Some time ago i found myself talking with heads of a investment fund looking for opportunities to invest in the Romanian internet. Aside my legendary gloom and discomfort with the way things are going in this industry, we tried to find unconquered niches to exploit (please remember this was a 2010 discussion, some things may have changed).
Category: random
“Why do you clean the sidewalk? Why are you working like a chump for others?”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard these words. I used to get out in the morning in the winter when i was young and clean the snow from the sidewalk for the flat i was living with my parents. I did that after i moved to another flat and i do it now, not because the law says so, but because it’s the right and logical thing to do.
One thing i do remember from 10 or 15 years ago: grown men watching me from behind their windows. Some were glad someone else is cleaning the sidewalk, so they could use it, others did no understand why i was doing it.
So what is wrong with Romania?
45 years of communism made us ugly on the inside. We forget how to be human. We forgot how to help others. We are suspicious, mean, hateful and we do it for no reason (the proverb is “să moară şi capra vecinului”, which translates into “make others suffer if you are suffering”).
A girl from a orphan shelter i used to volunteer 14 years ago called me today to wish me happy birthday. She always cries on the phone and talks about us, the volunteers, helping her wake up and do something with her life. She lives in a small village near Bucharest in a two-room shed, works hard and wants to have a family.
Some of us would throw her under a bus for no reason. Some of us do nothing, but expect everything in return.
This is a picture i hold dear. Taken in 2009, while on a shopping trip to Debrecen. I was living in Oradea, near the Romanian-Hungary border, and going shopping to Debrecen outlets on a monthly basis. Every time, that Trabant was there, no matter rain or sun, clean and shiny.
Now i pass by the same place, but the car is not there.
I am the one on the right.
I look at some Romanian journalists and TV personalities as they turned clowns because they did not know when to quit (Cristian Tudor Popescu comes to mind). And some others, that knew when the change scenery, because there was nothing left for them there: some took jobs in banks, some opened businesses: Radu Coşarcă, Cosmin Prelipceanu.
It is important to know when to quit.
There is a pretty simpley answer on why US authorities are taking down sites like MegaUpload. And it is below. Sites like this have gone under the radar until they became too big and too successful for their own good. In order to survive and pay bandwidth and space costs, they needed to make money. And pretending they do not know the users they pay for the uploaded content are uploading pirated content was a good enough strategy so far. Not anymore.
