Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Web Entrepreneurs

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be web geeks,
Don’t let ’em write Java or HTML.
Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be web geeks,
‘Cuz they’ll work all night long and they’ll never get rich.
While Google makes all the cash.
(With apologies to Ed Bruce and Willie Nelson)

Most web entrepreneurs need OTHER day jobs. Millions of them make little or no money, despite delivering informative and/or entertaining content. And they may well spend more on SEO than they make. An expensive hobby …

Sears Roebuck Invented Mail Order, but Amazon Ate Its Lunch, and Now Brick & Mortar Retail Suffers

Sears Roebuck was a hot stock when it held its IPO in 1906, and ninety years later its shares had grown 434,552 percent. But by 1973, when it opened the Sears Tower (at that time the tallest building in the world), it apparently had lost all or most of its entrepreneurial instrincts, and it let Amazon get started in 1994 and overtake it, apparently without any counter-offensive.

But Sears isn’t the only retailer who missed the resolutionary changes in retailing. Most department store chains are suffering from changes in people’s tastes and how and where they shop. And many shopping malls are shadows of their former selves. It will be very interesting to see if Amazon can innovate in the grocery category.

Can Women Write Code As Well as Men?

Anyone working in Silicon Valley (or reading local newspapers) cannot fail to be personally affected by issues of workplace diversity (at least vicariously). (Actually, anyone reading the Wall Street Journal these days could not avoid seeing the variety of prose on this topic from its chorus of reporters and columnists.) And during the last couple of weeks s/he could scarcely avoid hearing about the 10-page memo written by Google’s James Damore, his subsequent firing, and the furor both locally and nationally. There is a saying in Japanese that “the nail that sticks up is the one that gets pounded down”, and we are sure that he feels very pounded down these days. And his subsequent article published in the Wall Street Journal (in a nice touch the accompanying picture shows him wearing a T-shirt that says “Goolag”) has doubtlessly made Google management feel pounded down, too. (This appears to add insult to the injury already facing Google because the U.S. Department of Labor is already claiming that Google systematically pays women less than men.)

It is no secret that the tech industry in general employs a majority of white or Asian (mainly Indian) men, particularly in technical and leadership roles, which means that Google is no better or worse than other giant tech companies. But when one digs a bit deeper, it turns out that Damore’s belief that women are less capable at writing code than men is incorrect because Indian women CAN code too.

The Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler points out that there is limited proof that Google’s mandatory “Unconscious Bias” training has any merit, because of the fallibility of the numerous studies that have supported its inclusion.

Actually, it is meaningless to give OVERALL statistics about percents of male/female or race without also putting them in the context of compensation or managerial level or similar measure, as we have tried to do with the illustration above.

Shame on U.S. and Canada for Failing to Diagnose Diplomats’ Hearing Loss

The causes of hearing loss are pretty much well known. And presumably—because of the long history of Fidel Castro’s behavior and today’s less-than-relaxed relationship between the U.S. and Cuba—most of the tricks that could have been played have already been played. However, it is well known that Cuba has excellent health care. So presumably there is good medical knowledge in Cuba, which could well extend to knowledge of poisons and procedures that could have been used to cause hearing loss. What is scary, however, is that U.S. and Canadian medical experts have thus far been clueless as to the cause of the diplomats’ hearing loss that was announced on August 10. Shame on the US and Canada if they are bested by Cuba on ANY aspect of technology, though perhaps it was technology invented by the Fidel Castro regime to maintain his control of Cuba (“hear no evil see no evil speak no evil”). One thing that has not been mentioned in all of the press accounts is the possible effect of low-frequency (20-250 Hz (cycles per second)) sounds.

However, Cuba may have some motivation to punish the U.S. because Trump has (predictably) reversed some of the actions of Obama.

Net Neutrality: A Victim of Politics?

The current fracas about net neutrality is an example of the worst features of politics and the US’s two-party system. “European diplomats … believe Trump’s foreign policy is chiefly driven by an obsession with unravelling Barack Obama’s policies. “It’s his only real position,” one European diplomat said. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.’ He won’t even want to listen to the arguments or have a debate.”

In the case of Net Neutrality it MIGHT be predictable that even Republicans other than Trump would side with the big companies like Amazon, Comcast, Facebook, and Google. But new FCC head appointed by Trump seems to be going to extremes to kill and bury net neutrality. This is ironical because killing net neutrality is likely to most hurt the voters of the species who put Trump into the White House. We even suspect that many of the “little guys” who are members of this species don’t even understand what net neutrality is and that those little guys are the ones who will suffer most because it is THEY will suffer as they become second-class citizens with regard to information and entertainment they receive via the Internet. Readers of this post who are uncertain as to what net neutrality is would do well to have a look at its definition on Wikipedia or another reliable source of information.

President Trump and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai appear to be ignoring the U.S. Declaration of Independence that states “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Given the importance of the Internet today, their attitudes and actions are clearly violating Americans’ pursuit of Happiness.