generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-mooc-moment-and-the-end-of-reform/

loved that

The key to this piece of rhetorical alchemy is that you can’t over-think it, in the way I just have. Brooks is taking something that lacks prestige and cultural capital—a mode of education that is not valuable, only expensive, not innovative or exciting—and placing the name “Harvard” around it makes it into something that suddenly is both valuable and worthwhile, as a function of Harvard’s symbolic role in American higher education, to define the new cutting edge.

harvard is doing this too

which is the only reason moocs are suddenly relevant, but a real reason why they are

if capitalism evolves to a point where basic life necessities are super affordable, birth control readily available, etc, how does it convince the majority of ppl to breed + work? a) give them 80k-120k in student debt, b) force them to work for decades to pay it off, c) meanwhile they're so depressed by having to abandon their creative aspirations that they start families to give themselves something to feel okay about

FINE U WIN CAPITALISM

wait what? lots of people want to breed, beyond any kind of sense, i don't see that changing anytime soon!

Thomas Friedman’s good friend Michael Sandel

burrrrrnnn

I imagine people who have 80-120k in student debt are less likely not more likely to start families

http://deadspin.com/youre-fucked-but-youre-free-a-message-to-the-class-498483665

Trust me, your competition isn't as intimidating as you think it is. You wouldn't believe how shitty the rest of your peers are compared with you. All you have to do is not text during your job interview and you'll probably make the final round of nominees. People are fucking morons.

smh at the glorification of David Karp quitting high school.

if capitalism evolves to a point where basic life necessities are super affordable

uh huh

I'm sure David Karp is a smart, bright guy but the only thing he's shown is that he knows how to execute ideas with other people's money. Yay team.

For any species an increase in the food supply predictably results in an increase of population, until such time as the food surplus is fully consumed. If the food supply dips, there is a die off until the population again matches available food. Capitalism doesn't much affect this dynamic, but it does appear to affect food distribution.

sorry, I couldn't make it through the article

I'm sure David Karp is a smart, bright guy but the only thing he's shown is that he knows how to execute ideas with other people's money. Yay team.

― now is not the time for motorboating (dandydonweiner), Tuesday, May 21, 2013 8:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and that he's self-aware enough to know when to hire a guy to make business decisions

I'm sure David Karp is a smart, bright guy but the only thing he's shown is that he knows how to execute ideas with other people's money. Yay team.

that is not actually easy!

OTM

It's way easier to execute ideas with other people's money than to build a billion dollar business that is profitable.

I don't think David Karp ever had any grand ideas on how to make any money. He had grand ideas on how to build a great product, but every day products are built that never find any significant revenue, let alone profitability.

And when given the choice to clear $250MM vs. trying to figure out profitability, saying that he's self aware enough to take the money is sort of a backhanded compliment.

But I'm very glad that he got rich.

tbh tumblelogs were also someone else's idea.

marco arment's piece on karp prob relevant here imo

http://www.marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product

Intense focus requires neglecting almost everything else. David’s focus on pushing the product forward meant that he didn’t want to think about boring stuff: support, scaling, paperwork, and money.

Every time we’d get close to needing more funding, I’d try to convince David to hold out a bit longer or try to become profitable, and he’d convince me that everyone was better off if we’d focus on the product instead. And every time, he was right.

We tried to hold out as just two (and then just three) people as long as possible. We were scared of growing the staff, so we just put it off — for too long, in retrospect.

Eventually, David knew that we’d need to expand to handle the load, but his job never changed: rather than become a businessperson, he just hired one.

More importantly, David had a couple of key investors that were telling him exactly the same thing. Building a advertising blogging platform was always going to require scale and significant outside investment long before profit was on the radar. David enjoyed an enormous freedom in building his vision and the people who invested in him felt he deserved it. And his runway was evaporating rapidly, so Tumblr was going to need a major infusion within a few months or an acquisition.

There's a big difference between MySpace and Tumblr and yet...

is tumblr today significantly different from tumblr 3 years ago?

like after the site was successfully cobbled together and hit it big what did tumblr do other than not fuck up the formula?

there's way more porn now

what did tumblr do other than not fuck up the formula?

I presume what they did was scale it up enormously, which doesn't look like much from the user's side of things, but takes a lot of management skill. Also, not fucking up the formula requires an understanding of what it was about the formula that works and what would fuck it up; the urge to fuck up the formula is not easy to resist, because it always presents itself in the guise of becoming more awesome, or more sellable, or more (insert desirable trait).

clearly idg how anything in this business works. how does tumblr make money, even theoretically, in the future? what is yahoo paying for?

i don't get what blogger does for google either, except work as another ad platform. is that it for yahooblr?

only yahoo knows what yahoo was thinking - maybe eyeballs and harvestable data?

so off topic

oh ha whoops, i was just clicking thru bookmarks and didn't see what actual thread this was

Aimless is right--Tumblr refined the blog in quite a few ways but yes scaling (and keeping performance metrics) were high on the list of accomplishments. Mainly I would suspect the management skill was managing engineers and sys arch people. 175 employees is no easy task, not to mention 100million visitors. Tumblr found the sweet spot and kept adding users (until last November, when they started to lose them).

http://adage.com/article/creativity-pick-of-the-day/give-jobless-millennial-edge-a-free-yearly-businessweek/241634/

millennials. what a cracked up bunch.

Read "While giving millennials grief is highly entertaining" as "While millennials grief is highly entertaining" and almost lost my shit.

both thru imho

sorry iatee, didn't want this to be about tumblr

it's okay, it's relevant that the average net worth of millenials went up this week

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18n60kp6w6189png/k-bigpic.png

go MN

end the ncaa

wow. is that for real?

so that's why deans become deans

because they couldn't make coach?

super real

"Nor should any President deploy armed #drones over U.S. soil"

woops wrong thread

no I think this is the right thread

the war on millennials begins

feel like new jersey and rhode island are getting particularly ripped off there