I used to have this ECD affliction, but I discovered I could control my disorder by limiting it to certain mailboxes. I used to work for a company that did everything via email, the daily volume was obscene, no human could process it all. You could tell the folks that were trying because they would always reply days later about something that was resolved because they couldn't clear their backlog. So, as a matter of survival I created a "direct" mailbox and sorted everything I was explicitly in the To: or Cc: header into it, everyone was on about a hundred email lists. Then I had a mailbox for communication within my team. Those 2 I kept at inbox zero, the rest I got good at sorting per regular meeting (check before it occurred) and other. I'd check other once a day or so and its where I looked when someone said "did you see that email..." and I had no clue. Another self defense mechanism, as a matter of practice my vacation message always had this disclaimer "If this is important please resend after I return. Due to the volume of mail waiting for me, I may not get to it in a timely manner". Anyways, not every email is equal, you have to focus your energy on the important stuff first, filtering always saved me from being consumed by ECD. That said, I really appreciate that both you and your partners always answer your emails...

Ok, now I have to read the book... at least the first half. Its going to take a lot of convincing that even exceeding human intelligence will allow a computer intelligence to vaporize those jobs. At the core of creativity is a certain chaos where seemingly disjointed elements are recombined in a new form, raw intelligence often has little to do with the process. You aren't talking AI, you're talking a new life form ala Data from Star Trek II. I'll go read and see what he says.

If I grok this, post singularity, the only jobs left are in knowedge/creative categories. I'm not sure that necessarily leads to a tipping point in unemployment, as I don't believe potential in either of those categories is bounded. I'm not sure anyone could envision the number of widgets we currently manufacture that have value and power this economy. I can only imagine the knowledge/creative products that will have value in that new economy. Really, who would have thought that a tractor or other items in farmville would have some tangible value that could employ people. So, yes with squinting you can see parts of it.

I fully agree it will look very different, but I'm not buying that we'll go through a discontinutity to get there. The universal thing that I've seen over and over again is that people do what is necessary to provide for themselves and their families. If that means engaging parts of brains that have been stagnant during the industrial revolution, then they will. The same way the left the farms, traversed oceans and moved to cities. If we can do one thing to ease the pain and prepare for this, it would be to overhaul our education system.

Couldn't agree more, endurance racing and building companies require a tremendous expenditure of energy, using it wisely is a key to success. Iterating small simple moves is incredibly efficient for making large changes in the outcome. You touched on 2 other things, besides conviction, this iteration model depends upon. Having both internal and external awareness of your situation and the wisdom from use of these moves in the past that allows you to apply them for maximum effect. At the end of the race, this is what allows someone to "make it look easy".

We're pretty much what Colbert describes without Dreamy and his mountain tops

No worries. We've actually already engaged with both of those organizations and are hopeful we can bring their data streams on line in the near term as well.

Once we enter alpha we'd really like feedback from folks such as yourself. Also, if you have ideas for features that would help you be successful, we'd love to hear them

Mostly because I'm lazy and didn't want to spend a huge amount of time on this part. Running in a JEE container allowed me to write simple code while it handles db connection pooling and other system resources for me. Using an EJB3 container provided the ORM and object lifecycle control we needed for the ETL and service classes. Not to mention, scaling the container is pretty easy. I'm not necessarily sold its the long term winner for performance and conserving server resources, but to get something robust and scalable out the door quickly it fit the bill.

I think a good non-religious conversation about the long term solution for this piece needs to occur.

I should also ask if know a good stream of data that you'd like to see in our application? If yes, do you know someone we could talk to about it? Thanks for the comment, we really appreciate it.

Great question! No, we are working on getting access to as many data sources as possible eventually moving beyond just volunteer opportunities to things like public policy forums and fundraising events. Hands On Network is just our first feed which we can announce publicly and is enough data for us to go live.

It is confusing as written... probably should be "breaking things into httpd service, REST service, and database layers." The web application is static html/js/css which needs to be served to the browser where its executed. I need to write a post on sproutcore... make sense?