Monday, May 21, 2012

Meet the kids who were paid to drop out. From 60 Minutes.



10 comments:

  1. Seems like a reasonable idea, actually. College is a ticket-punch for most kids, and if these people don't need it to be successful, they don't need to keep attending. Of course, they have also burned their bridges a bit.

    They are probably a lot less Philistine than most of the ones that don't drop out.

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    1. That said, some of these ideas seem pretty trivial.

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  2. So the first one had ideas for the energy crisis, but now thanks to this fellowship, he's running a social gaming company. What a novel idea. Who would have thought of social gaming? What a ground breaker.

    And the last one?
    THAT ALREADY EXISTS!

    Unemployed, insomniac couch potatoes with low IQs who order "inventors kits" have better ideas than these.

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  3. I'm sorry, but I am disturbed by the bug-eyed intensity of the "never went" hopeful asteroid miner. He reminds me too much of the alien David Bowie played in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

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  4. @Frog: the token woman also has a project that has been done before. 12 years ago in Aus, they were programming solar dishes to follow the sun.

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    1. Well, OK, but she's still a token. You don't have to be good to be a token; that's the whole point of tokenism.

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    2. Not to mention - look at the body language. The boys are on the far side of the table so there's natural flow of communication. The girl is shoved off to the side, almost facing the wrong way, to wait until she's invited to participate.

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  5. I was expecting to see a video featuring certifiable geniuses. Seriously? A solar panel that follows the sun. Woooowwwwwww. An electric car powered by forklift motors? Because there's no shortage of tiny electric car companies that can't be successful no matter how hard they try (ever heard of Tesla or Fisker)? A book on asteroid mining...bwahahaha.

    Sounds like the Peter Thiel fellowship is a rich guy throwing money around for amusement. Dance monkeys! Dance!

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    1. You're very welcome here, but we need you to change your user name. There are no "anonymous" names allowed, and as I've noted three times, an "anonymous" has been a longtime troll here. After this, I'm going to have to delete your comments. Please update your user name to something else. You have our thanks.

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