I mean, me and everyone, right?
But what Tim's doing is especially meaningful to me, because he's a force for education in a state that used to have one of the best education systems in the world. The UCs (Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Santa Cruz, every jewel in the crown) have been decaying for the last 20 years because of a restructuring in their money base. Property taxes were dropped in the 70s, and so education funds dropped. For a long time, the UCs attempted to combat the pressure with budget cuts and rate increases. The result was less education for fewer people. I watched as people I knew got squeezed harder. Some had to stop school. Some left it with crushing debt. And now, you know, that's what we have to look on as the good times.
We're all kind of waiting around now to see if the budget crisis is going to have meant a killing blow.
The painful irony of all of it is that one of the reasons California became the world's 5th largest economy was because of the presence of Berkeley and Stanford, so close together, churning out so many people schooled in computer and other sciences.
Whether California can keep it together now is, to some extent, about whether those people educated in the good years can find ways to bring the next generation through the lean. And Tim O'Reilly's doing that.
I follow him on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/timoreillyAnd also on Google Buzz.
Doing this has also introduced me to the excellent pkedroksy on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/pkedroskyAnd then there's always O'Reilly Radar:
http://radar.oreilly.com/My boyfriend's working with R (the statistical program) thanks to a deal on the O'Reilly book I spotted on the twitter feed. Hopefully this summer I'll be learning to program with the help of these guys. And, even more, I hope that between O'Reilly, Salman Khan, and some other brave, smart, and energetic people, we'll find a wh*** new way to educate our current students with little to no debt. The students deserve it, and we all need them to have it.
Thanks, Evoke, for giving me the opportunity to talk about this guy I love.
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