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I actually see both sides of this issue and don't think either essay is very good, both are preaching to the choir and neither will never convert anyone. PG is
by dasil003 11y ago
I actually see both sides of this issue and don't think either essay is very good, both are preaching to the choir and neither will never convert anyone.
PG is arguing against a strawman using a very cold and clinical justification for his career—the wider social issues are not addressed at all.
Meanwhile this article barely stops to acknowledge that SV is actually building things as opposed to ripping people off with arbitrage and financial instruments. Beyond that it is just a frothy rant setting up another strawman about rich people telling poor people what to do (which is not really what PG was doing). Never does the author stop to acknowledge that they are probably fine with small mom-and-pop businesses, just not venture-funded unicorns, and that if we dislike the machinations of SV there must be some gray line papering over a pretty wide swath of the continuum between the two.
Personally I think PG would have been better off to just keep his mouth shut, because when you're rich it just looks like post-hoc rationalization no matter how you slice it. The social issues are real, and we are going to have to contend with what the effective replacement of labor with capital means for our society, but this is a conversation that the SV elite don't have the political capital to address.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoI think PG's essay was far better than this one. PG had actual thought-through points, whether or not you agreed with them (and whether or not it was wise for him to express them). This article is just someone looking for a pretext to yell, and flinging as much mud as possible in the hope that some will stick in the reader's mind.
- pcmaffey 11y ago> Personally I think PG would have been better off to just keep his mouth shut The intensity of the response to PG's articles stems precisely from the rarity of someone in his position speaking up to defend the capitalists' monopoly. It's rare because it almost always puts an obvious target on that person. He might have well have said, "Let them eat cake." Regardless of the relative merit of his essays, they've started a wider conversation that's raising the consciousness about the single-most important issue of our society. An issue that only 1 of a half-dozen presidential candidates is willing to talk about...
- oafitupa 11y ago> the single-most important issue of our society I thought that was global warming?
- mempko 11y agoThe article actually addresses that SV is building things. Wood mentions how 95 percent of start-ups fail. Presumably most of what is being built is crap, or destroyed. Would you rate that as building value or ripping people off?
- Redoubts 11y agoIs neither an option? Who is being ripped off when a startup fails?
- andrewingram 11y agoDepends what you consider to be failure. In a financial sense, going out of business is failure. But overall you can easily argue that's how things should be. It doesn't mean what was built was crap, just that it couldn't find a market fast enough (or at all).
- tolmasky 11y agoNot sure what point is being tried to be made here: 1. A startup that fails doesn't mean it has built crap. Sometimes things fail for unrelated reasons, whether ahead of their time or because the economy took a downturn, etc etc. SOMETIMES because they are "ripping us off". 2. 95% of scientific experiments "fail". Are scientists ripping us off? The whole idea of the market place IS failure. In fact, if our larger market was healthier, we'd see MORE failure (and in more established corporations, such as the "too big to fails"). The fact that 95% of startups fail is one of the healthiest indicators of SV. Experimentation necessarily means many failures in search of the one success. Maybe some day we'll have a magical simulation machine where we can run product ideas ahead of time and know "the right place" to put our money, but until then, the best system is one that invests in diverse companies with oftentimes mutually exclusive ideas.