Catching up on The New Yorker and stumbled on this profile by George Packer.
Combines both of my two favorite topics, politics & technology, throws them on the ground, stomps on them and then rebuilds them via Peter Thiel of PayPal & Founders Fund fame.
Libertarian Entrepreneurship.
I was surprised by how closely my line of thinking falls in step with his. Perhaps, I really am a closet libertarian ..aka..Republican.
Mind. Blown.
Here are some great excerpts:
On politics and technology -
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its form - from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guide so-called ‘social democracy’ …We are in a deadly race between politics and technology ..
On higher-education -
Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to sub-prime mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world. .Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become very expensive insurance policy…In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game “purely positional and extremely decoupled from the question of its benefit to the individual and society”
On Internet companies -
Internet companies over the past decade, the people who run them are sort of autistic. These mild cases of Asperger’s seem to be quite rampant. There’s no need for sales - “the companies themselves are weirdly nonsocial in nature.” But, he added, “In a society where things are not great and a lot of stuff is fairly dysfunctional, that may actually be the thing where you can add the most value”.
On Thiel himself -
An appetite on disruption and risk - two of Thiel’s favorite words - reflects in part, a sense of immunity to the normal heartbreak and defeats a deadening job, money trouble, and unhappy children deal out to the “unthinking herd”. Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people precisely because they’ve never refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow.
If you want the full piece, let me know. Great read.
2 days ago
Good reads. Coffee. Jazz. 52 degrees. Sunday fun day. (Taken with instagram)
F* it. It’s been one of those weeks. Plus, Midnight in Paris. (Taken with instagram)
Here, we co-exist. #workstation (Taken with Instagram at Office of State Representative Eddie Lucio III)
newyorker:
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
Fascinating and well-written.
Knowing many a prosecutors, public defenders, private jail owners and convicted felons, this piece presents an excellent array of perspectives/theories on this dilemma.
Mass incarceration is both ineffective and extremely costly. It costs more to house prisoners than it would be to educate him/her correctly. The social behavior adjustments noted at the end makes for an interesting argument. Plus, only in the US have we managed to privatize/capitalize on such sad human conditions. Lastly, I must read Professor Stuntz’s reading of the Bill of Rights as the root of our criminal justice system’s problems.
Of late, I really enjoy learning about the complexities of problems such as this. Don’t get me wrong, I still relish in tackling issues like SOPA & PIPA.
But, there are much dire problems out there. Living in an extremely poor, under served, un-educated area may sound like hell (and it can be); but I am most certainly thankful for the lessons I am learning & the perspective I have yet to really gain.
plasticshakeupsnow:
I just had a chance to sit down and actually read through the transcript of President Obama’s third State of the Union address. Now, before contribute my opinion on the content of the speech, I want to clarify something: I identify as a liberal. I voted for Barrack Obama in 2008. I’m a pretty big…
Sentiments shared. Thanks!!
5 days ago -
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