serious large scale demonstrations are going on in my home town last few days. the last time so many people gathered in protest was before we joined nato, in the height of anti-globalism movements of 2001. unfortunately it’s not that simple this time.
Bob at Piran Café blog in Slovenia shares this photograph in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. On his blog, he explains: This [photograph of a policeman behind a riot shield] was taken at about 6 pm last night, shortly after protesters were giving carnations to police officers stationed in front of Parliament.
via: boingboing.net
these demonstrations have nothing to do with neo-nazi’s, political disagreements or economic recession. they are just about people finally understanding that disillusionment is nothing without action. so far we assumed that politicians are paid to do a job of managing the country, just like profesional managers.
one thing that foreigners can’t understand from reports about neo-nazi groups in the otherwise quite city is that slovenians are normally very serious about in-activity. they should have protested any number of times in the last decade, or at least vote for different people the last 5 times they had a chance.
but they didn’t. they know the democracy doesn’t work, so they don’t bother with elections. neither they would bother with coming forth with plans to improve parts of it. instead they would complain a lot, and look at the most promising new european country flounder. slovenians have proven to be very good at feeling helpless.
we didn’t have corrupt elections yet, people actually voted for corrupt majors. some voted for them because they don’t know better. the others didn’t bother going to elections, or engaging in actions / conversations that would raise the profile of counter-candidates. it’s a pattern we have seen over and over again in our history of elections – rule of thumb is 30% voters turn-up is guaranteed, and 60% of them will vote for the commonly recognized worst option. dare to count how many times this was deemed ‘majority’ ? dare to guess how representative this sample is?
so getting 10k people on the streets is a great success, and hopefully a sign of changes to come. this post is more intended for fellow readers in slovenia, who are very good at amplifying opinions, but i’d like to provoke you to actually fucking do something. vote, vote more carefully, talk about issues when there is time to do something about them.
i wouldn’t even ask the next complaining slovenian: “and what did you do to make things better?” – they wouldn’t get it. the right questions is: “and what have you not done to contribute to this mess?”
© 2007 See-ming Lee ( Blog / Facebook / Flickr / LinkedIn / Network / Orkut / Twitter / Wiki ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve had an amazing blogging week last week.
I published a post about startup not being a job, that I’ve written in a very short moment when I was overwhelmed with disappointment over founders of a certain just-born startup that were not available for what could have been a life-changing meeting for them. we’ll never know now, but it made me realize just how different startup world I live in is from other forms of employment.
I didn’t think about it much more after I’ve written and scheduled it, so it was quite a surprise for me when I realized that another entrepreneur fried published it on Hacker News, and that it was receiving a lot of attention on it, as well as on Twitter.
The responses were amazingly different. While Twitter crowd liked the post very much, HN readership fell into a flame war against me, based on consistent misinterpretations that had one common topic – overworking yourself is hard, and you don’t need to do that in order to be a startup. I wholeheartedly agree with them, but that was not my point.
But a day later, I got this news in my inbox, and it shone an interesting light on the confusion: 50% of readers on HN are under 24-years old. the only other popular site that has younger audience is DeviantArt:
If you ever wanted to know the age and sex of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm … you’re in luck.
via: venturebeat.com
Now, this is significant new information, that has an important consequence: HN readership obviously has a different value system than most of the rest of the ecosystem. we should be more aware of it, because it will shape our world in the next 5 years.
or as a friend commented on facebook: “it seems HN is used only by lifestyle businesses”
![envie de randonnée [Explore 118 du 22/03/12]](http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7243/7002267239_07023185b6_m.jpg "envie de randonnée [Explore 118 du 22/03/12]")
Image by Vins64 via Flickr
the last two (of the three) points in this post are spot on! my take:
- stop over-consuming information – everyone wants you to be passive consumer, but you feel you should be active participant. stop f**ing listening to other then, stop obsessing over your wall, stop and think and write! i check out my FB messages occasionally, just so friends don’t call me rude, and that’s it!
- nobody’s perfect, don’t over-engineer – stop worrying about the quality, whatever you write will be 80% OK, and the last 20% you’ll develop by doing, not by waiting.
it’s exactly what I had to change in my mind, to start blogging again. and it makes me happier.
This Guest post is by Adarsh Thampy of Conversionchamp. I wish I started my blog a long time back when there was a lot less competition. I wish I was able to write great content from the start. I wish I had the money to purchase hosting and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog. I wish, I wish, I wish…
via: www.problogger.net
