The great tragedy of the pre-Internet era was that My So-Called Life superfans had no way of keeping the teen drama on the air. But we now know where the laconic bad boy, an ambling Zen koan in corduroy, might have ended up: an "early investor" in a "hot" human resources automation startup. Swoon.

Sometimes, beneath the sleaze and oblivion, you get the sense that techies do want to help others. But without basics like empathy, reason, or humanity, the startup community struggles to help its fellow man—and we wind up with things like this, a business analysis of the homeless shopping cart.