Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

Re:Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you by eropple on Monday October 09, 2017 @11:25AM (#15434601)

> The oddest turn is that of blaming the global rise in income inequality on SV

The rise in income inequality is tied pretty directly to pervasive automation. Economic efficiency is not always social progress, especially when coupled with retrograde politics and social policy. We're not having "more leisure" or whatever because of it, we're having people ground to dust in worthless jobs because the computers are doing more and more.

To that end, tech (and not just the Valley, but the Valley is a particularly visible and awfully smarmy representation of tech) probably should get more shade thrown at it than it does.

> then to lambaste SV for trying to come up with solutions to ameliorate that problem

Tech is doing no such thing. Tech is reifying capital, it is not trying to solve the problem on behalf of labor.

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Re:Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you by 323454 on Monday October 09, 2017 @11:53AM (#15434905)

Growing wealth inequality in the United States in the last twenty years was caused mostly by globalisation, the offshoring of jobs that left huge numbers of people out of work and broke while making the owners and investors multiple times wealthier. Automation has played its role in generating inequality at times in history, but the wave we are currently experiencing is not predominantly due to automation: it is instead due to cheap and plentiful foreign labor.

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Re:Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you by eropple on Monday October 09, 2017 @01:00PM (#15435513)

> Growing wealth inequality in the United States in the last twenty years was caused mostly by globalisation

Which is caused by two major factors: easier shipping, easier communication--both of which the tech sector encourages, facilitates, and pushes forward. And yes, automation is a nontrivial part of wealth inequality's growth, especially over the last ten years rather than twenty--you don't move a secretary's job elsewhere, you destroy it. Capital requires fewer hands than ever before and enables further centralization of that capital--and this is direct fallout of automation making workers superfluous.

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Re:Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you by goatlover on Monday October 09, 2017 @06:26PM (#15437947)

So all that cheap foreign labor doesn't count in the equation? There is automation, and there is moving operations overseas where the workforce is ten times cheaper.

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