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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#151

Post by astrange »

onethought wrote: post #143
e_y_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crappy payments isn't a tech problem, it's a market problem. Consumers and merchants can't be bothered to adopt contactless technologies that were introduced half a decade ago. Companies have tried QR codes and other payment schemes long before that (including the unfortunately named ISIS), but again, no traction.

Americans don’t like contactless payment? Or (more Likely), unlike their Chinese counterparts, American banks are way more conservative with adopting new technologies. Hence why y’all still get paid with paper cheques :)

We have contactless payment with EMVpay/Apple Pay. There are some QR code systems like Venmo but I don't know what the value add of scanning a code is supposed to be.

Nobody gets paid with paper checks unless they want to, although if you're poor and have been blacklisted by the bank system you might take it so you can use a check cashing service.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#152

Post by Clewza313 »

weinzierl wrote: post #130
Apocryphon wrote: post #78

The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes…

“The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.” I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds me of these tests where you are presented a list of wo…

Superconductors, buckyballs, artificial diamonds etc are all quite sexy and easy to grasp, so they have a big profile in popular news despite their comparative lack of utility, much more so than (until recently) incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about mRNA, convoluted neural networks and whatnot.

That said, materials science is vital for incremental improvements like modern composite airplanes or SpaceX rockets etc, and if we ever do get to space elevators or room-temperature superconductors, the potential is life-changing.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#153

Post by rapsey »

onethought wrote: post #134
rapsey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For software it sure is Mecca and nothing else comes close.

Except in China. Which is my point. For every Uber there is a Didi. Microsoft there is a Tencent... Etc. but they don’t play at US scale, they play at China scale.

You are listing giants who are generaly state supported and largely copies of western tech. The thing is about having a rich ecosystem of small players innovating. That is what makes SV.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#154

Post by kortilla »

Apocryphon wrote: post #78

The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes…

> Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers

This is just an ignorant hot-take though that once again blames upper middle class tech employees for a housing problem caused solely by bad govern policies.

There is no “domination” here considering that tech employees are well. 21 percent [1] are now considered tech jobs and the FAANG employees clearing $500K+ to afford houses make up a small fraction of that.

> Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance.

SF tax revenue has been climbing the whole decade [2]. CA is the same [3]. The governments are absolutely not “starved of revenue”. They have been operating in a completely inept fashion for decades and the waste/corruption is eating everything up. Double the tax revenue in California and politicians will have it squandered in the year.

This is just another lame attempt to blame the tech boogeyman for a failed government. How much homelessness, high housing costs, high tax rates, failed public infrastructure, etc do we have to endure before we realize crying about one of the few major successful industries isn’t an answer?

1. https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/tech-employment-bay-a... 2. https://sftreasurer.org/annual-report-fiscal-year-2018-19 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#155

Post by rapsey »

astrange wrote: post #144
rapsey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV will exist for as long as the US is in the position it is in the world. Money will flow while USD is the worlds reserve currency. The US is however rotting from within. The political disfunction will eventually destroy everything.

The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2 welfare states, but in practice their current governments react to everything with more austerity, and they're really anti-immigration.

US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality).

Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#156

Post by raverbashing »

logicchains wrote: post #103
networkimprov wrote: post #47

This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's expected to get much worse this year. https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660 Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing cybercrime. References: Cybercrime, $945B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu... Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimat…

The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals,…

Cybercrime will be properly addressed when companies realize: 1) it's not just a matter of insurance, "ticking boxes" and "buying solutions" and 2) law enforcement actually investigates and prosecutes those involved (even if it involves international action)

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#157

Post by astrange »

Zanneth wrote: post #146
astrange wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What company uses the scale in this comment? (IC5 IC6 IC7 etc)

At least Apple does. I'm not sure if other companies use it as well.

It's not the Apple scale though. I mean, it looks like it, but the details are different.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#158

Post by randomsearch »

baby wrote: post #45

I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...

This is a genuine question: have the tech companies done much to help out with the homelessness and crime rate? For example, through funding homeless shelters?

I ask because I thought SF wasn’t a very nice city, due to the large scale of homelessness. Seeing how much money there was, I wondered why tech companies didn’t just throw money at the problem so that they’d have a nicer environment to live in.

I know that homelessness is a multifaceted problem, but (especially in the states) high housing costs and lack of public services are major, solvable, factors.

In my home city in the U.K. we have a major homelessness problem, but we don’t have the wealth to do much about it. Looking at SF it’s not clear that generating wealth helps. And my overriding impression of Americans is that they’re far more generous with their cash than the English.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#159

Post by onethought »

astrange wrote: post #150
onethought wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, your right: - largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) - Most advanced solar manufacture - biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear - biggest investor in space based technology and delivery If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.

> - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet. Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.

Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome!

It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#160

Post by fancyfish »

ping_pong wrote: post #5

Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself, trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon Valley as the tech capital of the world. Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world. There's a re…

I love this take. It’s true, after the rise of modern tech post-2008, the top talent got rich off RSUs and lost their greediness. Greed made this industry what it is, in every innovation cycle (hardware, software, dotcom, mobile).

We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of starting a company.

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