If this is actually true (I've never tried to get a VC job) maybe partners in VC firms should plan better because they'd end up with better hires instead of the dregs who can't find a job anywhere else. No wonder some VCs are completely useless.
My guess is that the SSA didn't factor how poorly American's would treat themselves over the next 65 years. If they had their projections for life expectancy would have dropped inline with what they are today.
Either that or those fantastic flying cars we all though we were going to have by 2011 were supposed to have contributed to a longer lifespan.
If you read in the comments there is some discussion as to why this has happened. It seems that longer lifespan is being somewhat canceled out statistically by the swell of people born during the baby boom and immigration.
Exactly. The US (and most other western countries) are playing the game where you avoid the greying of the population by bringing in a constant supply of new immigrants from poorer countries. This is not, of course, sustainable over the long term.
Why is it surprising that a country could shut down access to the internet? It's not as if the internet is some sort of magic cloud where packets fly in and out to destinations across the world. It's a system. It has points of failure just like anything else. Granted it was built to survive failure but if you didn't build your internet infrastructure like the designers envisioned it's probably pretty easy to turn it off.
When I lived in NYC I was really surprised to find out that most transatlantic cables terminated in this tall windowless building on Duane and Chambers street. If you basically took that building away you probably could turn off the internet for a good portion of people in the US. Or at the very least make it hard.
My point being - in Egypt there probably is a similar building that houses all of their DNS servers, lines to other countries, etc. So its not hard to believe that someone just decided to walk in and turn off the power.
If this comment is interesting to you, you must read Mother Earth, Motherboard [1]. It's a fantastic long technojournalist piece by Neal Stephenson dealing with transoceanic cables.
In a nicely Pharaonic touch, one of the six ducts going
into the ground here is the sole property of President
Hosni Mubarak, or (presumably) whoever succeeds him as
head of state. It is hard to envision why a head of state
would want or need his own private tube full of air running
underneath the Sahara. The obvious guess is that the duct
might be used to create a secure communications system,
independent of the civilian and military systems (the
Egyptian military will own one of the six ducts, and ARENTO
will own three). This, in and of itself, says something
about the relationship between the military and the
government in Egypt.
If you have StyleBot, this makes it a lot more readable:
Who knows, what with old broken software installed on old broken routers, but there are transpacific cables, and Asia is directly connected to Europe... so I think there would be no loss of Internet functionality in this case. NYC-LON ping times would be a lot higher, of course, but that's exactly why those cables exist -- to make things faster.
I totally agree. It's such a piss poor way to rank universities I can't believe they published it. The data isn't even really complete so there are a bunch of universities (like the University of Waterloo) in the 76-100 ranking that should be in the top 30 that aren't because they haven't bothered to do all of their homework.
If 4% of founders in YC are female I would be interested to know what the breakdown of male/female entrepreneurs are for businesses outside of tech. My initial guess is that there are a lot more female entrepreneurs outside of the valley than there are in the valley. This article (http://www.examiner.com/women-s-entrepreneurship-in-washingt...) would seem to (albeit not definitely) agree with that assumption. So if we think there is a significant difference I would be really interested to see a profile of a female tech entrepreneur and a female non-tech entrepreneur. That profile would reveal a lot about why more women don't create technology startups.
In the end I think women are quite entrepreneurial and can make the sacrifices, tradeoffs, and decisions necessary to succeed. I just don't think the type of businesses that most women are interested in creating are technology in nature.
Based on this move I wonder how much truth there ever was to the rumor that Google was considering buying Trulia (http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091218/open-house-google-has-al...). The infrastructure they have is basically the same so they would have encountered the same infrastructure issues with the retirement of Google Base.
Congrats to the folks at Hipmunk. I've always really liked the simplicity of this idea for travel search.
I do wonder, however, how long they'll be able to continue to link directly to the airlines. I'm assuming (and this may be an overly broad generalization) that as they build out features for users this will naturally force them to create interstitial's between the carrier's website and their own. I seem to recall that Kayak was very similar in terms of its relationship with carriers when they initially started. But as they built out more functionality they created more for the user to do on their site distracting them away from the carrier site.
So although TechCrunch thinks it interesting that American isn't cutting out Hipmunk is this really going to be true in the long run?
I think so, for financial reasons. AA cut themselves out to cut costs. Orbitz and other similar services were (from what I heard) overcharging AA for referral costs. Naturally, I think Hipmunk and AA simply have a deal that won't really hurt AA.
