Priceonomics Blog: Diamonds Are Bullshit
American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage - they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will compound over time and someday provide a nest egg. Instead, they trade that money for a diamond ring, which isn’t much of an asset at all. As soon as you leave the jeweler with a diamond, it loses over 50% of its value.
Rebloged from : priceonomics
The men in the other room are shouting at the TV.
It’s understandable, of course. Some men on the TV have a thing. Ball? Puck? One of those.
And boy, the other men on the TV screen want it. They want the thing. They want it bad and they are not taking no for an answer.
So men have gathered in my living room, my housemate among them, to sit together, drink, and ruminate on the situation. I don’t think they’ve come to a definite conclusion regarding it all (it’s a tough situation, alright) but they seem to be under the impression that shouting their ideas at the TV will convey them to the men on the TV - both to those with the ball/puck and to those without. I don’t want to correct them because it’s clear by their raised voices they’re pretty close to a definite answer. I’m hoping it’ll be a peaceful one, but I doubt it.
Sports-things are difficult, you guys. Sports-things seem pretty difficult.
Rebloged from : everythinginthesky
What’s the probability that we’re idiots?
There’s a necessary assumption in lower-level economics, as well in much of philosophy, that people act rationally. Rebooting our global economy depends upon this (though it’s preceding crash ignored it), ethics necessitate a basic shared logic, and mathematics certainly assumes that we will accept conclusions using a similar rationality. Yet people waste billions of dollars per year because they make poor, emotional decisions against their nature. It’s this irrational impulse in each of us that has led to three of the largest, most mind-numbingly irrational markets in society: casinos, insurance, and religion.
Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZKMZyG7vOOL
Click to read a hilarious comic about finding “the one”.
(This post has nothing to do with Valentine’s Day being a week away.)
Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZKMZyG54xNc
Could coding be the next mass profession?
Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.
Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skills – but this stuttered as we moved to an information economy. Today, students without a higher education generally enter service professions or trades where employment, if they can get it, doesn’t offer much career growth.
There is a new opportunity emerging for young people to do productive, entrepreneurial, satisfying work: they can learn to code. Code isn’t that hard to start to learn – one outsourcing firm takes people with no training and makes them full-time Java programmers in 3 months. (Of course, mastery takes tremendous talent and craft.) Coding isn’t expensive – with netbooks, cloud hosting and storage, and open source software. Beyond a certain point, coders are self-taught, and can continue to advance their skills.
They’re handing out Gutenberg printing presses out there: with services like Treehouse (I’m a dues-paying member) and Codecademy (and its expertly-timed year of code), countless university courses free online, Google Code University, the warm embrace of Stack Overflow, in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp, summer camps for kids, even the promise of a one-day result with Decoded (the six-minute abs of learning to code), and great organizations like CodeNow (which I’ve been supporting) reaching out to teach code in underserved communities. I’m sure I’ve left many out.
Yet very few high school students learn to code. Almost no high schools teach code as part of the curriculum. Though of course they should — code is literacy, not (just) a specialist skill. And kids can get started coding early. Many students who would be terrific at coding, a creative, tinkering act, also may not thrive in institutional (school) environments.
There is real demand for coders – even despite overall unemployment – so learning to code produces rewards quickly. Online marketplaces like oDesk and Elance hire starting programmers at rates as high as $15-20 an hour or more. Learning to code is one of the best paths to entrepreneurship. Coding also offers students the joy of creation and mastery of a complex skill. Code may one day be a basic workplace expectation – like emailing, or “proficient in Word.” Young people are also willing to learn: coding now has a brand. The kid who writes an iPhone or Android app, these days, gets the girl (or boy!).
It might even be possible to do more than just learn to code – but also to become an elite coder – without necessarily going to college. We are in the early days of teaching code as a profession. Most academic training is focused on teaching students theory, not practice. (One Ivy League computer science program only required one course where students actually write code.) Imagine if students who might not otherwise even attend college could become elite coders.
In the U.S., the STEM line of thinking is about creating the next generation of scientists. In computing, this is even reflected in what we call the study of programming — computer “science.” We could be doing something different (and complementary), teaching students to be makers, not scientists: creating the next generation who can hack, beget, get paid right away, and maybe become entrepreneurs. Learning this would make the high school experience more rewarding, because it would have an immediate result. (I went to a high school with a vocational tradition, Stuyvesant in New York, and wish I had more courses like the architectural drafting class I took for a year.)
I’ve become personally passionate about this idea over the last couple of years. I think it could be a path to helping fix a lot of what doesn’t work right now: our ways of teaching students, powering our economy’s future, and making work a creative and fulfilling way to spend time.
I’m sure there are many more out there working on this — if you’re one of them, hit me up and let’s find a way to make common cause. And if you think I’m crazy, tell me why.
I’ve thought about teaching kids or non-kids programming for many years now. But that was when I was a broke student.
I did, though, coach a few engineering students with their Fortran asssignments. I was a mass communication student with a rare hobby.
God, Fortran was disgusting.
Rebloged from : roybahat
I’ve been thinking about Louis CK lately. I’m a fan of his show on FX, and I’m so happy his recent adventure in distributing his newest comedy special himself has been a rousing success. But my thoughts are going elsewhere to wonder why he has blown up in popularity in the past couple years, and why his comedy seems to resonate with these times. It always feels like there’s a comedian willing to address contemporary concerns with insight and honesty for each moment in time. All the greats had their focus: Richard Pryor and Chris Rock had race, George Carlin had absurdity, and I think Louis has hit on some sort of subterranean undercurrent of emotion that I didn’t realize might be swelling until I listened more closely: shame.
Rebloged from : viafrank-deactivated20120702
How Doctors Die (It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be)
TL;DR: Doctors will “overtreat” to comply with demands of patients, patients’ families, and the system, but they’d rather die in peace than receive such treatments themselves.
Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZKMZyCr76X_
I Believe In The Internet - The Content Industry Doesn't
I have always believed that the entertainment industry’s effort to stop piracy by asking search engines and ISPs to make it more difficult for their users to find pirate sites was the wrong way to solve the problem, but it could never put my finger on why I felt so strongly about it. After all, the entertainment industry argues that they are only targeting the worst pirates and are only asking for help because those pirates are offshore and out of the reach of U.S. authorities.
At a dinner earlier this week, Joi Ito, the head of the Media Lab at MIT described the Internet as a “belief system” and I suddenly understood. The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It’s core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Services like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy and AirBnB are built on the assumption that most people are honest. Other services like Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, and Soundcloud assume people will be generous with their ideas, insights and creations. Wikipedia has proven that people will share their knowledge. Companies like Kickstarter show that people will even be generous with their money. This does not mean that there are not bad people out there. All of these companies spend a lot of time and money to battle spam and fraud. The companies are simply betting that there are many more good people than bad. The architecture of the Internet shares this assumption. It could have been designed to prevent bad behavior. Instead its design empowers good behavior.The entertainment industry does not share this view of human nature.
Rebloged from : bradburnham
Hello. I'm Lionel. From Borneo.
In KL.
I invented the Twitter/Favrd bookmarklet, to rave reviews. Favstar's and Twitya's bookmarklets (and bastard kids I may not know about) inherited its genes. I did not invent Sexy Sex Thursdays, but I might have caused it.
A robot what?
My askhole. (Suggestions)
My Twitter.
Email: lionelster at gmail dotcom
There is distinct point in your life when you realize how fucking awesome you are and you want to make yourself...
At Priceonomics, we are fascinated by stolen bicycles. Put simply, why the heck do so many bicycles get stolen?...
In anticipation of the publication of On The Bro’d, here are classic movies subtitled for bros.
Exactly four months ago, Jason Kottke found my project, NewsBlur, and tweeted:
Adventures in logging.
I love this bitch.
Many of you have asked, so here’s what’s going on with me.
WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE
So I bought that new game that all the nerds are nerding about (Skyrim) and, as with a lot of the fantasy-type games, you find yourself fighting...
you are a moist robot programmed to sad and lol
