I won’t waste too many words here because you need to read all 7,000 of the words in this essay on the idiosyncrasies of salary negotiation. The key point being is to stop feeling guilty about asking for market compensation.

If you’re a young grad fresh out of college what’s the more attractive career option? Investment banking or starting a company from scratch that grows gourmet mushrooms out of old coffee grounds?

Well, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez were two young men who eschewed the safer career path to start a business which did $1.4 million in sales last year and employs 22 people.  Their story and the story of their company Back to the Roots is covered in this amazing story over at Good magazine.

From finding their feedstock, to partnering with Home Depot to discovering that their leftovers from growing these mushrooms was a highly valuable compost it’s an inspiring tale. Check it out.

Apple is one of the best known and most profitable companies on the planet. And while the mourning around Steve Jobs’ death might have gotten a little out of hand that hasn’t stopped two recent articles from pulling back the curtain on this extremely secretive company.

The first is a New York Times article by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher. The lede has President Obama asking Steve Jobs last February why iPhones can’t be made in the United States. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” was Jobs’ unambiguous reply. And if you’re curious as to why, it’s instructive to look at this anecdote that was dug up.

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

It’s pretty clear the only workforce “flexible” enough to deal with his demands would be a foreign one. This freakout over the screen of the iPhone is just the start. The article, which was submitted to Apple before it was published and which Apple refused to comment on breaks down the scale and practices of its Chinese workforce. It’s a great read.

The other article that is helping show just how Apple works isn’t an article at all, it’s a podcast. Called Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory it was featured on the popular program This American Life. In it, this performance artist from the US actually goes to Foxconn, goes to the massive, silent factories and sees how Apple products get made. It’s an incredibly well told story and the people at This American Life do an excellent job of fact checking.

If you want to know a little bit more about where your Apple products come from and how they get made. Read these articles.

The future should be an interesting place – I spent the last week trying to round up innovations that might save the world, from paint and concrete that eliminate air pollution to solar-powered space lasers that could solve all our energy problems. What I realized was that the future’s not just awesome – seriously, real-world tricorders – but that there are a lot of brilliant people out there with totally crazy, awesome ideas that they’re working to make a reality.

It’s doubtful that the 29 items on our list will all come to fruition – some will be abandoned as too expensive or outright impossible. But in the meantime we have people with vision, from the sponsors of the X-Prize to geniuses at IBM, giving these crazy ideas a shot.

The risk is that we’ll take these innovations as an excuse to continue with bad behaviour. Technology can mitigate some of our mistakes, but just because pumping the atmosphere full of sulfur dioxide will reduce the global temperature doesn’t mean we don’t need to worry about it. We also need to work on strategies for right now, and those may seem less exciting – the same basic, boring stuff like reducing emissions or using resources efficiently.

Everything happens quickly these days. But in the business of tech startups, it seems nothing happens quickly enough. When you think of the process behind creating a tech startup it usually includes caffeine-heavy all-nighters, mounds of take-out pizza and a scattered array of boxes and packaging. It’s that frantic, last-minute drive to be the first to come out on the other side.

When you consider the cheap accessibility of tech startups, it’s no wonder entrepreneurs feel the pinch when they’ve come onto a promising idea. With a low up-front cost and potentially enormous payout, the market for startups has become absurdly competitive. Consider the fact that startups don’t need to exist in a robust economy in order to flourish, as this New York Times blog alludes.

The cut-throat nature of the startup business was something I wasn’t fully aware of before writing my article for Unlimited Magazine. “It’s about getting products in front of customers faster,” says an Accelerator advertisement on Startup Edmonton’s website. This has always been the case, sure enough. But a tech startup now has to be productive in an ever-shrinking window of time – usually within only a few months, or even weeks. Some of the most successful startups were finished in a matter of days.

So you think you have a great idea? Well, someone else has the same one. So get to work. And my hat is off to you folks.

If you’ve wandered around your usual Internet haunts today you may have noticed that you can’t access them. Below we’ve got an abridged list of websites that have gone black today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sibling the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

People against the bill say that SOPA would render any site that included links, even if they were user-submitted, practically unoperable and liable to government take-down. SOPA has the potential to break the internet, to fracture it into a much less useful, more Balkanized world. Going dark is a dramatic but not entirely unrealistic warning of what the Internet could look like in a SOPA world.

The list of the big sites

• Imgur
• Wikipedia
• Reddit
• Mozilla
• WordPress.org
• icanhazCheezburger Network
• MoveOn.org
• TwitPic
• BoingBoing

While up here in Canada we have precious little influence over our neighbors to the south it’s heartening to see the biggies on the internet get together for some concerted action. It may have worked too, as Sen. James Leahy has backed away from the more egregious parts of the bill.