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[Servant Corps]

With all the hoopla over Facebook and Twitter among the chattering classes recently, including a movie that I can't believe anyone on the planet would actually pay money to see, there's a strong wind in the sails of people who insist "e-business" and "social networking" is the wave of the future and will change the way everything does investing and make every young person with a computer and some moxie rich, just like it was supposed to do, oh, about twelve years ago.  Concurrent, you should get to know e-prophet Peter Thiel.  He was the original chief financial backer of Facebook, who handed Mark Zuckerberg a cool half-million to build the ultimate ad-revenue and microtransaction generating website, and then founded PayPal to routinely freeze large customers out of their cash like an international mob bank.  Jacob Weisberg wrote an article about the guy that stopped me in my tracks when I read it, and I encourage anyone to read it.

It mainly relates to a little proposition Thiel recently made; his advice to young people entering college: drop out and start a website-based business, because all it takes is a computer and a little moxie (and six years and a cool half-million) to be the next Mark Zuckerberg.  He'll even find ten people under 20 who's sparkle-in-the-eye he likes the most to give a hundred grand if they impress him, like the Willy Wonky of iCommerce or something.  To get an idea of why this is actually frightening and not just dumb, take the man at his word to the Cato Institute.  The people of the American democracy are angry at the world of venture capitalism, therefore if the world is to survive, that is if fabulously rich people are to survive, democracy has to shape up or ship out.  People should build unregulated city-boats and space-stations to float around International Waters, free of those pesky taxes or labor laws or human rights.  Rich people should linger forever in cryogenic undeath, so they never lose control of their investments and that damn estate tax never takes half-a-percent of your nepotistic gift to the world.  That he's also a flaming homosexual with apparently little regard for the intellectual capacity of women and non-whites is just icing on the graphic-novel villain-esque cake.


This, to me, is the true face of libertarianism, transhumanism, and command-capitalism.  Men with the ambition and acumen to wring people and the stock market out of millions are entitled to set the rules, and it's time for everyone else to suck it up and get with the program, because if you weren't lucky enough to be born rich or screw your way to the top, then you have no right to complain about anything.  Thiel himself means nothing, certainly not to me - as little as a hundred years from now, his permanently frozen head will be mounted on a pillar reading, "I am Ozymandias, CEO of CEOs; look on my clickthrough ye mighty and invest."

It's what he represents that scares me - the already quintessential 21st century attitude - you, yes you, can sit at home naked and crank out a funny little program, and people will pay you millions to be a celebrity; if your startup fails, it was everyone's fault but yours, especially the law's; and if you get fucked over by a business or your employer, you have no one to blame but yourself for not seeing it coming and somehow being sharper than them.  We went through these pie-in-the-sky investment pit shenanigans with Pets.com once before, and now some hoary old veterans want to relive the glory days of 2001, and slapped on a veneer of Gernsbeck futurism to snazz it up.  I fervently hope this little venture of Thiel's falls flat on its ass, and every one of his Golden Ticket holders goes bust in record time, just to put some daylight back into the tech-business world.

On that happy note, I'd like to report that the Thiel Foundation have announced the winners of the first annual "20 under 20" competition! Cheer these winners on in fufilling their life-long dreams with the help of $100,000 and paid advisors (and then stalk to see if these projects are actually successful or are ready to flame out at any given moment)!

[Tilla]

I'm still eagerly awaiting the big Facebook collapse. The lulz will be fantastic. Apperently recently they had their first decrease in membership month after month since they started, after a years-long growth trend.

[Criptfeind]

You know, this guy is obviously a nutter, but giving out a cool two mil per year to bright minded entrepreneurs is one of the better ways he can express his craziness.

[Aqizzar]

Good God can I be wordy when I want to be.  I guess I should thank you, since I totally forgot about Peter Thiel's Magic Chocolate Factory, and have paid it absolutely no attention, because I figured nothing would come of it.  That's a really ugly quote though.  Stands to reason, I'd be eating some crow, but there's nothing wrong with winning the prize - my ire was with Thiel and his attitude, not the lucky plucky kids he fingers for possible greatness.  Let's take a look, shall we?

Spoiler: The Golden Tickets (click to show/hide)

Alexander Kiselev is a credit to the world of science.  I salute his goal and wish him luck - he probably has a bright future.

Andrew Hsu pisses me off with every moment of his existence.  Nobody should be that intelligent and driven.

Ben Yu will do the human race a tremendous favor by devoting his boundless energy to making it slightly more efficient to compare prices on used copies of World War Z between Amazon and eBay.

Christopher Rueth is about one-fifth of LulzSec.

Dale Stephens will revolutionize employment with a job-search system for people who refuse to go to school.

Daniel Friedman, Paul Gu, and Eric McKay are cheaters for winning as a group, and their plan either sounds like it'll keep me from getting a job longer or blow up the financial investment market again.

Darren Zhu is a proper scientist, who once again, makes me hate all life and mine in particular for not being born with a PhD.

David (Jiageng) Luan is a great guy, 'cause he's gonna build the Sex Bots.

Eden Full will be a witness in a war-crimes trial in a few years, after she tries to resolve the African energy market.

Faheem Zaman plan for "mobile financial services" is all Greek to me, but sounds like his heart's in the right place.

Gary Kurek is what entrepreneur success stories are supposed to sound like.

James Proud has a posse.

Jeffrey Lim thinks the world needs moar Facebook.

John Burnham will doom us all when the meteor redirection rocket-harness fails.

Laura Deming is already tapped for agency with The Majestic Twelve.

Jim Danielson cannot get his stuff on the road fast enough.

John Marbach is going to get blown out of the water by everything in the world that already uses YouTube.

Nick Cammarata and David Merfield are more cheaters who will earn my respect if and only if they come up with a better web system than Blackboard.

Sujay Tyle will bring about the Gray Goo.

Tom Currier has no idea how hard the energy industry pound him into the dirt.

Sebastien Zany had better make damn sure he hits the power plug as soon as the computers start asking him about love and war.

Six Orientals, two sub-continentals, twelve Caucasians, and exactly two women.  Not exactly surprising, but I guess I can give Thiel credit for not picking on a quota or anything.

[alway]

Spoiler: The Golden Tickets (click to show/hide)

Alexander Kiselev is a credit to the world of science.  I salute his goal and wish him luck - he probably has a bright future.

Andrew Hsu pisses me off with every moment of his existence.  Nobody should be that intelligent and driven.

Ben Yu will do the human race a tremendous favor by devoting his boundless energy to making it slightly more efficient to compare prices on used copies of World War Z between Amazon and eBay.

Christopher Rueth is about one-fifth of LulzSec.

Dale Stephens will revolutionize employment with a job-search system for people who refuse to go to school.

Daniel Friedman, Paul Gu, and Eric McKay are cheaters for winning as a group, and their plan either sounds like it'll keep me from getting a job longer or blow up the financial investment market again.

Darren Zhu is a proper scientist, who once again, makes me hate all life and mine in particular for not being born with a PhD.

David (Jiageng) Luan is a great guy, 'cause he's gonna build the Sex Bots.

Eden Full will be a witness in a war-crimes trial in a few years, after she tries to resolve the African energy market.

Faheem Zaman plan for "mobile financial services" is all Greek to me, but sounds like his heart's in the right place.

Gary Kurek is what entrepreneur success stories are supposed to sound like.

James Proud has a posse.

Jeffrey Lim thinks the world needs moar Facebook.

John Burnham will doom us all when the meteor redirection rocket-harness fails.

Laura Deming is already tapped for agency with The Majestic Twelve.

Jim Danielson cannot get his stuff on the road fast enough.

John Marbach is going to get blown out of the water by everything in the world that already uses YouTube.

Nick Cammarata and David Merfield are more cheaters who will earn my respect if and only if they come up with a better web system than Blackboard.

Sujay Tyle will bring about the Gray Goo.

Tom Currier has no idea how hard the energy industry pound him into the dirt.

Sebastien Zany had better make damn sure he hits the power plug as soon as the computers start asking him about love and war.

I can't tell if it's sarcasm or just optimism in some of those descriptions. Quite honestly, a lot of them sound an awful lot like the joke from this week's Prairie Home Companion: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2011/06/25/scripts/english.shtml

That last guy especially. Too much meaningless babble in that sentence and no actual substance.

is pursuing a program to unify computation in a cohesive and elegant framework based around Haskell, with the goal of finally realizing the potential of computers and the Internet to enable people to work with information fluidly and creatively, especially on mobile devices.

is pursuing a program: best I can decypher, that means he's designing it or something
to unify computation in a cohesive and elegant framework: so he's putting something together to make it pretty
based around Haskell: written in the programming language Haskell
with the goal of finally realizing the potential of computers and the Internet to enable people: to let people
to work with information fluidly and creatively: graphs, ho!
especially on mobile devices: and whatever he is making, it has to run on crappy mobile cpus

Or to sum it all up:
He is doing mobile development with Haskell to make pretty graphs with internet data.

See, why can't they ever be succinct and understandable in their descriptions. >_<

[Aqizzar]

See, why can't they ever be succinct and understandable in their descriptions. >_<

Because wordiness is how you make the big bucks.  In this case, quite literally.  But yeah, about half of those kids' proposals sound like either pie-in-sky nonsense about using computers to magically revolutionize the world by... well, existing, or like attempts to reinvent stuff like YouTube and Google Docs that already exist and work fine.  I wish I could get paid a hundred grand to propose making Facebook with a different name.

[Bouchart]

I wish I could get paid a hundred grand to propose making Facebook with a different name.

You could do at least 12 times better than that:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/the-naturallycurly-network-captures-12-million-in-additional-angel-investments-1530397.htm