19 ms·

A critique of trends in tech

473 points by dccoolgai 9y ago

jaboutboul 9y ago
This is the most hilarious (and sadly true) thing I've read in the last few months.
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago
  > "add a touch screen manufactured by Chinese tweens, call it “Smart,” and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair." As someone who spends hours pondering the same NYC subway ads, this captures what I'm seeing better than I could ever put it.
thesmallestcat 9y ago
I'd like to add that the MTA allows the most manipulative, screaming-at-you ads (depicted in this post). It's the least pleasant part of using the subway in my opinion.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  I would say my least favorite part is seeing that empty car and not realizing the reason why it's empty is because of the smell inside until the train's already left the stop.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Yeah, there's way worse things that can happen in the subway than staring at a picture with text.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    Sure, but that can happen in any system. The visually loud ads are unique to the MTA.
- JDiculous 9y ago
  The least pleasant part of the NYC subway is how over-congested, chronically delayed, and unreliable it is. But yes, the ads are annoying too.
draw_down 9y ago
Pretty good! That ad about "doers" is particularly ghoulish. And just generally I feel like I see the ideology of overworking as right and good all the time now. Things are not great.
- MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
  Yea, I loathe those fiverr ads. When I end up in a subway car filled with them it really sours my mood. I used to have no feelings about fiverr but now I absolutely would never use it.
dustingetz 9y ago
Free trade is voluntary, we choose to participate in trade because it benefits both parties. I'm interested in seeing arguments that attack SV/society but start from this principle?
- doytch 9y ago
  Are you saying that because both parties benefit then neither party can be to blame? Confirming, not sure based on your wording. If so, that assumes that both parties are going into the trade negotiations on equal footing. I don't think I'm the only one who would argue that's not the case in a great many rentseeker:rentee or owner:employee relationships. Even discarding any social or economic pressures in the current climate, the power of the rentseeker and owner allows them to shape the environment into one that benefits them more (see: lobbying and politics in the USA).
- athenot 9y ago
  When it comes to free-trade it doesn't need to benefit both parties, it just needs to benefit the party with the most leverage. The other side will then have to adapt.
- djohnston 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that, if we feel we are not benefiting from the current rent market, we can simply stop participating?
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    In Hawaii lots of people live on the beach, and don't get hassled for it. (Maybe they do get hassled, but anyway it isn't enough to end the practice...) There probably should be some sort of freely available liminal space in other states to serve the same purpose. Actually it seems like some people live under bridges?
    - yequalsx 9y ago
      300 million people can't do this. By and large, save for very few people, we all have to participate in the housing market. There are also long term, detrimental effects of having a large percentage of the population living on beaches or other designated areas.
_jal 9y ago
My next startup will be RentColosseum. Screw this bidding with money thing, renting an apartment really should be survival of the fittest. We won't need a cut of the winner's rent (but can probably take it anyway), because we'll televise it and profit on the ads. Did I miss anything? Opaque, exploitive finance on proprietary weapons for contestants, maybe?
- kps 9y ago
  Auctioning the loser's organs.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  Pivot idea: pay for admittance to a unit or building, and if you can throw the existing tenants out the window, the place is yours. Then you pay the landlord each month for the right to keep your door locked. If a prospective tenant can outbid your month's rent, man the battle stations.
  - Neliquat 9y ago
    Defenistration as a service comes next obviously.
    - dreamcompiler 9y ago
      DAAS is the business model of Apple and Redhat.
      - zanecodes 9y ago
        But they don't toss things out of windows, they toss Windows out of things
  - Hortinstein 9y ago
    I can't wait until I hear about a Young Adult novel with this as a primary plot device. I will know where the idea came from.
jstanley 9y ago
Rents aren't high because fat cats are charging more money. Rents are high because of supply and demand. That's literally all there is to it. Someone is going to get the house and someone isn't, and the one who gets it will be the one offering more money. The only thing the fat cats change is what proportion of the money goes to which people. The amount of money comes from supply and demand.
- jondubois 9y ago
  Also, this is mostly true for rent in big cities; big corporations are essentially forcing people to move to big cities where the quality of life is lower by promising them a better future. This increases house prices and makes everyone miserable (except wealthy shareholders and landlords).
  - euyyn 9y ago
    > forcing people [...] by promising them a better future Something doesn't add up in your analysis.
    - jondubois 9y ago
      Forcing people to do things doesn't necessarily entail holding them at gunpoint. You can make anyone do anything you want if you can bend their perception of reality - They are completely ignorant and powerless. If you're holding someone at gunpoint, at least they have the power to beg for mercy.
      - euyyn 9y ago
        So your opinion is that big corporations are forcing people to move to big cities by manipulating their perception of reality? Like with ads that suburban or rural life is crap, or what?
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Maybe, but if not, it isn't evident in what you quote of GP. I'll give you a million dollars tomorrow - I promise. See what I mean?
jondubois 9y ago
We need to push the reset button on Capitalism. The government of each country should repossess all the assets and money within that country and redistribute them to everyone within that country based purely on each person's age (so older people would get more and it won't affect their ability to retire).
- demonshalo 9y ago
  in my book, people like you are very dangerous. I fear people of your ideals far more than I fear terrorism or anything of that sort. Let that sink in for a while!
  - bittercynic 9y ago
    The GP's comment reads like an illustration of an extreme position that may be used to shine light on another extreme position. It may not be an accurate reflection of the person's ideals.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    I think it would shake things up and it would be fun for everyone. Capitalism as it is today is like a Monopoly game where all the properties have already been bought up and new players are forced to 'play' anyway (purely for the gratification of those who are already winning); it hasn't been fun for a very long time. We need to start a fresh game to make things interesting. I think that things would be better if everyone saw life as a game rather than a race to the finish line.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
      > I think that things would be better if everyone saw life as a game rather than a race to the finish line. Does it matter what history thinks?
- deleted 9y ago
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- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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nommm-nommm 9y ago
This post may only be tangentially related to TFA but these were my thoughts that came to my mind when reading this article and I'd like to get some alternative perspective as someone who "doesn't get it." Dollar Shave Club, apparently, delivers Dorco razor blades once a month. The exact same ones you can buy straight from Dorco for a fraction of the price, or if you prefer, Amazon. Razor blades are so small that several months worth can easily fit in even a dorm room. The CEO apparently believes that he's adding value from the subscription model. >[Dollar Shave CEO Michael] Dubin said his service offers greater "convenience." "Are there similar razors out there? Sure. But our goal is to create value." I pointed out that I can get the Dorco razors delivered conveniently to my front door, too. "Not once a month," he said... Bottom line, if people want to buy in bulk, there's a bazillion other places on the web to do that. Dollar Shave Club offers value beyond just the price of blades & convenience.(1) What does HN think about this? Would you pay a markup for the "convenience" of a subscription? Is this a real thing people find value in? (Personally I find 'create value' to be a suspect phrase in this context. I also, personally, find subscriptions to be inconvenient 99% of the time) (1) http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-the-same-high-quality-razors-for-a-third-of-the-price http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-th...
- dsacco 9y ago
  Eh, I don't think Dollar Shave Club fits in with the article's examples. The value created is that many people want to spend more money and less of their time with consistent results. The company doesn't try to ratchet up margin with unnecessary tech, it just satisfies a legitimate customer demand. That might be a customer demand you don't identify with, or which you believe shouldn't exist; it's still a legitimate demand. The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.
  - throwawaycopy 9y ago
    Just like the "legitimate demand" for heroin or cigarettes! While we're at it can we get rid of the FDA so we can go back to a world filled with the "legitimate demand" for laudnum sold as a miracle cure for consumption, hysterics and gout? Neoliberalism, by mixing ethical relativism with social Darwinism, allows for some rent seeking asshat to sleep well at night because they authorised a marketing campaign featuring a black woman. Good job, Team Progress! All we need are just a few more empty words and a few more empty products... We're almost there!
altcognito 9y ago
tl;dr; marketing adds a glossy veneer so people will overspend on useless crap, companies will screw you if it means margins are greater. So much of what society produces is meaningless nonsense. SV doesn't have that world cornered by any means. counterpoint: Capitalism sucks, but it seems to work better than most things we've tried thus far.
golergka 9y ago
So, let me get it right: this attack focuses on two vanity products that people buy from their free will to spend money on bullshit and two 'marketplaces' that nobody is forcing you to use? The author makes a boring mistake of taking people for irresponsible, stupid children that should be protected from making bad choices. Thanks, no. I've bought a lot of bullshit products in my lifetime, paid for a lot of bullshit subscriptions, and I'm happy to have the freedom to have made all this stupid mistakes, and a lot more too, that taken not just my money.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  I don't think that's what the author is saying. If anything, I think the point is that the "revolutionary" nature of most hip companies (not necessarily from SV) is really not revolutionary at all. Cutting edge progress in tech doesn't happen nearly as much as the general public perceives, but they believe it is because the slick marketing, subscription service for mundane products, adding an LCD touch screen to an existing product feels like technological progress, but really isn't. The few real leaps in technology that actually are unique and applicable outside of selling some product or service aren't visible to the end user. When Netflix caught on everyone thought "wow, technology!" Only some of us in the tech world realize that the idea of streaming movies and TV to your house isn't the amazing breakthrough they made -- it's the infrastructure behind making it work, and the layperson doesn't give a shit about that.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Back in the 90s there were real utopian dreams that the Internet could free us and form a world "more humane and fair than the world your governments made before" (Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, 1996). Instead, over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley went from being a land of dreams to an accelerator of the conditions that make middle class life so precarious in the developed world. Nobody in the valley seems to care. Many, including those on this thread, seem to be ignorant of the fact that over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has transformed, in people's minds, from a place that makes the future better to a place that makes the future worse, yet slightly more entertaining.
- lovich 9y ago
  I am aware, but even if silicon valley was how it used to be described it was never an option. Maybe its because I am younger, but in my age group everyone went to college and got massive student loans because that's what every adult in your life told you to do. How were you supposed to travel to the valley and work on something that didn't make you a lot of money when you had large, non dis chargeable loans tied to you for decades? The only people who had that option were rich kids, or the few who took the "bad" choice of not going to college and ended up lucking out. Seeing people reminisce about how silicon valley used to be always reminds me of older people complaining that the youth are no longer treating college as a place to learn. Well no shit. We are, on average, much poorer than we used to be and everyone has to eat. All those old ideals are nice, but they matter much less when you end up having to work yourself to death or decide between medicine or making rent that month
bjornlouser 9y ago
"the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horseshit... An industry that never stops lauding itself for its creativity and innovation has built its own success mythology by endlessly repackaging the same banal functions that have existed for about as long as the Web" Pretty funny coming from an academic who would gladly make a living pushing standardized testing at the undergraduate level.
- dccoolgai 9y ago
  https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  In what world do you think academics like standardized testing? Every teacher or professor I've ever met loathes the idea of having to "teach to the test". They didn't set the standards, but they're forced to follow them.
  - bjornlouser 9y ago
    https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/12843-standardized-assessments-of-college-learning/Assessment-White-Paper.72b9bbb2cf0447b4aacaabe6e6ea1824.pdf https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/12843-standardized...
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      My bad. I thought you were making a more general argument about academics. In this case, you're right.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      You should have put that in your original post. I made the same mistake as my sibling and thought you were just swiping at academics in general.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Sounds like a non sequitur, though. Standardized testing in academia isn't necessarily a sign of lack of creativity or innovation.
dsacco 9y ago
I'm normally not critical of mod behavior, so I don't make this point lightly: 1. The title was changed from something admittedly sensationalist, to something that is clearly antithetical to the point of the original title. "Trends in tech" completely lacks the tone of the original title. If you don't want to use a title with "horseshit" in it, fine, but change it to something that matches the intention of the author at least. "Trends in tech" could be anything from a VC thinkpiece, to technical language choices in startups, to what the author actually wrote. How do I know if it's worth my time or aligns with my interests if I'm a passing reader? This title manages to completely neutralize the author's point by robbing it of any interesting lead-in. If a mod did this, it's what I would call disingenuous curation of front page content. It's insidious because while clickbait titles get more attention than they should, and unfairly so, uninteresting titles receive proportionally less attention than they should. 2. This post has 92 points in less than an hour and is just barely on the front page (as of this writing). It will probably slip off imminently. The top post has less than 80 points and is over an hour old. Why? I understand there are algorithm nuances, but that utterly lacks transparency. I make these points because it raises an interesting juxtaposition between what the community wants and what is beneficial to Y Combinator. Some of the article could be interpreted as attacking Y Combinator's business model which provides a potential incentive for what I noted above. But that does not make it illegitimate given that it satisfies "intellectual curiosity" according to HN guidelines and is very well-upvoted. It appears suspicious to me that it is not higher up, and this is from someone who doesn't normally engage in this sort of criticism.
- brad0 9y ago
  Thanks for this. You've articulated how I've felt subconsciously about HN for a while now. HN used to be a place where I could be stimulated intellectually. Today it no longer seems to give me that. Where can I go now to get better content? Or should I give up on aggregation altogether?
  - _jal 9y ago
    Every site seems to have a life cycle. I find that I prefer the early stages, before things settle down in to the predictable debating club between stable poles of opinion that define the acceptable range of discourse there. That stage can last a long time, but it doesn't last forever. This doesn't work for everyone (which is probably why it still works at all), but, at least for technical discussion, mailing lists are where I have the bulk of my quality online interaction. I've found fewer good public lists for wider intellectual discussion, but they're out there, too. The difference is that they tend to range from somewhat to very topically silo'ed. Well, and they're email, so the cool kids don't want to play. (Again, I think that's partly why it works.)
bonestamp2 9y ago
My favorite part of this article is the hypocrisy. It's a huge rant about how stupid an unattractive people are if they buy into the new hot thing from Silicon Valley that doesn't do anything new; and then there it is, on line 2 of the page: "This is an automated feed of the blog posts at http://fredrikdeboer.com" http://fredrikdeboer.com". It seems like he forgot one line item in his list: 2012, Medium: At last, a way to post text on the internet!
- therealdrag0 9y ago
  Well in response to someone saying they worry about him he says, "Don’t. My life has never been better. Remember it’s a persona." So take that salt into consideration. Besides he never said every bit of tech is bad.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- tdb7893 9y ago
  My interpretation was that he didn't think that improving posting text to the Internet was inherently bad, just that the Silicon Valley hype around what are just improvements to an old model is strange. I think you can say the hype around a thing is ridiculous without saying that it is worthless
- niftich 9y ago
  It's not hypocrisy, it's offloading traffic to a company who hasn't quite figured out how to make money, but is willing to provide the author with analytics and hosting in exchange (... for what exactly???) In other words, it's milking the freebies.
- 8oblp 9y ago
  https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
fullshark 9y ago
I appreciate the righteous anger in this piece but I enjoyed this medium take down a bit more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400562
radarsat1 9y ago
Concerning RentBerry, it's the first I've heard of it and I know nothing about California bylaws, but isn't it illegal to just put the price of rent up in an unrestricted auction?
- haltingthoughts 9y ago
  I sure hope not.
  - radarsat1 9y ago
    Why? It is in many places, it's very common which is why I asked. Leads to frustration for property owners sure, but it helps balance the market, gives some power to tenants, to enable a decent cost of living. Ok I looked it up for SF: https://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol/ https://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol/ Indeed, there is a control of only a few percent per year. So how is RentBerry legal? "If the owner re-rents before the 5-year period is up, the residential property must be offered at the same rent that the former tenant was paying (plus annual allowable increases.)" https://www.sftu.org/are-you-paying-too-much-rent/ https://www.sftu.org/are-you-paying-too-much-rent/
yequalsx 9y ago
Swindling shouldn't be a crime? Doing a con shouldn't be a crime? Society is a mirage? It clearly isn't as you are living in one and benefitting from it. You may not want it to exist but clearly societies do exist. It's obvious that libertarianism doesn't work at scale. Especially in a world with so mmany people. Societies can be a failure too but there are plenty of examples of success. There no examples of libertarian success at scale. Once density reaches a critical mass libertarianism fails. Clearly you don't care or haven't thought about society's role in moderating exploitation and inequality in power.
- dang 9y ago
  > Clearly you don't care or haven't thought That's unduly personal. Users here aren't allowed to address each other that way, first because it's uncivil, and second because arguments get stronger when such bits are edited out. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    I don't think it was personal. I don't have a history of making personal attacks. It's clear that society in the form of government has a role in moderating exploitation. Someone who doesn't believe society should exist either doesn't care about moderating exploitation or hasn't thought about it. Do you know jstanley personally? Given sonne other comments that I've seen that have not been flagged I begin to suspect that perhaps some bias is at play with regard to your decision. I'm not suggesting that my comment should be restored. Overall it doesn't matter.
antisthenes 9y ago
> And yes. It probably is like libertarianism. I am a libertarian, and I don't take that as an insult. Yes, that explains the economic illiteracy. What you describe as individuals interacting with each other is really organizations interacting with individuals, or 2 entities interacting with each other with big power differentials in a market with low elasticity. If you ever decide to learn economics past 101, look into what those terms mean and what might happen in those markets.
- DiegoNolan 9y ago
  Yes, all these people know nothing about economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libertarian_economists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libertarian_economist...
- dang 9y ago
  Personal swipes are not welcome in comments here. We've warned you before, so if you want to continue commenting here, it's time to fix this. That includes avoiding snark tropes like "you do realize, right?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213226) We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
God bless you Fredrik deBoer!
andybak 9y ago
> and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair. Whilst that was amusing in a bitchy kind of way, it rather meant I stopped listening to anything said after that point. We're not dealing with a someone capable of great insight - or at least we're not dealing with someone who values insight over snark. EDIT - I read it to the end and I'm slightly more forgiving. I came to understand the intent a bit more. I initially came to it expecting something less literary/stand up comedy and took it in the wrong context.
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Some alternative writings (for all HN readers) with the same sentiment but in different tones than snark: Melancholic wistfulness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776 Kafka by way of Mike Judge https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-Now-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here#4716703 https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N...
  - ragazzina 9y ago
    >Kafka by way of Mike Judge https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N.. https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N.... This was written by someone who doesn't know how human interaction works. I have been in this situation twice. 2 years ago, I have lived in the same building as 20 other colleagues for 4 months. Now I am living in another city, but where most of the people I know and interact with in my free time are from work. Both of the time, me and my coworkers played football/basketball together, barbecued in the woods, went to the lake/beach, met for pizza-and-movie, partied almost every week and even planned trips out of the country together. We almost never talk about work, and surely not more than I talk about work with other friends.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  Yeah, his writing style reminds me of Ted Dziuba's past posts. More people should read Arrington's post which has a classic Teddy Roosevelt snippet: https://techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/the-man-in-the-arena/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/the-man-in-the-arena/ My memory may be hazy, but I vaguely remember him during saying something similar onstage during a past YC Startup School.
DonbunEf7 9y ago
Don't you wake up in the morning, feeling dead inside, and look in the mirror, wondering whether you ever were attractive in any way, whether you ever had something unique and interesting to contribute to society, whether you really are valued by your boss, whether your SO is attracted to you or to your bank account, whether the point of life is at all related to what you've done with your life so far? This article isn't for you. It's for people who answer my questions with "I have always been ugly, I have nothing of value to offer society, I don't understand why I'm still employed, she left two years ago and took my heart, and maybe nothing I've ever done in life is good."
- deleted 9y ago
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- mudil 9y ago
  You forgot the big guns: Google and Facebook, who literally exploit small publishers and individual content creators. They are killing journalism and content creation, and all for the ever escalating profit. (I run a med tech website that reports on medical technologies for doctors and med professionals. I am an MD. We are publishing every day since 2004. News, interviews and exclusive reports. We have a half a million page views a month from professional readership, and Google pays us pennies for Adsense. $60/day? WTF!)
  - Kalium 9y ago
    Once upon a time, an executive said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” It turns out that once you can measure very closely, it's often much more than half.
    - mudil 9y ago
      In the space of a decade the share of the UK advertising market going to UK regional and national newspapers has declined from nearly a half to little more than 10 per cent. Money which had been spent on journalists holding those in power to account, particularly at a local level, has been transferred to two US-owned digital platforms which exist purely to exploit content rather than create it.
lacampbell 9y ago
I stopped reading at "late capitalism".
- deleted 9y ago
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arjie 9y ago
I'm too late to save most of you (or myself), but for the rest: this is a contentless rant. Don't waste your time.
simplehuman 9y ago
2014, Medium: At last, a way to post blogs on the internet!
romeinaday 9y ago
These services are all designed to syphon away your money by making the amount seem so small you won't notice. I'm sure it all adds up though. Another method is obscuring the fact that there is a regular fee, and making the customer believe the initial payment is the only one - see Dog Renting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777218
peterwwillis 9y ago
> Our society is a hellish wasteland and I am dying inside. Settle down there, pampered white guy living in new york city.
nnfy 9y ago
The article is a swipe at evil silicon valley corporations who hide their products' lack of value behind fancy advertisements; but are consumers with freedom to choose not responsible for their choices?
- CPUstring 9y ago
  The morality of the consumer vs. the morality of the supplier an interesting problem. On one extreme, we have the drug dealer relationship. The supplier is obviously more morally duplicitous, and the consumer is often pitied (at least in liberal, anti-drug war circles). At the opposite side of the spectrum, you have suppliers making entirely ok or even ok things selling them to bad people. Are fertilizer providers to blame for consumers turning their products into bombs? Obviously not (actually, I'm not sure legally, but common sense says no). In the middle, you have a wide array of relationships. Is Coca-Cola to blame for the obesity epidemic? Are gun companies to blame for suicides or mass shootings? Is Juicero to blame for customers being dumb shits? I think when you answer different examples, you get a pattern: when a supplier is selling a negative/zero value product but induces demand by playing off human weakness, then they're doing something wrong. Juicero is playing off human weakness (the wealthy tech nerds' desire to be "hip" and "fit") just like a a fashion company plays off human weakness (by creating unrealistic representations that it goads its customers into trying to reach).
  - nnfy 9y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as to call desire to fit in or display wealth/success a weakness, considering it is a sexual strategy which is basic human nature and continues to be generally successful today. In this sense juicero arguably provides a service, although an obviously subpar one given alternatives. I'm not sure I follow your fashion industry example. Assuming youre referring to weight, the so called unrealistic representations manufactured by the fashion industry do not cause customers to spend extra money on clothing, since customers simply won't fit into unreasonable sizes. And here, similarly, fashion companies provide a service of status signalling. In any case, these are both examples of consumers failing to personally choose not to follow the herd. Additionally, corporations do not set standards in a vacuum, consumers create demand and vote with their wallets.
theprop 9y ago
While rising rents in SF/Bay Area are due to more & richer tech people, overall costs are declining thanks to tech companies. The cost and reliability of taxis is much much better with Uber than it was previously. The cost of many goods that one has access to is lower via Amazon for so many people. A lot of local businesses are probably more profitable working with Google than they were previously with the Yellow Pages. Yes, there will be spectacular failures, but right now 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the U.S. did not exist ~21 years ago (Google, Facebook, Amazon), and 1 of the 5 was a tech company which many had written off (Apple). It's easy to laugh at the failures, but the real entrepreneurs just don't care. I don't think Larry Page or Jeff Bezos minds if you want to laugh at them over Google Knol or the Amazon Fire phone. For their 100 failures, their one big win was with no doubt worth it e.g. AWS or Android.
- zepto 9y ago
  Android makes almost no profit for google and isn't a 'win'. All it does is protect the search monopoly from competition from Microsoft and Apple.
deleted 9y ago
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enraged_camel 9y ago
The irony is that the overwhelming majority of marketers who come up with those nonsense "Doer" posters and the like have never had to stay up all night and "eat coffee" in order to meet deadlines.
- jaggederest 9y ago
  I'm reasonably certain that advertising has a pretty big reputation as a stress-driven hellscape, at least in the classic Madison avenue format. Lots of deadlines and all-nighters
johan_larson 9y ago
Why am I hearing so much about "late capitalism" suddenly? I'm sure I'd never heard the term five years ago. Now it's in all sorts of articles.
- droopyEyelids 9y ago
  The idea is that we're entering the late stage capitalism phase of our civilization. Like, we went though antiquity and modernity and post modernity. There was a colonial period and a reconstruction. Pre and post ww2. They're all hard to define and poorly scoped, but there is something to each of the ideas, or people wouldn't talk about them. Anything I could say to define 'late capitalism' would detract from the point though, because any tech person can find a million nits to pick on any point made about even relatively precise subjects, and late capitalism refers to trends in something as diverse as global society. Just try and think for yourself, "If we are living through such a thing as late era capitalism, what characteristics of our world are relevant to that label?"
ashark 9y ago
> Are you the kind of person who is so worn down by the numbing drudgery of late capitalism that you can’t summon the energy to drag a 2 ounce toothbrush across your gums for 90 seconds a day? Well, the electric toothbrush has been a thing for a long time. OK. OK. Not defending other practices in the article, but as someone who long thought electric toothbrushes were a silly gimmick but finally got (a fairly cheap) one a couple months back: they are. not. a. gimmick. Oh man. Life changing. First time I used it it felt like I'd had a professional cleaning. No amount of brushing with an ordinary one had ever done that. I could never go back. Even when I'm lazy and only do half the cycle it gets my teeth much cleaner than a manual brush could. The difference is dramatic and they're not really that expensive as long as you don't go for a bunch of stupid features.
- _Adam 9y ago
  Which model did you get?
  - Domenic_S 9y ago
    Sonicare is the canonical choice!
  - ashark 9y ago
    Some oral b Braun. One without the Bluetooth connectivity(!!!) that even mid-range models seem to have now. I think it's just whatever sweethome recommended at the time. Might just be the 1000. Only feature it has is that it vibrates when you should switch quarters and vibrates differently when you should stop, in case you can't count. [edit] yeah, confirmed, it's the "pro 1000"
- drvdevd 9y ago
  Yeah brushing form is important, and for some like myself, difficult to get right consistently. I really need an electric toothbrush.
devrandomguy 9y ago
For those who are being pushed off their land by the rent-seekers, I offer a ray of light to brighten your day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9WWzbzevTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9WWzbzevTA The most desirable, and most physically constrained cities, are mostly coastal. Could something like this work in a place like Vancouver, Seattle, or SF? There is always the threat of bureaucracy or regulations getting in the way, but the incredible pressure of the housing crisis might be enough to encourage open-mindedness on the part of the relevant local leaders. For the endangered artist community, I could see this working better than it does for someone who works in a specific building. Certainly not a small undertaking, though. For those who don't like YT links, this is a short professional documentary/interview about a couple who built their home from scratch, on the ocean. Most materials are salvaged, and everything was built by hand. It is beautiful. For a Canadian bureaucrat, the whole thing probably doesn't even compute.
thetruthseeker1 9y ago
I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I do want to point out, that if you lived in another country unlike USA, it would be hard to even come up with a product like the quip or the juicer (however useless you may think it is). You would have funding barriers, you may find it hard to find people who have the engineering skill set to come up with a product that works the way it does etc, or worse you may not even have a local market for your product initially.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  Oh no, what a pity. It's harder to make pointless, bullshit companies that add literally nothing and instead contribute to degrading conditions and pay. I have zero sympathy for someone not being able to spin up a useless, zero-effort company. Put some effort in and come up with something worthwhile that contributes instead.
  - thetruthseeker1 9y ago
    If people had a choice to live in a country where it is hard to start "meaningful" companies vs living in a country where it is so easy to start companies that you can even start stupid companies, I would think most people here will choose #2. Now regarding degrading conditions and pay, that was not what I was commenting about.... Also, one thing to remember is small 'stupid' companies (like juicer) will be "taken care off" by free market economics. Over a period of years, if it does well, then it is fair game. Else it might go bust. It is unlikely that is not the outcome here.
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      > Also, one thing to remember is small 'stupid' companies (like juicer) will be "taken care off" by free market economics. If I think there's one thing we've learnt from the last several years, it's that the magical free market, doesn't do even half the things it's supposed to do, and really isn't a good solution.

473 points by dccoolgai 9y ago

jaboutboul 9y ago

This is the most hilarious (and sadly true) thing I've read in the last few months.

CoolGuySteve 9y ago
> "add a touch screen manufactured by Chinese tweens, call it “Smart,” and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair." As someone who spends hours pondering the same NYC subway ads, this captures what I'm seeing better than I could ever put it.

thesmallestcat 9y ago

I'd like to add that the MTA allows the most manipulative, screaming-at-you ads (depicted in this post). It's the least pleasant part of using the subway in my opinion.

iamatworknow 9y ago
I would say my least favorite part is seeing that empty car and not realizing the reason why it's empty is because of the smell inside until the train's already left the stop.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Yeah, there's way worse things that can happen in the subway than staring at a picture with text.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Sure, but that can happen in any system. The visually loud ads are unique to the MTA.
JDiculous 9y ago
The least pleasant part of the NYC subway is how over-congested, chronically delayed, and unreliable it is. But yes, the ads are annoying too.

draw_down 9y ago

Pretty good! That ad about "doers" is particularly ghoulish. And just generally I feel like I see the ideology of overworking as right and good all the time now. Things are not great.

MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
Yea, I loathe those fiverr ads. When I end up in a subway car filled with them it really sours my mood. I used to have no feelings about fiverr but now I absolutely would never use it.

dustingetz 9y ago

Free trade is voluntary, we choose to participate in trade because it benefits both parties. I'm interested in seeing arguments that attack SV/society but start from this principle?

doytch 9y ago
Are you saying that because both parties benefit then neither party can be to blame? Confirming, not sure based on your wording. If so, that assumes that both parties are going into the trade negotiations on equal footing. I don't think I'm the only one who would argue that's not the case in a great many rentseeker:rentee or owner:employee relationships. Even discarding any social or economic pressures in the current climate, the power of the rentseeker and owner allows them to shape the environment into one that benefits them more (see: lobbying and politics in the USA).
athenot 9y ago
When it comes to free-trade it doesn't need to benefit both parties, it just needs to benefit the party with the most leverage. The other side will then have to adapt.
djohnston 9y ago
Are you suggesting that, if we feel we are not benefiting from the current rent market, we can simply stop participating?
- jessaustin 9y ago
  In Hawaii lots of people live on the beach, and don't get hassled for it. (Maybe they do get hassled, but anyway it isn't enough to end the practice...) There probably should be some sort of freely available liminal space in other states to serve the same purpose. Actually it seems like some people live under bridges?
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    300 million people can't do this. By and large, save for very few people, we all have to participate in the housing market. There are also long term, detrimental effects of having a large percentage of the population living on beaches or other designated areas.

_jal 9y ago

My next startup will be RentColosseum. Screw this bidding with money thing, renting an apartment really should be survival of the fittest. We won't need a cut of the winner's rent (but can probably take it anyway), because we'll televise it and profit on the ads. Did I miss anything? Opaque, exploitive finance on proprietary weapons for contestants, maybe?

kps 9y ago
Auctioning the loser's organs.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Pivot idea: pay for admittance to a unit or building, and if you can throw the existing tenants out the window, the place is yours. Then you pay the landlord each month for the right to keep your door locked. If a prospective tenant can outbid your month's rent, man the battle stations.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  Defenistration as a service comes next obviously.
  - dreamcompiler 9y ago
    DAAS is the business model of Apple and Redhat.
    - zanecodes 9y ago
      But they don't toss things out of windows, they toss Windows out of things
- Hortinstein 9y ago
  I can't wait until I hear about a Young Adult novel with this as a primary plot device. I will know where the idea came from.

jstanley 9y ago

Rents aren't high because fat cats are charging more money. Rents are high because of supply and demand. That's literally all there is to it. Someone is going to get the house and someone isn't, and the one who gets it will be the one offering more money. The only thing the fat cats change is what proportion of the money goes to which people. The amount of money comes from supply and demand.

jondubois 9y ago
Also, this is mostly true for rent in big cities; big corporations are essentially forcing people to move to big cities where the quality of life is lower by promising them a better future. This increases house prices and makes everyone miserable (except wealthy shareholders and landlords).
- euyyn 9y ago
  > forcing people [...] by promising them a better future Something doesn't add up in your analysis.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Forcing people to do things doesn't necessarily entail holding them at gunpoint. You can make anyone do anything you want if you can bend their perception of reality - They are completely ignorant and powerless. If you're holding someone at gunpoint, at least they have the power to beg for mercy.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      So your opinion is that big corporations are forcing people to move to big cities by manipulating their perception of reality? Like with ads that suburban or rural life is crap, or what?
  - throwanem 9y ago
    Maybe, but if not, it isn't evident in what you quote of GP. I'll give you a million dollars tomorrow - I promise. See what I mean?

jondubois 9y ago

We need to push the reset button on Capitalism. The government of each country should repossess all the assets and money within that country and redistribute them to everyone within that country based purely on each person's age (so older people would get more and it won't affect their ability to retire).

demonshalo 9y ago
in my book, people like you are very dangerous. I fear people of your ideals far more than I fear terrorism or anything of that sort. Let that sink in for a while!
- bittercynic 9y ago
  The GP's comment reads like an illustration of an extreme position that may be used to shine light on another extreme position. It may not be an accurate reflection of the person's ideals.
- jondubois 9y ago
  I think it would shake things up and it would be fun for everyone. Capitalism as it is today is like a Monopoly game where all the properties have already been bought up and new players are forced to 'play' anyway (purely for the gratification of those who are already winning); it hasn't been fun for a very long time. We need to start a fresh game to make things interesting. I think that things would be better if everyone saw life as a game rather than a race to the finish line.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
    > I think that things would be better if everyone saw life as a game rather than a race to the finish line. Does it matter what history thinks?
deleted 9y ago
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nommm-nommm 9y ago

This post may only be tangentially related to TFA but these were my thoughts that came to my mind when reading this article and I'd like to get some alternative perspective as someone who "doesn't get it." Dollar Shave Club, apparently, delivers Dorco razor blades once a month. The exact same ones you can buy straight from Dorco for a fraction of the price, or if you prefer, Amazon. Razor blades are so small that several months worth can easily fit in even a dorm room. The CEO apparently believes that he's adding value from the subscription model. >[Dollar Shave CEO Michael] Dubin said his service offers greater "convenience." "Are there similar razors out there? Sure. But our goal is to create value." I pointed out that I can get the Dorco razors delivered conveniently to my front door, too. "Not once a month," he said... Bottom line, if people want to buy in bulk, there's a bazillion other places on the web to do that. Dollar Shave Club offers value beyond just the price of blades & convenience.(1) What does HN think about this? Would you pay a markup for the "convenience" of a subscription? Is this a real thing people find value in? (Personally I find 'create value' to be a suspect phrase in this context. I also, personally, find subscriptions to be inconvenient 99% of the time) (1) http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-the-same-high-quality-razors-for-a-third-of-the-price http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-th...

dsacco 9y ago
Eh, I don't think Dollar Shave Club fits in with the article's examples. The value created is that many people want to spend more money and less of their time with consistent results. The company doesn't try to ratchet up margin with unnecessary tech, it just satisfies a legitimate customer demand. That might be a customer demand you don't identify with, or which you believe shouldn't exist; it's still a legitimate demand. The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.
- throwawaycopy 9y ago
  Just like the "legitimate demand" for heroin or cigarettes! While we're at it can we get rid of the FDA so we can go back to a world filled with the "legitimate demand" for laudnum sold as a miracle cure for consumption, hysterics and gout? Neoliberalism, by mixing ethical relativism with social Darwinism, allows for some rent seeking asshat to sleep well at night because they authorised a marketing campaign featuring a black woman. Good job, Team Progress! All we need are just a few more empty words and a few more empty products... We're almost there!

altcognito 9y ago

tl;dr; marketing adds a glossy veneer so people will overspend on useless crap, companies will screw you if it means margins are greater. So much of what society produces is meaningless nonsense. SV doesn't have that world cornered by any means. counterpoint: Capitalism sucks, but it seems to work better than most things we've tried thus far.

golergka 9y ago

So, let me get it right: this attack focuses on two vanity products that people buy from their free will to spend money on bullshit and two 'marketplaces' that nobody is forcing you to use? The author makes a boring mistake of taking people for irresponsible, stupid children that should be protected from making bad choices. Thanks, no. I've bought a lot of bullshit products in my lifetime, paid for a lot of bullshit subscriptions, and I'm happy to have the freedom to have made all this stupid mistakes, and a lot more too, that taken not just my money.

iamatworknow 9y ago
I don't think that's what the author is saying. If anything, I think the point is that the "revolutionary" nature of most hip companies (not necessarily from SV) is really not revolutionary at all. Cutting edge progress in tech doesn't happen nearly as much as the general public perceives, but they believe it is because the slick marketing, subscription service for mundane products, adding an LCD touch screen to an existing product feels like technological progress, but really isn't. The few real leaps in technology that actually are unique and applicable outside of selling some product or service aren't visible to the end user. When Netflix caught on everyone thought "wow, technology!" Only some of us in the tech world realize that the idea of streaming movies and TV to your house isn't the amazing breakthrough they made -- it's the infrastructure behind making it work, and the layperson doesn't give a shit about that.

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

Back in the 90s there were real utopian dreams that the Internet could free us and form a world "more humane and fair than the world your governments made before" (Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, 1996). Instead, over the past 20 years, Silicon Valley went from being a land of dreams to an accelerator of the conditions that make middle class life so precarious in the developed world. Nobody in the valley seems to care. Many, including those on this thread, seem to be ignorant of the fact that over the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has transformed, in people's minds, from a place that makes the future better to a place that makes the future worse, yet slightly more entertaining.

lovich 9y ago
I am aware, but even if silicon valley was how it used to be described it was never an option. Maybe its because I am younger, but in my age group everyone went to college and got massive student loans because that's what every adult in your life told you to do. How were you supposed to travel to the valley and work on something that didn't make you a lot of money when you had large, non dis chargeable loans tied to you for decades? The only people who had that option were rich kids, or the few who took the "bad" choice of not going to college and ended up lucking out. Seeing people reminisce about how silicon valley used to be always reminds me of older people complaining that the youth are no longer treating college as a place to learn. Well no shit. We are, on average, much poorer than we used to be and everyone has to eat. All those old ideals are nice, but they matter much less when you end up having to work yourself to death or decide between medicine or making rent that month

bjornlouser 9y ago

"the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horseshit... An industry that never stops lauding itself for its creativity and innovation has built its own success mythology by endlessly repackaging the same banal functions that have existed for about as long as the Web" Pretty funny coming from an academic who would gladly make a living pushing standardized testing at the undergraduate level.

dccoolgai 9y ago
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque
iamatworknow 9y ago
In what world do you think academics like standardized testing? Every teacher or professor I've ever met loathes the idea of having to "teach to the test". They didn't set the standards, but they're forced to follow them.
- bjornlouser 9y ago
  https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/12843-standardized-assessments-of-college-learning/Assessment-White-Paper.72b9bbb2cf0447b4aacaabe6e6ea1824.pdf https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/12843-standardized...
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    My bad. I thought you were making a more general argument about academics. In this case, you're right.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    You should have put that in your original post. I made the same mistake as my sibling and thought you were just swiping at academics in general.
Apocryphon 9y ago
Sounds like a non sequitur, though. Standardized testing in academia isn't necessarily a sign of lack of creativity or innovation.

dsacco 9y ago

I'm normally not critical of mod behavior, so I don't make this point lightly: 1. The title was changed from something admittedly sensationalist, to something that is clearly antithetical to the point of the original title. "Trends in tech" completely lacks the tone of the original title. If you don't want to use a title with "horseshit" in it, fine, but change it to something that matches the intention of the author at least. "Trends in tech" could be anything from a VC thinkpiece, to technical language choices in startups, to what the author actually wrote. How do I know if it's worth my time or aligns with my interests if I'm a passing reader? This title manages to completely neutralize the author's point by robbing it of any interesting lead-in. If a mod did this, it's what I would call disingenuous curation of front page content. It's insidious because while clickbait titles get more attention than they should, and unfairly so, uninteresting titles receive proportionally less attention than they should. 2. This post has 92 points in less than an hour and is just barely on the front page (as of this writing). It will probably slip off imminently. The top post has less than 80 points and is over an hour old. Why? I understand there are algorithm nuances, but that utterly lacks transparency. I make these points because it raises an interesting juxtaposition between what the community wants and what is beneficial to Y Combinator. Some of the article could be interpreted as attacking Y Combinator's business model which provides a potential incentive for what I noted above. But that does not make it illegitimate given that it satisfies "intellectual curiosity" according to HN guidelines and is very well-upvoted. It appears suspicious to me that it is not higher up, and this is from someone who doesn't normally engage in this sort of criticism.

brad0 9y ago
Thanks for this. You've articulated how I've felt subconsciously about HN for a while now. HN used to be a place where I could be stimulated intellectually. Today it no longer seems to give me that. Where can I go now to get better content? Or should I give up on aggregation altogether?
- _jal 9y ago
  Every site seems to have a life cycle. I find that I prefer the early stages, before things settle down in to the predictable debating club between stable poles of opinion that define the acceptable range of discourse there. That stage can last a long time, but it doesn't last forever. This doesn't work for everyone (which is probably why it still works at all), but, at least for technical discussion, mailing lists are where I have the bulk of my quality online interaction. I've found fewer good public lists for wider intellectual discussion, but they're out there, too. The difference is that they tend to range from somewhat to very topically silo'ed. Well, and they're email, so the cool kids don't want to play. (Again, I think that's partly why it works.)

bonestamp2 9y ago

My favorite part of this article is the hypocrisy. It's a huge rant about how stupid an unattractive people are if they buy into the new hot thing from Silicon Valley that doesn't do anything new; and then there it is, on line 2 of the page: "This is an automated feed of the blog posts at http://fredrikdeboer.com" http://fredrikdeboer.com". It seems like he forgot one line item in his list: 2012, Medium: At last, a way to post text on the internet!

therealdrag0 9y ago
Well in response to someone saying they worry about him he says, "Don’t. My life has never been better. Remember it’s a persona." So take that salt into consideration. Besides he never said every bit of tech is bad.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tdb7893 9y ago
My interpretation was that he didn't think that improving posting text to the Internet was inherently bad, just that the Silicon Valley hype around what are just improvements to an old model is strange. I think you can say the hype around a thing is ridiculous without saying that it is worthless
niftich 9y ago
It's not hypocrisy, it's offloading traffic to a company who hasn't quite figured out how to make money, but is willing to provide the author with analytics and hosting in exchange (... for what exactly???) In other words, it's milking the freebies.
8oblp 9y ago
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

fullshark 9y ago

I appreciate the righteous anger in this piece but I enjoyed this medium take down a bit more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400562

radarsat1 9y ago

Concerning RentBerry, it's the first I've heard of it and I know nothing about California bylaws, but isn't it illegal to just put the price of rent up in an unrestricted auction?

haltingthoughts 9y ago
I sure hope not.
- radarsat1 9y ago
  Why? It is in many places, it's very common which is why I asked. Leads to frustration for property owners sure, but it helps balance the market, gives some power to tenants, to enable a decent cost of living. Ok I looked it up for SF: https://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol/ https://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol/ Indeed, there is a control of only a few percent per year. So how is RentBerry legal? "If the owner re-rents before the 5-year period is up, the residential property must be offered at the same rent that the former tenant was paying (plus annual allowable increases.)" https://www.sftu.org/are-you-paying-too-much-rent/ https://www.sftu.org/are-you-paying-too-much-rent/

yequalsx 9y ago

Swindling shouldn't be a crime? Doing a con shouldn't be a crime? Society is a mirage? It clearly isn't as you are living in one and benefitting from it. You may not want it to exist but clearly societies do exist. It's obvious that libertarianism doesn't work at scale. Especially in a world with so mmany people. Societies can be a failure too but there are plenty of examples of success. There no examples of libertarian success at scale. Once density reaches a critical mass libertarianism fails. Clearly you don't care or haven't thought about society's role in moderating exploitation and inequality in power.

dang 9y ago
> Clearly you don't care or haven't thought That's unduly personal. Users here aren't allowed to address each other that way, first because it's uncivil, and second because arguments get stronger when such bits are edited out. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.
- yequalsx 9y ago
  I don't think it was personal. I don't have a history of making personal attacks. It's clear that society in the form of government has a role in moderating exploitation. Someone who doesn't believe society should exist either doesn't care about moderating exploitation or hasn't thought about it. Do you know jstanley personally? Given sonne other comments that I've seen that have not been flagged I begin to suspect that perhaps some bias is at play with regard to your decision. I'm not suggesting that my comment should be restored. Overall it doesn't matter.

antisthenes 9y ago

> And yes. It probably is like libertarianism. I am a libertarian, and I don't take that as an insult. Yes, that explains the economic illiteracy. What you describe as individuals interacting with each other is really organizations interacting with individuals, or 2 entities interacting with each other with big power differentials in a market with low elasticity. If you ever decide to learn economics past 101, look into what those terms mean and what might happen in those markets.

DiegoNolan 9y ago
Yes, all these people know nothing about economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libertarian_economists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libertarian_economist...
dang 9y ago
Personal swipes are not welcome in comments here. We've warned you before, so if you want to continue commenting here, it's time to fix this. That includes avoiding snark tropes like "you do realize, right?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213226) We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

God bless you Fredrik deBoer!

andybak 9y ago

> and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair. Whilst that was amusing in a bitchy kind of way, it rather meant I stopped listening to anything said after that point. We're not dealing with a someone capable of great insight - or at least we're not dealing with someone who values insight over snark. EDIT - I read it to the end and I'm slightly more forgiving. I came to understand the intent a bit more. I initially came to it expecting something less literary/stand up comedy and took it in the wrong context.

Apocryphon 9y ago
Some alternative writings (for all HN readers) with the same sentiment but in different tones than snark: Melancholic wistfulness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776 Kafka by way of Mike Judge https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-Now-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here#4716703 https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N...
- ragazzina 9y ago
  >Kafka by way of Mike Judge https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N.. https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N.... This was written by someone who doesn't know how human interaction works. I have been in this situation twice. 2 years ago, I have lived in the same building as 20 other colleagues for 4 months. Now I am living in another city, but where most of the people I know and interact with in my free time are from work. Both of the time, me and my coworkers played football/basketball together, barbecued in the woods, went to the lake/beach, met for pizza-and-movie, partied almost every week and even planned trips out of the country together. We almost never talk about work, and surely not more than I talk about work with other friends.
chaostheory 9y ago
Yeah, his writing style reminds me of Ted Dziuba's past posts. More people should read Arrington's post which has a classic Teddy Roosevelt snippet: https://techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/the-man-in-the-arena/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/the-man-in-the-arena/ My memory may be hazy, but I vaguely remember him during saying something similar onstage during a past YC Startup School.

DonbunEf7 9y ago

Don't you wake up in the morning, feeling dead inside, and look in the mirror, wondering whether you ever were attractive in any way, whether you ever had something unique and interesting to contribute to society, whether you really are valued by your boss, whether your SO is attracted to you or to your bank account, whether the point of life is at all related to what you've done with your life so far? This article isn't for you. It's for people who answer my questions with "I have always been ugly, I have nothing of value to offer society, I don't understand why I'm still employed, she left two years ago and took my heart, and maybe nothing I've ever done in life is good."

deleted 9y ago
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mudil 9y ago
You forgot the big guns: Google and Facebook, who literally exploit small publishers and individual content creators. They are killing journalism and content creation, and all for the ever escalating profit. (I run a med tech website that reports on medical technologies for doctors and med professionals. I am an MD. We are publishing every day since 2004. News, interviews and exclusive reports. We have a half a million page views a month from professional readership, and Google pays us pennies for Adsense. $60/day? WTF!)
- Kalium 9y ago
  Once upon a time, an executive said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” It turns out that once you can measure very closely, it's often much more than half.
  - mudil 9y ago
    In the space of a decade the share of the UK advertising market going to UK regional and national newspapers has declined from nearly a half to little more than 10 per cent. Money which had been spent on journalists holding those in power to account, particularly at a local level, has been transferred to two US-owned digital platforms which exist purely to exploit content rather than create it.

lacampbell 9y ago

I stopped reading at "late capitalism".

deleted 9y ago
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arjie 9y ago

I'm too late to save most of you (or myself), but for the rest: this is a contentless rant. Don't waste your time.

simplehuman 9y ago

2014, Medium: At last, a way to post blogs on the internet!

romeinaday 9y ago

These services are all designed to syphon away your money by making the amount seem so small you won't notice. I'm sure it all adds up though. Another method is obscuring the fact that there is a regular fee, and making the customer believe the initial payment is the only one - see Dog Renting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13777218

peterwwillis 9y ago

> Our society is a hellish wasteland and I am dying inside. Settle down there, pampered white guy living in new york city.

nnfy 9y ago

The article is a swipe at evil silicon valley corporations who hide their products' lack of value behind fancy advertisements; but are consumers with freedom to choose not responsible for their choices?

CPUstring 9y ago
The morality of the consumer vs. the morality of the supplier an interesting problem. On one extreme, we have the drug dealer relationship. The supplier is obviously more morally duplicitous, and the consumer is often pitied (at least in liberal, anti-drug war circles). At the opposite side of the spectrum, you have suppliers making entirely ok or even ok things selling them to bad people. Are fertilizer providers to blame for consumers turning their products into bombs? Obviously not (actually, I'm not sure legally, but common sense says no). In the middle, you have a wide array of relationships. Is Coca-Cola to blame for the obesity epidemic? Are gun companies to blame for suicides or mass shootings? Is Juicero to blame for customers being dumb shits? I think when you answer different examples, you get a pattern: when a supplier is selling a negative/zero value product but induces demand by playing off human weakness, then they're doing something wrong. Juicero is playing off human weakness (the wealthy tech nerds' desire to be "hip" and "fit") just like a a fashion company plays off human weakness (by creating unrealistic representations that it goads its customers into trying to reach).
- nnfy 9y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to call desire to fit in or display wealth/success a weakness, considering it is a sexual strategy which is basic human nature and continues to be generally successful today. In this sense juicero arguably provides a service, although an obviously subpar one given alternatives. I'm not sure I follow your fashion industry example. Assuming youre referring to weight, the so called unrealistic representations manufactured by the fashion industry do not cause customers to spend extra money on clothing, since customers simply won't fit into unreasonable sizes. And here, similarly, fashion companies provide a service of status signalling. In any case, these are both examples of consumers failing to personally choose not to follow the herd. Additionally, corporations do not set standards in a vacuum, consumers create demand and vote with their wallets.

theprop 9y ago

While rising rents in SF/Bay Area are due to more & richer tech people, overall costs are declining thanks to tech companies. The cost and reliability of taxis is much much better with Uber than it was previously. The cost of many goods that one has access to is lower via Amazon for so many people. A lot of local businesses are probably more profitable working with Google than they were previously with the Yellow Pages. Yes, there will be spectacular failures, but right now 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the U.S. did not exist ~21 years ago (Google, Facebook, Amazon), and 1 of the 5 was a tech company which many had written off (Apple). It's easy to laugh at the failures, but the real entrepreneurs just don't care. I don't think Larry Page or Jeff Bezos minds if you want to laugh at them over Google Knol or the Amazon Fire phone. For their 100 failures, their one big win was with no doubt worth it e.g. AWS or Android.

zepto 9y ago
Android makes almost no profit for google and isn't a 'win'. All it does is protect the search monopoly from competition from Microsoft and Apple.

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enraged_camel 9y ago

The irony is that the overwhelming majority of marketers who come up with those nonsense "Doer" posters and the like have never had to stay up all night and "eat coffee" in order to meet deadlines.

jaggederest 9y ago
I'm reasonably certain that advertising has a pretty big reputation as a stress-driven hellscape, at least in the classic Madison avenue format. Lots of deadlines and all-nighters

johan_larson 9y ago

Why am I hearing so much about "late capitalism" suddenly? I'm sure I'd never heard the term five years ago. Now it's in all sorts of articles.

droopyEyelids 9y ago
The idea is that we're entering the late stage capitalism phase of our civilization. Like, we went though antiquity and modernity and post modernity. There was a colonial period and a reconstruction. Pre and post ww2. They're all hard to define and poorly scoped, but there is something to each of the ideas, or people wouldn't talk about them. Anything I could say to define 'late capitalism' would detract from the point though, because any tech person can find a million nits to pick on any point made about even relatively precise subjects, and late capitalism refers to trends in something as diverse as global society. Just try and think for yourself, "If we are living through such a thing as late era capitalism, what characteristics of our world are relevant to that label?"

ashark 9y ago

> Are you the kind of person who is so worn down by the numbing drudgery of late capitalism that you can’t summon the energy to drag a 2 ounce toothbrush across your gums for 90 seconds a day? Well, the electric toothbrush has been a thing for a long time. OK. OK. Not defending other practices in the article, but as someone who long thought electric toothbrushes were a silly gimmick but finally got (a fairly cheap) one a couple months back: they are. not. a. gimmick. Oh man. Life changing. First time I used it it felt like I'd had a professional cleaning. No amount of brushing with an ordinary one had ever done that. I could never go back. Even when I'm lazy and only do half the cycle it gets my teeth much cleaner than a manual brush could. The difference is dramatic and they're not really that expensive as long as you don't go for a bunch of stupid features.

_Adam 9y ago
Which model did you get?
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  Sonicare is the canonical choice!
- ashark 9y ago
  Some oral b Braun. One without the Bluetooth connectivity(!!!) that even mid-range models seem to have now. I think it's just whatever sweethome recommended at the time. Might just be the 1000. Only feature it has is that it vibrates when you should switch quarters and vibrates differently when you should stop, in case you can't count. [edit] yeah, confirmed, it's the "pro 1000"
drvdevd 9y ago
Yeah brushing form is important, and for some like myself, difficult to get right consistently. I really need an electric toothbrush.

devrandomguy 9y ago

For those who are being pushed off their land by the rent-seekers, I offer a ray of light to brighten your day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9WWzbzevTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9WWzbzevTA The most desirable, and most physically constrained cities, are mostly coastal. Could something like this work in a place like Vancouver, Seattle, or SF? There is always the threat of bureaucracy or regulations getting in the way, but the incredible pressure of the housing crisis might be enough to encourage open-mindedness on the part of the relevant local leaders. For the endangered artist community, I could see this working better than it does for someone who works in a specific building. Certainly not a small undertaking, though. For those who don't like YT links, this is a short professional documentary/interview about a couple who built their home from scratch, on the ocean. Most materials are salvaged, and everything was built by hand. It is beautiful. For a Canadian bureaucrat, the whole thing probably doesn't even compute.

thetruthseeker1 9y ago

I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I do want to point out, that if you lived in another country unlike USA, it would be hard to even come up with a product like the quip or the juicer (however useless you may think it is). You would have funding barriers, you may find it hard to find people who have the engineering skill set to come up with a product that works the way it does etc, or worse you may not even have a local market for your product initially.

FridgeSeal 9y ago
Oh no, what a pity. It's harder to make pointless, bullshit companies that add literally nothing and instead contribute to degrading conditions and pay. I have zero sympathy for someone not being able to spin up a useless, zero-effort company. Put some effort in and come up with something worthwhile that contributes instead.
- thetruthseeker1 9y ago
  If people had a choice to live in a country where it is hard to start "meaningful" companies vs living in a country where it is so easy to start companies that you can even start stupid companies, I would think most people here will choose #2. Now regarding degrading conditions and pay, that was not what I was commenting about.... Also, one thing to remember is small 'stupid' companies (like juicer) will be "taken care off" by free market economics. Over a period of years, if it does well, then it is fair game. Else it might go bust. It is unlikely that is not the outcome here.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    > Also, one thing to remember is small 'stupid' companies (like juicer) will be "taken care off" by free market economics. If I think there's one thing we've learnt from the last several years, it's that the magical free market, doesn't do even half the things it's supposed to do, and really isn't a good solution.