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Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

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Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#81

Post by tayo42 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #66
austenallred wrote: post #24

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 iPh…

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 lik…

> you can't treat customers with blatant disrespect time and time again and be shocked when they finally leave.

Has this actually ever happened? Maybe it's just to early but I can't think of any.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#82

Post by kevmo »

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]

-----

[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.

[2] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/white-jleo-reprint.pdf

[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.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#83

Post by dragonwriter »

julianozen wrote: post #36

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 b…

> 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.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#84

Post by sametmax »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #66
austenallred wrote: post #24

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 iPh…

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 lik…

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.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#86

Post by weberc2 »

wtflmaohnisdumb wrote: post #35
gotthemwmds wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.

Anecdotes: 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 in…

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.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-meas...

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#88

Post by ghaff »

jabot wrote: post #46

This article bashes Juicero - rightfully, in my (humble) opinion; it is a stupid and wasteful idea, and ridiculously overpriced. However, it has that in common with Keurig - which is a huge success. My point is that just because something is stupid and wasteful it doesn't have to fail...

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.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#89

Post by wtflmaohnisdumb »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #19
wtflmaohnisdumb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get similar salary / benefits (adjusted for rent)?

No. We're full. Stay in SV please /s There's good companies and bad companies, just like everywhere else.

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. :)

(FWIW I'm not in SV)

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#90

Post by eropple »

carbocation wrote: post #8

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. Th…

> 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.

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