
Why is anyone listening to Tim O'Reilly? - williamsmj
https://theoutline.com/post/2413/why-is-anyone-listening-to-tim-o-reilly
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gumby
This essay made some excellent points yet structurally undermined its work by
being unfocused.

E.g. It used O'Reilly's own metaphors as jumping off points to make deeper
observations. Yet on water the reviewer rambles instead of making the point.
And on O'Reilly's poor Alderaan metaphor -- well that's just a stupid metaphor
not worth the discussion.

On the other hand, some of the excellent points: \- The gold rush was in many
ways a disaster that we still are paying for, and reflects a "strip mining"
mentality that has been repeated, such as: highly polluted land on the
Peninsula thanks to chip production (you can't drink the groundwater in any of
the industrially-zoned land in the city of Santa Clara, for example); the
destructive style of farm production in the Central Valley (brought from
Oklahoma by people who had destroyed their previous environment with the same
system), and now strip-mining of middle class economies. \- The fact that the
narrative arc of the "high tech revolution" has followed the self-narrative
arc of US baby boomers \- The decades long privatization of the "common weal"
has made it brittle, failed to serve the people it was originally designed
for, and has broken up the social sense of common purpose.

I like Tim, have known him since he started with the Nutshell books, and think
this essay is a bit of a hatchet job. But there's a lot of meat hidden in
there too.

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stcredzero
_These increasingly destructive techniques, coupled with the San Francisco
peninsula’s population exploding from roughly 1,000 people in 1848 to over
36,000 in 1852, irrevocably changed the landscape of California, pulling up
old growth forests, pushing aside rivers, and literally washing away into the
Pacific Ocean some of the richest arable land on the North American continent.
The Gold Rush turned huge swathes of California into “sacrifice zones” —
geographic areas that have been permanently damaged or poisoned by industry._

We're still dealing with the environmental impact from those days. Precisely
the places one is likely to find gold, one is likely to find other heavy
metals like mercury. Those places are also the part of California where SF
gets its water from. Fortunately, metallic mercury is fairly nonreactive. Much
of that washed-away soil is still making its way down into reservoirs. There
are actually plans to safely mine that sediment for the mercury and gold.

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nerpderp83
God that was good. The thickness of the bubble is exponential in the amount of
money one has.

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rhapsodic
Tim's core business, tech book publishing, has certainly been disrupted by
technology. Glad to see he's not getting all Luddite over it.

