General Discussion

I meant exactly what I said. The problem is trying to define the attitudes of an era in terms of generations. That's a mistake. The 50s, 60s, and 70s were the years we saw the greatest achievements in this country since the industrial era.

The 80s ushered in the MBA age, the one that looked at people like they were resources. That put those people into little boxes and then treated the box like it was a commodity. Corporations took over and became mindless...truly mindless. Everything was a simple spreadsheet with a number that added up to a profit on the bottom line. The accountant became the controlling influence over the direction of companies. Somebody along the way defined entrepenuer as investor. Do you think DARPA built the internet as an investment? Do you think Wozniak did what he did with the idea of a investment?

This generation is the whiniest bunch of ... When my generation was faced with a war we couldn't accept we stood in front of loaded weapons and said no. And the ones behind those weapons were forced to the reality of being on the wrong side of history. The civil rights movement was the same. How long has Afghan been goin on?

Passion. That's what's missing.

As I said in my first post, the generation immediately after WW2 felt if there was something they couldn't accept, they changed it. When I wanted to build something, my father had the empathy to see that there was something I needed to do -- for my own reasons -- and helped me do it. His belief, a man who dropped out of the 9th grade to work in the mines, was that if a man put something together he could figure out how it worked and fix it when it broke.

So I go back to my challenge: what major social, cultural or tecnological achievements have there been since the 80s. In the computer systems world can the current crop of IT people build the replacement for those "legacy" systems? The ones I built from scratch...literally from scratch. They haven't shown it so far.

Boy but they sure can make up some great excuses and find blame.

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