# -So, What Do You Do--

Happy football season everyone! A football blowout preview spectacular
is below. Don't care about football? Happy second week of September! You
did it!\
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And now the links:\
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**At parties, people often ask "So, what do you do?" **It's highly
likely your job didn't exist 10 years ago, so the answer is a bit
squishy and the explanation is long. But I think the harder it is to
explain your job, the better. So I wrote this thing about how [I think
we should kill the job
title](http://99u.com/articles/31705/lets-kill-the-job-title). \
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Ever since the senseless murder of Google Reader, Digg Reader has been
the best RSS reader around. Now, the [devs have added "Digg
Deeper"](http://blog.digg.com/post/96548411766/new-today-digg-deeper-goes-deeper) which
surfaces links that the people you are following on Twitter are most
tweeting.\
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**Oh hey, look!** It's another venture capital-baked content startup
[that underpays its
writers](http://gawker.com/is-bustle-really-successful-1625559948)! (As
an aside, I once interviewed a VC who said he'd only invest in content
if it was based on user generated content. Bootstrap your content
startups, people.)\
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**Instead of "leaning in"** should we just be [paying more attention to
women like Milenda
Gates](http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2014/08/16/my-new-role-model-can-you-guess-who/)?\
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**Continuing a thread about Ivy League "sheep" from last week**: Peter
Thiel (best known as the man behind PayPal and Palantir, investor in
Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, among may others) was on the fast track form
Stanford, to law school, to a prestigious finance job. [But then he got
depressed and
quit](http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strategy/?utm_content=buffer7dee0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer). \
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**If you've ever yearned for the distraction-free nature of a flip
phone** with the modern amenities of a smart phone [I have an idea for
you](https://medium.com/life-hacks/my-year-with-a-distraction-free-iphone-and-how-to-start-your-own-experiment-6ff74a0e7a50). \
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**Can I just state, for the record:** who gives a shit [how many spaces
you put after a
period](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html)?\
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**Elizabeth Spiers on** [The downside of conversational
writing​](http://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-downside-of-conversational-writing/).\
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**"A lot of people who work in internet media secretly—or in many cases,
not-so-secretly—hate it**, and some even suspect they are actively
making the world a dumber place, as they very well may be." [A
pessimistic take on writing for the
internet](http://www.patrolmag.com/2014/08/25/david-sessions/the-state-of-the-internet-is-awful-and-everybody-knows-it/).
My thought: quality always always always wins in the end. It just may
take longer than we had hoped. \
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**And now the Sean Blanda NFL fun fact link swarm:** Did you know that
NFL players are twice as likely to face weapons charges but [half as
likely to face drug
charges](http://deadspin.com/what-do-arrests-data-really-say-about-nfl-players-and-c-733301399)?... [Here](https://twitter.com/MadMoneyOnCNBC/status/507994579992576000)
is Jim Cramer in an Eagles jersey. See? Not *all* Eagles fans are
obnoxious ... We are judging kickers [on the wrong
thing](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/sports/football/12score.html?_r=0)
... Want to know what it's like for billionaires who have been
successful their entire lives to finally regress to the mean? [Ask Jerry
Jones](http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11420510/dallas-cowboys-owner-jerry-jones-wants-known-football-man) ... [NFL
players](http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11452022/nfl-nation-confidential-majority-players-support-washington-redskins-nickname)
and [the general
public](http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/11451964/redskins-poll-most-favor-keeping-name-dissent-growing)
are in favor of keeping the name of the Washington professional football
team ... No one cares [about your fantasy
team](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=no+one+cares+about+your+fantasy+team)
.... "I wouldn't have any idea where to get a Molly [or what a Molly
is](http://www.denverpost.com/broncos/ci_26454229/wes-welker-suspended-4-games-taking-banned-substance)."
... For the record:
[this](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1752549-we-remember-reggie-bush-gets-lit-up-by-the-eagles-sheldon-brown)
is the most vicious hit in NFL history... If you want to know how good a
football team really was, [you need to know their Pythagorean
projection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_expectation#Use_in_pro_football).\
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And now my official preview: I'm going to go chalk and say the Seahawks
repeat, the Eagles go 8-8 after Foles or McCoy get hurt, and the nation
will collectively know all the words to approximately 145,121 stupid
beer and car commercials.\
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As always, thanks for making space in your inbox for this little ol'
letter.\
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--Sean