On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 02:36 PM, Steve Furlong wrote:
On Friday 25 July 2003 11:40, Steve Schear wrote:
... Now that many are un- or under-employed there still doesn't seem to be any activity by those active on this list in this critical infrastructure area.
Speaking only for myself, I'm making a lot less than I was a couple of years ago. In the wake of the dot-bomb, I'm working a lot more hours just to keep my bills paid. I no longer have much time or creativity left for non-paying tasks.
My analysis of the situation is that the peak creative years for CP ideas were 1992-95, and virtually no one on the list was being paid a cent for their efforts here or elsewhere. Some were students, some were libertarians with pent-up ideas about creating actual free societies or economies, some were engineers or programmers working for companies on unrelated projects, some were unemployed. The dot com era was actually a desert era...lots of nattering about raising VC money, buying other companies, creating grandiose plans to become rivals to Microsoft, and so on. Very few really good ideas in the 1996-00 era. And then came the crash. We haven't had much of an infusion of young blood--I believe this is closely related to Boomers and Heinlein, Rand, etc. and the differing interests of the young people of today and their anti-globalist, ring through nose politics--and those who got wiped out in the dot com frenzy have not gone back to blue sky thinking. A lot of them seem to be doing "uninteresting" (from a mathematical or first principles point of view) Unix security jobs. --Tim May