463 karma · joined February 7, 2008
I'm super curious, intellectually fearless, and willing to relocate (currently in Chicago; would prefer SF.) Contact info is in my profile.
And yes the wifi alliance has some biases, but Wakefield (http://www.wakefieldresearch.com/) is an independent research firm.
That's a good point, though about charging in order to throttle bandwidth concerns. But that comes at a potentially high cost in public perception points. All it takes is one airline to say "Everyone should have free wifi, so now we do!" and there will be a big jump in people complaining about having to pay for it.
Last year, there was a Wakefield/Wi-Fi Alliance study that found 76% of travelers would choose an airline based on wi-fi availability. (http://www.wi-fi.org/news_articles.php?f=media_news&news...) A number which, I can only imagine, has been increasing over time. And, as we've seen (re: Starbucks) there's a big difference between wi-fi and free wi-fi. As far as I can tell skimming a couple searches, there doesn't seem to be any line that offers free wifi... yet.
It seems like there's a coming sea-change, however. The going theory is that free wi-fi is going to be a standard check-box item by the middle of next year - with many assuming Virgin and SWA will likely be leading the way.
On a related note, I fly pretty much exclusively Southwest. I took my first flight at just over a week old and have flown pretty regularly ever since. About 6-7 years ago, I made the change to flying SWA whenever possible and haven't looked back. Last time I flew to SF, it took two different flights with a transfer in between - and I got a free drink on both.
I've been building and tinkering with computers since I was 11 and it has always been sort of a foregone conclusion that I would go into CS or compe. But when I started college, for a number of reasons, I decided I wanted to study physics. But a few years in, I realized I wasn't really getting the full-bodied education that I was hoping for. I noticed this in myself as well as my peers in comparable science/engineering programs. It turns out, many of the programs that leave you with marketable skills necessarily sacrifice breadth of understanding.
This isn't to say all cs grads know nothing of the world, but it was a noticeable problem. There is, of course, virtue in training people to think only about a single field and think about it deeply and constantly. But I didn't want to be one of those people, so I switched to Political Science.
Political Science, at my school, was an interdisciplinary program - it allowed students to design their own concentrations within the framework of the program. Because of this, I was able to take advanced level courses in philosophy, music theory, english, astrophysics, economics, and computer science. No I'm not an expert on any of these, but I have the groundwork to understand any of them that I wish to personally pursue further. And many of them, I have.
Of course, after five years of college, I finally realized that I'm most passionate about writing, advertising, and technology, but I'm stuck competing against people with more specifically tailored credentials. This is obviously a problem, and I'm not going to claim I haven't spent nights wishing I had just stuck with something that would land me a job and a life of comfort. But comfort is as dangerous as it is pleasant and a lack of it often spurs the greatest innovation. That last part, however, I'm still working on.
But what about my CS friends? Some of them are legitimately well-rounded and interesting people... and some sold their souls at 100 hr/wk at nyc firms making 100k but they'll never see the world with the appreciative eyes of the destitute - they'll always want more because that's all they've ever been taught to value. Many will live lives hopelessly seeking satisfaction through abundance.
Save your pity for those guys, thank you.
PS: I don't really think all these guys are doomed because they took high-stress, high-paying jobs, I just wanted to represent the other side of the coin. Don't assume all LAS grads are forever useless... also, if you have the means, hire one. (specifically, me)
Perhaps you could do some LEO photography? I'm thinking, if this is possible, there could be some interesting mapping applications.
If I ever find myself wanting for something to do or ponder, I just go to the to-do pile and browse.
I like the physical aspect of this system. To me, the important thing here is getting the ideas the hell out of my head - it gets kinda crazy in there, it's no place for a delicate thing like an idea. Plus having a big, unsorted stack makes them more interesting to browse.
When you're working on technical problems, the question of value is relatively straight-forward: you are attempting to solve a problem by creating tools or applying existing ones. As a writer, it's a bit more nuanced. Moreover there's not a quick or easy way to measure that value.
If I hack up a script to grep a dataset, when it's done, I can toss the code and nobody has to know how ugly it is - the task is done. I cut an hour of work down to 30 seconds using 15 minutes of coding: saved time = obvious value.
If I rewrite the copy on my landing page, I may see an increase in conversions, but there's a strong chance that I timed that rewrite to coincide with a marketing push. Did my new landing page with a stronger call to action and a more approachable voice convince people to sign up? Did my popular friend give me some twitter love? Or did I change the copy to fit a new, more attractive design?
Basically, 'value' is an extremely elusive concept. I've asked a lot of people about it and the resulting conversation is pretty formulaic: it starts with a simple, poorly veiled abstraction of what the respondent does and, as I challenge it, it morphs into this maddeningly abstract compromise.
This response was inappropriately long, I realize, but it's obviously a topic that's been tugging on my brainstrings.
But I spent a part of this summer working on a farm in rural Wisconsin and I ended up with a period of downtime in the early evening - after the day's work and catching up with emails and whatnot. As it turns out, I was also struggling with a particular quandary (specifically, I was trying to define 'value') and one day, I just sat down cross-legged on the porch with my eyes closed, facing the setting sun.
What I did from there is hardly what any sort of zen master would consider 'meditation,' but I was amazed at what a difference it made to simply make a conscious decision to sit and think only of one topic. Consequently, I was reminded of a zen koan that I had encountered earlier in my investigation of the meaning of value, which was edifying enough for me to feel okay with calling what I had started doing 'meditation.'
I guess the bottom line is not to put too much stake in what everyone else says meditation is or isn't and focus on the practice of just taking time to be alone with your thoughts long enough to organize them in such a way that makes sense for you. Again, this is strictly anecdotal, but I think that's where you'll really see many of the benefits associated with meditation coming from. As someone who was diagnosed ADHD in college and has always had a problem with focus, I can say that having a disorganized mind can really be toxic to your life and work.
You don't fill up on salad before a pie eating contest and you don't get into the ring with Coca-Cola on their terms.
The problem here is that Coke has to decide between a unified front and hedging their bets. One way kind of undermines the other.
First off, the farm I worked on was fully organic, so there was a ton of work to do, and to do the work we had 6 residents, in addition to a series of day laborers to do it. I was a resident, but the latter is what I think the campaign is endorsing. We had ~12 acres of produce in fields/greenhouses and a commercial kitchen. We ran a CSA program, sold to small coops and independent grocers, and set up at farmers market - total gross was around 600,000, growing at around 50%/yr (estimated max production was about 1.2 million gross)
Not all that information was necessary, but it's kind of interesting.
The obvious thing keeping people from working on a farm is the work. There's not a lot of beating around the bush there - it's hard work, you're out in the sun, it gets up above 100 REALLY easily in the greenhouses and occasionally in the fields, there's a lot of bending over and kneeling down - which I think we are becoming worse at as a species, and it can get really dirty.
Complaining about any of those obvious things, will get you branded a whiner - and farmers HATE whiners. One whiner can destroy an entire day's labor. I'm not even close to kidding - a negative work attitude is a problem in most places, but in a situation like this, it's absolutely toxic. Whiners on our farm rarely came back after lunch either by their own volition or strong suggestion (it usually didn't take much.)
Which brings me to my next point: it's surprisingly easy, at least in my experience, to get fired from farm labor. (no, I didn't get fired) Farms need labor, but they generally run on really tight margins and can't afford to lose money on unproductive labor.
Unfortunately, another thing that consistently leads to unproductive labor is something I tend to do a lot of - talking. I arrived in rural Wisconsin eager to find out people's life stories (which I assumed were going to be more interesting than many proved to be) only to find out that, for the 10+ hours a day we were working, I was pretty much barred from talking. Due to my residency, I was allowed a little more leeway with this than the day laborers, but sometimes I would be having a great conversation with one of them without thinking about it and they would get fired at lunch. (I felt really bad about that)
But the work on a farm can be incredibly rewarding - it's work that you can look back on and think you really accomplished something. Not to mention a strong sense of connection to the food chain which I think is sorely lacking (to our serious detriment) in modern society. I would recommend it, but there's one more thing that could be an issue for the average starting in this line of work: safety.
Many of us grew up in absurdly safe environments with anything of any particular risk or danger generally abstracted out of our realm of awareness or relegated to a distant location. Mike Rowe had a fantastic bit about this in his presentation to the Future Farmers of America. His speech, on the whole, was similar to his TED talk in some ways, but he drove it home with a slightly different point. He (to uproarious applause) suggested "Maybe OSHA doesn't have it right; maybe PETA doesn't have it right..." He went on to suggest something that I kept in my mind every single time I started up a roto tiller or rode around on a fully extended forklift fastening parts of a greenhouse:
"The second you think somebody else cares more about your safety than you do... you're in trouble"
The best part is, you can substitute in other things for safety too. (success, future, children, equipment, code, etc) But this is what we have a hard time with in our culture. People don't want you to get hurt, but on a farm, there's not usually a guy whose job it is to go around making sure everyone is safe - it's everyone's own job. You may not think it, but this can be very frightening. And it extends into quality of work - if you're only doing a good job so someone will come by and say "man, you did such a great job weeding that onion patch for 9 hours" you're going to be even more disappointed than you were when you found out you were going to have to weed the onion patch for nine hours.
I guess I'll call it here, as this is getting out of hand, but don't be so quick to call the unemployed wimps - it's insanely difficult work (gets better after a week or so) and it's a very daunting lifestyle that most comfortably employed people would similarly poopoo.
Also, there's a surprising amount of paperwork involved in farming (especially organic certification) and I've been brainstorming a way to use technology to alleviate some of that burden - if you're interested, email's in my profile.
You might try eliminating the word and having the hide button on the left (it seems comments always open anchored at the top left) and a delete button on the right. I would recommend changing the x (maybe make it red or a garbage can?) to make it more clearly signify 'delete.'
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpg...
As Dorothy Parker said "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think"
I think this post would be much more accurate if Zed had chosen a more fitting marquis word. There's tons of things that you learn in college but wouldn't pick up going straight to work. What I think has been most useful, for me, that I would not have picked up on my own is writing for different audiences.
In high school, you most likely wrote like a high school student: (generally speaking) unrefined, undirected, and usually lacking a clearly defined audience. When you get to college, you get used to the academic environment - you learn to communicate an idea efficiently to someone who isn't an english teacher. It's where you learn that all those "rules" they taught you aren't as steadfast as they would have liked you to believe. It is ok to start sentences with "And" or "But" and end with a preposition.
Obviously, not everyone shares my opinion considering they got 200+% funding in two weeks, but I was wholly unconvinced, most specifically by the "why us?" section - if you can't answer that question instinctively and convincingly, then (again, if I were the one doing the choosing) the answer would clearly be "not you."
0:{description:'You are at a computer using unixkcd.', exits:{west:1, south:10}},
1:{description:'Life is peaceful there.', exits:{east:0, west:2}},
2:{description:'In the open air.', exits:{east:1, west:3}},
3:{description:'Where the skies are blue.', exits:{east:2, west:4}},
4:{description:'This is what we\'re gonna do.', exits:{east:3, west:5}},
5:{description:'Sun in wintertime.', exits:{east:4, west:6}},
6:{description:'We will do just fine.', exits:{east:5, west:7}},
7:{description:'Where the skies are blue.', exits:{east:6, west:8}},
8:{description:'This is what we\'re gonna do.', exits:{east:7}},
10:{description:'A dark hallway.', exits:{north:0, south:11},
In high school, I worked in a library for about min wage + 40% or so. 5 years later, I got turned down for a position with the same township, paying barely above min wage, but they decided to "go with someone with tree-planting experience." The point is, the tagline for higher education has always been "Get a degree, get a better job - people with a college education earn X more in their lifetime" etc.
If college was free, it would be one thing. But it's not. And the truth is, I now have around 15k in student loans, and I'm begging and pleading for jobs that I could have done when I was 16 - and I'm losing those jobs to people with work experience that they got while I was off getting a piece of paper that seems to make me a liability.
Now we're coming back with a newfound respect for the people who were smart enough to see through that load. A high school buddy of mine just got out of the SEAL program and has been unemployed for six months. We're the prodigal sons of the working world, but nobody slaughters the fattened calf when we come crawling back.