4 ms·

Why is anyone listening to Tim O'Reilly?

48 points by williamsmj 9y ago

nerpderp83 9y ago
God that was good. The thickness of the bubble is exponential in the amount of money one has.
gumby 9y ago
This essay made some excellent points yet structurally undermined its work by being unfocused. E.g. It used O'Reilly's own metaphors as jumping off points to make deeper observations. Yet on water the reviewer rambles instead of making the point. And on O'Reilly's poor Alderaan metaphor -- well that's just a stupid metaphor not worth the discussion. On the other hand, some of the excellent points: - The gold rush was in many ways a disaster that we still are paying for, and reflects a "strip mining" mentality that has been repeated, such as: highly polluted land on the Peninsula thanks to chip production (you can't drink the groundwater in any of the industrially-zoned land in the city of Santa Clara, for example); the destructive style of farm production in the Central Valley (brought from Oklahoma by people who had destroyed their previous environment with the same system), and now strip-mining of middle class economies. - The fact that the narrative arc of the "high tech revolution" has followed the self-narrative arc of US baby boomers - The decades long privatization of the "common weal" has made it brittle, failed to serve the people it was originally designed for, and has broken up the social sense of common purpose. I like Tim, have known him since he started with the Nutshell books, and think this essay is a bit of a hatchet job. But there's a lot of meat hidden in there too.
rhapsodic 9y ago
Tim's core business, tech book publishing, has certainly been disrupted by technology. Glad to see he's not getting all Luddite over it.
stcredzero 9y ago
These increasingly destructive techniques, coupled with the San Francisco peninsula’s population exploding from roughly 1,000 people in 1848 to over 36,000 in 1852, irrevocably changed the landscape of California, pulling up old growth forests, pushing aside rivers, and literally washing away into the Pacific Ocean some of the richest arable land on the North American continent. The Gold Rush turned huge swathes of California into “sacrifice zones” — geographic areas that have been permanently damaged or poisoned by industry. We're still dealing with the environmental impact from those days. Precisely the places one is likely to find gold, one is likely to find other heavy metals like mercury. Those places are also the part of California where SF gets its water from. Fortunately, metallic mercury is fairly nonreactive. Much of that washed-away soil is still making its way down into reservoirs. There are actually plans to safely mine that sediment for the mercury and gold.

48 points by williamsmj 9y ago

God that was good. The thickness of the bubble is exponential in the amount of money one has.

This essay made some excellent points yet structurally undermined its work by being unfocused. E.g. It used O'Reilly's own metaphors as jumping off points to make deeper observations. Yet on water the reviewer rambles instead of making the point. And on O'Reilly's poor Alderaan metaphor -- well that's just a stupid metaphor not worth the discussion. On the other hand, some of the excellent points: - The gold rush was in many ways a disaster that we still are paying for, and reflects a "strip mining" mentality that has been repeated, such as: highly polluted land on the Peninsula thanks to chip production (you can't drink the groundwater in any of the industrially-zoned land in the city of Santa Clara, for example); the destructive style of farm production in the Central Valley (brought from Oklahoma by people who had destroyed their previous environment with the same system), and now strip-mining of middle class economies. - The fact that the narrative arc of the "high tech revolution" has followed the self-narrative arc of US baby boomers - The decades long privatization of the "common weal" has made it brittle, failed to serve the people it was originally designed for, and has broken up the social sense of common purpose. I like Tim, have known him since he started with the Nutshell books, and think this essay is a bit of a hatchet job. But there's a lot of meat hidden in there too.

rhapsodic 9y ago

Tim's core business, tech book publishing, has certainly been disrupted by technology. Glad to see he's not getting all Luddite over it.

stcredzero 9y ago

These increasingly destructive techniques, coupled with the San Francisco peninsula’s population exploding from roughly 1,000 people in 1848 to over 36,000 in 1852, irrevocably changed the landscape of California, pulling up old growth forests, pushing aside rivers, and literally washing away into the Pacific Ocean some of the richest arable land on the North American continent. The Gold Rush turned huge swathes of California into “sacrifice zones” — geographic areas that have been permanently damaged or poisoned by industry. We're still dealing with the environmental impact from those days. Precisely the places one is likely to find gold, one is likely to find other heavy metals like mercury. Those places are also the part of California where SF gets its water from. Fortunately, metallic mercury is fairly nonreactive. Much of that washed-away soil is still making its way down into reservoirs. There are actually plans to safely mine that sediment for the mercury and gold.