I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable.

The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry.

To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow.

Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned.

[1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).

In the case of Uber, the class of people that benefited economically were the kind that wield a fair amount of money and political influence. This means that 1) Uber had enough revenue (and promise of future revenue) that they had the resources to fight legal battles and 2) a reasonably politically influential class of people was likely to be on their side in any potential regulatory battle. As an aside, the perceived minimum reasonable amount of regulation required for housing is a good deal higher than that of transport. This makes forward movement without the co-operation of the regulatory regime much more difficult, since working outside of the regulatory framework exposes you to real problems involving sanitation, fire safety, infrastructure, etc[1].

The homeless unfortunately _don't_ wield these kind of resources or political influence, so efforts to route around housing regulation in a way that benefits the homeless has no economic incentive backing it (and much of the time and money currently dedicated to fighting homelessness generally doesn't think of housing regulation as a problem). This isn't even entirely hypothetical; the article I linked in this comment is about a guy in LA building mini-houses for the homeless that the city keeps tearing down. I'm not even saying that they're necessarily wrong to do so, just that "derp other companies in unrelated contexts weren't stopped by regulation" doesn't even close to approach a sensible response to "regulation might impede improvement of the housing problem".

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tiny-houses-seiz...

"Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change…"

Damn right. Those are real problems.

But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy, whatnot.

The author's utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between frivolous and meaningful is precisely the problem he's denouncing.