How about a startup where one can dial a 1-800 number from Japan and get someone in ,say, Europe, who is also bored, and the two can rant to each other about how bad things are , and then go back to their lives ? International PainBuddy program, Dial-An-Agony . 1800-call-pain !!
Best part, we pay a couple of life coaches to analyse some rants and provide anonymous advice
>> Takes me back to the good old days when Kiko was killed by Google Calendar
What would happen if someone were to try a startup doing what Kiko did ?
or for that matter, repeating any of the startups that users loved but were acquired and killed by Yahoo or Google ?
If I were to create (yet another) photo sharing site, what obstacles would I face because of Google already having Picasa/Photo and Yahoo owning Flickr ?
Subcultures are genes mixing and matching and exploring corners. Sentience burdens us with the ability to understand connotations of 'status', 'outcast' etc, but otherwise nature is on track with her research & development
> The gooey nougat of the hikikomori phenomenon is, it's sort of a quiet rebellion against the complicated and restrictive social protocols that are part and parcel of being Japanese. It is the same with otaku: however trivial their interests may be, they are determined to follow their own interests and choose their own path, rather than simply do what is expected of them.
I thought Zen was the quiet rebellion before it got stratified/institutionalized. I feel that the other phenomenon are more emergent, and they emerge from the mainstream not cracking down on them ,or not being able to..
>> was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Living in India with no access to the larger mathematical community, which was centred in Europe at the time, Ramanujan developed his own mathematical research in isolation. As a result, he sometimes rediscovered known theorems in addition to producing new work. Ramanujan was said to be a natural genius by the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, in the same league as mathematicians such as Euler and Gauss.[1] He died at the age of 32.
-- no formal training
-- developed his own mathematical research in isolation.
We're talking talent here, upper class or no. Talent is talent ,even when it is not discovered. In this case ,it was
>> . The positive-sum “win-win” outcomes that Technocrats seek exist, and they’re all over the place, but they never come without risk. Once the company decides that creative risks are intolerable, what’s left is zero-sum social-status-driven squabbling.
>> Why are programmers granted such high status and wealth in our society for living in a self-created self-indulgent intellectual world of constant escapism
We know the specifics of the answer to this, I'd like to answer this in a general sort of way -
in Alvin Toffer's 'Third wave' way of looking at the world, the integrators in a division-of-labour system are its rulers. Programmers give you tools to integrate.
Remember, the key themes of the the second wave are :
"The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."
So you see , programmers are actually bureaucracy-engineers, creating the process and flow and channels for the industries of the world to play together
has anyone seen him talking about a Tim Gallwey video ? Kathy Sierra mentioned one of Alan Kay's talks called 'doing with images makes symbols'... I'm trying to find this one ..
'Once a system is set up to solve some problem, the system itself is new entity which engenders new problems relating the development, operations, and maintenance of that system'