101–110 of 252 posts
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I'm not really disagreeing with the point that I suspect you're making, I'm just saying that it's a lot more cynical than "hero worship".
Do you mean "insidious," in that the tech celebrities that people use as role models might be charlatans?
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So I'd agree about taking the hero worship out of SV. The history of SV is one of successive technology waves, each of which certain people happen to spot & ride first, and then because they make a lot of money on those waves, everybody else idolizes them. And then the next wave happens and it's inevitably someone else who spots them and rides them, and suddenly we all have new heroes. But when it comes to building a…
Leaving aside disagreements by people(who a lot of them are politically motivated and maybe not the result of deep thinking and rational thought or aiming to benefit everyone), doesn't the research tells us about what interventions benefit everybody ? For example, that socialized medicine is the better method to reach that goal ?
(I'm not actually arguing that such science is shoddy, only that the perception that they are shoddy and invalid is a strong disincentive to listen to any research on this matter. It's actually really disheartening to me that this is the case.)
I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I…
This above comment is a perfect example. I don't know much about Marc, but where I'm concerned, he's just a guy who has experience in the VC scene, was invited to talk at an event, and agreed to share his personal thoughts and strategies. I read through the article, and nothing that he said really stood out in any way, good or bad. The thing about self-driving cars was just him saying "look at the potential upside for people who're currently wasting time in daily commutes" and "don't nitpick so much on the things that can go wrong, that you lose sight of the potential for things to go tremendously right".
A little platitude-like, sure. But not really objectionable in any way. I certainly don't think anything he said in the article warranted a ranting about "hot air coming out of money-grubbing share-diluting quality-of-life-ruining tech oligarchs whose feet we're worshipping". If you really want to have a discussion about this tangent, write your own blog post, submit it, and let's have a discussion there. But it's sad to see the comments thread get hijacked by such superfluous soapboxing.
I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything. This is a lost cause, and my venting is more cathartic than anything. The culture of this place has changed, and I don't think we can ever go back to how it used to be. I guess it's time to start looking for another place to frequent.
I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I…
Technology has warped and dominated our world and culture to an extent it never has before.
I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth.
That's more or less what we still do today.
The technological and scientific have replaced the religious as the ruling dogma and organizational frameworks of the world. Just as many folks in the middle ages probably couldn't conceive of the radical changes that would happen were religious hegemony toppled, it's hard for us to conceive of a world where the ruling technological caste loses their influence.
But what a wild world it might be.
What bothers me the most about our current age is our lack of questioning when it comes to technological progress. We have a sort of close your eyes and jump philosophy when it comes to technology--we seem to go ahead and create new technologies before a. considering the full scope of their possible effects, and b. developing the requisite social, political, and economic structures to support the shifts they'll bring about (e.g. in the case of self driving cars and automation of work in general we will have to switch to an economic model other than capitalism if we are against a very slim few having the majority of the world's wealth, more so than is already the case, which is hard to imagine.)
Of course, it's not possible to predict all of the side effects introducing new technology will have--for example, I doubt Tim had any notion of the extent to which the internet would change the world when he came up with an idea that let you view the documents your buddy had on his machine, but here we are.
Still, I think we have a bad tendency to accelerate change in the technological sphere while social, political, and economic structures remain woefully antiquated.
I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I…
The hero worship of successful people is just survivorship bias in action. Out of a population of people flipping coins, we (after the fact) find the ones who flipped heads 10 times in a row and fawn over them, asking them how they became such great coin flippers and what we can do to improve our coin flipping skills. See also: Good To Great or any similar business book.
If I become a remote/work-from-home/smb-owner I'd love to just being a self-driving car doing stuff on the go and also changing where I am all the time.
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Yeah. > Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jo…
Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years. 200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving…
What we're doing, now, is destroying whole sectors of the job market.
It has happened before, yes! -- but it was horrible then, and it will be horrible now (and now we have youtube, which they didn't have in the UK or India in the 19th century).
I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I…
I only came to HN somewhat recently, around 2 years ago, but I've started to notice a very major change in the culture of this forum lately. There is so much vitriol and blanket insults being levied at anyone and everyone. The linked article is almost always a sideshow, and simply acts as a prelude for the battle in the comments section. A battle which has little to do with what the article itself says, and is simply…
The comments sections are almost impossible to read because the signal to noise ratio is getting so large.
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What makes you jump to the conclusion that technology investment, or capitalism, or whatever you think is "bad" is "at the expense of others?" Currently, about 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It was 12% in 2012. It was 40% in 1990. The history of the world, post-war 20th century, is one of extreme progress for the lives of real people -- especially really poor people. So, what do you think dro…
This may surprise you, but people defined as "living in extreme poverty" weren't always unhappy to be there. Western standards of affluence are the economic default, but they don't include any measure of happiness, fulfilment, or contentment. The factors that generate the last three are largely unrelated to median income. In fact they reliably go down when neoliberal "efficient allocation of capital" becomes the domi…
Yes, median household income has stagnated in the U.S. since 2000, while both the low-end and the high-end have improved. Can you support your claim that it this correlates with "neoliberal" policies? Where in the world has life gotten better that you think is a better model? Can you please name a place on earth where something other than free-market capitalism has proven successful?
I never claimed that no one in the U.S. or U.K. was in poverty. I claimed fewer were than before, and fewer are than in countries will less access to technology and capital.
Your other point -- that people in extreme poverty can actually be happier -- well, I don't know what to say. Feeding starving people more often seems like an intrinsically worthy goal to me. I can't imagine the pain of not having enough food for my children.