Life Advice for Young Adults

Written specifically for the 22- year olds who are struggling to find jobs and a meaningful existence in our current climate (from Neal Wu at Quora):

1. Make friends as opposed to networking. Your friends will go a lot further than the professional contacts you make, especially since only one of the two groups is invested in your personal happiness.
2. Become an expert by learning as much as you can and deeply seeking out the things you are curious about. Find the things you enjoy and practice the skills you want to develop. If you can achieve expertise then it will be easy to obtain an audience.
3. Volunteer to help out those less fortunate than you. In the process you will gain a ton of new perspective and will better understand other people's real problems. In a society that always looks upward, those can be easy to forget.
4. Become as independent as possible. Even if you work at a big company, constantly make small steps to reduce your dependence on your job. Write a book, build an app, or start a small business on the side. Release your inner entrepreneur.
5. Don't spend too much time worrying about your personal brand. Accomplish things, and the recognition will follow.
6. Stop treating life as a competition and do things for their own sake. Genuine interest should be what drives you to improve yourself, rather than simply a desire to beat others. Find a community of people who are interested in the things you are, and drive each other to be the best you can be.

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This was in response to some more traditional advice given by Robert Wagner.

Ethics? Not Here!

House leader Eric Cantor just said we could solve the USA deficit problem if only we could cut those icky "entitlement programs."  You know, like Social Security and Medicaid, which are "unfunded liabilities" leaving a burden on "this generation and the next." Screw public entitlement (which used to be called social support and benefits, by the way), we need to save that money for more important things, like corporate wealthcare!

MyMy asks a good question; "what is government for except for 'promoting the general welfare' rather than protecting blind and stupid private interests?"

Well, besides ensuring the rich stay rich, it's also important to have government around to keep the trouble makers down.  Like these two woman in Texas, who desperately needed to be assaulted by two cops (for littering) and have dirty rubber gloves shoved inside their private orifices.

We might as well be ruled by Cthulhu...


“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
--Franklin D. Roosevelt

On female authors

Sci-fi author Maureen Johnson tells us why more books written by women have "girly covers":

"A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simply more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it. This idea that there are ‘girl books’ and ‘boy books’… gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints.”

See her Cover Challenge: more popular novels with the covers given this "girly cover" treatment: @the Mary Sue.

Poverty is the New Black

Poverty is now so popular, everyone's doing it:

- 4 in 5 Americans live near the poverty level

- less than half of American adults have a full time job

- America makes top 5 poorest developed countries worldwide

Spies & Socialists

Spies and Socialists-- all the fun things that start with S!  Read up on the latest:

1. USA wiretapping and internet spying by the NSA will not end anytime soon.  Because big surprise, the same people who made this law, just voted to keep it going full force.

2. Did you know the USA has a Socialist Workers party? Apparently no one else, did either.  The Federal Election Commission says the Socialist Workers Party doesn't need regulation like other political parties because they're "largely irrelevant."

Why so irrelevant?  Perhaps it's like the New York Times said, "it [already] succeeded, even in the United States. Socialism meant the emancipation of the working class and its transformation into the middle class; it championed social justice and a progressive tax system, and in that sense has largely done its job."

Yep...because the working class in the USA is doing just fine, and the middle class is secure and stable!  It's not like we have an increased income gap for the last 20 years, or sharply declining taxes on our wealthy.

3. Meanwhile, France is winning all the socialism, because last year they elected the first Socialist Party President since 1988.  François Hollande's catchphrase is  "I want to put the magic back in the French dream," and he plans to do this by enacting a 75% tax on France's most wealthy!  But don't tell his PR team, he got in trouble for making that comment last year! He just didn't know any better, because he's never held a national government office before.