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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

#121

Post by matt_wulfeck »

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.

I notice that some of the biggest proponent of basic income are work-aholics, not middle america that’s supposedly at the greatest risk of the incoming AI apocalypse. It’s the same people who eat soylent milkshakes because they don’t have any desire or time to cook for themselves. It’s no wonder they’d love it if the government came by and took away one more obstacle that keeps them from burying their heads in their computers.

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

#122

Post by csydas »

austenallred wrote: post #71
aaron-lebo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's false loyalty. People put up with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc with their fake "we care about you" marketing (could apps stop literally telling me this? it's weird), overpriced, and walled garden megalomania because they are addicted and their other options are mediocre walled gardens (look around). People aren't stupid, they can sense when they are being used and those companies have treated their customers lik…

It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.

I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?

SV really isn't as much of a meritocracy as people like to pretend, as so many times just being first to the party and locking people in is enough to keep them there. I'm sure tons of businesses on exchange would love to ditch and move to Google Apps for Business, but the change is just too much of a hassle, even if the features are exactly as desired. Same for Google businesses looking at the MS office world with starry eyes.

The merit often has less to do with a product's success and continued success as much as how efficient they are at locking people in. Going back to Facebook, it's not like there's a way to migrate or exfiltrate your data in any meaningful way to another system.

This is an exaggerated comparison, but the mafia adds value much in the same way, in that often you don't have a choice in the matter. This isn't to say people are forced to use Facebook, but much like a mafia town, it's hard to do business otherwise.

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

#123

Post by RodericDay »

carbocation wrote: post #8

As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…

The unwritten story of the Juicero debacle is that high income inequality causes capital to be misallocated towards luxury production. — Matt Bruenig, on a deleted Tweet

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

eropple wrote: post #90
carbocation wrote: post #8

As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…

> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doin…

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by Klockan »

ben_w wrote: post #79
arkh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the rank and file of tech the problem can't be eliminated until more than 20% of the STEM pipeline is comprised of women. This means fighting sexism at the startup level is useless, you better encourage young people to get into science by making it sexy and not for social outcasts. If there is sexism to fight against it is in education with how maths and physics are painted as "for dorks" instead of showing how y…

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.

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

#126

Post by jartelt »

jedrek wrote: post #49

What this piece misses the obvious financial privilege that many startups have. Uber is slaying yellow/black cabs around the world, but only by massively subsidizing its rides through investment capital. Amazon is the world's largest store, by working on margins that don't let people who actually expect a return on the investment compete. It's gotten to the point that if a company actually does things the old fashion…

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 margins really that much smaller than Walmart, Target, Costco or anything other big box discount retailer? Many products at Amazon can be found cheaper in a store. It's just really damn convenient to order it on Amazon and have it shipped the next day.

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

#128

Post by austenallred »

anonacct37 wrote: post #119
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…

> As an aside, I’ll never understand why people get so upset for rich people making bad bets and losing a bunch of money. Me neither. Sometimes people get upset that the pensions of teachers and firemen are being spent on subsidizing growth of meal delivery and transportation in San Francisco. Actually I live in a state that has spent a bunch of taxpayer money on a alt-coin currency based company that recently had an…

Venture Capital overall is a tiiiiny part of an investment portfolio. Compared to other amounts of capital allocation it’s pretty much a rounding error, and Juicero is a tiny piece of any portfolio.

The funds investing in Juicero and losing will have other 100x wins that will make them not worry about Juicero.

That’s why Silicon Valley works. It’s 1x wrong often, but occasionally 100x right.

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

#130

Post by p-funk »

austenallred wrote: post #101
toomuchtodo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. "If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!" > Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc... "Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions hav…

I hate to be the person saying “correlation != causation,” so instead let’s just agree that “the people who liked more things on Facebook self-reported to be less happy” is not a very rigorous way to analyze how Facebook affects human happiness levels.

Doesn't it follow, regardless of causality, that if Facebook were just as good as face-to-face social interaction, then there would be no difference in happiness levels between people who use Facebook and those who don't? If Facebook had a positive impact on people's lives, then there would be a similar positive correlation in using Facebook compared to seeing someone in person.

Maybe there isn't enough proof to say "Facebook is toxic", but it certainly seems true that Facebook is not as good as real human interaction.

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