Subluminal

“Millenials”…

 “We’re the future. And you don’t belong in it. Because we’re beyond you, and naturally, that makes you feel kind of bad. You have this deep-down feeling that you don’t matter anymore. You should be glad, though…  Do you want your kids’ world to be a step above yours? Isn’t that what we’re all doing? So, doesn’t it follow that if you’re a good parent, and your kids evolve, and are smarter than you, they’re gonna make you feel kind of dumb? So if you feel stupid around young people, things are going good.”

(Louie CK, video via Vulture (broken) – view on facebook)

There needs to be a ‘maximum wage’ vs minimum wage ; instead of paying young kids with no family obligations $200,000.00 + a year to sit at Philz Coffee all day and play the latest Candy Crush’ mind chewing gum  game with their Lucy Liu wanna be’s, at beck’n call . (SFWeekly, comments added to print)

puzzled by generational drives:

I dropped out of college when I was 18. To move to Los Angeles. To become a rock star. It’s true. […] And lo, it was glorious.

Why share all this silliness? Because there appears to be a strange parallel afoot. Because I recently found myself entranced by Nellie Bowles’ terrific profile over in California Sunday magazine, a tale of the new hordes of “lost boys” of San Francisco, all these naïve, clean-cut, mostly white teenaged computer whizzes from affluent families who are dropping out of college (and, increasingly, high school) to move to San Francisco.

They’re here to code, of course. To found companies. To singe their brains with a million lame logos. Which is to say, not for the fame, or the girls, or the fun drugs, or the free love (different era, but still).

They’re here for the money.
Attention teen dropouts racing to SF: The tech bubble is lying to you
– Mark Morford

or working for funny companies :

The Greylock partners hear a lot of pitches from companies with cute one-word names and bright logos (Meerkat, Sprig, Nextdoor, Vessel, Operator) that aim at “disrupting” some existing set of economic arrangements. At least in conversation, nobody is safe: education, health-care delivery, media, national currencies. – The Network Man (The New Yorker)

Happy New year !

Psychology and physiology, in so far as they bear upon the question of free will, tend to make it improbable. Work on internal secretions, increased knowledge of function of different part of the brain, Pavlov’s investigations of conditioned reflexes, and the psycho-analytic study of the effects of repressed memories and desires, have all contributed to the discovery of causal laws governing mental phenomena. None of them, of course, have disproved the possibility of free will, but the have made it highly probable that, if uncaused volitions do ever occur, they are very rare.

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Things are starting to look stark

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. – Norman Mailer

Some days, it is hard to make a sense of the current times…

All these people trying to sell me things that I don’t need…

A million guys walk into a Silicon Valley bar.
No one buys anything.
Bar declared massive success.
– Paul Stamatiou

skype                       twilio         wash.io
gyft         spotify        arduino        wise.io
lyft         appify         vimeo
Shyp                        venmo
swyft     

uber         paypal         box            youtube
tumblr       drupal         dropbox        roku    
flickr                      virtualbox     heroku
grindr       yo                            akamai
tinder       what's app     quora             
happn        wechat         pandora        pando
             snapchat                      mongo

tilt         vmware         airbnb         misterbnb
affirm       yesware        wevorce        homobile
stripe       xendit         spoonrocket    readability
square       squarespace    braintree      salesforce
slack        lifesum        meerkat        splunk
Wag          taskrabbit     periscope

Now that I have lived for over a year near the Silicon Valley, I have a better view of the local culture which is a strange mix of lefty utopian libertarian, lefty vegan liberals and all things that might seem contradictory in general, but not here.

Atlas Shrugged, in the liberal California

I want to address here what I’ve learned in these months, so that European newcomers can sharpen their learning curve !