Quick event summary:
- The time, money and energy we --America-- waste on the IRS and our ridiculous tax-code evasion game if invested in R&D and education would ensure our global dominating class-barrier-breaking affluent economy. We piss our advantage away on lawyers and accountants playing a stupid cat-and-mouse game with the IRS. Stupid we collectively are.
- Most of the most common practices of successful, profitable and consistently performing businesses-- accountability, terminating weak performers, employee and management incentives, innovation culture, free markets, access to union-free labor -- is absent in our public schools.
- Our H1B Visa policy is insanely bass-ackwards. "Let's educate our global competitors here in the US and then kick them out so we can outsource our jobs back to them." Sweet.
- Sarbanes-Oxley ('Sox') has exported our best small and mid-sized public capital offerings to foreign countries. While well intentioned, the lawyers and accountants again are making all the money while small businesses that used to be able to raise public financing in the US are headed to Canada, Europe and anywhere they can but the US.
- Safra Catz for President in 2012. What kind of person can put up with Larry "the Largest Ego in the World" Ellison? Safra Catz. Cool. Level headed. Smart. Witty. Plays the game to win. Humble. Self-depreciating. All the skills to lead one of the largest and most relevant businesses in the world...Oracle. Safra, please come back!
Like most businesses that depend on technology workers, we're constantly hurting for talent. Human capital is as important -- if not more -- than financial capital. Most sage entrepreneurs will tell you...and I'm one of them...human capital -- your workforce -- is what makes or breaks you. (By the way, we're looking for super cool talented kick-ass developers and creative's!)
First-off, what a great event. Awesome. I jotted down notes for about about 15 blog posts. It really got me thinking...
About the the only thing that sucked is that because it was organized by Senator Ensign & Crew a lot of "binary" people of the "D" flavor will immediately discount it and get crimped in their R v. D Kos-style black-and-white politics that dominates most dialog in an October predating an November election. If Reid had organized the event, the 98% of the same things would have been discussed.
So, kudos to Ensign & Crew! He did this event in Las Vegas yesterday as well. Yeah, he's trying to get re-elected. Duh. If you're not a fan of R's -- then at least respect the marketing. Splendid marketing. But at least my 'BS' detector didn't go off to many times today as I thought it would. The dialog was real and genuine. Education and workforce development is CRITICAL to Nevada. No matter what the attendees political flavor, everyone left with their thinking caps on.
The event stimulated great thought and dialog on education and workforce development to make help ensure that businesses (like mine) in Nevada can meet our human capital requirements. The silly thing right now is there's no shortage of "capital capital". We're consistently challenged (like most growing western cities) with attracting and/or retaining enough "human capital".
Again...kudos to Ensign. He's the MAN on the High Tech Task Force. That's a very good thing for Nevada.
While today's event was very science-math-education oriented, I think that there were a few facets of this problem that were not discussed and I'll pick those up in some future posts. Here's the teasers:
- The Internet is not through trashing the paradigms of society and social institutions as we know it. Mainstream media is under the gun today. Education -- and our traditions built around education -- are about to be blown apart as well. Homeschooling and socialschooling(C) (I made that term up) is going to reshape how we educate.
- I bet you can name 10 people most likely featured in any given issue of People magazine, can you name the top 10 scientists and mathematicians? Why Paris Hilton, Bono and Angelina Jolie will have more influence in solving our dilemma than the gray-haired PHD wielding education majors or the unions.
- My experiences with public schools and parenting. New thoughts on what matters...can you say THESPIAN?
- If access to knowledge, education and information is ubiquitous and a commodity, what separates a Stanford from a UNR? And why "who" you know still matters more than calculating the area of a dodecahedron...
tags: ensign, senator, senatorensign, Nevada, Reno, Las Vegas, education, workforce, schools, hightech, high-tech, oracle, Safra, Catz, TMCC, UNR
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