Being young is supposed to mean you have the luxury of time. But in hard times, a few fallow years can become a lifetime drag on what you earn, sort of the opposite of compound interest. Because the average person grabs 70 percent of their total pay bumps during their first ten years in the workforce, according to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, having stagnant or nonexistent wages during that period means you hit that springboard at a crawl. Economist Lisa Kahn explained to The Atlantic in 2010 that those who graduate into a recession are still earning an average of 10 percent less nearly two decades into their careers. In hard, paycheck-shrinking numbers, the salary lost over that stretch totals around $100,000. That works out to $490 or so less a month, money that could go, say, toward repaying student loans, which for the class of 2009 average $24,000. Those student loans (the responsible borrowing option!) have reportedly passed credit cards as the nation’s largest source of debt. This is not just a rotten moment to be young. It’s a putrid, stinking, several-months-old-stringy-goat-meat moment to be young.
Why the Current Crop of Twentysomethings Are Going to Be Okay — New York Magazine
I think, and this is an unfinished thought, that we are starting to see the consequences of the stratification of extreme growth. Innovation seems to naturally create extreme status differentials, which seem to be counter-balanced by cultural tendencies towards revolution for equality.
The next few years is going to be a bad time to be a slow track of personal improvement. If those that excel, invent, and innovate don’t find compassionate motivations, I fear there will be real societal upheaval.
Given the crunch we will feel from energy, food, and water shortages — and the fact that the workforces opportunities will continue to shrink through mechanization — a successful revolution could bring us our own version of the dark ages.
Ontologies supply a structure for relating information to other information in the semantic Web or the linked data realm. Ontologies thus provide a similar role for the organization of data that is provided by relational data schema. Because of this structural role, ontologies are pivotal to the coherence and interoperability of interconnected data.
[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn’t evil; it’s random; but random is pretty bad.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That’s why he’s so good.
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don’t have to use it.
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