Why is Pinterest such a shining example when it doesn't have a fully developed market model yet and hasn't shown a single profitable quarter? What makes it more than just another overvalued company waiting for the next burst?

It's got a user demographic similar to FarmVille. Female, late 20s to late 30s, well off. I'd guess some have decided based on FarmVille that this is a good demographic to grab the attention of.

This is be no means a scientifically valid survey, but based on the experience of my married friends when they got smart phones or tablets in their families, women buy, men seek free.

It's popular therefore it must be valuable, right? That metric worked well the last time the net got frothy.

Theory of the case: if the stuff is the focus of the experience, as opposed to communication (FB, twitter), it is a better marketing situation (less annoying, generallY).

Congrats, you've sort of discovered bizarro-marxism but phrased it in ridiculous terms based on a poor grasp of economic realities.

1)Peasants absolutely exist. There's an enormous invisible labor force in the US that is paid a fraction of minimum wage, let alone a living wage, and that's not even counting the literal prison slave labor employed in multiple states. Further, while the US may export a great deal of food, there are plenty of food types and a majority of manufactured products that are imported from places where they are made through the exploitation of third world laborers.

2) Your claim that business-ownership used to be a widespread individual experience is historically nonsense.

3) The article is full of tautologies like "If you have the human and social capital to start a business, it means you don’t have to worry so much about money." Yeah, if you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you tomorrow, you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you. Brilliant insight, and also not the lived experience of 99% of the world's population. Your suggestion that people simply "choose" to be this way is ridiculous.

4) The assertion that middle-class people spending a majority of their income as it comes in is "cultural" rather than a reality of saving being a LUXURY afforded to the few wealthy enough to afford it is both wrong and incredibly insulting. You're hardly the first person to perpetuate the "poor people just don't have good money sense" myth but it doesn't make it any less noxious.

And that's just for starters! Wealth is a zero-sum game and capitalism is built at its very foundation on the upward mobility of wealth through exploitation of labor. You can't change that with fairy-tale ideas about everyone magically being able to afford the risks and costs of business ownership if they just want it bad enough.

1) "Peasant" does not just mean "every lower class person", it means "subsistence farmer". We don't have subsistence farmers in the US anymore.

2) What's your evidence? Look at any photo of a city street from pre-1930 or so. Almost every business you see will be owned by some individual or family.

3) "Human and social capital" doesn't mean "rich", it means "human and social capital". I know several people with huge amounts of human and social capital who were homeless. Some of them then got rich, which they could do because they had human and social capital.

4) We know that most people saved during the 19th century, despite being far poorer than anyone today. It's a basic historical fact - farmers need to save at least some of income (whether in the form of money, food, or other goods). How do you make it through the winter otherwise? Harvests only come once or twice a year.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game, as anyone who knows basic economics can tell you. See http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Yes, why on earth would a population subjected to invasion and ongoing occupation by imperial western powers find an attack on their culture objectionable and representative of their entire daily situation?

MUST BE THOSE IGNORANT SAVAGES AND THEIR MYSTICAL NONSENSE

Because the US (or any other "imperial western power") has invaded Egypt and Libya? Damn, I should start watching the news a bit more!

Or are you suggesting that the invasions of Iraq / Afghanistan can be seen as "attacking their culture"? If that's your point, you've actually demonstrated that the root cause is in fact religion, because there really isn't much else that Afghanistani and Iraqi culture share with Egypt and Libya..

How else do you define a group led by royalists and other rich western expats, backed by the IMF and armed and supported by NATO, taking over the country and installing themselves as a puppet government in service to western interests? Is a South American coup not a US assassination just because the CIA only supplied the training, money, coordination, and intel and someone else pulled the trigger?

Gaddafi was hardly a beacon of good government, but debt-slavery to the IMF and open doors to the ransacking of national resources by western corporations is hardly an improvement. Not to mention little things like the incidents of ethnic cleansing.

I define them as winners in a civil war that are far more open to personal liberty and democracy than the predecessor.

Anyway, I reject your premise. To win that war they had to have wide support from the general population of Libya - there were no foreign troops on the ground, it was Libyans fighting Libyans.

Don't see how this is relevant to my observation that the violence was in fact religious in nature.

He's saying that there are motivations at play, as important if not more than the religious one.

I didn't say there weren't other motivations, I just pointed out that it's false to say religion wasn't one. So the comment is definitely irrelevant, or he meant something else.

Africa would have been subjected to a bloodbath of proportions unseen in history if the white man hadn't destroyed their culture first.

Examples I point to are as follows -

The Zulu nation was happily destroying not only all of it's neighbors, but many of their own people as the leadership happened to be certifiably insane. Shaka for example had a small penis (actually historically accurate) and killed thousands of people because of it. The zulu empire was actually not the bad one as the Matabele under Mzilikali after his loss to the zulu, took his tribe and conducted a scorched earth campaign across the lower section of africa destroying all in his path.

Lets not forget the laughable Xhosa girl Nongqawuse who said she saw visions that if everybody killed off their cattle and burned their fields the dead spirits of their ancestors would grant not only tenfold cattle in return, but destruction of the new white Anglo/Boer civilization in the southern cape. Needless to say after they slaughtered and burned everything no ancestors were forthcoming and 25 thousand of the Xhosa tribe died. The tribes of africa were largely barbaric and vicious groups of people who really only understood killing for the most part. There were exceptions to the rule as there always are, the hottentots, and various smaller tribes, but for the most part african culture was set up to destroy other cultures to begin with.

I'm not going to say that they are better off having been colonized by the europeans, but the alternative was pretty vicious as well.

Wow. Utter disbelief. A foreign more technologically advanced people came in with weapons and technologies that were basically magic to these hunter gather/pastoral people. These people took up a last ditch desperate idea rather than submitting to the holocaust by the Voortrekkers of the Dutch. "The tribes of africa were largely barbaric and vicious" The incoming Dutch tribes were vastly more barbaric and vicious despite having had a 400 year head start and education and technology. Tag on to that the subsequent Anglo-Boer war which Boers still describe as their holocaust and you can't distinguish between any of these tribes. Humans are just a nasty evil species when they agglomerate.

Tell that to the author of that post. Oh wait....

To provide some context, the above is a quote from a post written by the decedent.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=311...

I guessed. IT was written in the vein of a troll bait post I could easily see someone from GF/SA come up with.

Without context though, its effectively trolled everyone who reads it. A tribute to him I guess.

No, see, that was the "cool" thing about Vilerat. He wasn't just some Joe Goon "ironically" shouting racial slurs. He was the moderator of the "serious" discussion subforum on SA, where he frequently expressed such terrible opinions in complete seriousness and actively suppressed discussion that "hey, maybe you shouldn't share opinions with the BNP, just a thought" as moderator sass.

This is the man whose funeral Obama will solemnly attend and whose death Romney will use as the rallying cry to up the US government's murder-rate of non-whites. A terrible little internet nazi cum computer janitor for imperialism.

Rubbish

Zulu were a war like nation engaged in successful conquering of SAfrican tribes yes. Just like many many others before throughout the world.

If they had learnt to build the infrastructure of civilisation like others before then sub Saharan culture could have had one united pan- culture and developed just like others before it.

But we destroyed that - apparently doing them a favour

Japan shows an excellent example of how to absorb technological advances without getting wiped out - and offers an alternative to your rather insulting White conquer or self destruction theory.

Why are you encouraging debate on a comment which is irrelevant to the thread topic?

You are quite correct

I'm sorry, but this is largely irrelevant. There's a reason North Africa is usually included as the latter part of, "Middle East and North Africa".

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden-- Have done with childish days-- The lightly proferred laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

"Real Actors Reading Yelp Reviews" justifies any amount of sock puppetry.

"Real mass-market VR is just around the corner" is something I've been hearing since I was a little kid (I'm 30). I'll be super happy when/if it does happen, but won't hold my breath until it does.

Consider TrackIR, a phenomenal gaming technology that has been around for years and significantly increases immersion and "natural" input/control yet has failed to find meaningful traction with developers outside of simulators and a few other niche titles like Arma. Or 3D, which is still little more than a quickly-tiring gimmick despite a much wider range of titles being developed with support for it. Or Kinect, which, after the initial rush, has proved to still mostly be a solution in search of a problem.

Even if VR hardware has finally reached feasibility for mass-market production and pricing, without a large developer commitment it won't take off. It faces the same catch-22 as every add-on technology, requiring large developer time investment to support yet not having the market share to warrant such an investment, and the market share never getting large enough to warrant it because the investment is never made. The announced "launch titles" for the Rift don't really indicate that this hurdle is anywhere close to being surpassed.

It's cool to think about these things but "the future is now!" is inevitably premature. The article frames the entire thing as hypothetical to try to avoid this, but is still pretty gushing to the point of walking past these obvious and serious challenges.

Normalizing the "ironic" use of slurs normalizes the unironic use of them as well, and further entrenches privilege as a norm.

It doesn't take spending a lot of time in any nerd culture group to see that the racism, sexism, and homophobia are not ironic at all. Case in point, the enormous administrator/moderator-led backlash on SA in the past ~year against anyone daring to not openly welcome the death of anyone who is not a white cis male.

This is the weak link imo. The entire premise is that variance in developer preferences of environments is what leads to problems, but editors are where preferences tend to vary the most. If you're an open enough shop to not standardize systems, your devs sure aren't all going to want to be locked into the same editor.

In fact I'd guess most devs would be willing to sacrifice environment choice for editor choice if it came to that.

Or provide the five or so editors all. In a Unix shop, emacs, vim, eclipse, acme, and sam, with the popular plugins the current team members use, should satisfy almost everyone to get started.

The Indian people do not passively wait for government permission to have a voice, they buy it every day with action and sometimes with their lives. Large areas of India have reduced or virtually non-existent government control thanks to the efforts of the Naxalites to free themselves from a government still mired in racist traditions and an economy shaping itself to the worst excesses of neoliberal capitalism.

If the poor have no food or homes it is because they have been taken from them by a greedy government and a brutal police force. They will reclaim their lives and achieve justice not through waiting for liberal reform or by surrendering further control to a government instituting bare-minimum programs in an attempt to appease away the inevitable, but through continued people's war.

It's pretty telling that even an article trying to question the culture of unquestionable-exceptionalism is still chock-full of jingoistic language that says "if we just fix a few things we'll be the best country on earth again", as if such a thing was or is factual or even possible.

Not "exceptionalism is a myth" but "exceptionalism needs a new paint job". This is what passes for dissent in mainstream American discourse.

awesome point. you hit the nail on the head i think - this is an article soaked with deep cultural ego. unfortunately, these sorts of self-centered attitudes are probably necessary to rouse the interest of the average american reader. after all, america as a country is divorced from reality. kind of makes you wonder if there's any hope for the place in the long-term.

"as if such a thing was or is factual or even possible."

Or even desirable.