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Business Education Energy Finance Innovation Science Social Technology

Russia plans $65bn tunnel to America

Russia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait as part of a transport corridor linking Europe and America via Siberia and Alaska. The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York. The link would be twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France. The $65 billion (£33 billion) mega-project aims to transform trade links between Russia and its former Cold War enemies across some of the world’s most desolate terrain. It would create a high-speed railway line, energy links and a fibreoptic cable network.

Read the article: Russia plans $65bn tunnel to America

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Business Education Finance India Life Science Social Technology

Friends Don’t Let Geek Friends Work In Finance

While the practice of poaching engineering talent slowed after the economy tanked in 2008, Wadhwa is dismayed to report that thanks to hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks have recovered and gone back to their old, greedy ways, snagging engineering grads who might otherwise solve the world’s problems, making them financial offers they can’t refuse, and morphing them into quants, investment bankers and management consultants. ‘Not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs,’ writes Wadhwa, ‘they are using our best engineering graduates [25% of MIT grads in ’06] to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.’ He concludes: ‘Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.’

Read the article: Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance

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Business Life Social

What do people look for in employers?

Employee retention criteria

Take or view the survey on LinkedIn

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Art Business China Education Life Meta Social

The two paths to success

Of course this leads to the question, “What is success?” Someone who spent his life working 80 hour weeks, living in hotels, and fighting his way up the corporate ladder to become VP of toilet paper marketing would probably consider himself more successful than a sandwich shop owner who spends his nights and weekends playing with his kids and working on hobby projects, but maybe the sandwich shop owner would be happier and healthier. Ultimately, it is up to each person to decide what success means to them, but I think it’s important that everyone be mindful of the decision they are making.

Read the article: Paul Buchheit: The two paths to success

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Business Education Finance Health History Life Meta Science Social

Life skills

[Our economy] demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns […] We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.

Read the article: How to Make Trillions of Dollars

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Business Education Life Meta Technology

How to impress your techie boss?

A gem of a reply by Joel Spolsky!

Via Hacker News | How to impress Joel Spolsky

Read the article: How can a new programmer impress the software engineer (boss)?

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Business China Education Finance India Innovation Life Social Technology

Do Believe the Hype

Having traveled to both China and India in the last few weeks, here’s a
scary thought I have: What if — for all the hype about China, India and
globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping
giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic
technological and educational infrastructure in place to become
innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet?

Read the article: Do Believe the Hype

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Business Education Finance History Innovation Life Social Technology

The Sad Truth About the Facebook Movie

The Valley used to be a place run by scientists and engineers, people like Robert Noyce, the Ph.D. physicist who helped invent the integrated circuit and cofounded Intel. The Valley, in those days, was focused on hard science and making things. At first there were semiconductors, which is how Silicon Valley got its name; then came computers and software. But now the Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple.

Read the article: The Sad Truth About the Facebook Movie – Newsweek

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Art Business Education Health Life Meta Science Social

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working

For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Read the article: Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

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Business Education Finance Life Social

Paul Buchheit: “What do I do with my money?” & “What do I do with my life?”

Although today’s poster only asked, “What do I do with my money?”, there’s a second, related question that’s also very important, “What do I do with my life?” In both cases, I think the right answer is, “start slow, and avoid making any big decisions now”, though as always, there are exceptions.

Read the article: Paul Buchheit: What to do with your millions