David Acevedo's Blog

I'm starting a Non-Profit in Puerto Rico in 2012 that will revolutionize entrepreneurship on the island through the use of mentors in the broad Puerto Rican diaspora and the Hispanic community. I don't know how to do this, and I'm doing it anyway. There is a Buddhist story about a man that is poor and living on a hut. Underneath the hut is a large cache of gold but the man starves for lack of money; not knowing the wealth he possessed. This is so true, for there is no worse poverty than the poverty of the mind , not seeing the options that could be taken is far worse than having no options . And this is what I want to see impacted directly by my Non-profit. Entrepreneurship is a state of mind . It's how one approaches life, failure and risk. It's not about making money, the same way the human body is not about eating, shitting and sleeping. Money, profits are necessary like food is to the body, but the Olympic marathon runner doesn't run to eat ...

Law is one of the most inefficient processes of modern society. Still it's effective, all things considered. The inefficiency lies in the fact that figuring out what is legal or not is a complicated process that involves lawyers. Originally law was supposed to be simple enough to be interpreted by jurors but now you almost have to be a jurist to understand the law. This inefficiency is even used as a bargaining chip in many cases with the threat of "tying this up in court for years." How is that even possible? Law is not supposed to be obtuse, yet it gets that way. The law's complexity has driven the need for a highly sub-specialized class of professionals, that rather than be advocates or expert advisors are more like translators to the arcane practices and language of law. Have you ever read a contract and wondered what it meant? Then had it explained to you and you couldn't figure out why they didn't just said that, in plain language rather than th...

With persistent attacks on teachers being bandied around because of the situation in Wisconsin , I thought it would be good to comment on this. While I agree that the teachers unions have brought about part of this because of two very important and very stupid conditions they don't like changed: teacher pay based on seniority instead of performance and the constant harping of smaller class sizes; to blame the unions is both misguided and ridiculous. The only thing that unions are responsible for is making things harder to improve, but they are not responsible for how they got this way. In my opinion the number one reason that teaching is under-valued is due to the success of feminism. It used to be that if you were a highly-gifted woman like let's say Danica McKellar , one of the best jobs available for you would be math teachers. Because being a TV star/math-book writer was not easily within reach. Now, this is an extreme example and they've been women scientist for a long...