SamAtt

I wouldn't trade jobs with a CHP officer either but I do have to wonder about the skill level. I'm sure it's harder than I think but the job still boils down to parking on the side of the freeway, spotting violators, chasing them for about a minute and then writing them a ticket. Is that really worth $48+ an hour?

Because that seems to be around the average pay (The CHP has a very powerful union so their base pay hours are capped at an average 40 per week). I'm not for big cuts but cut $20,000 a year off each salary and they're still making $80,000 a year which is pretty respectable

I don’t think it’s a concern of most startups but it’s definitely one of most VCs. I think most VCs were either active as VCs or working in the industry back in the late 90s when Microsoft entering a market meant the death knell for any other company in that market. So that fear has carried over into today with Google taking Microsoft’s place as the dominant company in the industry.

The fact that Google hasn’t been near as successful at entering new markets doesn't seem to have entered the equation.

It's pretty far ahead right now but I think this trend is going to start to reverse pretty soon. The combination of Apple loosening their restrictions, technology like Appcelerator getting better and Android's success will make it hard for Objective-C to continue its rapid growth.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. If you think the Simpsons has become formulaic (which it had in some of those middle seasons) this might be enough to convince you they're taking risks again. Which MIGHT get you to tune in.

I'm not saying it's super effective but it's positive attention and that's worth something.

I honestly think that should be the headline of the post since I find that a lot more interesting. I've had the feeling for some time that the early adopter market is shifting from Firefox to Chrome and this provides some anecdotal evidence for that conclusion.

I don't think it's hidden at all. He says in the Drugs section...

"The problem is that our drugs, on the whole, cost about 50% more. For name brand pharmaceuticals, we pay about 77% more. Why? Some will say that it’s because we’re wealthier and need to subsidize for the rest of the world. But even if we paid more based on our relative wealth, it would come to about a 30% premium, not the 77% we do pay."

So the problem is obvious. The issue is how to fix it. We in the U.S. can either enforce our own price controls which will break the system or we can force U.S. companies to charge more to other countries and take the chance of denying medicine to sick people because foreign governments won't accept the higher prices.

Not an attractive choice no matter how you slice it.

It's an interesting read and worth bookmarking if you can't get through right now (the page was going in and out as I read it).

It's kind of depressing though in that his point boils down to neither side's solution being all that effective at solving the problem. Moreover his meta point seems to be that it's too complicated a problem for politicians to solve based on their need to boil things down to a sound bite solution.

The great thing about blogging is anyone can write and even if they don't write well they can probably convey the idea they're trying to get across. So it's a lowest common denominator communication media.

Video is a skill in itself. Put your average blogger in front of a camera and it will more than likely turn out badly because most people aren't skilled orators with the ability to manipulate their own body language.

This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:

"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article"

"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize"

What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?

Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.

It's beyond thin.

Every VC environment has loud personalities and personal conflict between various groups. Whether it's the Valley or Chicago you're going to have these types of stories. So to condemn the valley based on those stories getting more press is silly. It shows the author lives in a bubble and has never experienced what it's like to really raise money in such an environment.

Worse though is how high this got. The fact that this made it to #1 on HN actually makes me a little queasy. I don't tend to pay attention to all the HN is degrading talk but this makes me wonder

I don't think this makes the point that 500k/yr isn't rich but it does make the point that people's expenses will grow to fit their income. I've known several people in this pay bracket and I've often found their standard of living isn't all that much better than mine. They have a 60" TV instead of my 42" and a BMW instead of my Chevy but their still watching the same shows and stuck in the same traffic.

The irony is this author never once questions why American degrees aren’t paying off. If I was a professor at a University and I acknowledged the fact that degrees aren’t paying off I’d be looking for a solution. Not shrugging my shoulders and telling future students to accept the inevitability of their useless education.

It amazes me that he can make a point of mentioning the tough competition from China and India (where degrees are more “skill oriented”) and then go on to suggest students spend their college years pursuing a “liberal education” as he calls it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for General Education classes that introduce students to basic ideas of philosophy, other cultures and so on. But the University system needs to realize that those classes are the gravy and not the main course. The focus of college is to get a usable skill that will make you a productive member of society. I’m continually amazed by people in my professional life who have gone through 6 years of college (MBAs) and seemingly have no useful skills to show for it.

I think it’s time for University teachers to take ownership of the problem and start creating curriculums that are designed to fix it.