I spent a decade of my life in the valley and I do believe it's relevant to remember that what used to be a homebrew mixing of nerds, hippies, academics, researchers, teachers, makers, marketers, tinkerers and capitalists is now in large part skewed to marketers and capitalists. This is not necessarily good, bad, or romanticized it just is. So here are some tips:
Don't hustle.
Don't crush anything.
Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth.
Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically.
The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity.
Be nice.
Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.
Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".
Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world.
+100. I spent almost two decades in SV before moving to PHX and agree completely with your tips.
I've found that since moving to PHX, the hustling and "revolutionizing/world-changing/disruptive" rhetoric is kept to a minimum. Tech isn't its "own world" as much here and most of my friends and co-workers in the tech community end up talking about things we all enjoy doing as hobbies, or our families, more than anything. It's nice to find professional peers who enjoy hiking in Sedona, not worrying about how many PRs their open-source project has, or how many retweets their presentation at RubyConf got.
Its totally subjective, but its my kind of environment.
Hah. I live in Montana, and I find myself lusting sometimes for the inundation of tech in SV. I wish I could nerd out with more of my friends, instead of talking about hiking/skiing/whatever. I guess the grass is always greener :)
People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential.
Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy. But the media knows that, so it goes after the losers: It’s easy to point and laugh at the 100 things that look stupid, without realizing that “lol this social network for college kids thinks it’s worth $150m” seems just as crazy. Silicon Valley is the place that will be wrong funding Juicero in order to be right funding Facebook. You can’t have one without the other. (As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.)
But the media that sees itself losing its power, losing influence, and losing money. Of course they hate tech.
>"People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates."
No, your average non-techie consumer knows and cares very little about Silicon Valley. People like convenience and innovation that leads to convenience in their lives.
There is no transitive property where if I "love" ride-sharing I "love" Uber's leadership, business tactics and company culture.
>"Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy"
Again people like the convenience of the products these companies produce - being able to keep in touch with far away friends and relatives, and the convenience of on demand car service etc. This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor.
Companies love to think that people "love them" but truth is people like to use their products. I'd say people often dislike the company, but will buy the product anyway because that's what they care about.
Everyone has heard about Apple's douchey tax business, Google and Facebook's extreme data-collection, Amazon's aggressive business practices, etc. I'm not in "love" with any of these brands by a long shot. But we keep using them because we need their products to some degree.
> we keep using them because we need their products to some degree
In the same way we need nicotine or doritos: because they've been engineered to make us need them. I think people are starting to recognize it.
That 'our minds can be hijaked' article from yesterday -- headline is pretty click-baitey, the reading raises some legitimate points -- that article is a good companion to this thread's. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421704
The companies came along and gave us things we needed. There are such events in history that would inevitably happen regardless of the person (or people) who started it. People needed electricity. People needed long-range quick communication. People needed places to form groups, physically or not, etc.
Most of the corporations' products were inevitable. Thing is, they are abusing this fact to infest them with a load of stuff we don't want.
Should we care? They introduce problems we didn't have before -- namely how do they pay their hosting bills -- and then make us pay for those with ads.
It's their problem, not ours. If they can't manage, be very sure somebody else will gladly come along and replace them.
I don't know how I first got to this quote, but I like it:
(...) Users don't love your software. They tolerate it. And they
will abandon it when they find something that's just 1% better than what
you offer, or you do something that makes your software 1% worse than
your competition. (...)
> This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor.
Do you love your parents despite their flaws?
Do you love what your country affords you despite its shortcomings?
Attacks on "Silicon Valley" for what a handful of jerks at a small subset of companies in SV do is just as bad as articles like "Millennials are the laziest generation".
Do you really think its accurate to compare a corporation to one's family or place of birth? That's pretty absurd.
Did you actually read the article? The last part of the article - from "So, what can you do about it?" onward is a prescription for fixing the problems enumerated in the first part of the article. Attacks generally don't involve self-help advice.
>"This does not imply that they love surveillance, loss of privacy, sexist office culture, messianic and arrogant CEOs, lack of diversity, tax avoidance schemes or sweat shop labor."
Could you differentiate this from the financial sector, please?
Does anyone love the financial sector? The fact that the two are becoming difficult to distinguish from would be more evidence that people are falling out of love with Silicon Valley
It's false loyalty. People put up with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc with their fake "we care about you" marketing (could apps stop literally telling me this? it's weird), overpriced, and walled garden megalomania because they are addicted and their other options are mediocre walled gardens (look around).
People aren't stupid, they can sense when they are being used and those companies have treated their customers like cattle for the last decade or more. It's going to come crashing down one day, you can't treat customers with blatant disrespect time and time again and be shocked when they finally leave.
Why do you believe that people en masse "put up" with these tech companies? In my experience you're right that they're not stupid or unreasonable, but I think you're otherwise mistaken about the opinions of the vast majority. In my experience, they don't think they're being used - it's never occurred to them, because they don't particularly worry about centralized megacorporations having their personal data. And even if they are made aware of that, I think most still don't really care, even if they agree.
I judge how much people care about their personal data being in the hands of large companies based on how much they talk about it (but begrudgingly put up with it) or how much they stop using the products. Most people don't think about, talk about or consider their data being in e.g. Facebook's hands, and most people don't delete their Facebook accounts or diminish their usage, even when something shinier comes along. A lot of people on HN do those things and it's clear they care about their personal privacy, but I see no evidence that even a large minority of people actually care.
It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.
I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?
SV really isn't as much of a meritocracy as people like to pretend, as so many times just being first to the party and locking people in is enough to keep them there. I'm sure tons of businesses on exchange would love to ditch and move to Google Apps for Business, but the change is just too much of a hassle, even if the features are exactly as desired. Same for Google businesses looking at the MS office world with starry eyes.
The merit often has less to do with a product's success and continued success as much as how efficient they are at locking people in. Going back to Facebook, it's not like there's a way to migrate or exfiltrate your data in any meaningful way to another system.
This is an exaggerated comparison, but the mafia adds value much in the same way, in that often you don't have a choice in the matter. This isn't to say people are forced to use Facebook, but much like a mafia town, it's hard to do business otherwise.
>I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?
Sure, and that applied to Friendster and Myspace and others as well, until Facebook came along.
I don't like the term "first mover", because in practice, I think it's rare for the actual first to win. Friendster was the first friend-oriented online social network. They were the first mover, but the site performed terribly. MySpace and Facebook beat Friendster because they were better at doing what people wanted.
There are other examples. The iPhone was not the first smart phone, but it was better than all of the others when it came out. It dominated for a while, and even though it's no longer the dominant smart phone (I believe there are more Android phones), all smart phones are derivatives of that first iPhone. Google beat Yahoo and AltaVista. Historically, I think it's usually second-movers that win, because they tend to benefit from the first-movers defining the problem, and one of the second-movers solves it better.
Facebook was first in getting real identity on the internet right. The other social media sites before them never understood this well -- many had visions of people taking on avatars of other creatures, or defining their life around one myopic interest (in the case of MySpace: music).
It was first mover in getting real identity on the internet right. Social network is not an accurate term for what made Facebook "right" over its competitors.
In the instance of social networks, when everybody is already using a product, that’s part of what makes it a better product. Facebook wasn’t the first mover, and no one forced you to stay there, but now that we’re all there it is much more difficult to create a product better than it.
Yeah, it's like the end of an evolutionary branch. Slight mutations arent going to get you anything, you have to branch off in an orthogonal direction.
You are right. I don't think there will be another social network like Facebook. But do not in any way assume facebook cannot be toppled. Already the younger generation is not using facebook as much. I have zero loyalty to the company and its product.
But the next big social network or software that connects may not look anything like Facebook. It will be most likely be unrecognizable as a social network even.
Merely creating something better than Facebook is barely even the ante. Much more than that is required to convince somebody to use Facebook (Google, etc.). Marketing, some appreciable fraction of their userbase also using the would-be competitor, etc. is the absolute minimum requirement to play their game.
"Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions have arisen about the impact of online social interactions. In the present study, we assessed the associations of both online and offline social networks with several subjective measures of well-being. We used 3 waves (2013, 2014, and 2015) of data from 5,208 subjects in the nationally representative Gallup Panel Social Network Study survey, including social network measures, in combination with objective measures of Facebook use. We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in “likes clicked” (clicking “like” on someone else's content), “links clicked” (clicking a link to another site or article), or “status updates” (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. These associations were robust to multivariate cross-sectional analyses, as well as to 2-wave prospective analyses. The negative associations of Facebook use were comparable to or greater in magnitude than the positive impact of offline interactions, which suggests a possible tradeoff between offline and online relationships."
I hate to be the person saying “correlation != causation,” so instead let’s just agree that “the people who liked more things on Facebook self-reported to be less happy” is not a very rigorous way to analyze how Facebook affects human happiness levels.
Doesn't it follow, regardless of causality, that if Facebook were just as good as face-to-face social interaction, then there would be no difference in happiness levels between people who use Facebook and those who don't? If Facebook had a positive impact on people's lives, then there would be a similar positive correlation in using Facebook compared to seeing someone in person.
Maybe there isn't enough proof to say "Facebook is toxic", but it certainly seems true that Facebook is not as good as real human interaction.
I don’t think anyone is making the argument that Facebook is as good as face to face interaction. They’re also not mutually exclusive. That’s part of why this is so difficult to study.
You've got your correlation v causation mixed up there in interpreting those results. It's just as likely that negative well being means people take more shelter in digital interaction as opposed to the opposite (which is why the paper is careful to avoid actually suggesting causality).
Given that loneliness and isolation actually is toxic [0], for many it's not that online interactions are replacing offline interactions; they're the only interactions these people can get.
>For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in “likes clicked” (clicking “like” on someone else's content), “links clicked” (clicking a link to another site or article), or “status updates” (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health.
>Facebook is toxic.
Or alternatively mentally ill people like Facebook.
No, people love Facebook. But they love "Facebook", the utility that lets them connect with friends and family from afar, post photos and videos of loved ones and organise events. They do not love Facebook, the monolith company headed up by Mark Zuckerberg.
That's the important distinction here. People like the products they are given, but couldn't care less about how they are given them. By and large, that's fine, but it's highlighted when people assume that Uber customers care about how they were pioneers in innovation or whatever else SV applauds them for. Nope. They just want cheap car rides, please.
No, people can't sense anything. They keep forgiving the biggest cheaters in life and politics and reward thzir misbehavior with power and money. Better that people will do what's best for them assume they put a thought into it. They don't. They just react. And very basically.
I think people in general don't care about Silicon Valley. When they do care, they generally loath SV, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
People want the great monopolists regulated because they act like monopolists.
People want the giant companies to pay taxes, because they want them to pay a fair share and because it's unfair they get away with not paying taxes while competing with small companies that do pay taxes.
People realise that the giant companies create few jobs, often terrible ones as temps, but destroy many jobs. People are not sure the giant companies make up for the lost jobs.
People see that giant companies get away with blatantly disregarding laws like the ride sharing or apartment sharing conpanies that disregard taxi laws or employment laws or rental laws or hotelling laws, or like social networks or search engines disregarding privacy laws.
In short, people are tired for reasons that have everything to do with what these companies do as traditional capitalists and nothing to do with whether they innovate or are successfull.
Be careful. A little backlash has been brewing all over the place. Some of it's about privacy. Some of it's about power and influence. Some is about addictiveness. It's not much today, but the gap between a little backlash and a popular one is smaller than we're inclined to think.
This thread is full of comments making wild assumptions about cities they've never visited.
Uber and Lyft made the same assumption about Austin--that they could get away with anything because people love their product. They lost.
> People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates.
It's more like they tolerate the 500 pound gorilla in the room because there isn't an alternative.
Non-techies I associate with constantly complain about the poor quality of software, hardware (even Apple's devices, which regularly freeze and fail in all the ways any others might) and support. It's the best we have. It doesn't mean it's good, or that people are "in love" with it.
The non techies I associate with are intelligent enough to understand that they can buy a dumbphone like a Jitterbug if they don't like the downsides of the complexity of a smartphone, and that they get substantially more value out of the upsides than losses from the downsides. This shakes out to them being a lot more excited and optimistic and rosy about technology and technology companies.
Especially when I worked at Google: every non tech person I met would gush over how much they loved their products, how amazing the company must be, etc etc. This was true across a large gamut of people, from "coastal elites" to the rest of the country to people I met across the world once I quit Google and went backpacking for almost a year.
The _only_ place I've seen the level of cynicism you find on this forum is from people _in_ tech, too bitter and concerned with looking cool to even entertain the notion that there could be anything valuable about what these products do for people's lives.
I'm finding more and more of my friends and acquaintances are longing for a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, etc., and are taking the steps necessary to eliminate them from their lives. More and more people are reacting negatively to the digital leash to which they've attached themselves.
This pretty much follows the standard adoption pattern of technology. We always overuse and then over time figure out the acceptable use. Just as an example, I see the next ten years of iPhone as being dramatically different than the first ten years - and not in a way that would excite Tim Cook.
I think you underestimate how much this whole Russian fake news during and after the election has angered many Americans (at least outside of the ~30% of hard-core Trump supporters).
Facebook was already on a lot of people's shit list because they know they're the product, they know their privacy isn't respected, and yet they can't keep in touch with their friends without it. This direct attack on our democracy mounted via Facebook and other social media, while they performed no meaningful monitoring or self-policing of their own network, has made the situation all the worse.
So blame all of this on "old media" to your detriment. Bitter complaints about Facebook and other social media pervade far beyond the media.
I dare say the Russian fake news didn't do anything that Fox and Limbaugh and Brietbart haven't been doing for decades.
I'd really like to see some samples of Russian planted news and comments. I wonder if they would even be detectable compared to "normal" stuff the aforementioned organizations produce.
Yes, but we don't give foreign governments and intelligence agencies unhampered access to our TV and radio airwaves to broadcast whatever the hell they want. There's a big difference between US nationals broadcasting bullshit and hostile foreign governments broadcasting bullshit. Neither is ideal, but the latter is completely unacceptable, at least to me, because it touches on sovereignty issues.
I agree, but I think broadcast is a misleading term. They were buying ads on websites. And their buy footprint is very small. To say, as the media has insinuated, the Russians swayed the election by buying $100K in Facebook ads is disingenuous and alarmist.
That was just a single front. There were others on other platforms as well, and likely others on FB. It's unlikely we'll ever know the full extent of this operation, but it was clearly huge in its scope.
"As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money"
These rich people are not risking their own money but they risk the money of other people's pension funds and other sources. That has a real impact in people outside of SV.
Exactly this. Rich people privatize gains and socialize losses. Look at the financial crisis for an exact example. They aren't even playing with their own money! They are playing with investors' money, pension funds and mutual funds, and taking a huge management fee!
You need to look at the returns of a portfolio, not an individual investment. Most of the investors in these bad deals were investors in very very good deals based on very similar signaling. Most pension funds would be crawling over each other to get into top funds — which means a fund that’s going to blow up half its portfolio.
> As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.
Me neither. Sometimes people get upset that the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation in San Francisco.
Actually I live in a state that has spent a bunch of taxpayer money on a alt-coin currency based company that recently had an ICO.
p.s. I really don't care if someone wants to make a new food delivery/taskrabbit/uber/dropbox. I wish them luck! I just don't particularly like that little old ladies on fixed incomes are essentially forced to participate in that.
Venture Capital overall is a tiiiiny part of an investment portfolio. Compared to other amounts of capital allocation it’s pretty much a rounding error, and Juicero is a tiny piece of any portfolio.
The funds investing in Juicero and losing will have other 100x wins that will make them not worry about Juicero.
That’s why Silicon Valley works. It’s 1x wrong often, but occasionally 100x right.
>the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation
I don't argue against your sentiment, but you could have picked a better example, or be more precise.
Services like public transport and food delivery benefit poor people the most (where in "food delivery", I include "grocery delivery", and by "transportation", I understand "public transport"). Building an infrastructure for people to live without cars is a good thing.
I say that as someone who could not afford a car, and depended on buses and online grocery shopping back in 2005 in NY.
> I just don't particularly like that little old ladies on fixed incomes are essentially forced to participate in that.
Pension funds are only allowed to invest a tiny percentage of their funds into alternative asset classes like venture. And even then LPs spread their investments out over several funds.
These types of investors are largely intermediaries and their role can be automated away with technology and good financial education in high school / community colleges.
I'm not sure that you are in touch with the average person if you truly believe that. Because I'm just not seeing the same thing.
The people I talk to (which admittedly are people 35+ or kids, just due to where I am in life) couldn't care less about iPhones, social media, or SV. They don't actively hate it either... they just don't care. They have their own lives, which mostly revolve around their own family, friends and work. And tech exists as tools, sometimes toys, but not the focus of our lives. You are right that we aren't out laughing at mistaken funding choices. Because we aren't noticing.
> People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
People love some of the products that silicon valley produces. They definitely don't like the tech industry's staggering myopia, arrogance, and disdain for institutions and ideas that are not tech-centric (even if most people would never phrase it this way).
People hate on Juicero because Juicero's creators obviously had very little respect for their potential customers, but the engineers, designers, and backers of the venture did not seem to care.
> in order to be right funding Facebook
That Facebook is a net good is far from a universally held opinion, and the media is only now catching up to the fact that a significant portion of the population think that most social media platforms are pretty user-hostile.
>People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
Respectfully, this may be a biased perspective. Are you in SV? Because there are many non-media people outside of SV who don't share your enthusiasm.
>I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.
I think some consider it audacious and see a certain cynicism in it, especially given the context.
That is, we're living through an age of tremendous wealth/income disparity (on a relevant side-note, tech has played a not-insignificant role in that disparity). At the same time, we have massive national and global problems (climate change, rising nuclear regimes, terrorism, mass shootings, etc). Yet, all of this SV brainpower and capital is being deployed to make rich people richer off of over-priced trivialities like Juicero. The guys with the lifeboats are playing music for the people on the Titanic and charging them for the privilege.
When you really step back and look at it, it's a little nuts, really.
Too bad you're so bitter. I was in full agreement with your original comment, thought it was unfair you were downvoted in the first place. And you're the truly clueless one if you think you can extrapolate the extent of my cleverness from such a small cross section of interaction with my being.
But I'd love to know how my comment made your point?
Reality is altered by downvotes, at the minimum through the color change on our screens as I pointed out, and in the mental reactions that arise when someone on Hacker News sees that greyed text.
There's also the fact that the downvoting is causing you to lash out the way you are, to protect your fragile sense of ego. Is that not downvoting changing reality? At one moment you were not irritated by being downvoted, and the next moment you were. And don't try to weasel yourself out of this by attempting to be aloof regarding downvoting, you've already missed your chance at that.
P.S. For the sake of your well being I recommend you not to reply to this comment.
P.P.S. Lol @ you editing your comment. Looks like I made my point.
>Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace.
By this logic, Walmart is one of the most beloved companies in the US, right behind the oil companies and the cable companies.
> As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money.
I think people are more upset about what companies don't get funded rather than which VCs lose their money (more accurately, the money of California government retirees). Companies like WhatsApp created staggering amounts of value by enabling affordable messaging around the world. WhatsApp is obviously a success story, but for every Juicero that's 20-100 other companies that could have done great things and never got the chance. However -- the outrage is always easiest to point with 20/20 hindsight.
> Ask people to go to a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft and they’ll call you crazy.
I did used to the live in that world, and wasn't all that bad. There are times when I wish I still did. But better yet would be some reasonable compromise between the two where we had the convenience of smartphones and social media without Facebook, Google, etc and their massive surveillance, annoying advertising, and addictive practices.
> People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
Don't blame the messenger. "The media" is a reflection of the people. Not only is it made up of, largely, ordinary people; it spends billions of dollars each year to find out what ordinary people think, want, and feel. It tracks their lives in ways that companies like Google could only dream of, and is sitting on almost a century of trend data.
Look at any failed enterprise from the former Iraqi government to Richard Nixon to movie stars of today and a hundred years ago. Blaming the media is a pretty good indication that you're on the wrong side of things, and would rather point a finger at a scapegoat than take responsibility for and fix your own failings.
People used to love cars made in Michigan. But we found out that we loved cars from Japan more. You're confusing feelings toward Silicon Valley with feelings toward the products it creates. Silicon Valley is replaceable.
> "The media" is a reflection of the people. Not only is it made up of, largely, ordinary people; it spends billions of dollars each year to find out what ordinary people think, want, and feel.
Looking at the last election as an obvious example, I don’t think media is a good barometer at all for how most people feel.
You're confusing "the media" with a selection of news organizations that exist in their own echo chambers (a discussion for another time). "The media" is a lot broader than cable TV talking heads.
Relevance to this particular topic aside, I'd recommend looking into the corporate structure behind the "media" in the US before making that statement.
If you've spent that long in the media and aren't aware of the massive consolidation that has occurred, then I'm not sure this will interest you but I'll paste it anyway:
I'm not one to complain about downvotes but I am interested in knowing why because, unless this article is mistaken, it's pretty clear that this portrayal of media consolidation by a handful of corporations is accurate.
I think some of the people that do have a problem with SV or tech in general also just have a problem with people they perceive as having lower social status succeeding. It's not anti-intellectualism exactly, but it sort of parallels it in my opinion.
people in SV aren’t “suceeding” - they’re making twice as much money as everyone else in exchange for creating systems of surveillance. I’m not surprised people are salty about it.
> they’re making twice as much money as everyone else
...if that's not your definition of "succeeding", then okay fine, but be aware that this is a major component of most peoples' definitions, so yours will be the unconventional one in the conversation (and therefore you should probably justify it to be persuasive).
> in exchange for creating systems of surveillance
If you're talking about data mining and advertising, that's hardly a neutral way to refer to it. Reasonable people can disagree that these are "systems of surveillance" because they do not consider surveillance inclusive to non-military/intelligence/law enforcement activity.
Furthermore, plenty of people in Silicon Valley and tech in general do not work on advertising products. Not even everyone in companies like Google or Facebook works on advertising products.
Most people are ignorant about the whole surveillance thing, and most of those who do know don't care and don't think anything can be done about it. I'd say they're more angry because the people they thought were losers a couple years ago are making twice as much money of them. If your values system emphasizes social capital, but the economy doesn't value it nearly as much, you're going to be disappointed in yourself when socially awkward people are more successful than you.
It’s old money vs. new money. New money doesn’t respect the culture, rituals, and hierarchy created by the old guard. And because tech is printing money it doesn’t have to.
>People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t.
The problem is Google/YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are behaving like media companies of past century. They wasted no time in doing that. Amazon + Washington Post is perfect example of bridge from one to other.
May be it would take Silicon Valley (creative minds not necessarily located just in few zip-codes in CA) to take down the giants that are Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, or at least make them behave.
Reddit leadership team must be made to stand in front of photo of Aaron Swartz for one minute each day and be reminded of the cause. May be, just may be then the love would return.
Hate to break to you, but non-SV companies are quite fond of insane EULAs too. And drivers were exploited before Uber/Lyft, as taxi companies already classified them as contractors.
In states, maybe. With uber that cancer spread worldwide.
As far as I know, they've used that model (UberPOP) only in few places. In my European country, they just accept companies, which hire their drivers as employees.
Sure, I've written nothing about SV in my post, only about a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft
And only those products/companies have insane EULAs?
As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark.
I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates.
The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
> The criticism of Juicero and Theranos being emblematic of focusing on the wrong problems is not sensible. Companies fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes due to dishonest behavior, etc. If Theranos had the tech they claimed to have, it would have been richly rewarded (outshined only by the consumer surplus it would have created).
The problem with Juciero and Theranos isn't that they failed. The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money, and Theranos was so unabashedly, obviously mustache-twirlingly evil that if it were used to script an evil corporation for TV, I'd have called it unrealistic (and thereby, it wasted tons of money). They're the worst parts of SV (dumb companies offering things nobody wants at outrageous prices, and obvious evil pretending things are OK because they're 'changing the world' or some other nonsense) exaggerated to near-comical extremes.
Silicon Valley's problem is deeper than failing businesses or not enough diversity. It's that the entire enterprise is a bold-faced moneygrab for VCs; ethics, diversity, etc. were never really part of the point, and it's only now that the rest of the world is starting to figure that out. SV's problems are at the core of the reasons for its current existence.
>The problem with them is that Juciero was an immensely dumb idea that was never checked or questioned and thereby wasted tons of money
Like bottled water. The idea of people paying 1600x markup for something they got essentially free while creating massive amounts of waste when sports bottles already existed. When bottled water came out, I remember thinking, "that's a friggin' joke."
Unlike the Juicero, bottled water provides added value in that I can have access to suitable drinking water when I otherwise would be forced to drink tap water.
Before someone replies that tap water is perfectly suitable for drinking: Sure it's safe, but I have never had municipal water that didn't taste bad. Never. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I have a well that provides tasteless water.
There's a difference between ideas that seem dumb and ideas that are dumb. The problem is that Juciero was in the latter category. We didn't have to pour millions of dollars into it to figure that out; do you think the creators of bottled water spent anywhere near that much, or over-engineered their product half as crazily?
Put another way, do you imagine that nobody at Nestle or wherever stood up and said "this is a dumb idea" when bottled water was being devised? And how would you imagine the creators of the idea answered that challenge?
I know people who bought the Juicero so how do you know it didn't have the potential to make money? That is a gamble that is up to investors to decide. A niche product can still be very profitable.
Hindsight. Juicero is so obviously a stupid failure now that we know it is. We can't even imagine a world where it wasn't stupid.
Now try to remember a tech/company you thought was stupid that became a massive success. For me, I remember thinking wifi was stupid -- I was a power user, laptops were grossly underpowered circa 1998. Why would anyone need wireless internet on a desktop?
I keep that story in mind because it keeps me humble about hindsight bias.
It may have been dumb to you but what does that matter? The point of capitalism is that it's not anyone else's business. Things you may buy may be considered dumb to another. It doesn't matter in a free market where everyone decides for themselves and has their own reasons for what they buy. If it wasted money, that is on the people who invested in it.
With regards to Juciero, my point isn't "I think it's dumb so it shouldn't exist." It's "many people agree this is dumb and it shouldn't have had money poured into it given it clearly would not survive." It's that Juciero was a capitalistic failure that was treated like a success because Silicon Valley is out-of-touch and self-obsessed. I wouldn't call myself a capitalist, and I have no love for it as a system, but I get how it works.
With regards to Theranos, my point also stands. It's baldly evil on its face and shouldn't exist. Capitalism and "it's none of your business" are not excuses.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV
The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.
To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.
> then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem
Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.
Growing wealth inequality in the United States in the last twenty years was caused mostly by globalisation, the offshoring of jobs that left huge numbers of people out of work and broke while making the owners and investors multiple times wealthier. Automation has played its role in generating inequality at times in history, but the wave we are currently experiencing is not predominantly due to automation: it is instead due to cheap and plentiful foreign labor.
> Growing wealth inequality in the United States in the last twenty years was caused mostly by globalisation
Which is caused by two major factors: easier shipping, easier communication--both of which the tech sector encourages, facilitates, and pushes forward. And yes, automation is a nontrivial part of wealth inequality's growth, especially over the last ten years rather than twenty--you don't move a secretary's job elsewhere, you destroy it. Capital requires fewer hands than ever before and enables further centralization of that capital--and this is direct fallout of automation making workers superfluous.
So all that cheap foreign labor doesn't count in the equation? There is automation, and there is moving operations overseas where the workforce is ten times cheaper.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
The issue here is that many people feel SV's ideas of basic income will absolutely never work in the long-term. Heck, it will never work in this country period. We can't even socialize healthcare in this country, and those who collect unemployment are looked down upon.
What makes you think basic income will ever become a reality? What makes you think a major political party wouldn't call those people freeloaders and work ceaselessly to remove those benefits if they are put in place? And what makes you think those millions of people being given subsidized, substandard, meaningless lives won't rise up against a system that has basically sucked as much productivity out of them that they could before abandoning them?
There is no a priori reason that society feels comfortable acknowledging, but for anybody without those hangups, the reasons are actually quite obvious.
> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV, and then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem as it proceeds to its logical extreme.
People don't like new people getting money. A story as old as time.
>developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions
Some who make this argument (and I'm not necessarily saying you're in this camp) are essentially saying that "nerd culture" is some oppressive sexist force. That's sort of ironic given that it's basically a subculture formed by social rejects. There are of course aspects of workplace culture which do this, but an appreciation of science fiction and dungeons and dragons really shouldn't be on that list.
It's a bit ironic that SV nerds are dealing with rampant racial/gender issues, while NFL jocks are protesting for racial justice in policing. It's like all those 80's movies flipped the nerd/jock paradigm.
That's how the media is portraying it of course, but I think if you took a step back and took a look at the general behavior of each group I don't think it would really hold up.
But it's not the real nerds who run SV. It's the used car salesmen, itinerant bankers, and other various grifters who are only there because they follow the money from one industry to the next until they've bled it dry. Then they move on.
This is exactly what I mean. That's who people should be upset with. Culture issues stem from management, generally speaking. Some misplace this entirely and basically resent tech workers who have little say in policy anyways just because they have a subculture.
Is it truly ironic? Most 'social reject' subcultures trend towards their own styles of conformity and in/out group determination, which can be as harsh or harsher than that of the mainstream. Should it really come as a surprise that nerd culture has taken the same path? Just consider anti-dress code, 'mandatory' code marathons, etc.
Note that this is only because tech people are scarce in Columbus, OH (or anywhere that isn't SV).
See, SV doesn't have to tolerate weirdness- everyone in tech there is replaceable (there's a surplus of members). Because of human nature, the people there now have to adopt a different ingroup/outgroup structure (which usually has a negative correlation in how interested/competent in tech they are), and what better way to do that than by using the local political leanings?
And, as a quirk of (the local) progressive politics, this also puts SV and the rest of the tech community at odds- SV claims that it's important for tech communities to exclude men/non-minorities to promote the participation of women/minorities, but the vast majority of tech communities see an objective shortage of members and can't afford to discriminate (the fact that they skew male/majority is an afterthought) so they rightfully object to doing that.
Put another way, SV can afford to be illiberal/progressive and discriminate; the rest of us are liberal because being illiberal still has meaningful consequences.
Human behavior being what it is, I don't know why we'd be surprised when people who know the pain of rejection are happy to inflict that pain on others.
This view is ridiculously out of touch with reality. What you're describing is borderline cartoonish levels of evil. You make it sound like white males get together with conferences to discuss new ways of oppressing people.
The theory that explains this phenomenon needs to address how things still go wrong even when nobody has any dislike or prejudice.
> You make it sound like white males get together with conferences to discuss new ways of oppressing people.
Yeah so... about that. Here is an article about someone infiltrating one such conference in Seattle that was literally full of white male mostly techies who were discussing different ways of doing that.
Yeah, yeah... you'll probably point out that this was a only a couple hundred people, and thats very few when you compare it to the total population of seattle. And I'd mostly agree with that argument.
But I just thought it was funny that one such conference just happened.
> racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture
One need not be white or male to be biased against people of color or women. It's probably easier for us to fall into those patterns, and historical patterns of deliberate oppression were undoubtedly a major factor in establishing those biases as dominant cultural patterns, but anyone can do it with a little extra effort to rationalize how they're "one of the good ones".
Even better when we all recognize that it doesn't take a conscious racist or sexist decision. There are all kinds of ways to rationalize "better culture fit".
> And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.
How so? Suppose everyone accepts this... then what? What do we do with this information to change things?
I don't think racist and sexist white men are the problem. They exist, of course, and are a problem but that's not what's driving Silicon Valley's diversity issue. It's (1) the bias people have for entrusting people they understand and feel understand them and (2) the compounding opportunity gap various groups have.
Further, casting the issue this way nearly precludes a solution since it attacks and alienates the people whose help you probably need to change things -- those very white men running so much of SV and so much of everything else.
I guess it feels good to rage against the system, but in doing so you end up perpetuating and strengthening it.
For the rank and file of tech the problem can't be eliminated until more than 20% of the STEM pipeline is comprised of women. This means fighting sexism at the startup level is useless, you better encourage young people to get into science by making it sexy and not for social outcasts. If there is sexism to fight against it is in education with how maths and physics are painted as "for dorks" instead of showing how you do some crazy awesome things.
For the management level you have two problems:
- people tend to prefer people with technical baggage to handle technical teams. So you're back to the pipeline problem
- for the exec level you usually get older people for established companies. So it is a question of time for things to get better: current execs are from 1 or 2 generations past. Once those generations are replaced they'll mechanically have more women, those who are currently in their late 30s and working on their career. You don't have a lot of 20ish men at those positions.
For the startup founders you just need an idea, some seed money and time.
It is not just a pipeline problem at the elementary school level where women aren't being given enough Legos to play with or something.
It is a pipeline problem at the company level as well. As in, women in tech are very often driven out of the industry because of all the BS that they have to put up with.
Fix the sexism problem at the company level and the industry stops losing good workers who were being driven out.
Also something to think about, why would women want to join an industry when they know that they will have to put up with a lot of sexism? That would be a pretty big deterrent from them getting a CS degree in the first place.
If they don't want to join, then what is the problem? Their life, their choice.
Do we see as many article about the lack of women in waste management?
I think that's because seem like easy well-payed jobs. The reality is stupid hours, stupid management and no life. Only people who value money more than their time would choose to stay there.
But hey! A possible solution would be to force women to learn to code then work there for decades. We could start with those who chose to become journalist or some other humanities major. Women are too stupid to choose the right path for them, am I right? /s
No, a better solution would be to fix the rampant problems of sexism in tech so that women aren't driven out of it.
Problem should be fixed. They should be fixed because they are problems that make lots of people unhappy and keep them out of high paying jobs.
Women aren't stupid for choosing to not subject themselves to rampant sexism. That's actually smart. But fixing a huge problem that effects lots and lots of people is objectively a good thing.
Your argument is equivalent to saying "hey, black people don't want to report things to the police, because they are afraid of the police (do to them being shot at a much higher rate), but that's THEIR problem because it is their life and their choice to not have access to the police system whenever a crime accures to them and they choice to not report it".
That argument would be a bad argument, because even though they are "choosing" to not report things to the police (and therefore have to way to not get justice for crimes committed against them), we should still work to fix the problem of them being RATIONALLY afraid of the police (perhaps by trying to convince police to shoot them less).
Look, if you really don't care about a major problem that is effecting lots of people, we could at least look at this from a purely selfish perspective for the company. When women leave an industry the company loses lots of money, because they have lost a high skilled worker.
Therefore it is an objectively good thing for the tech industry to solve this major problem that is causing the industry to lose so many highly skilled workers. Because that cost money.
The reason there are more articles about this than simply bad management is because a hostile work environment for lots of people is a much worse problem that effects people in worse ways.
How do I "know" that it is a worse problem? Well that's because women are being driven out in droves. Obviously it is a worse problem, as evidenced by the sheer number of people for whom it causes to leave their very high paying jobs.
Here is my problem and I think a lot of people's problem.
The only sexism I've seen in tech is benevolent sexism. People interrupting you in meetings? Same thing for men. People who shit on your work? Same thing for most men. Bad jokes? I mean, put an audio recorder in a room full of men and see how it can be.
Most techies I know have been raised to be respectful of women. I'd say even too much.
So when suddenly tech becomes fashionable because there's lot of money there and most outsider media start bashing the field for being full of misogynists I'm starting to get a feeling of cognitive dissonance. A feeling of 1984 becoming reality.
How do men react then? They start getting distant and avoid interacting with women. And now you get articles about the lack of mentoring of women and how men don't interact the same way with women than they do with other men.
It's like the only way would be for men to live, think and interact exactly like women. And soon we'll have the same thing in the workplace as in school: men are defective women.
Maybe women should start their own tech companies and recruit other women if men lead ones are not good enough for them.
Disagree. Fight the problem at every level you encounter it. If startups are begging for more women, universities won’t be able to tolerate students or staff who discourage women from applying and/or finish their degrees.
Because they provide a valuable insight that is currently being systematically ignored, which can allow businesses to meaningful engage with and provide useful services to a currently poorly serviced market segment.
I haven't worked at a single team without at least one woman, why wouldn't people just ask them instead of going out of their way to get more? I mean, if we reduced the amount of sexism then the voices which are already in the field would suddenly be heard and we would no longer have the problem you are describing.
Wow, really? That seems unusual - how are you defining "team"? I use it to describe a group of about 7-10 people and I have definitely seen many of them with no women.
20% are women in the places I have worked so you would expect there to be around 2 on average then. The probability then that a team of 10 has zero women would be around 10% so not that common.
20% is definitely higher than average, and higher than any company I've worked at. And you're assuming a completely random distribution, which is not the case in my experience, for whatever reason.
If a company gets to 50% women in STEM jobs it means 2 other companies of the same size can't have any.
Or you'd have to recruit from other kind of degrees.
But realistically most companies are already begging for women in tech teams. Not being in the US, I've had some jobs where I've been told if they had just one female applicant the job woul be for them if they can type an Hello World program. But when you have 6 women in a class of 80, half of which are students from another country going back there once they have their degree it's hard to imagine a 50/50 team.
I think the biggest wall is not sexism, but the media using some cases to create the illusion of rampant sexism. Exactly like how people think violence is on the rise while stats show it is down due to coverage.
You can't say "white males" on HN without getting slaughtered. I think a fairer way to phrase this is people with power discriminate. Consciously and unconsciously. Doesn't matter if they are white, non white, male, or female. We just happen to live in a society where most positions of power have been historically held by one group.
> You can't say "white males" on HN without getting slaughtered.
I say it pretty often, and I don't get "slaughtered". The commentariat here tends to be kinda gross at times (and, tbh, the proprietors should probably do something about it, but I kinda shrug at that one now) but the votes generally bear out that the crowd, at least, is reasonable.
Claiming racism and sexism will put off anyone in the center who may be convinced that there is a diversity problem. I would prefer the term "subconsciously biased against". It's not so much a concentrated group effort by everyone who hires to keep minorities down, but a subconscious effect caused by the media and constant anti-minority propaganda (only a few decades ago). Even minorities themselves are influenced by this (see: confidence issues).
It's not conducive to growth as a society or as individuals when you attack people who may otherwise be convinced to help you. The ones that are just blatantly racist are fair game (imo), though.
I mostly agree, but the media (and a slew of other industries) are pro-minority, not anti-minority, so if the media are undermining minority confidence, it's not necessarily intuitive. Further, even the implicit bias theory has a lot working against it; chiefly, it is utterly dependant on the principle tool for measuring implicit bias, the IAT, which fails to actually predict bias or even return consistent results (in short, it fails basic psychology tool standards). Implicit or explicit bias may well be the cause of these disparities, but we shouldn't punish skeptics as severely as we have been doing given the dearth of supporting evidence.
I can't see why you would be skeptical about bias given studies (not relying on IAT) showing that -- all else being equal -- people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks? The same goes with subtle class cues and identification. If IAT is broken, it's a broken tool. Not every bias test uses it.
The idea that the media is pro-minority when we still have the media pissing themselves over kneeling in protest is silly. Also when Fox News is still watched by a significant portion of Americans. Also when the media constantly shows minorities in negative situations (yes, it's reporting, and information, but that creates biases as well). I mean it's easier to internalize a minority doing a violent crime as "terrible" than it is a white male embezzling funds or something. In addition, a few decades ago the story was not the same. The people who grew up then have developed a bias due to the media and the people who are raised by the people who grew up then will also internalize some of it. Discrimination is not something solved in a generation.
EDIT: Edited my post a bit because I completely misread your comment.
> Edited my post a bit because I completely misread your comment.
No worries. Sorry if I was hard to understand.
> people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks?
Assuming this is a consistently-reproducible finding (I'm aware of at least one study that finds no disparity), how far can we extrapolate this finding? On this basis alone, can we conclude that pay is lower for employed minorities than otherwise equivalent whites/males, or that workplaces are more hostile? Is it sufficient to change policy? Can we extrapolate this to tech specifically? Should we fire people who openly question our extrapolations?
> Not every bias test uses it.
No, but most do, and it's considered to be the best bias test in social psychology (a very low bar, due to the difficult and complex nature of divining motives). If you throw away the racial-bias research predicated on the IAT and other unreliable tests, what remains is largely anecdote.
> The idea that the media is pro-minority when we still have the media pissing themselves over kneeling in protest is silly.
I don't see why; rightly or wrongly, most of the media is sympathetic to the BLM side of the issue. Media reporting is widely considered (by the left and right) to be socially left-leaning, and it's self-evident that the media goes to great lengths to show minorities in the best-possible light. Of course some outlets are exceptions--like Fox News--but exceptions don't disprove the rule. Even if the media are horrible racists (90% of journalists are Democrats, so we should expect them to favor a pro-minority narrative, but even assuming this isn't the case...), they are compelled by self-interest to at least appear pro-minority (in which case, they are still pro-minority for all relevant purposes).
With sincere respect, if you really think the media is anti-minority, I don't see how you and I can have a reasonable, agreeable, productive conversation about bias in tech, and maybe we should just let this thread die.
EDIT: Some edits made to improve clarity/organization.
> I can't see why you would be skeptical about bias given studies (not relying on IAT) showing that -- all else being equal -- people with minority names on their resume get significantly less callbacks
Studies like that generally tend not to replicate, including at least one specifically about race and names on resumes.
That’s not a priori, that’s given X, this follows. Had the dominant race been, say, Chinese, had the dominant sex been women, there is no reason to think the sexist and racist people would be behaving any differently than they are now.
We still need to stop the racists and sexists. My personal short-term benefit from being in the “right” group comes at the hidden cost of 96.75%* of the world not being treated fairly or given tools that genuinely help them.
* 6.25% of humans are “white”, according to wikipedia
As a non-american and as a person who has never been to SV but love the idea that is described in the article that anyone can start up a company I would like to adress the points in the article.
1. Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people.
Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from.
2. Your rainforest of innovation has turned into a factory farm.
Totally agree, this is why startups should bootstrap and perhaps not start up in Sillicon Valley. Perhaps it is better to start up somewhere cheaper.
I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it.
I have been wanting to start a company for years but haven't just yet because of the economic game. I am still planning to do it, hopefully pretty soon but I want to save up enough so I can run my company for at least 1-2 years without any other income.
In my country Sweden, unfortunately, smaller companies get taxated pretty hard which makes any earning disappear. You will need a pretty good stream of incoming cash to be able to survive. Since I do want to create a product and not simply be a consultant this is much harder to achieve.
"Well, if anyone can start a company the door isn't shut. I don't buy that white men only invests in white men. I think people invest in companies (for the most part) where investors think they will gain the most money from."
Numbers don't lie. And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs, but after adding a male founder, suddenly were asked to come in for meetings.
"I think countries of the world should make it easier and less expensive to start a company. That is the best recipee for success in my view. If it is less of a risk to create a company, more people will do it."
Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.
> And there are countless examples of times where women-led startups couldn't even get meetings with VCs
Lol, please provide countless examples. I dare you to find even one. My guess is that if you find even one, you will find 10 reverse where women get meetings because of their gender.
> Most of the costs are not something that countries can help with. You're still going to need funds for equipment, salaries, and such.
What I meant was that new, small companies should not be taxated as much as companies that is established.
The article is shallow and it would be easy to rip apart most of its arguments (eg. [1][2]). But the worrying trend is that such articles are now appearing very regularly, and at some point perception becomes reality. At this pace, SV will be the Wall Street in no time, if it is not already.
[1] > You’re churning out companies that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and going bankrupt in literal satires of themselves
Yes, and that is an aspect of capitalism. You take risk on crazy ideas. Some of them will be a fancy juicer, but some of them will also be an electric car.
[2] > Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice) versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve
Google wants to deploy Loon in Puerto Rico to offer connectivity. Tesla offered to rebuild Puerto Rico electrical grid based on Solar energy. If these are not real world problems affecting everything, I don't know what the author has in mind.
Google is not "deploying Loon" and Tesla is not "rebuilding the grid" out of the kindness of their heart, the problem is everyone already sees phase two coming and doesn't like it. It's not a media problem, it's pattern recognition.
Just to add on to your point, notice the writer is on the Board of a VC firm that does business inside and outside SV. I see huge potential for him trying to deface SV for the sake of his other projects.
Yeah I think little has changed in SV in the last year compared to the near 180 in public opinion. My theory is that journalists and readers who used to hate trump as a hobby are bored with the lack of scandal and have turned to SV, the only other interesting new thing in the us.
1. The startup scene's smarmy feel-good rhetoric and forced friendliness. The cutesy aesthetics, the wacky company names, and most gratingly the lofty mission statements that cover up at best business as usual and at worst actual corporate malfeasance. How did we get to here? When did "making the world a better place" become the mantra of Silicon Valley, and why did this laughable cliche get created? Was SV truly idealistic at one point, or has it been trying to cover up its true mission all along by pretending to be better than Wall Street or Hollywood, those other synonyms for wealth generation and inequality?
2. Silicon Valley can't even make the Bay Area a better place, never mind America, or the world. The extreme inequality in San Francisco and its environs is largely due to local government and broken politics, it is true. But SV companies should spend more of their lobbying efforts not in D.C. clamoring for special statuses, but in local legislatures securing better housing and infrastructure. Both their employees and the local populations will benefit, and like them more for it. Instead, what's the most high profile example of an SV executive interacting with local leaders? Steve Jobs presenting the new Apple headquarters plan to the Cupertino City Council in 2011. How's the traffic on Stevens Creek these days?
“Making the world a better place” is simply the cheapest marketing gag you can get. And in a way, they did make the world a better place—it's just for a select group of founders and investors only.
The overlords of Silicon Valley need to do a bit more to turn America's best minds towards solving serious social problems.
Personal anecdote: Right now, I am building software that automates the process of filing super-simple Chapter 7 bankruptcies. We give the product away for free.[1] Technologically, this is a really straightforward problem and solution: You just collect some documents and fill out a long questionnaire, fill out a PDF, show up to a couple of meetings, then you've discharged a bunch of unsecured debt and have a fresh start in life and the economy.
There should literally be millions of these Chapter 7 bankruptcies filed every year[2]... but nobody has built the software before! Despite its enormous potential impact and amazingly low cost (we have two full-time employees, though we could use more), nobody has really tackled the problem because there's no way to simultaneously get rich while building the most successful product.[3]
There is a crazy amount of low-hanging fruit out there like this. Much of it could be plucked by small, bright teams of the sort Silicon Valley has in abundance. The most powerful people just need to dedicate a little more money and 5-20% of their time to it - not just money, but serious, ongoing advice. [4]
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[1] https://Upsolve.org. The product is free and we're a non-profit because you trigger an avalanche of regulatory activity if you try to make money doing this. We've also been able to garner an incredible amount of institutional (judicial) buy-in because we are a non-profit.
[3] Our #1 success metric is simply "number of Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharges received".
[4] Real advice - not sending it down the black hole of billionaire philanthropy. Without even getting into the subject of how those institutions grind their founders' personal axes, there is a huge qualitative difference between their advice and Silicon Valley-level "Let's build a huge thing on a lean budget" advice.
A tangential curiosity, perhaps you can give some insight on a very naive question I've had regarding nonprofits:
You mention re: avalanch of regulatory activity if you try to make money; where does the line get drawn between providing competitive salaries and "making money"? I've always been somewhat curious of the band Non Profits have to operate in to maintain that status vs. what pragmatic benefits it gives. (I realize this is a very broad question, so any "sparknotes" breadcrumb you have would also be welcome)
The avalanche I'm referring to there has to do with whether the company itself is for-profit or non-profit, and the legal, institutional, and PR ramifications thereof.
The non-profit competitive salary question is one which people endlessly debate. Some people think it is ridiculous that the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center makes a $300k salary despite SPLC's tremendous success and the fact that he could clearly command much more in the private sector.
Thanks for the response, To be more precise to the second part of my question: I was more wondering how the 300k would be decided; e.g. why not 400k or 200k? (Personally that seems like a very acceptable salary, but if non-executives are scaled down to something commensurate as opposed to squeezing the distribution, that becomes harder to sell.)
And how would SV (outwith funding a civil war) solve the problems cased by an devolved and outdated political system that is more appropriate for serving the needs of 18th century rich landowners?
Here's another view of the problem: the "average Joe" American is starting to hate all the centralized and monolithic institutions in the country, because he sees them as being corrupt, privileged, and primarily concerned with cementing their own power. It used to be that SV was a rebel and outsider going against Washington and Wall Street, but increasingly SV is just another pillar of the power structure.
I think it'd be an interesting startup idea to decentralized all the monolithic services. Create an Uber for City X(ie Uber for London, Uber for Chicago, etc.). Allow the municipalities to run those services. And do the same for Airbnb, Yelp, Google, Facebook etc.
I love this idea. I use to work for a "The WordPress of $INDUSTRY" startup and letting people rum their own thing and self brand was very fulfilling work. I think it's important to protect specific categories of small businesses (or simply markets that shouldn't need to be overly centralized) from the growth of underhanded heavy hitting centralized monopolies. I call it AmaZoning when a large player comes in and says "I'm the new middle man".
I've always thought cities should do this with regard to bottled water. It's one of those things you feel guilty spending money on but the convenience now and then is just worth it.
But if it was local, I wouldn't feel as bad about environmental impact and the profits would hopefully go towards something useful like filling potholes or education.
I'm ambivalent when it comes to bottle water but I certainly don't like giving Nestle my money.
Of course. That's basic systems theory. And one reason why checks and balances are not just romantic crap but really necessary. The deregulation hype is the real romantic crap.
To you, in the words of one Silicon Valley investor, this seems like “the only logical conclusion.”
To the average person, this seems like the height of arrogance. People are uncomfortable with
universal basic income because you’re essentially saying their labor isn’t worth anything — but you don’t see it!
I think this point is really missing from most UBI conversations that happen on HN. UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
I think a lot of start ups have thrived trying to solve the problem of high density cities. Airbnb and Uber are start ups that get created when your biggest problems are high rent and poor public transit. I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide.
> UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
No, it's not.
UBI is the answer when you recognize that capitalism directs the gains from productivity (whether made in the US coasts or anywhere else) to a narrow class of megacapitalists, that it's gotten more efficient at that over time, and that the welfare state of the modern mixed economy is an overly complicated, inefficient corrective measure for that that leaves lots of gaps for people to fall through and responds slowly to changes in the details of the mechanisms of capitalist wealth capture. UBI is the simple, low-overhead, responsive implementation of a mixed economy, which gets out of the way—compared to classic welfare state programs—of realizing the value of labor, especially including labor marked as worthless and prohibited from sale by minimum wage laws.
> "I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs."
In my opinion these aren't technical problems to be solved by a team of engineers in their SF Bay offices. They are political problems that need legislative solutions. To think that we can outsource political problems to the realm of tech is misguided and won't solve our long-standing public policy issues.
I don't see UBI as saying that someone's labour isn't worth anything, it just allows them the freedom to keep experimenting in order to find out what it is worth when applied to different jobs.
UBI is the answer when you believe that all economic productivity must come from the US coasts.
This is a failure of a common way presenting the UBI as "you should be able to have a comfortable life without working", which is both economically infeasible and not actually desirable. A UBI, at least in the form that I support, isn't something that you should be happy to live off of indefinitely, it's just better protection against homelessness and hunger than our current convoluted welfare systems. The expectation should still be that you'll find something productive to do, and a UBI incentivizes that because it avoids the welfare trap of losing a dollar in benefits for every dollar you earn.
>I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs. I think the fact that are very few companies like this is indicative of our increasing cultural divide
You'll have an uphill battle because "environment". Nobody wants to invest in making commuting more bearable or making areas with non-city population densities more environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to hitch their wagon into whatever the latest scheme to cram people into carbon neutral shipping containers.
> "As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.""
I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".
"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’.”" (https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corn...)
The problem with Bodega is not the name. It's that it doesn't carry much of an inventory. It's just another box accessed with an app for in-plant vending. Byte Foods does that.[1] TechShop SF has one of those, as do many hospitals. The vending industry term is "micro-market".
Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations.
The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley.
The description of the symptoms here has a lot of resonance for me.
I was just talking with the CEO I worked for in 2001; she's busy putting together her next startup. We had a good conversation about what I was calling "unicorn fever", the way the desire for instant massive valuation has distorted so much of what we thought good about the startup ecosystem. The article calling this factory farming seems spot on to me.
It's not the problem of Silicon Valley it's the problem of investors throwing money at anything that is located in SV. You can still make some good money in SV you just have to invest in a startup with real future not just a good pitch. I don't think there will be big D-day when all unicorns will fail. We will see more and more stupid startups to fail (Juicero, Soccer Genomics etc.) and lower willingnes to invest into dumb startups but those that have the future like Dropbox, Github, WeWork etc.
What this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who actually expect a return on the investment compete.
It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashioned way: taking a small seed, creating a product that people want, selling it and expanding based on that revenue... we ooh and ahh, calling it "organic growth". Everywhere else, it's just called "building a business".
Pair that with the "thought leaders" who dismiss businesses that allow people to build a life for themselves and their families. Because Silicon Valley isn't really about making things anymore, it's about making financial bets. And that's a shame - watching billionaires blow money on reinventing the vending machine isn't much fun.
Uber/lyft are also slaying yellow/black cabs because the cabs chose to just milk their monopoly for maximum profit for 30 years rather than invest in any technology or make any improvements to rider experience or comfort. It's not just the subsidies. It's the fact that calling random 800 numbers trying to get a cab is really frustrating, especially when they do not show up 20% of the time.
For Amazon... are their margins really that much smaller than Walmart, Target, Costco or anything other big box discount retailer? Many products at Amazon can be found cheaper in a store. It's just really damn convenient to order it on Amazon and have it shipped the next day.
Amazon's stated goal is to have no margins (Bezos 'your margin is my opportunity'). So yes if they are following their zero margin strategy they should be lower than WMT, whose only claim is low price. If something is cheaper elsewhere it is because Amazon has not figured out how to deliver that particular item to the consumer at cost yet. So for example if you find something cheaper at WMT it may be that WMT has a great distributor license and is an exclusive channel, something like that.
>but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital
This is not true for many cities. Most of the subsidizing only happens in new markets to get people interested. Uber/Lyft are still better than cabs when unsubsidized.
The subsidizing happens to find drivers and passengers. When Uber came to my city, it was months before I paid for a ride, and drivers told us all about how they were getting cash bonuses for working high traffic times.
No matter how optimistic you are about the product, Uber isn't worth a fraction of its valuation without the constant expansion, and the constant expansion is impossible without very inexpensive money that is VC.
Some taxi companies buy new cars, which adds overhead, but largely I think the Uber/Lyft driver model doesn't work for a full-time wage. It's great supplemental income for some.
From hearing many interviews with Uber drivers, I've gathered that most are happy about the opportunity and possibilities in the beginning but then realize within a year that it's a meager living (less than minimum wage). They also notice that their profit margins can easily be eaten away by Uber's rev share changes or when Uber tests the price elasticity of a market. Anecdotally, Uber drivers don't last more than about 2 years.
My father is a sole proprietor limo driver who has occasionally tried driving for Uber.
The small midwestern town from which I hail is rotting. The residents could never afford the luxuries flowing here in the valley. They are angry. They are huge Trump supporters. They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes. They are stuck.
>They don't want handouts. They want jobs. They want to contribute. They don't want to leave their homes.
Well, they can't have everything. A big part of why America has historically had social and economic mobility is because it also had literal mobility; people willing to go where the work is.
What I hear when I read this is, "they want someone to come along and hand them a stable well-paying job." And who doesn't? But we live in the real world.
I think this is the main reason the Democrats got swept, and will probably continue to get swept. They aren't offering what most people want, honest pay for honest work. They are offering welfare, which most people are to proud to take, let alone want.
This isn't just a problem in the Midwest, this is a problem for almost anywhere that isn't a large city on the coast (with some exceptions). This problem affects probably 90% of our land mass and the problem has been consistently growing for the past 45 years or so.
Neither political party knows how to solve this, or if they do, don't have the political will to solve it.
That's not true at all. Clinton had plans with job retraining for coal miners. They were offering jobs. They got swept because Trump came in and said, "We'll keep coal mining," despite having no actual plan for what to do.
Yes, but coal miners are such a small subset of middle America. I'm talking about all the blood letting between VA and CA. And (I'm not being snarky) but what would you retrain them to do? Unless those cities grow an economy, they will just be retrained, still unemployed people.
Unless you have a massive migration to large cities, it's not going to do much good.
I mean think about that for a few steps. You have millions of people in small towns all over America in ghost towns. Training will help, but until these towns start growing businesses, then what? I mean read about the Walmatization of America. Read about all the factories moving to Mexico after NAFTA. It's all dead.
The Democrats used to serve the middle class, but they stopped after Carter got demolished by Reagan. Bill Clinton pushed that retrain idea, but the blood kept flowing. Why would it be any different now?
Like it or not the default vote for most of middle America is GOP. The Dems have to actually come up with something that works to get these smaller cities and towns vibrant again if they want the votes. I don't think the establishment Dems understand America outside the coastal areas.
The latest plan from Schumer is the same. Would probably do a lot of good for the working poor in cities, but won't do much for middle America. Same ole same ole. Like I said, it's a problem neither party knows how to solve, or doesn't have the political will to solve it.
The problem for democrats isn't their ideas or a lack of talking about jobs and economic growth, the problem is that voters instinctively sense that both parties are fungible in terms of economic outcomes regardless of what they say, so they stop critically thinking about a candidate's policy proposals and become easily swayed by bluster and demagoguery; this is a losing position for democrats because republicans are much better at these tactics and the result is the continued decline of the democratic party.
> The Democrats used to serve the middle class, but they stopped after Carter got demolished by Reagan.
No, the Democrats now serve the middle and upper class, they used to serve the working class.
And the pro-labor faction of the a party was dominant until Bill Clinton (and arguably until 1994; there's a reason why Clinton had to rely on mainly Republican votes to pass NAFTA.)
> Like it or not the default vote for most of middle America is GOP
If your default vote is for your own destruction, you will be destroyed, and then to your vote, default or otherwise, will be irrelevant. The GOP has nothing to offer Middle America but a series of people (blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, ...) to vent their anger at as a distraction while the GOP’s financiers destroy Middle America.
> The Dems have to actually come up with something that works to get these smaller cities and towns vibrant again if they want the votes.
The people can be saved; their small towns and cities, in many cases, cannot. Some might survive as shadows of themselves and living museums (see Columbia, CA, as an example from the Gold Rush), but once the economic basis for a town is gone, finding a new one is unlikely, and doing it for more than a small share of a large number is just not going to happen.
> I don't think the establishment Dems understand America outside the coastal areas.
The neoliberal establishment has been losing ground in the Democratic party for decades; and what they don't connect with has more to do with class than geography.
Then have the migrate to the cities. Seriously, the US was founded by people moving over the Atlantic in search of better opportunities and the west was converted the same way.
Yes the vast majority of the non-urban population is going to become urban for economic reasons. That’s been going on since the dawn of civilization (it's literally where the name “civilization” comes from), and it's not going to reversed any time soon.
So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large cities? Will the government pay for the move, or no? What about the skyrocketing rents in the large cities with the large influx? What about their homes and land they own now? Write it off? What exactly would you train them to do?
That's got a lot of red flags in the details. Ignoring that, it doesn't sound anywhere near ideal solution. I would expect something better. I think getting the federal government into building things again instead of contracting it out would be a start, similar to FDR's works programs. I'm sure it will get a lot of resistance, but the same way we've been doing things isn't working.
> So the solution is train 50 million people and tell them to move to large cities?
No, that's not a solution or what they need to be told to do, the move is just what is largely going to happen over time.
Insofar as there as a policy solution, it's supporting the effected population through the transition, which, certainly includes funding retraining those who can benefit from that, assisting relocation, and assisting those who can't benefit from retraining.
(While it's politically unlikely in the near term, UBI could address much of that with less friction and overhead than targeted programs.)
> I would expect something better. I think getting the federal government into building things again instead of contracting it out would be a start, similar to FDR's works programs.
Whether it's government jobs or contractor jobs makes no difference; FDRs works programs weren't significant because of that but instead because of the scale of the work. But those were to deal with a major business cycle downturn, not an effort to hold back the long-term rural→urban transition.
Unless your works program is a permanent one building monuments to waste in rural areas, it’s beside the point of the problem you are trying to address
Many of them are on some sort of government assistance with part time or low paying jobs. Also it would be 10 million over 5 cities. That has big problems in and of itself.
>Also there is no rule that big problems can't have simple solutions.
No, but if the solution was simple, it would have been solved already.
As a son and grandson of coal miners. That is just politician speak. My father and grandfather can't be retrained to do something else and make the same amount.
So you don't want a handout and you don't want re-training, then what do you want? For someone to wave a magic wand and make coal economically viable again?
They want honest wage for honest work. Pretty straight forward. The government sure subsidizes industry in California, New England and coastal cities, why not middle America?
As someone who enjoys breathing clean air, they can't continue to mine coal. They just cannot. And I'm sorry they feel that way about their wages, but they have to continue to adapt.
Coal is dead due to the economies of natural gas. Besides, China uses coal like crazy, and we pay China to do so, so as far as the atmosphere goes, the US not using coal doesn't really matter that much.
They say they are working to reduce consumption, but at the same time, they are building more coal fired plants, which is projected to increase through at least 2020. They are also building plants in other countries.
According to Bloomberg, China’s coal-fired generation capacity may increase by as much as 19 percent over the next five years. While the country has canceled some coal-fired capacity due to lack of demand growth, China still plans to increase its coal-fired power plants to almost 1,100 gigawatts, which is three times the coal-fired capacity of the United States.
While it is true that China is building wind and solar units domestically, many of these units are being curtailed due to lack of infrastructure and a preference for coal.
Edit: The Chinese government indicates they are though, which coincides with your 2013 statistic.
This is remarkably tone-deaf. I also originally hailed from a small Midwestern town. The lack of available work is not a pretty sight, and suggesting that people should just uproot themselves and move somewhere else is not a solution for a number of reasons (family/friends, lack of money to move in the first place, etc). It's no small wonder that people voted for Trump - even though his promises were pretty obviously full of hot air, the opposition was (and still does) not even attempt to mask their total contempt for 'flyover country'.
It's not tone deaf. It's tone deaf to not recognize that what these people want is a handout of it's own sort. They want to do the same stuff that they've been doing for the last 50 years. And it sucks for them, but that's just not feasible anymore. Jobs retraining programs have been available, but that's not what they want. They want the economy of the 50s, where they were able to do the same factory job for 30 years.
I don't disagree that the old timers want the old economy, but if they've been working that system their entire lives that's not exactly surprising. The younger folks, on the other hand, most of them just want something that provides a livable wage. I don't know how to fix that problem, but it's a problem, and every time I hear "lol move to the coasts there's jobs" it just tells me that whoever is saying that has some combination of lack of understanding that not all people are okay with abandoning their family (e.g. older relatives that may rely on them or they otherwise want to spend time with), that they can't afford that move in the first place, or otherwise have any true interest in even considering the problem at more than a superficial level.
Its also similar to "farmer palmer" attitude in Viz "get of moi land" and you don't get that stereotype (farmers living of the CAP subsidies) without some truth.
Flyover country has nothing but contempt for coastal liberal elites. To the point where they make up bullshit about how much contempt we have for them and whine about being "flyover country".
Tone-deaf or not, you have to go where the work is. You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code. Maybe that means uprooting your family and finding new friends. You have to make it work. To not find work is to not survive.
>You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code.
I'm sure you can't honestly believe this will work for the vast majority of people in the US. Either you don't value your trade, or you are simply unwilling to seriously discuss the issue.
There was large amounts of net migration in the late 19th century - early 20th century from rural areas (where work increasingly wasn't due to agriculture automation) to urban areas. [1]
As farms automated, it was often "flyover territories" that took the lead in creating the then-new high school movement. [2]
Heck, for technologies that were increasingly becoming indispensable to life, there was even strong government efforts to make sure access was available for that. (EG in 1936: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act)
So, "pick up a laptop and learn to code" is an acceptable answer to me. Of course, actually, there are a lot of other careers besides coding. The issue is that increasingly, former career paths like resource extraction and manufacturing are either getting automated away, or are getting shoved out by globalization. This leaves the service industry (including the knowledge economy). Your "standard" service job doesn't pay very good these days, and the current "career path" in America to obtain a good knowledge economy job is through a college degree (I know, not the best "signal" in many ways, but for now it is the signal) and rural participation rate is very low [3].
One frustration with the current political scene, which is so dominated by culture war anger, is that these concepts don't even really get aired. How to improve rural higher education, how to aid career transitions from manufacturing, how to improved wage standards for service workers (which are increasingly replacing manufacturing jobs), or even something like rural Internet initiatives? Seems far more interesting to discuss than what often passes for "political news" these days.
Yes, but the population was a lot smaller. Also they had jobs to go to. Even in coastal states, good entry level jobs are hard to come by, even with a college education.
Think about getting everyone outside of a coastal state to move to a coastal state. What would that do to existing jobs in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the non-coastal states? Think those people would be able to sell their old houses?
I mean "train and move," isn't really a solution. It makes a good sound bite, but once you think about the details, it kinda falls down when you are talking what? 50 million people?
We don't need more people churning out more webshit. Some of us actually give a shit about wanting to better our local communities instead of running off to SV or NYC to build Tinder for Dogs.
You don't have to run there. If you wanted to better your local community, you'd be working to better opportunities there, instead of decrying the idea that the economy is changing.
Valuable comment - because both sides of the spectrum miss something in there. It cost the democrats the election not to understand that these people wanted jobs, not welfare, and the reason they won't get jobs is that they won't go where the jobs are.
Well they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps like good little republicans.
On my team of 8 people 1 grew up anywhere near the Seattle area. Half the team moved to the US from other countries. Maybe these people should move. It sucks, but life isn't fair and sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you actually need.
The big problem is that they do want handouts; just of a different kind. Jobs retraining programs have been around for quite a while; they were central to Clinton's plan for what to do with people who used to work in coal mines. But they don't want to stop mining coal, no matter how shitty it is for everyone involved (the miners themselves, the environment, those who live near coal plants, etc). They want to keep the coal mining jobs. They want... a handout.
The grammar is ambiguous. "half the world" == "the poorest 50% of the population". "half the world's wealth" == "the wealth of the poorest 50% of the population"
After living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same and the community is much better.
The PHX community is "much better" in my opinion because the people I meet at various Dev groups aren't doing it because they want to be "software-developer famous"...if you know what I mean. When I was in SV I went to tons of meetups where it seemed like the devs were just trying to create something to get themselves "likes/favs/PRs/followers/etc" on HN/GitHub/Twitter. It was a weird kind of in-group celebrity that I detest.
Here in PHX, I don't really see any of that. I went to a Linux Users Meetup and it was pretty chill, nobody was pushing their GitHub repo/blog/Twitter on the audience, it was just a laid back discussion on the latest happenings, but not the software-developer-gossip nonsense. When I go to a .NET developer group meetup, we discuss .NET Core and Azure...just the facts. We don't discuss the latest thing Scott Hanselman said on Twitter, or what so-and-so said about the latest <insert topic>. The discussion tend to be about the tech, how to use it, and what the new features allow us to do, that's it.
Some of us don't want to be famous for our GitHub, we want to work with nice teammates on cool engineering problems that matter. I found my current employment (working on electrical grid software for a major SW utility company) to fit perfectly with my interests and background.
No problem, glad I could provide some insight. Also...
The whole "diversity-in-tech" is less of an issue here (from my anecdotal experience). My current team is 70/30 men/women and while we'll occasionally talk about the larger tech community, rarely does it devolve into talks about diversity/gender representation/social issues. My team cares about technology, solving problems related to the electric grid, and maintaining our systems so the operators can ensure power is restored quickly and promptly to our customers.
Its a pretty good gig in that respect. My lead is a Mexican-American female that if you asked her about it, she'd say she is an professional Electrical Engineer first and foremost. I like that kind of environment, as opposed to when I worked for Google and it was a constant barrage of "women/diversity candidate/veteran in tech." My wife is a software engineer as well and she likes the fact that her current company doesn't treat her as the token female developer, something that she experience all too much in SV.
I was interested if the parent moved and maintained his (adjusted) total comp and was happy with his decision, or was happy despite a loss in total comp. Obviously there are good companies and bad companies everywhere. :)
I had a loss in total comp, however, my wife and I are not your typical consumerist-minded people, we like to save and invest. "Make half a million, but live like we make 100k" has kind of been our motto. The move to PHX was a drop in total comp, a net increase in the amount we could save/invest given the COL, and a much larger increase in total happiness.
That's actually fair and I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the whole Juicero debacle, someone uttered the phrase "Keurig for Juice" or something along those lines. The thing with Keurigs and the like is that there's actually a market for making single cups of hot coffee. I don't personally own or want one but it's a compromise that a lot of people are willing to make both at home and the workplace in exchange for convenience. (Really Keurig is effectively positioned as a better instant coffee.)
But there were very real differences between Keurig and Juicero that make one costly/wasteful/but fills a niche and the other just stupid.
Ha, that's one of the reasons that my answer is always the same whenever someone asks what I think of their idea: "Whatever I think of the merits of your idea are almost completely irrelevant. I've seen horrible ideas succeed, and I've seen great ideas fail for irrelevant reasons. What I can offer, however, is a list of challenges I think you'll have."
I stopped reading when the author suggests that people are falling out of love with silicon valley because most companies hire mostly white males. What a terrible racist/sexist thing to say.
The fundamental problem with this article is it presupposes that America used to love Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley loves Silicon Valley, and investors kinda-sorta love Silicon Valley, and the rest of us like Apple and begrudgingly use Facebook, because, well, what else is there?
It'd be nice if Silicon Valley did something other than make software to keep our noses in our phones.
You haven’t produced a new firm that has cracked the world’s top 200 since Facebook’s founding in 2003.
That's a significant point.
Of the 15 companies that entered the Fortune 500 this year, only one, Lam Research, is in Silicon Valley. And they're in Fremont. (PayPal made the list, but as a spinoff of eBay.)[1]
Silicon Valley will eventually be seen as yet another textbook case of a new industry getting away with externalization of costs initially unrecognized as such.
Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess, but don’t expect to escape liability for the foreseeable consequences of the systems you build for all perpetuity.
Great article, but I'm surprised it didn't mention the left-leaning politics. There is the alleged censorship by Twitter and Facebook of conservative views; the firing of the Google diversity memo guy; and even House of Cards raising the nefarious search engine manipulation meme. Silicon Valley is starting to get the "liberal Hollywood" treatment by the conservative media.
> Your companies are now solving “my-world problems” (food delivery, cold-pressed, on-demand juice versus the “real-world problems” you used to solve (getting affordable computers in the hands of everyone; inventing the Internet).
You can understand where these hapless doofuses are coming from, though: whatever you come up with has to have paying customers, and be something someone won't steal two weeks after release. In other words, some plausible return on investment.
Inventing the internet was fun hacking paid by cushy government grants. You're not easily gonna get that today, or not for just any old idea that pops into your head.
Affordable computers in the hands of everyone means optimizing existing commodity stuff down to razor-thin margins (if not indeed taking a loss) plus all the logistics of actually reaching everyone.
Dare we say… 'handouts'? Gee, seems like that might not be such a bad thing after all.
Want flyover America to grow economies and produce stuff to perk up SV's ears? Pay it to do so.
People treat economics as if it's a merit-evaluating system capable of managing the ground its actors grow from, and it's absolutely not. Money is better considered as a vote, or like water in the environment. You can't have it function both in its fundamental property of facilitating commerce, and as a score indicator. I think something akin to 'likes' ought to replace money as the score indicator, and money ought to be entirely allocated to population-wide commerce.
That means entirely abandoning the connotations of 'value' it has, reimagining it as 'abstracted power', and leaning much harder on the capacity of populations to innovate. It is stark madness to assume that the capacity to accumulate abstracted power (money) signifies ANYTHING other than itself, plus the ability of that power to convert back into actions (easily mistaken for merit or virtue!)
Anyone who's seriously dug into the genetic algorithm ought to be able to see the merits of doling out 'power' (money, ability to act in an economic system) across a massive population of organisms who're on the whole still individually more intelligent than AI could hope to be.
Starving populations of humans to death for the crime of not being as economically powerful as Silicon Valley is not only immoral, it's a grotesque and foolish waste of intelligence and innovation resources. Elon Musk is a clever and interesting fellow, but he's WAY less intelligent/innovative than a supported POPULATION of humans. You only think he's that much more clever, because his resources are almost unmeasurable compared to the fellow (times 10,000) in Boise Idaho with just a garage, who've got almost no resources at all.
Genetic Algorithm says to focus solely on giving more resources to Elon is producing a local maximum and screwing yourself in the long run. We can't afford to make that mistake.
Except I do see at least investors like YC making an effort to broaden the kinds of investments they make, more into actual "public good" type companies like in the education, health, and non-profit sectors.
I'm praying for a day when SV has been replaced by largely remote and decentralized teams. Spreading the wealth and opportunity beyond the privilege bubble and exposing the industry to a more representative distribution of political preferences.
It may just be a dream, but I do feel hope as SV has been getting backlash for it's identity politics and new blockchain tech is looking to be a way to enable decentralized remote organizations.
this article is so nonsensical, it's almost comical, I don't even know where to start. Ok, how about calling it a problem that 19 out of 20 investments will fail. Willing to invest like that is a great thing about SV, not a bad thing!
19 of 20 investments fail because VCs equate success with > 1B$ valuation. Among the failed companies there are plenty that produce great and useful products but need to shut down because the VC deals forced them to grow to unsustainable size.
ok, but those 19 investments didn't have to take VC money. if they produced great and useful products, then why couldn't they grow organically, borrow from a bank, etc.? I mean it's just complete nonsense to complain about the fact that you failed using someone else's money.
They could grow organically and there are plenty of companies that do, but this is not the Silicon Valley way, and this is what the article is complaining about.
well, to be honest, I don't get that criticism. Why does it need to be the silicon valley way? you want to build a 10 million dollar business? you can do that in Boise, Idaho without VC funding. I mean the article is just clickbait.
If Michael Jordan calls himself elite, is he an elitist? If a quite successful Valley engineer calls himself elite, am I an elitist? These are different words. Populists will call SV elitist. That doesn't make them right.
He did. He may have never used that word but he was the biggest trash talker. At the Olympic workouts there was an All Star's All Star game and afterward he told Magic Johnson there was new sheriff in town.
Elitism is a self-protecting cabal. SV doesn't really do that. That's the point of disruptive technology. You're disrupting an existing order. That's anti-elitist.
“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.”
So, for one, he said that in private, you called yourself elite on a public form. Two, that's MJ, are you saying you're the MJ of SV software engineers? (please do, that would be hysterical).
I don't understand the point of this observation; are you saying they aren't allowed to criticize? Or that they are guilty of the same things? Or that they're somehow complicit? What are you getting at?
We become desensitized to certain forms of stimuli over time. Someone with horrendous body odor may not even notice it at first, but once he can actually smell it the stench is making his neighbors gag.
In other words, it's bad enough that TechCrunch has noticed.
"So, what can you do about it?"
As much as I love the Sillicon Valley, disproportional concentration of venture capital and brain drain to a geographical location is not the healthiest thing in the world. I am a big proponent of democratization of early-stage investment for years. Now it started to happen in the cryptocurrency world. It is wild west now, but who knows how it turns out?
Free thought isn't allowed-- Silicon Valley enforces thought control like Weinstein did over Hollywood.
Sooner or later (looks like sooner) everyone realizes Silicon Valley is 90% white and Asian male. All the politically-correct talk is lipservice alone. (That's probably why the self-virtue-signaling went into overdrive in the first place.)
It's not just the word Bodega, it's the insult to injury added to the death of the American dream. Bodega's were ways that people could people of a community could pool their resources together and make a living for themselves while serving their community. Now some ambitious VC-backed firm not only wants to decimate that road to the American dream, but they also have to steal the name too? That's like killing your neighbor and wearing his skin while fucking his wife.
> That's like killing your neighbor and wearing his skin while fucking his wife.
Somewhat over the top, no?
A bodega is not a religious shrine, it's just a business like any other. I agree that the naming is tacky (it's like "Walmart" rebranding as "Mom & Pop's"), but that's about the extent of it. Certainly, they are not guilty of "decimating the American dream" by starting a business.
I'm not saying they've done it or are going to do it, just that they clearly want to. And I don't see the Walmart comparison as comparable because this issue is also compounded with the issue of gentrification, which is particularly emblematic of the things that people hate about Silicon Valley and to a lesser extent the Presidency (VC-baked out-of-touch privileged idiots colonizing the urban landscape).
> this issue is also compounded with the issue of gentrification
How is this a gentrification issue? They're distributing glorified vending machines with "bodega" products, it's not as if they're pricing the neighborhood out of paper towels and frosted flakes. This is really a huge overreaction for something very benign.
Bodegas traditionally are run by Puerto Ricans and Dominicians in the NE (Not Mexicans).
Taken into a NY-centric context it's easier to understand the backlash in a rapidly gentrifying and appropriating atmosphere.
It is a Xoogler-founded startup called Bodega offering a product that would compete with, and potentially replace, real-world working-class owned bodegas.
There's a certain "startup style" that appeared in the marketing for tech in the Web 2.0 period, maybe kicking off when Google adopted "Don't be evil" as their corporate slogan. (I allude to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436272)
The name being too accurate falls into the stereotypical Silicon Valley trap of cheerfully "disrupting" with negative consequences for "regular people." Not only does the product ostensibly challenge the economic security of bodega owners, they're using the name of their livelihood to brand their own company. So the name becomes an extra sore spot. It's insult to potential injury. It's banally Orwellian, in the Ministry of Peace sort of way.
I am starting to see it: the name is too cheerful -- almost boastful about a powerfully-backed business beating their less-powerful competitors.
Markets are brutal sometimes. This still seems to rank pretty low on that scale. For a long time competition was looked at more like a non-violent form of warfare, and this wouldn't even register. Now, I guess we have a more cooperative view of business (or perhaps some people have just never been in business and don't know), so they should be sensitive to the plight of their competitors.
There's a colonization sort of dynamic emerging when sharp differences in tech are involved. A VC-backed state-of-the-art startup going against old-fashioned brick and mortar shops is like tanks against spearmen in a game of Civ. Or gentrification through other means.
This article's dumb. 8 men control half the world's wealth? All of a sudden the word 'bodega' is racist? Too many white men contributing value is 'problematic'? Articles like this are the reason why Trump won.
tech wasn't always this ... douchey. I don't know what happened. I've been a programming since the early 1990s. It used to be fun. Now I don't tell people what I do.
I agree with this statement - as a cybersecurity professional, I feel this. "Your ideas are only as good as the people in the room. And your door is shut to most people."
This focuses on finance, and honestly doesn't seem that different than the gripes people had against banks 50 years ago. White men in charge? Not helping solve inequality?
people from the midwest and south are largely not represented in sv companies. sv has done a great job at basically hiring the same type of person over and over. I believe this is mostly because of their preference for a narrow set of universities, among other things.
It's more of a gap between the educated in the useful fields vs everyone else. And it's not going anywhere. The people who don't have the capacity to learn complex and useful things are left behind in our quickly accelerating world.
These same criticisms were lobbed at Microsoft 15 years ago (and IBM before that), but then, as now, people forget that part of why some of us love technology is that nobody can rest on past success. Ten years from now, some new upstart is going to make everyone wonder what the big fuss was about.
SV will adapt or die. It's how stuff like this always goes. What's left of domestic manufacturing adapted. Coal is basically dead.
If SV picks latter option I just hope the corpse doesn't stink up the rest of society.
(obviously this is a long ways off because inertia but it's something to think about if you think you'll retire by selling your SV property to the next sucker)
Funny how one of your examples is New York, probably one of the world's strongest city brands, especially after the whole "Big Apple", and "I heart NY" campaigns targeted at promoting tourism.
That's not the real reason public opinion has shifted sharply against denizens of the Valley.
That would be Uber. A company so sociopathic, so awful, so entitled, so full of loathsome self-aggrandising bullies they became an unwitting figurehead for hatred of the Valley. And Uber make it so easy to hate them.
The fact that Uber hasn't suffered any noticeable loss of business suggests that this is false. Or at least that it doesn't matter if people love you or not.
You don't have to be loved to be profitable. That said Uber is currently neither, nor is it likely to be any time soon.
But my point is that Uber's reputation plumbing the abyssal depths, and to a lesser extent AirBnB's, is dragging down the reputation of the rest of the valley.
I think those early SV days were probably not that way. Hard to see Hewlett and Packard or the folks at Fairchild or some of the other firms out there acting the way SV folks act in 2017.
Can you imagine Bill Hewlett kicking some kids off a field because he had reserved it for his kick-ball team?
I seen a commercial advertising googles "home" device and was a cringeworthy moment. The partner to the NSA, the SJW brigade is now trying to have me purchase something that sits in my home and reminds me of what a pathetic corporation it has become. No thanks.
The startup was aiming to replace existing corner stores, which are called 'bodegas' in many parts of the US because they're typically run by Latino people.
Using a Latino name for a company of (likely middle-class, likely Asian and European rather than Latino) engineers seeking to disintermediate working class bodega owners was the problem.
This author is drinking some serious anti captalist kool-aid. First off both Bannon and Bernie are Leninists. True believers are interchangeable with one another if you believe Eric Hoffer.
Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.
There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.
> Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.
Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what a basic income does. A basic income isn't housing projects and government cheese, it's cash money you can decide how to spend for yourself. Different people will choose to spend it on different things.
What's your alternative? Let corporations accumulate all the wealth generated by technology and subject everyone else to serfdom?
It's not as if people are going to stop inventing things.
Housing projects and government cheese aren't terrible because they're inexpensive. The government spends a ridiculous amount of money on them. They're terrible because the buyer is the bureaucracy instead of the consumer. Which is a thing the UBI fixes.
If you have a UBI then you don't have to buy cheese. You can buy beans, pasta, carrots, potatoes, rice, bananas, it's your choice.
You're presenting everything as ideal case. $12k a year means $1k a month to live. You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for. You won't have a choice. Go break down the budget at $1k a month. You'll find that people on government welfare often already live better than that.
...earning $10,000 a year (which was about half the federal poverty level that year)...
The state with the highest total value of welfare benefits was Hawaii, at $49,175. The lowest was Mississippi, at $16,984. Welfare packages in only 10 states, plus Washington, D.C., exceeded Grothman’s threshold of $35,000.
Note, that's an article showing that a representative was exaggerating how much welfare recipients receive; those are the numbers refuting his claim.
> You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for. You won't have a choice.
You won't have a choice between all the different things you have to choose from?
> Go break down the budget at $1k a month. You'll find that people on government welfare often already live better than that.
And the same people are completely screwed if they want to do one dollar better than that because as soon as they get a job most of the benefits evaporate. Which is why they stay unemployed.
That's not at all obvious. You'll have people screaming about welfare queens, for example. Never mind the fact that some of this screaming comes from a racist place of giving money away to brown people, it does need to be addressed in order to gain broad acceptance.
One way to defend against the welfare queen argument might be to recognize that there are economies of scale in child-rearing, and pay out adult/2 for the first child, adult/4 for the second child, etc, never going above one whole adult worth of BMI income no matter how many children you have.
> You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for.
You are kinda ignorant, your food expenses will be less than $1 a day if you only buy cheap food like that. I've lived on less than $1k a month most of my life, totally doable, you can buy good healthy food for around $4 a day if you cook yourself.
In countries where you have e.g. gangs they can be worse than that, but if you're in a peaceful country, as a [working] poor, bureaucracy is easy your problem #1.
They can make all your savings disappear for a clerical error, for starters, and you are stretched on time to stay in lines to make things right.
The idea behind BI is that you can still work, but if you don't work you still get to live. If you want more than the concrete block - fine. Go do something and earn money, but if not just STFU and live with what you get.
You realize that with our current entitlement programs that if you don’t work you still “get to live” right? There’s all sorts of safety nets, and many normal people use them.
> There’s all sorts of safety nets, and many normal people use them.
Yeah, and they're often a mess. You often have to sign up in a bunch of different places and deal with a bunch of different broken bureaucracies, which isn't the ideal thing to have dropped on your plate when financial hardship strikes. It's not surprising that, for example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it."[1] Simplifying the system and having it already active when people hit a hardship would be a huge improvement.
I was reading a story about one cities dilapidated homeless shelter. The people there were living in poor conditions - the building's infrastructure was falling apart, the food provided was terrible, etc. It was costing the city $4,680 a month to house the people there. The people would be much better off if the city simply handed them that money - heck, they'd be much better off if the city simply handed them half of that.
That's noble, but "living" shouldn't be the focus of discourse because there's much more to life than just "living".
It's already the case that if you don't work, you can "live". We should focus on making sure everyone can work if they want to, and their work will pay enough, which is the real problem at hand imo.
How do you propose that we ensure that everyone can work in an increasingly automated world? How will we employ a quarter of the population if, for example, nearly any job that can be done by a person with an IQ of 90 can be done more cheaply by a machine?
Do we crack down on automation? If so, how do we do that? And if we do, how do we stay competitive with the rest of the world?
The thing is, UBI has the potential to solve this. With a basic income, you're less likely to have to take a full time job you don't care about just to make sure the bills get paid. The labor market will shrink (and UBI allows that to be tuned), so there will be more jobs available, and there's no longer as much pressure to take an unfulfilling job.
This gives people options. Maybe instead of working a dreary office job full time, you work it part time (leaving hours open for someone else to fill), and spend the extra time with your family. Or maybe you take the extra time to foster a project you're passionate about. Maybe you tighten your belt and work on that project full time. And depending on how high the basic income is (which would be largely a function of how many crappy jobs we've automated), that passion project doesn't even have to be profitable. You can do what's rewarding instead of what puts food on your table.
This is, to me, the ultimate vision of humankind flourishing, sans-singularity. The only realistic alternatives I see are a massive increase in poverty, as we continue to convince ourselves that somehow price floors and retraining will save us, or a regulatory morass in which we try to stay one step ahead of the loopholes, preserving jobs that simply shouldn't be done by humans anymore.
Instead of basic income wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of basic "lifestyle" provided by government. Out of the box you get a very small government built apartment (no rent or utility bills, all part of the package), vouchers for 3 meals per day (government run canteens in these government apartment buildings), free healthcare and education also provided by the government.
So you would get all these basic necessities as part of the basic government program. To actually make any money to buy nicer things (car, bigger apartment or house), you'd need to find a job.
This would make sense as the basic income would not work as free market would adjust and increase prices as reaction to the new source of free money to spend available every month for everybody.
You're presupposing a uniformity of needs that simply does not exist.
Do the government canteens have vegan options? Vegetarian? Nut-free? Just peanut-free? Gluten-free? Halal? Kosher? Why or why not? Which of those are "necessities" and which are "luxuries"? It may well turn out that your opinion on that last question differs from your neighbor's, which differs from that of the bureaucrat who actually makes the call. And at least in the US, having government-provided food facilities that are expected to be widely used but effectively discriminate on a religious basis in any way would end up in court on First Amendment grounds in a hurry...
That's just the food end. There are similar questions about housing. Should all the apartments involved be wheelchair-accessible? Should all the bathrooms be accessible by someone who is mobility-impaired?
(Healthcare and education have similar issues, though to a large extent people seem make the opposite choice on those, as compared to food.)
Anyway, one of my big takeaways from the history of the 20th century (both from nominally communist countries and the experience in the US with housing projects and urban redevelopment in general) is that uniformization schemes like what you describe tend to lead to a good deal of misery...
> Instead of basic income wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of basic "lifestyle" provided by government. Out of the box you get a very small government built apartment (no rent or utility bills, all part of the package), vouchers for 3 meals per day (government run canteens in these government apartment buildings), free healthcare and education also provided by the government.
The government is bad at operating a business. They aren't subject to competition. If they do something poorly they don't lose business so they just keep doing it poorly. There is no reason to ever have the government build housing or grow food instead of just giving people money to buy housing or food.
Government products also have another flaw. If the government provides $500 worth of free government housing, and you have $200, there is no way for you to turn that into $700 worth of housing. Improving your housing by $200 costs you $700. It's a poverty trap.
And allocating money to specific things has the same problems. Governments are bad at allocating things. Give someone a housing voucher and they'll buy housing, even if they don't need housing as much as they need something else. Many people would be better off to e.g. live with relatives and use the same money to pay for car insurance so they can drive to work. With a housing voucher they can't do that, so instead they waste the government's money on unneeded housing. And in the process raise both taxes and housing costs for everyone else.
Moreover, in any situation where that isn't the case, vouchers for necessities are equivalent to cash regardless. If you're buying $200 worth of food anyway, a $100 food voucher is the same as $100 in cash, because you use the food voucher for food and use the $100 you would have spent on food to buy whatever you want.
Which means that vouchers require a voucher checking bureaucracy that spends resources doing something which is completely redundant in every case that it isn't actively harmful.
It's far more efficient to just give people cash and let them figure it out for themselves.
While in principle it sounds great, the reality is it wouldn't function or scale properly and would be dangerously close to causing the same problems that many Communist countries face (from apathy of the populous to manipulation by those that have).
What about argument that basic income will cause prices to rise since people will be able to afford X spending per month. Wouldn't this be free market's natural response? Supply of money / disposable monthly income would increase therefor prices would go up?
A different approach, one in which people can still work to get paid, but wages are reasonable.
Fulfillment is not all about the money and what you can buy with it. It's about feeling that your'e serving some purpose, and there's value to what you do.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think your statement could be misread as overly harsh.
I would emphasize that money solves all problems measured in money, but humans care about things not measured in money. So faced with a janitorial job making minimum wage $13/hr or a volunteer gig that can only afford a $3/hr stipend, it lets the person take the job that pays more in ways not necessarily measured in money -- it some evolved enlightened form of capitalism that frees us from the serfdom of capitalism itself or some such aggrandization nonsense.
But we've been dreaming about the cultured and creative paradise that only a life formed solely on the unlocked potential of leisure could afford since the dawn of the industrial age, so shrug Maaaaybe this time is different...
> It lets the person whose labor is only worth $3/hour take a $3/hour job and still not starve to death.
You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.
How is this feeling "you're serving a purpose" and that "there's value in what you do" as per my parent comment? Again, a job is about much more than the money, and "not starving to death".
> You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.
But your labor is worth only $3/hour. The only way to change that is for the person to improve their skillset, but if that was practical in a given case then it would happen regardless.
Value is not intrinsic to the object, but varies depending on the market and its rules. Go to another country and your labour might be worth more or less.
So your labor is not worth $3/hour, it's worth $3/hour in this market. The approach I think would be better for everyone is designing the market so that your labor holds some value.
> Value is not intrinsic to the object, but varies depending on the market and its rules. Go to another country and your labour might be worth more or less.
Sure, but the issue is the relative difference between what your labor is worth and what your costs are. Automation reduces unskilled wages, meanwhile the worker's costs for necessities like housing have if anything gone up over time.
You could try to fix this by artificially raising wages for unskilled workers, but that's counterproductive. Increasing costs will increase prices workers pay when they buy things or drive people to substitute with alternatives that cause workers to lose their jobs. Exactly the opposite of the desired result.
What you really want is to reduce the cost of necessities so the wages they actually earn will go further. Doing so using government subsidies brings us right back to a UBI, and you seem to want something else.
The something else is basically changing the laws around housing and medicine to increase competition and drive down prices. Doing that is a good idea but good luck with that. The incumbents have a ton of lobbyists and a vested interest in staying fat.
I do believe in raising the minimum wage, but how does that address the fact that outsourcing and automation have been reducing and will continue to reduce the supply of jobs?
Thousands of people have skills that are not worth enough, these days, to support the lifestyle they are used to. That's the problem here.
Except that the employee can walk away from an employer who doesn't pay enough and still keep the UBI.
And the demand for labor at $3/hour is huge. People making even $40K/year would stop doing their own laundry or washing their own cars if they could hire someone to do it for that price. Good luck convincing anyone to work for $1/hour when everyone else is paying more.
Moreover, even if someone could only get a job for $1/hour, what is that supposed to change? Then they get a job at $1/hour + UBI, they don't starve, and the second someone offers $2/hour they trade up. Or they decide that their time is worth more than that to themselves and spend it volunteering to gain experience or going to school or whatever. Which one of these is supposed to be a problem?
Why? Minimum wage is largely designed to stop people being exploited by a form of economic slavery, but the UBI should prevent that, and mean that the wage has to be attractive.
I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their computers.
Or - it's that the work-aholics know that they're never going to get ahead.
Middle America thinks they'll get ahead soon. That it's their gumption and attitude that got them to where they are.
Which of course is a load of horse shit, and they're being used and abused as much as any SV work-aholic, if not more because of their lack of compensation.
Perhaps because the first group doesn't have as much time/effort sunk into learning to use the current social safety patchwork, so changes to it are less scary.
Also, they don't need to keep up any self-denial that well-paying jobs will magically return for coal-mining or buggy-whip manufacture.
Middle America doesn't seem to be keen on much of anything these days, besides torches and pitchforks.
I'd rather put my money on the people trying to build solutions rather than more problems. Sure, it seems like the actual silicon valley location is mostly making solutions for problems that it created, these days. But there's plenty of tech outside of California.
And anyways, dire imprecations of fire and brimstone if we don't do things your way is so 1700s.
That has nothing to do with Silicon Valley; don't conflate issues. The widening wealth inequality in this country is a product of much larger forces, don't blame people simply because they've happened to have found a modern-day trade which lets them eke out a middle-class lifestyle in the current economy.
It seems like you're the one shifting blame, onto people who have no power to change the situation. How about taking a look at DC, Virginia, and NYC, where the real power is?
Nah, it's easier to complain, stoke divisions, and take potshots at people slightly higher up the ladder than you. Classic crab bucket mentality.
> How about taking a look at DC, Virginia, and NYC, where the real power is?
Uh, SV is an area with a concentration of power, money, and influence as well. Think of the incredibly influential power a company like Google could have on a democracy. Think of how they are trying to shape popular culture to suit their needs. If you don't think it is powerful, then spend some time in rural Arkansas and see what a stark contrast there is.
If inequality triggers a war, then it will be a war against the rich. It wouldn't be a matter of creating change, it would be about getting screwed by the rich so they can make more money off of us.
So Google "could have" seriously influential impact eventually. And they "are trying to shape" narratives and policies.
I guess, but I'll keep focusing on institutions that "are having" serious impact, and that "are successfully shaping" those discourses for now. The stark differences that I see across the nation are more a product of those than any young, nascent, 21st-century forces.
4 of the top 5 most valuable companies in the world are tech companies. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon. Hundreds of millions of people use their products every day.
Because they are an obvious sign of that wealth inequality. It's like how someone will say something like 'this damn cough' when in reality the cough is just a symptom.
A major people's rebellion (started for all practical purposes mostly with pitchforks and torches) against the tyranny and oppression of the wealthy noble-class in far-off lands happened in 1776 or somewhere around then...
couldn't help but notice the irony of using the 1700's in the above example.
I think you mean 1789, if you're really meaning revolt against the ruling class.
1776 was a rebellion of bankers, wealthy landowners, merchants, and industrialists, against relatively minor tax hikes and slight imposition of oversight on long-neglected possessions...
Yes, and revolutions we had in US and Europe in 18th/19th century could happen again if the income inequality continues to grow and quality of life of middle class / working class continues to decrease. This is sort of extreme reaction a really stressed society would be capable of.
Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.
> Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday
Sure they do -- there's plenty of homeless people in the suburbs these days, it's just a different interaction.
It's homeless people standing on the sides of freeway offramps and stripmall driveways, dying in front of them on the grassy lawn road medians. It's handing change to a homeless person in the stormwater road ditch while you wait at a red light.
That used to be true, but the nation's very poor live mostly in the suburbs and rural parts of the country now. It shifted about 20 years ago. You can't go anywhere without encountering desperately poor people these days.
This is true. I live in a 30,000 person town in rural America that is a popular tourist destination for upper middle class types. Despite the cold winters, there is a surprising amount of homelessness - the city finally set up a camp area because they were concerned with the visibility to the tourists. Apart from a handful of white collar jobs (a small college, a hospital, a couple law offices), everything else is just above minimum wage, meaning even if you aren't homeless, there is limited mobility. Thankfully real estate is still very affordable, but as coastal cities push more people out of the market, even that is changing, as people move inland to find something cheaper.
> with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do
You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities.
I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.
That's because the encampments are not tolerated in NYC.[0]
There's lots of patchwork "solutions": shelters, hotels, housing vouchers, and roaming the subways (as long as they keep moving or don't congregate too many), but not long-term encampments. It's kind of like how spreading unwanted food around on your plate makes it look as though it's been eaten - is indeed weird how it affects the perception.
There are no tents, but you definitely see plenty of homeless people on the street or sleeping in trains in NYC. It does feel less dystopian somehow than SF though.
Here in the Midwest (MI) people beg for change on every other street corner. It's obvious to us here why things are falling apart politically. Whole cities have collapsed.
>It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.
In other words you posted a reply to austenallred's comment that had nothing to do with it in order to try to game the ordering system here. That's quite rude.
Not really. The comment I posted it under was very pro-Silicon Valley, claiming regular people just love SV and all the wonderful goodies they bestow upon us.
It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot.
In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.
Pro tip: cyberpunk fiction was largely dystopian.
I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. Without a culture of opportunity and vision people turn inward to drugs (opiate epidemic), various forms of Skinner box masturbation (game and social media addiction), or lash out. The latter takes the form of disorganized lone nut mass shootings like Las Vegas or organized political fanaticism like ISIS or neo-fascism. People don't like to be worthless.
The solution is not basic income. The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling:
- Radically extending the human life span
- Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general.
- Colonizing the Moon and Mars
- Replacing our entire fossil fuel based infrastructure with renewables, storage, and possibly some nuclear in areas where those are not sufficient.
- Connecting all our major cities with high speed rail or maybe even more exotic things like underground hyperloop transit.
- Rebuilding suburbia with modern knowledge about design including the social impact of the built environment.
Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people.
... and so on.
Basic income is the conservative risk-averse option. The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work.
Part of the problem is the "developed world" narrative. Start with the premise that our children should properly regard us as un-developed, then commit a few trillion to becoming developed. If our children and our grandchildren do not look back at us as ignorant and backward we have failed.
"When I was your age we only lived on one planet, drove around manual cars that burned dead stuff, and we only lived about 80 years and had a 100 median IQ."
Edit:
I didn't vote for Trump but when he won I did hold out a little hope that he might be some kind of crypto-liberal who would actually make good on that "trillion dollar infrastructure plan" talk. (A trillion is too low but it's a start.) Alas it appears that this isn't the case and he really is as bad as he looked.
Interesting that you come along with a hopeful vision for the future where there's interesting and lucrative work for people to do, and your comment is turning grayer and grayer.
I went back and watched some Star Trek TNG a while back. It's shocking. There is no way anything that optimistic could be written today. People literally can't even think it.
Well people can think of something like TNG but the (alt-)right will instantly crapstorm you for being a communist. Just look at how they're opposing healthcare for all, a society like TNG would be the ultimate enemy for them.
The alt-right is the logical endpoint. It kind of combines all the worst ideas from liberalism over the past 50 years (postmodernism, identity politics) with all the worst ideas from conservatism (nationalism, racism, biological determinism) in the previous century.
I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend about "what's the worst ideology you can possibly imagine" and it kind of resembles what I came up with but (mostly) minus the theocracy (I pictured a pomo professor, a Christian Reconstructionist, and a fascist hashing out a synthesis). In some respects it's worse-- its obnoxious meme aesthetic is far trashier than anything I would have ever imagined. No dystopian writer could have come up with a fever dream as hideous as the collision of 4chan and Stormfront.
Maybe you have to hit bottom before things can bounce back. I have a tough time imagining anything worse than this, but I'm sure people will try.
> It kind of combines all the worst ideas from liberalism over the past 50 years (postmodernism, identity politics)
Not to be pedantic, but those are _illiberal_ ideas. You're conflating liberals and the left, which was mostly fine when they were in a coalition for a while. But if you're talking about identity politics et al, you're very specifically describing things that are almost definitionally illiberal.
Yea, liberalism just isn't in vogue anywhere on the political spectrum. The kind of people you're talking about are particularly intellectually dishonest and morally decrepit, but a rejection of liberalism seems to have taken root all over the place.
All countercultural movements are trashy. The alt-right certainly have hit a certain watermark for going for cheap shocks and taboo-breaking transgressive behavior, but that's because they're attuned to the standards of the current generation. In the '70s, punk was countercultural and the Brits banned "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols just because the cover had Elizabeth II wearing a nose ring. What's considered trashy or taboo shifts with each generation.
Effectively, the governments at the time (USA), figured it was cheaper to ghettoize poor, sick, and others whom cannot support themselves. Wall them off, and keep them out of society. Out of sight, out of mind.
This literally is the thoughts of the Right-Wing. Ive seen that justification here, on HN. Why bother with the poor? They have no money! Better to keep them 'away', as 'We' are better. Of course, right now we have White-Nationalists beating on their drums. But the real war here is against the poor. Black people are.. disdained by the Conservative elite because they are primarily low income (by way of discrimination, but thats aside the point!). Ideally, all poor trash should be taken out, white, black, asian, native - you name it. No money = no livelihood = no choice = no living.
EDIT: Seriously? -1's? Am I wrong? I would love to see the conservative plans to boost people from poverty, medical maladies, and systemic discrimination. So far, what I see are attacks on any programs trying to assist with poverty, medical, and discrimination. And these attacks are done by the "ruling party", Republicans, with their base plans being as such.
Not that I agree with everything you’ve said here, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate this comment and the ensuing thread.
> The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species. Here are some real first world problems we could be tackling: …
There must be some way to get people to work on all this without dangling homelessness and starvation constantly over their heads. Can’t we have a basic income to at least take care of the basics, and still motivate people to participate in these projects using some carrots like a) desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself, or even b) consumerism?
> Exterminating mental illness through a deep and diligent study of the human brain, and also possibly increasing human intelligence in general
There's been waaay too many stories of how technology like this will only be available to the rich and privileged, furthering their already-sizable inherited wealth and privilege.
That's kinda the... not condescending, but dismissive?... attitude that the article is talking about.
We kinda need to find ways of how to just start having conversations about this stuff, let alone suggest how to avoid going down the dystopia route. Agree with your other comments that something like TNG couldn't even be written now -- look at how the new one is about an unprovoked war with a primal-looking warrior civilization. Yeah, we got interracial female leads, but the conversation being had is about nothing more than space sword fights with space explosions.
> The solution is a massive increase in our ambition as a species.
god what conservative bullshit. you must labor for others or else you are useless! just, no.
>There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true
No one says that you disingenuous weasel. Basic income is so that people can survive without being forced to hold a job. This is especially important for those that cannot hold a job - children, elderly, sick, disabled - or those that have lost jobs through automation, where there IS no more job to have.
> "put people to work"
Most people already work (95%+) and those that don't - children, elderly, sick, disabled - those people aren't ever joining your work programs. They make up a huge percentage of the total population and you just.. ignore them like they don't count. But i guess in your eyes 'work or starve' is better so there are no 'moral' issues, right?
Is there any reason you're being so rude and hostile? It's very off-putting, distracts from your point, and is not in line with HN comment guidelines:
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names..."
>Most people already work (95%+) and those that don't - children, elderly, sick, disabled - those people aren't ever joining your work programs. They make up a huge percentage of the total population and you just.. ignore them like they don't count.
Your argument is very similar to yesterday's discussions around stock buybacks as a conservative, risk-averse way for companies to control their stock prices and enrich top executives without giving more power to labor.
The core problem is that we are hard-wired for scarcity. Our brains think we are on the African savannah 100,000 years ago. When things get a little tough we clutch and build fortresses. This can make sense as an individual, but collectively it hasn't made sense since the industrial revolution (and maybe even a bit earlier).
Today the proper collective response to depression is to double down. Economy failing? Double spending. Things look stagnant and bleak? Increase our ambition by at least an order of magnitude.
The problem is that we are thinking too small. A civilization of our scale should be thinking beyond the planet, beyond history, and beyond the current biological definition of human. Anything less is a waste of our effort.
> It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot.
> In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building.
Too true. But that was Gibson's way of showing the "bad result" of society. There's plenty of places where scifi authors use constructs of absolutism to show very bad places policies go.
And if you think TV was the great pacifier, then just wait till VR and AR really take off. Live in a 15'x15' room and feels like a mansion.
> I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do.
No, basic income was a way to provide the basics of living plus a bit more, so everyone has the innate rights of: water, food, electricity, communication, lodging. To not have this covered for every human should be abhorrent. The converse to this is that some people just don't deserve food, or water, or shelter, or electricity, or communication. And especially with food/water/shelter, we see semi-significant efforts to try to stem those.
Solving lack of food is solved by... providing food. Same with water, but thankfully we don't see coin-op water fountains. We do have homeless shelters, but many have barriers for the people to use. Drug usage is rampant along with mental illnesses. And many a time they have oppressive "closing hours" so homeless cannot simply take any job.
A UBI would provide money in so that people could put it where they need it. Many a times, these are cashflow problems which can be solved by cash.
> (List of many non-UBI things that can be done)
Without the requisite resources for #1, it seems torturous to say you can lengthen life spans without the means to keep someone alive respectfully. This seems more like "Keep the rich living 2x-3x life span while the rest of us die in our 60's".
The extermination of mental illness is something I would heartily support. The only problems with those are well cited - you need permission from the very people whom you want to treat. And many times, their illness has them not give permission. This has been well discussed in the homeless/jail/mental health discussions on many places, including HN and Reddit.
But I believe that you have posted UBI as a "UBI -or- Multipoint plan". I disagree with the postulate of "A or B". Both can be done. With people freed from the monotony of tiring drugde-work, people could start working on the very societal things you mention. Not everyone will, of course. But that's the nature of freedom: people can and should be able to choose their destiny. Right now, that's bound by threat of hunger, lack of shelter, being divorced from social net, and poverty.
"It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh.""
It only does that if a recipient decides to do nothing but sit on their ass. Otherwise, it provides the opportunity to explore things that one wouldn't have the time to do if they were spending most of their day laboring to afford food and housing.
"Options 3, 4, 5, and 6 would employ quite a few people."
Would they? Or would robots be doing most of that work?
"The things I listed above (and more) are for civilizations who are not afraid to spend a little money and put people to work."
> It only does that if a recipient decides to do nothing but sit on their ass. Otherwise, it provides the opportunity to explore things that one wouldn't have the time to do if they were spending most of their day laboring to afford food and housing.
Regardless of wether I do nothing or go out and explore, it would mean I'm not essential. Working is not only about the money; is about finding a place in a community and having some sense of identity and purpose.
> Would they? Or would robots be doing most of that work?
"Regardless of wether I do nothing or go out and explore, it would mean I'm not essential."
You never were. Neither am I.
"Working is not only about the money; is about finding a place in a community and having some sense of identity and purpose."
And now, since you're not forced to get a job to support yourself, you can go and find that identity and purpose with something you actually want to do, rather than something you must do to survive.
"Could be either, as necessary."
Doubtful. Most of those projects will largely be done by machines. So the jobs available will be small.
"Work on the projects he listed"
I mean work how, as in, most of the work on those projects won't be done by people. So how are most people going to work?
In much of the country, the number 1 job is truck driver. But we're working on driverless technology more and more, and eventually that will be phased out.
If middle America wants to blame someone for the changes that have hit rural life in the last 50 years, they'd do better than to look at Silicon Valley.
Uber isn't the reason Big Ag took over the family farm, and Google isn't the reason their daughter moved to Brooklyn and is now dating a girl.
But actually, I think the rural folk will be the first to adopt the "basic income" (scare quotes and all), because in a lot of ways, they're already doing it, just under a different name. SSDI, for example, is huge in rural West Virginia, whether you're disabled or no. Doctors there are in on it, as an act of compassion, because the work simply isn't there and there is no other safety net.
So, all middle America needs is appropriate framing. Call it the Real America Dividend instead of "basic income" and they'll line up for it.
It's difficult to imagine a more off-topic comment. If you are choosing basic income as a poster child of Silicon Valley, you need to be much clearer about that.
My advice to those people: Git gud. There are lots of services and goods that can be created. If you want to help the homeless, or devote your life to the works of Bach there is plenty of meaning to be found doing that.
I find it kind of ridiculous that the reasons why people supposedly hate silicon valley ("it's all run by old white guys") are pretty much the opposite of the reasons why I hear hate of silicon valley (virtue signally/wrongthink/over concerned with diversity).
Don't hustle.
Don't crush anything.
Try not to have to give a stage presentation with a mic at the corner of your mouth.
Your creation is not completely superlative or world changing yet, speak of it realistically.
The internet is not a substitute or replacement for you having to deal with humanity.
Be nice.
Follow your curiosities and interests. Have curiosities and interests.
Don't claim false passions. You're not passionate about "revolutionizing HR" or "remaking the way people buy nail polish".
Learn how tech relates to the world and how you relate to it, don't make tech its own world.
Maybe get a hobby.
Be kind.