...the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence – all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour.

In addition to the questionable morality of a company that is about to create 1,000 millionaires when it floats paying such paltry sums, there are significant privacy concerns for the rest of us. Although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users’ personal details [...]

maybe disgruntled commuters, old schoolfriends and new mothers will think twice before sharing intimate information with their “friends” – only to find that two minutes later it’s being viewed by an under-vetted, unfulfilled person on a dollar an hour in an internet café in Marrakech.

NYT from two years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html

I spent two years building an app that helps people organize and archive hundreds of tweet replies, solving a problem that basically no one else has.

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere.

@1:15:00 music industry is totally corrupt, also @1:47:00

* MR doesn't think the climate crisis is anything to worry about ("work on Malaria and AIDS instead", "things that directly affect people" [hmmm...])

* millions upon millions in profit earned throughout his life, and he's working on a cloud music service

I view big technological challenges as things like alternative energy, better scrubber technology, cleaner nuclear technology, agricultural science to make sure out food supply is secure for years to come, better desalination techniques so we never run out of water, cheaper more effective housing solutions, medical breakthroughs, better and longer lasting roads, technology making airline travel easier, more effective video conferencing to facilitate quicker and easier communication – basically: how to make everybody’s lives better without destroying our world – you know – the big challenges.

Contrast this to what we see every day and read about – and in fact saw last night – which is more and more iterations on social media. No doubt social is hot, it is being funded, it is being written about, and people are looking for the next big breakthrough in it. Fred Wilson talked about this today on his blog regarding Twitter as a platform (see here), and Anil referred to it when he showed his over 300,000 Twitter followers and exclaimed that he and all the others were addicted to social media like drug addicts. At the Tech Meetup there was one social media derivative after another, trying to get people to figure out better and weasier ways to hang out, hook up, meet up, etc… and I was wondering why so many people are interested in these sort of problems as opposed to the ones Anil professes he wants to devote his time to.

[annoying Silicon Valley disposition: how large corporations can make money by amassing data in order to sell things; no vision, just gadgets and tools.]

Whoever cracks this code, providing frameworks that make it possible for applications to be functionally social without being socially promiscuous, will win. Platform providers are in a good position to solve this problem once, so that users don't have to give credentials to a larger and larger pool of application providers, with little assurance that the data they provide won't be misused.

[Semper Cogito's comment; O'Reilly does, "yeah yeah, that's what I've always said": http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/state-of-internet-operating-system.html#comment-2406964 ]

Even when the trauma of the financial crisis subsides, Silicon Valley will still be at risk because of deeper, long-term challenges, the report said.

Sixty percent of the region’s scientists and engineers are foreign-born, but foreign immigration to the region dropped 34 percent over the last year. The home countries of foreigners are increasingly luring them back, while the United States government’s policies have made it harder for them to stay, the report said.

To combat the brain drain, California must do a better job educating local students

What made BarCamp so interesting, and quickly turned it into a worldwide underground phenomenon, was the way it incorporated open-source and related principles. While the term means many things to many people, to Messina open source is “both an attitude and a methodology. It’s a practice for how you work. You build an idea by being transparent and by offering up the blueprints, by allowing other people to modify that work so they can spawn their own individual project.”

For the first BarCamp, Messina and his buddies devised a simple system that let attendees, rather than organizers, create the day’s agenda on the spot. Anyone could claim a room and lead a talk. The result was a user-generated “unconference” where collaboration and serendipity ruled.

http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00

For centuries, people have worried that economic growth had limits — that the only way for one group to prosper was at the expense of another. The pessimists, from Malthus and the Luddites and on, have been proved wrong again and again. Growth is not finite. But it is also not inevitable. It requires a strategy.

links re: tech companies

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seemed misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depended on entrepreneurs and innovations and green-tech businesses getting “traction,”

Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software. If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems. Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions — in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions.