freshfunk

For me, it comes down to what he said here: >Meanwhile, though, I have no sympathy for people who are trying to shortcut the established processes. The "hope for a better life" just doesn't justify bypassing all the other people that wait in line.

The thing is that everyone else who is in the line is also hoping for a better life. So what justifies someone cutting?

In this specific case, he had no choice in the matter (put on a plane as a kid) so I think he should be allowed to stay. But every other adult is, in my opinion, cutting in line.

With that said, I think illegal immigration creates all kinds of societal problems and is unfair to legal immigrants.

The problem it creates is that there's enormous stress on those that are illegal. They live in the shadows and can be taken advantage of. My own personal experience was driving in LA and being rear-ended by someone who then fled the scene (most likely illegal). They work for less than minimum wage and don't cooperate with law enforcement for fear of deportation.

I'm a child of legal immigrants so I'm naturally biased. There is a legal system and many people every year try to go through that system like my parents did. I see illegal immigrants as "cutting in line" and I see nothing fair about it.

But I'm also human. People like Vargas had no choice (sent here as a kid) and has made a life here. I also sympathize those that flee poverty, crime and even wanting a brighter future. I also grew up in LA and know that many illegal immigrants live decent lives.. heck some of my friends are probably undocumented.

But completely opening the borders is not feasible. Creating systems that encourage illegal immigration only make the problem worse (and exacerbate the problems mentioned above).

His other example are teams in professional sports. This is also horrible because even the "average" professional athlete represents the cream of the crop (.01%). Scotty Pippen, Steve Kerr, and Dennis Rodman were no Michael Jordan but surely they're stars by any other metric.

- append -ly, -able, -r, -up, -in, -on - remove all vowels - substitute k for c unless it ends in -ck in which case just remove the c... or the k - take the last two letters and put them into the doma.in - prepend with get- or the- - use a sound

And, if all those fail, just buy the domain you want with .net instead of .com and buy the .com after you've raised some cash. ;P

"Another hacker, known as @th3j35t3, or "The Jester," has said "Gloves off" to the LulzSec group in a Twitter statement. "The Jester" is said to be responsible for a host of DDoS attacks on Islamist sites and targeted Wikileaks after their last release. In that attack he used the military phrase "tango down" which was parroted by LulzSec for their apparent CIA attack."

https://twitter.com/#!/th3j35t3r/status/81121623712874496

While one may affect the other, the debate is around the bubble.

You imply that the global economic situation may cause this bubble to burst or deflate. It actually tends to be the other way around. Hot markets can pull economies out of (or into) recession. The housing/internet markets contributed to the boom years during the Clinton era (and pulled us out of the recession of the 80s). Over-leveraged, cheap-money financial markets pulled us into one.

It may be the case that this next internet "bubble" helps bring us out of our current economic malaise.

He has some pretty compelling graphs and arguments for his position!

Pointing out the obvious here but using matured languages/frameworks tends to have less of this problem.

It's like dating: stable -> boring and reliable while dynamically changing -> exciting but scary.

What frameworks, in your opinion, are stable, relevant today, easy to use, and has a good community?

I've been doing some client-side scripting with Ruby lately just for fun and I've also played with Python in the past. I haven't used Rails or Django. After reading all of this, I'm leaning towards Python/Django but haven't used neither web framework I'm curious as to people's opinions.

That's the real lulz!

Also, keep in mind that the ratings are based on the complete experience not just the food. If someone had great food but a bad experience with the waiter, they may have no problems leaving 1 or 2 stars. Crap food with awesome service could get 4 stars.

It's Yelp, not Zagat or Michelin. If you use it appropriately, it will work for you.

IMO, if a business is doing this and trying to cut costs then don't be surprised if that person does NOT convert into a regular customer. It's penny wise pound foolish.

It's obvious that people are smart enough to spot that their servings are smaller and their choices are limited compared to normal people. That angers customers! It's as bad as microwaving your food and thinking people are clueless and can't tell microwaved food from fresh food.

Sure, maybe you're saving a little here and there but you're almost guaranteeing that that person won't come back.

What's better is if you have: - A product person who's done product management, product marketing, user experience and design. Ideally they have a CS background and can understand technology. - A technical person who's a generalist and can code things up from front to back. They should also have some sense of front-end design as well as product.

BOTH needs to have some business sense.

By having product/technical overlap, they can work together to create an elegant solution both in the product sense as well as the technical sense. By both having business sense, they can create a product that fits a business.

A business person with no sense of product is not a cofounder because they can't scope anything out. Just having ideas and describing a solution by mouth or pointing at another website and saying "do this" is not cofounder material.

A coder who needs to be told exactly what to do for anything and has no feedback or insight on the product/business is also not a cofounder.

These aren't hard and fast rules but is my conclusion based on my entrepreneur experiences.

Great product/business people are more than just ideas. Great technical people are more than just "coders."

Pump and dump.

It's akin to finding a greater fool down the road to leave the bag with. Normally that wouldn't bother me too much but given that they're going public the last fool who ends up holding the back may be your average, every day investor.

Maybe they'll put their personal money in it. Maybe the company managing their retirement account will buy it. Either way, it'll be out there in the public for less sophisticated investors to buy.

And, given that they've used such a high percentage of their latter investments to pay out early investors, always always looks bad. It shows low confidence in the company in the long run.

I think it would be wise to stay clear of Groupon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_spending

Let's say you're in the business of giving $10 for $9.

Let's say you become so popular at it that you beat out all your competitors and now whenever anybody wants to make $1 comes to you and goes to no one else. So multiply this by the size of your market.

Now you add the condition (or maybe you had it in the first place) that those $9 have to stay with you at least 10 years. Now you're pretty much running a bank (well perhaps a CD is closer in terms of return and style of investment.

That's a real business. It's not just leveraging capital but now you're the only bank out there so you've pretty much got a monopoly going. Now you can change your terms and say instead of giving back a $1 maybe you only give back $0.50 or $0.25. What is everyone else going to do about it since you have so much power in the industry you can crush your competition?

In all three of these cases, you have situations where sophisticated financial instruments were used to hide real losses or very risky and costly investment bets.

That's a very different situation than one where you're leveraging debt to gobble up market share to become the market leader for a certain kind of service. This is particularly useful in types of businesses where winner takes all.

Much of what they did is par for the course today but, at the time, it was innovative. Amazon didn't win because they were lucky. They won because they were smart. Investors who recognized this were betting intelligently, not just lucky.

The other thing to notice is that that culture still exists today. They take big chances in areas seem tangential to their business (eg. AWS, Kindle) or use business innovation to drive sales (eg. Amazon Mom).

Last I saw, LivingSocial's trajectory was steeper than GroupOns. I think we can expect LivingSocial to go public soon so they can add some cash to their war chest.

The type of businesses that do benefit the most are those that will operate anyway but have excess capacity to use (eg. beds and breakfasts).