Aaron's Life

An Aaron Dispatch

I’m having a day where my mind can’t keep up with my typing.  I need to bullet point it out.

• @eisenberg’s this am I listened to an NPR podcast about a woman in Wheaton, IL who lost a good 75k  enviromental mgmt job and now works at Target for minimum wage.  She’s 45 and doesn’t know what to do and sounded smart.
• #Occupy has all kinds of challengers and supporters.  VCs @bijan, @fredwilson, @aweissmann have all embraced it very publicly on twitter, tumblr and at last night’s tech fashion show.  
• Speaking of fashion show, a very glitzy fundraiser held last night for a non-profit dedicated to bringing more engineers to NYC.  Essentially Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins created an economic development corporation to support the Internet scene here and everybody turned up to donate money to create more interns for our startups.  
• Meanwhile my 6th grader son is using google docs in school to do group work with his classmates, but nobody is teaching him to code even though a zillion articles like this one say he must.   

There seems to be a massive disconnect between the tech industry and the rest of the world.  SOPA is part of this.  Media companies have been furious for years.  Frankly, non-tech people have been confused, initimidated, resentful, angered and envious of the wealth creation that started with MSFT and has continue through Twitter.  With the exception of Hedge Funds, nobody has made more money so quickly and easily.  

BETABEAT just published a list of the 20 most poachable executives and most of these non-founders were making 200k plus.   The industry sometimes feels like the only one we have awash in capital and open to experimentation.  Most normal Americans are grinding it out in a tough economy but @arrington and Kleiner Perkins are investing in high end time share plays.  

Something feels Delilloesque to me.  It’s like things are slipping away a bit.

That said, here’s some good news.  I’m sending my kids to codecademy to preserve their futures.   At least somebody is spending time hacking education instead of that brutal problem that so much of the world faces:  renting the right mansion in Cabo or Gstaad.

Notes

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