4 ms·

Not overall. There may be a bubble in certain small areas of tech, but there is nothing happening right now that equals the mania of the late 1990s. I was ther

• jacquesm 11y ago
  Shame that comments like these are being downvoted.
  • mcdougle 11y ago
    I upvoted it. Why is it getting downvoted, I wonder? Seems like a fairly rational explanation. Is it just because of the negative tone? I mean, this post is asking for opinions, and the commenter simply gave his opinion....
    • michaelochurch 11y ago
      This whole anti-"negativity" thing is just an attempt to impose Bay Area passive-aggressive culture on every participant in the discussion, even though we "in tech" come from (and ought to come from) all over the world. It makes me fucking sick that people get downvoted for expressing unpleasant but completely accurate accounts of what is actually going on.
      • carboncopy 11y ago
        I think you're making an enormous intellectual leap from the data you have (someone with greater than 500 karma clicked a glyph of an inverted pyramid). api's answer is the most complete response to the question so far.
        • S4M 11y ago
          Not really, api's comment is currently one of the last in this thread, which means that it has a low karma. On the other hand, it is likely that several people upvoted it - I did, and probably people who complain that it was downvoted also upvoted it, which means that it got several downvote - something not attributable to bad luck.
          • carboncopy 11y ago
            When I made that comment, there were 3 others in the thread. Next time I'll put a timestamp to add context (I'm not being sarcastic, I genuinely recognized the ambiguity)
      • pav7en 11y ago
        Haha, that's kind of ironic, someone downvoted you for this.
      • api 11y ago
        Curious: how does one discuss negative things without negativity? Oops... missed a dose of Soma. You're absolutely right. It's also a way of prohibiting criticism, since it's sort of hard to criticize without... umm... criticizing. I noticed that the policy came into effect after the bizarre "let's regulate CS to prevent killer AI" paranoid psychotic episode that seized this community a few months ago. People criticized that rather sharply, and a number of the recipients of that criticism were very high ranking members of the community. (I still puzzle about that one. I could forgive such a meme for coming from the Internet's more kooky corners like rense.com but from a site full of people who actually understand such things? I still can't discount the Machiavellian idea that it was a trial balloon for pushing for measures that would deliver a monopoly on high-end CS research to highly funded companies and VC-backed startups.) Culturally the Bay Area is at least as aggressive as New York, but it's covered with a gloss of hippie veneer appropriated from the counterculture and a lot of politically correct schmaltz. The result is absolutely passive-aggressive. In New York they say 'fuck you,' stab you in the back, and cut you out. In the Bay Area they do the same but with a positive attitude, a talk about seeing the big picture, and well wishes as they send you on your way. It's also the only place a hyper-elitist top-ten university club of >95% white/asian males could pretend to be a force for diversity, equality, and cultural progress. I kinda like SoCal. It's also as aggressive as New York. It has a veneer of its own too, but a significantly more transparent one. But the biggest thing I love about LA in particular is that it's a place where the brilliantly intelligent pretend to be stupid. I saw a SpaceX webcast once with this girl who was like ohmygod a rocket scientist. She was even blonde. Like ohmygod here let me show you the, like, importance of the Oberth Effect and why the second stage needs higher specific impulse. The Bay Area is the other way around, which I find irritating... really stupid stuff masquerading as genius. "Here, I'm a 4.0 white male Stanford graduate. Let me show you how I'm changing the world with my app for finding the nearest fried chicken franchise..." BTW: click on my username and drop me an e-mail @michaelochurch -- if you are in the bay we will need to share a coffee or a beer next time I am up there. Edit: LOL, got down voted in like five minutes, and on a mostly deserted thread! Is someone running a bot for this?
    • sanoli 11y ago
      I don't get it either. This dumb idea that you should downvote if the views are different from yours sucks.
  • 001sky 11y ago
    Agree. Disgracefull that this (referenced) comment is #2 from the bottom of thread right now. LOL: downvotes
• pav7en 11y ago
  Doesn't seem negative at all. And makes a very good case.
• hga 11y ago
  In flavor, at least, this is different from the '70s. Insane government action is less apparent, e.g. no even-odd days for gas stations in the city (Nixon's wage and price controls were not relaxed for oil and natural gas, and by the late '70s bureaucrats in D.C. were e.g. directing where all refined gasoline went, in farming areas like mine we were swimming in the stuff, cities, not so much). Inflation was raging, today's 0% or or negative real interest rates are quite different. Screwing up the Cold War was an existential threat, ISIS et. al. are not one. The Limits to Growth meme was stronger and apparently more immediate a threat than Global Warming. Space was a big letdown in that period; if you're watching it today, SpaceX is the biggest thing since Apollo, and likely more consequential (well, Apollo helped us win the Cold War, but really getting out into space will be "bigger"). The Internet and ubiquitous powerful computing (easy access to something with power akin to a Cray 1) are game changers; there's no excitement like there was with the rapid march of microprocessors then, but that was a geek thing until maybe the Apple II. But the Internet ... really, that's such a big thing I can't really grasp how much it's changed the game, despite or perhaps because I have lived it starting from before the launch of the TCP/IP Internet.
  • api 11y ago
    You're absolutely right that "everything isn't broken" and some things are better. The problem is that all the better things are mostly not helping ~90% of the population. You do have orders of magnitude better access to information and better gadgets, but that doesn't help you make your bills or plan for retirement (essentially impossible today if you are not rich). Like I said, generally speaking everything is inflating but wages and technology products. We are in something that I've heard called "in-deflation" -- inflation in everything you need, deflation in everything else, and stagnant wages and employment. I think this is at least as bad as the stagflation of the 70s, though obviously a far different phenomenon. I'm not completely convinced that this isn't the result of the "limits to growth." Americans love apocalypses. They think everything will happen suddenly, explosively, in a film directed by J.J. Abrams with a lot of explosions and a plucky hero. The reality is that things like LTG may manifest very slowly and without much fireworks. Scenario: Commodities just inflate, and inflate, and inflate, and eat up surplus wealth for all but the top. Surplus wealth at the top then inflates things like real estate. Demand collapses, hollowing out employment and accelerating the whole thing (deflationary spiral). Eventually the middle class is destroyed. Then assuming a fairly bad case scenario the die-off begins, but also slowly. In the third world it starts first through warfare, revolutions, disease, and starvation. Finally it slowly progress to the "first world" in the form of decreased longevity and increased mortality among the now impoverished majority unable to afford good health care any longer. Since contraception is still available in the first world, birth rates don't spike as they might in poorer places. This saves the developed world from birth spike / death spike Darwinian hell. We go not with a bang but a whimper. In the end we have falling population, collapsing economies, and a wealthy elite cloistered in a few surviving high-tech mega-cities. These are dystopian police states however -- like Singapore with more police brutality and arbitrary power -- so it kind of sucks for them too. Of course the vast global slum also is a police state, but policed more haphazardly with drones and such. In the even longer term these too collapse or are overthrown by angry populist revolutions, knowledge is forgotten, and we're back in some kind of dark age. Tall tales are told of the great science and power of the fallen high civilization of old, but also of how its arrogance offended the Gods and brought about its fall... etc. Unfortunately our high-tech civilization is a one-shot. Fossil fuels and concentrated mineral deposits are now depleted. We fell victim to the same game-theoretic Great Filter as everyone else. See: Fermi Paradox. -- The above may not occur. The future is hard to predict and complex. But that, I think, is a good expression of how the world looks today and where it looks like it's going. It looks as hellishly pessimistic as the 70s, if not worse. In the 1990s a rising tide lifted all boats, opportunity was exploding for everyone, and the Internet was going to transform our society for the better and empower everyone. Libertarianism was popular. That wonderful age ended on 9/11/2001, though the writing was on the wall when the dot.com crash started in 2000. Since then I've seen nothing but escalating pessimism and depression among the general public, though the parallel universe alpha cities of the coasts seem partially exempt. Today the tide is falling but the biggest boats are still rising, opportunity is collapsing for the majority, and the Internet is a surveillance and distraction machine where people look at stupid cat pictures and blob comics while AI profiles them to sell them stuff or manipulate them. Authoritarianism is experiencing a renaissance -- both in populist and hyper-elitist forms. Much like the 70s the music and culture is mostly trash with the exception of a few indie gems. Cinema is remakes of reboots, music is mass produced soulless auto-tuned Muzak, and the Internet has developed a trash culture of its own centered on dumb memes, blob comics, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and verbal abuse. I miss that optimistic world, and much like those in the 70s I worry that it was the apex of civilization... maybe even of intelligence on this planet for this geological epoch. Of course in the 70s you could have said that about the 50s and 60s, so hopefully it's a cycle.
• mtbcoder 11y ago
  > We are at a time in history where unprecedented amounts of money are sloshing around at the top and it isn't 'trickling down' much via ordinary routes like wages. Not sure I would say 'unprecedented' as this has happened before [1]. Perhaps it's time for another New Deal-style intervention. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#/media/File:U.S._Income_Shares_of_Top_1%25_and_0.1%25_1913-2013.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
• elektromekatron 11y ago
  It is funny reading hacker news from outside the bubble, so to speak. When I hear of this troubling issue of too much money being thrown around by VCs, I do wonder if, while they are at it, they could learn to throw a little further maybe.