Hey! There are currently two posts on the main page blaming the older generation for all the world's ills. I was born in the fifties, and I have this to say about it.

matt2500

I'm 41 and have done the same. But how many times have you been really engaged in a local election?

matt2500

There's a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I think is very informative here:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

matt2500

I'm going to nip this self-righteous bit right now. This demographic is 50-60 years now, how is it just now affecting change, 30-40 years after becoming voters?

The thing is, it's not just the ability to vote that affects change. Remember, people vote more the older they are, so while boomers may have had the right to vote for several decades now, in the early years they didn't exercise it as often.

And more importantly, you can't just vote in sweeping social change. You have to vote in the right candidates, yes, but then those elected officials have to advance to the point where they are the influential members of their institutions, the ones setting the agenda. This also takes time.

Finally, and most importantly, progressive social change almost always comes from the bottom up. You're going to see things like easing of marijuana laws and marriage equality for the lgbt community coming at the state level, and in turn these issues hit the state level only after there has been a groundswell from even lower levels of government, when counties and cities start pushing the envelope. And this happens only when those governments are filled by people progressive enough to push for these issues. And who are the folks filling county commisioner and city council seats? Well, it's by people who are well-entrenched in their communities, with homes and families and good jobs. In other words, by older types. Not by twenty-somethings just starting out in adult life.

Add to this that, because they are entrenched in the community, with good jobs and homes and families, they tend to grow more conservative. Progressive social change simply takes time. When people are in place who recognize that letting gays and lesbians marry doesn't threaten anyone's housing values, and that legalizing pot won't lead to mass drug abuse and crime, then we'll see progress in those directions. Which we're seeing.

The slow pace of change is frustrating, but it's the way the world works.

matt2500

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKT1P7x_Pzo

Might as well just leave that here.

matt2500

It's funny, one game I remember very specifically is Dragon's Lair, and that had almost the opposite problem. For the day, it's graphics were amazing (heck, they're good today, they were done by a Disney animator). But the stupid game was on Laser Disc, and it was more like a choose-your-own-adventure story than a game, from a purely gameplay perspective. There was so little interaction, it was frustrating as hell to play.

We still dropped dozens of quarters into that thing, though. It looked so good.

EDIT: I just bought this stupid game for my iPod. It's worse than I remember. You can't even look at the pretty graphics, because you have to look at the controls the whole time, and press the right button when it lights up at exactly the right time. It's nothing more than a glorified version of electronic Simon Says. I'm so glad that style of gaming died out.

matt2500

I found this via comments left by this spammer: http://www.reddit.com/user/ony3000

Here's another, similar post: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8nt61/informationtechnology/

I've seen spammers leave comments on other, older spam posts before, but never anything as crazy as this!

EDIT: basically, every comment left by ony3000 is to a spam post which has hundreds of comments left by other spambots. Just clicking through links at random leads to more and more spam posts, each of which ALSO have hundreds of comments by other spambots. Craziest, dumbest junk I've seen in a long time.

matt2500

Is it this?

matt2500

Didn't see he'd signed a three-year deal, but he's still at $3 million for 2010, nevertheless.

matt2500

Service time. Neither has signed their first free-agent contract yet.

EDIT: and their contracts aren't a wash. Blanton is making $3 million, Lee is making $9 million.

matt2500

West Sounder here, I'm in Kingston.

matt2500

Suckers they be sayin' they can take out Adam Horowitz.

matt2500

That Cantillon Gueuze looks delicious. I'll give it a try.

matt2500

Just finished that one. It's a damn fine beer. Tomorrow I'll try the Cascade.

matt2500

Yeah, I was just rounding out the shopping with that one. The gueze is about my favorite beer ever.

matt2500

So at your age, you're absolutely right to be looking at this to be the time in your life to be taking chances working for a startup. A piece of advice, though, from someone who worked at one. EQUITY! You are trading the early years of your career for a chance at being on the ground floor of something big. This is a risk, and you should be compensated for it, preferably with some kind of equity stake in the company. The thought of working in a cube farm for some safe company for the next twenty years may sound horrifying, but that job pays better, offers more security long-term, and can get you further ahead in the rat-race in the short-term than does your current job. Even if you'd never take the cube-farm job, this doesn't mean you shouldn't be compensated for that risk. Five years from now, you might meet the mate of your dreams, and wish you could settle down and have kids if it weren't for this damned job working for a startup that never seems to be going anywhere.

matt2500

This reminds of a cool brewer-related story that I might as well tell here.

In grad school, one of my best friends was an undergrad, Frank. Frank was older than the average student, as he'd done a stint in the Marines prior to college. He also happened to be a very handsome, charismatic and incredibly intelligent guy. He met amazing people wherever he went. As an example, he served as a page for Senator Paul Simon one summer. Most pages do drudge work, and only meet the senator once or twice. Frank, within a couple of weeks, was working on projects directly with Simon, and got invited to accompany him to a taping of Jesse Jackson's TV show. This was typical for Frank.

Well, he was doing a trip in Europe, and while in London, stopped in at a pub. He was sitting at the bar and struck up a conversation with the guy sitting next to him. Without introducing themselves, Frank and his barmate started talking about beer, and the guy showed himself to be an expert, and got samplers for Frank of all different styles of beer, talking about each with expertise on how it was made, what foods it might go well with, etc.

Finally, my buddy asked the guy how he knew so much about beer. The guy looked at Frank and introduced himself as Pete. Of Pete's Wicked Ale. And this kind of stuff was absolutely par for the course for my friend Frank.

matt2500

Short answer: yes. Borders won't be around much longer. Their UK division has recently filed for bankruptcy, and they are selling off pieces of the company to stay afloat (they sold Paperchase, a UK stationery store, just a few weeks ago). Their stock price is moving toward zero as investors jump ship. Borders is not long for this world.

I haven't followed Barnes and Noble for a long time, but they're struggling as well. Amazon is eating their lunch on books, and sales of music and video on physical media is a dying business. They can hope to get pull even with Amazon via the Nook, and they might, but they can't sustain a nationwide chain of brick and mortar stores that way.

Here's a good overview, lumping Borders and Barnes and Noble with Blockbuster as companies that are dying:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/07/21/barnes-noble-blockbuster-borders-the-killer-bs-are.aspx

matt2500

No, you have no idea how happy this makes ME! I bought this last summer, just for stretches of weather like this. I'm planning my second road trip of the summer now.

matt2500

John Lee Hooker:

Crawlin' Kingsnake

Father Was a Jockey

Boom Boom

matt2500

I see where you're coming from, but in my mind, that's what a re-read is for.

matt2500

Almost never, and here's why: if it was a good book (and if it wasn't, I'm not going to finish it anyway), then by the end I feel satisfied. I've got conclusion, on the plot and the characters. The story that the author needed to tell is finished. Maybe I'm left wanting more, which is almost always a good thing, but I am almost never sad that the story is over. Instead, I am generally left feeling satisfied, with a sense of accomplishment at having finished a great book. There is a very nice sense of closure at reading the last page of a great book, closing it, leaning back in your chair, and reflecting for a while on what you've just read. And if it's good enough, opening the book to page one and starting over.

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matt2500

TROPHY CASE

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