HN user
This is a horrible idea. The Panglossianism that will result from this is indicative of the bubble hype which will destroy Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator and Hacker News. In fact, this is the worst idea I ever heard in my life.
So continues the descent of HN...
This reminds me of Javed Iqbal, an American satellite dish repairman who was thrown in jail for allowing Americans access (Hezbollah and supposedly Iran backed) Al-Manar television.
Actually the article from NPR, a station often described as liberal, doesn't seem all that incredulous over it happening when the shoe's on the other foot. Headline: "N.Y. Man Charged with Aiding Hezbollah TV Channel". First sentence: "This past week, the Department of Justice charged a New York City man for aiding a terrorist organization.". Geez, to the average American it starts making it sound like he did something wrong and kind of deserves to be in jail. I guess Iranians feel the same way with their guy.
Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have been wasted on a very, very undeserving person.
Wow, he hacked into some corporation's computers, that's just so awful. Pacific Bell - a shady monopoly who is granted a monopoly by the government, and in return showers politicians with bribes, I mean donations, and sends our calls and web history off to the NSA for monitoring and permanent storage.
in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically
In reality, he has been doing security consultations for corporations, so he has already been co-opted. "The service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end 'zero-day' exploits". That doesn't really smell of rebel. Of course, everyone has to grow up and make a living.
I can think of a number of IT companies that were founded in the past 20 years, sold for billions of dollars, or worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars, that were founded by ex-hackers, or at least people very associated with the hacker scene and whose first technical hires were ex-hackers. It's mentioned in the tech press, in interviews, in blogs etc. It's easy enough to look up if you want to. I mean, one of YC's founders is rtm, and he was around back in Viaweb days.
It's difficult for me to perceive of a modern working class kid interested in technology today, it seems he has more resources at his disposable (although not many - a dinky Vic 20 booted people right into a programming environment, whereas a kid with an iPad and iPhone today would find it very difficult to program his own device - it is pretty much that definition of an embedded system of a device that can't program itself). Back in the 1980's a working class kid with a Vic 20 and 300 baud modem could only call people locally, call local BBS's, and be stuck with poor computing power.
If he hacked and phreaked, he could call around the country, access teleconferences, call BBS's around the country, access powerful Unix, Vax/VMS etc. systems, access the Internet, access x.25 networks and x.25 chat networks in Europe etc. He could follow the law and accept his straitjacket of being designated by the Relations of Production to be one who works a menial job, and for the privilege of being allowed to work he can kick up his expropriated surplus labor work time to the idle class job creator heirs who own his company. Or he can bend the rules, see new vistas, and somewhere down the line maybe co-found a billion dollar company, or a hundred billion dollar company. Then he, or his apologists like you, can then go around complaining about the kids hacking into his company's computers.
I know nothing of your family, deduce nothing about them and have nothing to say about them.
However younger people often have little or no idea what happened before them. Perhaps among the aunts and uncles of a family, an older brother or sister sacrificed for years working at a dead-end job in order to put a younger brother through college. Then as things work, the younger brother moves across the country has some success, and the older brother is working in a dead-end job. This was the story in "It's A Wonderful Life" 60 years ago and the story wasn't new then.
Then they have kids - the better-off ones go to a private prep school, the ones of the guy who sacrificed go to public schools. The children don't even know everything about how one brother sacrificed his potentiality and even to some extent his children's potentiality for the other brother. Some kids go to Ivy League schools, have great financial success, and develop a conceited attitude. The sacrificer's kids might not even be able to go to college.
If you look at the Forbes 400 richest list with tech CEO's, we see Bill Gates, who was born with a million dollar trust fund, Larry Page, whose father was a professor, Mark Zuckerberg, who went to Phillips Exeter Academy etc. These are are all white, male people born on third base, or at least second base. You look at Silicon Valley CEO's and you see people whose success was shaped to a large extent before they were born. Why have they succeeded whereas some black kid, whose family moved from Mississippi to Oakland in 1947, did not? Or maybe some Ohlone's whose families "owned" large tracts of lands in the Bay Area before whites came and stole it?
It's a self-serving narrative that people succeed solely due to initiative, hard work, flexibility etc. Are white males from upper middle class families the only people who possess these traits? Of course for the self-serving narrative to be tautological, there will always be murmurs among those people that that is so. Of course once in a while a white woman from an upper class familiy will slip through, or someone from a wealthy Brahmin immigrant family, but that should go without saying.
If one brother sacrifices in a family so that another can have success, the successful person will often have a wife and kids with a vain attitude that they're better than the sacrificer and his family. The repayment for the sacrifice is contempt that they're now better than the sacrificer, and that the poorer family has some innate flaws, are uncouth and so forth. If they feel some resentment toward that, they go on HN and whine how their family resents them driving around in a flashy sports car. The only real excuse the golden child has is he has no knowledge of what went on in the years before he was born.
I know a few (computer-interested) people who went to expensive private prep schools as their families are rich. They really live in a complete bubble. In the documentary "Born Rich", one of the rich kids talks about how much of a bubble his parents live in when he introduced his normal, middle class friend to them and they ask him "where did you summer last year?" This is certainly the case, these people have no idea how the average American worker lives. It's kind of like Mitt Romney, whose father was a CEO and who went to the exclusive Cranbrook prep school blathering on how 47% of Americans are dependents who see themselves as victims. Americans were smart enough to throw him to the curb. These people who are born to the manor, and who live off the wealth they expropriate from the workers who create that wealth, are ever increasingly disconnected from the real world and reality. Why shouldn't they hold themselves in ever high regard? Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette did in the years before they wer
If you're itching to start something new, why chase the nth iteration of a company already serving the young, privileged, liberal jetsetter?
Because those are the projects which angels and VCs bankroll. Because those are the people who have disposable cash.
I was just reading an article on a conservative web site, actually one run by Ben Horowitz's father ( http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/cbs-colbert-and... ). It talks about how TV doesn't care about older viewers, rural viewers, and increasingly only cares about young professionals on both coasts, and how television programming is being focused on such people. Not sure how true it is but it makes sense.
Audre Lorde once said that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and capitalism is not going to solve the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, other than by imploding, as so many economic systems before have done (feudalism, slavery, primitive communism).
Also, anyone who has done work organizing working class people knows the solution is not for a genius from MIT to swoop in with some corporation to try to fix problems wrought by corporations. You see what is possible and organize around that. The American white working class once had power, and it chose to send bombers north of the Yalu river, support a war in Vietnam, on and on up to modern day with Obama's support of the Honduran's military overthrow of Honduras's democracy etc. The AFL-CIO saw it's steepest decline under someone who never worked or ran a union, but was involved undermining foreign unions in cahoots with the CIA and American big business. And on and on. Now they go down to fundamentalist churches and watch Fox News as they age, and slowly become a minority in their own country. Empowering white, blue collar Americans gave us No Gun Ri and My Lai. Thanks, I'll pass. I'm glad to see the sun setting on the white American working class.
Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense.
The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.
It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.
The article has a tweet from someone who says:
what about the fact that 170 people died in Homs on July 19th? any mention about those "Atrocious Actions"? no. antisemite.
One reason to mention what is going on in Gaza and not in Syria is that US voters/taxpayers are financing, directly or indirectly, what is going on in Gaza. The Ron Reiter's of the world want me as a worker and taxpayer to bankroll his country. Then if I have a critical word for what his country does with the money, say I do something outrageous in his mind like quote what the head of the UN says about it, then I'm an anti-semite.
Shut down AIPAC and stop having them tax my money to send to Israel, and my criticism of Israel will subside. These people bite the hand that feeds them.
Someone telling me I need the strength to love God is not someone who is making a rational argument to counter. I can't even conceive of how to address the "argument" that I'm weak because I don't love this deity who he seems to be high on.
There is no argument to address. He is not someone with an AEI hat on talking about monetary policy or trade agreements or so forth, he is jabbering on about how I should live my life, what my values should be, dressed up with a lot of superstitious hokum.
The author is the president of the American Enterprise Insititute. AEI's board are the CEO's of ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical etc. Including the CEO of Enron until he was ousted. They are bankrolled by Ford, GE, Chrysler, AT&T etc.
What is his message to us?
"when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery"..."People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed"..."the moral snares of materialism"..."it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires"
The majority shareholders of the companies bankrolling his institute own the lion's share of this country's stocks, bonds and other assets, and are continually at war with the workers in the company's they own so that a larger lion's share of money coming in goes to profits and not wages.
So of course in this zero-sum game, the parasitical side is going to tell the workers, the wealth creating side, that they should not be too concerned with money, that wealth isn't everything, that uneasy lay the head that wears the crown, and all this other nonsense. They used to have priests and reverends dress up these ideas with superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but nowadays more people are smart enough to see through that BS ( although he does talk about "Saint" Paul, the Dalai Lama, Buddha, the Love of God ).
This crook is so full of hubris, he wants to lecture me on how to live a better life - that being that I should ask for a smaller piece of the pie that I work to create, and perhaps instead dwell on "the strength to love others - [...] God", the thoughts of "Saint" Paul and other nonsense.
Why doesn't he tell his contributors to stop employing psychologists and Madison Avenue to try to figure out how best to create conspicuous consumption so that people will buy the commodities they're pumping out. The advertising business is one of the biggest forces out there trying to tell people life is more enjoyable if certain commodities are purchased, and he is at the center of that world. He likes quoting the bible? Try Matthew 7:
"Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
You quote exactly what I am talking about from Wealth of Nations. How is the "support of domestic to that of foreign industry" free trade in modern parlance? That is protectionism. Your paraphrase echoes what I am saying as well. The modern conception of the invisible hand is not one which leads to tariffs and protectionism, but international free trade. This is the opposite of what he said though.
This article goes over much of what happens, but seems to have missed the point of things.
It talks about how the mango went to some backwoods provinces of China - probably not electrified, where a farmer would be considered well-off if they owned a single animal - and how some had superstitious thoughts about it. How is that any different than the uproar we see in the rural US about biology and Darwin being taught in schools, since it contradicts some bizarre superstitions they have out there? In 2009 one of these rural religious types shot dead Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, as Bill O'Reilly and others were on the radio and television talking about how Tiller was the tool of the Devil. 1960s China is played up as being all crazy in this article, in contrast to what I assume would be a sane, modern US. The reality is rural idiocy, class resentments and so forth exist in both places at both times.
I also think the point about the mangoes is missed. It would be like saying an American flag displayed in a political demonstration was worshipped, or some doves let free during a peace demonstration were worshipped, or the CND peace symbol displayed during an anti-war demonstration was worshipped. The mangoes represented an end to much of the strife of the Cultural Revolution, and were understood as such. Most of the militant students were sent off to live in the countryside for a year or two, to cool them down and get them acquainted with the realities of the country. The mangoes represented peace, an end of strife, most people in Beijing understood it in this way, and did see them as a positive symbol. This either escaped the writer, or they are writing the same kind of propaganda they're accusing the Chinese of writing.
Dogma has penetrated very deep. If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations.
Nowadays, 99% of the time people use his term the exact opposite way. They say it is a hand that gently guides merchants from different nations to trade with one another within a free market, and that such thing. They have twisted his term to mean the exact opposite of how Smith intended it.
Through the years that he has been at the California Institute of Technology (REDACTED) he has in my opinion made a definite point of knowing well and cultivating such persons as the president of California Institute of Technology, the dean of the school of physics, department heads (including REDACTED and Linus Pauling), regents of California Institute of Technology, as well as REDACTED.
Well it shouldn't be too much detective work to figure out what Caltech department head Feynman was buddy buddy with other than Pauling. They seemed to feel need to redact the name for some reason.
From all of the references to Caltech implying a personal knowledge of the school, to the continual references to Feynman being a religious skeptic and critical of Republicans, I'd guess this letter was written by a conservative working at Caltech. It would make sense in terms of the initial FBI contact, the acquaintanceship but not friendship with Feynman etc.
I am confusing nothing. Israel claims the West Bank is part of Israel, and with IDF troops marching through the West Bank and settlements popping up everywhere, it is de facto Israel, and according to Israel, de jure Israel.
Can an Arab in the West Bank vote in the Israeli elections? No. Thus, Israel is not a democracy. The article questioned if Islam was conducive to democracy. On that basis, we have to question whether Judaism is conducive to democracy. Meir Kahane did not think it was, and his policies are what are being carried out on the West Bank.
"Palestinians voted for their own leadership". What does this mean? Can they vote for MPs in the Israeli Knesset? No. Can they vote for representation in a country that Israel or the US recognizes? No.
You moved to Australia. Arabs have been living in Jericho for thousands of years. Yet they are not allowed to vote for any government of a country recognized by Israel or the US. Yet an ultraorthodox Russian off the plane from Russia in a new settlement next to Jericho can vote in the Israeli election. People in the West Bank were invaded in an offensive war in 1967 and stripped of their rights. You moving to Australia was your choice. They had no choice.
While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak.
The Western countries and Israel have been doing everything they can for the past century to keep Arab democracy weak.
In the soi disant "only democracy in the Middle East", the West bank, claimed by Israel, where ultraorthodox right off the plane from Russia can go to a West Bank settlement to vote, but in which Palestinians who have been there for thousands of years can not vote for any government which Israel or the US recognizes - why not let the Palestinians vote? Israel is no democracy - they claim the West Bank is Israel, in a defacto sense it is, and they do not let Arabs vote. We see the contemplation of Islam causing problems, why don't we look at Judaism in the same manner in how it is against democracy? Meir Kahane said as much himself, and his policies have been running Israel, and the US and European backing of Israel for the past years.
Meanwhile the US and UK destroyed Iranian democracy, its parliament, Mossadegh, and installed a dictator whose CIA-backed secret police arrested, tortured and killed those who wanted a return to democracy. We had France, the UK and Israel invade Egypt in 1956, and on and on and on.
The economic and military might of the west and Israel has been fighting autonomy and democracy in the Middle East for a century, and will continue to in the next century.
Despite this, as we can see the beginnings of in the Arab Spring, as well as a history rooted in pan-Arab nationalism, in the years to come Arabs will see themselves freed from the shackles of imperialism and Zionism, and restore power in the the Middle East to the people of the Middle East.
Some of the figures Altman gives are important. There are some more:
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...
If you read that article and consult the (mostly government) sources, you'll see:
* It's not just government debt that is high - household, business, and especially financial debt is high
* The financial sector has been growing much faster than the "real" economy
* Less and less of the GDP goes to consumers in wages and salaries
* Industrial capacity utilization goes down and down and down (so why invest in new capital?)
* Since the 1980s, profits have been an increasing share of GDP, while investment has been going down
Macroeconomic collapse on the scale (or greater then) it happened in the 1930s will, I believe, inevitably happen.
What promising idea is that, making a business on the basis of ignoring the laws of the municipalities your business is in, or having the drivers, who were in business before Uber and will be in business after Uber, do all the work and wealth creation while some startup and its VCs and its VCs LP's parasitically suck up profits from all that labor?
In a country with little or no place to gather for the free expression of ideas and no place to talk politics without fear of repression
Edward Snowden revealed that the USA was monitoring its citizens and storing that data in a way that far outstrips anything the KGB was ever capable of. Should he fear repression? He should, the government wants to lock him up and throw away the key for revealing this, just like they did to Manning for what he revealed. Actually, NPR spends most of its time bashing Snowden.
They seem gaga for dissidence in some foreign country, in a government that hasn't existed for over two decades though.
* Argentinian workers begin organizing, get better pay, get Argentinian resources into hands of Argentinian people * CIA and US military help organize a coup, help kill off opposition to dictatorship * Dictatorship loads on tons of debt * Decades later, US international powers invoked to force Argentinian people to pay off debts incurred by the dictator who the CIA and US military imposed on them
And people wonder why Saudi nationalists flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center...
I take this with a grain of salt. You have a security business trying to drum up business, anonymous NSA sources etc. I take the indictment of the five with a grain of salt as well - it very conveniently comes just when US corporations are getting flak around the world about how the US government spies and steals trade secrets via the commodities US corporations are trying to sell.
If you look at espionage over the past century, the James Bond concept is it is countries wanting to get the US military's secret plans. The reality is it is overwhelmingly industrial espionage. Countries behind the curve want to catch up to the industrial power on the bleeding edge. Even the atomic espionage in the 1940s, which was more military, followed this same pattern of wanting to keep up with the US.
One reason I take all this with a grain of salt is Chinese espionage is a little more subtle than western espionage. In the US/USSR spy vs. spy there were dead drops, honey traps, microfilm and all of that. In some ways Chinese espionage hasn't changed much in thousands of years. They get a tiny bit of information from a wide variety of different sources. Then they take all the information and put it together. It's kind of hard to point the finger at someone and say they are a spy since the information given never seems all that much. Of course there are exceptions but this is how it's usually done. You don't find pretty redheads like Anna Chapman sneaking into the country.
Well the existence of the UK is what erected a border between the 6 north counties of Ireland and the 26 south counties of Ireland. So what might remove some borders is a weakening of the United Kingdom.
First world problems.
Decades from now, under a portrait of Lenin, this article will be one of the readings of the lesson in a social studies class.
I wonder if the bags manufactured in US prisons ever have notes slipped into them. You don't have to go to Saks, you can buy them online -
http://www.iaprisonind.com/store/c/31-Plastic-Bags.aspx http://www.iaprisonind.com/store/c/77-Miscellany.aspx
Oh yaa, he says he's not guilty. I'm sure it would be hard to find a prisoner in a US prison who says he's not guilty.
In fact some judges in the US freelance in sending innocent people to jail, in exchange for the kickbacks they get - http://articles.philly.com/2014-02-05/news/47009400_1_ciavar...
Americans just love moralizing and pointing their fingers at other countries for the exact same things they do.
One thing people tend to forget is China lucked out in some ways by 9/11. On April 1st, 2001, less than three months after Bush became president, he sent a US plane to the Chinese border, it rammed into a Chinese pilot's plane, killing him, then landed on Chinese soil without permission. Then the US government and press went crazy because the Chinese went in to inspect the plane. Continual press reports about how "we can see with satellites them looking at our plane and technology".
Luckily for the Chinese, all this warmongering ended five months later when the guy who the US armed to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government crashed into the Pentagon etc. because he opposed US bases on Saudi soil.
In all the mawkish tributes to the dead in the Pentagon and changed focus to Afghanistan and the Middle East, the Chinese got about a decade's breathing room from US imperialism. Of course the US is now redeploying to the Philippines and so forth, so that is changing again.
Here are some of those peaceful people you were talking about in Beijing - a soldier bloodied by the peaceful crowds beating, a soldier beaten to death by the peaceful crowd, a tank set on fire by the peaceful crowd etc. Glad they were peaceful and not violent criminals like in Los Angeles.
http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bi... http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bi... http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/china060412/s_t29_...
This person makes my point. As I said, American students are more apt to know about what happened longer ago and farther away in Beijing than what happened more recently and closer to home in Los Angeles. When and if it is brought up, the military being unleashed on the poor and working people of Los Angeles is defended, the civilian population is called criminals etc. This is a fairly normal reaction for a typical American professional.
As far as being "peaceful" in Tiananmen Square, policemen and soldiers were killed, vehicles were set on fire injuring and killing the occupants - there are plenty of pictures and videos of the violence the police and military faced when they tried to peacefully clear the square, as well as in other parts of the city.
In the United States, poor and working people in Los Angeles performed similar actions around this time of year back in 1992. They were concerned with the brutality of the local police, and how the government was unaccountable for it. The US government sent the army and the Marines in and killed some people. This is also unknown to most students in the US nowadays. If it is brought up they say the people were thugs, rioters, gang members, criminals etc. It must have been a lot of criminals since it took thousands of heavily armed police, national guard and military to get back control.
From the Google NY Times article ( http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp... ) > Thirty percent of Googles 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women....Of its United States employees... 2 percent are black ... Of Googles technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black...Though Google did not specifically say how it planned to change the numbers, it said that it hoped releasing them would start a dialogue. The company had made changes in the past to recruit and retain women...
Then it goes on and on about women. If 30% overall and 17% technical are women, compared to 2% and 1% for black, it sounds like women have it relatively good.
Many of my CS classes had more black guys than women of any color. Yet there is almost no discussion of this. It's Jesse Jackson who prompted that this data be released.
While this is about Google, they've been the most open and forthright about it in releasing the data. The situation is widespread through the Valley.
I hear happy horseshit about Watsi and other nonsense in the Valley. Begin at the source - with the LPs of VC's exploiting mostly young talent in the various startups - startups where 1% of the hired technical workers are black, if that.
god help us, using the output of that mind as a platform on which to build suggestions on changing our culture
Why not? There's what to do lessons and what not to do lessons.
From what I read in the essay he talks continually about how he lives in a beautiful, wealthy suburb, has an apartment and BMW, nice clothes and so forth. I don't watch teenage television shows like the OC, The Hills or whatever, but from this material perspective he had the perfect life. Yet his parents split up, he didn't get along with his movie premiere attending father's new wife, and he was isolated and cut off from human contact. He is miserable. He even says repeatedly he goes crazy watching guys with much less money have so much "social success".
Something can be learned from him. That buying into the idea that money alone buys happiness is something close to insanity. That growing up in a wealthy community where image and status are everything, even among kids, might not be healthy. That close friendships and lovers are more important than the BMW he continually refers to.
I can see shades of this when I walk into a post Series A startup on Saturday at 8 PM and see that 95% of the office is there working, many of the people in their 20's. They all think they are going to be the Mark Zuckerberg. It seems like insanity to me. It reminds me of all the people I know who were having trouble in their marriages, so they would work until 6, 7, 8 doing busy work so they wouldn't have to go home. Usually in a few months time I hear from them they are separating from their spouse. Some people see work as an escape from their other problems. Our society being run as it is, by those who it is run by, this is not much frowned upon as a real problem.
I can easily imagine this kid growing up the son of some guy who was in early on some hot startup, with the kid now living in Palo Alto, Altadena or somewhere...
You seem not to have not only read the article, but not read the title of the article. The entire point is that not only are US children of parents with low parental education behind countries like Portugal, Estonia etc., but US children of parents with high parental education are behind Portugal, Estonia etc.
The analysis of this study dovetails with other analysis of PISA rankings, about how the top 10% of students in Japan and Korea have significantly better math proficiency than the top 10% of math students in the US, how their top 20% is better than the US's top 20%.
This is what the data says and the analysis of the data. The typical reaction is of your type - you don't even read the article title, assume it is saying average rankings are below, and repeat the Panglossian idea that the US children of the well-educated who are ahead of most US students are on top of the world, or near it. The data shows otherwise. Even non-stringent observation shows otherwise, if you take a look around at who is getting doctorates in mathematics and the like at top American universities.