Today Silicon Valley is the establishment. It seems less like the nerd mecca it used to be (remember Weird Stuff?) and is now a place that is much more obsessed with money. When a basic 1960s suburban tract house within a reasonable commute from work costs more than $2 million, it’s hard not to be obsessed with money. There are still good people and awesome technologies in Silicon Valley, which is one of the main reasons I’ve decided to stay in the Bay Area, but it seems like some companies in Silicon Valley have gone absolutely mercenary, and they have eroded the goodwill the area had as recently as a decade ago.
But I think this is part of the natural evolution of industry. The same could be said about the history of the railroad and car industries in America. Think of how essential telecommunications and electricity are to modern society, yet I’ve yet to meet a person who loves Comcast and PG&E.
Hell I’m guilty of some myself. I was surprised early in my career when I found out that most of my peers did not have a computer and internet access as children in the early 90s
I checked Ritchie, Thompson, McCarthy, Sussman, Wirth… none had blue name parents.
Edit: you’ve got luminaries like Stallman too, who didn’t have the rich family but did get the university they worked at to cover their living expenses. An uncomfortable amount of leaders in the Free Software and Open Source communities openly advocate for people to give away their time and effort for free, while living on the largesse of others
What I was critiquing was the fact that a seemingly inordinate number of people who advocate that your work in software should be free for anyone else to take without payment, also happen to not ever need to consider how they put food on the table due to wealth they inherited or were given due to their celebrity status
Turns out this is bullshit.
It's fine I bought into it too. But it's a pretty unbroken path from today back through the history of business in Silicon Valley. It's always been a smokescreen.
I recommend this book, it's highly illuminating and specific: https://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-History-California-Capitali...
This reminds me of the tycoon's thunderously semi-religious speech from The Network [0], which has aged pretty well for a movie 50 years old.
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
They started with the same values: make as much money as possible, even if it destroys the world. Any entreaties to the contrary were a smokescreen to deflect criticism until they could shore up their position. This is the natural end-state of incentivizing profit maximization.
If you are bad you will continue to be so before and after money.
I would hope a YCombinator news site of all places would see that.
I admit that's a large ask for a consumer, to keep track of a larger organizations abusing you.
This implies all. I then said I don’t doubt their impact.
They’re not all like this is my point.
They aren't saying SV is firing the missiles. Rather, the suggestion is SV is helping those that do.
So when you say
> I don't see Silicon Valley firing missiles in the Red Sea
You aren't countering the original claim. Instead, you'd have to argue that you don't see SV helping those firing missiles in the Red Sea. And, in that regard, I'm not so sure of that. Just look at crypto as a clear example of helping those regimes actually doing the firing.
And its a grey business so to say, you can see various justifications for it also here since many folks here work for them, its not some Zyklon-B factory. At the end, everybody under certain circumstances has a price, and kids tend to blur this even more for many.
It’s not surprising, but it is kind of disappointing.
When I was young, I was convinced that all the bad in the world, was the fault of evil, greedy old men. If young folks ran things, we’d be empathetic, kind, ethical, and positive.
As SV is basically completely run by young folks, of various races, genders, and backgrounds , I have to admit that it is actually worse, than the evil old men.
I think OP meant the opposite -- that when people have children in the Bay Area and want to support them, they'll make moral compromises to do so, given the cost.
The very young may not grasp what they are doing, and they may be easily "boiled as frogs", but I think they are more likely to believe that they are not making moral compromises.
To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing feats of science and engineering to power the new industrial economy. The defense companies made remarkable technological advances to help deter Soviet aggression and win the space race. And before the link to lung cancer was discovered, tobacco was like coffee: it gave people a nice cognitive boost, as well as possibly helping them stay thin.
Now you can just buy nicotine products for that boost with a substantially reduced risk profile (it's not a carcinogen). Some writeup on it: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Does nicotine give a cognitive boost, or does it return one to their pre-addiction baseline?
I'm curious what definition of "addiction" you're using to arrive at the conclusion that caffeine isn't addictive.
There's no one standard definition of "addiction", and most concise definitions (one or two lines) are extremely fragile and break down when you try to apply them in any meaningful context.
By this definition you're putting forth, caffeine certainly could be addictive, as could any substance - and in fact, nearly any behavior, which is why professionals generally frown upon using this measure definitionally, because it leads to pseudoscientific terms like "X addiction", for absurd values of X.
You may also be interested in studies on caffeine dependence, like: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/
> Numerous controlled laboratory investigations reviewed in this article show that caffeine produces behavioral and physiological effects similar to other drugs of dependence. Moreover, several recent clinical studies indicate that caffeine dependence is a clinically meaningful disorder that affects a nontrivial proportion of caffeine users.
This is an exception and other common drugs like caffeine that do not have any positive effects at all. Or any other drug for that matter.
Theatre at its finest. But this shan't ever be discussed.
However:
Amidst all the talk about the causes of obesity, surely "not smoking anymore" is in there somewhere?
No, but you're being purposefully hyper-sensitive.
If you're replying to someone higher, you should hit Reply on that comment. Not on someone lower down.
There's a large subset of people, the majority in my opinion, who are somewhat prone to addiction. Most are just a wee bit prone. They certainly won't peruse the streets for drugs. But, if something is readily available and socially accepted, they'll do it.
Before this was smoking, now its ultra-processed foods. Fast food, junk food, sweets type stuff.
It's probably still a boon, I'd say. I mean, I think being obese is probably healthier than smoking. But we didn't really "solve" anything, we just moved the problem.
Smokers used to claim that it suppressed their appetites. Not being a smoker, or obese, I wouldn't know. But it seems plausible as a (partial) cause.
But when people are dying slowly, and painfully, by their own hand and they can't stop, I personally consider that an addiction. In addition, we know ultra-processed foods are designed to invoke as much pleasure in the user as possible. In many ways, they suffer the same hyper-optimization that modern cigarettes do.
There's also some* evidence that part of the Tobacco industry shifted to food as Tobacco in the US died off. This is more circumstantial evidence. I think the "hard" evidence is that everyone smoked and was thin, now nobody smokes, and everyone is obese.
Regardless, I think we need harder and more proven solutions to the obesity epidemic. I think "willpower!" isn't working out for us, on a large scale. I'm rooting for Ozempic. And, fun fact, Ozempic also curbs nicotine and alcohol addiction.
It's heart and lung damage. Congestive heart failure, heart attacks, COPD, etc. A lot of these are slow, painful, and terminal.
--Charlie Munger
Anyone care to suggest what money "wants" or where it wants to go?
I know it's a flawed question, because money is in many ways inert, but we have similar caveats around genes and evolution. Non-sentient things can still create persistent structures that we can label with our human values. Or something :)
The modern wrinkle is that our effects on the world are more significant. This design has side effects (re: the climate, to name just one). These are side effects which we may not be able to tolerate forever. I think that money, being a status-quo preserver, "wants" us to ignore them for as long as possible, but since they're cumulative, that's going to be tougher sell as time goes on.
Also, It's an information technology. As the makers of such things I think it's up to us to figure out what the next version should look like.
The only way to interfere with it is by using other unrelated forces, like kindness, just like we can move masses around with electromagnetism.
People want food, housing, entertainment, and many more things so there is money to be made providing them.
Sometimes people do a bad job at picking what they want.
Sometimes people dont like what other people want, and when other people get it.
Nothing ever has changed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...
Now asset owners have the whole thing comfortably under their thumb, every large tech co has MBAs throughout and schools have been pumping out engineers for 20 years so workers have no leverage. It has become the same as every other large industry.
But they ended up exactly the same. Helping the worst regimes, all-in in military complex, taking advantage of screen addiction and teen insecurities.
But hey at least they don’t wear white collars like the old bad guys.