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josephdunphy

Last seen: 14 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    More about Firinn and Linkup Central (who I referred to in a recent post) can, perhaps, be gleaned from this article in SFGate.com about the man's site, in which we read this:




    "In 2003, he was a refugee from Silicon Valley who walked away from a job just before a historic public offering. Why? Because the people he worked with repelled him.



    "They were not just greedy. They had no integrity," said Taisdeal, who went from being about-to-be-very wealthy to being unemployed.



    'One day my girlfriend came downstairs and said, 'You need to join a lunch club' he recalled."





    I get the impression that Firinn wasn't headed straight into another job, and I think one begins to see where some of the values of his site come from, or at least reflect. There is a real difference between being unemployed and being a bum, and a big part of the difference is to be found in the answer to the question "where, given the choice, would you choose to be". There are those who mail off resumes by the thousands, pound their feet bloody on the pavement walking from office to office when the funds for postage run out, and find themselves being stonewalled, but they keep going anyway, trying to find a legitimate way out of the bad circumstances in which they find themselves. Then there are those who don't just live in poverty, they wallow in it - contemptible, not because they've dealt with unemployment, but because they've allowed themselves to be defined by it.



    If one chooses to walk out on one job without having another to go to, who does one think will be paying one's bills? One's friends? One's family? The government, maybe? Because certainly one won't be able to do so oneself, and food and rent are not free. How responsible a choice is it to ask others to do that for one, just so that one will not have to hang around with people one doesn't like? Yet this would seem to be the choice Firinn made. Picture the kind of person who would make such a choice, picture the kind of friends he'd be likely to have, the kind who encourage such choices, and then picture them in charge of a social networking service, creating the rules according to their own value system, one in which real work and the acceptance of real responsibility see little respect. So motivated, what policies would you expect to see put in place?



    The ones you're seeing right now, maybe? Having been poor, myself, I've known people like these, people who will drag you right down into the gutter with them given half a chance. As bizarre luck would have it, one of them has made a mildly good living doing what bad drinking buddies have been doing for those down at the heels for generations, but his marginal prosperity is not going to be contagious because it comes to him entirely at the expense of his "friends", coming to him through his promotion of values that, being incapable of contributing to an increase in general prosperity (play being put before work), must therefore present us with the logic of a zero sum game - the enrichment of one must be the impoverishment of another. Keeping the kind of company one will at a place in which such expectations make law, ie. those to whom such expectations would seem reasonable, that improverishment may come more quickly than usual, because while false prosperity isn't contagious, bad habits most assuredly are, and bad company is a rich source of trouble.