[HN Gopher] Other challenges to SV's preeminence are more fundam...
___________________________________________________________________
Other challenges to SV's preeminence are more fundamental than the
tech diaspora
Author : hacksilver
Score : 185 points
Date : 2021-03-19 12:05 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oreilly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oreilly.com)
| dang wrote:
| All: please respond to the substance of the article, not the
| baity title. The latter leads to boring flamewar, while the
| article (and we all) deserve better.
|
| To help with that, we've changed the title above to the what high
| school English teachers would call its thesis statement.
| pdimitar wrote:
| SV is a bubble and it will be defended by those who benefit from
| that status quo for quite a while still.
|
| I do agree with the article decrying humanity's chronic inability
| to act on preventable crises. But it seems (a) most of humanity
| is much more inert and passive than we are inclined to think and
| (b) the vested interests and/or the powers-that-be are really
| that powerful so as to prevent the action of everybody else.
|
| At the same time the article is overly optimistic: it claims that
| the consumer internet and social media are coming to an end.
| sradman wrote:
| > as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a
| hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the
| markets where Silicon Valley has prospered.
|
| This narrative continues to frustrate me. Eleanor Roosevelt
| famously said:
|
| > Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small
| minds discuss people.
|
| The big idea behind Theranos was that combining multiple
| microfluidic tests could produce a lab-on-a-chip. Theranos failed
| to combine more than a handful of microfluidics together and
| scrambled to find alternatives to bridge the gap.
|
| Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests that
| specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory test has
| to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood; a key
| feature of microfluidic tests.
|
| Our collective small minds couldn't focus on anything but the
| people involved. The core idea is still an outstanding hard
| problem.
| rcxdude wrote:
| > Ultimately they were foiled by brain-dead regulatory tests
| that specified blood draw volumes of blood. This regulatory
| test has to change to accommodate fingerpick volumes of blood;
| a key feature of microfluidic tests.
|
| As I understand it, for many of the tests Theranos was aiming
| to do there's no real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes
| of blood they were trying to use: the concentrations of the
| substance they were testing for were so low the statistical
| variation of the amount in any given small volume of blood
| would invalidate the test, even if you could accurately count
| it.
| sradman wrote:
| > for many of the tests Theranos was aiming to do there's no
| real way to achieve it with the tiny volumes of blood they
| were trying to use
|
| This is exactly the right question to ask. Right from the
| start we should have had a scorecard of the common lab tests
| doctors request (under 50 I think). For each test you should
| ask "is it possible with microfluidics?" and then "has it
| been combined on a single strip/card yet?"
|
| I'm not sure if any concentrations are too low for
| microfluidics rather than the dilution required to meet the
| volumes specified in the standardized tests. Are fingerpick
| volumes too small or are the regulatory tests outdated?
|
| The same issue applies to self administered rapid antigen
| tests during the pandemic. Regulators focused on the "gold
| standard" PCR tests and ignored the benefit of cheap and easy
| unamplified tests that can be used in a daily regiment.
| ghaff wrote:
| They focused on the people because they were either scammers or
| well-known people with no domain knowledge.
|
| The basic idea was very straightforward. I can come up with
| lots of great ideas if I ignore whether there's any reasonable
| path to a solution. Hey! Let's have a Star Trek medical
| tricorder implemented in a watch. Let me know when you're done
| implementing it. I'll be at the beach.
|
| Nothing to do with regulator bogeyman.
| sradman wrote:
| > They focused on the people because they were either
| scammers
|
| The scamming came after the failure of the core premise of
| the startup: microfluidic lab-on-a-chip. My point was not to
| excuse the scamming, it was to switch focus back to the core
| ideas and not the people sporting black turtlenecks.
|
| I suspect that if the original strategy worked the story
| would be different. Transparently reporting
| technical/business failure is an admirable trait but it is a
| different thing than innovation. Journalists and analysts
| should have been reporting on the scorecard
| (strategy/tactics/execution). When the company did a
| technical pivot why was this not enough to investigate the
| underlying cause? I'm a potential customer that wants this
| solution; I feel like I've been cheated by all involved.
|
| QUESTION: if someone else succeeds with a microfluidic lab-
| on-a-chip can the regulators validate its efficacy?
| ghaff wrote:
| Presumably they compare the results with those from known
| good tests.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I don't think a lot of people quite grasp how big of a scam
| silicon valley is. I've pieced most of the information together
| from articles that I have seen here.
|
| Do you know who owns the majority of rental properties in silicon
| valley? East coast and Midwest pension funds or investment firms
| using their capital. This includes office space and residential
| areas. Care to take a guess who's capital the majority of VC
| firms are investing? If you guessed east coast and Midwest
| pension funds, you're right.
|
| Moving to silicon valley to get a good paying job? Prepare to
| spend most of it on rent, basically paying a significant portion
| if not the majority of your salary to the very individuals that
| own controlling interest in the company paying you. Going to
| silicon valley to start a company? Prepare to pay a significant
| portion of that funding you got right back where you got it for
| office space.
|
| Imagine if you could take a significant share, potentially a
| controlling interest, in every major tech startup basically for
| free. You create an engine to suck productivity out of some of
| the most creative, technically proficient innovators in the US by
| owning land in northern California and convincing them that they
| have to go there and rent from you to get your money to make
| their big ideas happen. Now you get to own some of the most
| productive people on the planet. That's one hell of a profitable
| scam. And the funny thing, we all forgot why you had to go there
| in the first place, that the silicon was made there, and we just
| take it as gospel that you have to go there to work in tech, even
| though the silicon is all made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and
| China now. And let's not even get started on the hypocrisy of
| pension funds that exist due to union lobbying doing this.
|
| Now, if you're still considering going there, as an added bonus
| consider that you'll be surrounded by people that step over
| homeless people on the way to work where they will write social
| media posts about income inequality.
| blast wrote:
| You're not entirely wrong, but you're more wrong than right.
| For example, yes, a good paying SV job involves spending a lot
| on rent, but nowhere near "most of it"...very much the
| opposite. Yes there are issues, but it's not "how big of a
| scam", and by describing it that way you lose credibility.
| keenreed wrote:
| When I looked a few years back, nice houses would go around
| 12k/month. Maybe shared condos are not expensive, but not
| everyone wants to live that way.
| jjav wrote:
| Your definition of nice is pretty over the top, even by SV
| standards, if you'd need 12K/mo to find a place.
| keenreed wrote:
| Maybe now corona it is better, but a few years landlords
| could choose from several applicants. 12k was realistic
| asking price for foreigner with no credit history without
| waiting.
| keenreed wrote:
| Agree. We tried to get funded a few years ago, but gave up. VCs
| insisted we relocate to SV, but it would not make sense (we are
| remote). It felt like a scam to pump property market.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I started a PhD in biomedical engineering back in 2017, coming
| from a EEE background. The topic I was studying was the
| application of machine learning for neurosignal decoding.
|
| Imagine the development of a "thought keyboard" that could be
| used by someone with motor neurone disease to communicate with
| their family or drive a robotic arm - young me was excited!
|
| While it's true that the field had shifted towards machine
| learning in the decade preceding, that wasn't because ML
| techniques showed any amazing promise or were likely to be the
| foundation of any breakthrough. Quite the opposite, in fact -
| there was strong evidence to suggest that the "ML revolution"
| would go nowhere, but that's where all the grant money was.
|
| So day after day, year after year, hordes of researchers would
| churn out ML papers they knew would yield no fruit simply because
| that was the path of least resistance. Occasionally they would
| get a "breakthrough" result that never generalised to other
| datasets. It could be the case that ML is showing genuinely
| amazing results in other biomedical fields, but after going
| through that I'm always a bit skeptical. (For anyone wondering, I
| left after a year and basically gave up the right to ever study a
| PhD in Australia again.)
| purple-again wrote:
| Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very
| real and so is the immense value it's capable of granting
| us...HOWEVER it's really only in a narrow category of problems
| and people don't want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it
| into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from
| blockchain.
|
| That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is
| classification problems where the cost of a false positive is
| marginal. In the industry we frequently refer to it as
| "professional judgement" and anyone who has ever referred to
| that statement in the course of their work should be concerned
| because ML is coming for you. As far as the false positive part
| of it, we'll no on bats an eye when a surgeon loses a patient,
| but we're unlikely to accept the same from a computer any time
| soon.
|
| The biggest area where I can think of that this narrow problem
| space exists to be capitalized on is...search. Not surprising
| then that Google became a king of ML because to them it was
| actually a revolutionary leap forward to their core problem.
| nikanj wrote:
| And just like blockchain, the reason it gets forced into
| every field is VCs.
|
| "We are going to challenge existing players in $market" gets
| you nothing, "We are going to disrupt $market with
| blockchain/ML" gets you a eight-digit seed round.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| You don't have to take the money, or at least take it on
| those terms. Entrepreneurs have agency. They should
| exercise it.
| tchalla wrote:
| In you view, why do you think the society has an issue when a
| "machine " makes a decision vs a human? Can you think of a
| legitimate areas where trust in machine outputs wouldn't be
| favoured vs a human?
| mattkrause wrote:
| ML systems will struggle when the question itself is ill-
| posed.
|
| A human can say "I've been instructed to group these data
| into those categories, but this particular example doesn't
| fit into any them." and then devise a way to handle special
| cases.
|
| By construction, an ML system can't. At the end of the day,
| a classifier needs to assign one of the predefined labels
| to each example. At best, it might give you a confidence
| value, or a probability distribution over labels. However,
| interpreting those is usually outside of the system itself.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Seriously? A narrow category of problems?
|
| ML has been used and is being used to significantly advance
| image processing, video processing, image classification,
| speech-to-text, natural language understanding, medical
| imaging interpretation, medical notes and differential
| diagnosis, warehouse management, shipping and delivery,
| transportation, networking, agriculture, biomedical research,
| insurance, law practice (document scanning), journalism,
| politics (through better polling, targeting, gerrymandering,
| whatever), probably other things I'm missing.
| wardnath wrote:
| Seconded. Today's "narrow"applications are quite wide
| compared to the expert systems of decades ago. I wouldn't
| say we are in a second AI winter when cool new applications
| of DNNs pop up frequently on HN.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Please. The vast majority of the above are fields where ML
| failed spectacularly.
|
| If you had any idea about medical diagnosis, biomedical
| research, supply chain optimization, politics and
| journalism you would know that machine learning is a
| laughing stock in these fields.
|
| ML had 2 big wins: (image & data) Classification & NLP. It
| is stupid to not use ML for these problems, but it equally
| stupid to try to fit ML in fields that it cannot work.
| emteycz wrote:
| Let's not claim something has failed when it has just
| begun... Given today's hardware and given that it's a
| very new topic of research, IMHO the accomplishments are
| incredible. It's not yet production ready, but that
| doesn't mean another 10 years of progress won't get it
| there.
| whatever1 wrote:
| We need to invest in long term R&D to potentially achieve
| an ML breakthrough in one of the above fields instead of
| allocating enormous capital to ML unicorn businesses.
|
| But to do so, we need to first openly admit the truth. ML
| is not working for the wide range the problems it is
| currently pitched for.
| ssivark wrote:
| That list is flag planting of the first order -- like a dog
| claiming territory as a kingdom after a few stray golden
| showers here and there.
|
| Yes, ML has been applied to all those topics, but to
| narrow/superficial applications & with limited success (in
| most of those areas, any how). The applications have also
| been explored in relatively ad-hoc ways, with little
| improvement in systematic understanding/knowledge of any of
| those fields.
| mrtksn wrote:
| My impression about ML is that it shines where "intuition of
| a master" is needed. That is, for example, the mastery of a
| "technician painter" who has build an intuition of imitating
| Van Gogh painting can be achieved through AI.
|
| Any intuitive skill that can be built through hard work and
| years of experience seems to be within the realms of what
| AI/ML can learn to do. Separating background from the
| subjects, guessing the 3D shape of an object from a 2D image
| etc. Anything that people can master through experience,
| including stuff like "sensing that there's something fishy
| but can't tell exactly what" kind of intuition.
|
| I bet that there would be welding machines that can help an
| amateur to weld like a master by learning and imitating the
| way a master welder does its job.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Forgive me for my ignorance, but could the issue have not been
| the ML but rather, put simply, the input data? Is it the case
| that we truly know what signals to measure to get a clear
| indication of intent? It seems to me the answer is no (then ML
| is not going to help)?
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head. There were actually
| impressive trials done wherein researchers used invasive
| sensors that penetrated the brain tissue itself and directly
| measured neutral spikes.
|
| The idea that ML could magically classify signals from
| sensors above the dura/skull was laughable. Your signal (and
| therefore training data) is affected by basically any thought
| of action the user has, and is then spatially low pass
| filtered by a big fat slab of bone and flesh.
|
| Imagine trying to train a "cat recogniser" by showing it low-
| resolution pictures of a random location in a room where a
| cat is. It was a joke then and I suspect still is now.
| ehnto wrote:
| > The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the
| norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its
| objective function in 1970: "The social responsibility of
| business is to increase its profits." This is all the sadder,
| though, since the tech industry set out to model something
| better. The generosity of open source software and the World Wide
| Web, the genius of algorithmically amplified collective
| intelligence are still there...
|
| I don't buy that at all, the tech INDUSTRY was the result of
| attempting to extract value out of technology. I have to scoff at
| the inclusion of "algorithmically amplified intelligence" as one
| of the egalitarian core values of SV. If you hadn't caught on by
| then, you must have been heady off the fumes of it all.
| onethought wrote:
| So open source was just tech people not understanding their
| core purpose of "extract value out of technology" ?
| ehnto wrote:
| Open source is an entirely different movement. OSS is written
| the world over, yet SV is where everyone is busy extracting
| orders of magnitude of value from it.
|
| From plenty of experience, SV open sources because it
| provides a business advantage, because it costs them nothing
| or because it's part of the business model of OSS+Support.
| Individual contributors are the heroes here, people doing it
| for the love of the software. The software industry will spin
| their work for a dollar all fucking day with no contribution
| back.
| onethought wrote:
| Oh really... So the open source code that contributed/drove
| the delivery of that comment wasn't written in SV?
|
| edit: To the second part of your comment... so why are the
| browsers all open source (at least at their core)? What's
| the business advantage? The non-organisational contributors
| are hardly the "heroes" of those projects. And they have
| contributed a ridiculous amount of free value to world.
| ehnto wrote:
| There is no doubt that the vast majority of open source
| software comes out of the software industry in SV. The
| arguing point I have is that it isn't out of an
| egalitarian view from the industry to provide for others
| and make the world better, generally speaking. Exceptions
| abound, sure. But the industry is busy making money, the
| fact that say Chromium and Webkit are open source is a
| very good example of how a company can use open source to
| leverage a competitive advantage.
|
| My main gripe with the article is that it tried to
| conflate the technology movement and the software
| industry. Tied tightly together no doubt, but they are
| different. The very nature of the industry is to make
| money and that is totally fine, but let's not pretend the
| industry was some utopian ideal from the outset. As I
| said in my first comment, the industry specifically, grew
| out of the attempt to extract value from the technology.
| That's fine. It hasn't been twisted over time, it just is
| what it is.
|
| I may have been flippant in my commentary.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| For some business plans, open source is a means of keeping
| competitors some number of releases behind internal
| development, perpetually, while they're none the wiser.
| 627467 wrote:
| > The final, and perhaps most important, reason why Silicon
| Valley as we know it may be over is that its current incarnation
| is a product of the extraordinarily cheap capital of the years
| since the global financial crisis of 2009.
|
| Seems to be implying that cheap capital is ending? Isn't the
| narrative everywhere right now that capital will remain cheap
| (almost) indefinitely and one of the reasons why many fear
| inflation and money is rushing to wallstreet and sv-casino
| (SPACs)?
| nightshadetrie wrote:
| Maybe, at least people won't be tied down 100% and can work
| remote. If you have a family you can now afford a home to raise
| kids in.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O'Reilly piece,
| which taught me that the man's got a bit of social consciousness
| in his critiques of SV:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403
|
| I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren't actually
| engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to
| medical science is indeed exciting, but it's hard to envision
| what exactly is the product that causes "The nexus of machine
| learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to
| the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th
| and early 21st century." Not to mention, I would wager most
| commentators are not equipped to address his point about SV being
| unable to deal with medical regulations, seeing as there's been
| medtech startups that have already attempted to flout FDA
| regulation.
|
| > The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special
| province of Silicon Valley
|
| Isn't South SF a biotech hotbed?
|
| His points about regulators actually doing able something
| substantive towards big tech platforms, and the end of "casino
| capitalism" also feel too Pollyannaish for our current lamentable
| moment. Maybe it has to all get worse before it's foreseeable.
|
| O'Reilly certainly calls it out as he sees it with the social
| commentary:
|
| > When the "superstar firms" ruthlessly compete with smaller
| firms that come up with fresh ideas, not only starving them of
| talent but often introducing copycat products and services, there
| is decreased innovation from the market as a whole. Cities are
| dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees
| driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers;
| wages and working conditions of workers in less profitable
| industries are squeezed to drive the growth of the giants. Their
| very jobs are made contingent and disposable, with inequality
| baked in from the beginning of their employment. Governments are
| starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art
| of tax avoidance. The list is far longer than that.
|
| Honestly, this article's a great read.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-
| company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out
| lower wage workers
|
| This is just an ignorant hot-take though that once again blames
| upper middle class tech employees for a housing problem caused
| solely by bad govern policies.
|
| There is no "domination" here considering that tech employees
| are well. 21 percent [1] are now considered tech jobs and the
| FAANG employees clearing $500K+ to afford houses make up a
| small fraction of that.
|
| > Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that
| have mastered the art of tax avoidance.
|
| SF tax revenue has been climbing the whole decade [2]. CA is
| the same [3]. The governments are absolutely not "starved of
| revenue". They have been operating in a completely inept
| fashion for decades and the waste/corruption is eating
| everything up. Double the tax revenue in California and
| politicians will have it squandered in the year.
|
| This is just another lame attempt to blame the tech boogeyman
| for a failed government. How much homelessness, high housing
| costs, high tax rates, failed public infrastructure, etc do we
| have to endure before we realize crying about one of the few
| major successful industries isn't an answer?
|
| 1. https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/tech-employment-
| bay-a... 2. https://sftreasurer.org/annual-report-fiscal-
| year-2018-19 3.
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/313176/california-state-...
| [deleted]
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that
| have mastered the art of tax avoidance.
|
| Your rebuttal appears to miss the point that O'Reilly makes.
|
| First: This page [1] shows business tax is about 1B of 6B
| total for San Francisco. In most cities in the United States,
| business tax is a relatively small part of total tax revenue.
| Most cities derive the largest proportion of tax revenue from
| property taxes. For SF, it is 2B per year -- the highest of
| any tax revenue category. SF property prices have risen a lot
| in the last ten years, so property tax has also risen. I
| understand some of this could be attributed to a strong
| economy combined with difficult regulations to build new
| residential housing. Thus, SF has seen a historic rise in
| housing prices.
|
| Second: Speaking more specifically to O'Reilly's point about
| the "art of tax avoidance": Are you familiar with "base
| erosion and profit shifting (BEPS)"? Sometimes you hear the
| term "Dutch Sandwich" or "Double Irish arrangement" in media.
| Global (tech) companies can greatly reduce _national_ taxes
| by using these tax strategies. Thus, they deny much needed
| tax revenue to various countries where they operate. Please
| note: These tax strategies are not only limited to tech. Any
| industry that is heavily weighted towards "intellectual
| property", such as pharma, uses similar tax strategies.
| (General Electric was one of the earliest and most
| aggressive.) Famously, even Starbucks, which isn't a very "IP
| intense" industry managed to pay zero national taxes in the
| UK one year. After some embarrassing news stories, they
| offered a voluntary payment to the UK nat'l gov't.
|
| [1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards//finance/expenditures-and-
| reven...
| kortilla wrote:
| The lost national taxes in the US are effectively
| irrelevant for his point though. The despair in the Bay
| Area has nothing to do with federal funds. More
| importantly, federal funds haven't been dictated by federal
| revenue in decades. In the US the federal government just
| accumulates debt whenever it wants at historically low
| interest.
| weinzierl wrote:
| "The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and
| materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon
| Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century."
|
| I've been hearing the trinity of information technology, life
| sciences and materials science for over a quarter of a century
| again and again. Since the first time and ever since it reminds
| me of these tests where you are presented a list of words that
| are related somehow and you have to find the one word that
| doesn't fit in the set.
|
| For me materials science seems to almost fit at first glance,
| but not really when you look at it. Both the other areas have
| already changed our life more than anything in the past decades
| and there is good reason they will continue to do so even more
| in the near and intermediate future. I don't see this to be
| true for materials science. At least there seem to be at least
| a dozen fields that are equally influential.
|
| Does anyone know why materials science is so often included?
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Superconductors, buckyballs, artificial diamonds etc are all
| quite sexy and easy to grasp, so they have a big profile in
| popular news despite their comparative lack of utility, much
| more so than (until recently) incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo
| about mRNA, convoluted neural networks and whatnot.
|
| That said, materials science is vital for incremental
| improvements like modern composite airplanes or SpaceX
| rockets etc, and if we ever do get to space elevators or
| room-temperature superconductors, the potential is life-
| changing.
| bsenftner wrote:
| It sounds crackpot, but in the merger of ML enhanced medicine
| and bio-generics, we're gonna see attempts to push genetic
| manipulating cosmetic plastic surgeries into the mainstream -
| like tattoos, these medical enhancements will be sold like
| apps, and they will create novelty capabilities or novel
| appearance transformations for the customers. Some artist
| gets sparrow wings on their feet (like the Greek God Mercury)
| or an artist has a living hydra-snake-wig created that
| accompanies her with backup vocals, who the hell knows? with
| this tech, bizarre combinations are possible and will driven
| by pop culture excess curiosity. Not "if" but "when" a
| popular music artist embraces such technology, we'll see a
| whole generation of Transhumanists Entertainers flooding
| society.
| ping_pong wrote:
| Im so tired of random writers, even if it's O'Reilly himself,
| trying to predict that Silicon Valley is doomed. That's like
| saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is doomed. I've been
| around long enough to know that nothing will unseat Silicon
| Valley as the tech capital of the world.
|
| Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and
| greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
| There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US. Despite having much
| higher educational standards even in 3rd world countries, the
| best the world could do is China which just stole US ideas and
| then built a firewall to keep others out.
|
| Do I like what Silicon Valley has turned into? Hell no. I like
| the 90s version so much better, where nerds were tinkering with
| cool stuff and writing software because they loved software, not
| because they want to increase engagement by 1%. But it is what it
| is, and Silicon Valley will change with the times, I'm sure. I
| would love to see another dot-com-bust and clear out some of the
| chaff, but it doesn't seem like it's going to happen this time
| around.
|
| If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that
| people since 2010 have made *too* much money. Practically anyone
| at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you've
| worked on. One of the factors I listed above, greed, is now
| missing for the most part. People have too much money, and with
| that they stop getting hungry. The hunger for making money, which
| propelled a lot of the advancement in previous decades, is absent
| in many people here. Even I've become a multi-millionaire over
| the last 5 years by doing nothing differently except buying a
| house and working at a tech company. This causes a financial
| convection current, which you're somewhat seeing, of the bored
| rich Googlers moving on and doing other stuff. The incentive is
| gone for many.
|
| But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to
| Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come,
| that will continue to fuel things for decades to come. These
| days, if you get funded by a VC, you're getting $5 million for
| 20%, which is a lot of money. Deals like that can't be matched
| elsewhere and another reason why you won't see people trying to
| raise money elsewhere, they will just come to Silicon Valley with
| their greatest ideas and keep propelling it.
|
| Silicon Valley will never die.
| dataking wrote:
| > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US.
|
| Spotify, ATI, ARM, BlackBerry?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Canonical and the part of AWS built in SA?
| sampo wrote:
| > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US.
|
| Young people might not remember but 10+ years ago, Nokia used
| to be the market leader in mobile phones.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-mobile-phone-mark...
| keenreed wrote:
| >> But as long as more immigrants from other countries come to
| Silicon Valley because they've heard about how rich people come
|
| Why should I come to SV? Living standard, taxes, workforce
| cost, housing... I may get $5m funding, but that would only buy
| an office and couple of employees for a few years. And if I
| ever make it, VC and California taxes would eat 90% of my
| profit.
|
| And do not even let me start on family and children cost and
| friendliness. Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose
| himself in front of my daughter... :(
|
| Raising funds is not that big deal, there is so much free
| capital now. New trend is residency in tax heaven (UAE,
| Singapore, Cyprus) and globally distributed team.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Buying $3m house, so homeless guy can expose himself in
| front of my daughter... :(
|
| You're talking about a few limited neighborhoods out of an
| entire metropolitan area.
| jstepka wrote:
| that it's normalized is his point
|
| shame on us for that
| astrange wrote:
| California doesn't have a high tax burden. If you manage to
| get a house you're actually set, it's a feudal system where
| you essentially never have to pay taxes again, since your
| property tax will be below inflation forever.
| gedy wrote:
| Prop 13 allows for 2% increase every year[0]. That's more
| than the (supposed) inflation rate in many years[1], though
| agreed that feels inaccurate.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposi
| tion_...
|
| [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-
| cpi
| keenreed wrote:
| Compared to what? California is not exactly known as tax
| heaven.
| astrange wrote:
| That's because the only people who complain about "taxes"
| in general terms are propagandists like Grover Norquist
| who don't care about reality. People actually trying to
| skip on their tax bills like Musk tend to do it quietly
| and make up excuses.
|
| Anyone who lives here knows perfectly well that their
| neighbor who bought a house in the 80s has a property tax
| bill 10x lower than theirs - actually I live next to
| several car dealerships who'd pay less than I would if I
| could afford a house here. That's the power of Prop 13.
|
| Besides that, CA residents are probably getting a tax
| refund this year because the state has a budget surplus.
| keenreed wrote:
| So rant about local politics and shaming people who
| decide to leave.
|
| I am sure California tax rate is under 70%, but I find it
| highly non transparent and unpredictable.
| fancyfish wrote:
| I love this take. It's true, after the rise of modern tech
| post-2008, the top talent got rich off RSUs and lost their
| greediness. Greed made this industry what it is, in every
| innovation cycle (hardware, software, dotcom, mobile).
|
| We need a return to greed and a rise in hunger and
| competitiveness, which creates innovation. Too many talented
| individuals resting on their laurels cashing RSUs instead of
| starting a company.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I think it's a massive success that tech has been able to
| share as much of its profits with its workers, and I think
| that's because of stock comp creating a race to the top with
| wage growth. We need more of that, not less.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly
| global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are
| meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What
| traditionally _has_ been unique is the culture, the importance
| of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for
| Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside
| of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of
| The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with
| them due to making loads of money.
|
| To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at
| employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been
| detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology
| startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly
| qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable
| in many domains that require such employees to have any chance
| of executing successfully. This has created an arguably
| pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can
| be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a
| given company.
|
| Silicon Valley isn't dead but as a place to build a tech
| company it is looking less differentiated with each passing
| year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed
| almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even
| at companies headquartered in the Valley.
| nmfisher wrote:
| > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US.
|
| Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I agree completely with what you mean, but this was an
| unnecessary, extremely insulting way to say it.
| nmfisher wrote:
| What the OP wrote is considerably more offensive than what
| I responded with (and I also was originally going to
| respond with something FAR less polite, but decided against
| it).
|
| Sugarcoating it any more would just dilute the message. I
| stand by what I said.
| stepbeek wrote:
| This sentiment crops up semi-frequently here and I find it
| really odd. The USA has a lot going for it, but they don't
| have a monopoly on impactful tech.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| temporalparts wrote:
| Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-
| leading tech companies that are not in the US?
|
| I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company
| valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is
| confined to China instead of the world.
| nmfisher wrote:
| There's dozens already listed - but just to name a few off
| the top of my head - ARM, TSMC, Spotify, Sony, Nintendo,
| DJI, TikTok (ByteDance), Atlassian, Skype (pre-MS), Canva,
| Nubank.
|
| And that's also ignoring the dozens of Chinese companies
| that dwarf their US counterparts but don't really do much
| outside China (Ant/Alibaba/Jingdong/DiDi/etc).
|
| "Only the US can produce world-leading tech companies" is
| the type of thing you say when you get all your news from
| TechCrunch and have never been outside the US.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Spotify came from Sweden. Not sure they're a world leading
| tech company but they definitely fit the SV startup mould.
| m_mueller wrote:
| I'll bite: Leadership in chip manufacturing is firmly in
| TSMC's hands. Chip design is dominated by ARM and Qualcomm.
| Display tech by Samsung and LG.
|
| Today, if you have an idea for a new gadget and you need
| fast prototyping, you're far better off setting up shop in
| Shenzen than San Jose.
|
| I'll give you one thing: When it comes to _software_ , by
| far SV has still the most influence. But when you include
| the whole tech space I think one should differentiate.
| presentation wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, but isn't Qualcomm an American
| company?
| m_mueller wrote:
| you could say that, but certainly not an SV company.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| I would even add that only a handful of companies out of
| SV did add real societal value and many of them with
| their dark engagement patterns are even detrimental.
| gxs wrote:
| I agree, but never say never.
|
| The Chinese will for sure have their own version of Silicon
| Valley and their giants will rival ours, no doubt.
|
| I think there will be other critical centers of tech
| innovation, similar to how Hollywood is Hollywood but NYC has
| an industry as well.
| raspasov wrote:
| The fear of China "overtaking" the US is like the fear of the
| Soviet Union during the Cold War. Real, but with no
| substance. A system built on top of paranoia is very unlikely
| to succeed.
| mempko wrote:
| I'm sorry, but China is much stronger economically than the
| USSR ever was
| gxs wrote:
| No one said they would over take - merely they that are a
| formidable foe and will have a presence no doubt.
|
| The kind of hubris in this thread tells me despite how
| asinine these articles are they hit HNs nerve.
| kelnos wrote:
| I wouldn't say "no one"; my personal opinion is that if
| the West doesn't wake up, they'll quite easily overtake
| in a few decades, if not sooner. We continue to enable
| their rise, while ignoring their bad behavior, all
| because we need access to their manufacturing
| capability... capability we've willingly ceded to them
| over the past decades.
| kelnos wrote:
| Downplaying China and their potential is exactly how China
| got to the level of prominence they have today. I don't see
| the Soviet Union as a good comparison. I think China could
| still fail, of course, but they're much more likely than
| the Soviets (from whom they no doubt learned some of what
| not to do) to succeed in the longer term.
|
| The biggest problem is that the West is allowing them to
| win, by being addicted to cheap goods and losing the
| ability to manufacture many things (cost-effectively or at
| all) ourselves, while China doesn't open up their markets
| to outsiders, at least nowhere near the same degree as we
| give them access.
| seniorivn wrote:
| you oversimplify their model, for most people in
| Schenchzen(Chinese silicon valley) the motivation is the
| same as it was in US
| busterarm wrote:
| Also it's very much worth nothing that Silicon Valley no
| longer has the monopoly on talent that it once had. In fact
| in some of the more important development areas now, it's
| shifted to places like Boston or elsewhere.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I think you're not looking far enough back in the history
| of computer technology to think it's _recently_ shifted to
| places like Boston. There's always been companies outside
| SV, and especially in Boston. And there's always been ebb
| and flow.
| busterarm wrote:
| I'm well aware, but my point is this time that there are
| entire fields where the _hub_ is Boston and not SV.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Not to mention that a lot of talent are moving to Austin,
| Miami, or literally anywhere thanks to the teleconferencing
| technology that Silicon Valley invented.
|
| Which raises the question if Silicon Valley isn't
| geographical but is rather a catch-all for the cutting edge
| and dumb money aspects of the U.S. tech industry. Is the
| Amazon/Microsoft/Valve tech scene in Seattle any less
| Silicon Valley than SV itself? Is Austin, which had
| techbros since the 90s with the likes of Trilogy [0], and
| an ongoing rush of new blood flowing out of the Bay Area,
| any less SV? Will VCs moving to Miami turn it into the
| funding operations center of SV?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620848
| ulfw wrote:
| Zoom is mostly developed in China, not even SV.
| busterarm wrote:
| I've found that as much as the technical folks have
| spread out to Seattle & Austin (and now elsewhere as
| those are getting too expensive), nearly all of the
| business folks stick to the Valley. Both the brilliant
| and the parasites.
|
| As the capital cycle has shifted away from VC towards
| companies consolidating and needing to make real returns,
| it's going to be interesting to see if SV can stay what
| it is until things turn around again.
|
| During the dotcom correction, it was still possible for
| some people to stick around and eek out a living. Today
| that's not possible without technologist wages.
|
| Business folks are mostly trend followers now and
| "leaving California" is a trendy thing to do.
| onethought wrote:
| > the best the world could do is China which just stole US
| ideas and then built a firewall to keep others out.
|
| So where was WeChat and ubiquitous QR codes for everything
| stolen from? Silicon Valley still haven't figured out how to do
| Ubiquitous contactless payment... it's like going back in time
| every time I travel there, and I have to swipe a credit card
| and sign with a pen.
|
| Or Taiwan's COVID/PPE Supply tracking system's?
|
| Sorry... Silicon Valley is dying.
| e_y_ wrote:
| Crappy payments isn't a tech problem, it's a market problem.
| Consumers and merchants can't be bothered to adopt
| contactless technologies that were introduced half a decade
| ago.
|
| Companies have tried QR codes and other payment schemes long
| before that (including the unfortunately named ISIS), but
| again, no traction.
| onethought wrote:
| Americans don't like contactless payment?
|
| Or (more Likely), unlike their Chinese counterparts,
| American banks are way more conservative with adopting new
| technologies. Hence why y'all still get paid with paper
| cheques :)
| astrange wrote:
| We have contactless payment with EMVpay/Apple Pay. There
| are some QR code systems like Venmo but I don't know what
| the value add of scanning a code is supposed to be.
|
| Nobody gets paid with paper checks unless they want to,
| although if you're poor and have been blacklisted by the
| bank system you might take it so you can use a check
| cashing service.
| ghaff wrote:
| People have their habits. I do increasingly use my Apple
| Watch (or a contactless credit card) to pay but my
| observation on the outskirts of a large East Coast metro
| is that effectively no one does.
|
| I still use checks for service people and some other
| purposes, e.g. when there's a fee for online payment.
| ubertoop wrote:
| You've listed literally 4 things.
|
| You can't really believe that compares to the innovations to
| come out of Silicon Valley, right?
| onethought wrote:
| Sorry, your right:
|
| - largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption
|
| - 5G (still no SV grown solution there)
|
| - Most advanced solar manufacture
|
| - biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear
|
| - biggest investor in space based technology and delivery
|
| If you'd like more I can keep going. I was responding to:
| "they steal everything"... I pointed out the most widely
| used social network that was homegrown and unique.
| astrange wrote:
| > - 5G (still no SV grown solution there)
|
| Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a
| lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few
| months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud
| infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad
| strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what
| it was supposed to mean yet.
|
| Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high
| margin business.
| onethought wrote:
| Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It's really fast and awesome!
|
| It involves both improvements in hardware and software.
| Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the
| narrative that China just copies everyone)
| inshadows wrote:
| Define awesome. How will it improve my life? Please don't
| mention high speed. Or if you do, mention applications
| where it makes difference.
| throwaway-8c93 wrote:
| I do share your skepticism overall, 5G is being pushed
| more aggressively than its value would warrant. But there
| are parts of 5G suite that are indeed valuable and go
| beyond the mere "moar speed" mantra.
|
| Network slicing is not consumer facing, but is a big deal
| in business-to-business connectivity, likely enabling
| business models that just aren't possible today. It's a
| bit like renting virtual machines in the cloud, but
| instead you're renting connectivity, tailored to your SLA
| needs.
|
| Higher bandwidth, lower latency and lower power
| consumption are not exciting in isolation, but improving
| all of them at the same time does bring notably better
| user experience (see the raving reviews of M1 Mac for the
| same phenomenon).
| astrange wrote:
| 5G FR2 is certainly fast but we already had "fast" (5Ghz
| Wi-Fi or wired Internet), and it's pretty harsh on mobile
| batteries. 5G FR1 is somewhat better than LTE but not
| really enough to enable new uses.
|
| The real issue preventing new consumer uses is that
| wireless plans are expensive and have data limits.
| Driving that down presumably involves investing in the
| wireless ISP backend, which doesn't have much to do with
| the radio technology.
| ubertoop wrote:
| This list includes no genuinely new innovations except
| for maybe 5G. You are listing that China is a major
| manufacturer, which is true. The OPs point was that China
| has a record of stealing IP from the US, which is also
| true. Listing manufacturers in China doesn't disprove
| this point.
|
| So please, if you'd like, a list of genuine technologies
| who's origins can be traced to China... I'll be waiting.
| onethought wrote:
| So WeChat, and 5G. Should be discounted because they
| don't support your point, and you will wait for others?
| Got it!
|
| - Facial recognition on banking transactions.
|
| - Tele Health rolled out via their ubiquitous home grown
| social network
|
| - AI drones policing temperature and mask wearing
|
| - real-time automatic translation hardware and software.
|
| - Chinese based text input via keyboards
|
| - Chinese voice recognition (a different problem to tonal
| languages)
|
| By all means point out where they stole those things from
|
| Then when you can't do that, check out their space
| program, their capability easily surpasses NASA and is
| competitive with space X. Which given they are banned
| from even the iss where did they steal that from?
| ping_pong wrote:
| QR codes are Japanese not Chinese.
|
| Contactless payment systems are everywhere now, the big push
| being COVID.
|
| Taiwan isn't China, any Taiwanese will tell you that. Taiwan
| did a lot of things right when it came to the COVID response,
| but it's easy to do when you have a population of 23 million
| on a tiny island. I have several friends who are living in
| Taiwan and I've been jealous of them throughout the pandemic
| because their government handled it correctly. However, the
| US vaccination response is the best in the world. Even I have
| been vaccinated.
|
| Silicon Valley isn't dying. It's literally the biggest
| creator of wealth in the world, and it's so much that it's
| causing a horrible amount of income inequality, especially in
| the Bay Area itself. It's almost being a victim of its own
| success, as I already mentioned.
| onethought wrote:
| I never said Taiwan was part of China... in fact I
| mentioned them both separately by name... which would be
| weird if I was saying they were the same right? #strawman
|
| >biggest creator of wealth in the world
|
| Amazon you mean? Or do you mean Tesla? Or Microsoft?... oh
| wait... none of them are from SV.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wojciii wrote:
| > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US.
|
| A few examples:
|
| Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :))
|
| Nordic Semiconductor
|
| The Qt Company
|
| Unity Technologies
|
| I might be influenced by living in Scandinavia. :)
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Wasn't Opera, Nokia, and QT all within the same building too
| in Oslo? Maybe something's in the water
| kmonsen wrote:
| Not Nokia, but yes I used to work for opera and trolltech
| was just a floor above us. We did a lot of work for Nokia
| device so maybe that's what you were thinking of.
|
| Nokia itself was a giant corporation with multiple
| buildings around Finland.
| hu3 wrote:
| TSMC
|
| ASML
| busterarm wrote:
| > Nokia (the sleeping giant will awaken again :))
|
| There is a nice little scene of companies in Espoo filled
| with some incredibily talented technologists who all got
| their start at Nokia.
|
| Even if Nokia itself doesn't return, I expect at least one or
| two major technology developments out of there. I have my eye
| on ICEYE and have even thought of maybe working there.
| 0DHm2CxO7Lb3 wrote:
| Also Nintendo, Sony, Ericsson, and Samsung
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| > Silicon Valley will never die.
|
| Over what time period? It's absurd to say this and mean
| forever, if you have ever opened a history book. Even America
| itself will pass out of dominance, as all superpowers have.
| Rome, Britain, etc. Change is the rule, not the exception. It
| is the natural way.
|
| https://marketcap.com.au/history-world-reserve-currencies/
| m0llusk wrote:
| The research at Los Alamos that Geoffrey West has summarized
| most recently in his book Scale demonstrates different
| dynamics are at work. Creatures and companies grow and age
| and die. Cities are a completely different construct. Rome
| and Londinium are both still large and influential. Two
| particularly stark demonstrations of this effect are
| Hiroshima and Nagasaki both of which were wiped off the map
| with nukes yet in roughly 30 years were back to being
| thriving urban conurbations. Times change, but influence
| remains more consistent than most expect. The startup scenes
| in Detroit and Cleveland are other examples of boom towns
| that were written off yet remain significant contributors.
| rory wrote:
| Sure, there is still innovation coming out of Detroit and
| Cleveland, but I still think if SF/SV became like one of
| those cities that would qualify as "dying" to a lot of
| people who currently live there.
| dang wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnyCJDYONSU#t=57
| [deleted]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Did you even read the article? Because you seem to be
| addressing a generic "Silicon Valley the place is dead"
| clickbait article rather than an in-depth thoughtful essay
| about the state of the tech industry and how it might transform
| as more sciences beyond computing come to prominence.
|
| As detailed as your comment is, it doesn't seem germane to the
| OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and
| the identity of the author.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that."_"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Very well, next time I will simply state "the article
| doesn't mention any of that, you have clearly not read it,
| and you are using this comment thread as a personal soapbox
| to broadcast your own opinions about a subject that is
| orthogonal to the actual link, sucking up valuable
| discussion that could be actually relevant and addresses
| the article at hand."
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I see what you mean and realize that I didn't really
| read your comment beyond the trigger phrase at the
| beginning. Yes, generic top subthreads that don't really
| address the article, but rather get sucked straight into
| $predictable-thing-people-always-argue-about, are indeed
| one of the biggest problems on HN and I'm constantly
| trying to convince people not to go there.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"--it
| doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of
| these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread,
| gathering mass and choking out more interesting
| discussion, there actually is something super helpful you
| can do: email hn@ycombinator.com to let us know. We
| downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single
| best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It
| makes a huge difference.
|
| Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation,
| and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic
| comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's
| more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking
| out on any individual user. The solution is moderation,
| i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main
| system and jiggle it out of its failure modes.
|
| I plan to add software so that users can help identify
| and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that,
| though, emails hn@ycombinator.com alerting us to these
| are greatly, fabulously appreciated.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I understand, it's incredibly dispiriting to see long
| written comments that grab a bunch of upvotes yet have
| _absolutely nothing to do with the OP_ kill off all the
| interest in the actual article. Can they simply be
| flagged?
|
| Though admittedly this article would probably be easier
| to approach if it was broken up into four parts that
| could each be addressed in different threads.
| dang wrote:
| You can flag them because generic tangents are against
| the site guidelines. It might help, but when they're at
| the top of a thread, the upvotes will most likely
| dominate the flags. That's why moderator intervention is
| needed.
|
| Btw, a lot of the time these comments are perfectly fine
| as long as they're halfway down the page. Humans like to
| talk and we naturally talk about what we already know,
| and repeat things we've said or felt many times before--
| it's just the way we are. The problem comes more because
| people upvote the familiar (because hey! I feel that way
| too!), and then suddenly the more boring category
| (regurgitating the familiar) chokes out the more
| interesting one (new and unpredictable information). In
| most cases that wasn't the commenter's intention. The
| solution is for a countervailing mechanism, like
| downweights, to dampen the effect of this suboptimal one.
| Unfortunately that still requires moderator intervention,
| which is a bottleneck.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and
| greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
|
| Tel Aviv has it. Beijing has it. SV's big advantage over them
| is the internal market and Beijing will acquire that soon
| enough.
|
| > There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech
| company come out from anywhere except the US.
|
| True enough in software but see SAP. DeepMind was British, no?
| Give it time. Germany was the epicenter of the chemical
| industry before and to a large extent after WW1. It's still a
| big deal but Detroit is still a big deal in the automotive
| industry too.
|
| > Despite having much higher educational standards even in 3rd
| world countries, the best the world could do is China which
| just stole US ideas and then built a firewall to keep others
| out.
|
| There is no credible interpretation of this. In CS the US'
| dominance in research is so great I'm not even sure what the
| best non-US university even is, perhaps ETH Zurich?
| rapsey wrote:
| > Beijing will acquire that soon enough.
|
| I very much doubt it. Israel and china have something in
| common like all rising powers do, strong nationalism.
| Foreigners getting funded before locals is I am sure
| completely unthinkable.
| rapsey wrote:
| SV will exist for as long as the US is in the position it is in
| the world. Money will flow while USD is the worlds reserve
| currency.
|
| The US is however rotting from within. The political
| disfunction will eventually destroy everything.
| astrange wrote:
| The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for
| the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic
| policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2
| welfare states, but in practice their current governments
| react to everything with more austerity, and they're really
| anti-immigration.
| rapsey wrote:
| US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world
| reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being
| overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality).
|
| Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US
| largely benefits from highly educated european and asian
| immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to
| capital. It all comes down to the dollar.
| astrange wrote:
| Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have
| to lose the status to do the experiment.
|
| There are countries with higher median wealth than the US
| and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio -
| Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like
| printing money is much safer than people think, and
| everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened
| once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
| rapsey wrote:
| > There are countries with higher median wealth than the
| US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP
| ratio - Japan and Canada have both.
|
| All irrelevant.
|
| > Really it just seems like printing money is much safer
| than people think
|
| It is safer when your currency is the one most other
| countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD
| increasing in value causes economic crises around the
| world, USD decreasing in value causes economic booms
| around the world. All because countries are paying their
| debts in dollars.
|
| > and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it
| happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
|
| A whole lot of things happened in the 70s. Like the USD
| going off the gold standard completely, other countries
| starting to get rid of it for this reason and the
| establishment of the petro dollar to get it under control
| again. The 70s showed how things start unraveling when
| USD status is threatened.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The root cause is people around the world still trust the
| US organization as a country, at least more than the
| others.
| rapsey wrote:
| Yeah and the terrirists hate you for your freedom.
| astrange wrote:
| > If there's anything that will kill Silicon Valley it's that
| people since 2010 have made _too_ much money. Practically
| anyone at a FAANG is now a multi-millionaire no matter what you
| 've worked on.
|
| No they're not. A multi-thousandaire maybe.
|
| You can get to millionaire status if you buy a house and pay
| off the loan, but for that you need more than 10 years of
| working in SV or an inheritance.
| serial_dev wrote:
| > That's like saying Hollywood is doomed, or Wall Street is
| doomed.
|
| > Silicon Valley has the critical mass of talent, VC money and
| greed that can't be replicated anywhere else in the world.
|
| Nothing lasts forever. Some time ago, Detroit would have been
| on your list, too:
|
| "so tired of random writers trying to predict that Silicon
| Valley is doomed. It's like saying Detroit is doomed. Detroit
| has the critical mass of talent and greed that can't be
| replicated anywhere else in the world."
| KorematsuFred wrote:
| While the title of Tim's essay (which is not all matching with
| the title) is wrong so is your conclusion.
|
| > Silicon Valley will never die.
|
| Silicon valley is already dead in many sense. It has long
| stopped being the place where bunch of nerds could meet and
| make interesting stuff purely for the soul in the game. In last
| 20 years it is replaced by "i want to get rich" crowd who are
| building crappy products, VCs in suites who just get lucky
| every now and then, Big Tech which is a bog in itself, greedy
| and corrupt politicians squeezing people. The joy of building
| stuff is replaced with pressure of white board coding, and
| folks are large cos are not really solving interesting problems
| but haggling over promos and TC on teamblind.com.
|
| SV of today is just another wall street where people spend
| their 20s and 30s doing back breaking work so they could get
| out of this place in their 40s. It is a soul less place.
|
| I think SV will die eventually (so will NY, London or any other
| city) over sufficiently long period.
| justinzollars wrote:
| > or Wall Street is doomed
|
| IDK Wall Street seems pretty irrelevant to me. The only thing
| that matters these days is the Fed.
| onethought wrote:
| Isn't another growing/bigger centre for technology innovation now
| in China/Taiwan? Are we just pretending that Silicon Valley is
| still Mecca?
| rapsey wrote:
| For software it sure is Mecca and nothing else comes close.
| ulfw wrote:
| Well good to know there's a ton of other holy places besides
| Mecca
| onethought wrote:
| Except in China. Which is my point.
|
| For every Uber there is a Didi. Microsoft there is a
| Tencent...
|
| Etc. but they don't play at US scale, they play at China
| scale.
| rapsey wrote:
| You are listing giants who are generaly state supported and
| largely copies of western tech. The thing is about having a
| rich ecosystem of small players innovating. That is what
| makes SV.
| onethought wrote:
| I'm trying to say that the "good old days" of SV are the
| current days in Shenzhen. Yes, heaps of little startups
| doing cool stuff with easy access to software and
| hardware talent.
|
| Copies of western tech? This is just propaganda the US
| tells itself. There is a lot of original tech in China.
| Where did they copy 5G from? Or their vaunted "social
| credit" system from?
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think its fair to say that they're growing for sure, as the
| government and corporations have been investing there. What I
| feel makes Silicon Valley unique (backed by the history as I
| understand it) is the proximity of things
|
| - The foundational organizations and proximity to an intense
| congregation of early innovation orgs, many of which started in
| Silicon Valley, or always had a large presence from the early
| days
|
| - Proximity to a delta of good universities (large hiring pool,
| of ready to work post grads helps a lot)
|
| - The incubation of VCs that despite many attempts to lure
| them, are still largely located in Silicon Valley
|
| I think these over arching factors are the biggest reason
| Silicon Valley is unique. They're also not often talked about
| in this way very often in the 'mythos' of SV, but are very much
| the bedrock
|
| It also doesn't make SV unique, per say (I think for medical
| device startups, states like Minnesota would be a good fit for
| your company, since they have a lot of investment in this area
| by multiple entities, as well as the same university graph so
| the pool of students you can hire is pretty good, and I feel
| this is pretty key to a lot of it)
| onethought wrote:
| I'm guessing you haven't been to Shenzhen. Where everything
| you mentioned is, and growing.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Proximity to a delta of good universities
|
| What good unis are in Guangdong (GD) province? The most
| famous ones I know are in Shanghai and Beijing. From my
| limited experience with hiring in Shenzhen, almost no one
| was from GD, nor went to uni in GD. Most went to uni in
| Shanghai or Beijing.
|
| > The foundational organizations
|
| I think the OP is referring to big gov't research (DARPA,
| etc.) that is the backbone of technologies behind the
| Internet and integrated circuits. Do similar orgs (and
| history) exist in Shenzhen? Again, my impression is that
| most of those orgs exist in Shanghai and Beijing.
| onethought wrote:
| DARPA was based in Virginia... so not sure what SV
| history you are referring to.
|
| Yes Guangdong is the technology zone for China, it
| receives both state funding, state run incubators and
| special economic status.
|
| But in essence they have both highly skilled hardware
| engineers and software engineers which is like SV of old.
| Where as current day SV is dominated by software, where
| they ship the manufacture of things to Shenzhen or
| Taiwan.
|
| As far as universities, you have Sun Yat Sen University
| in GZ one of the top tier universities in China. And yes
| a whole lot of internal migration from the north to the
| south. Shenzhen growing from 70k to 10mil in 40 years is
| an insane population movement
| baby wrote:
| I was in both BJ and Taipei and I didn't see that. BJ has
| Chinese players for sure, but that's it, while Taipei still
| feels like a small player that's comparable to berlin /
| chiangmai
| onethought wrote:
| Taiwan home to TMSC (amoung others) currently (with apples
| help admittedly) putting intel to shame.
|
| Edit: Looking for Tech in PK is like looking for tech in D.C
| China's "bay area" is in Guangdong in the GZ, SZ, DS
| triangle.
| baby wrote:
| It's still going to be Chinese heavy (assuming you said
| ShenZhen and not SuZhou)
| EGreg wrote:
| Until 1988, California was ruled largely by Republicans.
|
| Since 1988, it gradually cane to be ruled more by Democrats, with
| the notable exception of the "moderate" Republican governor
| Schwartzenegger.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-voting...
|
| In both eras, its GDP and population went up, until it became the
| 5th or 4th largest economy in the world.
|
| A bit of mean reversion occurs, after massive spikes in housing
| prices, wildfires and a pandemic and everyone loses their crap.
| Seriously, people... this is about as bad as cries of "CARNAGE!!"
| in 2016 when crime has a slight uptick after 10 years of decline.
| baloney1 wrote:
| Correlation does not imply causation, son.
| seniorivn wrote:
| but he clearly does
| throw-away_42 wrote:
| Perhaps you're thinking of some other state?
|
| https://governors.library.ca.gov/36-wilson.html
| azinman2 wrote:
| What I don't understand about the article is saying that SV is
| doomed because other areas are likely to be so huge is to ignore
| that there are already so many other areas of the economy even
| during SV's growth. True FAANG grew at incredible rates over the
| past decade. It's unclear that'll slow down at all as software
| and computerization continues its current path. But all these
| biotech / green economy jobs it talks about will still run on
| software and microchips... in R&D, manufacturing, logistics, etc.
| Why can't this be an AND versus an XOR? The article also implies
| there's no biotech in SV - the Bay Area is home to many world
| leading biotech companies. Yes there are other gravitational
| pulls in SD, Boston, NJ (and I'm sure others internationally),
| but it's not like that mix doesn't exist here. And once the green
| economy starts really going, why wouldn't there be places for new
| companies for follow in SV?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "To be sure, a great deal of content on the World Wide Web and in
| social media is produced and consumed with commercial intent, but
| a remarkable amount is produced entirely without a profit motive.
| Google economists have told me that only six percent of Google
| search result pages carry any advertising at all. The other 94%
| of pages are the product of the joyful exuberance of humanity,
| creating and sharing for the joy of it."
|
| I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a
| truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing.
|
| Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of
| the searches I make have zero targeted ads.
|
| To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there
| appears to be no commercial/non-commercial distinction.
|
| For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data
| collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is
| fair game anywhere and everywhere.
|
| "Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and
| corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst
| exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top
| spot.)"
|
| Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV
| is highly unregulated.
|
| It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the
| list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a
| criticism of "casino capitalism".
|
| Perhaps there are links between the rise of "casino capitalism"
| and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the
| late 1990s/early 2000's and again more recently.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero
|
| Google has pretty much eaten all advertising they can eat,
| there is no more to eat no matter how many ads they add. They
| can pretty much set the prices of their ads arbitrarily high
| since they have control over both advertisers and publishers.
|
| > financial services did not make the the list of exemplars
|
| Yeah, from the outside , SV currently seems to be Finance #2:
| greed is good, morals are for losers, grow fast and gtfo
| mentality
| TedShiller wrote:
| The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who
| have left have all peaked in their careers. The real loss would
| not be of people who have peaked leaving but of people who
| haven't peaked yet leaving.
| jmeister wrote:
| People who have "peaked" have a lot of offer in terms of
| mentorship, connections etc.
|
| In fact, a concentration of people who've been there done that
| is probably that hardest thing to find in one place outside the
| respective central cities.
| ulfw wrote:
| LOL yea.
|
| That's exactly the SV problem. Lure a bunch of inexperienced
| young people who give away their best years to a corporation in
| hopes of becoming rich. Very few do.
|
| The vast majority spend their money on NYC-level high taxes and
| rent.
| TedShiller wrote:
| You gotta play to win. Yes, not everyone can win the lottery,
| that's true.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| > people who haven't peaked yet leaving.
|
| No, it is people who haven't peaked yet not even coming in the
| first place.
| TedShiller wrote:
| True. Hence the wrong focus in the article.
|
| It's like if Bill Gates leaves Seattle. Nothing happens
| because Gates is done in his career.
| ulfw wrote:
| Bill Gates is not done at all. In fact he is doing more and
| better things for mankind with his career now than he did
| when he ran Microsoft.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Sure, but Bill Gates leaving Seattle would not impact the
| Seattle tech industry at all.
| NeverFade wrote:
| Elon Musk has "peaked in his career"? I understand that we need
| to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal, but maybe let's try
| to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?
| dang wrote:
| Please let's not go into the Musk Wars. They're all the same
| and always lame.
| NeverFade wrote:
| Hi! Maybe you'd like to address the blatant abuse of the
| flagging system on this website?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26402532
| dang wrote:
| You'd need to come up with better examples than
| nationalistic flamewar comments like that one and its
| parent, both of which were correctly flagged by users.
| The only problem I see with flags in that hellish thread
| is that there weren't enough of them.
|
| Would you mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Between
| that case and this one, it seems like it would be good to
| calibrate your sense of what we're trying for here.
| NeverFade wrote:
| I presented a coherent argument against an Antisemitic
| comment which you admit has no place here. At the time I
| posted my response, the Antisemitic comment was not
| flagged, in fact it was highly upvoted and visible.
|
| My own comment got abusively flagged by the same brigade
| which upvoted the Antisemitic comment I was pointing out.
| And you are justifying this.
|
| Now I made this comment, which is entirely innocent. Is
| there a rule against refuting the claim that Musk's
| career is in some sort of terminal decline? Are we only
| allowed to state that it is, like OP has done?
|
| My innocent comment, the first one I made since that last
| discussion, gets an uncalled-for response by a mod. Seems
| I'm either being flag-abused again by the same brigade,
| or it's just your dislike for opposition to Antiemitic
| comments. Opposition which you condemn as
| "nationalistic".
| dang wrote:
| There's a rule against making unsubstantive, inflammatory
| comments, especially on divisive topics.
|
| The problem with what you're saying here is that everyone
| overestimates the "innocence" of their own comments by
| (say) 100x and overestimates the guilt/provocation of
| others' comments by a similar factor. That leads to a
| 10000x distortion, which leads to a worldview in which
| everyone else is getting away with outrageous shit while
| the rule-enforcers are picking on you completely
| unfairly. This is a standard bias--I assure you that the
| other side feels exactly the same way. If we stay in that
| perspective, the entire forum will turn into flamewar and
| burn to a crisp. That's not an outcome which serves
| anybody.
|
| The only way out of this is to recognize the bias and
| work to overcome it in oneself. I think if you re-read
| your posts in that spirit, it's pretty easy to see how
| they weren't as coherent and innocent as you say--from my
| perspective they were very similar to the other
| unsubstantive/inflammatory/flamewar comments and all that
| is happening here is routine moderation.
|
| Let's take your above post as an example. No doubt you
| have very coherent, cogent thoughts about this topic but
| what did your post actually say? First it repeated what
| the other person said, then it went straight to snark ("I
| understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who
| left NorCal") and then to personal attack ("maybe let's
| try to maintain some semblance of connection to
| reality?"). If you've read
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it
| should be easy to see that this is not the sort of
| comment that we want on HN. I'm sure that if a third
| party had posted that, this would be obvious to you,
| especially if it were about some unrelated topic that you
| don't feel so strongly about.
|
| It's common for people to assume that their comment
| expresses their thoughts--their solid, substantive ideas
| on an issue--when in reality their comment has done
| nothing the sort. This is an easy mistake to make because
| to each of us, our own thoughts are transparently
| present, and we can just assume them. However, nobody
| else (with the possible exception of any gifted mind-
| readers among us) has any clue what those thoughts are
| unless you express them explicitly, and it doesn't matter
| how insightful or clever or right you are if your comment
| consists of snark and attack. To be a good HN
| contributor, you should therefore (1) express your solid
| thoughts explicitly, and (2) drop any snark and attack.
|
| As for Antisemitism, you've made a pretty dangerous and
| damaging claim here, which is neither true nor fair, nor
| does it serve the cause you're supporting. I'm not going
| to take it personally, but in my view you should try to
| be more careful about throwing such grave charges. When
| you do it casually or unjustly (and you did both here),
| you cheapen them--and you can also really hurt people.
| NeverFade wrote:
| Let's look at the post I was responding to:
|
| > _The people that he mentions at the beginning of the
| article who have left have all peaked in their careers._
|
| That is very dismissive of a long list of entrepreneurs
| who contributed so much to the Valley. I'm not even a
| Musk fan (I'd never work for him, for example) but he
| came up as a clear example of someone on that list who is
| objectively still in a very strong phase of his career
| and could easily have more and greater impact for years
| to come.
|
| I did find OP's dismissal rude to these entrepreneurs,
| but considered my stronger argument to be the
| counterfactual nature of the claim that Musk has
| "peaked".
|
| Thus I pointed out that claiming Musk has "peaked" is
| factually detached from reality. Even if you disagree, my
| argument clearly pertains to OP's claim (i.e. that all
| these entrepreneurs have "peaked") and not in any way to
| OP as a person.
|
| Finally, I've been contributing here for two years now.
| In this time, I saw many, many snarky comments, and made
| a few too. I've never seen a comment flagged for snark.
|
| Then I participated respectfully in a discussion, where I
| spoke out against Antisemitism, and my comment got
| flagged. It was the first time I got flagged in two
| years. Then almost immediately multiple other comments of
| mine got flagged.
|
| Then I made this comment, which seems normal based on all
| the comments I've seen here before, and it got flagged,
| and you got involved.
|
| The only reasonable way to interpret this situation: the
| same people who started spuriously flagging me before are
| still flagging my comments. You notice a flagged comment,
| get involved, and tried to backward-rationalize why after
| two years I'm suddenly a troublemaker. First because I
| mentioned Musk (no rule against that). Then because I
| used snark (very common here, and again not forbidden by
| the rules). Then because I supposedly made a personal
| attack (I didn't).
|
| As for Antisemitism, I only ask you to imagine yourself
| as a Jewish person reading multiple comments about how
| Israeli Jews are using "many dirty tricks", constantly
| and intentionally war mongering, mocking and insulting
| other nations and their people just for spite, are
| universally murderous and blood-thirsty, "steal land",
| have no rightful place in this world - all echoing
| classic Antisemitic false narratives about Jews.
|
| And these comments aren't just downvoted and flagged -
| they are often upvoted and visible. Then you speak out
| against that racist bias, and you get flagged. Then you
| try to continue to use the site as you've done before,
| and suddenly 2/3 of your comments get flagged and mods
| start addressing you as a troublemaker.
|
| How would you feel?
| [deleted]
| caslon wrote:
| _High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists
| like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle
| and HP Enterprise are all leaving California._
|
| Oh wow! Larry Ellison, that one guy who lies about his cars
| _putting literal lives at risk_ , a figurative vampire (infuses
| literal blood of young people into himself) and his thrall, and a
| company that hasn't been relevant since the 1970s all are leaving
| the Valley!
|
| I don't even live there, and I never plan on living there, but
| they're not citing anyone all that meaningful. _Larry Ellison_ is
| somehow the person who comes off the best out of that group!
| Larry Ellison! A guy who can best be described with a lawnmower
| metaphor! Come on!
|
| And now a guy who corporatized free software to the point of it
| being completely unenforced _and also_ coined Web 2.0 to sell you
| books is telling you to leave!
|
| I'm skeptical about this "end" of the Valley, somehow. Almost
| seems like they're trying to get you to leave to devalue the
| price of real estate, scoop it up and then advocate once more for
| the Valley.
| busterarm wrote:
| Oracle is, unfortunately, extremely relevant, just in none of
| the places you care about. Your biases keep you from seeing it.
|
| In fact I was just recently involved in some conversations that
| could see the spend of tens of millions on their Cloud platform
| and where they are seriously looking like the strongest
| contender on both the technical and the business side.
|
| Second tier cloud providers should be extremely worried about
| Oracle eating their lunch. Eventually the big three might have
| to too...
| caslon wrote:
| Silicon Valley's value is in _innovation._ Oracle doesn 't
| innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really
| nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies;
| they're valueless.
| busterarm wrote:
| Was.
|
| Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has
| now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to
| ideas.
|
| It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's
| just that they are in proximity to money.
|
| Now the business people and their greed and money are
| leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?
| caslon wrote:
| "give money"
|
| This isn't what happens.
|
| SV worked fine before there was money there, they'll work
| fine after. No VC is going to stop throwing money with
| conditions at people in the Valley, because they're not
| stupid, and they know how to make more. They're just
| going to tell other people to leave.
| busterarm wrote:
| Capital is cyclical and we're moving out of the phase
| that's favorable to VCs literally right now. We're in a
| consolidation period and winners/losers are going to be
| picked very soon. Funding has been slowing down a lot.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The article neither tells anyone to leave SV nor is it talking
| about SV as a geographical area but rather the modern state of
| the tech industry, if you and so many others like you have
| actually bothered to read to the end of the very first
| paragraph.
|
| > Is this the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? Perhaps. But
| other challenges to Silicon Valley's preeminence are more
| fundamental than the tech diaspora.
| caslon wrote:
| I _did_ read the article. I 'm still 100% confident that it's
| just a way to get people to leave.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I read, or skimmed, all the way to the end, and I don't think
| it gets any better.
|
| One particular super up-to-date cliche that annoys me is
| where it goes on about "casino capitalism". So today we're
| not attacking "Wall Street's short term thinking"? When
| you're against risk taking _and_ conservatism, all you 're
| saying is "people shouldn't make mistakes, blaargh". You're
| right, they shouldn't. It's been noted.
|
| I don't think the whole thing says anything worthwhile at
| all, or contains any non-cliched thought, so I think people
| who didn't read it should be excused.
|
| All I want from a "thoughtful" article is some thought that
| is new _and could be right or wrong_. "Not even wrong" gets
| all the clicks.
| op03 wrote:
| Its been in decline ever since outsourcing began. Inevitable in a
| connected world. Time to move on. Whats the Chinese/Indian
| equivalent of HN?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I really wish I believed this article more, but it strikes me as
| too optimistic :( It says a bunch of changes are coming that I
| wish were coming, but don't believe we'll get soon. Weird to come
| away from a "SV will die" article with that feeling.
| mempko wrote:
| Overall this is a really good piece. O'Reilly is wrong that the
| world was unprepared. South east Asia was prepared and handled it
| Amazingly. It's not just communist governments that did well, New
| Zealand and Australia did well too.
|
| However, the western world was unprepared and despite being rich,
| failed it's people... Especially the USA and UK.
|
| O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve climate
| change instead of more social media ad tech development. And he
| may be right the skills needed are elsewhere.
| geomark wrote:
| What you say is true, but I wonder what you mean by "failed
| it's people". Because from what I saw it wasn't just really
| poor leadership. It was the prevalent attitude of individualism
| above everyone else that made things really bad in many western
| countries. People failed themselves. And great leaders aren't
| going to change that culture.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Oceania's willingness to be bold may be a good omen for their
| future
| refurb wrote:
| Oceania will be on the front lines of the geopolitical
| rivalry between China and the West. Australia is already
| hurting because China is screwing with their exports.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > O'Reilly is right that we need to switch gears and solve
| climate change instead of more social media ad tech development
|
| Solving climate change in relevant timescales involves severe
| cuts to consumption, which will cause havoc because it will
| mess with all the economic growth projections people expect,
| which will cause short term pain even if it accomplishes long
| term gain. I wouldn't hold my breath.
| shinkim0914 wrote:
| There is no place like Silicon Valley where taking a career risk
| to quit a job and start a company is normalized, understood, and
| encouraged.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| he says that the question is what kind of company one will
| build
| baby wrote:
| Yet with the high rents and the lack of universal healthcare it
| takes a crazy person to take such a risk. I personally will
| start my startup from abroad when the time is right.
| shinkim0914 wrote:
| Yes, it's still risky. But at least you're still understood
| because of the pervasive startup culture in SV. Everyone in
| SV can relate to startups. I think what's tough outside of SV
| is that people don't relate to startups. People might think
| you're just weird.
| baby wrote:
| Who cares if your investors are from sv but you're based
| elsewhere?
| astrange wrote:
| The investors care. Traditionally they wouldn't fund
| anyone who wasn't in easy reach.
|
| It's also easier to hire employees since they're all in
| SV.
| baby wrote:
| Employees are all in SV? What?
| tolbish wrote:
| I am curious. What else do investors "traditionally" care
| about? I am referring to aspects that aren't always
| explicit, like physical proximity.
|
| Do investors not also want (competent) exceptions that
| stand out?
| astrange wrote:
| Some VCs want to see you have a good team that works
| together, and some combination of good ideas and work
| history that makes it seem like your startup will take
| off even if you have to pivot and give up your current
| prototype.
|
| Others are having a midlife crisis and want to be your
| new rich dad, or they want a cult leader who makes them
| feel smart and throws cool insider parties. In this case
| it helps to be a white guy or at least Elizabeth Holmes.
|
| One would hope YC is the first since we're on their
| website, but having read pg's essays and noticed his
| advice for startups is half post hoc fallacies ("use Lisp
| because I did") and half is unethical ("don't hire women
| or people with accents to get culture fit") I dunno.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Investors want to meet a slightly smarter but younger
| version of themselves. This makes them feel comfortable
| with the risk of their investment, they imagine all kinds
| of congruencies between you and them, even if they don't
| exist. They want to convey some nugget of wisdom that
| you, the entrepreneur, reverence as they key to their
| success. But most of all, they want you to be a money
| tree that buds and flowers and bears fruit continually,
| to the degree the generated revenues are a problem.
| Anything less, and they go silent for a while before
| applying pressures with rarely helpful advice from non-
| technology or old-technology backgrounds.
| baby wrote:
| Considering the amount of random cryptocurrency being
| funded, heh
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| There's a strong distance effect, where investors will
| invest more easily companies located near them. It could
| be that this will change after a year of experience with
| doing everything online, but it's been true historically.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It kinda balances out when you're young and can easily get a
| seed $1M dollars to build a company with a very dubious (or
| non-existent) business plan
|
| There's your salary. If the company works out or not later,
| well, you're a founder and has the experience, it's easier to
| get a job anywhere.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Additionally, California is one of the only states that doesn't
| recognize non-competes [1], that is key for innovation and
| competitors coming up including small/medium competitors. This
| part is always overlooked.
|
| > _A few states, such as California, Montana, North Dakota, and
| Oklahoma, totally ban non-compete agreements for employees, or
| prohibit all non-compete agreements except in limited
| circumstances._ [1]
|
| There is also a massive augmented wave coming that is heavily
| underestimated and will change everything. The future is
| heavily content creation in new phases of technology which are
| huge. Overall, it is better to have a virtual economy that uses
| less resources than a physical one.
|
| The new markets are definitely remote and that is how you
| communicate with most people now even in the same building, so
| being physically in California isn't as needed. Though the
| policies of not recognizing non-competes needs to go
| nationwide. Non-competes are anti-innovation, anti-worker,
| anti-business, anti-competition and only help the bigs.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| compete_clause#United_Stat...
| ghaff wrote:
| Tons of companies that aren't in California don't have non-
| competes or have very limited ones. I've never had a
| meaningful non-compete in the course of my career. (Had a
| very narrow one when one company was acquired.)
|
| I'm certainly not a fan of non-competes but note that, even
| in California, a company can drag you into an expensive court
| battle over non-solicitation clauses, NDAs, etc. It's also a
| matter of non-competes not being _enforceable_ in general. A
| small company may still choose not to hire you if they think
| there 's a possibility they may need to go to court.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| I've had 3 in a row in Europe. I doubt they would have been
| enforceable, but from conversations with colleagues they
| certainly had a chilling effect.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| ... that's because it's not a career risk when you're a multi
| millionaire who will just be rehired by your friends if your
| venture fails.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong
| people in tech in the Bay Area.
| opportune wrote:
| Probably most people I work with in their 30s or 40s are
| multimillionaires.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Yeah? On paper, 401k, or elsewhere? Where have they
| worked and for how long?
|
| Because in my experience, the "everyone who works at a
| FAANG is a multi-millionaire" meme is 100% bullshit.
| Especially when I read things like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029
| opportune wrote:
| I never said everybody is, but I do think most people who
| have been at FAANG or companies that pay in the same
| ballpark like trendy late stage pre-ipo companies for 10+
| years are or are close (especially if we define
| multimillionaire as >2m networth including 401k and house
| equity, and include household wealth for married
| couples).
|
| My other comment you linked I still stand by. But you
| don't need to be IC6/L6/E6, refreshers and equity
| appreciation are very powerful if you are lucky enough to
| get both.
| astrange wrote:
| What company uses the scale in this comment? (IC5 IC6 IC7
| etc)
| Zanneth wrote:
| At least Apple does. I'm not sure if other companies use
| it as well.
| astrange wrote:
| It's not the Apple scale though. I mean, it looks like
| it, but the details are different.
| refurb wrote:
| Definite humblebrag here.
| mrgordon wrote:
| Maybe you should check what some of their houses are worth
| lol
| WalterGR wrote:
| The people I know in tech in the Bay Area rent. It's
| their parents, who bought their properties in the 1980s
| or before, who are the land-owners.
|
| That said, I'd definitely be interested to see actual
| statistics about own vs. rent for people in tech in the
| Bay.
| katbyte wrote:
| If your talented and fail at starting your own company it
| won't be very hard to find a job in sv
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| If you get an entry level TC of 140k and save 50% of it,
| you'll be a millionaire in 15 years.
|
| That's without any kind of growth, investment, stock
| options growing in value, raises, etc.
| WalterGR wrote:
| And if you make $65,000 a year and save 100% of it,
| you'll be a millionaire in 15 years.
|
| Nobody is arguing that it's _possible_.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Whoops, missed a word. I meant not possible.
| dang wrote:
| I don't think that's the primary reason, nor as common as you
| imply. The old saw about how SV is a place where failure
| isn't disrespected is closer to the truth.
| shinkim0914 wrote:
| Why doesn't that happen elsewhere?
| helen___keller wrote:
| There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon
| Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from
| a failure in city-building.
|
| For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of
| people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers.
| The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable,
| except for the well compensated engineers.
|
| Monoculturalism is a failure to diversify, and it stems from an
| inability to build an effective dense urban region. The bay area
| could have had human AND financial capital rivaling NYC, a
| megapolis perhaps in league with Tokyo, but this failed to
| materialize so instead the region will likely go the way of
| Detroit: rising and falling in step with the industry it's built
| around.
| tjr225 wrote:
| People have been saying SV will be the next Detroit on HN for
| the past 5 years.
|
| I think this might be more of a wish than based in any sort of
| reality. Perhaps if it _does_ go the way of Detroit then I can
| afford to move there!
| helen___keller wrote:
| To be clear, my position on "next Detroit" is
|
| > rising and falling in step with the industry it's built
| around
|
| The tech industry is definitely still rising
| novok wrote:
| It might definitely be leaving, giving the same result.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify
| effectively from a failure in city-building.
|
| What if it's the other way around? Public school didn't teach
| me about the Second Great Migration of black Americans westward
| during and after World War 2, and I was unaware that there was
| basically zero black population here until then. Check out the
| first graph in particular in this article:
| https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
|
| It's impossible for me to ignore the time correlation between
| these demographic changes, the civil rights movement, and the
| birth of California's various anti-housing policies like Prop
| 13. All the houses in my area of San Francisco had racial deed
| covenants making it illegal to sell them to non-whites, and
| this was new construction in the 1940s and '50s! That obviously
| became illegal in the 1960s so segregation became economic,
| locking in existing segregation by pricing out newcomers and
| letting existing residents pass homes to their kids down with
| no tax reassessment:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO
| rcpt wrote:
| Prop 13 is the root of the issue. It's had an awful effect on
| minorities and is probably illegal as "disparate impact"
| under the Fair Housing Act. This paper makes it clear:
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3012949
|
| I don't know if it's wise to pursue this under Trump's
| supreme court though
| kory wrote:
| I think a big challenge here is single family housing with a
| yard is by far the most desirable housing in the US.
|
| I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if
| they were the engineers of tomorrow. They'd expect the single
| family home and yard for their work.
|
| Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning
| is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities
| have little reason to want that to change.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't think this is all democratic will. The legal and
| government structures we have that enable the NIMBYism
| undermine democracy. Yes, single family homes are the greater
| meme, but I'm convinced if we actually built the density we
| need (building and public transit) it would be prosperous and
| people wouldn't flee it.
|
| Simply put, the fact that prices go up in densest parts of SF
| and NYC basically confirms that there's people that enough
| people want real cities to bootstrap the process.
| novok wrote:
| Many engineers of today and tomorrow would much prefer a
| large apartment in tokyo with SF weather than droll american
| suburbia and the worst of all worlds that is american city
| life with bad transit, choking car life and a lack of safety
| and hygiene due to a failure of public institutions.
|
| Millenials have show a preference for good cities, %50+ of SV
| engineers are immigrants from all over the world. A truely
| urban SV would be amazing.
| spoonjim wrote:
| It honestly doesn't really matter to the world if "Silicon
| Valley" moves to another or multiple other locations. What's far
| more important is, "does the ever-accelerating dominance of a
| small number of companies show any signs of weakness?" and this
| article doesn't seem to think so.
| laurent92 wrote:
| It may seem unfair. However, population increases (fast,
| actually), so hierarchical structures grow in size, and
| concentration as well.
|
| A CEO of a large company in 1980 would be considered a small
| CEO in 2020. There are more employees everywhere and
| necessarily more layers of management (and the same goes for
| the startup/VC ecosystem, and the same goes for democratic
| structures which require more stringent rule so everyone lives
| on the same planet). Concentration is more a side-effect of
| population than any other trend.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I have been a long time fan of Tim O'Reilly for the past ~20
| years or so. Recently I had the opportunity to interview him [0]
| for a podcast/videocast I run, in which we covered his friendship
| and work with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, how the O'Reilly
| Media company came to be; but most importantly, Tim's "political"
| involvement in keeping the internet free and open.
|
| In particular, I really like his way of looking at good startups
| and good companies: the ones that don't simply intercept or
| capture value, but that instead create it.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AgeutcMbC4
| Haarisgrey wrote:
| Of course we got people like this!. I smoke and I've been a
| smoker for years. Most of the time I am surrounded by people who
| do not smoke at all. Doesn't amaze me. I have some close friends,
| we hangout together international;y and vacation parties but they
| both have never smoked weed and I am a regular smoker and this
| thing doesn't affect our friendship at all. It's not about
| something being legal or illegal. If a thing is facilitating you
| either way it is totally okay for the other person to use it. I
| started using it for my chronic pain and eventually ended up like
| this. https://www.weedmarket420.us/ Being a marijuana enthusiast
| I keep on researching for good material and here I came across 5
| new researches! Have a good day!
| sradman wrote:
| At the heart of progressive thought is concern over the twin
| evils of oppression and exploitation. O'Reilly's piece focuses on
| the latter but relies on the assumption that
| profit==exploitation. I'm not convinced it is that simple.
|
| I wish I could have had a chat with Milton about the Friedman
| doctrine [1]. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. From
| my perspective, shareholder value is a relatively easy measure
| that acts as a proxy for the true goal of a corporation: creating
| sustainable customer value.
|
| Within the context of his original article, Friedman was arguing
| that customers, employees, and shareholders could choose to give
| to charity, for instance, but it is wrong for a corporation to do
| it on their behalf. The concept is not intuitive but it is far
| from promoting selfishness.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
| baby wrote:
| I'm one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather,
| high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is
| absorbed by their work, etc.
|
| I've been travelling and I'm currently wondering if I should come
| back or not...
| randomsearch wrote:
| This is a genuine question: have the tech companies done much
| to help out with the homelessness and crime rate? For example,
| through funding homeless shelters?
|
| I ask because I thought SF wasn't a very nice city, due to the
| large scale of homelessness. Seeing how much money there was, I
| wondered why tech companies didn't just throw money at the
| problem so that they'd have a nicer environment to live in.
|
| I know that homelessness is a multifaceted problem, but
| (especially in the states) high housing costs and lack of
| public services are major, solvable, factors.
|
| In my home city in the U.K. we have a major homelessness
| problem, but we don't have the wealth to do much about it.
| Looking at SF it's not clear that generating wealth helps. And
| my overriding impression of Americans is that they're far more
| generous with their cash than the English.
| maccaw wrote:
| Yes, they threw a huge amount of money at the problem.
|
| https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/state-and-local-
| ta...
| axaxs wrote:
| I can't figure it out. I'm fairly well travelled in the world,
| and San Francisco is my least favorite of any city I've ever
| encountered.
|
| But some tell me I just don't understand, which, in fairness,
| is also a true statement.
| jjav wrote:
| But San Francisco isn't Silicon Valley. For most of the
| history of Silicon Valley, SF wasn't any part of it. It is
| only in the last decade (roughly) that a handful of high
| profile companies have established in SF, so arguably,
| perhaps, SF is today part of Silicon Valley.
|
| Even today, none of FANG is HQ'd in San Francisco.
| baby wrote:
| That feels unfair, they can't be HQ'ed in SF because
| there's no space for an HQ.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Perhaps you are part of the problem? Maybe leaving would be
| best for both you and SF.
|
| I was born and raised in the area, and have watched as friends
| and family are forced out due to rising costs. These are folks
| who legitimately loved the area and were actively involved in
| their communities. And they get replaced by people who seem to
| only care about big paychecks and spend more time complaining
| about the area than actually doing anything to improve it.
|
| The rise in remote work due to COVID seems like a perfect
| opportunity to correct this misalignment. For those that don't
| like it here, I think everyone would be better off if you moved
| to somewhere that suits you better. And as a bonus you can take
| your big paycheck with you. I don't mean to offend, it just
| gets a little old seeing people complain about a place when
| they are perfectly capable of leaving.
| baby wrote:
| I'm totally part of the problem! I actually had that theory
| that most people in SF are just temporarily here to get as
| much money as possible before leaving. Knowing that why would
| they try to improve anything? To improve homelessness you
| need both a national effort and a local effort. Both are
| embarrassingly small compared to the seriousness of the
| crisis.
| astrange wrote:
| People are not leaving SF because tech employees are coming
| in. If nobody moved in, the economy would just get worse,
| housing wouldn't get any more available.
|
| The problem is that your parents go to every community
| meeting and get all the housing projects shut down to prevent
| "greedy developers". That's been happening consistently since
| the 70s.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Housing is cheaper when the economy is worse. See Berlin.
| astrange wrote:
| That's not sustainable, you're just living on scraps
| because a lot of other people have made bad decisions in
| your favor. They're not going to keep investing after
| that, and of course it's bad for the people who moved out
| - this is a cause of gentrification.
|
| Tokyo, Vienna, Singapore are examples of cities with good
| housing policies. Although for Vienna's to get started
| all the landlords had to die in WW1, and then the
| planners died in WW2.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| > People are not leaving SF because tech employees are
| coming in
|
| I didn't say that. I literally said they are "forced out
| due to rising costs".
|
| I am all for tech workers moving to the bay area if it
| suits them. What I don't like, is tech workers who show up
| and then just complain about how much they hate it here. If
| you don't like it here, either leave or get involved with
| your community and help us fix things (including YIMBY,
| which all of my friends and family support, for the
| record).
| baby wrote:
| One day you too will move somewhere else, and realize
| that either you love it or that it's pretty bad and...
| think "why should I try to improve this place when I can
| just move elsewhere?"
| emptysongglass wrote:
| It's not SF but I did leave Seattle because of tech
| employees coming in. They destroyed my beloved city of
| excellent, cheap music played out of our parents' basements
| and in any of the bars on Capitol Hill and replaced it with
| shining citadels of emptiness. Seattle was a bright little
| miracle before Amazon set itself down right in the middle
| and disgorged its peoples flown in from far and wide.
|
| The knock-on effects of Amazon moving in included a flurry
| of real estate speculation which directly led to the
| closing of a restaurant that had been continuously
| operating for over a decade and close family losing their
| job there they had worked since its beginning.
|
| I firmly lay the blame of this wanton appropriation at the
| hands of the tech companies. Amazon didn't need to move
| directly into the heart of Seattle: they could have done as
| Microsoft and moved next door to Redmond. But hey, eff the
| residents who grew up there, right?
|
| I have a great little story of a waiter who had lived in
| his apartment in the Belltown neighborhood for many years:
| somebody had come in to look at apartments for all the new
| tech hires. Person is getting the tour of a unit, pauses to
| look around at all the _other_ units, "Great, we'll take
| it!" _It_ was every unit in the building including the
| occupied. Waiter got the boot.
|
| Seattle had and continues to hold onto the cultural evil of
| the "Seattle Freeze" but I sure do miss the music and to
| hear the punky cries of Alice Glass: _" Down, down, cities
| fall down on me."_
| pottertheotter wrote:
| There's a lot more to Silicon Valley than San Francisco. It's
| just as expensive with a lot of people absorbed in their work,
| but does away with the bad weather and crime.
|
| I've never understood why so many tech companies over the last
| decade went up to SF. Before that most were down the peninsula
| and in San Jose. I'd pick the lower peninsula over SF no
| question.
| mrgordon wrote:
| Because the younger talent they're trying to attract prefers
| a lively city to the suburban sprawl with good schools
| slimsag wrote:
| The younger talent they are trying to recruit prefers a
| lively city with broad culture and opportunities, which
| exist in many places outside of SV - and in different forms
| than just the tech mono-culture that SF is today.
| opportune wrote:
| The South Bay is either boring or very expensive. SF still
| feels very genuine and has a lot more going on compared to
| Sunnyvale. Not to say there is no reason to live there, but
| it seems to mostly attract families who like suburban living
| astrange wrote:
| South Bay has much better restaurants than most suburbs, if
| you like food, and it's not hard to get out to nature.
| Weather's better than SF and it's a lot cleaner. But if you
| want nightlife there isn't any, no.
| ulfw wrote:
| There is even less to do there.
|
| If you like office parks upon office parks and parking lots
| then yea sure... go to Sunnyvale or Santa Clara etc...
| baby wrote:
| Everything else is pretty dead imo, for people in their 20-30
| who prefer a city vibe SF is sort of the only solution here.
| davmar wrote:
| LOL @ rabois being a harbinger of things to come.
| networkimprov wrote:
| This overlooks the cybercrime crisis, which in 2020 did ~4x more
| financial damage than weather & climate disasters. And it's
| expected to get much worse this year.
|
| https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail/status/1372201054213787660
|
| Silicon Valley probably has a role to play in suppressing
| cybercrime.
|
| References:
|
| Cybercrime, $945B:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/07/cybersecu...
|
| Climate, $258B: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/world-
| hammered-by...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Comparing these two numbers doesn't make sense, because:
|
| 1) Cybercrime activity has an immediate impact, whereas the
| impact of climate-changing activity will be felt for many
| years, and
|
| 2) The impact of climate-changing activity results in actual
| destruction of value, whereas cybercrime results in only the
| transfer of value (from the victims to the perpetrators).
|
| Of course, the threat of cybercrime results in other value-
| destroying activity, like the effort spent on cybersecurity
| ($200B/year according to Statista).
| PeterisP wrote:
| Cybercrime generally results in actual destruction of value,
| as even for pure ransomware attacks where a ransom is paid,
| the losses to businesses and recovery costs are on the same
| scale as the ransom itself, and of course there are cases
| like the NotPetya attack, which caused billions of damages
| and did not even have a working mechanism to extract money
| from victims, it was purely destructive.
| vnorilo wrote:
| While I agree with the overall sentiment, crime is usually
| negative sum: the perpetrator gains less than the victim
| lost, thus some value is destroyed even before security
| spending.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That seems astonishing and hard to believe; the WaPo is
| paywalled, where are they getting that number from? Is it by
| any chance an organization trying to sell cybercrime solutions?
|
| SV has probably had just as much a role in enabling cybercrime
| as fighting it.
| sva_ wrote:
| > The projection of $945 billion in losses, from a new report
| out today[0] from the Center for Strategic and International
| Studies and computer security company McAfee, is almost
| double the monetary loss from cybercrime than the $500
| billion in 2018.
|
| McAfee's report "The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime"[0] seems to
| be the source.
|
| [0] https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-
| us/assets/reports/rp-hi...
| networkimprov wrote:
| I can read the WaPo article in a private/incognito browser
| window.
|
| The IETF in particular has had a huge role in facilitating
| phishing via SMTP.
| logicchains wrote:
| The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when
| companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom
| line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper
| cybersecurity. Whereas with climate, any thing a single company
| or individual does has absolutely minimal impact on reducing
| their risks unless everyone else does it too. Most cybercrime
| isn't a result of really really clever cybercriminals, it's a
| result of really really poor security practices, a solveable
| problem.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Cybercrime will be properly addressed when companies realize:
| 1) it's not just a matter of insurance, "ticking boxes" and
| "buying solutions" and 2) law enforcement actually
| investigates and prosecutes those involved (even if it
| involves international action)
| helge9210 wrote:
| > The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when
| companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom
| line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper
| cybersecurity.
|
| Let's drop "cyber" for a second.
|
| Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor
| starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in
| company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom
| line. No one would say "They have to start investing more
| into security". It would be normal for the company to totally
| offload the problem on the home state.
|
| Now, getting back to "cybersecurity": why company is supposed
| to handle it instead of offloading the problem on the state?
| lanternfish wrote:
| You're still supposed to put locks on your doors even
| though it's the police's 'job' to prevent property crime.
|
| Moreover, I don't think many tech companies want to give
| the state the access required to impliment preventative
| security measures for them, they'd rather role them
| themselves to maintain control.
| helge9210 wrote:
| > You're still supposed to put locks on your doors
|
| Locks are for honest people.
|
| > to impliment preventative security measures for them
|
| That's not a job of the state. The job of the state is to
| punish (cyber)criminals. And it's not the harshness of
| the punishment that matters, it's the inevitability.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Locks are for honest people.
|
| That's a great slogan. But-- your (cyber)security stance
| obviously affects your risk. There are things you can do
| with business model, stance, and organizational controls
| that absolutely affect your exposure to both cybercrime
| and real-world crime. Your home state can absolutely
| provide help in your strategy against (cyber)crime, but
| surely we also should probably avoid getting blackout
| drunk and flashing large sums of cash around dense urban
| cores, too.
| chadash wrote:
| I don't believe this is true. Wealthy companies that do
| business in dangerous countries tend to pay quite a bit for
| security of key employees. If you are a white collar worker
| of MegaCorp Oil traveling to Iraq for business, you will be
| provided with security. If you are a local Iraqi working in
| the oil fields, you can probably expect less security,
| precisely because your loss won't affect the bottom line.
| But even so, private security is common in many factories
| and other company facilities, even in the US. Pretty much
| every skyscraper in NYC has security employees even though
| you can call the police there. If New York became more
| dangerous, I assure you security budgets would go up
| patja wrote:
| This reminds me that there is a fascinating Econtalk
| podcast episode on the subject of how the kidnapping
| insurance market works. Companies who have employees
| working in parts of the world where they are at risk of
| kidnapping for ransom have access to insurance against
| this risk.
|
| Two of the things that struck me about this market are
| (a) the insurance companies require their customers to
| get serious about mitigating the risk. Employees all have
| to attend training on how to avoid kidnapping and what to
| do when it happens, the insurance customer has to take
| other measures to limit where they go, the customer has
| to beef up physical security, etc. And there are some
| situations they refuse to insure, so that's a big red
| flag. The insurance company becomes a partner in doing
| everything they can to prevent kidnappings. and (b)
| customers are sworn to secrecy and may not reveal that
| they have this insurance. Employees don't know they are
| insured against kidnapping. They don't want kidnapped
| employees spilling the beans.
|
| The insurers have local negotiators in their employ who
| often have longstanding relationships with the
| kidnappers.
|
| Anyways, a bit tangential, but I learned a lot about this
| niche industry, and it gave me more of an appreciation
| for how insurers can raise the professionalism of their
| customers in their efforts to minimize risks. A similar
| approach with the benefit of setting standards could
| definitely apply to cybercrime insurance.
|
| https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-kidnap/
| helge9210 wrote:
| You're right, that's why I deliberately limited the scope
| of the argument to "home country".
| networkimprov wrote:
| Cybercrime vs cybersecurity is an arms race, and arms race
| scenarios are not necessarily resolvable.
| tatersolid wrote:
| > arms race scenarios are not necessarily resolvable.
|
| Usually they are resolved when one or more of the racers
| goes bankrupt. See the Soviet Union.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Climate is self-solving too, just not in a way that humanity
| should welcome. When the climate becomes inhospitable enough,
| lots of humans will die. When humans die, they stop producing
| carbon emissions (well, technically a bit _after_ they die,
| since they still need to decompose). Eventually the planet
| reaches a new equilibrium with fewer humans and higher
| temperatures.
|
| Humanity has a self-preservation instinct in not letting that
| happen, just as corporations have a self-preservation
| instinct for not losing all their money to cybercrime. But
| one advantage corporations have is that they can generally
| act as one body, while getting all of humanity to agree on
| something is usually not possible until it's too late.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Climate should be considered worse, the 250B will go up. and
| the lost oppotunity cost isn't factored. Crime will always be
| with us. right now we are in the wild west stage of the
| internet (still) but give it 20-30 years and everything will be
| better. The crime will be more complex. But the climate will
| just keep getting worse.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Just a quick review of the four main points based on my own
| experience and also reworded hopefully respectfully:
|
| 1. Consumer internet founders are not great at life sciences
|
| This is a distraction. Most of the money in internet has been
| with automating or supporting business operations for medium to
| large sized businesses. Life science tech brings unique
| challenges which is why so many life science tech companies are
| based in the valley or have offices here. Just to pick out one
| example the highest resolution ultrasound machines made come from
| a company based in the valley. This statement appears to be based
| more on the distracting powers of social media and consumer tech.
|
| 2. Internet regulation is upon us
|
| This is good thing because regulations give consumers confidence
| in the reliability and safety of new technologies. Even the most
| care free developers do not expect that the current order of
| things will endure.
|
| 3. Climate response is capital intensive
|
| This is a distraction from the fact that the most promising
| technologies for addressing climate response are extremely well
| represented in the valley. Analysis of orbital and aerial sensor
| data, automated sensors, control systems for solar and wind
| generation, modernized electrical grid support systems, and more
| were all led in part by companies in the valley. More to the
| point all of these technologies were initially developed by small
| companies for small applications. Real progress with climate
| response is likely to involve some big projects, but these
| projects will be successful because they are based on much
| smaller works.
|
| 4. The end of the betting economy
|
| Economies are based on bets and consist of bets, as is said, all
| the way down. The difference is that the terms are changing.
| Instead of throwing money at pets.com or Facebook plugins or
| cryptocoin wallets founders are going to have to be more careful
| and sparing of resources. This is actually a good thing and is
| likely to at least in part lead to a return to business success
| competing with hype for available capital. The situation now is
| that investors can outspend customers in any sector so the
| venture capital space has become disconnected from genuine
| business success. Squeezing the slop out of the system should be
| good for everyone.
|
| The analogy that comes to mind is being told that the future is
| being researched and started at universities and then concluding
| that frat parties do not yield meaningful tech progress, frat
| parties are consistently targeted for regulation, frat parties do
| not address social issues, therefore universities are not
| actually likely to host research and development that shapes the
| future. And yes, in this example the current giants in the valley
| are what amounts to a loud frat party.
| armatav wrote:
| Nope.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > The generosity of open source software and the World Wide Web,
| the genius of algorithmically amplified collective intelligence
| are still there
|
| Is it? I think it's dying with the generation that believed in
| that culture. What are the collective intelligence projects
| created by young inventors?
|
| Even this article is written by someone who is of an older
| generation
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| There are sv open projects but many are extentions of some
| company effort, i.e pytorch/Facebook, tensorflow/Google.
|
| Much of the traditional spirit of open source seems to be
| coming from Europe and South America.
| lansdale10 wrote:
| The spirit is still there outside the USA, but especially
| developers from Europe catch on to the fact that their free
| labor is exploited by U.S. Foundation and Council members,
| who build their careers on the work of others.
|
| This is not "ideological flamewar", it is a _fact_ that
| international contributions are monetized and governed in
| America.
| [deleted]
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