Jeffrey Neil Jackson

Brilliant Blundering Billionaires

*Mark Zuckerberg addressing the Y Combinator Startup School at Stanford University: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise.

(Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.) “Young people are just smarter,” he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. “Why are most chess masters under 30?” he asked. “I don’t know…Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.” (Margret Kane March 28, 2007 www.cnet.com)

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Contemporary Colonization

Make no mistake; this is colonization under the guise of immigration.

You enter the country without permission, disrespecting the laws of that country. You settle in and establish your culture, ignoring the native culture. You don’t speak the language, and make little effort to learn the language.

You even fly the flag of your home country, instead of the flag of the country where you reside. You take advantage of the already built industries as well as the infrastructure. If fact, you stress the wealth of the country that you have taken over. You have no intention of adopting the language, and you exploit the economy, as well as the infrastructure, to your advantage.

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Pre-employment Predictors of Prejudice

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*When you look at job descriptions, many times there are phrases and descriptions of prejudice that, apparently, are not recognized as prejudiced. Diversity is more than ethnicity, race or gender, but I will leave it to you to determine what other factors should be considered. But don’t take my word for it; the U.S. Congress said so in 1967, when the Gen-Xers and Millennials were just a gleam in their parents’ eyes.

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The Digital Death Blow to Sarcasm

That highly-touted, often-quoted, super- scientific website “Mother Nature Network” on the internet is now reporting that the internet is dealing the death blow to sarcasm. To quote the website: “Of course, that statement could be dripping with sarcasm and you wouldn’t know it. Don’t worry, your sarcasm detector isn’t broken. It’s just that words on a screen — the prevailing mode of communication in the digital age — just can’t handle the fine nuances that sarcasm requires. As a result, sarcasm is dying. And if anything, the internet is dealing the death blow.”

I sure hope that America’s dear friend and ally, that poor self-sacrificing Vladimir Putin doesn’t hear of this. Of course, this report also coincides with and is an indicator of the end of the world, which will happen in just a few months.

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Swearing Off Software with Savoir Faire

I see so many positions that require “software experience” with very detailed specifications that give me pause. It would seem that someone should be getting wealthy teaching all of this software.

I learned a cutting-edge software a few years ago, and my instructor told me that knowing how to use that software would mean an instant hire. After investing a considerable amount of time and money (bought the software) none of the organizations that required knowing the software ever called me.

Ever.

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Technology, Digital Analytics, and the new Monopoly

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As time and technology march on, occupations, professions, and major market players adapt or fade away. I can recall as a freshman in college being told that newspapers had already had their heyday decades ago.

News isn’t going away, but paper is being replaced by screens the size of your hand and much, much larger, with speed (but not really depth) that travels around the world in split seconds.

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Election Interference – The Next Intelligence Failure

DAYTON — Special investigator Robert Mueller secured indictments for three Russian companies and thirteen Russian citizens with “a widespread effort to interfere with the  2016 presidential election,” according to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.  The Russians had a “strategic goal to sow discord into the U.S. political system.”

Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, said that there is no allegation in the indictment that any U.S. citizen knowingly participated in the alleged crimes. That’s one of those statements that I would repeat, because a lot of readers will not believe it the first time they read it, and they will tune into or read some media that will falsely report that the Trump administration officials are next in line to be indicted.

Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn

Nowhere does it say the Trump administration  is still under investigation, although Michael Flynn, former national security advisor, has pleaded guilty, and “there was no indication Friday that Mr. Mueller wouldn’t seek more charges in the future.”

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Better Business With Age; America’s Underrepresented Entrepreneurs

We live in a youth-oriented society, as evidenced by the media’s rare profile of older entrepreneurs; Mark Zuckerberg is far more interesting according to the media. Americans aged 35 or older enter the ranks of the entrepreneur far more frequently than the successful youth plastered across prime media outlets, despite the average age of the beginning entrepreneur hovering around the 39 year mark.

The trendy business incubators who attract the media’s stereotypical “entrepreneur” appear to miss the backbone of America’s entrepreneurship – the mid-career professional. The general inability to see the potential of the mid-career professional leaves companies with unrealized potential (translation lost innovation and profit) right in front of them.

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