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Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#171

Post by frenchman_in_ny »

SilasX wrote: post #145
wallace_f wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok not bad, but it isn't really fair. The real villains are not PE firms (people who play with their own money and don't care who they hurt trying to make more), but the commercial-investment banking empires (people who play with other people's money, get the world's cheapest, most unlimited insurance--err no: bail out policy, from a private bank that somehow swindled the American people into controlling its printing…

PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government." IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.

"PE firms do pretty villainous things" -- in whose name? Investors in many PE funds are often .... you guessed it: pension plans chasing returns for their retirees.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#172

Post by Caveman_Coder »

rublev wrote: post #146
dclowd9901 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. We don't always get to choose our battles, and this is one I won't win. And trying, in earnest, to avoid putting yourself on a stage is a far cry from publishing posts incessantly, looking to be a social media celebrity of some kind.

>This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms. Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes? I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform…

> I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.

When I told my family I was getting off of those types of platforms and only using email/phone/text, there was absolutely no issues on their end keeping up with communication. If anything, I was able to cut down on the chatter and only keep up comms with two really close friends, the rest were just acquaintances that I don't mind not getting updates on.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#173

Post by SilasX »

frenchman_in_ny wrote: post #171
SilasX wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government." IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.

"PE firms do pretty villainous things" -- in whose name? Investors in many PE funds are often .... you guessed it: pension plans chasing returns for their retirees.

So, like, the Great Circle of Life...time-income-defaulting?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#174

Post by vog »

KirinDave wrote: post #46
vog wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payment is not sufficient, but necessary. Without payment, they either make loss or have ads, so of course your are the product. With payment, they can afford to have strong privacy rules and have others check their system integrity. But they'll only do so if there's demand for sanity. So, pay for it and demand sanity. Oh, and payment doesn't necessarily mean a "pay per use" that makes user surveillance necessary. Fo…

> With payment, they can afford to have strong privacy rules and have others check their system integrity. But they'll only do so if there's demand for sanity. I confess it's frustrating to me that I just defined 2 alternative models that involve customer paying, break customer faith, and do not involve ads. A post ignoring the examples I gave immediately appears. There is no set of behavior YOU can engage in to enco…

> A post ignoring the examples I gave immediately appears

Not sure what you mean.

Am I supposed to only reply if I disagree?

Just because I did't express disagreement with your examples doesn't mean I didn't read them. Your question that summarized the examples was:

"Why is it that folks think that paying for a product somehow fixes this?"

My answer was:

"Because that is a necessary condition (although not sufficient)."

Your examples focused IMHO too much on the "not sufficient" part, so I added the missing counterpart ("but necessary!").

I do not disagree with you at all, my intend was just to add a missing piece to your argument.

Moreover, I did not say that "demand sanity" merely means voting with your wallet. It also means demanding proper laws from your politicians.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#175

Post by RestlessMind »

KirinDave wrote: post #6

Let's be selfish for a moment. Mandating decentralization of these services is probably a net good not only for society (and us, because we'll be the ones employed to do it) by way of distributing more wealth, opportunity and responsibilities to more people. But it'll also be good from a technical standpoint. We're in desperate need of a wake-up call about the centralized and often legacy, government mandated insecur…

Any mandate about decentralization has to come from those with powers to enforce such a mandate (eg. government), and such entities benefit from all the centralization (eg. easy spying on citizens). So while such a mandate would be good for the society, who would enforce it?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#176

Post by jrs95 »

bogomipz wrote: post #140
jrs95 wrote: post #35

"Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend...but we, at The New York Times, totally are."

What a total strawman comment that is. The free press is necessary for a functioning democracy, Silicon Valley is not.

Isn’t any media company’s ability to hide behind “we’re the free press and we’re necessary for democracy” even more potent than SV’s faux dedication to the interests of humanity? There’s a lot wrong with what SV companies do, but they don’t have the same direct power to define what is and isn’t “true” like the media does.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#177

Post by WalterBright »

aaroninsf wrote: post #157
ChuckMcM wrote: post #62

I wonder how "Wall Street is not your friend" would play in the NY Times. I mean I get it, greed and flexible morality result in exploitation of the masses, but it is not unique to tech. During the dot.com boom it was pretty clear that there were people here in the Bay Area whose only goal was to sell some investors on an idea, pump it up, take it public on a story, pocket some big profits and then blow town. My frie…

The generalized case is both obviously the case, and not an examined axiom in contemporary politics: corporations operating without a value function that incorporates the public good and the commons, are not your friend. Well, unless 'you' are one of the very few (statistically speaking) benefiting. It's neither impossible nor unreasonable to constrain organizational behavior to incorporate collective goals. It's jus…

> a value function that incorporates the public good and the commons

That would be providing a product that people are freely willing to pay for.

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#178

Post by Toboe »

qudat wrote: post #27

Who thought tech companies were ever a friend? I don't see a problem with massive corporations so long as they get that way by offering the best good or service at the lowest price (natural monopolies). If they achieve their status by partaking in political activity or otherwise using their power in a coercive manner (coercive monopolies) then that's where I draw the line. There lies the biggest problem with powerful…

>I don't see a problem with massive corporations so long as they get that way by offering the best good or service at the lowest price (natural monopolies)

What about massive corporations that grew naturally to the point of having no competition and then start using their power coercively?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#179

Post by Toboe »

pascalxus wrote: post #116

I think 2017 is the year we have a turning point in the media's opinion of Silicon valley. I don't remember seeing this much SV bashing in the last 10 years. I think it has less to do with what SV is doing precisely: it's more about the threat of automation and the consolidation of power in the hands of a few companies. Pieces like this, so enfused with bitterness show a fundamental lack of understanding of how capit…

>"Growth becomes the overriding motivation". Of course is the overriding motiviation - this is how capitalism works.

Maybe in their view the economy/capitalism isn't supposed to be the only factor/overriding everything else?

Re: Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

#180

Post by stevenwoo »

free_everybody wrote: post #156
stevenwoo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big and how much change? There's Ben and Jerry's and Newman's Own, some people might say Costco.

Ok, that's interesting. I wonder what is the common thread among those three. Could it be benevolent founders who don't hand the reins over to investment partners?

Yes on the first two, until Ben and Jerry retired and sold to some multiconglomerate, and since Paul Newman died, some question the direction of the company. Costco is public, but they currently get away with there being a relatively small spread between the CEO and the lowest paid fulltime employee (less than 10x?). Bob's Red Mill might be considered somewhat in the same vein, the owner/CEO recently retired and gave the company to the employees. Tangentially the only non billionaire owned major sports team in the USA is the Green Bay Packers which has shares that are owned by locals.
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