
What Silicon Valley Doesn't Get About People - misnamed
https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/09/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-get-about-people/539799/
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eevilspock
> the cobbler’s children have no shoes. (Or, regionally adjusted, the
> engineer’s children have no slide rules.

For an article that talks about "the empathy gap", it lacks a lot of empathy
to choose the weaker interpretation of "the cobbler’s children have no shoes",
that Silicon Valley isn't taking care of its own house.

No, the real failure of empathy and morality is that The Haves buy shoes from
have-not cobblers paying them so little that they can't afford shoes for their
own children. What's worse, they are focused on making society more
"efficient" by facilitating a race-to-the-bottom in worker wages (e.g. Uber)
if not hoping to put them out of work entirely through automation (e.g. Bodega
[1]).

The Haves send their children to private schools because of the quality
teachers, who can't themselves afford to send their own children to the
school.

The haves hire immigrants to be nannies so that their children get full-time
quality adult care (while they're at work making the big bucks). The nannies
can't afford to do the same for their children. In other words, the nannies
spend more time with The Haves kids than their own, and The Haves have no
problem with that. [2]

The Haves buy a new smartphone every year that is built by people who work in
sweatshop conditions for monthly pay that is less than what The Haves just
spent on their phone.

Feel free to add to this list.

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[1] _‘Bodega,’ the very bad startup that wants to kill mom-and-pop shops_ ,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272086)

[2] _The Cost of Caring_ ,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11458399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11458399)

