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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

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Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#661

Post by mrep »

Mc91 wrote: post #475
titzer wrote: post #310

I'm 37 and, God, people treat me like I'm a dinosaur. I've been programming C for 25 years and it's hard to relate to young people who don't know what a machine register is. We can argue about it, I can get downvoted, whatever. I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider. It has li…

I am 44 and visit the Bay Area from time to time. I have the same feeling on various levels. Anything older than two years has disappeared into a vortex. I mean I remember when the peninsula was the center of the tech industry - I mean Facebook came out of Palo Alto in 2004, it wasn't that long ago. Now the peninsula is the home of Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and other dinosaurs founded between the 1960s and 1980s, and now…

> If your laptop is HP, if you actually send e-mails from time to time, if you still use IRC and Freenode (or heaven forbid, EFnet) - dinosaur.

I work at a FAANG company and while most people use mac, email is still without competition and irc is still somewhat used but on the decline since our company is so big we now have our own in house tool that works better.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#662

Post by hateduser2 »

moonka wrote: post #427
hateduser2 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You admit in your own writing that this is a new way to use twitter. And this wasn't twitter anyways. Most social media platforms have support for blasting things across the nation and support for more private info. You'd have to be insane to actually argue (and it seems thats what you're doing) that Peter Thiel was trying to tell the nation he was gay.

>You'd have to be insane to actually argue (and it seems thats what you're doing) I think it's unlikely we'll be able to have a productive conversation. Have a good day!

I don't see why not

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#663

Post by DrScump »

sseveran wrote: post #426
strangeloops85 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't get it either, especially the "feeling alienated" part. Does that include being feted and having a respectful discussion with your liberal friend and old colleague, Reid Hoffman, on the Stanford campus on Jan. 31 of this year, moderated by a very sympathetic Niall Ferguson? With laudatory words and praise from the President and Provost? https://news.stanford.edu/2018/02/01/cardinal-conversation-r... Look…

Mrs. Clinton won college educated voters by 9 percentage points which is not exactly a super majority. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...

Note that none of those that Pew's counts as "college educated" in its surveys is in any way verified to be a college graduate of any degree or discipline.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#664

Post by andybak »

rsp1984 wrote: post #457
andybak wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visual Studio Code Surely Atom would be a better "typical hipster editor"?

It's whichever sucks more 100s of MBs of memory for putting a text file on screen.

Emacs?

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#665

Post by DrScump »

dragonwriter wrote: post #510
ameister14 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What you think is the threshold where political opinion can become personal? When your family is deported? Hilariously enough, Clinton and Obama deported far and away more people.

Trump deported more people already living in the US ; Clinton and Obama deported more at the border, by enough that total deportations were higher.

Turning away somebody at a border is not deportation.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#666

Post by bsder »

Fins wrote: post #617
bsder wrote: post #547

So we should all take a lesson from how people in the Bible belt treat those who are agnostic or atheist, right? If the Valley is such a "liberal echo chamber", why is it that women, homosexual, transsexuals, etc. are the ones still receiving the death threats. When I see rich, conservative, white men shivering in fear from getting death threats for expressing their religious or political beliefs, I'll worry about yo…

Didn't Damore receive threats of physical violence? And he's no Thiel by any stretch of imagination.

I don't see anything obvious with a quick Google search, and anybody complaining about that seems to start throwing around words like "antifa" so my skepticism and troll alerts are on maximum.

HOWEVER, Damore is a REALLY good example of the kind nitwit snowflake that deserves all the approbation he is receiving.

If you are sitting in a corporation and are about to do something that is going to cause political shockwaves, you need to make sure that your position and stance is absolutely rock solid and airtight.

This is true whether you are talking about technology or social behavior. If you're going to political war, you had better have incontrovertible facts and arguments and they had best be overwhelming. You need to run your presentation past a couple of friends and colleagues to solidify it. If you half-ass it, you're going to get your head handed to you on a platter.

Well, guess what? He half-assed it with a bunch of unsupported conjecture and weak arguments that people destroyed almost immediately with real evidence and research and then whined about the fact that people handed him his head.

Which probably STILL would have been okay if he actually admitted to being wrong and put his head back down. But, no, nitwits like him feel that not simply accepting everything he says as correct is terribly, horribly unfair. As such, he doubled down on stuff that everybody already showed was wrong and basically just tried to shout louder.

And then was shocked when he got canned.

The worst part is, there ARE lots of outstanding questions and issues about diversity programs and initiatives. What should that actual goal of such a program be? How do you measure whether it is succeeding? Is success for the company the same as success for the group? Is success for the group the same as success for the individual? What are the downsides of such programs?

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#667

Post by wyclif »

utopcell wrote: post #532
bsbechtel wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brendan Eich, James Damore?

Damore wasn't fired because he is a conservative. He was fired because he thinks women are inferior wrt tech and was very vocal about it.

This is false. Damore did not get fired "because he thinks women are inferior" which is a simplistic, uninformed, and cartoonish version of the controversy. Damore was fired by Google for writing about scientifically supported sex differences and the social ramifications of those differences:

https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#668

Post by otterley »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #641
otterley wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very easy to contemplate how to solve this problem: make it easy to build extremely dense housing in SF. The problem is that the powers that be don’t want to make it easier, and they all have ultimately self serving excuses as to why. Every time a politician tells me more housing won’t make it cheaper, I posit the hypothetical “what if we built 100,000 more units? No? How about 1 million more? 5 million more?” T…

Unfortunately, it isn't actually that simple. Since WW2, the vast majority of our financing mechanisms and housing policy has been aimed at creating family housing because that was what the parents of the Baby Boomers wanted and needed. Meanwhile, our population has diversified away from that. Plus there are myriad zoning policies, tax policies etc at all levels of government that are pieces of the puzzle for how SF…

To say that matters are complex is not really helpful, though. We must demand our representatives break down these barriers and eliminate complexity.

The infill argument is totally bogus. The majority of the Financial District, which is where the majority of high rises are today, is on the very same infill you claim cannot support high rise structures. Singapore is largely infill and is mostly high rises. Tokyo is very dense and is in an earthquake prone area.

The absolute area argument is similarly specious. That argument would be valid only if, per unit area, we were already building at a density similar to New York. Moreover, it’s irrelevant how large the city is within its political boundaries if you consider this to be a regional problem, which it is.

So I’m not really sure whose side you’re on in this matter since you muddied the waters instead of clarifying them.

The problem is entirely political. You can either help or make excuses.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#669

Post by andrewjl »

refurb wrote: post #182
andrewjl wrote: post #41

I find the recent uptick in progressivism in SV refreshing, and sorely needed. Then again, I've lived my entire life in liberal enclaves and do not personally identify with conservative / "family values" viewpoints.

So you self-identify as liberal and never actually been exposed to people in an area that is predominantly conservative? Isn't that the definition of insular and close-minded?

I've never said not exposed. There's plenty of exposure available via the media. As an example, I've watched Tomi Lahren's commentary on pro athletes and political involvement. No surprises there, but suffice to say I'm glad Tomi's views on the matter are generally frowned upon here in SV.

For most of history, holding progressive or even liberal viewpoints carried social consequences. Polite company was conservative company. Now the script has flipped, and the pendulum swings the other way. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#670

Post by andrewjl »

freyir wrote: post #174
friedman23 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conservative housing policies Rent control is conservative now? All of SF policy is leftist and pro government intervention. I wonder why it fails...

Poor choice of words on my part. I meant "conservative" in terms of NIMBYs' aversion to change and development.

Use of liberal / conservative in this context is muddled at best and misleading at worst.
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