So maybe the slackers had it right after all
boston.com
boston.com
I stopped reading there. "You" did what? Is the author suggesting that "slackers" brought us the internet? It seems to me that a vast army of workaholic scientists and hackers of all types "brought us the internet", not a bunch of wannabe artists working part-time jobs at Starbucks.
Perhaps I'm missing the point of this article, but it seems overly loose and unjustified, and filled with fallacies. Freelancers aren't slackers, they work harder than people in regular jobs, in most cases. Hackers aren't slackers - they have many characteristics of slackers, perhaps, but if you get down to it, most of us are obsessive, driven workaholics - for the right work.
Interestingly, I've heard these sort of cataclysmic shifts in the environment are why procrastination and lazyness evolved. In the ancestral human environment, a "black swan" event wasn't just losing your job, it was having your whole tribe killed by marauding invaders, or losing your food supply to a bunch of hungry monkeys, or having a brushfire sweep through your camp and destroy everything. And they happened much more frequently than they do today. So it makes sense to eat the food now rather than stockpile it, fuck lots of women instead of raise the offspring, and not bother with building shelter because it'll just be destroyed. People who did otherwise often found their hard work negated by events outside of their control, and so they evolved impulses to not bother.
Author makes some big leaps. He doesn't think that having high work ethic is a virtue regardless of what work he's doing... and he follows through with the logical non-materialism... and then, he's lucky he doesn't have kids, because you have to buy toys for your kids?
I think he was trying to drive home that he's a nonconformist, and nonconformity is looking a lot better right now than it did two years ago. Very true - but you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Americans work more hours each week than other industrialized nations, but we have one of the lowest per-hour productivities. We need to change the productivity, at least.
http://www.conference-board.org/economics/downloads/Producti... (page 18)
What studies are you basing your claim off of?
I get the point about slackers bringing the internet. The internet may have been invented for "workaholic scientists" to scam more grant money out of DARPA, but it is what it is today due to the persistent, unstoppable, abuse of employer's computers and resources for non-work related activity.
It takes a slacker to show up to work early on Monday morning to use the faster internet connection to browse ebay.
If so much internet usage wasn't on employer's computers, there would less incentive to use javascript and AJAX, because it would be easier to get people to just install desktop applications.
Teach for America is a horrible example. The organization is good, and I'm not questioning the dedication of the teachers for giving up two years of their life for TFA. But the volunteers are not giving up a chance at a lucrative career in the private sector. In fact, TFA may be viewed as a strong positive to many companies.
Top business, medical, and law schools will give volunteers two year deferrals. HBS has TFA as 2+2 partner(2+2 is a program where Harvard will give admitted college seniors 2 years experience, then a MBA in 2 years. Stanford will give out two-year deferrals for law,medical, and business schools. Caltech will give out deferrals for some programs. UCBerkeley will give out deferrals for engineering. Also, many school have scholarships set up for alumni. Those schools are basically endorsing TFA
One of Wendy Kopp's goals is to move TFA alumni into leadership positions. Amgen and bulge bracket investment banks are working with TFA to recruit students. J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have both found themselves competing with TFA for college graduates, so they decided they needed to partner with TFA. Google treats TFA like a core recruiting school, whatever that means.
So while volunteers are making big sacrifices to work for TFA, it might help them get other benefits like a high paying job, or entrance into a great grad school.
List of partnerships. Schools:http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/grad_school_partnershi... Employers: http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/employer_partnerships....
Personally, I aim to never 'finance' something, aside from the house I buy. I aim to never have credit card debt, that my cards are completely clean before the end of the month.
Another thing, I want to live a life where I can afford 100% of my life, that I don't have to rely on my wife to work so that on the chance one of us loses our job we don't have 50% of our expenses to cut, we only have 10-20%.
The last few years have been particularly disgusting. People competed to get ever-bigger and fancier houses, cars, and various toys that they really did not need.
Its time to start spending only what we earn as a nation, and individually.
I worked as a game reviewer for a number of years, and this is perhaps why I can value a video game much better than most other people. I reviewed many a game that I wouldn't ever justify spending $5 on.
I mean it's like the extended warranty they try to sell you on games. Whenever I buy a DS game, they always ask me for extended warranty (It's their job, so I don't snap at them) but the SD cartridge a DS game uses is virtually indestructible through normal accidents. I've had one go through a washing machine with suds and everything in and I took it out, peeled the remnants of the label off and continued playing the game. I stepped on one on a concrete floor in boots (it fell out of my pocket when I grabbed my iPod, tangled up in the headphones or something) and no one would be the wiser. Yet they ask me if I want to spend $3 to insure something that'll survive me: if I fall off a skyscraper, if I fall in the ocean and drown, get hit by a car and numerous other things.
In 1929, for example, just before the stock market crash, the private debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent. Last year, private sector debt as a percentage of the GDP: 300 percent; far more leverage. And you can see it’s been a steady increase basically since almost the end of World War II.
In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset. The economy is going to have to re-establish itself at a level of spending that reflects the real value of underlying assets before we can all start growing again at a healthy rate.
This may not be the thing that people really want to hear, but it’s certainly what we’re planning on, and it’s the truth on which we’re basing sort of our model, if you will, at Microsoft.
In our opinion, in order to reach the reset point, three things need to happen. First, the economy must be deleveraged. Private debt as a percentage of GDP has to be reduced. Restoring health to the nation’s financial system is a fundamental part of this."
Steve Ballmer, February 2009 Speech to Democratic Policy Confab
I wonder what he thinks of Tennyson.
There is nothing wrong with prudent management of your money and the accumulation of wealth... the advantage that people that live within their means have right now is that they don't have cash-flow issues. Their lives don't depend on predictable steady cash-flow to the same extent as that prototypical American with the $22k in credit card debt.
The fact that most slackers tend to live within their means does not imply that most people that live within their means are slackers.