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Oh brother. Silicon Valley deserves to be dragged for a lot of garbage... truly... but calling the whole SoftBank funded clusterfuck the “Silicon Valley Economy

Oh brother. Silicon Valley deserves to be dragged for a lot of garbage... truly... but calling the whole SoftBank funded clusterfuck the “Silicon Valley Economy” is just nakedly intellectually dishonest. Does the contemporary New York Economy connect people around the world and put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips? Oh no, they just wreck the economy as a whole and feed us garbage like how they create value through “liquidity.” How about the Washington DC economy? You know, the old joyful military-industrial complex that sucks in taxpayer money and converts it into dead civilians in the Middle East. Or maybe the other geographically centralized titan of the US, The Texas Economy? You know, the one responsible for many of the major geopolitical conflicts in recent history that is also a huge part of what is turning the only planet we have into an unlivable hellscape. And as far as I can tell the whole SoftBank funded fake tech masquerade thing is starting to melt down, so?

hybrids 7y ago
Where does the article mention SoftBank specifically?
- borski 7y ago
  It doesn’t, and that is parent’s point. The companies it mentions and the “gig economy” it lambasts is largely the result of insane amounts of funding from SoftBank, causing those companies to make profit at any cost.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    And to really connect the dots here, SoftBank is Japanese and its Vision Fund is mostly Japanese and Saudi money.
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
      >SoftBank is Japanese and its Vision Fund is mostly Japanese and Saudi money. Does that money exist in a vacuum? No, it's invested in American companies, for the most part. SoftBank has set absurd valuations, which other VCs have benefited from.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Nobody forced SV companies to take that money, though. They knew what the deal was.
  - jellicle 7y ago
    How many of these have anything to do with Softbank? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gig_economy_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gig_economy_companies
cforrester 7y ago
> Does the contemporary New York Economy connect people around the world and put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips? Would it be any more acceptable to lure people into the "dependent contractor" trap if it did?
codyb 7y ago
The contemporary NY economy is incredibly diverse and far more than its banks. The dead civilians in the Middle East is terrible but all in all this is the most peaceful period of world history since civilization started. In most eras there’d be dead civilians in the vast majority of places instead of the minority. Doesn’t make it right or good, but it’s not as bad as things past. And lets not pretend companies not funded by SoftBank are paying their warehouse workers, janitors, caterer or content curators good money. Seems like SV in general is pretty good at cutting costs at the expense of workers. But if your point is sweeping generalizations are generally pretty inept at painting a nuanced and detailed picture, I’d say I agree with that.
- minblaster 7y ago
  I think total, not relative, suffering matters. Killing 10x the population of Mesopotamia in the Iraq war isn’t assuaged because it’s low as a percentage of the population. The amount of absolute suffering has increased drastically.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    The US's ruling class four out of four catastrophic fuckups in the middle east and Central Asia doesn't bode very well for their ability to effectively rule the United States either.
breck 7y ago
I largely agree with your sentiment, except for this: > put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips? I think this is a dream that has passed by. There's a lot of simplified knowledge now on the web, littered with ads, but we are far from having the worlds knowledge at our fingertips. Instead we get a slow, controlled leak, of very noisy data, accompanied by as many ads as possible. If you truly want access to the world's knowledge, you have to work for one of a handful of elite companies, pay an exorbitant amount for premium databases, or get it illegally via tools like scihub.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>And as far as I can tell the whole SoftBank funded fake tech masquerade thing is starting to melt down, so? If you think this starts and ends with SoftBank, you're crazy. SoftBank may be the biggest and worst offender, but this stuff is rampant in SV and the VC world. It goes well beyond the last few months. You can pretend this is exaggeration, but public sentiment is starting to turn. >What about the New York Economy. What about the DC Economy. What about the Texas Economy. What about them? This article is about the Silicon Valley Economy. Are you asserting that the NYT doesn't write articles covering wars or Wall Street scandals or political controversy? Their pages are filled with them. Go read those if that's what you're looking for.
Lammy 7y ago
You can see the mindset everywhere in the Valley; it's just easiest with the "gig economy" companies that put it right in our collective faces. For example, compare what was described in the linked article to how brutally companies like Facebook and Google resist treating their campus staff like "real employees": https://gizmodo.com/google-and-facebooks-security-guards-are-fighting-to-ea-1826104897 https://gizmodo.com/google-and-facebooks-security-guards-are...
- spaced-out 7y ago
  Why do you only name Google and Facebook when this is common practice all over corporate America? At least they pay their workers as opposed to the entertainment and fashion industries which are notorious for abusing unpaid "interns".
  - Lammy 7y ago
    I can only have fair opinions of environments I’ve personally experienced, and this thread is about SV companies.
    - neo4sure 7y ago
      The only issue I have with this is the people that are wrecking the planet are not getting criticized at all IE BIG OIL. Somehow I think they are the winners in all of this.
- Lammy 7y ago
  This quote stood out to me when re-reading this article—emphasis mine: “You can offer to work for 16 hours a day,” said Annabelle, a security officer who asked to be identified only by her middle name because she feared retaliation from her employer. “And they always have places where they need officers, so if you can stay awake and you can work the hours, you can earn some overtime, and that will help pay for a desperately needed car repair, or it will put food on the table—whatever the latest catastrophe is.” And makes me wonder if there is any correlation between the need to work more hours at unsteady jobs and the rise in methamphetamine use in the last decade: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/methamphetamine/what-scope-methamphetamine-misuse-in-united-states https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/meth... "NIDA’s National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS), which tracks drug trends in sentinel sites across the country, found that treatment admissions for methamphetamine as the primary substance of use were less than one percent in sites east of the Mississippi River, but ranged from 12-29 percent in the sites west of the Mississippi. Nationwide, overdose deaths from the category of drugs that includes methamphetamine increased by 7.5 times between 2007 and 2017." https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/meth_rr_fig6.gif https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/met...
_marlowe_ 7y ago
> feed us garbage like how they create value through “liquidity.” Nobody values liquidity until they absolutely need it. Transfer of liquidity risk IS value creation, and absolutely necessary for a well functioning economy.
- webmaven 7y ago
  As a general principle, just because some of something is good, does not necessarily mean that more of that thing is better.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Let's not use the failings of others to somehow justify our own.

hybrids 7y ago

Where does the article mention SoftBank specifically?

borski 7y ago
It doesn’t, and that is parent’s point. The companies it mentions and the “gig economy” it lambasts is largely the result of insane amounts of funding from SoftBank, causing those companies to make profit at any cost.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  And to really connect the dots here, SoftBank is Japanese and its Vision Fund is mostly Japanese and Saudi money.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >SoftBank is Japanese and its Vision Fund is mostly Japanese and Saudi money. Does that money exist in a vacuum? No, it's invested in American companies, for the most part. SoftBank has set absurd valuations, which other VCs have benefited from.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Nobody forced SV companies to take that money, though. They knew what the deal was.
- jellicle 7y ago
  How many of these have anything to do with Softbank? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gig_economy_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gig_economy_companies

cforrester 7y ago

> Does the contemporary New York Economy connect people around the world and put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips? Would it be any more acceptable to lure people into the "dependent contractor" trap if it did?

codyb 7y ago

The contemporary NY economy is incredibly diverse and far more than its banks. The dead civilians in the Middle East is terrible but all in all this is the most peaceful period of world history since civilization started. In most eras there’d be dead civilians in the vast majority of places instead of the minority. Doesn’t make it right or good, but it’s not as bad as things past. And lets not pretend companies not funded by SoftBank are paying their warehouse workers, janitors, caterer or content curators good money. Seems like SV in general is pretty good at cutting costs at the expense of workers. But if your point is sweeping generalizations are generally pretty inept at painting a nuanced and detailed picture, I’d say I agree with that.

minblaster 7y ago
I think total, not relative, suffering matters. Killing 10x the population of Mesopotamia in the Iraq war isn’t assuaged because it’s low as a percentage of the population. The amount of absolute suffering has increased drastically.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  The US's ruling class four out of four catastrophic fuckups in the middle east and Central Asia doesn't bode very well for their ability to effectively rule the United States either.

breck 7y ago

I largely agree with your sentiment, except for this: > put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips? I think this is a dream that has passed by. There's a lot of simplified knowledge now on the web, littered with ads, but we are far from having the worlds knowledge at our fingertips. Instead we get a slow, controlled leak, of very noisy data, accompanied by as many ads as possible. If you truly want access to the world's knowledge, you have to work for one of a handful of elite companies, pay an exorbitant amount for premium databases, or get it illegally via tools like scihub.

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>And as far as I can tell the whole SoftBank funded fake tech masquerade thing is starting to melt down, so? If you think this starts and ends with SoftBank, you're crazy. SoftBank may be the biggest and worst offender, but this stuff is rampant in SV and the VC world. It goes well beyond the last few months. You can pretend this is exaggeration, but public sentiment is starting to turn. >What about the New York Economy. What about the DC Economy. What about the Texas Economy. What about them? This article is about the Silicon Valley Economy. Are you asserting that the NYT doesn't write articles covering wars or Wall Street scandals or political controversy? Their pages are filled with them. Go read those if that's what you're looking for.

Lammy 7y ago

You can see the mindset everywhere in the Valley; it's just easiest with the "gig economy" companies that put it right in our collective faces. For example, compare what was described in the linked article to how brutally companies like Facebook and Google resist treating their campus staff like "real employees": https://gizmodo.com/google-and-facebooks-security-guards-are-fighting-to-ea-1826104897 https://gizmodo.com/google-and-facebooks-security-guards-are...

spaced-out 7y ago
Why do you only name Google and Facebook when this is common practice all over corporate America? At least they pay their workers as opposed to the entertainment and fashion industries which are notorious for abusing unpaid "interns".
- Lammy 7y ago
  I can only have fair opinions of environments I’ve personally experienced, and this thread is about SV companies.
  - neo4sure 7y ago
    The only issue I have with this is the people that are wrecking the planet are not getting criticized at all IE BIG OIL. Somehow I think they are the winners in all of this.
Lammy 7y ago
This quote stood out to me when re-reading this article—emphasis mine: “You can offer to work for 16 hours a day,” said Annabelle, a security officer who asked to be identified only by her middle name because she feared retaliation from her employer. “And they always have places where they need officers, so if you can stay awake and you can work the hours, you can earn some overtime, and that will help pay for a desperately needed car repair, or it will put food on the table—whatever the latest catastrophe is.” And makes me wonder if there is any correlation between the need to work more hours at unsteady jobs and the rise in methamphetamine use in the last decade: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/methamphetamine/what-scope-methamphetamine-misuse-in-united-states https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/meth... "NIDA’s National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS), which tracks drug trends in sentinel sites across the country, found that treatment admissions for methamphetamine as the primary substance of use were less than one percent in sites east of the Mississippi River, but ranged from 12-29 percent in the sites west of the Mississippi. Nationwide, overdose deaths from the category of drugs that includes methamphetamine increased by 7.5 times between 2007 and 2017." https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/meth_rr_fig6.gif https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/met...

_marlowe_ 7y ago

> feed us garbage like how they create value through “liquidity.” Nobody values liquidity until they absolutely need it. Transfer of liquidity risk IS value creation, and absolutely necessary for a well functioning economy.

webmaven 7y ago
As a general principle, just because some of something is good, does not necessarily mean that more of that thing is better.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

Let's not use the failings of others to somehow justify our own.