>Most of those people have no other options. You don't want to fund people (in general; obviously there are outliers with 150+ IQs and fucked-up careers, I was one and, who knows, may be one in the future) who don't have other options.
I don't disagree. The problem is that the incapable and highly capable (who both fail in typical, micromanaged, closed-allocation type environments) get lumped together and there are fewer of the latter. The profiling (see: job-hopper stigma) really hurts those of us who've had a lot of failures or mistakes but have good reasons.
If you really need A+ players (not just the A- and B+ players who become executives) this costs you. But VC-istan is just another version of the corporate ladder and most of these VC-funded startups don't need outlier excellence, so a person like me might not be worth the trouble.
VC culture is about commoditizing founders and companies (and especially engineers) and it has worked at creating a world in which A+ players (the people who originally built SV because they didn't fit anywhere else) aren't really needed.
If you're in SV/SF, over 26, and haven't made at least a million dollars for yourself through an exit yet, you're not in the cool crowd. Bonus points for an Official Exit and not just an acquihire.
Your street cred can wain though. The Powerset acquisition by Microsoft was okay for the time, but now it shows up as essentially an acquihire. If that sale was going through today, it would probably be a $200 million to $500 million acquisition instead of the $50 million bauble they got at the time.
I'm in SV/SF, and this attitude is completely silly. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but I would say it's far from the norm, even in tech circles.
Sure, but this wouldn't be one of them. If a woman even suggested their employer had discriminated against them on the basis of weight, then lawsuit or not, their employer would be crucified. Sorry, but being overweight is no worse on a woman than it is on a man - not that it's peachy for either of them.
This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.
The huge amount of draws and the almost-required bibliographical knowledge of opening theory (aside from the seemingly arbitrary sets of rules and pieces) are why I decided to play go. Have not looked back, except to see what's going on in the chess world.
I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?
>I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?
Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.
Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.
>It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.
Isn't the opposite true?
We can certainly point to famous examples of heirs/heiresses behaving badly, but that seems largely the exception rather than the rule-- by and large, the terms nouveau riche and "new money" carry a negative connotation, while "old money" is associated with taste and sophistication (though certainly also snobbery).
> "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly†." --Abraham Lincoln
†may require working democratic process, ability for regular people to affect policy change, lack of special interest groups with opposing positions, and a congressional representative who will actually do something about the issue for you. restrictions apply, including but not limited to: population of those disaffected is too small; population of those disaffected is discriminated against by the population at large; population of those disaffected is too poor and focused on survival to work at policy change; congressman disagrees; congressman doesn't care; policy is remotely controversial; policy can be associated with incendiary buzzwords such as socialism, government spending, and "big government"; and more.
Yes. Americans keep complaining about their government, yet every election they keep on voting for the same party they voted for last time, the same one that already did what the didn't like - or they don't bother. Where I live, people complain that they can't influence politics, they can't even complain about the government online without getting arrested. They don't have voting rights to do anything about it. Americans do! No amount of lobbying can force you to vote for someone you don't want.
Your logical fallacy here is that you have no evidence whatsoever that the people complaining are not voting for a third party every time. Perhaps they are, and in fact, it is as ineffectual as they claim.
even ignoring the issues i raised in my original post, another huge problem is the success of propaganda and the polarization of the political landscape. even if the system worked perfectly, a large portion of the population would continue to vote against their self-interest due to propaganda and social conditioning. and the polarization makes it so you can't get people to entertain different views, as they feel that they're getting attacked and "losing the fight" if they change their stance.
This movie isn't misunderstood or clever at all. It was originally exactly as dumb as people think it is (working title: "Bug Hunt On Outpost Nine), but the studio realized they could get the license to Starship Troopers for free.
Verhoeven didn't even read Starship Troopers-- he skimmed a few chapters, decided it was depressing and that Heinlein was a fascist, and made the movie a parody of the book, and a lazy parody at that.
When people call this movie dumb, they're completely right, albeit not for the reasons they may think.
I've read the book, and seen the movie. Let me tell you, I can't say that anything more than a skimming of that book is necessary. It's about as one dimensional as sci-fi gets. Worse even than Scott Cards work, and I don't say that lightly. Both Enders Game and Starship Troopers replace that tedious work of actually figuring out what sort of character development you want to be in your story with "young naive guy matures as he learns the value of war."
The movie, for all of its self-aware cheese, has much more to offer.
I never read Starship Troopers (actually, never knew it existed) but always enjoyed it as a fun movie. I know, fun and dumb do overlap at certain points, and maybe that's why I liked it. I like one of the comments here describing it as "Ken and Barbie go to outer space" or something like that - sums it up well for me.
I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!
