David Acevedo's Blog

My college buddy just cancelled hanging out with me because it was going to be after 8pm and he didn't want to go out that late because he was worried about crime. He didn't excuse himself for feeling this way, or explain why being worried about crime would be an issue, he just texted me: Ok. Puerto Rico. Crime. A reality. I'd rather reschedule. Sorry to be an old man 8( And we're the same age! (By the way, as a close friend I understand what he means. He's got a young daughter and would rather stay at home with her than leave her alone.) I've been encountering this over and over. "That's just the way things are here." Or the much worse: "It's like that everywhere. " (The Japanese got "shikata ga nai", "it's no use.")   I'm still not sure why people don't see the huge trap going around like that is. Let me make a parallel. This morning I was watching a TED video from Lisa Bu , who talks about ...

How do you know what restaurant is good? As I was walking through the food kiosks at Luquillo, a beach town in Puerto Rico. I realized that you look for the crowded one, because if the locals frequent it, then it most be at least decent, right? At least that's how the thinking goes. While food-poisoning looks imminent in that lonely restaurant with nobody in it. This is a type of group think. You crowd-source your restaurant decision because you don't have time to check each restaurant for cleanliness and audit their food, you go where others have gone to eat and trust in the wisdom of the crowds. Now sometimes you go off exploring too, and go check out that restaurant you haven't tried or that new place that opened. But when you're in a hurry, in an unfamiliar place, need to eat quick the lonely food kiosk just feels sketchy even if it's totally fine and the crowded one is just good. Why is this important? It isn't but it's a cool way of thinking about ...

So today again I've been drawn into reading another article on what should you put or not put on your resume article. Probably the umpteenth one I've read this year. You get into this self-judgmental dialog: Should I do this? Should I do that? And Oh my God I did it wrong that time! None of that helps. I find it curious how the Job Seeker starts to makes this dance trying to present him or herself as the perfect candidate for a job. Twisting and turning, fixing a resume here, tweaking there. But what does this accomplish? It's patently obvious to me that the process is broken because it treats people like interchangeable cogs. You need an engineer? Then only an engineer will do. I wonder about pople like Robert McNamara who is the subject of the documentary "Fog of War" which I saw this weekend. He went from the government to working for Ford. It was clear he didn't get that job because he had "previous automobile working experience." Yet his c...

Steam has released its first movie through its digital distribution network. Netflix streams movies directly to your computer. Hulu is the new cable. Is there a place for physical distribution? Is Bluray dead? The short answer is: yes it is. I used to work in the DVD industry and after getting laid-off a few years back I've been looking to re-invent myself as a writer, as a programmer and as a leader. Things easier said than done in this economy. The sad part of this is that this digital transition was inevitable and foreseeable. Yet the studios and the vendors (I worked for a vendor) and even the retail stores all pretended that it wasn't happening, until it did. Blockbuster is no more, Hollywood Video is no more. All preventable 'deaths' if they'd moved their assents correctly. The next thing on the chopping block is film canister delivery to movie theaters. With silver jumping in price (I'm not sure but I think it quadrupled) and silver being a huge compo...

A black man was shot in Florida. A kid really. Wearing a hoodie, buying skittles not to far from his home. Unarmed. The man who shot him was Hispanic. Everybody is crying racism.  I doubt it.  Race had something to do with it I'm sure, but I don't think it's as simple as racism. I think it's from a different way of looking at the other man, a way where the man is suddenly a threat before anything else, a kind of Anton's blindness that prevents people from seeing what's in front of them . A teenager with skittles becomes a threat. A danger. A terror that has to be stopped, lethal. I, of course, don't know for sure if this is what happened in Florida a few weeks ago, since few details have come out. But I doubt the calls for racism and wonder if it is this other thing. I'll call it the Scary Man syndrome, w hich is distinct from racism. I've seen it before. My roommate in college told me an experience so bizarre at first I thought he was pulling...

I've been researching to write a book on Truth after I finish my novel. It's slow research, one can't rush philosophy or theology. So tonight on a restless night I was reading about a person that ran into trouble with his neighbor on his tiny house. I got upset. I got sad. I went through teeth-grinding frustration reading his blog post. Only words yet they got me so upset. I've been noticing this more and more lately and paying attention to them and recording them to see why they make me so upset. Like for example one of the people in my Agile Management Class, writes in such a way that I get upset, angry and furious about it and become rather arrogant with him. I'm not sure why it pisses me off so much the way he writes but I'm beginning to think I strikes me as him "being better than me" and I just want to show him his not better than me. I should say that in his writing he doesn't say he's better than me but that's how it strikes me, pre...

I've been between jobs for a while, so I spend a fair amount of time looking at job postings. Admittedly this is a sad and very depressing activity so some weeks I just don't even look, let alone apply. Seems that my time is better used reading, learning programming, mastering a new swimming technique or writing. After a while though you start seeing some really weird patterns in the postings, that make me wonder when people write this, do they know what they want? Some of them almost sound like dating site profiles' "What do you look for in a partner." I'm waiting for the one that says Requirements "Be Tall, Dark and Handsome." But more often you see the exact same type of language over and over again. Almost like a code that I can't quite decipher. I'm tempted (well more than tempted) to call my friends that work in HR (Human Resources) and have them translate it for me. Going by Job Postings, there are no jobs for calm people outside o...

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...

Brain Drain happens when the opportunities in a country or place for educated people favors them leaving permanently the area. I've noticed that Puerto Rico suffers from a Brain Drain since I was in college fifteen years ago, but now finally the unseen consequences of this brain drain are being felt. With the downturn in the economy many professionals have left (many to Texas) and Puerto Rico for the first time lost population in the 2010 census. Brain drain has seen and unseen consequences. For example due to a lack of internships many doctors are leaving the island to complete their training abroad and never return. In my family alone four doctors trained in the University of Puerto Rico Medical School are now abroad and likely will stay that way permanently. While moving outside of Puerto Rico involves becoming a minority in the larger US, that is not as much a concern for English-speaking professionals who are already familiar with American culture since they were kids ....

A few years ago I was involved in a car accident. Not my fault, I got rear ended and my car totaled.  For over a year I suffered from severe back pain. My orthopedic surgeon and back specialist looked at the X-rays, the ordered MRIs. The back pain was getting worse and at times it was excruciating. All I got was a prescription to Hydro-codone, the generic of the Vicodin. Last year I decided to take advantage of the time between jobs to concentrate on getting healthy again. Throughout the pain, I had kept working because I couldn't afford to leave work and the pain was intermittent, so some days, it was not too terrible. I only used the (sixty pill!) bottle of Vicodin I got for emergencies, or plane trips, were sitting in a chair in pain was just too much. But since Vicodin is so powerful (it puts me in a daze) I could not use it for work, so I managed work in pain , sitting for long hours in front of a monitor doing work. The pain had not only reduced the quality of life ,...

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...

Today I heard on the radio how the economy has so drastically turned on the former Irish Tiger that people are being pushed into the security industry since that seems to be one of the few growth industries. Ireland copied a version of the development program Puerto Rico followed out of the forties under operation bootstrap . It gave tax breaks to American Corporations that set up in Puerto Rico, similar to the way Dell set up in Ireland. Puerto Rico also made these tax-breaks subject to being located outside of the capital to encourage development in the country-side, which was a brilliant idea. Since Puerto Rico was mostly undeveloped in the rural areas and only the capital of San Juan and surroundings had been developed. This development program was abandoned in Puerto Rico by pro-statehood government because these tax-breaks would result in an obstacle towards statehood. This had an adverse effect on employment, though I think this was small considering the effect of the brain-drai...

Most people get Darwin wrong by confusing him with Social Darwinism. I just heard an interview with author Lawrence Goldstone and he had really good grasp of Social Darwinism and how it's really more of an excuse for social discrimination than a scientific theory. Social Darwinism attempts to do something very ancient in Western Tradition which is the application of a "natural law" to social order. Since Darwin had just upended the traditional creationist view of the world at the time, many intellectuals sought to apply this new knowledge to old "natural laws" similar in a way to what Newton did. This turns out to be hogwash. Not too different from kings claiming divine lineage to justify their position in life, now the rich could use Social Darwinism to claim superior fitness, and justify their position in society. A feeling that still lingers today in some circles, with claims of superior intelligence and books like "The Bell Curve." Goldstone...

One of the benefits of scientific research is that by being empirical or experimentally driven it avoids circular and endless discussions on what works or should work. You can just check it. You test to see what works. Jeff Bezos described in a Stanford lecture how Amazon utilizes this testing in it's site live to verify improvements. The ability to test which option is best increases efficiency as it cuts down not only on inefficient options but also on the time that would have been spent discussing the pros and cons of each approach. At Amazon this approach is called A-B testing. Where one option "A" is tested against option "B" and the results are seen immediately. This data-driven approach is what makes science edge out over other disciplines, and it's one that seems sorely lacking on the social sciences, where argument rather than data still reigns king. It doesn't matter that "trickle down economics" didn't have it's intended effe...

NiNis are the youth segment of the population 16-35 that neither study nor work ( Ni estudian, Ni trabajan). They are the Spanish and Latin-American equivalent of the slacker. They typically live at home with their parents or other family and are sometimes referred to as leeches on family resources. I posit that the NiNis like the slackers before them are mislabeled as lazy by society and incorrectly perceived as leeches or drains on normal society. Slackers were of my generation. Smart people that seemed unable to focus and apply themselves to take work seriously; they spent a lot of their time on seemly wasted hobbies like video games, making videos, or writing blogs (many of which are now rather decent careers). But thinking of them as lazy is wrong. These are people that want to work, sometimes desperately, but they just don't see the point. They're not lazy, just unmotivated. I recently got Jane McGonigal's book 'Reality is Broken' and I agree with her. It is ...