api

525 ms·

16501.
by api 16y ago
I LOLed at that as well. Remember too that to use the bathroom in California you have to get in your car and drive four exits down the expressway. So add another $400/month to your cost of living on top of rent/mortgage. Not having to own a
16502.
by api 16y ago
It seems to be "beat up on academia year" this year. Yawn. College might occasionally be over-valued in some areas, but it's not useless. Last I checked towns with strong top-tier universities were much healthier economically than towns wit
16503.
by api 16y ago
They gather the brains, yes. But a feudal business culture would make that irrelevant. Feudal social contracts in general kill all forms of innovation.
16504.
by api 16y ago
Another thing that came to mind that this article alludes to: on the East Coast (and most other places) salesmen and MBA types always outrank geeks. It's deeply ingrained in the culture. Those who can do. Those who can't lead. Being a doe
16505.
by api 16y ago
I guess it depends on how you define conservative. I define it partly as "hierarchical, aristocratic, exploitative" while liberal is "self-made, innovative, meritocratic." Those are not the pop definitions though, especially in America. The
16506.
by api 16y ago
There are a lot of startups in Cambridge and downtown and a few in Newton and other train-serviced places. But you're right about 128... but that's part of why 128 is a terrible place to locate a startup. I would pick Quincy over 128. Lots
16507.
by api 16y ago
I have a little bit of experience with London, and I can second this. London actually gives me the willies after meeting the business culture there. If you ever want to make an argument for the actual existence of shape shifting reptiles (a
16508.
by api 16y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Massachusetts is more like California in that respect. That might be one reason Boston is better than NYC for tech.
16509.
by api 16y ago
The VC culture is probably closer to banker culture, so you're right about that. I've never gotten to meet with a VC without an intro. But I was talking more about the culture at large. You've kind of got it with your last sentence. The lar
16510.
by api 16y ago
Boston is probably the closest runner up to the Valley, and it's not even close. Boston has the brains, but not the culture. It's like a Ferrari motor in a stuffy Mercedes driven by an old blue haired lawyer. Really the whole East Coast has
16511.
by api 16y ago
It's not just academia. It's society-wide. The whole thing in macroeconomic policy about optimizing economies for "GDP growth" is similar. Spend a million on healthcare, GDP goes up by a million. Spend a million on science, GDP goes up by a
16512.
by api 16y ago
FYI: Vannevar Bush has no relation to George Bush I or II...
16513.
by api 16y ago
He's being very hyperbolic. But, it would be correct to say that the genome has not been the boon to understanding that we thought it would be. I think the fundamental problem is that we don't quite know how to think about evolving genetic
16514.
by api 16y ago
I read a puff piece on this place in Harvard Business Review. It did not have the intended puffing effect.
16515.
by api 16y ago
What a bunch of vapid bullshit.
16516.
by api 16y ago
This would be far more indicative if it were scaled to organizational size. Some of the top places are great places, but they're also huge places.
16517.
by api 16y ago
Aren't you describing 95% of all business advice?
16518.
by api 16y ago
Sure news organizations curate and editorialize content... they ask "is this the official party line?" If the answer is no, they don't print it.
16519.
by api 16y ago
It's sort of amazing that an amateur and somewhat half-assed journalist club is getting this much attention for just reporting the news. Of course, it's because "real journalists" no longer report the news or investigate anything. They just
16520.
by api 16y ago
But what if they don't actually want anything? What if demand is actually being satiated, and all those dollars are just worthless fiat paper that doesn't actually mean anything? http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5309 That article talks abou
16521.
by api 16y ago
But then the Morlocks will eat us!
16522.
by api 16y ago
Simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity. Try to solve problems by removing things, not adding them.
16523.
by api 16y ago
I've started to wonder if the whole "creative class mega-cities" phenomenon is a mistake for a similar reason.
16524.
by api 16y ago
Isn't the pay of sports coaches largely related to the fact that sports is a big earner for the university? So basically you're paying someone a lot of money to put on a popular show that brings in a lot of money.
16525.
by api 16y ago
That's a widespread problem, and I don't see how tenure affects it. The problem there is that we're no longer trying to win a cold war with the USSR, and there's no domestic demand for such things. People don't want to go to the stars. They
16526.
by api 16y ago
The article talks more about the humanities, but my reaction was based more on thinking about the sciences. The sciences, I suppose, are a far different ballgame... if you don't make it to a tenure track position or want to skip the whole p
16527.
by api 16y ago
Here's a better idea: let new Ph.D graduates go into industry, and treat their time solving real world problems in industry as their postdoc. Then, when/if they go into academic tenure-track positions, they'll have more experience to draw u
16528.
by api 16y ago
Nonsense. The problem that tenure solves is that politics is the enemy of truth. In any organization without some form of tenure, an individual is going to have to be very political to stay employed, advance, etc. (When I say politics, I do
16529.
by api 16y ago
What? KitchenSinkNuclearReactorDependencyInjectionSingletonFactoryObserver is excessive?
16530.
by api 16y ago
I was referring to things like ADO.NET, event driven control data bindings, etc.

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