Ralph Haygood
I'm an entrepreneur and scientist. As an entrepreneur, I founded CardVine. As a scientist, I study evolution, ecology, genetics, and genomics. Learn more about me at http://ralphhaygood.com/.
On Why A News Portal Snapped Up A James Deen Furry Cosplay Gif Site
@NotAndersonCooper Both, presumably, Tumblr being chock full of porn.
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On Ugh, Can We Stop Talking About 'DSM' Already?
It may be big, but no book could be big enough to contain all the crazy in this world or even in this country or maybe even in a typical academic department, including departments of psychiatry. For example, are people who make under $100,000 a year and vote Republican in there? How about the professor who claimed publishing a paper in Science was better than having sex? (I'm an author of a paper in Science. Believe me, it's not that great.)
Also, you *can* just blame god for everything - that's what I do - with the proviso that god is actually evolution. Happiness isn't necessarily conducive to survival and reproduction, so evolution isn't much interested in promoting happiness. Not that recognizing this really helps, of course.
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On It's Baby-Cloning Time!
"Who are we going to clone first?" Obviously, Dick Cheney. He's already one of the Undead, so clearly his will to immortality is strong, and of course he's well known to have truckloads of money and no scruples whatsoever.
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On Will You Welcome Your New Silicon Valley Emo-Choad Oligarch Government?
@deepomega If only more of those trolls would leave Facebook in a huff. They stink up the place even worse than Zuckerberg and company's cockamamie advertising schemes.
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On Will You Welcome Your New Silicon Valley Emo-Choad Oligarch Government?
@Clarence Rosario So true. A couple of years ago, I spent six months living in Silicon Valley, Atherton, to be exact, home of many of these people. Why anyone would choose to stay there is beyond me. As Ken Layne wrote here awhile back, "Silicon Valley is a dull and ugly landscape of low-rise stucco office parks and immense traffic-clogged boulevards [and, I would add, sprawling tracts of staggeringly overpriced mcmansions]...There is nothing to do, nowhere to go." (http://bit.ly/13evvrO)
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On Either Way, Media People Unpleasant
"Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I'll tell you. A borderline sociopath." Of course, to the extent this is true, it's because the world is largely run by well-over-the-borderline sociopaths.
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On When Is A Media Model A Revolution, And When Is It A Unicorn?
Thriving cultural hubs don't happen because tycoons decide to make them happen by throwing money around. If Hsieh is serious, maybe he should start a university, like James Duke or Leland Stanford did, which might eventually attract enough smart, industrious, and creative people to matter. Or maybe it's too late in American history for that strategy to work anymore. Anyhow, urban revitalization in places like Durham, NC, where I live, is a long, messy, and organic process involving people like artists, musicians, and restauranteurs who are unlikely to move somewhere just because some zillionaire is spending wads of cash there.
It would help to be somewhere more prepossessing than Las Vegas, too. I've spent time in Las Vegas. It has about as much soul as a paper cup. (Raymond Chandler said similar about Los Angeles, where I grew up, but Las Vegas is worse.) The town barely existed before World War II, and it grew up almost exclusively as a tourist trap. The surroundings aren't bad if, like me, you like deserts (e.g., Red Rock Canyon is lovely), but the town is an island of hotels and casinos in a sea of suburban sprawl. There's no there there, and it would take a lot more than an outcropping of venture-backed startups to change that.
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On Our Radical Future: Cults, Utopias and Rebellions of the 1890s
"Wisconsin death trip" is a weird, fascinating, and depressing book unlike any other I've ever read. I highly recommend it. It inspired a film with the same title, which is surprisingly good. Among other things, the film juxtaposes material from the book with scenes of present-day Black River Falls, which suggest the craziness of a century ago is far from over. Neither the book nor the film situates events at Black River Falls in the larger context sketched by this post, which is a reminder that the triumph of industrial capitalism and colonialism was a sordid and squalid affair that caused enormous amounts of gratuitous suffering and waste.
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On Memories Short
On the contrary, I remember when my mother - who in turn dimly remembered the Great Depression and was therefore a Nervous Nellie about spending money on anything ever - freaked out over paying $34,000 for a house in suburban Los Angeles. Of course, two years later, she sold it for a third again that much.
Then again, I rent an apartment, so I'm not actually a member of "the buying public," partly because I remember real-estate bubbles past (but mostly because I can't stand spending time or money on home maintenance).
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On Why A News Portal Snapped Up A James Deen Furry Cosplay Gif Site
"create advertising opportunities that are seamless" and "enhance user experience": at least one of these two things does not belong.
Well, so long, Tumblr - been okay knowin' ya (I liked Posterous better, before it disappeared into the maw of Twitter). I expect this acquisition will work out just as well for all parties as Yahoo's previous acquisitions of Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc., ad nauseam. It's downright comical to watch flailing companies like Yahoo trying to buy their way out of their own entrenched dysfunctionality. There's nothing deep or difficult about Tumblr's design or implementation. You could indeed build it for less than a billion dollars; in fact, you could probably build it, market it, and grow it to a respectable size for less than ten million dollars. Unless, of course, you're Yahoo or Microsoft or some other beached whale of a company, where engineers "sit in a cubicle all day and can't make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking."
On the bright side, this development does open space for someone to launch a new and improved casual blogging platform.