sbardle

Hey NoCoiners, can you give us some coin?

I didn't appreciate the severity of the condition. My apologies if I come across as insensitive, I should have paid more attention to the original post.

I certainly don't think "the disabled just aren't trying hard enough", I think you are extrapolating quite wildly there and I find the implication quite offensive. The point I was trying to make is that having supportive parents can really help, and the poster is obviously very supportive of his son. Every situation is different though.

I went to a school where a number of friends were not academic in the slightest. They left as soon as they could often with no qualifications but gradually learnt trades.

Many now have their own businesses (one is a plasterer, another a builder) and they earn good money, own their own homes, and have no student debt.

The reason? They had supportive parents. Many of the people who are falling into despair tragically come from very broken families.

I think NZ could become a major tech hub over the next 15 years. The geographical isolation will be alleviated by the internet and the development of faster air travel.

For anyone interested in tech, wanting to start up or grow in NZ, check out the Edmund Hilary fellowship.

Moving towards an isolated environment is pretty much what pioneers do. If they succeed, people will follow and new networks develop.

In the seventeenth century, media shifted from manuscripts to print. Now print has shifted to digital, but with the rise of Social some of the earlier dynamics of manuscript circulation are coming back into play, e.g "scribal communities" can be compared with "social media communities". What this means, I've no idea, but it could lead to a further polarising of political opinion as social media communities solidify and cross-community dialogue disappears.

Good point. I think it's a combination of zealot-like intensity and humble open-mindedness which wins the day.

Most people are one or the other (or somewhere in between) but to combine both in one human personality is quite rare. This may be a reason why people find it hard to work around and for such people.

Sure, but I'd still want a bling tombstone (angels, cherubim, the works) to tell everyone I basically Owned It when I was alive.

How does a big ego and small ego exist in the same person at the same time? It sounds like a square triangle.

Just taken a look. I see what you mean, lots of nuances. Nice product!

Out of interest, for those who have been in the Bay Area for a while, when was the best time to live there?

Couldn't someone just do a hashtag search on Instagram?

Why not just go big and do a social network for hairstyling in general?

I think the social commerce angle could be great for revenue, esp now Instagram are starting to launch it.

Great point.

Also, I think a problem is one person can only send one like.

Returning to my example, I'd like to be able to give the litter picker 20 likes, and maybe the Selfie uploader 1 like.

I think there has to the option of another accreditation technology which runs across social networks.

It's an area I'm interested in and looking to do my next project on...

Dropbox is a utility/product/feature. It can be replaced.

Snapchat is a network and therefore is open to network effects, i.e. the sum becomes greater than the parts.

I think in ten years time Snapchat will look the more justified valuation, providing they execute.

Dropbox are going to struggle unless they can innovate ontop of the current business model.

Didn't Friendfeed invent the Like button?

The article goes too far but there is something to be said about its core argument.

I don't think the Like button or emojis are good at recognising Value. A popular extrovert with 1000 fb friends uploads a selfie and gets 100 Likes.

Meanwhile a quiet but conscientious person uploads a before and after picture of a litter-pick they have undertaken and they get 2 Likes from their 50 friends.

There has to be a better way of recognising and incentivising the latter activity across social networks.

I'm in on this, thanks very much.

Maybe it was also just a unique period of history, never to again be repeated.

At the risk of the grossest generalisation, the Bay Area has worked because it's combined two very different types of people. On the one hand, the engineers/techies (with roots in the defence industry and conservative midwest backgrounds) and on the other, the idealists/utopians (with roots in the counter-culture movement). Strange bedfellows, but a world-changing combination back then. I don't live in the Valley now, so can't comment on the situation, but I hear it is far more of a mono-culture now.

I'm hoping Basic Income will be up and running by the time I hit my late 60s.

As I understand it, the "herbivore" man is rejecting the "carnivore" existence of the Japanese male executive. So he is not working every hour of the day, he is just getting by. But you are right, they are not focusing on "self improvement", rather just withdrawing from society.

Tim Benners Lee refers to social "levelling". It's interesting to compare the inventors of the internet with the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. They showed great creativity early on, but gradually got worn down by the failure of the rest of mankind to get behind and realise their vision of a reborn society. I think this is the major problem with the "reinvention of the internet" - the majority of people aren't particularly bothered about changing it in the first place.

The West is following Japan in so many ways, I suppose because they had their financial crisis before us. Herbivore men, minimalist living, collapsing fertility rates, we are turning Japanese.

The prestige angle is really important as a factor in why people go to law school.

I know parents who have worked every hour God gives so their son or daughter can be a lawyer - they see it as a route for their kids into the middle class. It's a shame, I feel the legal education system is benefiting from their ignorance of how bad it is out there for graduating lawyers.

I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.

I still think certain professional careers will always exist for the most passionate and high quality candidates (or, alas, the best connected).

Thanks for your considered response. You could well be right, but for the moment, I'd put a red-hot poker in my eye if LinkedIn is worth 26 big ones.

Long term, tech is a great place to be, but this is getting silly, surely.

LinkedIn is a static and largely useless platform. I have been on it for many years, there has been no innovation, and I can fully understand why its share price has taken a beating. Microsoft are desperate and deluded. Who would want to own Microsoft shares - this company is finished, surely. If this doesn't indicate a bubble in tech, I don't know what does.

John Donne had a remarkable intellect. We live in a visual culture, but the early modern period was very much a literary culture, and the breadth of learning demonstrated in just a short poem by Donne or Marvell continues to astonish. Donne's ruminations on suicide parallel those of Hamlet around the same time. Whenever I walk past St Pauls in London, I think of Donne, giving his regular 2 hour plus sermons in the old cathedral.

There was some research a while back that people get happier as they age as their memories of painful experiences fade.