Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Thread for general discussion of, and feeble resistance to, our new overpaid 20-something savant overlords, starting with this lovely article:

http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

is the baffler as smug and unreadable as it was in the late 90s/early 00s? to be frank all i ever got from them (or thomas frank solo) was a withering contempt for most of america, rather than any mournful concern.

haha to be frank see what I (unintentionally) did there?

nerds with power

shudder

This is the first Baffler thing I've bothered with in a while. I thought it had its moments back in its earlier incarnation -- there was an essay on cities and the "creative class" that I still refer to mentally sometimes. I think the internet has kind of made the sort of bullshit-skewering it specialized in more widespread and diffuse.

oh yeah, they had some good articles from time to time. there was one incredibly condescending and snide and yet fascinating one about gay pornography. unfortinately they also published ray carney's screed against tarantino and a lot of other worthless crap. and i always felt tom frank needed to have a few beer bottles smashed over his head.

Frank seems kind of worse to me now in his Harper's editorials. I always hated Lapham's and it feels like Frank is really trying his best to assume the mantle.

Anyway

In a widely covered secessionist speech at a Silicon Valley “startup school” last year, there was more than a hint of Moldbug (see video below). The speech, by former Stanford professor and Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, never mentioned Moldbug or the Dark Enlightenment, but it was suffused with neoreactionary rhetoric and ideas. Srinivasan used the phrase “the paper belt” to describe his enemies, namely the government, the publishing industries, and universities. The formulation mirrored Moldbug’s “Cathedral.” Srinivasan’s central theme was the notion of “exit”—as in, exit from democratic society, and entry into any number of corporate mini-states whose arrival will leave the world looking like a patchwork map of feudal Europe.

Forget universal rights; this is the true “opt-in society.”

An excerpt:

We want to show what a society run by Silicon Valley would look like. That’s where “exit” comes in . . . . It basically means: build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. This is where we’re going over the next ten years . . . [Google co-founder] Larry Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation. That’s carefully phrased. He’s not saying, “take away the laws in the U.S.” If you like your country, you can keep it. Same with Marc Andreessen: “The world is going to see an explosion of countries in the years ahead—doubled, tripled, quadrupled countries.”

Srinivasan ticked through the signposts of the neoreactionary fantasyland: Bitcoin as the future of finance, corporate city-states as the future of government, Detroit as a loaded symbol of government failure and 3D-printed firearms as an example of emerging technology that defies regulation.

The speech succeeded in promoting the anti-democratic authoritarianism at the core of neoreactionary thought, while glossing over the attendant bigotry. This has long been a goal of some in the movement. One such moderate—if the word can be used in this context—is Patri Friedman, grandson of the late libertarian demigod Milton Friedman. The younger Friedman expressed the need for “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” after a public falling out with Yarvin in 2009.

Friedman has lately been devoting his time (and leveraging his family name) to raise money for the SeaSteading Institute, which, as the name suggests, is a blue-sea libertarian dream to build floating fiefdoms free of outside regulation and law. Sound familiar?

The principal backer of the SeaSteading project, Peter Thiel, is also an investor in companies run by Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, an original investor in Facebook and hedge fund manager, as well as being the inspiration for a villainous investor on the satirical HBO series Silicon Valley. Thiel’s extreme libertarian advocacy is long and storied, beginning with his days founding the Collegiate Network-backed Stanford Review. Lately he’s been noticed writing big checks for Ted Cruz.

He’s invested in Yarvin’s current startup, Tlon. Thiel invested personally in Tlon co-founder John Burnham. In 2011, at age 18, Burnham accepted $100,000 from Thiel to skip college and go directly into business. Instead of mining asteroids as he originally intended, Burnham wound up working on obscure networking software with Yarvin, whose title at Tlon is, appropriately enough, “benevolent dictator for life.”

I love this stuff, these guys are like comic book supervillains.

yeah i dunno, this seems discountable. it's not going to get much traction.

i still think we shd take these guys out before they acquire sentience

another school of thought says that they just need to experience a moment of humanity to temper their wild anti-humanist delusions

we could administer this cure from a safe distance thanks to their work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PspagsTFvlg

Been dismayed with The Baffler since it's new revival. Seems about as shrill as Adbusters these days.

OTOH, there's these guys to make fun of: http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/#

i still think we shd take these guys out before they acquire sentience

― coign of wantage (Noodle Vague), Thursday, May 22, 2014 6:35 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

100%

yeah i dunno, this seems discountable. it's not going to get much traction.

― display name changed. (amateurist), Thursday, May 22, 2014 6:33 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd be more willing to discount it if these weren't people with money, political fever dreams, and the ability to build & destory things

Yeah I'm not exactly alarmed yet but I am a little o_O

these people aren't good at building things that people actually need to survive so I dunno - the rhetoric is horrible and these people are frightening, at the same time they're woefully inept

fantastic article, thank you for sharing

A seafaring community of 10 plutocrats is probably going to do just fine. They can just take a private jet back to the US any time they need fresh virgins to feed on. They don't want the rest of us anyway.

Shouldn't that be Tlön, and holy shit we do not need techno-libertarians referencing Borges

I thought the setting up a new country idea sounded really good, hopefully it would end like jonestown

I am all in favor of techno-libertarian island

me too. preferably one that will be underwater in a few decades.

tru

im less worried about these creeps building their own bioshock dystopias than i am about them using their tremendous money and influence to undermine regulation and other democratic things (tm) at home

yeah that is a more serious danger

I wonder if we can convince them to relocate to Canada

I think their politics might go over well in, like, Edmonton

It should be fun to watch what happens when the VC money starts to dry up.

they all scramble for the surviving corporate monoliths

This Baffler article mentions Nick Land. That's kind of depressing, is he fully in that camp? I've only read some of his stuff but have liked work from his contemporaries.

isn't his own camp bad enough???

maybe! I'm out of the loop

yes, nick land is fully in

this is all a lil weird to me cos reading these dudes has been a minor internet fascination of mine for a long time

if anything, land's story is evidence against the thesis that an encounter with adulthood will chill these guys out: he was a philosophy professor in the 80s (?) and 90s, left for china at some point to be a journalist, was a pro-war neocon type in the early 00s and at some point during/after the 08 crash flipped to austrian economics, "race realism" (if you don't mind me using their euphemisms for a sec) and all the rest.

i feel super weird that even know this shit tbh

the connection with silicon valley utopian-supremacy is only one leg of the thing, there are linkages to a lot of weird old righty type scenes that have been left behind by contemporary conservatism, which have been kept alive in its most public face by association with ron paul. but also the remnants of european throne-and-altar type stuff

this isn't what I think of when I think of 'techno-utopianism' these dudes are just idiots

really the most salient through-line is hostility to democracy.

xp yeah this thread title is a little narrow & off from the corey pein article

feel like the broader 'apps with solve it'/obsessed with meritocracy and measurement/transnational professionalism stuff that permeates the valley and its politics is way more pernicious and worth countering than these dudes who cant help but marginalize themselves by being themselves

I feel like these guys make better bad guys than the republican party, at least their politics are internally consistent

idk i think their predilection for lingo and willingness to set up their own discursive zones is an important idea generator.

there's huge overlap with the PUA/men's rights scene, and *their* language and pop-psych antifeminism is reeeally short work way from being conservative canon

Definitely seems like there is at the root of a lot of it a bitterness stemming from a dissonance between the "meritocracy" these people have been sold on (in which their particular skillset is supposed to make them the fittest dudes) and the reality they grew up in, and the *other* reality they grew up in (having to attend high school and go on the dating scene and such) in which their supposed superior qualities didn't seem to help so much. I know this might sound like just a rehash of the "butthurt nerd" canard, but I think there's something about the combination of ego inflation AND deflation that they experience -- one world telling them they are geniuses and another telling them they are losers at the same time, that makes them want to remake the entire world in the image of the former.

Like you don't get this kind of worldview coming out of getting sand kicked in your face alone, it's more the rage that results from feeling entitled to alpha status and then getting sand kicked in your face.

yup

And to cross reference that with the "men's rights" stuff, it's not unlike "I'm a *nice* and *intelligent* guy and yet hot babes are not throwing themselves at my feet like they are supposed to. Therefore women are defective and dangerous and I must use 'techniques' to disarm and conquer them."

is there an app for that

i'm really skeptical of 'just a thwarted nerd' type explanations. some people just end up believing this kind of shit for reasons that aren't readily explicable. in many cases it doesn't appear to be true.

yeah 'chicks just didn't want him and he's not successful' doesn't explain peter thiel very well

will plain ole megalomania do.

i think it's a more basic failure to grasp that economic and social processes/developments/problems/etc are not governed by clearly delineated causal relationships. and that there is not a predictable utopia that is being stymied by the unpredictable urges of the irrational human heart.

the cliché explanation for this is that hey these dudes are coders and computers do what you tell them and garbage in garbage out etc etc. maybe it is more an incomplete understanding of the human soul? and the truth of the yawning black chasm of despair that is existence? that there is no app that can stave off the darkness forever? idk man

'shitty paypal founder and devout gay catholic wanted everyone to drop out of college' is the obit in my head for peter thiel
(i mean shitty paypal founder to mean paypal is shitty, not necessarily that thiel is shitty any more than being responsible for shitty paypal)

it's mostly ebay's fault

there does seem to be a mentality of thinking of the problems of the world as something you can code for, like I have this one pretty successful silicon valley friend who likes to say stuff like "that depends on what you want to optimize for" wrt policy questions.

inputs go in, outputs go out, you've just got to optimize. tell me your variables.

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.

i'm cool with this

that lady is a complete fucking nut, btw

otm

I do think that the thread title is off a bit(it makes me think more of transhumanists or cyberpunk-fetishists) since the tone of these guys seems to be bits & pieces of wanting totalitarianism or even some sorta anarcho-corporatism. Not fascism quite yet, but certainly shit that can lead to proto-fascism once violence enters the situation.

I think the inflation/deflation aspect is a key bit to it. Like, the real world is complicated and fucked up and you're kinda sorta sold a bill of goods by authority figures a about what adulthood actually will be v. what you wind up in 15 years after adolescence.

I get the sense that a lot of these guys are pretty much victims, with a high intelligence stat but a correspondingly low wisdom stat. Being really smart but not getting how that doesn't solve everything and can be a hindrance. Its that gap that breeds the intense anger and alienation.

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

there's also a strong overlap, I would wager, between this group and those that think wearing google glass everywhere is a great idea

lol cyberpunk was all about dystopianism

― a strange man (mh), Thursday, May 22, 2014 8:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but cyberpunk ~fetishists~ are people who can't wait to jack into their decks so they can have outsized power and information

not so far from these nerds imo

I mean, the baffler piece makes the point that they don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. blade runner sure as hell wasn't a utopia... from my standpoint. this despotic, oligarchic vision seems to be "utopia and all the freedom and information for me, shitty gutter with my leftover circuit boards for you"

fuckin' ayn rand fetishists, thinking that the disadvantaged or "less meritous" deserve what they get, good and hard

hi tech lowlife

your faulty code is not my problem, if you've got enough money we got some patches you can try.

can't wait for a movement populated by people allergic to brands.
i guess the naomi klein thing happened but i mean literally allergic to brands.

are brands a gluten?

thread of brand shaming

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

it's an authoritarian state run by engineers hell bent on getting rich as quickly as possible, what's not to love

true, there are multiple stripes of badness here

yeah they're big on how little they agree on things (while the prof left is a huge monolith of conformity etc etc)

*prog left

yeah, unified front on the left, for sure

" don't really want utopianism but embrace what seems like a blade runner world without the chinese people. "

some of these guys really like the chinese state! land in particular

right, I think Singapore, Hong Kong are the promising models for some of them - and from what I've seen the "racial realism" end of the dark enlightenment/mencius moldbug crowd throw around NAM as an acronym for the ppl they want out of their dictatorships – "non-asian minorites"

they are other-ing the hell out of people, aren't they?

i'd be more willing to discount it if these weren't people with money, political fever dreams, and the ability to build & destory things

― purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, May 22, 2014 3:11 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This seems completely otm to me – techno-libertarianism maybe has the money, connections, technical accomplishment, power to fuck up a lot of the decent bits of the state & society in the future. Probably just enough of those things to implement a really miserable, corrupt and half-arsed version of its Utopia in a muddled alliance with the old right.

To be clear: techno-libertarian utopia = shit, robot cars, people starving on the streets; half-arsed version = probably even shitter, robot car companies sueing the starving people they run over on the streets.

techno-montessori schools?

kids making their own beats at their own pace, discovering new filters

808fasciststate

ok, i take it back, it's all ok if Thiel is like

http://www.me.gr/m/photos/get_image/file/c4a5ed918dd0eb0c058b5cfa95afc85d.jpg

forwarded this link with subject: "smug silicon valley shits want to create a randian/fascist utopia" which is pretty much all i can really think to say about this

what is that gatefold from??

prodigy - music for the jilted generation

I think there's something about the combination of ego inflation AND deflation that they experience -- one world telling them they are geniuses and another telling them they are losers at the same time

Interestingly enough the thesis of Amy Chua's follow-up book was that this combo was at the root of Jewish-Chinese greatness

on second thought that's not actually that interesting

i, for one, welcome our asshole-technofascist overlords.

http://recode.net/2014/03/15/marc-andreessens-latest-tweetathon-naughty-fun-leads-to-ruined-lives-in-anonymous-apps/

this ding-dong has this sweet new bulleted point twitter rant style that seems pretty indicative of the dystopian trend

http://supost.com/post/index/129734920

This may not be the right place if you:

already seen this list republished about twenty times on twitter

is that a suggestion to add to their list?

hah, sure!

Could you live in Startup Castle?

but this is a good place for it as well

oh sorrry yeah

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIxGwLRWcAAnWLt.jpg

haha omg

let's not get trolled by the SeekingArrangement dude, come on

jesus what a dolt

https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/636183145776181248
https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/635472257008058368

barf

dude needs an ascot and a pipe to really complete the full elitist WASPy asshole picture

yet *another* article about these guys:

http://www.theawl.com/2015/09/good-luck-to-human-kind

really good too

funny enuf this came out today too (have not read)

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/29/9411117/silicon-valley-politics-charts

wait what's that pancake machine tho

http://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html

https://twitter.com/AdamBalkin/status/684179869631135744

Somesaid Paul Graham was full of shit but I wasn't totally sure yet, but now I get it.

startups are good

startups create inequality

therefore inequality is good

'attack poverty' ok

Kinder shows you what expression is on your child's face so you don't have to look at it.

is there inequality where you live? shock and awe the problem with one of our poverty seeking opportunity bombs

remember when pg lived in cambridge and wrote lisp for a living

yeah this is actually good http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.ps

Not sure what thread this belongs in...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html?_r=0

I agree with the basic premise of self improvement methods here. But wow these people seem insufferable. All optimization of systems and practices of extreme rationality should be performed in the privacy of ones own home and not shacked up with a bunch of tech bros shoving their hands in your leftover curry.

Is Soylent involved?

Asher is a singing, freestyle rapping, former international Quidditch All-American turned software engineer.

yea nytimes is very obsessed w/ silly lifestyles of tech bros, this is like one of a dozen pieces in the past few years

This is the problem though

Last year, President Obama established a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team at the White House; based on its findings, he recently ordered federal agencies to use behavioral-economics strategies to improve participation in their programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defense)

I have some "visions of the future" type book I got at a book sale that is a publication of the RAND corporation from the 70s, I need to dig that out

This administration has been really receptive to basically any techbro idea that isn't total political poison on its face; while that doesn't inevitably lead to SecDef Zuckerberg leading us into a war that his algorithms tell us we can win because science, it does make me increasingly uncomfortable for about a zillion other reasons and the presumptive 45th POTUS doesn't seem to have any interest in changing course

also seriously is there nobody around to point out that this shit is Esalen All Over Again or is that just understood and accepted because it's California, dude?

if it was a little less based in "research" it'd be scientology

that dude who has no formal training but is into the singularity is a good reference point, though

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-has-it-worked
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

:-(

You know what Cass Sunstein did at OIRA? He wrote a memo that said that .gov website feedback forms could get through the Paperwork Reduction Act process in 90 days or less. This was called the Fast Track process. And then delayed the hell out of a bunch of EPA regulations on ozone. Guy's a fuckin' genius.

i was in dc for the first time a couple of weeks ago tombot and i described https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service to ppl there and they straight up laughed at the idea

actually i laughed at the bit where i said government websites are now responsive by de facto regulation

i mean it's utopian and sinister to apply #product design to government but having dealt with both governments as a resident i know which i prefer

http://giphy.com/gifs/2016-journalism-journalist-3o7rbU8oYEVkUwyMs8

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7rbU8oYEVkUwyMs8/giphy.gif

seriously who did you tell that to? 'Cause Barack straight up hired Mikey from Google and started this shit last year and it's the new hotness all over the local version of "trade press"

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/11/fact-sheet-improving-and-simplifying-digital-services

https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service

I actually threw my resume in the ring on a recommendation from a guy who was leaving for greener pastures, they gave me a phone interview and then told me I wasn't their type about four months later

I mean there was a 2011 executive order on customer service which was straight ripped off y'all's gov.uk initiatives and serious talk about driving down the federal web footprint to the absolute minimum necessary - they even put my team's domain on the chopping block

I am having fun relating these tales in outdated parody blogger voice

anyway there are actual cool kids working under the digital services banner doing neat stuff - like https://pages.18f.gov/guides/ is pretty neat for example
but on most levels it's still all covered in the static-free sheen of technocratic solutionism and of course no seasoned security asshole like me is going to trust any of it

Sign me up for the technocratic socialism

it was someone from the urban institute iirc

think tankers are all basically performative academics
I can't wait until my turn

an uber but for shoveling snow

what is wrong with these people? http://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

jesus fucking christ

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/30/10876838/obama-computer-science-education-funding-4-billion

What we need more of is... entry-level coders!

http://jezebel.com/there-s-only-one-nurse-for-5-500-students-in-flint-mic-1756011390

who gives a shit about school nurses they're all in cahoots with those fucking teachers' unions anyway

I mean this administration has bought into the fucking valley koolaid like nobody's business and I should not be surprised but $4 billion for pushing CS in K-12 is really unbelievable

http://i.imgur.com/Mdx79Ma.jpg
"Christ, what an asshole."

what we really need is a ton of assisted living facility caregivers for when all these baby boomers need help getting on and off the toilet in a couple years

tbf computer science skills are pretty useful to anyone who works in an even tangentially technical field. it is like the new computer literacy for analytical/technical jobs

in my field some measure of programming literacy is a required baseline skill, and nothing about the field itself would imply that competency as necessary

*to the outside observer

*fart*

thx

the art/fart pun is the pizza! of all art departments

― Sufjan Grafton, Sunday, 27 December 2015 01:31 (1 month ago) Permalink

what is your field, art, if you don't mind me asking? (sorry if you do)

bananas https://twitter.com/balajis/status/703519076107194368

wow that guy's samrt

"Singapore and Estonia are far along here" would be a good thread title

someone needs to set that guy on fire

i'm sure the cloud will rush to save him

His viewpoint matches that of flea that thinks all it has to do is jump to a new dog.

I love that

otm

(what Aimless said, not the tweets of nutjob)

probably a dumb question but what are these guys doing in the cloud that is so important. my IT friends at my work aren't geniuses but they get the job done. i don't think many of them have a desire to move around to exotic locals either, one just started dating a really awesome secretary (single mom of two) from the other side of our building.

The cloud is kind of over imho
insourcing IT management saves you money more often than not - paying somebody else so they can upcharge you on equipment refresh and electric bills is not, as it turns out, the best business decision.

Not strictly true ime - the cooling and power infrastructure saves money in larger quantities. That's why so many companies who previously ran their own dc's are outsourcing to like Amazon who can run them on a huge cost saving scale

OK, I'm just going to say it now, you watch, Amazon spins off the EC2 side in a few years. People are going to start figuring out that a colo is a colo and having your own guys to run your own cages is safer and easier than the arrangement with a CSP. Governments and similarly lugubrious institutions are going to be the last PaaS customers standing.

The cloud is kind of over imho
insourcing IT management saves you money more often than not

please someone tell upper management this, we just upgraded all our IT infrastructure and finally got a full team of sysadmins but someone seems to be deciding why even use that stuff when The Cloud is a buzzword and we need to be in on all the buzzwords even if the people signing the paperwork don't know what they mean

Governments and similarly lugubrious institutions are going to be the last PaaS customers standing

oh... oh yeah. that's us. ah. "lugubrious nonprofit" TICK there we are.

dammit.

terrible band name btw

running your own shit is horrible, my workplace have two moderately modern data centers and a good contract with the power company and amazon is still cheaper and often easier to set up. fire suppression systems and redundant power and only spooling up compute power when you need it instead of running a bigass virtual machine cluster in house is nice

fuck the people who think putting our mail server in the cloud or having a very limited number of vpn access points is a good idea, though

Cloud's great when you need less than one or a great many of something. And when you can budget for opex.

tbf the "cloud" I fear mgmt throwing money at is not so much EC2 etc but "why do we even need to have a shell prompt and access to our own data anyway, we can give lots of money to a 3rd-party Cloud Solutions provider to run everything for us, not let us build on it in any way except maybe writing some horrible kludge which maxes out our allowed no. of API calls by 4am every day, and when we stop giving them money and ask how we export our data to the next next big thing they say 'you don't'"

another thing which sounds appealing to lugubrious nonprofits

actually this might be fine for a lot of places but my particular lugubrious nonprofit is also clinging to a lot of arcane practices not really catered for by off-the-shelf packages. perhaps in the long run it's no bad thing if this year's management would rather push an assortment of irregular polygons down a single round hole

idk if tom is right. maybe he knows things i don't (my speciality is power + cooling infrastructure) but i'll say this - if you're a financial institute, or a healthcare institute, or any other kind of proprietary information - you better handle that shit yourself no matter how much you might save w/ a colo.

i don't think that's generally true. you could make the case that the more sensitive the information, the worse an idea it is to try to handle it yourself. that's the way credit card billing has gone. no one does that themselves any more. everyone farms it out to square or whoever.

the point is "it depends"

Should be a cloud c/d.

http://wiki.biohack.me/

Grinders are passionate individuals who believe the tools and knowledge of science belong to everyone.

Grinders practice functional (sometimes extreme) body modification in an effort to improve the human condition. We hack ourselves with electronic hardware to extend and improve human capacities.

Grinders believe in action, our bodies the experiment.

http://i.imgur.com/PK1gPCu.gif

if you're a financial institute, or a healthcare institute, or any other kind of proprietary information - you better handle that shit yourself no matter how much you might save w/ a colo.

That's interesting -- my company handles a lot of confidential and proprietary information that can affect market activity (and sells ourselves partly on security), and last year we went from an in-house server array to a colo.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CchcB-aW0AAx5Oi?format=pjpg&name=large

1) 10 dads
2) there are 10 of them
3) if u count the dads, u will count from 1 to 10
4) they are 10 times as big as regular dads

Before you decide to have a child, it's not a bad idea to do a SWOT analysis. Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. It's a Marketing 101 keywords that I've learned.

Before you decide to have a child, it's not a bad idea to do a AYTD analysis. Are You Ten Dads.

https://38.media.tumblr.com/a0d94b74bb43ba83eb6728e95665dec2/tumblr_inline_neg5qxMhrF1rzosu7.png

lol at pluggers/grinders connection

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/03/07/what-thomas-hardy-taught-me/

On education reform by SV tech-obsessives

bay-area effective altruist i know is going to one of these

of course

http://www.circlinginstitute.com/

the transformation of your way of being through authentic relating

sounds legit

xp i'm not crazy about freddie de boer but that's a good article

Not sure if this is the thread for "gig economy" startups, but I've been seeing a lot of analysis like this lately, and it sounds about right:

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/27/good_riddance_gig_economy_uber_ayn_rand_and_the_awesome_collapse_of_silicon_valleys_dream_of_destroying_your_job/

haha, this is very encouraging. love the litany of failed business i've never heard of but all of which i hate on principle: "Companies like Cherry (car washes), Prim (laundry), SnapGoods (gear rental), Rewinery (wine), HomeJoy (home cleaning)" ---- fuuuuuuck you all

Totally would have used SnapGoods.

http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html

What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valley? I feel like I understand Pittsburgh pretty well, because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley pretty well because that's where I live now. Could you get that kind of startup ecosystem going here?

When I agreed to speak here, I didn't think I'd be able to give a very optimistic talk. I thought I'd be talking about what Pittsburgh could do to become a startup hub, very much in the subjunctive. Instead I'm going to talk about what Pittsburgh can do.

What changed my mind was an article I read in of all places the New York Times food section. The title was "Pittsburgh's Youth-Driven Food Boom." To most people that might not even sound interesting, let alone something related to startups. But it was electrifying to me to read that title. I don't think I could pick a more promising one if I tried. And when I read the article I got even more excited. It said "people ages 25 to 29 now make up 7.6 percent of all residents, up from 7 percent about a decade ago." Wow, I thought, Pittsburgh could be the next Portland. It could become the cool place all the people in their twenties want to go live.

It's true that people aged 25 to 29 tend to be open to trying new things and to accepting risks, which is generally necessary for prompting rapid change. They are also drawn to living in places where they can meet other people aged 25 to 29.

"youth-driven food boom" is very corny and this dude basing his talk & his excitement on a nytimes food article is especially corny but i do think the range of "cool places all the people in their twenties want to go live" could change overtime as places like austin, portland, bay area, nyc increasingly become completely unaffordable. idk though. people in their twenties are okay w/ living in shitty conditions if the location is cool. i think maybe more "cool places all the young people in their 30s with families want to settle down" is more what i am thinking of

It's p ridiculous to think that "cool place where people in their 20s want to move" = enough to fuel becoming the "next silicon valley."

Also I assume every ex-industrial city in America is trying to do the same thing right now, and I don't see what most of them have to offer other than competing with each other to lowball tax incentives or w/e.

you don't think cost of living + stable cultural institutions is an incentive?

low cost of living that is

idk i am very much speaking from my own personal experience especially since i grew up in an ex-industrial city trying to revitalize itself and i am considering moving back there. but i currently live in an expensive city w/ a thriving tech industry and i have a decent job at a major research university but we are effectively priced out of this city. i love it here but we really have no sustainable future here, it is not even that expensive here compared w/ bay area or nyc. being able to buy a sweet house in a smaller city that may be suffering but has stable cultural + higher ed institutions is a huge draw. i mean we can't even really afford a 1br condo here.

pittsburgh rules

I visited 4-5 years ago and it was a fuckin' blast. weird to get around tho, coming from LA.

fwiw i too have heard that pittsburgh rules

must be that extra 0.6% of people age 25-29 over the last decade

i've never really been to pittsburgh! drove near it a million times since i grew up in cleveland but i've never really spent time there. fwiw i have also heard great things about it. from what i understand they have been much more successful in seeking a post-industrialization cultural renaissance

*than cleveland that is

I went to a gastro pub type place that was in a renovated cathedral. p legit even if I dont even remember if the food was good.

its also kind of like sf in that it's very hill-ey

surely all the new youngs have bernified it a little

i know this is kind of sudden but should we all form a startup there? it all seems so...undisrupted

disrupt pittsburgh by making a sandwich without french fries on it

omg that is such bullshit, cleveland has the same thing, there is a sandwich chain called "PANINI'S" but their sandwiches are ...not actual paninis? they are filled w/ fries and served on thick cut untoasted white bread, fuck that

saw that PG piece linked as "very clever satire" which makes it great

lots of cheap bars in 'tsburgh, too. played a crusthole basement show there 2 winters ago and then one of the bands brought us to several bars that had like, 2$ drinks

When I lived in Baltimore there was a restaurant that served what they called "Pittsburgh-style sandwiches" with french fries on them and it always made me feel Pittsburgh must be a glorious place

http://www.clickhole.com/article/pittsburgh-new-austin-austin-we-hoped-and-dreamed--1227

“What of Portland,” indeed. For years, tales of old claimed the Pacific Northwest city was the promised land—a new Eden upon this earth, where men and women would be free to think, and live, and love. A blossoming Eden teeming with hope and food trucks.

But the old tales are clear reminders that the devil himself could not craft a trap so beautiful in its deceitfulness.

quality lol, was reminded of robert caro

looooooooooool

20 years ago my mom worked for a pittsburgh-area local-government consortium, and their foremost long-term concern was 'how do we keep young adults from leaving?'

it seems like a worthwhile endeavor -- whether you want to create a silicon valley or not -- having decent jobs in a place where people might want and could afford to live. it's a virtuous circle, and making the place seem 'cool' is a low-cost input.

(my real father, who lives in houston, periodically wonders aloud why so many companies have headquarters in nyc where it's so expensive -- why not just put everyone in a cheap office park in topeka or albany? whatever dude.)

tbh i had much the same reaction to that nyt foodie article that the silicon valley guy did -- that would *never* have happened when i grew up. and yeah, gentrification kind of sucks, but being the kind of place where ppl reminisce about how kraft american slices used to be so much better is both worse and a dead end.

btw the fries-on-sandwich thing is just good marketing; no one ate that when i was a kid, because it's stupid

Pittsburgh's probably going to "happen" if it isn't already, hope they're ready to upzone.

I'm sure it can be the next Portland or a regional sort of Portland, I just think the jump from there to being an international tech capital is a long one.

Probably a lot of these cities can become like local portlands if the trend continues toward young people wanting to be in cities into their 30s and even beyond.

I was friends with some musicians and artists who lived in Pittsburgh and they were pretty chill. Definitely left a good mark on my mind about the place ... seemed a lot better than the cut-throat hipsterism of NYC. Honestly, I'm sick of New York, it's like all the things I think make it worth it just keeps shrinking, and rents keep ascending into the stratosphere, and obnoxious rich shits are multiplying by unthinkable numbers, which I didn't think was even possible. It seems like all the traditional "good cities" are going that way, so maybe it's time to look at the "b-list" cities.

Portland is a nice town and I like it here, but hearing people talk about it as if it were some sort of ideal paradise feels kind of strange to someone who grew up here. We need Mt. St. Helens to blow up again and dump a couple cubic miles worth of volcanic ash on our heads to bring those expectations back down to earth. But if the only remedy is that 9.0 earthquake we're due for, I think I'd rather live with all the starry-eyed newcomers and take a pass on the universal ruin and devastation for a while longer.

Xp I think it's been true for at least a decade that NYC is not really a good place to live the bohemian life - too expensive, too competitive.

It seems like all the traditional "good cities" are going that way, so maybe it's time to look at the "b-list" cities.

― larry appleton, Wednesday, April 13, 2016 8:42 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea this feels true to me

Every US city in the top three tiers needs to start upzoning and making inclusive and egalitarian housing plans about five years ago, but, failing that, right now.

I've thought about Philly for years. I think the things that keep me from doing it are (1) closeness to in-laws who help with kids, (2) my job, although I have contacts in Philly for similar kinds of work (3) slightly embarrassed about this one, but just a feeling that Philly is *less safe* compared to what I've gotten used to. Like stuff has happened to friends there that I don't hear about happening to friends in NYC.

But yeah, NYC does suck in certain ways. I've gotten very accustomed to it but it's not the place I'd probably choose if I were starting over.

In my musician days I though it seemed like a much better place to be, but I wound up in Jersey City for various reasons, and didn't really like it much.

philly's the one i think about too

xxxp I'm an office drone, I'm not necessarily talking full bohemian here. Even in the past 10 years things have changed a lot, and they're changing in such a way that it's like, what's the point anymore. Nearly everyone I know who lived here through that time has left, mostly to start families, some because the places where they worked closed down and were replaced by I don't know, BMW dealership/art gallery hybrids with their own on-site artisan micro-brew. Maybe my own priorities have changed. I'm going to soak up the educational and career opportunities while I can, though.

Safety in NYC is definitely a bonus. I moved back to the suburbs in NJ for a while; a nice looking middle class place just outside of the city, but I got to taste some street violence here. 10 years living in NYC and I never once had a problem, and I get to the suburbs and it's like a totally different world, safety wise. Weird how things have shifted.

aw yeah baby https://www.desmoinesmetro.com/en/dsm_metro_info/rankings/

I feel like Milwaukee is filled with very cool young people who live well and don't really care whether Milwaukee is the next Portland. (Milwaukee is not the next Portland.)

there are very nice neighborhoods just outside philadelphia in terms of safety + family friendliness and yr like a 10 minute drive into the city

NYC has a lot to offer, I just don't think I'm the kind of person for whom those things matter enough for it to make it worth my while. I mean we have the "best" in so many cultural and culinary type things. I like museums a lot, for example, and NYC is great for those. But I have two small kids and live out in Queens, which is the only place I can really afford a family-friendly life in (i.e. a reasonable-sized apartment, decent public schools), and it's such a schlep to go to the Manhattan museums as it is -- either drive and pay a lot for parking, or take two small kids on the subway and change trains. All the "high" performing arts stuff is great but expensive, especially with babysitter. I'd actually love to see classical music concerts more often, for example, I just can't realistically do it very often. Same thing with the good restaurants, and honestly I love food but I really don't give too much of a shit about high end restaurants with big deal chefs. I enjoy them, but I could go the rest of my life without eating in one. I find the faddy stuff that excitement gets manufactured about (cronuts) boring, I like nature, and I don't really like convenience culture. I also, weirdly, don't enjoy Central Park all that much when I get to it, I find it too crowded and overwhelming -- it feels more like a destination than a park, if that makes sense. In fact too many parts of the city are like that for me, always feeling surrounded by tourists and strangers.

I live in a nondescript red brick co-op in an area that is many square blocks of near-identical, non-descript red brick co-ops. I sometimes call them bourgeois housing projects. The commercial stuff in my neighborhood is pretty much indistinguishable from a suburb with a walkable downtown, and not an especially nice one (Gap, Banana Republic, Verizon Store, three Starbucks, mediocre overpriced restaurants, TGI Fridays), and I have this butt-ugly quasi-highway called Queens Boulevard in the center of my neighborhood. I have better QOL than a lot of people I know but it's still not great.

I kind of feel for you here, because it seems like you have a setup that's pretty similar to what most people around America have (you're used to it, it works, it's fine, in-laws nearby which is kinda huge when you have kids) but it's embedded in this cultural expectation that living in New York is supposed to be AMAZING and also AN IMPOSSIBLE CRISIS when for you it is neither and I feel like that would create some kind of internal dissonance

Yeah, actually I think it's sort of the feeling that I have to work harder and have a better job than most people just to have an ordinary standard of living, not that there's actually anything wrong with the standard of living. I never actually aimed to live here for all the "AMAZING NYC" stuff, it just sort of worked out that we live here. But that stuff sometimes feels like this fantastical simulacra that exists just beyond the threshold of my actual life.

Like I have more stress for that same standard of living.

My own issue is maybe I'm getting older. When I first moved to NYC I was in my early 20s, and I was a wannabe hipster scumbag. New York was awesome for that. Now that I'm a little more mature, it's like, have a normal life in a more expensive, more stressful environment ... it's worth some thought.

tbh most people, especially parents, tend to live that way -- commute to a job, spend the rest of your time in and around a neighborhood, with the exception of occasional excursions for shopping/entertainment or regular semi-commutes for kid activities (sports, dance class, music lessons)

Silicon Valley is kind of a weird one in that a lot of smaller companies are now in SF, but the larger employers remain in big suburban campuses. Apple, Google, etc have a number of people doing the reverse city-to-suburb commute, but a lot of people who are settled in those businesses live in the outlying suburbs closer to work

afaik Google is still working on a campus in Boulder, Colorado, which is relatively self-contained and would have a minimal commute, at least until housing dries up completely and people are driving from the next town over

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cihoxn-UgAAlbU0.jpg

apparently marc andreessen posted something about how india would be better off if it was still a colony

He didn't quite say that - he said anti-colonialism had been disastrous for the Indian economy for decades. It was in the context of the country rejecting Facebook's 'free basics' model.

sounds like a moldbugism xp

facebook's free basics thing is a poor fit for India and is pretty much the most neo-colonial capitalist endeavor

Yep. There was a good Guardian article about it last week.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-free-basics-india-zuckerberg

Senior people at Facebook, the executive said, had convinced themselves they had special pull with the prime minister. “They believed Modi would do it for them,” he said, recalling meetings where people discussed the similarities in “managing” India and Africa: “It worked in Burundi, so it should work in India.”

*reads up about the people of Burundi and its government*

ummm

Smartest guys in the room

andreessen framing it as some anti-western influence thing when it was actually indians having a public discussion about net neutrality and corporate influence

and people in silicon valley wonder why we're so skeptical of their techno-utopianism

Zuckerberg is apparently going to meet with Dana Perino and Glenn Beck after the pathetic WATB fallout from FB's insipid "lock j-school grads in a basement and make them do 3 line summaries of news" experiment. Maybe he can finally convince social conservatives like Curt Schilling to start using Facebook.

perhaps ‎andrew schlafly will be inspired to start his own version of facebook

misread as andrew ridgely, was surprised

fingers crossed xp

I miss the days when the super-rich would just start dumb ineffectual charities and not try to usurp the role of government.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/plutocrats-at-work-how-big-philanthropy-undermines-democracy

this "free basics" thing has very little to do with charity and a hell of a lot to do with getting more facebook users and expanding their advertising network

Caek that essay is terrific, thanks for that link.

yup i enjoyed the opening rant i saved my highlights which were...

“One hundred years later, big philanthropy still aims to solve the world’s problems—with foundation trustees deciding what is a problem and how to fix it. They may act with good intentions, but they define “good.” The arrangement remains thoroughly plutocratic: it is the exercise of wealth-derived power in the public sphere with minimal democratic controls and civic obligations.”

“The main rationale for both the tax exemption and the charitable contribution tax deduction (created in 1917) is to stimulate private giving. Yet this is a weak rationale when applied to the super-rich; a more effective way to stimulate their giving would be to raise the estate and capital gains taxes. It is a meaningless rationale for the 65 percent of American taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions and therefore can’t use the charity tax break.”

“Sycophancy is built into the structure of philanthropy: grantees shape their work to please their benefactors; they are perpetual supplicants for future funding. As a result, foundation executives and trustees almost never receive critical feedback. They are treated like royalty, which breeds hubris—the occupational disorder of philanthro-barons”

“When the creator of a mega-foundation says, “I can do what I want because it’s my money,” he or she is wrong. A substantial portion of the wealth—35 percent or more, depending on tax rates—has been diverted from the public treasury, where voters would have determined its use.”

The fact that gigantic charitable foundations, such as the Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundation, are merely alternative methods for their boards of directors (often controlled by their founder or by their founder's heirs) to exercise power over society is an open secret. This was one of those compromises that were made at the time the income tax and estate taxes were being imposed on the plutocrats who arose in the last decades of the 19th century. It was always understood that this arrangement allowed wealthy people to continue to control their money as they saw fit, provided some sort of philanthropic fig leaf was applied to the transaction.

i ended up looking into the alternatives in case i am a billionaire one day and it seems the options are either:

voluntarily pay down the national debt (lol this is dumb) https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm

and "gifts to the united states"

http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html
Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called "Gifts to the United States." This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to the address below.

hmm we should have beers more often

your treat

tangentially reminds me of the savings bonds my grandma bought for me. not the most interest-bearing investment, but at the time they were something like 6% compounded annually. so $250 worth of bonds every year or two turned into a couple grand for me after 20 years

current bond rate is something like .1% for EE series :(

I have no money rn but I believe in the American Dream xxp

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CixMwpfXAAA5rvI.jpg

dude is disrupting the shit out of the status quo

can we talk about this
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/may/17/rentberry-sparks-fears-housing-crisis/

jesus christ

gross

omg what how can that possibly be legal

Great. Something else for the leftists to whine about. "But I DESERVE that big, nice apartment in the chic area for what it would have gone for 25 years ago! I can't afford to pay more, but that's where I need to live!" Shaddap.
Reply 0 ▲0 ▼

‒

Free market. No one complains about eBay. And Sf has rent control. Those entitled people just cry about everything. Move away from the city if you won't put in the effort to afford it.

I also wonder how it would work logistically -- Does rentberry meet you and check you out? Does it do a credit check? Does it hold your security deposit money for you and verify that you actually have the ability to pay the rent you bid?

If you don't pay, the landlord can just use GoonBerry.

http://www.theonion.com/article/ayahuasca-shaman-dreading-another-week-guiding-tec-52941

this is excellent https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/

Good writing, but I wonder who all of these tech-obsessed techies are that spend every minute talking about tech and going to meetups and talking about funding at parties and everything. I've been in the valley for a long time, and this seems to be a particular breed of nerd that I haven't come across too often. The author makes it seem pervasive. Maybe she needs a new group of friends...

cross-posted from the "buying a house" thread but figured it could go here too http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/05/the-rise-of-million-dollar-homes-in-san-francisco-and-the-bay-area/483485/

crazy

thanks for that caek, that was really good.

at least when she was talking about the office day, it was v redolent of my own experience in a medium sized pre-ipo startup

schwantz i agree that your social life is what you make of them to an extent, and it's very easy to avoid the tech scene in nyc. but this rang true

We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture.

how many ppl is "medium-sized" approximately?

i don't know how accurately it depicts the silicon valley culture and don't really care too much, but the writing was excellent.

i joined at just below 200, people had been saying IPO next year for a year or two at that stage. still no IPO but they're at about 500 employees i think

that sounds reasonable, I wasn't sure where the line merged into large

anything more than like... 50 - 100 people, maybe, seems like a medium-sized company? I'm sure there's a gartner study that tells me exactly where the quadrants are

Under Dunbar's number, small company. Over Dunbar's number, medium company. Over 10x Dunbar's number, large company.

https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Standards_Table.pdf

Information businesses generally are categorized as "large" at >~$30M or >1000 employees apparently.

hmm, tricky one. I think my employer fits under a couple different categories

just making it towards the end of caek's article, which I v much enjoyed (with all the usual tinges of bitterness)

I tell her that the first woman engineer is also the only engineer without SSH access to the servers

sad lol of recognition, from across the world and considerably further down the glamour (and pay) scale

lmao yeah i listened to a lot of industrial music as a teen too

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/735135973323898880

He didn't quite say that - he said anti-colonialism had been disastrous for the Indian economy for decades. It was in the context of the country rejecting Facebook's 'free basics' model.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Sunday, May 15, 2016 10:49 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he donated tonnes of money to mitt and supports his politics so this makes sense

this is excellent https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, May 23, 2016 10:22 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

great read thanks

goole wtf is that

http://gizmodo.com/how-san-francisco-plans-to-use-self-driving-cars-to-fix-1778306148

Done right, self-driving cars can also alleviate the city’s affordable housing crisis. “It’s a space issue,” said Tim Papandreou, chief innovation officer for San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), who recently spearheaded the city’s big proposal. “We have the data to prove we won’t need the space on the streets anymore. But if we do both shared and electric automated vehicles, we’re not just freeing up space in the street, we’re freeing up space in the lots.”

San Francisco’s vision is one of the seven finalists for the Smart City Challenge, the US Department of Transportation-sponsored contest to turn one American city into a transportation utopia. As one of the finalists, San Francisco received $100,000 to refine its proposal, and could get up to $50 million more for implementation when the winning Smart City is announced this summer.

SMDH WTF $50M bonfire waiting to happen.

You know what could alleviate your housing crisis is density and fixing the fucking transit systems you've already got
but no - robot cars will save us all! do they work? no! but free money for local companies that are already made of money and are basically all tax cheats! yes!

otfm

Done right, self-driving cars can also alleviate the city’s affordable housing crisis

love when you can check out after the first sentence

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2016/0517/20160517_071827_google-stuckped-0518.jpg

This diagram from a patent granted May 17 to Google shows how a pedestrian hit by a self-driving car would remain stuck to the front of the vehicle with glue, theoretically to prevent further injuries from being carried along and then thrown. (U.S. Patent Office)

lol what the hell

tombot otm

what could possibly go wrong w pedestrians glued to the front of cars

well if they're glued to a self-driving car that never needs parking then they aren't part of the housing problem anymore

just make the self-driving cars out of homeless people and skip the glue

Crumple zones!

The Collateral remake will be spectacular

You're also going to have to glue the first pedestrian that gets hit so that the next one doesn't get thrown.

Peter Bromberg
Energetic, Positive, Confident, Assertive Motivator-Visionary Influencer-Driver personality.

I am a former Microsoft C# .NET MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for 10 years , author, and UnEducator based in the Orlando Florida area. I write mostly about .NET, formerly for eggheadcafe and currently at my programming blog at peterbromberg.net. I'm an ex-jazz musician and stockbroker who dreams of being a philanthropist and paying less in taxes. I believe in the US Constitution and free-market "Austrian" economic theories. I'm also a "climate realist" and believe in good science, which is never "settled".

As a computer programmer with over 25 years of hands-on experience in designing and developing large-scale enterprise applications, I am an expert at solving business problems.

I'm on Google+ because I enjoy engaging with others. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the G+ ecosystem makes this much easier.

I'm a long time Mensa member, but I do not believe that possessing a high IQ makes you smart. My favorite quotation is: "Wrong is Right" -- Thelonius Monk.

I tend to be skeptical of everything, and believe that is a healthy way to approach ideas.

Some subjects that I am interested in are: Art, Jazz, Classical, Photography, Politics, Science, Erotica, Psychology,Economics. One of my hobbies is creating digital photocollage with my original photographs and Autodesk Maya software.

Most all of my posts are public, and I only have two circles: Close Friends (I get notifications) and Friends (Everybody else). You graduate to "Close Friends" when you engage with me and I see that we have some things in common. I am very accessible, but get to know me first by interacting with me before you send me a Hangout request.

NOTE: I occasionally make controversial posts or comments in order to stir debate. This rubs some people the wrong way. That's too bad. My comments are my own, and do not represent in any way those of any employer or client, past or present. I encourage civil debate, whether you agree with me or not, but if you engage in ad-hominem personal insults on one of my posts you are gonna get blocked in a New York second.

Excerpts provided by me are pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine for educational and discussion purposes per Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

these self-aggrandizing tech libertarian bio blurbs are irresistible to me

amazing

I tend to be skeptical of everything

Energetic, Positive, Confident, Assertive Motivator-Visionary Influencer-Driver personality.

http://i.imgur.com/P8wV1vq.png

so happy I am never in a role that requires me to write a bio

brb adapting that guy's bio to be my okcupid profile

feel like it's probably reasonably simple to write a bio that doesn't present yourself as an enormous pulsating tool

that thinks it rules from the centre of the ultraworld?

, Erotica,

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus

wait they actually thought Google now was a huge looming threat? lol

How about Facebook’s first version of Search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends, and since discontinued?

rip Facebook search I miss u

good piece

on reading old issues of Wired from the 90s

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/on-reading-issues-of-wired-from-1993-to-1995

I don't get why they killed facebook search, it wasn't some life-changing product, it just made their search engine marginally more useful

Maybe I don't remember what that was, because it seems to me like they have a search function that works ok and certainly better than the one they originally had.

i want someone to write about the change in Facebook Event visibility

at some point you could see any (public) Event anyone you were friends with was invited to. and then it switched to only events that you were personally invited to. and now i think they charge the promoter for greater visibility. i was helping run a venue space last year and now it's super fucked, you can't even invite members of a group you manage but only your personal friends. so only personal friends of promoters get explicitly invited

anyways it used to be great cause you could easily find out about stuff going on that you werent necessarily directly plugged into. and i swear to god this change had discernible effects in montreal music + party scene (and i assume elsewhere)

Huh, I can see 'Events Popular in your Network' and 'Related to your Events History' AND 'Popular Events Nearby' on the web and I occasionally get a notification "Friends of yours are going to an event nearby", which seems a Zuckertastic double-edged sword.

lol every time I get that notification I'm like "Holy shit, there is actually an event in Forest Hills?" And then I realize it just means "New York City." But it fools me every time.

i've got "friends are going to an event nearby" when it's on in brighton. or yeah, just "hey your friend also lives in london". events has been fucked for a long time for various reasons, i can't even keep track of them all since it's been so annoying for so long in so many different ways.

yeah you can see some stuff but i know for a fact they're withholding 90% of it from you

they killed fb search because it gave an instant view to all the data you have "visible" to the public/friends/friends-of-friends

it's one thing to not mind if a random friend-of-friend knows where you work, but when some creep (*cough*) can think "hmm this girl named Sarah said she works at that local giant place" and you search "women named Sarah who work at giant place and live in this city" and she pops up it's fuckin' weird

Or, say, "women between ages of 18 and 35 with no relationship status or single relationship status who live in.." and get every person who has their gender, age, and vague location set to public

that makes sense. it would work fine if everyone had sensible privacy settings, but fb has reason to push people away from sensible privacy settings.

obviously that shit is way useful for serving targeted ads, but randos or even advertisers shouldn't get more than "12 users matched your criteria"

I'd argue their privacy settings aren't that bad as long as there's not a way to troll that shit! Even if I were to program something, I wouldn't get a list of all ppl in my area given broad criteria because that's not public

public to find manually versus public to broadly search are two pretty diff things

Miss that search.

my man

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/peter-thiel.html

he's a christian too??!? how does one person become such an intellectual trainwreck

Social maladaption + money

right obviously but i mean, i always thought the point of being a nerd and/or having money was that it freed you from kowtowing to all the myths and cant

plus what kind of christian wants to extend life indefinitely, IT'S ALREADY EXTENDED EVERLASTINGLY

maybe a la the protestant ethic the idea is to extend life indefinitely in order to obtain maximal wealth and thus maximal salvation!

yeesh http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/14/zenefits-is-laying-off-another-106-people-and-offering-others-a-buyout/

https://medium.com/thinkpiece-dot-club/techs-scapegoat-complex-38a4bfb37f22#.mcz4fwrf1

ryan, you will be so into this

!

are we to presume that Thiel took classes from Girard.

Michel Serres is at Stanford too. if he wasn't so loopy i could imagine silicon valley types getting into him.

that was what i gathered but i dunno

well this happened

http://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Self-driving-car-driver-died-after-crash-in-8334982.php

feel like self-driving car is not something i want to be beta-testing

So far, way better than human-driven cars...

I'm quite capable of driving under a truck without digital intervention

theres one for the old silicon valley resume

The deaths per miles driven stay that Tesla is citing is a little misleading - that number is going to include drunk driving accidents, people not wearing seat belts etc.

granted a drunk person is obviously a lot safer in a self driving car.

unless the car is drunk

That's at least one Herbie film, right?

Seen so many techno-utopians on reddit and elsewhere screaming that it's the driver's fault for not taking over the autopilot when they saw the truck turning, not the software's fault. a) if you are not already driving the car, your reaction time is gonna be a lot slower, and b) if the autopilot works correctly for the first two months you have a car, of course you're gonna assume it works correctly all the time. people compare it to cruise control, but cruise control is waaaay more predictable. I don't even understand why people think an autopilot you have to monitor vigilantly is even a good idea

I don't even understand why people think an autopilot you have to monitor vigilantly is even a good idea.

Bingo! We have a winner!

This is not exactly a situation like airliners, where the human pilots are highly trained, highly paid professionals, with the built-in redundancy of a co-pilot who can take over for the main pilot at any moment. Plus there aren't many other objects to hit at 30,000 feet. In that situation an autopilot is just a tool for use by professionals. Ordinary cars and their drivers do not meet any of these qualifications.

even w airline pilots in the autopilot era you get things like air france 447, where the autopilot fails and at least one of the pilots hasn't actually played microsoft flight simulator enough (and/or is sufficiently panicked+confused) to know you nose down in a stall

monitoring an autopilot vigilantly sounds like it would take more mental effort than driving

i agree that an autopilot you have to monitor in a quick response situation like driving seems lethal, but 1 death in, what, a year?, seems like it's less lethal than letting the human drive.

1 death in, what, a year?

tbf, human-piloted cars were driven a few more miles and hours last year than the self-driving ones

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-driver-killed-autopilot-self-driving-car-harry-potter

Tesla driver killed while using autopilot was watching Harry Potter, witness says

Inattentius collisio!

one third of automobile deaths result from drunk driving and more than half involve no seatbelt, so musk's comparison needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. So far it is certainly not apparent that self driving cars are as safe as human-driven by non drunks where you are wearing a restraint.

Ouch from NYT: “[Joshua Brown] had said, ‘For something to catch Elon Musk’s eye, I can die and go to heaven now,’” said a neighbor, Krista Kitchen, choking up. “He was absolutely thrilled – and then a couple weeks later he died.”

If this was a subplot on Silicon Valley we would be laughing

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmXghC9WAAAfbrU.jpg

http://toyworth.com/browse/Knight/2000/Crash/Set/action/figure//1983//Knight/Rider/Accessories/100/lrg-packaged-front.jpg

Rex: I was still young enough that I wanted to have a, like, a party hangout kind of life, and Seattle…seemed interesting at the time, but man, I just kept meeting people that — I always say it’s a city that has product managers who want to be vice presidents.

Paul: Ooof.

Rex: Like it’s a lot of, just…

Rich: Wow.

Paul: [wounded noise]

Rex: A lot of Amazon people…

Rich: That’s a rough tagline for Seattle tourism right there.

they're easy to spot and avoid tho

caek, what is that from

sorry https://trackchanges.postlight.com/podcast-20-rex-sorgatz-the-other-side-of-fate-2151da51f998#.ivs4e4udy

hey I know that Paul Ford guy, was at his wedding and everything

what?!

I'm surprised at the connection, but mostly surprised you aren't commenting on a thread about his wedding saying that you didn't go but heard it was a bad ceremony

he married the woman who officiated my own wedding. we aren't best buds or anything, but his wife is an old college friend of mine

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CnCBn18VMAAfqhw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ZeqyR0o.jpg

Benioff is one of the least terrible though

Like, he actually uses some of his money & influence on actual progressive political causes in the real world, he's not trying to invent Utopia in a west coast bunker and export it to the rest of us dummies

Yeah he's ok w me

Tweet was inappropriate but its undeniable social media has been crucial un bringing this issue wide attention

he is sorry

Source?

Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it

yeah idk look at LBI's image

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CnXjMNOUsAAztY1.jpg:small

idk what 'expensify' is but they do realize the Lord of the Flies was a rotting pig's head on a stick, right?

oddly enough, so is the ceo of expensify

should we have a thread for Sourpuss Valley techno-dystopianism?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/pokemon-go-invasion-oliver-stone-snowden-surveillance/

It manipulates your behaviour. It has happened already quite a bit on the Internet, but you’ll see it everywhere—you'll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave and they will make the mockup that matches how you behave and feed you. It’s what they call totalitarianism.

lol the promos for that oliver stone snowden film look horrible

I enjoy the work of Joseph Gordon-Levitt but hearing him do that monotone "I do very important work" voice made me shake my head

Seems relevant, in terms of mocking SV shit:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/magazine/the-oppressive-gospel-of-minimalism.html

the author retweeted this which is definitely an early stage homeware startup look right now

https://twitter.com/333333333433333/status/759038739951788032

I think that's the shade of pink that BUTT uses

He now carries nothing but a bag of clothes and a backpack containing a computer, an iPad and a smartphone. “I have zero other possessions,” he writes

Other than clothing and all of the world's knowledge, information, communications channels and entertainment at my fingertips, I have no possessions.

that's all I took on vacation and while I was surviving, I really missed my shit

scratch that, I just had the iPad and phone in one bag and clothes in another. even then, I kept accumulating magazines and books and more shit. I am an expert shit-acquirer

all of the world's knowledge, information, communications channels and entertainment

vast amounts of this are not on the internet but sure

no, it's all there. you just haven't found it yet.

so how about that Peter Thiel, living off the blood of youth? what a guy

“I don’t hold onto all the things society tells me to hold onto.”

deal_with_it.gif

"i want to live on a barge in the ocean, with other libertarians."
"huh ok."
"forever. i need blood."

wait was is this blood thing about

Google it.

surprised the Soylent guy's escapades in "experimental housing" didn't make it to this thread yet

Peter Thiel is Dracula

vast amounts of this are not on the internet but sure

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 1, 2016 3:59 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Obv did not mean that literally, just kind of lol @ people who are like "I only travel with clothing and an iphone and ipad" when that's the equivalent of traveling with many libraries' worth of books and periodicals, maps, directories, music and movies, etc.

yeah if you can get any fuckin' wifi that doesn't suck

I only travel with a sock to hide my genitals and a CB radio

and a bigass antenna for the CB

I guess you could put that in the sock, too

idk if this is the right thread but the combination of start-up / new tech and complete gullibility around Theranos is fascinating and points to a wider issue around disruptive technology that sounds amazing but doesn't actually work.

Elizabeth Holmes' chutzpah is remarkable:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/elizabeth-holmes-presentation-theranos-data

From a paywalled FT article:

“It is a bait and switch,” said Dr Geoffrey Baird, an associate professor of laboratory medicine at the University of Washington. “We were told we were going to hear about the science of Theranos, but this is a new speculative prototype idea.”

“What we just saw was BS,” he added. “It is not the device they used clinically, and we saw nothing that tells us that these assays are valid or even safe for patients.”

John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, Ms Holmes’ alma mater, said the presentation was “better than nothing” but bemoaned the fact that the company still had not produced any peer-reviewed research.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler?currentPage=all

What exactly happens in the machines is treated as a state secret, and Holmes’s description of the process was comically vague: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.” She added that, thanks to “miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples.”

Board members are clearly charmed by Holmes. She is a careful listener, and she is unnervingly serene; employees say that they can’t remember an instance when she raised her voice. “She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison,” Perry, who knew Jobs, said. “She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”

Kissinger advised Holmes to concentrate on building up Theranos in the U.S. before launching it in developing nations, he said, so that “it would not look like we were experimenting on them.”

Theranos has been a busted flush for a while - there's a great article from Vanity Fair from May (and one from Wired from last year) excoriating the expansion of silicon valley tech press breathlessness to medical matters (I thought I read about it on here, but I guess not?)

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/theranos-silicon-valley-media

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/theranos-scandal-exposes-the-problem-with-techs-hype-cycle/

iirc theranos had some licensing revoked and it's valued lower than their outstanding debts

Yep, went from being valued at $9bn to practically zero within a few weeks and Holmes has a two year ban on operating a lab pending.

http://blog.traintracks.io/a-swede-returns-to-silicon-valley-from-china-2/

My first experience of the States and of Silicon Valley was absolutely soul-crushingly disappointing. I landed in San Francisco and felt like I had traveled back in time. Far from the expected glass towers of a technological utopia, what I found was a surprisingly run down city that reminded me of traveling in Eastern Europe. It seemed to be all pot and potholes, and the culture was difficult to navigate. I was told not to discuss religion and politics, which is really all we talk about in Sweden, and I was confused by the sheer amount of narcissistic Ayn Rand followers.

What's the point of innovation if you're not building a better society?

I encountered levels of homelessness and mental illness that I was entirely unprepared for, but was repeatedly discouraged from donating any spare change by my new American community. It's not your problem, that was the mantra that un-ironically flowed from the lips of entrepreneurs that otherwise convinced themselves that they were making the world a better place, presumably for themselves and the people who were their problem. There was something absurd and almost obscene about watching the technocrats step over and around the homeless to get to jobs where they're given free food and drink.

As a Swede coming to the States, I was disillusioned. I had, as I think many young entrepreneurs have, idolized Silicon Valley as a utopian vision of an idealistic but well-meaning band of technocrats building the foundations for a just and democratic society, but in its place I found vanity, pettiness and greed. Not only did the emperor have no clothes, but the naked corpus revealed was unappetizing to my Swedish quasi-socialist ideals. Ultimately, I felt alone in Silicon Valley... I left.

Well, yeah.

yeah, San Francisco, what shithole, not enough glass towers.

the rest of silicon valley is way more depressing than san francisco

all the money in the world is being funneled into the area and it's just a bunch of freeways and shitty office parks

sweden cutting edge in minimalist lifestyles though

yeah I mean I mostly agree with what that guy says, I just don't really share his affection for glass towers

never known anyone in SF to be shy about discussing religion or politics

well and he picked beijing instead so

surprised the Soylent guy's escapades in "experimental housing" didn't make it to this thread yet

― El Tomboto, Monday, August 1, 2016 5:25 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We got into it over here - Soylent - the end of food

The thing about Sweden guy is that he's so embedded in the ideology that his critique becomes incoherent. I had, as I think many young entrepreneurs have, idolized Silicon Valley as a utopian vision of an idealistic but well-meaning band of technocrats building the foundations for a just and democratic society... Er - - - so wait, which is it, technocracy or democracy? If you're actually surprised to find that technocrats treat capitalism's inequities as externalities (or as invisible), then it sounds like maybe you don't know much about technocrats. The "glass towers" thing, which equates the built fabric of a city with its degree of managed social progress, just layers that over with weird throwbacks to the interwar Modernist imaginary - when the technocrats are in charge, everyone will live in glass towers of light and air!

"no i did actually want absurd utopian futurism, you americans are just blind greedy sickos"

Dr. C otm

Yeah it's kind of obvious he's circumscribing the real narrative which is that the money in the SV dried up for him but the PRC has backed up to his office in a cash truck.

Elizabeth Holmes' chutzpah is remarkable

I find her ability to snow people astounding. I'm obviously primed and biased because of what I know now about the company and her in particular but watching her speak it's just really hard to fathom how so many folks didn't immediately grasp that they were / are dealing with a total bullshitter. Watch her at 0:54 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiNFXcI9Rb8 This person is a bad liar. She's not good. What the hell is wrong with people?

sorry https://trackchanges.postlight.com/podcast-20-rex-sorgatz-the-other-side-of-fate-2151da51f998#.ivs4e4udy

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 5 July 2016 18:05 Bookmark

are there any other podcasts like this ppl might reccommend? stumbled across it randomly a while ago (i don't work in or have a specific interest in tech) but i really like it, always funny and perceptive

(can post them here Podcasts not to derail)

there is https://gimletmedia.com/show/reply-all/ which is kind of like track changes meets bbc radio 4 home truths

oh man, had never actually watched a video of Elizabeth Holmes before. TBH hadn't even paid attention wrt Theranos until it became a scandal. This is like Madoff-level shit.

had not known the theranos board features bill frist, sam nunn, william perry, and henry kissinger

(i see in a nyer profile from 2014)

(the one that rtc posted)

Another "well yeah" thinkpiece: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification

In 2011, a New York artist and designer named Laurel Schwulst started perusing Airbnb listings across the world in part to find design inspiration for her own apartment. "I viewed it almost as Google Street View for inside homes," she says. Schwulst began saving images that appealed to her and posting them on a Tumblr called "Modern Life Space." But she had a creeping feeling something was happening across the platform. "The Airbnb experience is supposed to be about real people and authenticity," Schwulst says. "But so many of them were similar," whether in Brooklyn, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, or Santiago.

There was the prevalence of mass-produced but tasteful furniture, for one. "It’s kind of an extension of Ikea showrooms," she says. But the similarities went beyond mass-production. The ideal Airbnb is both unfamiliar and completely recognizable: a sprinkling of specific cultural symbols of a place mixed with comprehensible devices, furniture, and decoration. "It’s funny how you want these really generic things but also want authenticity, too," Schwulst says.

Funny that...

That's how you stage a home to be sold.
You want to get that super classy hotel vibe, where the things are nice, but also don't have any individual touch or imprint that could be interpreted as personal expression.
That's why all the RE agents and the stager told us first to take all of our books and turn them backwards, with the spines facing inwards, and then later just to put them all in storage (along with the shelves). Anything that says "other people live here" is a turn-off.

The idea of finding design inspiration from Airbnb would never occur to me. That's like finding musical inspiration from the Weather Channel.

I'm several days late to this but just lolling at Peter Thiel. I got quite into reading about de Grey and the eternal longevity people a little while ago (I can never remember what they're actually called, I think I might have discovered them on some David Avocado Wolfe thread on here?).

xps Who would have thought theverge.com would quote Marc Augé's Nicht-Orte one day. Decent article on a very interesting topic.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-valley-startup-574ced8acdff#.iemww3rp9

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/technology/a-silicon-valley-dream-collapses-in-allegations-of-fraud.html?ref=technology&_r=1

“I’d heard stories about late paychecks or start-ups failing, but who expects fraud in Silicon Valley?”

Who, indeed?

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-exclusive

This is great.

Holmes subsequently raised $6 million in funding, the first of almost $700 million that would follow. Money often comes with strings attached in Silicon Valley, but even by its byzantine terms, Holmes’s were unusual. She took the money on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked, and that she had final say and control over every aspect of her company. This surreptitiousness scared off some investors.

this is a failure of due diligence on a massive scale. isnt that what these fucking VCs are supposed to do?

very few of the VCs i have met are able to explain how things like ad tech works, much less any thing involving experimental science

professional ted-talker holmes continues on that circuit

I know I overuse the term "cargo cult," buuuut...

replied with a variation of a line from Jobs. “This is what happens when you work to change things,” she said, her long blond hair tousled, her smile amplified by red lipstick. “First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then, all of a sudden, you change the world.”

*sigh*

Yup

Jobs outed as Bob Marley plagiarist

:D

Bob-a-Jobs

Job Rastafari

This is what happens when you work to change things... you change the world.

Yeah, maybe about 0.01% of the time. A much more significant percentage of the time your idea is shitty or unworkable, or your idea is passably OK but the world stubbornly refuses to change because your idea really isn't worth going to all the trouble and expense.

@NellieBowles
Apple on headphone port: "It really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on and do something better for all of us."

Fuck apples

Pearl Gabel, Kevin Bannon and 7 others like The Economist.

Like Page

The Economist

Sponsored ·
..
A Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Sam Altman was so cost-conscious when building his first company that for weeks he ate only ramen noodles and coffee ice cream, until he developed scurvy

A complete meal in a bag?

“ONE should eat to live, not live to eat,” wrote Molière

learnmore.economist.com

"Cost-conscious" is a charitable word to use here

you wouldn't believe it, but ramen and coffee ice cream is the most efficient diet. except for the scurvy.

"Weeks?" Doesn't scurvy take several months to develop?

they disrupted scurvy

NHS says three months.

I knew a guy in college who, being cost conscious, lived off potato chips and water long enough that he developed it.

I know at some basic level if you get calories your body is going to keep working but wouldn't you feel like garbage all the time?

maybe you can disrupt that with caffeine or something

feel like the next step for these guys is to shit into a tube.

I thought we were all already doing that

the internet is a series of tubes

for me to poop in

this is good content http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

blimey that Scott story is incredible

it's a very different case, but the guy in the admiralty who figured ordering west indian limes instead of lemons reminds me of the people at the waste isolation plant (where radioactive materials are stored) who fucked up and ordered organic cat litter

that was a great read, thank you.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-work-on-atlas/

As part of rubbing elbows online with my tribe, I’ve had contact with another tribe over the years, which is venture-backed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. To paraphrase a remark made by a Japanese businessman of my acquaintance, they’re a society organized around attempting to find the optimal level of crazy.

When you have too much crazy, you start a social network for cat photo sharing and say — in all earnestness — that it will change the world for all days to come.

When you have too little crazy, you end up taking a safe job at a megacorp and staying even though you hate it.

When you have just enough crazy, you found a payments company, heedless of the fact that founding a payments company is doomed to failure because it involves mountains of hard and boring work and the incumbents have billions of dollars.

hmm

^ too glib to be informative

tbf he's joining a payments company that has already survived long enough to gain some traction, which is not that crazy.

there are so many payment companies with different target markets and market niches that exist, and many more that have already closed up shop

i think it's a very charitable spin on the modus vivendi of these people (and clearly doesn't apply to someone taking a job a stripe)

there's a local company that has been working since 2010 or so on payments and they've gone through a handful of iterations. one of the last was actually doing all kinds of due diligence, meeting with people high up in banking and banking regulation, and attempting to come up with a closer-to-realtime, more secure alternative to ACH. they've dialed back a fair bit and now mainly do larger direct payments and I think their main product is a white label API for ACH transfers

it's a really difficult market. afaik stripe is basically a point-of-sale system for the web, which seems ok

"charitable spin" is otm

the payments/financial companies are an interesting case because they're more keyed in (by necessity) to the current legal and social realities than a lot of startups off the bat

things like uber seemed to wing it on a handful of issues until questioned (liability, insurance, whether they could legally operate in cities under existing codes, etc)

then companies like facebook/twitter start with a bare minimum when it comes to legal boilerplate and build whatever they think will get the most users and only look at the problems, which may not even be addressed by law (persistent harassment that might not be illegal unless the law catches up, spam and bot accounts) at the very last minute

i don't think it's a million miles off the mark. but it's just a very glass half full interpretation.

this idea that if you're letting people spew whatever user-contributed data they want on to your servers you don't have to care about it as long as you get those page impressions, because it's just a bunch of words and pictures

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/11/both-parties-stink-let-s-build-a-new-american-politics-2-0.html

counterpoint: the caucus/primary/delegate nomination system is not mindlessly archaic and broken, it's actually pretty good and could be made a little better

Nope, sorry, gotta disrupt that shit

That article's the biggest load of horse tripe I've read in quite a while.

The author simply takes it for granted that once you give The People the correct technology, they'll immediately discover they all agree with each other about taxes, budget priorities, and public policy, because those are mere details compared to getting the technological part sorted out.

I'm really having a hard time understanding Travis Kalanick's claim that a fleet of self-driving cars that are never not driving is going to somehow simultaneously reduce traffic, obviate the need for personal automobiles, and make public transit obsolete. In high-density areas, buses that can carry 15x or trains that can carry 200x as many people as a car will always make more sense. Combining carpooling with robots does not somehow change this. Even if you move to a mass shuttle model -- ever taken one of those airport multi-hotel shuttles? They suck balls and take forever. Meanwhile, in low-density areas, there are never going to be enough people going from/to the same areas at the same time to make this thing at all economical.

I mean I realize they are predicting lower-maintenance cars and not having the labor cost of a driver, but it's still hard to imagine the economics work out.

it's a weird series of diminishing returns

low density areas could still benefit from a hub/spoke type of transportation if automated vehicles only took traffic from local hubs (large downtowns and business areas would be large hubs, shopping areas/suburban centers would be local hubs, cars would go from local hubs to your destination and back)

but even then, you're going to need larger scale transportation to get to those local hubs.

I have a couple friends who attempted that kind of regular commuting doing a park-and-ride system but there was still very low demand, and that was during the work week. The transit authority kept changing the parking location, so my friend who was able to walk or bike to the location eventually had a five or ten minute drive to the parking lot to catch a bus. He could drive downtown in fifteen minutes, so the only benefit was guaranteed parking.

the next great idea is going to be megabus... inside the city

So, uh, drive to the fucking Uber hub no thank you.

park & rides (park and take bus) here are p popular but the parking is free at the park n ride locations which a spot downtown is $8 a day minimum or about $150 a month at least for a contract spot

xpost
my brilliant idea for megabus is to have them hire one employee who knows anything whatsoever about what's going on at the stop they're located at so that they can calm down the dozens of confused people in 3.5 chaotic lines whose buses are 45-75 minutes late

Megabus is definitely run by a 1970s mainframe, there are no supervisory employees of Megabus

when i'm in the megabus line hell i feel like a operations guru from the early 1970s. everything that is wrong is so clear and obvious. for example, you could have an employee who periodically yells out "If you're taking the 12:30 bus to Baltimore, stand in this line!" GROUNDBREAKING

I like to imagine the Megabus central office is just a nest of wires and conduit all plugging in to a blinkenlights console with a big reel-to-reel storage installation, whining with fan and chiller noise and freezing cold, posting job ads to craigslist, printing schedules and ticketing on teletype paper falling directly into a wastebin, gradually attaining sentience

Buses built in a Czech factory and loaded onto container ships at the behest of faxed orders, nobody at Eurocoach plc has ever spoken to someone at Megabus

after grabbing the last scrap of teletype paper from underneath the breakfast taco and wiping off most of the salsa, it says only

"make the driver buy the $1 ticket so that no one else can ever get it"

So, uh, drive to the fucking Uber hub no thank you.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Monday, September 19, 2016 2:00 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, I meant uber drives you to the public transport hub, where you then catch a bigger uber that goes to the main transit route. Big uber is what you're stuck with because your city doesn't feel its worthwhile to have public transport.

everyone otm about megabus

pretty sure megabus's "free wifi" is some sort of scam where it just tries to find open wifi access points along the interstate and acts as a wifi bridge

I love that we started trying to imagine how the Uber guy's idea was even workable and then almost immediately arrived at oh yeah, bus lines.

if you want a look into the inner workings of how people feel about transportation, the relationships sub-reddit has at least one thread per month about some couple that will never work out because one person refuses to walk anywhere and thinks anything other than driving from door-to-door is for poors

^ spammer shows great discrimination in his choice of thread

I think that's part of an Uber pilot program, they've said they want the driverless cars to be able to post to ILX by 2019.

i wish AI the best in listening to Rod Stewart ablums no one likes

I definitely want to hear what AIs are IA about.

Maybe they could wire up some of the posters who are already robots to offer cabbie-like chitchat with riders. I look forward to cruising to the airport while frustratedly trying to overcome canned spiels on the number of chord changes and melodic lines necessary for true great pop, rendered in the voice of the defense computer from WarGames.

https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/778259408379908096

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cszup6TWEAEWoX-.jpg

as much as i hate Theil & co I feel like being anti-SVTU easily and often bleeds over into Luddism or daft bad sci-fi, like the above quote

it's like when you're young and hipsters don't like a band after the wrong people get into it. we shouldn't not be stoked on technologies just cuz of turds like Benedict Evans being lameasses on twitter

the thing is that a lot of these technologies and companies, outside of the ones that are pure social networking/online stuff, exist outside of silicon valley

it's like silicon valley is LA of some past year and all kinds of bands from there are getting promo money and radio play, everyone in the industry falling over each other to say how they really get music, keep wondering why bands are even trying to start out anywhere else

bands elsewhere are trying to just make music and are doing ok but all the press is about LA because they're just throwing money everywhere

I don't think "we've tried this before, it was called edwardianism" is ludditism any more than "we've tried libertarianism before it was called feudalism"

That said, SV is not as bad as benedict Evans it's true

I mean, SV the geographical place that exists irl sounds like hell on earth, granted. but i would never live there and don't have to. just bummed that the "SV of the mind", generally being stoked on technologies, is now considered in poor taste, in my circles

I don't get why 'property is expensive in London' + 'apps' = Downton Abbey tho?

tbh what rankles me most is the unease at seeing that I (or, well maybe i'm more techno-optimist than yall but many of my gen) will be just as anti-tech as, like, my mom, who takes decades to adopt any new technology, only after a period of intense suspicion that it will either a. give her some form of cancer, b. lead to the wholesale deterioration of society

I'm stoked on technology like agricultural automation and biomedical research and carbon sequestration, which is capable of transforming the material reality and well-being of entire societies if funded and focused in communitarian ways

phone apps are pretty piddly by comparison

That's a good point

I don't get why 'property is expensive in London' + 'apps' = Downton Abbey tho?

i guess the idea is that from the self-taught economist POV of SV, sharing apps are merely more efficient allocation of capital. but if that's true then we learned in the 19th c that unfettered capitalism enables and amplify inequalities that most semi-social democracies (even the US) now seek to correct.

in the particular case that guy is imagining, it's domestic service with payment in room share housing instead of money, which is the downton abbey model. in 1900 housing was inexpensive enough that you needed to supplement the accomodation with money. nowadays housing in places like london and SF is expensive enough relative to local wages (lol 30% of your income on housing ahhahah) that it's not obvious the market would require you to supplement it at all.

yea silby otm

i tihnk it is obv the language customs and culture of SV that is most grating, "disruption" and coders drinking soylent and greed and housing prices in SF and all that shit that turn people off? (and fwiw most people love SV talk still right? eg i think when most people talk about uber they are still talking about how rad it is and not like the effect on urban transportation and the taxi industry and all that)

the SVTU talk drips into other spheres too, like lol do you guys get ads pushed to you by this company? they are all over my twitter and fb feed https://hiburrow.com/

THE FURNITURE INDUSTRY HASN’T EVOLVED IN OVER 50 YEARS. THROUGH YEARS OF RESEARCH AND BY TALKING TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU, WE WERE ABLE TO IDENTIFY AND SOLVE THE BIGGEST PAIN POINTS IN THE INDUSTRY.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/575b6a34d210b8173a48796a/t/57aeab35579fb31363782bc5/1471064886507/Scene+Hero.jpg

disrupting the furniture industry

there is this thing called live-in nannies xp

thank you for your contribution, but perhaps your time would be better spent posting literally every thought that runs through your head about your portable telephone

i tihnk it is obv the language customs and culture of SV that is most grating, "disruption" and coders drinking soylent and greed and housing prices in SF and all that shit that turn people off?

that's how it feels for this SF resident. it's embedded in the contradiction between their utopian pseudo-hippie claims and they're entitled libertarian practices ime.

imo they seem like people that don't go out very often, and if they do, it's to places that are bad

That said, SV is not as bad as benedict Evans it's true

very few things are, thankfully

benny evans being clowned on his inability to find things to do in SF was a definite highlight

For context, we have a situation in the UK at the moment where people are employed (or not 'employed' as such) at a rate of £3.75 per delivery to take food from restaurants to people who have requested it via an app. There is no guarantee that you are going to be required, but the model essentially requires massive spare capacity (hanging around all day, unpaid) so people don't have to wait more than a fixed amount of time in the lunchtime rush. Make eight deliveries a day and you earn £30. Do that 30 days a month, you earn £900. A single room in a flat share will cost you two thirds of that as a minimum.

Idk if it so outlandish to see a return to widespread domestic service (albeit with some level of payment) as possible.

Xps

it's applicable to a few topics (hell, half the topics) but I was struck by a passage about modernism when reading over the weekend. it was a very top-down movement: an elite class creating an aesthetic, in architecture, furniture, and design that sets a direction for society

nobody ever started producing eames lounge chairs or even the molded fiberglass ones in the quantity or price point that many people would want or afford them. there's also the fact that few people can really jump on to a design movement -- even if you like new, innovative designs, you're going to compromise and pick things that kind of blend with your lifestyle and aesthetic. so there are a lot of decent-to-mediocre designs that did well because they remind you of sleek modernism but blend pretty well with that chair you inherited

I love a bunch of modernist designs and find them aspirational in the sense I'd like to own some, and like to live in the streamlined way others imply, but there's the sense that the built objects are still a model of what could be but could never quite fit

the SV utopianism is like a modernism that is so very hung up on being profitable, yet at the same time the insistence that a ground-up utopia could exist is an ever-present fantasy. thiel's enthusiasm for libertarian island, burning man camps that have all of the modern luxuries and only have the people. soylent to avoid labor and interactions that remind you of things like food sourcing, prep work, and the people involved in all of that business.

those pesky harassers and the harassed who remind you that communities, even online ones, need moderation because you can't have an audience of only your people, like you can in your encampment

benny evans being clowned on his inability to find things to do in SF was a definite highlight

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, September 20, 2016 1:01 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg I must hate-read this later

never mind, it was short. the responses from people in SF who have no idea where interesting things are might be the best part

that's kind of every city, in that people who live in cities tend to fall into routines and go to museums, large parks, less often than visitors do unless they live right next to them (or they _actually like art and parks_)

but holy shit some people are clueless

reminds me I need to head back to see SF MOMA, though. I was there a couple months before it closed!

haven't been to the new MOMA yet but def excited to check it out

there's a million things to do in this City, having kids to expose things to has def expanded my range of stuff/places we go to (granted the number of restaurants/clubs I go out to has correspondingly decreased)

basically what mh and silby said

sv investors throw a lot of money at dumb mobile app devs because they're under the impression that apps are solving valuable problems

there's still money to be made in developing them, so devs churn out these useless apps and exaggerate the seriousness of the "problem" they're solving

the rest of us see that they solve low priority problems and we equate tech with these app devs and start feeling like they're entitled pos's

there are lots of things devs could be working on that fix how businesses interact with each other or building better erp's, data software, green tech, or even research, but all this is boring to them and not "sexy"

i feel like this is the world we live in though. if it's not cool, hip, or where all the money is, people will run away from it

v succinct and accurate description ime

except it's not like there isn't money to be made on ERP implementation, and heck if you do it right you might even make a few thousand people's lives a little less unpleasant. Nobody's going to blog about it though.

I love a bunch of modernist designs and find them aspirational in the sense I'd like to own some, and like to live in the streamlined way others imply, but there's the sense that the built objects are still a model of what could be but could never quite fit

― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Tuesday, September 20, 2016 11:15 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a balance between functional and artistic for me

i'm a strong believer of form follows function but there needs to be a bit of not-completely-coherent art to it because it's nice to look at nice things or live around things that look cool

i think there's space for both and if "not fitting" is taken as a more "artistic endeavour," it is an important element because it enhances our lives, it prevents us from being in such a dull and coldly designed space

xxp i'd be fine with that situation if it weren't for the fact that investors think traditional companies with long-term business plans and research need to show year-over-year growth continually when products take years to develop and some markets are cyclical

that and academic/nonprofit research getting shafted, jesus

oh yeah well that's kind of an electoral issue, NIH's budget has like not grown in real dollars for a decade or something miserable like that; I spent November through August under the impression that I could end up getting laid off at any time if a grant didn't fund

there's supposed to be some badass stanley kubrick exhibit at the jewish contemporary museum. free passes at most libraries.

Sfmoma is amazing

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/29/technology/chris-messina-non-monogamy/

luv 2 disrupt fuckin

every single paragraph contains a punchable sentiment

"But as a child of divorce and an aspiring designer-entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, I was suspicious of marriage, or any other limit on my access to other people's attention"

didn't we already clown this in 2015, maybe on another thread?

it's really hard to top the cutoff culture dude but polygamy guy tried

I grew up spoon fed monogamist fairy tales that pushed "happily ever after" endings

vs

as a child of divorce

http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=5357198&boardid=77&threadid=97044

guys I was the one who posted it, sorry

damn it, 77 link, abort abort

the bicycle for our hearts is peak ted talk

looking for the fleshlight for my heart

double-fuck him for also apparently inventing the hashtag

lol at that claim

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/the-algorithms-that-tell-bosses-how-employees-feel/502064/

techno-dystopianism

on trendwatch: the phrase "nerdesse oblige" to refer to neoliberal "code for good" stuff

e.g. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/780875752967380994

lol holy fuck at their summary of agriculture

can't wait 2 disrupt plants&animals

all the actual work on vat-grown meat is happening in academia of course

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny

it is once again time to mock the silicon valley hero who got scurvy

At Graham’s table, he and others discussed how to stop Donald Trump, then decided to reach out to an affiliated expert: Chris Lehane, a former White House lawyer now at the YC company Airbnb. Altman declared, “The best idea seems to be just to support Hillary.”

someone hand that guy a billion dollars

you know that attitude some people get around precocious youth? not to just be a good mentor or resource, but they treat them like some houseplant to be watered and put in the sun. and then not expect them to develop personally, just to keep coming up with more of the same precocious youth stuff.

"hmm yes, look at my youth. truly a great example"

"dude he's 30 now and just got scurvy for the third time because he's a large child"

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13180666/theranos-close-labs-fire-employees

Anybody catch the sniper theories regarding musk's last rocket bust?

Sorry I said sniper I meant UFO

either way, lol

I feel like my "hey, sup" messages to Liz Holmes in the hopes she will buy me sushi and chat are increasingly futile now

Liz, get back at me, not too late

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuGvQEkWcAA9bcG.jpg:large

note: no longer a billionaire by any reasonable meaning of that word

^ I let these kinds of people run after the kind of success they seek, without their attracting either my interest or involvement.

I might not be interested in Theranos, but I'm interested in a FDA and healthcare industry that's capable of vetting things and adopting new technology. Their shell game only made it so far because of a lack of public interest in vetting their claims!

https://twitter.com/shanevader/status/773720109529509888

this replicant is saying many things that are true but is incapable of delivering any of it, and in pushing her company, drew resources and attention away from other companies that might be more successful in pursuing those goals.

like if I find out some day that a company that was on the verge of delivering a way to check for a disease I end up with, and I would have been diagnosed a decade earlier had theranos not driven them out of business, I'm going to be pissed

Sam Kriss on the SV/Muskian obsession with simulation theory:

"Tech billionaires want to destroy the universe"

...Just a little tweak to the formula: All that appears to exist must be destroyed. There’s something admirable in this blasphemous ambition, but it’s based on some very shaky ideas. It helps to look at an influence on simulation theory that’s a little better known that the Nag Hammadi codices: 1999’s The Matrix, in which a gang of heroic freedom-fighters try to wake humanity from a false computer-generated universe and return them to the real world. The film has plenty of knowing references to those older traditions, and to some newer ones: In one scene, Neo is shown hiding his cash in a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (appropriately, a black hardback edition that doesn’t seem to have ever actually been printed.) The philosopher himself wasn’t particularly pleased, insisting in an interview that the film fundamentally misunderstood his work, that ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.’ In The Matrix, there’s a real world behind the simulation. It’s not pretty, but it’s the truth. In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast. ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’ Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’

namaste

lol, I wrote a piece for my college weekly making almost the exact same point back when Matrix came out.

TS: https://twitter.com/benedictevans vs https://twitter.com/JoshConstine

btw lol https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/18/in-its-vrar-push-twitter-trolls-itself/

A nice column on Obama's talk with a room of wannabe disruptors:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obama-silicon-valley-20161017-snap-story.html

The business model of drug companies such as Turing and Mylan exploits shortcomings in the regulatory system, but their sky’s-the-limit pricing strategies victimize patients who can’t afford their life-saving drugs. Obama made the case that “blowing up the system” because it doesn’t serve entrepreneurs perfectly is the wrong answer. No, he said, government “is not inherently wrecked; it's just [that] government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.”

Of course he’s correct. Private companies work well when they need to concern themselves with their own balance sheets. But that’s not how government works. Caring for veterans, or the poor or aged appear on the surface and in the short term to be liabilities on the public ledger. But in the long run, they’re assets, because they testify to the cohesiveness of society, which is priceless. What’s sad about this is that President Obama’s statement of the principle needs to be repeated over and over again, time without end.

it needs to be repeated inside the government as well.

more than once, i endured an all-hands meeting featuring a new upper management figure - presidentially appointed - straight from the private sector, declaring their intention to "run government like a business"

despite the fact that the public sector's purpose is to maximize the public good, whereas a business' purpose is to maximize profit. being forced to follow marching orders of a madman who equates the two was demoralizing.

I feel you

holy shit that liz holmes vid on that twitter link

"run it like a business" predates SV of course.

as well as the KPIs being different, the basic mechanics of the economic system in which you're operating are different too. i like this krugman piece on that from 1996 https://hbr.org/1996/01/a-country-is-not-a-company

full self-driving tesla

https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-tesla-cars

Pretty sweet.

the hardware is the easy part!

hard to tell with edited video, but that looks somewhat ahead of Uber based on what I read of the tests

Elon Musk said "The hardware is ready, but the feasibility of mass self-driving car use is still decades away. It's a good step forward, though."

when and where did he say that?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/elon-musk-says-fully-self-driving-tesla-cars-already-being-built

He said it in an alternate universe where he actually had a shred of respect for other people's intelligence.

Self-driving cars are a terrible idea anyway, imo, it adds nothing good while adding more bad, based on a false premise that cars, and the environments where they're needed, aren't deeply unsustainable. If Musk were really worthy of respect for me he'd be a champion of mass transportation and better-designed cities and towns. Can't make a gazillion dollars off that, though.

Nothing good? Come on.

And, Tesla is working on trucks (for transporting stuff) and buses.

Maybe someday he'll deserve your respect.

lol maybe

There's definitely some potential for safety and traffic improvement. Obviously I prefer public transit but there are many existing urban areas that have neither good public transit nor adequate density nor the political will for public transit from scratch, and in places like that, self-driving electric cars that pool users MIGHT be preferable to the current system.

like it or not, cars and the massive infrastructure already built up to support them are here for the foreseeable future. of all the possible visions of how that might play out, energy-wise, the mass adoption of self-driving cars is one of the most optimistic scenarios. electric self-driving cars could drive themselves to recharge at the local solar station while you're at work or sleeping, for example.

oh yeah, and also ~30,000 fewer people would die every year in the u.s. alone, but that's nothing good.

i'm all for shifting resources toward public transport as well, of course, and urban planning that prioritizes low-energy commutes for residents (and tele-working, for that matter). but it's not a zero-sum game. rich dudes like elon musk can focus on their plan to create a giant electric car pooling system at the same time that city planners try to re-orient neighborhoods in a more sustainable direction. i don't understand why you'd root against one of those options when both can be pursued at the same time.

These purported benefits are based on a technology that doesn't even exist yet, let alone hasn't even been implemented successfully in the conditions/environment/situations where these beneficial scenarios are apparently going to exist. It's nothing based on nothing based on ideal scenarios immune to change or fluctuations, yet ... it's real?

All I'm saying is, it's self-interested hype coming from people who have poor track records of credibility and having the public interest at heart.

To take the other side of this, I have concerns about the fact that we are creating massive moneyed interests that might have incentive to lobby against further public transit development. I mean, maybe no more so than the current fossil fuel and auto industries (and much smaller by comparison), but still, we've already seen Uber meddle in municipal politics a lot.

Poor record of credibility?! Musk and Tesla pretty much single-handedly resurrected the electric car (and gave away much of the technology). His whole raison d'etre seems to be trying to keep the human race from going extinct.

Also, he builds self-landing rocketships. Seems credible to me.

His whole raison d'etre seems to be trying to keep the human race from going extinct.

C'mon. Do you actually believe this? Even if this were his goal, like he's got a Jesus complex or something, the way he's pursuing it is so fucking stupid that he should be relieved of his duties.

So cynical. Yeah, I believe him. So far, he seems to be working toward that goal.

Musk: "Lower consumption levels to help stem climate change? Nah, that'd cut into my businesses. How about we GO TO MARS!!! YEAH!"

Smart person: "Wouldn't that actually just add to the conditions causing climate change?"

Musk: "Get 'em, boys!" ('em here are Elon Musk's entourage of cultists)

Like wtf is that? How could you possibly believe a) this guy is really this great humanitarian; b) if he is, that he isn't totally incompetent and downright bizarre about it?

you're drawing some weird connections here - how is going to Mars increasing emissions

You're right, we use spice melange now to transport spacecraft

do you even know what rocket fuel is made of

why am I bothering

xpost wait a second. do you think that al gore is a hypocrite when he flies to conferences?

fwiw, exhaust from space ship engines does contribute a few kilotons of GHGs to the atmosphere every year - a small fraction of the hundreds of kilotons that commercial airplanes emit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_by_rocket_launches

did you read the entire wikipedia article

also the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change are completely different things

On a global scale today, rockets have a negligible impact on destruction of the ozone layer.

fwiw the majority of rocket launches are to put satellites in orbit

To me, Musk seems like he's doing as much as he can do within the current system (we don't live in some command economy utopia where we can just force everyone to ride the bus to work) to try and help. Yes, he's using technology, but that's his area of expertise! I'd love to hear what you think Musk should be doing.

I don't feel comfortable defending some rich dude, honestly, but your arguments seem like straight-up hating to me.

I'm just saying here, he doesn't seem to be all that great at preventing the human race's extinction when 1) he isn't tackling the actual problems we're facing here on earth, because they cut into his business operations; and 2) his supposedly great ideas are pretty fucking stupid, and not only that, are actually doing more harm than good (the good here being "0" unless you count entertainment and distraction a positive value). Even if his rockets were perfectly clean, including the building and maintenance of the, going to Mars is a dumb shit idea.

Can't believe you guys are so taken in by Musk. It's not hating, I'm just not a big fan of cult of personalities, especially ones that co-opt genuine issues that need to be solved, monopolize the time spent discussing them, and then provide crap solutions for them. Dude's doing more harm than good, and the cult surrounding him gives this stupidity more power and sway than it should have.

I'm all into forcing everyone to ride the bus btw

Xp

Electric cars powered by solar cells with big batteries to support the power grid when the sun isn't out - those are dumb ideas?

Well the best idea is to immediately make cars illegal

I dont like Musk at all but you are making nonsensical arguments

Xp

The home energy cell stuff is pretty good (normal caveats for rare earth metal mining apply, though) and it's making investors hate him, but I think bringing that business into Tesla makes sense.

I don't think his goal is some weird lofty thing like preventing human extinction (?!?) but putting investment into technologies that he believes are genuine goods. Hyperloop seems like a solution that doesn't quite fit with any existing problem but it's something that could be useful long-term. Electric vehicles, technology that harnesses renewable energy and developing better battery storage, making space launch technology that's reusable... all seem pretty good uses of resources.

Sending humans to mars is of questionable utility to me, but it's a goalpost that drives a lot of useful technology that will need to be created in the interim.

That doesn't really do much good for the world, except take power from one industry and locate it in another; who's sitting on the throne of that particular industry you may ask? Well, if it isn't Elon Musk! Wonder why this is such a big issue for him. Solar power, electric cars, they will not do anything to solve climate change or our shitting up the earth. It's a gamble to become the head of a new empire, which seems more suited to Musk's actual personality than Earth Savior.

It's interesting from a business perspective, but the cult around him just grosses me out.

xxp

I have a friend who works at SolarCity but I haven't talked to him for a while and have barely discussed his work, other than that he likes his workplace.

He wrote out his plan, if anyone is interested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

Solarcity is a good company fwiw

elon musk wants to be hank scorpio but he's really clive sinclair

the other thing, and i always find myself beating this drum on these threads, but it's not like there is something 'natural' about automobile ubiquity that just responds to innate human needs or demands. okay, we can't force everyone to ride the bus. but we do a ton to force people to take cars! or at least manipulate the conditions that make that choice an appealing nexus that reconciles many needs and opportunities conveniently.

this has all been documented and rehashed a thousand times but the big ones to bear in mind are that highway spending and to a great degree local road-building is treated as a free good with the costs levied on everybody, drivers and non-drivers alike; federally-backed mortgages make living in a detached single-family home (and thus the associated low-density development pattern) unbelievably cheap; enormous sums are devoted to foreign policy and general support for energy companies, which has kept petrochemicals much more readily available than you would expect for something that is unbelievably expensive and slow to locate and exploit; local governments dedicate extensive resources to providing driver's ed and issuing licenses (versus another universe where, say, the operation of a dangerous high-speed one-ton death machine would have been restricted to skilled professionals very early on) .... etc. etc. plus there are the historical circumstances of zoning, how urban disinvestment starting with the depression combined with red-lining and white flight to create additional pressures towards suburbanization - - - and the old business of the auto companies tearing out the streetcar lines, and so on and so on.

i'm sure most in this thread know all this stuff so forgive me for running through it. and none of it has much to do with elon musk directly. but i think it's a loaded decision to start a conversation about automobiles in america, and what to do about climate change and other related problems, by saying "well basically widespread automobile use is inevitable so all we can really change is what kind of car it is and who builds them." this isn't to speak to the other points about (potentially) (hypothetically) reducing loss of life, maybe reducing the total surface area of roads and parking, and maybe being able to make a more convincing and viable overall package for cars running on renewables. those would all definitely be good things but these things are all entangled with each other.

Solar power, electric cars, they will not do anything to solve climate change or our shitting up the earth.

I just want to say... wrong

(DrC also otm about cars being treated as an inevitability btw)

but i think it's a loaded decision to start a conversation about automobiles in america, and what to do about climate change and other related problems, by saying "well basically widespread automobile use is inevitable so all we can really change is what kind of car it is and who builds them."

i'm not sure if i'm the one you mean - what i said was "like it or not, cars and the massive infrastructure already built up to support them are here for the foreseeable future." but just in case i am, let it be known that i totally agree with you that today's reliance on personal automobiles wasn't inevtable, for all the reasons you cited, and that i don't think it's inevitable for the rest of our lives. i do think it's inevitable for the foreseeable future, by which i just mean the next 20 or so years. there's just too much currently invested in it, and too much psychological attachment, for it to be abandoned before then (although i would love to be wrong on that). since the window for avoiding the worst projections for climate change is rapidly closing (we're likely already past the point of no return for some effects), the things that we do in the next 20 years, working off of existing infrastructure, are very important. carpooling using electric cars strikes me as something that is feasible and something we should be pursuing.

i do think it's inevitable for the foreseeable future, by which i just mean the next 20 or so years.

and just in case anyone is wondering, yes, i can see the future of the next 20 years. it's gonna be crazy, believe me!

yeah, sorry - i did sincerely lose the actual plot of my post in there somewhere. basically what i was going for is more like "if elon musk is an altruist whose dream is solving the climate and automobile fatalities, there is all this other shit to work on, and accepting the automobile technology as a given, whatever its pros and cons, doesn't really make him a visionary."

the electric automatic carpooling thing surely has lots of potential in some form or fashion, mind you. and i agree - there's not going to be an overnight shift away from the world we've built since WWII. infrastructures aren't quite as durable or locked-in/path-dependent as some people think, but they do have some longevity for all kinds of reasons. but there can be lots of mini-transformations going on slowly in the midst of what seems like a stable socio-technical system, til you look around one day and realize, huh, people don't really get from city to city by train anymore, everybody's got cars, when'd that happen? and the other way around. but yeah there is way too much wealth and emotional attachment and ideology sunk into the suburban automobile life right now to think that in a few years that will all be abandoned wilderness tracts.

Well the best idea is to immediately make cars illegal

― slathered in cream and covered with stickers (silby), Thursday, October 20, 2016 3:39 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a man after my own heart

I thought this interview was going to be completely terrible but he makes a couple of good points.

http://www.theverge.com/a/verge-2021/google-x-astro-teller-interview-drones-innovation

filing to read later, I saw that dude speak in like... 2001? and I own his fiction book somewhere around here

https://twitter.com/griph/status/796539192721506304

https://twitter.com/sacca/status/796445435162345472

Theranos: truly horrible.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/the-personal-bloodbath-behind-theranos-rise-and-fall/

http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-whistleblower-shook-the-companyand-his-family-1479335963

I like this one where George Shultz basically stopped speaking to his grandson who blew the whistle.

Is there any scenario in which Elizabeth Holmes goes to jail for any of this shit? I know the answer but WTF

I want to joke but people have actually died from this via guilt, I would imagine if they made it very far with useless blood tests people would indirectly have died from a lack of diagnostic ability