R.I.P. (was: Re: A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online)

[Tim May]

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