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Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

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Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#101

Post by fluoridation »

immibis wrote: post #97
fluoridation wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "a bug"? A bug in what? If to someone it makes sense to pour money into an apparently non-viable business on the off chance that it succeeds, what exactly is it that you're saying is not functioning properly? The person's mind? So what do you want to do about it?

You're only reacting to a part of the system. You're starting from the axiom that businesses need a level of risky funding that only VCs will provide, and then congratulating VCs for swooping in and saving the day. But would it be possible to have a system where startups to require less funding? For example, by UBI, or normalizing bootstrapping?

Sorry, but your reply is so utterly disconnected from my question that I'm just going to assume you replied to me by mistake and ignore it. If it wasn't a mistake then you've completely missed the point.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#102

Post by fluoridation »

frankest wrote: post #94
fluoridation wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you count human brain time and attention as the most valuable and sparse of resource But it's not, though. Human brain time (just in general, with no additional conditions) is pretty worthless, that's why people piss it away in idle activities. Just look at services like Mechanical Turk. The so-called attention economy is not about the attention itself. It's about getting the brains that give the attention to spe…

The brains are being skewed with the content making fears disproportionate to reality and raising anxiety which disables rational thought and constructive activity.

That's simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. Optimistic because it assumes that someone, say, replying to a comment on Hacker News, is doing that instead of something incredibly constructive. Pessimistic because it also assumes that those negative emotions necessarily impact the person once the activity finishes. While that may be the case for some dysfunctional individuals, most people will not be compelled to quit their job and bunker themselves up in their room after reading a Reddit post.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#103

Post by pickledonions49 »

Nothing is ever going to be completely equal in society. Innovation is driven by labor being capital (thus profit), or by influence (state backed stuff loses money in exchange for influence). I have a right to make money with resources at my disposal. Taxes are exchanged for the privileges of citizenship, and hopefully, someday, the ability to not get screwed by insurance.

Correct me if I am wrong, I am open to ideas. My knowledge of economics is all from social studies class, my brother almost dying because insurance at first denied to pay for his surgery, and making money from yard work and fixing electronics because I am not old enough to get a legit job. I have never paid taxes, but I somewhat understand disdain towards taxation in an age where the cost of living is as high as it is relative to the amount of money one is capable of making.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#105

Post by layer8 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #75
layer8 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of these has better marketing for sure.

Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company. I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then. I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then. That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a…

The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization.

I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#106

Post by HumanOstrich »

ffsm8 wrote: post #99
labcomputer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t thinking this through. If a startup defaults, it is because they have no money left (which is because they do not have a viable business yet). So there is nothing of value to repossess. This is the same reason the bank asks for an independent valuation of a house (and requires the buyer to maintain insurance) before releasing the money to pay for it: The value of the collateral needs to plausibly match the…

Naw, you're making a claim that's just not true. The company will have some value left on default. E.g if it's a software company it will have the IP for the software etc pp Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk with the loan is another story and thus I could now quote my previous comment in its entirety

The residual value in the failed startup will be such a small fraction of the funding. You aren't making a convincing argument.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#107

Post by HumanOstrich »

judahmeek wrote: post #71
cjbgkagh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree it is unfair and it would be better if they didn’t, the reality is that there is a meta-game at a higher level and they are playing according to the meta-game rules. Part of the meta-game is to convince others to stay in the regular game sandbox which gives rise to the hypocrisy we are all familiar with. I don’t know what it would take to diminish the meta-gaming let alone eliminate it, it’s very hard t…

The Atlantic just wrote an article that references this concept: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/marjorie-taylor-gr... They also have several older articles directly targeting insider trading by politicians.

Insider trading by politicians is not really what's being discussed. Rich people and corporations lobbying politicians is different.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#108

Post by [deleted] »

judahmeek wrote: post #65
haritha-j wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, when you start to lobby, when you explicitly pay people to pass laws in your favour, that's when you cross a line. You go from playing within the rules of the system to making up rules that favour you, and it's wild that it's legal much less acceptable for corporations to do that.

So who do you think should be allowed to lobby politicians & how would you avoid lobbying from bleeding through unofficial channels?

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#109

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

layer8 wrote: post #105
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company. I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then. I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then. That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a…

The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization. I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.

That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate.

I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently.

But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset.

Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases).

A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care.

We’re seeing quite a bit of that stuff, nowadays.

Re: Silicon Valley startups: being evil, again and again

#110

Post by rixed »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #86
rixed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read Marx since I left college, but in my remembering the only thing that is "theft" in the capital is the initial accumulation. There is no idea that any form of ownership beside that is theft (I don't believe there is any notion of "evil" either.) To be honest, you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting. Marx is like those ancient greek phylosophers and c…

"you don't give the impression that you have read anything from the author that you are siting" Oh, ok. Anyways. First section of Capital Vol I is all about "surplus value" and exploitation, with a heavy dose of the labour theory of value. It has nothing to do with "initial accumulation" at all, it's about ongoing extraction of surplus value in production, and no, Marx doesn't call it "theft" -- he calls it "exploita…

As the other person who responded to me wrote, I might have misunderstood your comment. I believed that you associated the idea that "property is theft" with Marx, and that's this association that I wanted to warn against.

But that's indeed not what you were saying.

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