Larry Kuperman

Join Date 04/2001

+43

Jews On The Internet

ZOMG!! Y1d5 Ru|3!!!!

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The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of "What is a Jew?" and also "Who is a Jew?" Questions that have been asked many a time.....mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes....well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world's population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.

Not so, bubbala. (A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.) The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers. Lets look at "Who's A Yid?"

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. Larry Page's mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University. It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students, but expanded quickly. Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital. He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish. Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale. How much is Facebook worth? Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel: "Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015." Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.

Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30. He is best known for founding Digg.com. Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers He began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV. On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS into arguably the premier tech news site. Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.

Scott Blum has been referred to as the "Sam Walton of e-commerce." Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers. Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash. He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father. Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com. He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.

RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product. But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential. When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft. He has had a major impact on the Internet.

Certainly also worth mentioning are Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago; and Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland.

What would the Internet be like with Google, PayPal, Facebook, Digg.com, Buy.com? It would be very, very different.

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NightTrainthedark

Join Date 07/2003

+255

O.J. Simpson...not a jew.

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Oy gevalt, I left off Michael Dell!

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vStyler

Join Date 11/2004

+919

Good for them..

I couldnt live without Google and Paypal..

..now where are all the internet savvy and wealthy Brits?

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Simple Question, Are they American born or not?

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They are all American Jews, except for except for Phillipe Kahn, who was born in France.

A while ago, I posted a blog on the American immigrant experience for religious Jews and Mennonites. You might want to check it out at Link

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1840

ZOMG!! Y1d5 Ru|3!!!!

Yay...Larry's a 1337 geek....

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I prefer the term "Y1ddis4 h@x0r" actually....

Wealth is an interesting metric. According to the Forbes list for 2007, there is not one Jew in the top 10. However, we begin with Mr. Ellison after that:

Larry Ellison, number 11, $21.5 billion.
Sergey and Larry share the honors at number 26 with $16.6 billion.
Michael Dell at number 30 with $15.8 billion.
Steve Ballmer at 31 with $15.0 billion.

Rose and Zuckerberg may have more potential wealth than realized at this time.

The point being that we have been good for technology and technology has, in return, been very, very good to us.

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Simple Question, Are they American born or

I know the saying is there is no such thing as a stupid question...but why?

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

I guess my reaction to this is "so what"?

Are you suggesting that Jewish people are inherently superior in some way? Perhaps that Judaism, as a religion creates a culture that is predisposed to being entrepreneurial? Or what?

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and then there is you, me, adventuredude, andrew, and a few others, maybe wwe should have a Jewish blog roll count one day and see how many joe users are Jewish just for the hell of it.

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Frogboy, this disproportionate degree of success should be interesting in its own right.

I don't believe in "inherent" superiority. Ability may be inherent, but the willingness to use it is a matter of individual choice. Success is based on both ability and drive. To your second point, yes, I suggest that the values of Judaic culture, as opposed to the religion itself, increase the odds of entrepreneurial success. Concrete examples:

1- Jews have always valued learning and literacy. It is part of the culture. Jews were required to read and often to be multi-lingual. That was a key factor in ancient days.

2- Jews have always had a sensible attitude towards money and venture capitalism. Look at the Jews of the Middle Ages.

3- The Diaspora created a very diverse gene pool with people identifying themselves as Jews living in places as diverse as Ethiopia to Russia. I doubt that an Ethiopian Jew has the same genetic mix as an Ashkenazim from Minsk, but they both share the common experience of someone coming along every couple of generations and killing half the Jewish population. That tends to weed out the slow runners. While everyone alive today is descended from the "winners" it is more true for some than others.

A supporting article can be found at: Link

A new national study shows that religious affiliation plays a powerful role in how much wealth Americans accumulate, with Jews amassing the most wealth and conservative Protestants the least.

Quoting Lisa Keister, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ohio State University, “The results suggest people draw on the tools they learn from religion to develop strategies for saving, investing and spending, and those tools may be different in various faiths.”

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1840

That tends to weed out the slow runners.

Larry...that reminds me of the PC Game advert that said "You can run, but you'll only die tired"...

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Larry,

Who cares?

Regardless of whether this kind of ignorant self-serving rhetoric belongs posted in the "Internet" forum(rather than say a religious forum), you are wrong.

There is no "disproportionate degree". You named a handful of successful entrepreneurs out of literally thousands of billionaires. For every example you present, there are tens if not hundreds of contrary examples.

And to either position, I exclaim "So what?!"

I suggest that you would do better to judge men (and women) on their talents and achievements rather than where they happened to have been born in the world (the overwhelmingly deterministic factor in anyone's religion).

You might also take note that PRIDE is a major sin in EVERY religion.

Ahem.

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1840

Larry,

Who cares?

Regardless of whether this kind of ignorant self-serving rhetoric belongs posted in the "Internet" forum(rather than say a religious forum), you are wrong.

Er...clearly you do, hence your own colourful choice of rhetoric 'ignorant self-serving'.

It looked to me more as a curious observation, perhaps with a modicum of causuality, but hardly 'sinful pride'....

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And the division of people into class and categories and religions continues ... and continues....

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@old crab,

Precisely.

Racism has two sides.

@Jafo

I do indeed challenge racism (as ignorance) wherever I see it, from any side of the coin it comes from. And since Larry has posted almost nothing but stories about Jewish issues (no problem there), I made the assumption that he is indeed Jewish. That would be why I believe his post was prideful, and this self-serving.

Peace.

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amen...

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starkers

Join Date 05/2004

+1153

A person's worth should never be measured/determined by race, colour or creed, but by their deeds/actions. Deeds, good or bad, have no race, colour or creed....for if we attach any of these to action(s), we open the door to jealousies, prejudices and/or intolerances....

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He wasn't measuring a person by his race, but a race by the (net) worth of certain people.

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"I don't believe in "inherent" superiority. Ability may be inherent, but the willingness to use it is a matter of individual choice. Success is based on both ability and drive. To your second point, yes, I suggest that the values of Judaic culture, as opposed to the religion itself, increase the odds of entrepreneurial success."

Culture, not race or religion.

"I made the assumption that he is indeed Jewish."

Stated in the first paragraph.

"You named a handful of successful entrepreneurs out of literally thousands of billionaires."

I also cited a report conducted by Ohio State University to support my theory. There are many, many others. A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Kevin MacDonald, can be viewed at Link

A study by Stanford University cited: "Today, though barely 2% of the nation's (referring to the US) population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews." Continuing on the report further cites "The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked. Jews are elected to public office in disproportionate numbers. In 1993, ten members of the United States Senate and thirty-two members of the House of Representatives were Jewish, three to four times their percentage of the general population."

I cited that 4 out of the top 31 billionaires on the Forbes list were Jewish. That is approximately 13%, or 52 times the percentage of the population. Disproportionate.

Interesting that this article was termed "racism." Jews are so ethnically diverse that we never really consider ourselves a race, more often a religion or a culture. Is stating that one culture is more likely to lead to success (and supporting that assertion) prideful? Maybe, if you belong to that culture. Racist? Hardly.

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Jews are so ethnically diverse that we never really consider ourselves a race, more often a religion or a culture

agree with that.

More: RACISM/RACIST i'm sorry but it's dumb to talk about race about humans

English a nationality, Black white yellow a color of skin, christian jew a religion. and all of that it's HUMAN and there are only one RACE: HUMAN

At least you can talk about species in talking about different humans but not Race.
So pretend to be racist is dumb

you can maybe pretend to be "specist"

To be serious a little: i guess here people take a word for one of his definition and others for the other definition

Larry i could be wrong talk about Jews as culture (who include history and religion)
And some other take this word only for nationality or religion.

No Racism/specism here only studies about culture behavior and adaptation in different society through the success of certain people from this culture.
Nothing more.

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So what? I mean seriously... yes so some rich people believe in one big fairy godfather in the sky instead of another big fairy godfather in the sky? If you're going to publish something like this on Wincustomize lets have some articles about other rich people and their imaginary friends too!

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Good Article Larry - from A Jew who lives in Israel
John

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1840

I made the assumption that he is indeed Jewish. That would be why I believe his post was prideful, and this self-serving

Now, as I understand it Americans are a proud nation....they take pride in their nationalism/heritage/etc. But gosh, darn....pride is 'self-serving'...it's a 'major sin in every religion'.

Gee....I'll have to look down on my sinful American friends, then,....lest God smite me down too.

I think those who most espouse the 'challenging of racism' actually need to redefine their interstices with reality [yes, it's a word].

Fortunately [for me] I'm Australian, not American. We don't feel 'pride' as such....but 'luck', hence we refer to 'the lucky country'.

Don't confuse 'pride' with 'arrogance'.

There IS nothing wrong with being proud....

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And the division of people into class and categories and religions continues ... and continues....

Sad isn't it.

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