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This is, honestly, a pretty silly article since it is cherry picking certain bad apples and setting it against the backdrop of the bus protests in San Francisco
by JohnTHaller 13y ago
This is, honestly, a pretty silly article since it is cherry picking certain bad apples and setting it against the backdrop of the bus protests in San Francisco (mostly the last round of gentrification protesting against this round of gentrification). Yes, SF's housing market is crap, which is a combination of absurd laws and regulations plus demand. Tech workers wanting to live there are helping on the demand side, but that's about it.
As for disruptive industries, cherrypicking AirBnb and Uber isn't representative of the vast majority of the industry. Airbnb enables about 1/2 of its users to illegally sublet their apartments in cities like NYC. And its annoying a lot of the folks out here. But does that make other tech companies bad? Uber, from various anecdotal insider reports, seems like a pretty shady company that tried to operate illegally in multiple cities but is being reigned in. Does that make other tech companies bad? King.com got absurd trademarks for their game designed to extract money from unsuspecting players and is now using those trademarks to inhibit competition. But does that make other tech companies bad? Yes, Apple price fixed the whole book publishing industry and Google bought and killed off multiple products people liked and Adobe costs too much and all three of them conspired to keep tech wages down. And Facebook is an immense privacy-gobbling behemoth that won't let you install their Android app unless you let them read your SMS messages. But does that make ALL other tech companies bad?
Realistically, it's a combination of the fact that some companies are now big enough to actually throw their weight around money/size wise the way other industries do -- Industries that get kickbacks, govt handouts, etc on things like corn and oil that most of America hates -- and the fact that the bad actors are getting a decent amount of press for their bad actions. But that doesn't make all tech companies bad. Nor does it make the actors engaging in these actions all bad. And it certainly doesn't make the average wage earner at a company working for a living worthy of harassment.
- S4M 13y agoI honestly find it hard to know if your comment is ironic or not.
- kremlin 13y agoI was thinking the same. "99% of tech companies make the rest of us look bad" is how I was reading it.
- Crito 13y agoMost tech companies you have never heard of. The public has never read a single news article or angry blog post about most of them. The majority of tech companies is certainly not making the rest of us look bad, they aren't making us look anything.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoIt was purposeful to give that many examples. Just because there are that many I can think of... compare that to just how many tech companies there are. And consider that Uber and Airbnb aren't even tech companies.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago>As for disruptive industries, cherrypicking AirBnb and Uber isn't representative of the vast majority of the industry. Airbnb enables about 1/2 of its users to illegally sublet their apartments in cities like NYC. And its annoying a lot of the folks out here. But does that make other tech companies bad? Uber, from various anecdotal insider reports, seems like a pretty shady company that tried to operate illegally in multiple cities but is being reigned in. Does that make other tech companies bad? King.com got absurd trademarks for their game designed to extract money from unsuspecting players and is now using those trademarks to inhibit competition. But does that make other tech companies bad? Yes, Apple price fixed the whole book publishing industry and Google bought and killed off multiple products people liked and Adobe costs too much and all three of them conspired to keep tech wages down. And Facebook is an immense privacy-gobbling behemoth that won't let you install their Android app unless you let them read your SMS messages. But does that make ALL other tech companies bad? You know, it doesn't make all tech companies automatically bad, but in statistical terms, it sure as hell establishes a pattern. Once is accident. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is enemy action.
- avn2109 13y ago>> "Once is accident. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is enemy action." I was hoping that this was a quote from General Patton or something. But it just turned out to be Ian Fleming :(
- JohnTHaller 13y agoFirst, name me an industry that doesn't have 3 companies that have done something bad. Education? Medicine? Even grandmothers? Nope, sorry. Second, basically EVERY company is a tech company these days. Honestly, Uber and Airbnb aren't even really tech companies. They just use tech. Like virtually every other company.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago>First, name me an industry that doesn't have 3 companies that have done something bad. Why? That would imply I don't believe the tech industry's malignity is just a further example of capitalism's more general malignity.
- Crito 13y agoDo people even really consider Uber to be a tech company? I assumed that we all just were interested in them because they aim to solve a problem that many of us experience in cities, because they are disruptive and we dig disruptive startups. Sort of like why HN is interested in Tesla. Technology is certainly involved there, but I don't think of them as a "tech startup". Tesla hires mostly non-CS engineers I imagine, and I suspect Uber mostly hires drivers.
- ForHackernews 13y agoTesla is definitely a technology company. They're doing innovative things with electric car technology. They're not a software company, or a web startup. Uber, on the other hand, pretends to be a tech company, but in reality is a consumer services firm.