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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

#281

Post by tome »

jonbarker wrote: post #185
jartelt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

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 g…

Huh? So how does Amazon actually make money?

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

#282

Post by floatrock »

api wrote: post #116
nsxwolf wrote: post #105

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.

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 buildin…

Hold up there for a sec. Things like:

> 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.

That part is well-said though. Cheers.

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

#283

Post by Clubber »

shoefly wrote: post #78

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.

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.

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

#284

Post by joshuaheard »

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.

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

#285

Post by kevmo »

existencebox wrote: post #266
kevmo wrote: post #82

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 questio…

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 r…

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.

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

#286

Post by taylodl »

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…

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.

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

#287

Post by Clubber »

crush-n-spread wrote: post #265
deadmetheny wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#288

Post by mistercow »

aylmao wrote: post #249
dna_polymerase wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#289

Post by ben_w »

Klockan wrote: post #125
ben_w wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If startups are begging for more women Why would they start doing that? Eliminating sexism just means that you don't have any bias, not that you suddenly see them as the next coming.

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.

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

#290

Post by deadmetheny »

crush-n-spread wrote: post #265
deadmetheny wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.
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