You're assuming that what is true where you live is true everywhere. There are MANY places in the USA where one can inexpensively purchase 100% grassfed beef. Huge swaths of the US are nothing but grassland. I can buy 100% grassfed beef in my city for about double the price of factory farm beef. When one drives from my city to the other big city in my state they encounter nothing but pasture and farmland for about six hours and that's traveling at 70mph or so.

It's fairly obvious that racial problems in the US will never be fixed. There is too much bad blood on both sides for it to ever go away. It's like an abusive couple who have gone through a really ugly divorce trying to re-marry and live happily ever after.

I have a "held a door for a black guy" story too! I was leaving the mall. I turned around before closing the door to see if someone else was behind. There was a giant black dude about 10-15 feet away. He was holding a baby in his arms. I waited 10-20 seconds for him to get to the door and held it open until he was through. The guy turned and said "thanks." The look on his face was one of grateful bewilderment. He was grateful but he couldn't believe what had happened. We live in fairly segregated city with a ton of racism so I completely empathize with the guy. He never thought some young white dude would stop and hold the door for him and his baby.

The thing you can take from my story and yours is that people are people regardless of color, race, etc. A lot of black people are assholes (the guy in your story). A lot of white people are assholes. Some black people are awesome. Some white people are awesome. People are people are people.

Oh so wrong! My dinner is ready so I will lazily cut&paste from Wikipedia:

"Although the term citizens of color was used by Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963, and other uses date to as early as 1793, people of color did not gain prominence for many years.[6][7] Influenced by radical theorists like Frantz Fanon, racial justice activists in the U.S. began to use the term people of color in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was in wide circulation.[8] Both anti-racist activists and academics sought to move understandings of race beyond the black-white binary then prevalent."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_color

I don't think that's a race thing. All of the adults in my nearly 100% white suburbs were saying the exact same thing when I was growing up. I was told it was wasted time. Teachers didn't want me typing up papers on my computer. They asked "How will you do it in the real world when you don't have your computer there to do it all for you?" One professor at my very expensive private university said "The internet will never amount to anything. It's a toy for computer geeks." The older generation really got caught with their pants down on the whole computer thing.

This describes me too. Although it was an Atari 800, not a VIC-20.

What I know about VC's:

#1 They love money

#2 They never have enough money

#3 Nothing much else matters to them in this life other than acquiring more money

Given the above, I believe that most VC's would gladly suck a bag of dicks if it meant an additional $1B in their bank account. I assume that funding a black guy's tech firm is much more pleasant than sucking a bag of dicks. My conclusion is that VC's would be happy to fund black tech firms, or asian tech firms, or latino tech firms if they thought they could make a bunch of money from doing so.

The open question is whether or not VC's underestimate the ability of black/asian/latino firms to make them a ton of cash.

Fuck! There goes another hobby. Chemistry, Rocketry, RC Planes... I wonder which geeky hobby is next up to be regulated into oblivion.

+1

I wouldn't go back to the old gnome if you paid me.

You are soooooo wrong. Big government + cronyism is the default steady state of capitalism. The capitalist system can have no other outcome. Wealth concentrates. The rich use it to brainwash the masses and pay for political favors. The two dynamics amplify each other until you get what we have today. It's inevitable.

To each his own I guess. I've tried those and think they suck. I think Spotify is awesome.

I listened to the same old shit over and over again.

Spotify is the first streaming service that I've consistently used. I've tried the others but none of them "stuck" with me. The unique thing it provides is full access to albums played any way I choose.

I use it to listen to albums I already like and to discover new artists. When I'm looking for new artists, I don't want to hear one or two songs ala Pandora. I want to listen to entire albums. I usually need to listen to songs two or more times before I can decide if they're really great. Spotify lets me do that. I can queue up (via playlists) artists that I've discovered now but don't have time to listen to until later.

It's changed music's place in my life, seriously! Before Spotify I was stuck listening to the same old stuff from my collection. I thought I didn't have enough time to find new artists. With Spotify, I'm listening to new stuff all the time with little effort on my part.

When I want to listen to a mix of artists I listen to a professional DJ mix or a decent radio station. The Pandora model just doesn't do it for me.

That said, it REALLY sucks that Spotify is in bed with Facebook. I was contemplating the paid premium Spotify membership but no way in hell will I associate my billing information with a fucking Facebook profile. Fuck that!

Yes they can. There's an App for that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognative_dissonance

This attitude is exactly why education in this country (university, secondary, and elementary) are such a goddamn mess. When my employers told me to do something I never asked "What's in it for me?" The sense of entitlement of American "educators" never ceases to amaze and disgust me.