I've been burned out a few times and I'd suggest reducing work to minimum hours to give yourself some recovery time. Keep exposing yourself to new things and follow your inspirations. Eventually something will take and that spark will turn into a flame again.
I've been burned out a few times, some I didn't think I'd recover from at all. Each time though, learning something new is what brought me out of it.
I think most of the anti-microsoft disposition is legacy and deservingly so, but IMO no longer applicable. At least not against the technology anyway, since the mvc framework is pretty good. Licensing costs are a different matter all together.
I had an idea for single mothers to post info about deadbeat dads for others to avoid. However, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized it would turn into what you were proposing and decided against it.
I've forgotten my 'stupidest' ideas, but my 'worst' idea was basically to do what PRISM is doing now. I realized you can infer a hell of a lot from the bits of information people post publicly and you could aggregate them into a comprehensive profile. There's obviously a market for this as we all now know, but I realized how evil it was and that even if it was highly successful, how shitty would I feel about selling out humanity. ... however, it does still strike me as a fascinating technical challenge.
I think it's safe to assume they've requested pretty much everything for each request. And while just sharing the number of requests seems benign, you can see a disproportionate number of requests coming from certain countries in the report FB published (https://www.facebook.com/about/government_requests). Although, I do wish these reports had a 'request per 100,000 users' column.
"if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else."
Are you freak'n kidding me? The 99% is the market not the 1%. Who do you think is buying what the 1% is selling? It's the 99% who determine what is being made by buying what they buy!
I've had a few jobs like this, not many though, and I can tell you that none of them were at companies small enough for an owner to know who I was.
I'd like to propose a different reason for these jobs; middle manager decision makers who have ulterior motives than to optimize ROI. Like what you ask? Like getting a bigger budget next year. Like empire building. Like maximizing the illusion of importance. I could go on, but since I've never had one of these positions, I'm sure I could never do the list justice.
Law (since it was mentioned) and consulting are slightly different since you might end up doing something pointless where your company is maximizing ROI because the market is paying for you to do something pointless. ... and given that situation, I'd venture to guess that either a) it was one of the non-stakeholders mentioned above that brought you in, or b) an owner who bought into your industry/company's marketing BS and hasn't been disillusioned yet. ... yet.
There may be situations I can't think of, but I'd suggest that it's the 99% who has created this situation in most cases.
In my opinion, people in the 'it's all about the idea' camp, won't appreciate others immediately competing against them with the same idea. And people in the 'it's all about execution' camp, probably won't care enough about the ideas to pay for a site like this.