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...

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".

I can only have fair opinions of environments I’ve personally experienced, and this thread is about SV companies.

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.

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/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/met...

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.

> 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?

> 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.

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

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Where does the article mention SoftBank specifically?

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.

And to really connect the dots here, SoftBank is Japanese and its Vision Fund is mostly Japanese and Saudi money.

>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.

How many of these have anything to do with Softbank?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gig_economy_companies

Nobody forced SV companies to take that money, though. They knew what the deal was.