping. Clothes shopping. Random nicknack shopping. Going anywhere out of the house takes an extra 10 minutes on top of how long it normally takes, with the car seats and grocery carts.
When children get older, 2-5, you don't have the diapers, but you have potty training, which takes forever (and sometimes results in 3 baths per day). Also the bedtime routine (which can be an hour per day for nap and nighttime).
Then there's random stuff like dentist visits for the child. Doctor's visits for the child.
And then there's just teaching the child. Teach the child how to eat for themself. How to pick up their toys, taking them to the park or on playdates.
And this assumes you have a pretty troublefree kid. Add relatively common complicators like a kid who is collicky or has food allergies (which often means a span of a few months with a lot of trips to the hospital) or has GURD and there's more time there.
I don't know how many more hours this stuff. I suspect it is highly variable. And if you have four kids, it's probably a lot different than one. But if someone told me they were working 60 hours per week taking care of a household with kids age 0 to 6, I'd believe them.
Once children go to school fulltime, things change quite a bit. But I think most people are referring to the period of time when they have to take care of the kids.
Raising children can be tough, but 60 hours of housework per week?
That statistic comes from the book "More Work for Mother" which is the history of "labor saving" devices and their impact on housework (short version: labor saving devices have generally led to increased expectations for quality, not actual reduction in hours spent on housework). IIRC, 60 hours per week has been a stable figure for roughly 300 years so it probably hasn't changed much since I read the book.
I don't doubt that there are exceptions. I've certainly rearranged my life to eliminate as much housework as possible.
There is no pipeline. I see lots of comments about how entry level developers are useless. No one wants to train the next gen of developers, so companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pool of people.
The only way to get any experience seems to be to start your own company. Which is great for the person who goes off and does it, but not smart for the company trying to hire them.
If employers don't want to waste money investing in entry-level positions, why waste it investing in someone who has made it clear they want to work for themselves?
I'm sorry but this idea that you get a pass for drug dealing and misogynistic lyrics because you are black and from a poor background needs to just die.
There are options that don't involve poisoning the very community you claim to care about through drugs and promoting a lifestyle/"profession" that can get someone killed or sent to jail.
What I meant and what you appear to be ascribing to me are separated by such a wide gulf that I must have communicated very poorly, indeed.
I am not saying anybody gets a pass for anything.
I am saying that the comment above has simply substituted a set of new rules for when someone can be praised (e.g. "you can't have ever been a drug dealer") in place of the old ones (e.g. "you can't be black") with the same puritanical intent of undermining anything the target of the criticism might have actually accomplished.
It's tempting to think that this acts as a filter, keeping the riff-raff out of the pantheon of saints, but in practice it only rewards large-scale ignorance, subterfuge, and mythologizing.
Jay-Z promotes ambition, through whatever means necessary.
Lots of things get people killed and/or sent to jail.
Zuckerberg profits off the millions of college students "dumb enough" to waste their precious time "socializing" instead of studying like our society says they should. And don't forget the videos of myspace obsessed children and the like, I'm sure there are people out there who have died of social media related things, it's just not as easily attributed as a cause of death.
Similarly Jay-Z just happened to profit from people "dumb enough" to buy the drugs he sold. It was an opportunity, and he capitalized on it.
You have to work with what you got. It's just the way the world works. I'm pretty sure if you put Zuckerberg in the hood, he'd turn out to be a dealer and give Jay-Z computers in his childhood and he'd probably be a hacker. It's a combination of the ambitious troublemaker personality with the environment that makes what these people have become.
In a sense, you could say Jay hacked the coke game, and was smart(lucky?) enough to get out before he got into too much trouble.
I agree, we shouldn't look up to Zuckerberg either. Both are doing rather slimy and morally questionable things, and I would argue that we should find both of them distasteful.
What's entertainment for a lot of Jay-Z's listeners is more like a guidebook for far too many young black men (and the women who chase men like him). I personally like rap and know that if you dig deeper into many of Jay-Z's songs, you'll find more substance, but that doesn't negate the fact that he has a far more negative than positive influence on people who need all the positive role models they can get.
I upvoted the comment above yours because I see his (and other rappers) influence firsthand among friends and family members and it's really very depressing. Sometimes I don't know how I justify listening to his music...
There are very few perfect role models. I would argue that the best roles models are the ones who made mistakes, learned from them and then kept moving forward.
People also tend to hear themselves in music. They hear the parts they relate with and block out the parts they don't. I hear Jay-Z and hear a story about a kid who had nothing, did what he had to do to survive and kept working till he made it. You don't even have to go that deep into his tracks to start getting a lot of good motivational lyrics. He has an entire song (with some Notorious Big dubbed in) talking about never getting lazy to keep working and 'treat your last like your first.'
Why is it that so many entrepreneurs find his lyrics inspiring and focus on his positive change- and "many young black men" see his reference to his past as a "guidebook"? The answer is because his art is subjective.
He does obviously have a responsibility to make sure he is a positive role model; but the fact that his lyrics very clearly reference his past in relation to his present- makes me wonder why anyone would focus their energy on emulating his past when they can see the success his positive ambition has brought him.
Lastly, can you cite your sample of "many young black men"? Does this source also include the amount of young black men who were inspired by his lyrics to overcome?
No, the answer is NOT that art is subjective. I don't think it can be boiled down that easily, but if I were to try and answer succinctly, I would say the difference is there because black people, specifically African Americans, live in a culturally parallel America where there are different rules about what is and isn't acceptable. There is intense pressure on Black men to be "hard" and the way to express that is usually laid out in song.
I actually DON'T think it's his responsibility to be a role model. BUT I think it's wrong to glorify his success without saying something about the path he walked/walks to obtain it. He is 40-something and STILL writing lyrics about selling drugs.
As for citing examples, I'm sorry, I haven't been keeping a running log of the number of funerals I've been to, the guys I've known who've gotten shot, the women (including myself) who've been physically harassed by guys trying to re-enact the latest video, the children who are lost to drug addicted parents, and every other societal ramification that comes from supporting hip hop culture without qualifying/recognizing the damage it does to the black community. I live it, I think that's enough.
"There is intense pressure on Black men to be "hard" and the way to express that is usually laid out in song."
I understand this, and it is also exactly my point. I have not been exposed to the elements that really any impoverished America (or wherever) faces. This is why I'm not affected in such a negative way if I listen to Jay-Z. The fact that there is differentiation at all is what makes it subjective.
Rereading my post; I could have been more clear. I absolutely did not intend to suggest that the subjectivity was the reason for the pressures of any different cultures. I am suggesting that these pressures where the reason for the emulation.
Which is obviously unfortunate, but I don't believe his fault. There are lots of pressures encouraging black males to be hard, I just don't think Jay-Z is one of them. Even compared to other relatively tame mainstream rappers (say, 50 cent).
If I can make a relevant reference (sometimes I cannot): consider any artist who has ever been scrutinized for the "negativity" of their production.
If I can make a relevant analogy (sometimes I cannot): "lessons learned".
1. If you don't already have familiarity with HTML and CSS, learn those first. I recommend a book called Learning Web Design: http://www.learningwebdesign.com/
It teaches like a math book, with practice problems after each lesson.
2. Pick a language to learn. I had a C++ background that I hadn't touched since high school, so I found Ruby a little confusing. But it may also be because of the teaching style of the books I used...
3. Going through both of these will probably take you 2-3 months if you're diligent. But once you're halfway through the second book, I'd say you know enough to start building something and using the PHP book as a reference.
What you'll find is that as you build things, you will learn a lot more about how to make your app come together.
Also, I disagree with the comment that it takes years to be able to do something decent with your newfound programming knowledge. Yes, it will take years before you can talk shop with the best of them, but as someone who has taken several languages (Spanish, Japanese, Latin) and played several instruments (piano, flute), I know it doesn't have take years to get past doing scales.
That's has more to do with ability to learn quickly and dedication.
Had this article been written by a man, people would zero in immediately on Penelope's real issue:
She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.
She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.
I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.
Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/200810/devin-frie...
This article, while somewhat old, does a great job of discussing just how shallow that 100-year "achievement" really is. We may live near each other, but that doesn't mean we interact in non-superficial ways.