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Trabisnikof posted:I never was saying that Silicon Valley is the great evil, but that Silicon Valley gets a free pass on being "good" and "ethical". Remember, this discussed was sparked by the number of silicon valley companies and leaders who believe generally "if it sells it must be ethical". There is a general mood for some reason if tech or startups are involved our ability to criticism them for ethical lapses should somehow be reduced. I honestly don't see anyone taking those attitudes in this thread. It seems to me like you're arguing against something that is, at best, a manifestation of breathless high-tech-oriented journalism but not the prevailing attitude here.
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Jul 11, 2014 08:27
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Leperflesh posted:But there's a lot of good things Amazon does, too. They sell DRM-free MP3s, competing aggressively with Apple's DRM-laden marketplace. iTunes music hasn't had DRM since 2009.
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Jul 11, 2014 09:12
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Shbobdb posted:To me, tech wipes all that away and replaces it with a very small cadre of super rich folks and a whole lot of not much else. It is a reinvention of early capitalism. Big tech companies recreate a lot of standard inefficiencies (though they have a larger in-house slave pool as opposed to working primarily off of acquisition) but start-ups are the worst. And yet somehow those in-house slaves are ruining, just ruining I tell you, the real estate market of SF and the Bay Area generally. Tell me, if tech only creates a handful of super rich CEOs and 'not much else' how does that happen? The answer is that tech creates thousands of well paying jobs. There is an actual middle class here, when the middle class is getting reamed in the rear end elsewhere. Would you rather the Bay Area have a rust belt economy?
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Jul 11, 2014 15:22
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The Bay Area is 7 million people. "Thousands" of jobs doesn't a middle class make. But regardless, the problems with housing go beyond the monied tech elite. It's a whole host of compounding problems caused by people selling false dichotomies, just like you.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:06
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Bobby Digital posted:iTunes music hasn't had DRM since 2009. And that was quite clearly a requirement of the labels and not something Apple wanted.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:06
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Kobayashi posted:The Bay Area is 7 million people. "Thousands" of jobs doesn't a middle class make. But regardless, the problems with housing go beyond the monied tech elite. It's a whole host of compounding problems caused by people selling false dichotomies, just like you. So the tech industry is simultaneously ruining everything and irrelevant. Got it. computer parts posted:And that was quite clearly a requirement of the labels and not something Apple wanted. Steve Jobs Thoughts on Music was published in 2007.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:37
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Software startups are a small minority of the total employment in the Bay Area. They get a lot of attention because there are more here than anywhere else. But even total software employment is only like 15% of the bay area's jobs. Silicon Valley is a lot more than just software. The Bay Area is a big hub for biotech, and we also have some hardware, aerospace, and a big financial industry in san francisco. It's a relatively diverse economy. Overall we have a thriving middle class in the Bay Area and we owe a lot of it to the culture of innovation and technology that has been fostered since the post-war period. The problems with housing absolutely go beyond the moneyed tech elite. We have a fragmented political structure that rewards individual communities for refusing to grow their populations at the expense of the shared regional infrastructure, we have geographical limitations on sprawl, and we have a population that is growing fairly rapidly due to both the attractiveness of our region to immigrants (national and international) and our ethnic diversity. I don't think it's helpful or accurate to demonize (or lionize) the high tech, software, or startup industries.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:56
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And actually compared to their market cap or revenues tech companies (that don't manufacture their own hardware) produce far fewer jobs than similar sized companies in other industries. So sure, a successful software startup might have thousands of employees eventually, but that company will be worth billions and if it wasn't a tech company they'd hired tens of thousands. But they're a "job creator" so we should just be thankful for their blessing I guess. Leperflesh posted:The problems with housing absolutely go beyond the moneyed tech elite. We have a fragmented political structure that rewards individual communities for refusing to grow their populations at the expense of the shared regional infrastructure, we have geographical limitations on sprawl, and we have a population that is growing fairly rapidly due to both the attractiveness of our region to immigrants (national and international) and our ethnic diversity. Exactly!
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Jul 11, 2014 20:58
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Family Values posted:And yet somehow those in-house slaves are ruining, just ruining I tell you, the real estate market of SF and the Bay Area generally. Tell me, if tech only creates a handful of super rich CEOs and 'not much else' how does that happen? are you illiterate?
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Jul 12, 2014 00:36
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Trabisnikof posted:I never was saying that Silicon Valley is the great evil, but that Silicon Valley gets a free pass on being "good" and "ethical". Remember, this discussed was sparked by the number of silicon valley companies and leaders who believe generally "if it sells it must be ethical". There is a general mood for some reason if tech or startups are involved our ability to criticism them for ethical lapses should somehow be reduced. Please provide quotations from this thread that supports this assertion. quote:Silicon Valley isn't out to save, empower, or help us. They're businesses out to make money as they should. They aren't our saviors and they aren't out to do "good" by you or me, unless that helps them somehow. Sure there are some who have loftier goals, but it's not fair to characterize any industry by glorifying a small section of their industry and then pretending they're representative of the norm. Silicon Valley has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in the Valley. And I'm not sure if you notice, but a lot of other countries are trying to emulate the model, and for good reason: technological advancement correlates with a ton of other important metrics. Trabisnikof posted:And actually compared to their market cap or revenues tech companies (that don't manufacture their own hardware) produce far fewer jobs than similar sized companies in other industries. So sure, a successful software startup might have thousands of employees eventually, but that company will be worth billions and if it wasn't a tech company they'd hired tens of thousands. Tech companies employ fewer people, because the very technology that they use makes them more efficient. Efficiency is a good thing. It allows society to produce the same output with fewer resources, whether those resources are time, people or raw materials. If you want to provide jobs to people, pay them to go dig ditches out in the desert.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:09
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enraged_camel posted:Please provide quotations from this thread that supports this assertion. That's what this whole argument is about, read the last few pages. Someone claimed that there are a ton of "good", "ethical", and "meaningful" companies in SV and that we're just picking on a few bad apples. When pressed for examples of those "good", "ethical", and "meaningful" companies the examples given were rather flimsy as supposed best-actors, which then devolved into how unfair it is to ask SV companies to be "good", "ethical", and "meaningful" companies in the first place. enraged_camel posted:Tech companies employ fewer people, because the very technology that they use makes them more efficient. Efficiency is a good thing. It allows society to produce the same output with fewer resources, whether those resources are time, people or raw materials. I'm not talking about how technology improves productivity, I'm talking about how software companies don't really create jobs on the same scale as non-software companies. In SV there are companies worth $100B+ dollars yet have less than 10k employees. So the pro-ported net-good to the community of the jobs they create is massively reduced compared to a company that makes a physical thing. See the difference between Tesla and Facebook one is "worth" a lot more but doesn't create that many more jobs. Wow, I missed that crazy statement. That's a perfect example of the self-centered and entitled attitude that is more and more pervasive in SV. \/ Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 01:23
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enraged_camel posted:Please provide quotations from this thread that supports this assertion. Hmmm.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:25
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm not talking about how technology improves productivity, I'm talking about how software companies don't really create jobs on the same scale as non-software companies. quote:In SV there are companies worth $100B+ dollars yet have less than 10k employees. edit: Facebook is the only one I see here in the tech sector that has < 10k employees - http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/audit-services/capital-market/publications/assets/document/pwc-global-top-100-march-update.pdf Cicero fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 01:33
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Cicero posted:How true is this? I mean, most startups aren't Whatsapp, getting multiple billion-dollar valuations on like 16 engineers. And it seems like as these companies mature, they inevitably bloat up with normal levels of employees. For example, Microsoft is at 127k employees now. But that's my point exactly, companies like Microsoft and Apple actually produce physical products. So, I should have said "companies with $100s Billion of market caps and 10s of thousands of employees" which does then include google et al. But its not hard to see why Twitter only needs 3K employees and a more traditional tech company (like Apple) or media company (like the New York Times) would need a lot more employees than that if they were a $22B company. I mean, its not that controversial that software needs fewer employees to manage its supply chain etc. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 01:45
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Twitter, Facebook, and Google's principle customers are advertisers. Their product is user eyeballs. Their software is a user eyeball-to-customer-advertisement delivery system. This is different from most software companies, which produce applications, middleware, and infrastructure that enable and improve business processes, provide entertainment, facilitate research, etc., and then sell those products directly or indirectly to those customers. Google certainly also provides a bunch of useful applications (poo poo like google maps is incredible) but it's all just part of the overall method of attracting and categorizing eyeballs for their actual customers, advertisers. I don't think it's special pleading to say that those three companies should be considered differently from the majority of software companies, nor should software be singled out as the only part of Silicon Valley worth discussing. Microsoft and Apple making physical products is irrelevant. There are plenty of software-only companies that employ tens of thousands of people. And nationwide, small employers employ more total people than large employees anyway. According to the small business & entrepreneurship council quote:American Business Overwhelmingly Small Business quote:Bulk of Job Creation Comes from Small Business So if you care about "job creation", small startups and small companies are far more important than Google or Facebook, even if the latter get most of the press. Google is massively profitable, supporting a large market cap, but profit margin does not correlate strongly to number of employees either. If your question is whether "silicon valley" is ethical, none of the points being raised about Google or Twitter or whatever are particularly relevant to the answer. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 01:57
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Leperflesh posted:
I'm not the one claiming that silicon valley is "ethical" nor am I trying to claim they don't create jobs, I'm just saying their positive impacts are rather overblown. Also the use of national employment data to argue that tech and software startups are large job creators is a bit misguided. Tech and software startups are incredibly tiny section of small businesses. In the SF-San Jose MSA "information" firms, which includes all software/web/IT/media firms, only account for 0.7% of businesses with <20 employees (http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/). Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 02:20
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Trabisnikof posted:But that's my point exactly, companies like Microsoft and Apple actually produce physical products. So, I should have said "companies with $100s Billion of market caps and 10s of thousands of employees" which does then include google et al It's true that some software companies are unusually profitable per employee, of course, but I'm not convinced that's the norm. (On a related note, Facebook will be in the business of physical products as soon as their acquisition of Oculus completes)
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Jul 12, 2014 02:38
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Cicero posted:Ok, so Google/MS/Apple have large market caps and lots of employees, how does that fit into your point? Actually Oculus will remain a distinct company, but that's a different point. And lets do compare Google, Microsoft, and Apple: (market cap, employees) Google: 395.69B, 47,756 Employees Microsoft: 347.68B, 99,000 Employees Apple: 574.15B, 80,000 Employees 2 of these companies are old style tech companies and 1 is one of the newer, more software focused style of tech company. I doubt Google is planning on doubling their workforce anytime soon and can you even think of a bigger hirer in the new tech rich besides Google? I'm not arguing that they don't create jobs, just that the nature of these businesses don't create as many jobs as other industries do.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:51
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Trabisnikof posted:2 of these companies are old style tech companies and 1 is one of the newer, more software focused style of tech company. I doubt Google is planning on doubling their workforce anytime soon and can you even think of a bigger hirer in the new tech rich besides Google? I'm not arguing that they don't create jobs, just that the nature of these businesses don't create as many jobs as other industries do. Who cares? Highly paid, stable low-skill jobs are not coming back to America anytime soon, between outsourcing and our inability to control immigration of unskilled workers.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:32
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Trabisnikof posted:Actually Oculus will remain a distinct company, but that's a different point. And lets do compare Google, Microsoft, and Apple: What is the point of bringing market cap into this? Wall Street can play their casino game and value these companies any way they like, when the stock price goes up that doesn't mean the company sees any of that money with which to hire additional employees (which I think is where you're trying to go with this; that tech companies don't hire enough people with the money they make.) You should be comparing revenue/employment of tech companies to revenue/employment of other sectors. I don't actually know how they stack up on that metric but at least it's a more valid comparison.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:36
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Trabisnikof posted:Wow, I missed that crazy statement. That's a perfect example of the self-centered and entitled attitude that is more and more pervasive in SV. computer parts posted:Hmmm. What exactly is "self-centered" or "entitled" about that statement? Here, I'll provide it again for context: enraged_camel posted:Silicon Valley has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in the Valley. Please state the nature of your disagreement, thanks.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:37
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Trabisnikof posted:[Apple... Google... Microsoft...] Wow, you have such an incredibly narrow perspective it's nothing short of amazing. You're way too focused on the number of people the companies you cited employ directly, and you completely ignore the entirely new markets and platforms they have created that employ or otherwise provide income for tens of millions of people. I'm not talking about just software either. There's also hardware, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and much more.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:45
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enraged_camel posted:What exactly is "self-centered" or "entitled" about that statement? Here, I'll provide it again for context: I'll give you a hint: if someone from Detroit said that regarding the automobile would you think they were self-centered or entitled?
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Jul 12, 2014 03:47
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computer parts posted:I'll give you a hint: if someone from Detroit said that regarding the automobile would you think they were self-centered or entitled? How could anyone disagree that inexpensive cars have transformed life as we know it?
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Jul 12, 2014 03:51
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enraged_camel posted:Please state the nature of your disagreement, thanks. The nature of my disagreement is three fold: 1. Silicon Valley's wasn't the "prime driver" of innovation, standard of living or economic development for the last 60 years. That's absurd. 2. People don't owe anything to tech companies, flat out. The idea is pure self-entitlement. 3. Even for the examples of Silicon Valley's finest (e.g. in this thread, Microsoft & Amazon  ) the fact is, technology marches forward and if Silicon Valley wasn't here it would be somewhere else. If it wasn't for the massive spending of public dollars on research, institutions, and public infrastructure in the Bay Area and California in general these industries couldn't flourish here. If anything, the tech companies owe their communities for allowing them the environment to create massively profitable technology rather than the other way around.
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Jul 12, 2014 04:17
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Trabisnikof posted:1. Silicon Valley's wasn't the "prime driver" of innovation, standard of living or economic development for the last 60 years. That's absurd. Actually, yes it has. The development of the microchip and practically everything else we consider modern technology was done mostly in Silicon Valley. Solid state transistors, silicon ICs, and computer networks are all products of Silicon Valley.
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Jul 12, 2014 04:23
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on the left posted:Actually, yes it has. The development of the microchip and practically everything else we consider modern technology was done mostly in Silicon Valley. Solid state transistors, silicon ICs, and computer networks are all products of Silicon Valley. Sure, there was a lot of research done in SV, but to say it was the prime driver for the last 60 years is a huge exaggeration. I wouldn't contest the point if one said the last decade or two. Also, my 3rd point contributes directly to why there was research was in SV at all. Also, you're pretty much mistaken to assume that the microchip, the transistor, Silicon ICs or Computer Networks are a "product" of Silicon Valley: Microchip (I assumed you mean Microprocessor): but out of the 3 companies credited with some of the "first" was in SV, the other two in LA and Texas (Intel, Garrett AiResearch, and TI). Transistor: The team that won the Nobel Prize was working in NJ (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1956/index.html). Although one did move to SV to try to make more $$$ from it. Silicon IC: Was invented in Texas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kilby) Computer Network: SV was 1 of 4 end points of the first ARPANET (my 3rd point again), but the standard of operation was designed in Michigan (http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_roberts.htm) Obviously lots of teams are working on the same ideas at the same time, which is my point...its silly to claim these as "products" of Silicon Valley. Edit: Before anyone says anything, I'm not trying to imply that SV didn't contribute. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 04:48
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on the left posted:How could anyone disagree that inexpensive cars have transformed life as we know it? Not entirely for the better though, as that includes all the socioeconomic problems associated with sprawl and climate change, not to mention traffic and the death of public transit, which brings us back to tech busses and that inequity that they represent.
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Jul 12, 2014 12:22
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Kobayashi posted:Not entirely for the better though, as that includes all the socioeconomic problems associated with sprawl and climate change, not to mention traffic and the death of public transit, which brings us back to tech busses and that inequity that they represent. The advantages heavily outweigh the disadvantages. Who wants to live in a world where the vast majority of people never venture more than 50 miles from home?
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Jul 12, 2014 13:20
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Much like how carmakers indirectly employ many times more people than they directly employ - by virtue of the hundreds of vendors, dealers, and aftermarket companies that are part of the ecosystem surrounding each carmaker - large software companies create ecosystems that depend on them. Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and even (or perhaps especially) newer companies like Facebook, Twitter, etc. all work with literally hundreds of system integrators, application developers using their platforms, and partners who create ecosystems around their products and services. An analysis of how much benefit a given company provides in terms of jobs is incomplete if it does not consider all those add-on companies whose businesses are completely or mostly dependent on the existence and ongoing operation of the giants. Also ignored is the quality of those jobs. WalMart is one of the biggest employers in the country by sheer job numbers, but the average wage at WalMart is way, way lower than the average wage at Microsoft. Most technology company jobs are full-time and include good benefits packages with health care, dental, etc. for the whole family of the worker; most service-industry jobs do not. Leaving aside the employment issue, I think it'd be difficult to overestimate the impact that the computer and internet revolution has had on the world. Yes, many of the innovators and companies that contribute to that revolution are outside Silicon Valley, and I'm sure if you counted them all up, there'd be more outside than inside. That's true of any industry: Detroit was the central hub of a global automaking industry that revolutionized human lifestyles and transportation networks worldwide, and surely is still the largest single place where cars are made in the country... probably the world. But at no time did Detroit employ more autoworkers or have a higher market capitalization of automaking companies than the rest of the world's automakers combined. Silicon Valley holds a similar place in the information technology revolution. Frankly this is the first time I've ever heard someone try to argue otherwise. The ecosystem of mutually supporting (and competing) hardware and software companies, universities, research labs, and customers of IT all combine to create a critical mass here that feeds and sustains the whole industry. This is why new startups and large companies both continue to pay exorbitantly high costs to stay in Silicon Valley. Texas may try to tempt away companies, and may occasionally get a win, but most IT companies located in SV know that it is here, and only here, that they can access the social networks that recruit the technology experts and innovators they rely on to advance their businesses and stay on the cutting edge. It's not just about plopping down enough universities or business parks and offering the right tax benefits, as so many other communities have figured out after they tried to emulate SV and failed. Like most companies hiring white-collar workers, the IT industry relies more on networking and word-of-mouth to locate and hire employees than it does international-level blind recruiting and resume gathering. Especially for small startups, you get involved by knowing someone who knows someone. SV has an established and ever-churning informal network of people, a network that has grown organically since the 1950s and especially since the 1980s. You can start a software startup anywhere, and you'll probably find someone who is qualified. But if you start one here, you'll already know someone who is qualified, and they'll know someone else, and despite being stereotyped as antisocial nerds, IT and software people are just like people in any other industry; they hire people they know, or who have been recommended by someone they trust, over someone who is just a resume and a photograph. Networking is also how those small companies find venture capital, partners, and customers. Being here has a distinct business advantage over not being here, when it comes to turning a new business idea into a successful business, anywhere in the software, internet, IT, and IT-related service arena. So SV has been and remains the best place in the world to start a small IT company. It's the hub of the global information age. It's not an exaggeration to say so. Would we still have computers without Silicon Valley? Sure, probably so, but probably there would have to have been somewhere that such a hub formed. Perhaps it would have formed in Cambridge, around MIT, or in Tokyo, or who knows. But like Detroit with automaking, or Pittsburgh with steelmaking, or Hollywood with movie-making. Throughout the history of the world, there have been central hubs for new and expanding industries to grow and thrive, even as innovations and developments occur all over the place all at once. I think it's a natural result of the tendency of people to congregate and form face-to-face interpersonal networks when trying to get involved in a new big thing. I'm not sure where exactly the motivation to try and play down SV's contribution comes from. Whether it's anger about some lovely new software companies that have been in the news lately, or the Google Bus phenomenon, or just general malaise about the income gap (exemplified by the paychecks of Silicon Valley CEOs), it doesn't matter really. Say what you want about the specific lovely behavior of specific lovely companies and I'm on board, those are facts that can be discussed. Talk about specific unethical practices infecting the IT industry even, and I'm on board. Try and act like the global hub of software and information technology just isn't that big of a deal, though, and you're being absurd.
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Jul 12, 2014 17:15
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Leperflesh posted:I'm not sure where exactly the motivation to try and play down SV's contribution comes from. Whether it's anger about some lovely new software companies that have been in the news lately, or the Google Bus phenomenon, or just general malaise about the income gap (exemplified by the paychecks of Silicon Valley CEOs), it doesn't matter really. Say what you want about the specific lovely behavior of specific lovely companies and I'm on board, those are facts that can be discussed. Talk about specific unethical practices infecting the IT industry even, and I'm on board. Try and act like the global hub of software and information technology just isn't that big of a deal, though, and you're being absurd. I'd say that the tech media contributes to the anger. They go after sensational stories - like the one about the Google Glass girl leaving the restaurant after being asked to take it off - because they know those stories will get read, shared and talked about. And then you get goons who just eat those stories up and post vitriolic nonsense about how entitled tech workers are and how Silicon Valley is the home of the devil and poo poo. People also don't realize how big of a role the PR industry plays in shaping public opinion. If I were a large tech company outside the valley, I'd be willing to pay a PR agency large sums of money to feed the media stories about how awful Silicon Valley is, with an innocent, tiny tidbit about how many tech workers are migrating to [insert my company hometown here] because it's much nicer. That results in a larger pool of local workers to recruit from and also makes those workers cheaper. Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 18:17
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Trabisnikof posted:Sure, there was a lot of research done in SV, but to say it was the prime driver for the last 60 years is a huge exaggeration. I wouldn't contest the point if one said the last decade or two. Also, my 3rd point contributes directly to why there was research was in SV at all. Yeah, the current status of Silicon Valley is due to a variety of events outside the valley, in some ways similar to how Hollywood ended up how it is (or really, was). Hollywood wasn't always the major center for the movie industry, but it eventually became that. The Silicon Valley also changed dramatically over the years in terms of what is driving it and what internally and externally is currently influencing it. Most of the early stuff in the valley I've heard revolves around a group of people leaving some defense companies back east and forming National Semiconductor, and from there you can trace various movements of people out of National Semiconductor forming other companies, and then repeat. As it became less than ideal to perform really dirty SI manufacturing here other companies/industries formed replacing them, but were still heavily connected to the old companies through the migration of groups of employees. The valley also has been sucking in massive amounts of high-end immigration, which has kept it one of the major focal points for ongoing innovation, preventing other major hubs from forming or really supplanting it. California's laws regarding non-competes and other stuff also played a large part in it, similar to Hollywood (though that was more about ignoring patents). There's also the various major federal labs (JPL, LLNL, Sandia), portions of the defense industry (Lockheed space/satellite stuff), Major Air Force operations (the Blue Cube, etc), UC Berkely's presence, and of course the presence of Stanford (and therefore Stanford Research Institute - SRI) that all contribute greatly. Add in the financial pull of San Francisco, a major port nearby, and amazing weather, and you get a really unique place for this type of work. Without the labs and federal funding/research at Stanford/Berkeley and other less prestigious universities, it's unlikely that things would be the way they are, though the Bay would still be a major urban area due to the other factors, and could still have ended up a hub. As for the anger, even in the CA thread, I can understand most of it. The valley has largely been moving independent of the rest of the economy for a long while, in it's own bubble. Life outside the bubble hasn't been very good, even in state. Local/County/State/Federal employees have all been facing serious problems for basically the last decade and change. Other industries pay has been shrinking, outsourcing, and things have generally been poo poo. As this recent bubble has grown there's been a lot more outward publicity from parts of the valley that make it really, really obvious that they are sheltered and aren't really experiencing the same issues that everyone else is, nor do they really care. Lots of it is coming from younger folks, who just wouldn't have the experience to know better. Overall it's sort of a mini-America - either you are part of the industry and on the leading edge, making lots of money, or you aren't, and you are suffering badly, benefits (corporate or government-based) are getting cut. The presence of the valley is almost certainly helping CA as a whole and largely hiding the absolute destruction of manufacturing and other industries, but if you aren't in the industry you are probably worse off than you were before. It's an obvious point of friction and a very visible gap in society to those on the other side, but not to those who a recent newcomers to the bubble. In some ways it's similar to how people in New York must feel for those not in the Financial Industry. The other thing to really notice is that during the last bubble the valley sucked in all sorts of general non-tech folks who were living here already, and the gains from the bubble were much more spread out than they are today. Graduating even high school in the Bay Area during that time was basically a free ticket to a very nicely paying (15 years ago, 60-70k+) job doing some random thing or another at the many companies that popped up, since a lot of jobs were administrative in nature or required fairly low-level skills (you can type? Great, go provision DSL orders or make websites or whatever). This bubble hasn't done that at all, and is really centered around high-end jobs. It's part of why the bubble hasn't burnt itself out yet but it's also a point of friction. The entry/mid-level jobs that were created last time are still outsourced to China/India/Philippines/Eastern Europe or possibly fully automated away or are in the processing of being automated away. Rather than looking at the companies and thinking of the valley that way, it's really about the movements of teams around and groups of them going off and starting a new company when their current one doesn't want to try something. There's very little separation in the valley (like 2 or at most 3 degrees of separation) and basically every major thing (like say Android) that's happened can be traced back through the movements of entire teams of people between companies, which causes the rise and fall of said companies, rather than the other way around. Even VC funding is this way, as well as the general spread of ideas and innovation. People run in to each other for lunch or at parties or school and there's lots of in-person communication that goes on that makes the flow of ideas work much quicker than to even to the rest of your business that's out of the region, if that makes sense. If your company doesn't adopt the idea someone else will, or maybe will re-try something and succeed where you fail, rather than getting bogged down in the typical corporate bureaucracy. In some ways the idea of "proprietary information" that you can't share outside of your company actually runs counter to how the valley really functions, and the fact that people talk to each other really has been driving everything forward and keeping the valley a or the focal point of innovation in the industry. Not that the major existing corporations like that, since while it's the basis of their formation, it's also the basis of competition.
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Jul 12, 2014 18:24
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xyqbc7SQ4w I guess it's nsfw? Get back to work Johnson.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:07
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on the left posted:The advantages heavily outweigh the disadvantages. Who wants to live in a world where the vast majority of people never venture more than 50 miles from home? I don't think it's quite as clear cut that urban and exurban sprawl, reduced air quality, climate change and the global political effects of the American demand for cheap fossil fuels are completely balanced out by the ability to easily take road trips.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:10
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cafel posted:I don't think it's quite as clear cut that urban and exurban sprawl, reduced air quality, climate change and the global political effects of the American demand for cheap fossil fuels are completely balanced out by the ability to easily take road trips. I like how you're distilling the benefits of automobile down to "the ability to easily take road trips." It's laughably short-sighted.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:21
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enraged_camel posted:I like how you're distilling the benefits of automobile down to "the ability to easily take road trips." It's laughably short-sighted. Why are we discussing automobiles and how they relate to Silicon Valley anyway? So are you willing to say that: Detroit has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in Detroit. and Houston has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in Houston. and Boston has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in the Boston. etc etc? Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 22:27
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Trabisnikof posted:So are you willing to say that: Sure. But those cities innovate in different fields. Silicon Valley innovates in the high-tech field. Houston innovates in energy. Detroit innovated in manufacturing, before those jobs left America. Boston... sure, it innovates in tech, but it's far behind Silicon Valley so I wouldn't call it a "prime" driver of innovation in tech.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:46
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enraged_camel posted:Sure. But those cities innovate in different fields. So your statement is pretty meaningless if it boils down to "The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented". (Also, I'd check your assumptions about the Boston area, poo poo like LORAN was pretty important and we're talking about the last 60 years remember). I said: quote:Silicon Valley isn't out to save, empower, or help us. They're businesses out to make money as they should. They aren't our saviors and they aren't out to do "good" by you or me, unless that helps them somehow. Sure there are some who have loftier goals, but it's not fair to characterize any industry by glorifying a small section of their industry and then pretending they're representative of the norm. and your response was: quote:Silicon Valley has been a prime driver of innovation in this country for the past 60 years. The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented in the Valley. Also you've never actually responded to my 3 criticism of that point. The average American household owes Silicon Valley no more than it owes Houston, Schenectady, College Station, Davis, Los Alamos or any other center of innovation.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:59
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Trabisnikof posted:So your statement is pretty meaningless if it boils down to "The average American household owes a lot of its economic wellbeing and standard of living to the technology that was invented". (Also, I'd check your assumptions about the Boston area, poo poo like LORAN was pretty important and we're talking about the last 60 years remember). Perhaps the problem is that you are trying to attach too much meaning to that statement to begin with. I simply posted it in response to your dismissal of Silicon Valley as "businesses out to make money as they should." No, SV is a lot more than that. To understand this, you need to understand how innovation happens. I suggest (re)reading Leperfresh's post. quote:Also you've never actually responded to my 3 criticism of that point. The average American household owes Silicon Valley no more than it owes Houston, Schenectady, College Station, Davis, Los Alamos or any other center of innovation. The point is that they are tiny centers of innovation compared to Silicon Valley. Look, there are many good loving reasons, explained by Leperfresh, why Silicon Valley is the prime location for tech companies. There's a ton of amazing technology that comes out of the place because it has a critical mass of tech companies, highly educated workers, great research institutions and venture capital firms. You simply cannot find that combination elsewhere in nearly the same density (for example, it has the highest number of Fortune 1000 tech companies). Sure, technology occasionally comes out of places like Los Alamos, but measure it in the aggregate and you'll see that it pales in comparison to the stuff that gets invented and funded in the Valley.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:13
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enraged_camel posted:Perhaps the problem is that you are trying to attach too much meaning to that statement to begin with. I simply posted it in response to your dismissal of Silicon Valley as "businesses out to make money as they should." No, SV is a lot more than that. To understand this, you need to understand how innovation happens. Literally every urban center that's not a decaying husk fits the description of "innovation center" and "full of businesses out to make money". The point is that you're not more special than Chicago, Houston, or NYC.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:19
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