Two things: firstly, the article was about the long term problem of automation, so not sure the meantime is a factor here. Secondly, who is to say that even without waiting there will be enough jobs returned to make any dent in the joblessness of that "middle of our IQ bell curve".
The "Hackathon" part in "Hackathon Hackers" is totally relative. Your "hackathon" depends completely on the people judging it. Being judged by a bunch of suits with no connection to the technical world? Prepare for Uber for Facebook Cats. However, if you go to a hackathon where the judges are intimately familiar with the technology at hand, you'll get more praise for technical hacks.
In mainstream culture, the latter gets far less press, but the rewards of those hackathons in terms of networking are priceless.
Unfortunately, the judges for the major collegiate hackathons are usually almost all from technical backgrounds, but they're representatives from companies looking to hire, and they're told to judge by factoring in entrepreneurial value.
Jeff Dean was a judge at TreeHacks but some of the top prizes where shitty hacks (App to wake up or something). Most of the prized hacks were really impressive though and involved a lot of engineering. I was really excited about that.
Same feeling at Hack the North (Waterloo) some shitty Airbnb for X but overall some really impressive and cool hacks. Speaks volume for the engineering culture at both Universities.
> I don't see Angry Birds being much different than doing a puzzle on the floor,
You're missing a huge part of tactile development going on when she's playing a puzzle on the floor vs. touching a flat surface. The fine motor skills involved with physically handling a puzzle will come in handy later, not to mention that there is an element of combining tactile response with mental strategy missing on the iPad.
Yup, plus the style of recall for a puzzle is tree-like.
The puzzle is a "natural" form, that encourages "natural" skills. Whereas Angry Birds is an addictive game pattern. Any skills it "teaches" are incidental to its commercial goals.
My point is invalid if the whole entire world turns into a giant commercialized strip mall and recall no longer becomes a valued skill. :<
Angry Birds is just a single example (and one that has him interested in the physical versions). It's hardly the only option - plenty of creative puzzle apps, reading apps, etc. are available and a lot of them are quite good.
That said, I'd say Angry Birds has given my son a lot of practice in perseverance, problem solving, and not getting frustrated when something doesn't work first time.
I don't think people outsource to developing countries because they think they'll get cheaper hotels there... it's more about the cost of the services / goods being delivered.
Interdependence is something that I always think about in these situations. Our society is so dependent on trade and working with other regions/countries that to see those systems collapse would be utter chaos.
Manassas is an example of white flight (which is a big theme of the communities in NoVA period). Mike O'Meara refers to it as "deviltown" for a reason: it's pretty much been abandoned by its residents.
Though many communities in that region suffer from it, I think Manassas has had very very bad urban planning. Very little is walkable, there's no character to the town, and you see very little green space. It's a case of suburban decay.
The downtown of Manassas is nice enough, but almost nobody thinks of that as "Manassas". Locals almost all call that strip of old Sudly Rd. from 66 to 28 "Manassas" even though I don't think it's part of the municipality in any meaningful way and hence grew without plan or structure. I think probably the only groups with any say-so in the direction it grew were the Battlefield protectionist groups.
But all that was very much a product of the Western expansion of 66. Most of the older folks in the area remember when 66 didn't come out that far and Manassas was just the 234/28 intersection and 28 East to Manassas Park.
When something was done, we end up with bizarreness like two entirely different roads called "234", one that goes through the main strip of town, and the other that goes through countryside and bypasses the commercial center entirely...which no doubt hasn't helped the commercial interests of that area at all.
I know from growing up out there that the anti-battlefield people put a really bad taste in lots of big commercial company's mouths. For example, just a few miles away near Haymarket, the Walt Disney company was even going to open up a theme park and were basically driven out of town.
Right. The problem was his misconception with society on the side of the errand runner. All he seemed to have experience with was the exec who has tasks needed to be done.
On that note, something like this in a society with very high unemployment and a large casual labor market could possibly do well (granted, people were wealthy enough to own smartphones). My partner's family in India would constantly go through servants/maids/gardners/etc because there're so many people willing to work.
One of my parents is Egyptian and when she was growing up they had multiple "servants" but each with a different speciality. One was the transportation (pick up/drop off) guy, one did cleaning, one was the handy man, one was the doorman/concierge type person, one did shopping, someone watched the kids, etc.
In effect, there were no errands for the family to ever run because they had one servant that specialized in one thing but that servant did it for all the families on the block resulting in a full time job. All the affluent city blocks had their own network of specialized servants.
Two of your apps mention Montessori by name, which makes me wonder how often you are criticized for using her name in vain?
My wife is a Montessori teacher and would flip her shit if a parent ever substituted the real montessori numbers/letters (usually sand paper letters) for an app. Montessori would've surely been incredibly against an app for children young enough to learn anything from sand paper letters.
It is a big discussion in the Montessori community. Some montessorian love my apps, some wants kids to play only with wood objects... Nobody knows what would think Maria Montessori but since she was an innovator, I think she would be open-minded and uses all the tools that can help kids to learn. If you check my last app about tracing letters, the sense of touch coming from the sand paper has been replaced with sound (another sense). Anyway, I say it again: the iPad is just another tool, it does not replace all the existing materials.
