Swapping experience for money - when working unpaid becomes the newnormal...

When I was in my teens someone gave me a poster with a picture of a rather frustrated looking panda bear.  The caption read "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want".  True enough, when I was in high school and college I would seek out part-time work that paid some money.  But in the early 80s   interest rates were sky high and inflation was up there right there along with it.  Paid work could not always be found.  However, we could get "experience" by volunteering or creating an internship.  Back then, unpaid internships existed but they were self-limiting, did not serve to "replace" paid employees.   The duration was limited to a semester or a summer.  Students got  "experience" at a level that they could not obtain if they were compensated. This was particularly true of internships in research labs.

Innovation with a little "i" is booming but we probably need biggergovernment for big problems...

"Yes! There's an app for that!"  Too bad if its an app for trying to find single men between the ages of 40 -50 in a 3 block radius when what you really need is an app for finding affordable health insurance after you've been diagnosed with cancer.  The dichotomy between the apparent collapse of real deal innovation and the explosion of useless "fluff" apps was brought to vivid life by C.Z. Nnaemeka  in the "The Unexotic Underclass" in the MIT Entrepreneurship Review.  It is a great article worth the read and don't forget the comment thread.

Truth be told, the author was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned.  I mentioned this in previous blogs about little "i" innovation outpacing big "I" innovation at an alarming pace.  America has big yawning problems with a dearth of solutions, yet there is app after app, and product after product for the trivial and irrelevant.  We have iPhones, iPhone apps, iPads, and even iShares to help you make a killing in the market.  We have apps to find the perfect restaurant, apps for train schedules.  VC flows freely into these ventures while the purse strings remain tightly closed for the big issues such as climate change, income inequality, or our apparent inability to keep America's roads and bridges from collapsing.

Business Bites Back - the suits spin on the EPI study on STEM workers...

It didn't take long, did it?  About a month ago the EPI (Economic Policy Institute) put out a report on guest workers and their impact on STEM fields.  The results were alarming.  Rather than repeating them again, I will refer you to my post on this subject.  The bottom line was that there was no STEM shortage and most of this was a canard to get cheap labor from abroad (my interpretation - although it was implied in the results of the report.