The personification of "Silicon Valley" into some giant evil blob-like entity attempting to consume innocent, creative counter-revolutionaries undermines a perfectly awesome, but 100% non-unique to SV opinion: Technologists (and any industry with any modicum of power) can suffer from a bad case of hubris.
Is creative destruction real and good (most of the time)? Yes. Is your startup selling SGaaS (scuba gear as a service) going to radically impact the disinherited and the poor? No. Is there anything new under the sun?
Still, the criticism of the author is received: More humility from the collective "we" of SV wouldn't hurt.
I think the hubris is a necessary protection mechanism for the fact that without arrogance and conviction no progress would ever happen. Reasonable people get convinced not to rock the boat. Only unreasonable people ignore that "good" advice and fuck shit up for the benefit (or sometimes detriment, or sometimes both) of society.
Silicon valley entreprenerds are top-notch conformists. The fact that they're conforming to a culture that puts value on arrogance, megalomania, or "rocking the boat" doesn't make them agents of progress, any more than being a goth kid who hangs out at the Cinnabon threatens middle-class values.
I disagree. Take George Hotz and compare him to your everyday Harvard pedigreed Director of Sales at Facebook. Two stereotypes that look similar but require very different values, levels of conformity, etc. Just look at whoever is in tech but rejects SV culture - perhaps that is the real future.
I don't think the author wants humility. The author doesn't seem to think humility is required. As near as I can tell, the author thinks all the power is there, it just hasn't been used properly by a bunch of arrogant nerds who don't care about people.
I've known plenty of creative counter-revolutionaries in my time. They're often fascinating people. They're also often given to misplaces rage and nonsensical notions, like marching against the supposed dehumanizing influence of computers.
In a world where technical & economic progress are artificially retarded by statist regulation, capitalism is revolutionary. What makes me sad is to think about how much improvement we'd see if all technologies were as free as software (it also scares me to imagine what civil engineering would be like were it as free as software — obviously not all regulations are bad).
Granted, I think it's a little twee when folks claim (to use the article's example) that they are 'building the restaurant of the future,' but that's harmless enough.
Capitalism can only exist within a framework of "statist regulation". Complaining about it is like a goldfish being angry that there are aquarium walls. You can argue that the aquarium is the wrong shape, or the castle is the wrong color, but you would not like a world where there were no state-enforced rules.
I meant to imply a progression, which I apparently failed to do. The hypothetical state of "there is no government; my private property exists to the extent that I can personally defend it" is incredibly unstable. Like, element-named-after-its-weight unstable.
> How are you going to guarantee that your neighbors won't be better-armed than you and rob (if you're lucky) or kill you?
It's easy: like most people who believe that shit, they likely also believe they'll be on the top of the food chain at that point -- just once the big mean government goes away, that is. It's likely the only thing that's kept them from being on top, after all. There is no consideration for the possibility that they will be ruled over or taken advantage of. That's not a credible theory, you see -- because it assumes they're not at the top.
Thus, this possibility you have entertained is actually an impossibility, you see! Checkmate.
> Why would anyone else want to join you in your utopia?
Total, all-encompassing delusion and market worship.
He says that in the sense that "day" doesn't make sense without "night": for the former to make sense, you need the latter to exist in order to compare/understand them.
What are you talking about? I thought previously you were asking serious questions, but this is just hilariously untrue. Pre-state tribes invariably used gift and sharing economies, and well up until the European Middle Ages those had evolved into feudal planned economies or vast palace economies such as that of the Incas. Capitalism is not the state of nature.
Capitalism developed in the merchant cities of Northern Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages. These states were certainly regulated, some of these regulations are recognizable to us (licensing requirements to practice trades, import taxes, trade barriers to certain countries, ...). Capitalism isn't the bedrock of humanity's economic interactions, it is a fairly recent economic model. It requires markets, private property (and its protection), individual agency to participate in contracts, what have you. These things didn't just emerge out of thin air, and they most certainly don't predate states and regulation.
And what for of economy did people use before Italy "invented" capitalism? Were ancient Greeks socialists? Were they communist? What where they using, planned state economy?
"Capitalism" doesn't just mean "any system where trade for profit happens". It encompasses much more and implies the use of (and therefore invention and state sanction of) organizations like joint-stock companies and a much larger and more flexible credit system than what came before.
Planned state economy might be pushing the usage of the word, but the government and economy were so intertwined in ancient Greek city states it's hard to call them capitalists. At the most extreme, they were palace economies, with all redistribution of goods done by the state, and most of them had the largest part of economic management handled at the agora.
The simple act of creating a business requires a legal framework and hence a state. The economy would be a lot different if the owner of an entreprise had to bear the risk of losing his own capital.
Taking Athens as an example, the Assembly seems to have had wide latitude to rule as they pleased on a huge variety of lawsuit. The ruling class was heavily preoccupied with the practice of law and rhetoric for the purpose of defending and prosecuting these suits, which seem to have been extremely common. I think it's fair to guess that yes, any upstart business would have required the consent of the Assembly (the government) in order not to be ruined by suits brought by their competitors, which probably means staying on good terms with at least some of said competitors and likely doing a lot of political work before launching the business. And certainly taxes would be collected.
Plus, if you were in Athens odds were "you" were a slave. So the state's just a bit involved in your (in)ability to start a business in that case.
Then there's Sparta with its requirements of state service and bizarre, heavy-handed property laws. And again, you're probably a slave.
If technologies were as free as software without regulation, cars would not have crumple zones, seat belts, airbags, anti lock brakes, or any other safety technology mandatory. Companies would use the cheapest pesticide even if it causes horrible birth defects and medical issues to grow our food. Medical and pharma companies would price their services and drugs however they want because they can and people have to buy it (which is what's happening already, and 17.1% of the US GDP is spent on medicine as of 2014[1], higher than any other country in the world). In every example, companies wouldn't do the right thing because it would cut into their profits, which is what capitalism boils down to.
Not every regulation is good -- look at SF's housing and how you can have multiple overlapping regulations that mean that building a building is impossible in some situations -- but in many ways they're better than "free as software" technology.
Edit: Yes, safety features like seat belts were available before they were mandatory, but not everyone would buy them. I would be surprised if car manufacturers marketed the seat belt much even if they offered it.
Sorry, I was a little off. It's 17.1%, not 17%. And I also said it's higher than any developed country when it's actually every country in The World Bank's data.
Seat belts were offered in cars prior to regulation [1]:
"American car manufacturers Nash (in 1949) and Ford (in 1955) offered seat belts as options, while Swedish Saab first introduced seat belts as standard in 1958.[7] After the Saab GT 750 was introduced at the New York Motor Show in 1958 with safety belts fitted as standard, the practice became commonplace.[8]"
"... The world's first seat belt law was put in place in 1970, in the state of Victoria, Australia, making the wearing of a seat belt compulsory for drivers and front-seat passengers. This legislation was enacted after trialing Hemco seatbelts, designed by Desmond Hemphill (1926–2001), in the front seats of police vehicles, lowering the incidence of officer injury and death."
Wikipedia mentions "in 1959, Congress passed legislation requiring all automobiles to comply with certain safety standards." but the writing leaves it unclear to me whether that included mandating seat belts.
The theory that government regulation is mandatory or companies will never do anything healthy requires a consumer base who assigns no regard to their health and safety, which is obviously false. I'm not say it's all market, either; I think a government that watches a free market but does not participate is generally the ideal. But the idea that we wouldn't have standard seat belts if it weren't for government is silly.
In the general case, the government can't mandate things that don't exist yet. They can at least prod things in certain directions with things like CAFE standards, but that's all.
> The theory that government regulation is mandatory or companies will never do anything healthy requires a consumer base who assigns no regard to their health and safety, which is obviously false.
Either that or companies price health-and-safety options out of the price range of some consumers, resulting in a society where we think it's right that anyone under a certain level of income doesn't deserve to be as safe as we are.
At least in the current system, you can't buy things without much the same level of safety as we have - meaning that you can't realistically push their income+benefits any lower without lots of pushback. If we thought that health and safety features were optional... that'd be a lot different.
> resulting in a society where we think it's right that anyone under a certain level of income doesn't deserve to be as safe as we are.
This sounds bad, but even current society is like this. You can always use more money to be more safe. Car regulations don't change this but they do make cars less affordable.
You can buy more safety systems, like ABS. You could buy a car with a larger crumple zone. You can drive more slowly, which would cost you time which is ultimately money.
Depends, there are a level of technologies on cars based around accidents that require more money to obtain. Small, cheap car that meets bare minimum safety regulations versus big, expensive car that goes beyond required safety regulations. I bet the survivability rate of a Tesla is much higher than my Altima in the same near-fatal accident.
I think an under-appreciated effect of regulation is making participation in the market easier.
I don't need to research the apple I'm buying at the store. I don't need to look into the company that certified its safety to ensure it's not captured by the very company producing/selling the apple, or that it's not the same company that had huge scandal last year but with a new name (to take the Anarcho-Libertarian idea that private companies would replace government regulators in certifying safety and quality). That huge time/money cost is just gone. Anything in the grocery store will be basically fine. I can just toss it in the cart without a thought. I might gain some benefit from researching the products there, but it will be marginal. I don't have to do that stuff to just probably not die of food poisoning.
Same with car safety and any number of other things. Regulation ensures a baseline under which products will (generally) not drop, making it easier (cheaper) for buyers to spend. It reduces (consumer) overhead and greases wheels.
> I think an under-appreciated effect of regulation is making participation in the market easier.
As a consumer — but it also makes it significantly more difficult to participate as a producer. This is why existing firms are so often pro-regulation: they have the resources to absorb the initial hit and then pass the costs on to consumers, while an upstart has to raise the resources to pay for the hit before having a single customer.
Your post is all over the place with made up anecdotes. For your car example, it assumes nobody would ever buy cars for safety features. For the medical example, the entire reason pharma can charge that is because of government grants monopolies. For the pesticide example, capitalism != no laws on poisoning people.
> For your car example, it assumes nobody would ever buy cars for safety features.
You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any governed inspecting organ.
> or the medical example, the entire reason pharma can charge that is because of government grants monopolies.
No, the FDA approves things (for good: people don't die from rushed medicine with unseen side effects, and bad: it takes a lot of time and money to market, when people want new treatment now) for a reason. Why the current example has a monopoly is because of corrupt/lobbied regulation, not because the concept of regulation is bad. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
> You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any governed inspecting organ.
Sure, I definitely would, and probably give a quick glance over who performed it. Those are however not available in all fields or products. I'm also not considering myself better than anyone else, but am still very sure that a lot if not most people don't always check that. They however still deserve at least some form of baseline safety (not get sick, not get into product-fault accident) even without that.
I save you by knowing how my field works and alerting you/stopping bad practices, and you save me by knowing your field. Then we institutionalize and compartmentalize that to ensure that unlike consumer reports, it's not influenced by market interests (which the US is still brilliant at ruining with lobbying). That is how a community works.
Of course, you can instead pay someone explicitly to look after your interests/safety, to make sure they're not paid by other interests, ie companies wanting to pay as little as possible to sell you as much as possible. The thing is you've now just created a government. If it's not working it's not because of its concept.
A better approach than consumer reports is label certifications. A product bearing more testing labels (like things from Under writer's laboratory, or movies rated by MPAA etc etc) will have a better chance of being marketed to bigger audience.
> You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any governed inspecting organ.
Average Joe doesn't spend time figuring out which technology/product is good for him or not because of govt regulation. If not for that, then people would develop a lot more ability to figure these things out. So you can't say that average joe doesn't have a way of knowing something which he today doesn't have any need to know.
We're dealing with what is observable or we're just guessing.
Sure, we don't know what average joe would be capable of in such a scenario, but we equally don't know that capitalism would contain itself without regulation. What we however do know because we see it repeatedly is that corporations gladly take any shortcuts possible until they're caught. BP, VW, endless others. You can't be suggesting it would be BETTER without regulation?
Doesn't software also have some regulations depending on usage? Also, you can't say DDos a website or infringe copyright of code, there are still laws and regulation. Of course, relative to other industries it's much less.
"the industry—despite its language of revolution—is quite conservative"
This statement is crazy and captures the folly of this article. Silicon Valley is not conservative in any sense of the word. SV is about as radical as you can get without losing touch with reality.
The author seems to think that anything that touches money must be evil. But you can't make much positive impact on the world by sitting around a fire singing kumbaya. Ultimately money has to be part of the equation for the vast majority of worthy causes.
And if you think I'm just one of those greedy capitalists peddling propaganda: I say this as someone who took a 60% pay cut in hopes of ultimately making more impact on the world.
Silicon Valley's politics, overall, lean towards being socially slightly-right-of-centre and fiscally almost libertarian, from the perspective of a Brit.
That's odd. From a perspective of an actual libertarian, SV political preferences are so far left (basic income, etc.), it's like Communist propaganda once again.
I don't think "SV" actually supports basic income, it just likes saying that it does.
Whenever discussing what "SV" wants, we should try to distinguish whether we're talking about the leaders, venture capitalists, prominent opinion-formers etc versus trying to find an average of what the public in that area think. And there's an extreme diversity of views to average over.
(basic income, etc.), it's like Communist propaganda once again
I don't think you really understand what Communism/Socialism is. Under these systems you have no right to private property. They are post-capitalistic. In Communism money doesn't exist. Communist Countries have been Socialist (example: U.S.S.R. United Soviet Socialist Republic). Socialism is the transfer from Capitalism TO Communism.
Basic Income is just classical liberalism. Helping people survive who are under privileged within a capitalistic economy while leaving the existing capitalistic economy and power structures largely intact.
Calling basic income communism is just GOP propaganda, not even libertarian propaganda.
:.:.:
Communists see Basic Income as a bourgeoisie hand out necessary to preserve existing class structures of a post scarcity capitalist society. By pacifying the proletariat and ensuring that in the event the bourgeoisie no longer require proletariat labor, they will still be able to exploit them for profit.
But if there is no scarcity or labor, why must there be profit?
I lived under communism for 17 years as I was born in such a country. I think you have a wrong idea about what communism was, I hope you will eventually try to find out and wake up.
I'm sorry you had to live thought the post Khrushchev era Soviet reforms. I'm also sorry that national propaganda taught you your nation was communist, and you haven't questioned this well into your adulthood.
Have you seriously ever read Marx as an adult? Not under a teachers supervision? He disagrees with >75% of everything Stalin, and everyone who came after him did. A strong argument can even be made that Leninism is a fundamental diversion from Marxism.
But (assuming you are European) non-Leninist communist literature was banned.
> He disagrees with >75% of everything Stalin, and everyone who came after him did.
The divergence actually goes back further than Stalin to Lenin and his rather extensive deviations from classical Marxism to come up with a new program that could plausibly be deployed in a society that was itself pre-capitalist without developing mature capitalism on the road to the socialism that Marx saw as the necessary stage between capitalism and the end-state goal of utopian communism. Outside of the utopian ultimate end-state that both strove for in principle, this required complete revision of every part of the Marxist program starting with the preconditions and working through the whole rest of the policy path.
I was born and went to school in the USSR. It was taught exactly this way: first, we'll have socialism, which has an immense economic advantage over capitalist system; then, we'll use this advantage to drastically increase productivity and move to post-scarcity; then, everyone will get to their need, as robots will do most of the work.:
> SV political preferences are so far left (basic income, etc.)
Basic income as an alternative to existing social welfare programs has a substantial amount of support on the right, particularly the libertarian right (and, likewise, a substantial amount of opposition from the left, particularly outside of the small left-libertarian segment, which is actually probably where the most fervent support for BI is), though the more extreme position of "no social support structure at all" is even more popular on the right (both libertarian and not).
BI, IOW, is not a distinctively left-wing position.
> One thing we all can agree it's radical.
There's some support for truly radical (or reactionary) ideas in SV, but overall its not really "radical" except in being a radical break from the establishment orthodoxy of either the left or the right. SV, on the whole, is a weird mix of naivete and pragmatism when it comes to policy preferences, with some leanings (though perhaps not as strong as one would expect from the people making up SV) toward the self-interest of relatively wealthy white men.
>SV is about as radical as you can get without losing touch with reality.
Being outside of the SV bubble looking in, this is patently false. These companies make grandiose claims like "we're going to democratize the social web!" and "we're changing the world for good!" when this most often translates to "we're building a website that steals all of its users' personal information and sells it to the highest bidder!"
Silicon Valley is not conservative in any sense of the word.
SV is libertarian to radically libertarian on nearly all fiscal issues. They are left of center on some social issues.
Yes SV is not GOP conservative. But it is nonetheless right of center. I really think you don't understand that libertarians can be liberal on social issues, while being conservative on social issues. This is still very right of center.
Ultimately money has to be part of the equation
for the vast majority of worthy causes.
This is capitalist propaganda. Some problems require social change not economic, and they are worthy causes. Some worthy causes simply need legal changes.
And if you think I'm just one of those greedy capitalists peddling propaganda
The cognitive dissonance is real.
I say this as someone who took a 60% pay cut
in hopes of ultimately making more impact on the world.
Doing what? Taking a pay cut to join a startup to change the world?
The idea that not being paid what you are worth IS some how heroic is capitalist propaganda. The idea is to make you feel morally superior when being paid less, and guilty when being paid more.
Capitalism is built on hypocrisy and an illusion of justice (which most people believe).
Those who obey the rules are at the bottom of society and those who break the rules (in clever ways) are at the top.
I think that most of the people at the top are fundamentally evil but they genuinely think of themselves as benevolent.
Companies continue to deliver growth by fostering a culture of hypocrisy and by shielding themselves from unpleasant ideas which would adversely affect their desire to keep growing.
Most companies have negative side effects on society but no one involved wants to admit it (even to themselves).
Companies pretty much all say the same things about themselves, inside of SV or out. It's just whatever happens to be the marketing buzzwords of today.
My feeling is that we've barely started to grips with any of the consequences of any of the (Silicon Valley-originated) digital services we use. Where would you even begin to study how ever present access to information has changed life for most people? Who can say which technologies (or any technologies) have led to the decades-long cratering of crime rates? Really, how has Facebook changed our lives? How has Amazon changed cities? These are almost futile questions to seriously study, and the fact that they revolve around major corporate brands means that a lot of smart people (such as the author) mostly just roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.
"Yet the San Francisco of today is also strikingly different from the one my parents knew—and not just because I can’t find a single good burger under $10."
I've never paid more than $10 for a good burger in San Francisco and if you spend a minute of work on it, you won't either.
I wonder though if the burgers the author's parents knew would qualify for the author as "good". Lots of mom and pop diners throwing stuff together in the "rent is cheap" days, and that's still where you'll find the cheap burgers, if you don't mind them leaving off the truffle shavings.
SV's major fault lies in its overuse of hyperbole, which it uses to trick itself into thinking it's revolutionary.
Isn't most of what we hear from SV just typical corporate bro-speak + double espresso?
Dennis Miller once said that 95% of art is shit, 4% shit with an asterisk, but God bless the remaining 1%? That sums up what I see from SV pretty well.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadIt's not shiny or different - it doesn't have to. As long as it makes X more productive, it will help people in the long-term.
Is creative destruction real and good (most of the time)? Yes. Is your startup selling SGaaS (scuba gear as a service) going to radically impact the disinherited and the poor? No. Is there anything new under the sun?
Still, the criticism of the author is received: More humility from the collective "we" of SV wouldn't hurt.
Gavrilo Princip was just some angsty kid who wanted to fit in with his fellow revolutionaries. He still succeeded at starting a world war.
Every organization is composed mainly of followers, even ones that have recognizably brought progress to our world.
That claim is demonstrably false.
I've known plenty of creative counter-revolutionaries in my time. They're often fascinating people. They're also often given to misplaces rage and nonsensical notions, like marching against the supposed dehumanizing influence of computers.
Granted, I think it's a little twee when folks claim (to use the article's example) that they are 'building the restaurant of the future,' but that's harmless enough.
This isn't true at all. We had capitalism before we had states and regulation.
How are you going to guarantee that your neighbors won't be better-armed than you and rob (if you're lucky) or kill you?
Why would anyone else want to join you in your utopia?
It's easy: like most people who believe that shit, they likely also believe they'll be on the top of the food chain at that point -- just once the big mean government goes away, that is. It's likely the only thing that's kept them from being on top, after all. There is no consideration for the possibility that they will be ruled over or taken advantage of. That's not a credible theory, you see -- because it assumes they're not at the top.
Thus, this possibility you have entertained is actually an impossibility, you see! Checkmate.
> Why would anyone else want to join you in your utopia?
Total, all-encompassing delusion and market worship.
Wikipedia is helpful here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism
Plus, if you were in Athens odds were "you" were a slave. So the state's just a bit involved in your (in)ability to start a business in that case.
Then there's Sparta with its requirements of state service and bizarre, heavy-handed property laws. And again, you're probably a slave.
In some cases it might be fine, in others we might end up with http://i.imgur.com/NhebE.jpg
It really depends.
Not every regulation is good -- look at SF's housing and how you can have multiple overlapping regulations that mean that building a building is impossible in some situations -- but in many ways they're better than "free as software" technology.
Edit: Yes, safety features like seat belts were available before they were mandatory, but not everyone would buy them. I would be surprised if car manufacturers marketed the seat belt much even if they offered it.
1: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?year_high...
Sorry, I was a little off. It's 17.1%, not 17%. And I also said it's higher than any developed country when it's actually every country in The World Bank's data.
"American car manufacturers Nash (in 1949) and Ford (in 1955) offered seat belts as options, while Swedish Saab first introduced seat belts as standard in 1958.[7] After the Saab GT 750 was introduced at the New York Motor Show in 1958 with safety belts fitted as standard, the practice became commonplace.[8]"
"... The world's first seat belt law was put in place in 1970, in the state of Victoria, Australia, making the wearing of a seat belt compulsory for drivers and front-seat passengers. This legislation was enacted after trialing Hemco seatbelts, designed by Desmond Hemphill (1926–2001), in the front seats of police vehicles, lowering the incidence of officer injury and death."
Wikipedia mentions "in 1959, Congress passed legislation requiring all automobiles to comply with certain safety standards." but the writing leaves it unclear to me whether that included mandating seat belts.
The theory that government regulation is mandatory or companies will never do anything healthy requires a consumer base who assigns no regard to their health and safety, which is obviously false. I'm not say it's all market, either; I think a government that watches a free market but does not participate is generally the ideal. But the idea that we wouldn't have standard seat belts if it weren't for government is silly.
In the general case, the government can't mandate things that don't exist yet. They can at least prod things in certain directions with things like CAFE standards, but that's all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#History
Either that or companies price health-and-safety options out of the price range of some consumers, resulting in a society where we think it's right that anyone under a certain level of income doesn't deserve to be as safe as we are.
At least in the current system, you can't buy things without much the same level of safety as we have - meaning that you can't realistically push their income+benefits any lower without lots of pushback. If we thought that health and safety features were optional... that'd be a lot different.
This sounds bad, but even current society is like this. You can always use more money to be more safe. Car regulations don't change this but they do make cars less affordable.
To some degree, and for some things. In general, spending more on your car isn't going to help much when you get into a crash.
I don't need to research the apple I'm buying at the store. I don't need to look into the company that certified its safety to ensure it's not captured by the very company producing/selling the apple, or that it's not the same company that had huge scandal last year but with a new name (to take the Anarcho-Libertarian idea that private companies would replace government regulators in certifying safety and quality). That huge time/money cost is just gone. Anything in the grocery store will be basically fine. I can just toss it in the cart without a thought. I might gain some benefit from researching the products there, but it will be marginal. I don't have to do that stuff to just probably not die of food poisoning.
Same with car safety and any number of other things. Regulation ensures a baseline under which products will (generally) not drop, making it easier (cheaper) for buyers to spend. It reduces (consumer) overhead and greases wheels.
As a consumer — but it also makes it significantly more difficult to participate as a producer. This is why existing firms are so often pro-regulation: they have the resources to absorb the initial hit and then pass the costs on to consumers, while an upstart has to raise the resources to pay for the hit before having a single customer.
It can be hard to produce food safely, and ensuring food safety often has fixed costs (like buying safety/lab equipment, etc.)
You would think that would be true, but ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/business/energy-environmen...
You're assuming average Joe has any way of knowing wether produced-by-paper seatbelts in car A is any different from vinyl seatbelts in car B without any governed inspecting organ.
> or the medical example, the entire reason pharma can charge that is because of government grants monopolies.
No, the FDA approves things (for good: people don't die from rushed medicine with unseen side effects, and bad: it takes a lot of time and money to market, when people want new treatment now) for a reason. Why the current example has a monopoly is because of corrupt/lobbied regulation, not because the concept of regulation is bad. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
Consumer reports?
I save you by knowing how my field works and alerting you/stopping bad practices, and you save me by knowing your field. Then we institutionalize and compartmentalize that to ensure that unlike consumer reports, it's not influenced by market interests (which the US is still brilliant at ruining with lobbying). That is how a community works.
Of course, you can instead pay someone explicitly to look after your interests/safety, to make sure they're not paid by other interests, ie companies wanting to pay as little as possible to sell you as much as possible. The thing is you've now just created a government. If it's not working it's not because of its concept.
Average Joe doesn't spend time figuring out which technology/product is good for him or not because of govt regulation. If not for that, then people would develop a lot more ability to figure these things out. So you can't say that average joe doesn't have a way of knowing something which he today doesn't have any need to know.
Sure, we don't know what average joe would be capable of in such a scenario, but we equally don't know that capitalism would contain itself without regulation. What we however do know because we see it repeatedly is that corporations gladly take any shortcuts possible until they're caught. BP, VW, endless others. You can't be suggesting it would be BETTER without regulation?
Especially since I'm sure there's a "regulation", or three, for that under criminal code.
This statement is crazy and captures the folly of this article. Silicon Valley is not conservative in any sense of the word. SV is about as radical as you can get without losing touch with reality.
The author seems to think that anything that touches money must be evil. But you can't make much positive impact on the world by sitting around a fire singing kumbaya. Ultimately money has to be part of the equation for the vast majority of worthy causes.
And if you think I'm just one of those greedy capitalists peddling propaganda: I say this as someone who took a 60% pay cut in hopes of ultimately making more impact on the world.
One thing we all can agree it's radical.
Whenever discussing what "SV" wants, we should try to distinguish whether we're talking about the leaders, venture capitalists, prominent opinion-formers etc versus trying to find an average of what the public in that area think. And there's an extreme diversity of views to average over.
Basic Income is just classical liberalism. Helping people survive who are under privileged within a capitalistic economy while leaving the existing capitalistic economy and power structures largely intact.
Calling basic income communism is just GOP propaganda, not even libertarian propaganda.
:.:.:
Communists see Basic Income as a bourgeoisie hand out necessary to preserve existing class structures of a post scarcity capitalist society. By pacifying the proletariat and ensuring that in the event the bourgeoisie no longer require proletariat labor, they will still be able to exploit them for profit.
But if there is no scarcity or labor, why must there be profit?
Have you seriously ever read Marx as an adult? Not under a teachers supervision? He disagrees with >75% of everything Stalin, and everyone who came after him did. A strong argument can even be made that Leninism is a fundamental diversion from Marxism.
But (assuming you are European) non-Leninist communist literature was banned.
The divergence actually goes back further than Stalin to Lenin and his rather extensive deviations from classical Marxism to come up with a new program that could plausibly be deployed in a society that was itself pre-capitalist without developing mature capitalism on the road to the socialism that Marx saw as the necessary stage between capitalism and the end-state goal of utopian communism. Outside of the utopian ultimate end-state that both strove for in principle, this required complete revision of every part of the Marxist program starting with the preconditions and working through the whole rest of the policy path.
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We heard it all before, down to every word.
Basic income as an alternative to existing social welfare programs has a substantial amount of support on the right, particularly the libertarian right (and, likewise, a substantial amount of opposition from the left, particularly outside of the small left-libertarian segment, which is actually probably where the most fervent support for BI is), though the more extreme position of "no social support structure at all" is even more popular on the right (both libertarian and not).
BI, IOW, is not a distinctively left-wing position.
> One thing we all can agree it's radical.
There's some support for truly radical (or reactionary) ideas in SV, but overall its not really "radical" except in being a radical break from the establishment orthodoxy of either the left or the right. SV, on the whole, is a weird mix of naivete and pragmatism when it comes to policy preferences, with some leanings (though perhaps not as strong as one would expect from the people making up SV) toward the self-interest of relatively wealthy white men.
Being outside of the SV bubble looking in, this is patently false. These companies make grandiose claims like "we're going to democratize the social web!" and "we're changing the world for good!" when this most often translates to "we're building a website that steals all of its users' personal information and sells it to the highest bidder!"
Yes SV is not GOP conservative. But it is nonetheless right of center. I really think you don't understand that libertarians can be liberal on social issues, while being conservative on social issues. This is still very right of center.
This is capitalist propaganda. Some problems require social change not economic, and they are worthy causes. Some worthy causes simply need legal changes. The cognitive dissonance is real. Doing what? Taking a pay cut to join a startup to change the world?The idea that not being paid what you are worth IS some how heroic is capitalist propaganda. The idea is to make you feel morally superior when being paid less, and guilty when being paid more.
Those who obey the rules are at the bottom of society and those who break the rules (in clever ways) are at the top.
I think that most of the people at the top are fundamentally evil but they genuinely think of themselves as benevolent.
Companies continue to deliver growth by fostering a culture of hypocrisy and by shielding themselves from unpleasant ideas which would adversely affect their desire to keep growing.
Most companies have negative side effects on society but no one involved wants to admit it (even to themselves).
This is not exclusive to capitalism. It actually goes against the basic idea of a free market.
Capitalism isn't revolutionary. But looking to the corporate world to solve all your social problems might be.
Companies pretty much all say the same things about themselves, inside of SV or out. It's just whatever happens to be the marketing buzzwords of today.
I've never paid more than $10 for a good burger in San Francisco and if you spend a minute of work on it, you won't either.
I wonder though if the burgers the author's parents knew would qualify for the author as "good". Lots of mom and pop diners throwing stuff together in the "rent is cheap" days, and that's still where you'll find the cheap burgers, if you don't mind them leaving off the truffle shavings.
Isn't most of what we hear from SV just typical corporate bro-speak + double espresso?
Dennis Miller once said that 95% of art is shit, 4% shit with an asterisk, but God bless the remaining 1%? That sums up what I see from SV pretty well.