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The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

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Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#171

Post by philwelch »

bokonist wrote: post #144
michaelochurch wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true and people always seem to forget that it's much easier to innovate when the cost of living is lower. The problem, or the balance that must be struck, is that it's hard to innovate without being surrounded by other innovative people. You need a city with a critical mass of innovative, talented people and a low cost-of-living. California in the 1970s had that. I don't know what the 2013 analogue is, or…

Expensive real estate is a deliberate policy of the government. Local government zoning laws keep the supply tight. And low interest rates and easy credit enable people to take out huge loans to bid up the prices of real estate. To get cheap housing, the government would just need to repeal zoning laws and limit all the size of all home mortgages from any government subsidized institution (FDIC insured banks, etc.) t…

Let's not use FDIC as a crowbar to micromanage consumer banking, please. There are so many better dials for the government to turn than resorting to that.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#172

Post by pessimizer »

pg wrote: post #158
jacoblyles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts. When someone tells you about the snapchat/instagram clone they are building at a startup event, you are socially obligated to smile and say something nice about it. But on the inside you wonder at an economic system that puts people through two decades of training so that they can apply their talents to such activities. Meanwhile, companies doing…

The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts. That is exactly the problem. Nothing is less the product of systematic analysis than what you call an "unspoken thought." "Speak our unspoken thoughts" is a nicer way of saying "appeal to our unexamined prejudices."

They may be prejudices, but I don't think that they're unexamined.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#173

Post by saraid216 »

OGinparadise wrote: post #143
saraid216 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing about self-driving cars...

Oh, you must've heard about BMW, Audi and other car manufacturers that can't match Google's PR machine http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars-ev...

I've heard about them, too, but when I find the relevance of your point, I'll drop you a line.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#174

Post by philwelch »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #97
DaniFong wrote: post #82

For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually ARE extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com) These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections. Particular people who h…

Ok, so here's a fun question: where do I find a list of the Big Problems? Because when I look at the world, it seems to me as if most of the really Big Problems are not technological but social. In the end, the conversion to solar energy won't be a single man's heroic effort, it'll be the combined efforts of an entire society that finally decided to go solar. On the other hand, technological approaches to social prob…

Generating power through nuclear fusion is a technological solution to a social problem. Improving desalination might be another. Arcologies might be another. Fundamental improvements in human health would be a possibility.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#175

Post by zaidf »

philwelch wrote: post #170
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #49

Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious. I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products.…

There are no more tech startups. There are startups that use technology, but writing CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars isn't developing new technology.

Define "tech startups".

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#177

Post by robomartin »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #161
RougeFemme wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't have a major issue with a company profitting from the cure for cancer. On the other hand, I hate to seethe senior management of said company reaping handsome profits while people without the means to pay for it die without it. And I have major issue with sick people's inability to pay when the initial research was either done by or funded by taxpayer dollars. And then apply that same principle to all the m…

I think it's a slippery slope though: exactly who should profit and how much profit is too much? Posing those kinds of questions raises the ire of the "free market/profit motive cures everything" crowd that drives our current brand of capitalism. Once we give something over to the machine, we introduce the very problem. IMO, we need to completely rethink what should be left to the markets vs. what we produce as a soc…

That's a tough one because it is beyond clear that --and I am going to use that word-- innovation does not originate in government, master plans or even companies with huge funding.

Make a list of all the major products in the last fifty years, the companies they came from and how they got started to prove the point.

I can't think of a single major scientific discovery in any scientific field over the last, say, 500 years, that was originated or planned by any government or government agency in any country or culture.

Typical examples given are such things as power plants, roads, bridges, water and sewage distribution systems and such large infrastructure projects. These, I argue, have only been created at such scales mostly out of two positions: war-time strategic needs (autobahn and US highway system) and the "natural" evolution of human settlements (as they got larger the infrastructure was a must). In other words, I have never seen any proof that any government engaged in some kind of a long-range master plan to build and deploy infrastructure in support of specific future goals.

Well, except for China.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#178

Post by bokonist »

philwelch wrote: post #171
bokonist wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expensive real estate is a deliberate policy of the government. Local government zoning laws keep the supply tight. And low interest rates and easy credit enable people to take out huge loans to bid up the prices of real estate. To get cheap housing, the government would just need to repeal zoning laws and limit all the size of all home mortgages from any government subsidized institution (FDIC insured banks, etc.) t…

Let's not use FDIC as a crowbar to micromanage consumer banking, please. There are so many better dials for the government to turn than resorting to that.

"Let [us] not use FDIC as a crowbar"

Who's "us"? I don't work for or have any power over the government or FDIC.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#179

Post by babesh »

robomartin wrote: post #177
unclebucknasty wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a slippery slope though: exactly who should profit and how much profit is too much? Posing those kinds of questions raises the ire of the "free market/profit motive cures everything" crowd that drives our current brand of capitalism. Once we give something over to the machine, we introduce the very problem. IMO, we need to completely rethink what should be left to the markets vs. what we produce as a soc…

That's a tough one because it is beyond clear that --and I am going to use that word-- innovation does not originate in government, master plans or even companies with huge funding. Make a list of all the major products in the last fifty years, the companies they came from and how they got started to prove the point. I can't think of a single major scientific discovery in any scientific field over the last, say, 500…

Its not always the direct innovation that government creates, is the seeding of an environment that allows the innovation or prevents the rise of extreme elements: Agricultural and mining state colleges in the US, UC system, infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam, bringing electricity to rural areas during the Great Depression, public work projects that allowed artists to keep on producing works of art, the Space program. All these infrastructure projects and applied research projects helped lay the groundwork for innovation. Sowing seeds and letting the next generation harvest them. The supposed pay forward of Silicon Valley.

Re: The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

#180

Post by nostrademons »

philwelch wrote: post #170
kevinalexbrown wrote: post #49

Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious. I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products.…

There are no more tech startups. There are startups that use technology, but writing CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars isn't developing new technology.

That's no more true now than it was 15 years ago. There're startups doing amazing things with depth cameras, motion capture, computer vision, robotics, large-scale databases, multimedia processing, collaborative filtering, and so on. They are, of course, a tiny minority of all startups, but that's because it will always be easier to write CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars than to develop genuinely new technology.

I remember a quote from Larry or Sergey back in the early days of Google (before the dot-com implosion) that was to the effect of "Do any of those other tech startups have any actual technology?" It's always been like this - wannabes hoping to get rich quickly outnumber the genuine innovators. It doesn't mean the latter group doesn't exist, only that you have to work to find them.

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