Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?

Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by chc on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:03PM (#2935709)

You also don't see breathless AccountingCrunch articles about accountants getting $41 million to develop accounting for pets and similarly silly things. The call for loftier thinking is in response to the fact that the tech industry seems to actively celebrate shallow crap. It's easy to forget that there are more praiseworthy goals in the world than having a successful social network when that's what everyone actually praises.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by patio11 on Monday August 29, 2011 @05:11AM (#2936516)

You also don't see breathless AccountingCrunch articles about accountants getting $41 million to develop accounting for pets and similarly silly things.

I don't agree with the normative implication here, but strongly suggest you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. It will help expand your worldview vis-a-vis questions like "Is accounting Important?" or "Is $41 million a lot of money?"

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by code_duck on Monday August 29, 2011 @10:24AM (#2937255)

"Is $41 million a lot of money" is a perspective-less question. Is it a lot of money for an individual? Tell me you don't think so. Is it a lot of money for an investment bank? Doubtlessly not.

Did the person you're responding to somehow say accounting was not important? How will the Wall Street Journal help me understand that further and why do you assume we need that insight based on all of this?

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by tptacek on Monday August 29, 2011 @12:10PM (#2937646)

All he's saying is that it's not a lot of money for accountants.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by code_duck on Monday August 29, 2011 @04:47PM (#2938890)

Not much to take home or own part of, or not much to push around on someone else's behalf? I have yet to understand. The first seems pretty unlikely, unless accounting is a much better career path than I've heard, and the second seems irrelevant.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by chc on Monday August 29, 2011 @02:37PM (#2938262)

Since it sounds like I gave the wrong impression, just to clarify: I'm not trying to imply that accounting is unimportant. What I said (jokingly) is that there are probably better uses for accounting knowledge than trying to teach it to pets, and if accountants regularly engaged in such fanciful ventures, you'd probably see similar articles about their profession.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by puredemo on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:14PM (#2935745)

Pet care is a billion dollar industry.

Could we stop arbitrarily dismissing things that are important to hundreds of millions of people as "silly"?

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by chc on Sunday August 28, 2011 @11:43PM (#2935809)

"X is a billion-dollar industry" is not equivalent to "X is praiseworthy," so it's not really relevant. There are lots of billion-dollar industries that are positively sleazy. Also, the precise example was both irrelevant (since it was deliberately silly) and not a petcare solution.

Anyway, you're free to disagree with this thinking. I disagree with many instances of it. I'm just explaining why the software industry is different.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by patrocles on Monday August 29, 2011 @03:50AM (#2936349)

Spot on. cdixon is trying to direct traffic to things he associates with 'gravitas'. These may or may not unleash much value.

Relative cost structures are really complex; a mind-numbing TV show that people use (instead of alcohol) to cope with their jobs may save more lives than an exceptional charity.

If we think something is retarded and yet millions of people do it, we either have different values than them or have failed to see the value. Neither puts us in good stead to judge those people.

Unless we actually prefer a world of Moral One-upmanship ....

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by paganel on Monday August 29, 2011 @08:20AM (#2936885)

> It's easy to forget that there are more praiseworthy goals in the world than having a successful social network when that's what everyone actually praises.

I became depressed the day when realized that some of most bright engineers working for one of the most unique companies of our times spent their time and energy and intellectual resources on cloning a social network (google+ vs. FB). And I'm not really claiming that they should save the world or anything, I'm just saying that with the huge amount of data that they have gathered so far and considering the human capital they have available they could start answering a lot of very interesting questions, which gave bugged us as an intelligent species for quite a long time (think linguistics-related issues, for example).

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by tsotha on Monday August 29, 2011 @03:01AM (#2936267)

Implicit in those kinds of criticisms is the idea everyone shares a common view of what goals are and are not praiseworthy. One person's praiseworthy goal is another person's key to the apocalypse.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by gurkendoktor on Monday August 29, 2011 @01:08AM (#2936020)

This. Reading TechCrunch for the first time made me feel so embarrassed about my major.

Other proudly shallow businesses are probably acting and music, and many actors and musicians actually like to point to their side projects of saving the world. I guess it helps them feel more confident with what they spend their life on too.

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Re:Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change ... by gfodor on Monday August 29, 2011 @02:00AM (#2936139)

That said, art in and of itself is a whole different can of worms. I think art can stand alone on its merit in many ways the latest startup on TechCrunch cannot.

The way I see it, we are the only generation that has had access to the computing power and knowledge that we have. It's our responsibility to take advantage of it since many of our ancestors dreamed of such things.

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