I can focus on the words, because the rest of the environment is vignetted in a fuzziness produced by its lack of opinion on the world.

Frank Chimero

Love it. I probably should be there to say these things.

Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

For the interested news reader, the distinction between what's natural and what's artificial is already blurring in the fields of biology and chemistry. It is mind-boggling, though, that the most advanced technology might be undetectable because it appears to us as natural physical phenomena.

Some things—apps, presentations, speeches, appliances—are simple, but feel just right. I have to remind myself every now and then that it takes hard work to achieve that effect. 

Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment.

Early 2009 iMac revisions shipped with a new version of the wired keyboard, which omitted the numeric pad, similar to its wireless counterpart. The full keyboard with numeric pad remained available as a built-to-order option for no extra charge, as well as a separate purchase. The A1242 was silently discontinued in December 2010. #

Noooooooooo!

They passed the bill despite good reasons against it (do you need any?). For a funny overview, watch the first few minutes of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show (hat tip to Eiko). 

I still can't believe this is happening.

The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. […] The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with.

Where Godin lays out the characteristics of future jobs, Stiglitz stays in the realm of classic economic advice, and demands government spending in infrastructure to move to a service economy. It comes as a surprise to no-one that the outdated, industrial education system is one of his four major targets:

We have to transition out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality. To that end, there are many high-return investments we can make. Education is a crucial one—a highly educated population is a fundamental driver of economic growth.

An investment in traditional educations systems is essential, but not enough. Until money put into primary and secondary education shows an effect the world will be a very different one. Funding post-secondary education and basic research will introduce new technologies and ideas. Without infrastructure to bring them to life, however, they will not prosper.

We need to prepare all organizations to use new ideas, play with them and make them better, and execute on their realization. We need to do that now. Too few are prepared for that.

It's incredibily difficult to build a civil society on the back of "read the fine print." Emptor fidem works so much better than caveat emptor. When we have to spend all our time watching our back and working with lawyers, it's far more challenging to get anything done

Seth Godin

“The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”

Bruce Schneier in Charles C. Mann's Vanity Fair article Smoke Screening

[Senator Lindsey] Graham added that it was right that Americans should be subject to the detention law as well as foreigners. "It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next," he said. "And when they say, 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up. You don't get a lawyer.'"

The Guardian reporting on a new security bill about to be passed into law in the United States. The law would allow the US military to detain civilians indefinitely without trial.

Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball, commenting on There Is a Flip Side by Dave Winer

What makes Deresiewicz’s article so difficult is not only that it feels a little insulting. It’s that he has identified the right symptoms, but is mistaken about the underlying patterns. Aiming to rebut and explain, I’d like to make a few points about the Millennial Generation.

We don’t need to revolt

We millennials had an experience that is somewhat unique in history. We understood the fast-emerging digital technology considerably faster than our parents, and they never caught up. When technology became more mainstream, we were our parents’ teachers at an age when other teenagers feel disempowered. 

This is our source of self-confidence. We figure that we can add value to the world in a way that most people before us can’t. We’re not fighting previous generations because we don’t have to. We mostly don’t need them to do what we choose to accomplish.

There’s a certain kind of power that comes with this realization, and it has made us incompatible with large, naturally conservative organizations. In corporations, politics, and academia, you have to work your way up to succeed. This power imbalance contradicts our generation’s feeling of empowerment. We secretly feel we’ve leapfrogged this system, and often choose entrepreneurship over climbing the ladder. 

We’re not selling

Deresiewicz called us Generation Sell for our skill of marketing and giving our identity a voice—behavior that he finds to be typical of sales people. I think there’s an underlying characteristic that describes us better. Our generation grew up in the information age, and we have unprecedented, easy access to information. We drank it in as fast as it dropped onto the screen: We’re eager to learn. The skill of marketing ourselves and our ideas is just the symptom of that—it’s important in the world, so we learned how to do it. 

Similarly, we strive to become more socially competent (in his words: “polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly”) because at the core of how we work is collaboration and leadership. Our “smile and hearty handshake” is sincere much more often than not; we know how important relationships are, and we place value on building them.

Our culture is hard to grasp. “No anger, no edge, no ego.” Correct, we’re pragmatic, not angry. We know that anger is what people feel who’ve been left out, the feeling of those who set the banlieues of Paris or London on fire—and most of us don’t feel like that. Also, we apparently don’t display edge, but that’s just because we have our discussions where older people seldom go. Social change has become harder to gauge if you look in the wrong places (hint: you don’t read about it in the newspapers). Lastly, we don’t need ego, because we have self-confidence.

It’s not uncommon for culture and art to be equally misunderstood. It does hurt, though, to read this: “The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan”. Really? Has Deresiewicz ever been to Vimeo? Listened to studio-quality, home-recorded music or enjoyed a perfectly written essay by a (yes, self-publishing) journalist? I don’t see businesses making money. Most often I see artists who don’t ask for money at all, and sometimes I see artists fortunate enough to make a living by delighting a million patrons earning average income, rather than a handful rich ones. That doesn’t make them more of a business than Michelangelo.

We’re building something

No, a business plan is to this generation more like a work contract to baby boomers. It makes sense, and therefore we set it up. Our passion is directed elsewhere: the common denominator of entrepreneurship is not the business plan, it’s building something of value. We’re a generation of creators.

Although we will if we have to, we don’t always need to fight for rights and values anymore; our parents and grandparents did that. They succeeded—at least in many places in the world. We’re now using this victory to build and re-build business, society and politics based on their legacy. 

The reason why some of us look like sales people is also because we’ve started in areas where change happens more quickly than in others: business, and more specifically digital products. The rest will follow, and everything will implicitly be based on the values of previous and current generations.

We believe in freedom of thought, speech, and creation. We believe in democracy, protecting and empowering minorities, as well as justice. We support diversity in our countries of origin, and we’d rather live in another country than send soldiers. We think listening to many sides is more important than defining one truth, and moral views should be discussed instead of imposed. Self-realization comes before dogma; openness, transparency and change before holding on too much.

What we build reflects that. It’s transformative. It’s real. Come visit our websites.

I Believe I Can Fly

The long and short of it is, "pay enough so that money isn’t an issue, then give your employees high recognition, autonomy, and the opportunity to learn and grow," and watch them excel.

Fast Company: Want To Keep (And Motivate) Your Best Employees? It's Not About The Money