This counterpoint by Ezra Klein was a good reminder that not all the startups are about minimizing the inconveniences of being a twenty-something with tons of money. And now I'll read the Tkacik piece!
Goodness, I really do love Tkacik's stuff.
Software today delivers the miracles of rapidly improving hardware.
Network and disk capacity are improving so quickly that indifferent engineering geared to fast deployment beats a more careful process for lots of clients.
Packer's writing in the OP is long-winded, a style problem for the New Yorker. Also nearly pointless-- the insular millionaires to the south in Hollywood are also obnoxious, similraly bankers and brokers in Manhattan. Is his other writing good?
Funny, I always thought Facebook was staffed by mediocrities.
This open letter by Tim Slee is a really good way into the politics of "disruption" and startups:
So now here comes AirBnB (to take one example), who want to keep the idea that it's about the noncommercial and "sharing" informal economy, and scale it up. They talk about their hosts in a non-commercial sense: earning "additional income", or "extra money" (link) -- rolling out, I could not help but notice, the very phrases used years ago to justify not giving women's jobs the same protections and benefits as men's jobs. It's not the real economy, it's just a bit of pocket money: we don't need all those expensive rules and regulations. But they want to build a billion dollar business on the back of it.
Please to see that L.A. cease-and-desisted Uber and Lyft yesterday.
sorry, from Tom Slee to Tim Wu.
In related news, David Lowery has been pushing me closer to the Halford side of things, internet millionaire vs. content millionaire-wise. Although I still think that ISPs should pay a fee that gets divided up among musicians, Canada-blank-tape style, which probably makes no one happy.
That second linked article is a weird stream of consciousness. I'll try to summarize.
"George Packer is a boring writer who is a stereotypical old white man. He likes Malcolm Gladwell. Is there anyone worse than Malcolm Gladwell? This book is boring. This book seems OK, but because it's so disorganized it is actually counterproductive. Also, it's dangerous. George Packer is a hack who is not a real journalist. He seems to be saying that this painkiller lobbyist got disillusioned because of all the bad things he did as a lobbyist, but it doesn't point out that he did bad things as a lobbyist, or that he likes Hernando De Soto, who is a horrible person. The New Yorker is boring, and so is George Packer, who clearly doesn't read the things he writes about. His book also sucks because a lot of it consists of repurposed magazine articles. And a lot of quotes from a guy named Jeff Connaughton, who I had a pleasant conversation with. To summarize, I have hereby employed various vague guilt-by-association tactics to try to make you not like George Packer."
Please to see that L.A. cease-and-desisted Uber and Lyft yesterday.
Which is worse, Lyft or Uber?
Uber: run by a libertarian Marina douchebag.
Lyft: fucking ugly pink mustaches on cars all over the city.
7: the quotations she gave from Packer's book were enough to make me not like him.
[Comment characterizing this as the usual generational conflict among media types.]
[Sardonic reference to Tkacik's "American defectors to North Korea are heroes of the human spirit because my father was a Reaganite Republican" article of a few months ago.]
[OT: No prison can hold Rusty the red panda.]
Which is worse, Lyft or Uber?
It probably doesn't have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, but Leap, which duplicates a Muni line but charges $6 for the privilege of not having to interact with the poor, sure seems to be trying to become hate-worthy.
4: I never understood how Facebook got the reputation of being an impressive technology achievement. Google and iPhone, sure, but the reason for Facebook's success it that it started at Harvard, and we all like to curry favor with our betters.
6: Pandora created a system that can serve a million plays of the song over the Internet. And they're not going to get rich from this -- they managed $100 million in revenue in 2011.
12.1: The cigarette is an impressive technology.
12 - There's a good deal of interesting engineering work being done at Facebook. (Admittedly, some of it is in place to deal with earlier bad technology decisions.) Thrift, their PHP preprocessor, and the datacenter specs are the things that come to mind.
Uber is clearly a regulatory dodge, but it's still quite clear that it's trying to facilitate a straightforward commercial transaction (hey, you, with a particular commercially-licenced vehicle: drive me somewhere for money). Lyft appears to be hesitant even to commit to that, with their talk of "donations" and the indirect way drivers are compensated. I think Lyft is vastly sketchier, even without the pink-moustache business.
Please to see that L.A. cease-and-desisted Uber and Lyft yesterday.
Lyft can suck it, but then again so can the taxi cartel. There's no one to cheer for in that particular arena.
8: Uber has the virtue of not expecting you to fist-bump the driver. (They also make no pretense that they're a business, as opposed to Lyft which claims to be a "ride-sharing" facilitator.)
I had no idea until a couple of days ago that the deal with Lyft was that any random whoever could go pretend to be a taxi for a few hours. Shady!
On the other hand I had forgotten until my last visit how egregiously, impossibly shitty the taxi situation is in SF. So, you know, they kinda deserve whatever disruption they get.
I had no idea until just now. That's really how it works? How do you get the stupid mustache? How is this not a dream come true for a creepy dude?
17: Particularly shady since most people's auto insurance policies exclude commercial use. I wonder how many people have been bitten by that so far.
19: Yeah, you're supposed to sit in the front seat and make conversation with the driver to maintain the fiction that you're just catching a ride from a friend you haven't met yet.
Ars Technica has had good articles on some of the stuff in 12:
What's so impossibly, egregiously shitty about the taxi situation in SF?
23: you call one on a saturday night and it's a solid hour at least before one shows up? They're impossible to hail anywhere outside of the central city?
That sounds a lot better than the taxi situation in Pittsburgh. Why don't the big-brained boffins at CMU cook up quasi-legal schemes to deal with these problems?
More seriously, why is the concept of "venture capital" so insanely limited geographically?
14: I was thinking specifically of their cluster-fuck of an Android app, where they basically did no pre-processing of feed information on the server. Instead they would send tons of raw data to be processed by a dinky little phone-based client on the end of a potentially dodgy wireless connection. And then give hand-wavy excuses about shitty performance.
Also, I never enjoyed having to explain to my boss why the stupid like button suddenly reset to zero likes on his favorite page.
26.1: I just took one. Sixty bucks, but it was right there because they like airport trips. New cab, wheel chair accessible and very spacious.
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Sort of on-topic: this opinion piece on Boeing, by financial analyst Richard Aboulafia. The short version is that Boeing management has been focusing on short-term profits, guided by financial metrics that may not reflect the long-term health of the company. This isn't the first time Aboulafia has complained that Boeing management is neglecting its core engineering talent, but this time he's arguing that it's more than a struggle between two competing viewpoints ("finance" vs "engineering"), it's actually damaging the performance of the company.
Moreover, from a broader perspective, these are the kinds of manufacturing/export jobs the US is trying to retain. But the public interest in keeping these jobs doesn't align with the goals that Boeing's management seems to be pursuing.
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Boeing's management has chosen a whole lot of outsourcing, good for MBAs with spreadsheets and bad for union guys in WA.
The biggest hope for US manufacturing jobs for now is very cheap natural gas compensating for the cost of higher wages.
I actually think US aerospace manufacturing is viable, though. Large components of the 787 were indeed outsourced... to Japanese industry, so it was obviously more about risk-aversion than high labor costs. Moreover, as everyone else in the small-airliner business* can attest, the Airbus-Boeing duopoly is well situated to keep out any lower-cost competitors.
*(Bombardier, Comac, Embraer, Mitsubishi, Antonov and Sukhoi... this means you!)
Sure, similarly turbines, vacuum systems, fast lasers, lots of high-end gear. But Boeing management in particular I do not think sees even their engineers much less their machinists union as helpful partners.
I hate those mustaches.
Über doesn't bother me. Richer people get better service, news at 11. Leap needs to get nailed for using bus stops.
On the general topic, last time I worked for a VC funded company, the CEO (one of the VCs, after he displaced the founder had this cute trick of asking me how long it would take to build/test/integrate/deploy a particular new feature, then cutting the estimate in half as my deliverable. I'm surprised the stuff we built didn't suck more than it did.
I wonder how much of the Boeing-vs-unions conflict is driven by tangible issues, and how much of it is cultural? Or maybe it's all gotten blurred together now.
this cute trick of asking me how long it would take to build/test/integrate/deploy a particular new feature, then cutting the estimate in half as my deliverable.
Always pad your estimates.
Oh man. This entire worldview is so frustrating to me because it is fundamentally based on the false notion that people are all treated equally. Seriously: In their world, there is no power differential, no matter what. Every transaction is between equals, even when the world is manifestly not equal.
Can you imagine Henry Louis Gates using Airbnb and having the cops called on him for being a "stranger" (read: black person) fumbling with the keys at his rented front door? Can you imagine the police not giving him the benefit of the doubt when he said he made arrangements with a stranger over the Internet who said the key was going to be under the blue flowerpot but it wasn't?
All of these services are perfectly useful and usable until they aren't. They all solve one set of problems, but create another. Maybe some people think those tradeoffs are worth it -- heck, in certain circumstances, *I* think they're worth it.
But man, it makes me unutterably angry to have to deal with people who think there aren't tradeoffs.
(Fairness compels me to add that Latoya Peterson at Racialicious did have an interesting article a few moths ago about why she liked Uber because she could actually be guaranteed a ride, unlike taxis that would refuse to stop and/or refuse to go where she wanted to go.)
24 23: you call one on a saturday night and it's a solid hour at least before one shows up? They're impossible to hail anywhere outside of the central city?
Isn't that the taxi situation in all but, I dunno, 3 cities in the US?
I feel like Silicon Valley is slowly poisoning a lot of our intellectual culture. Like the physics postdoc I know who got enthusiastic about trying to find a way to apply his skills to doing actually useful things for the world, but quickly devolved into talking about what sort of things the VCs look for, and who suggested in all apparent seriousness to me that we could go a long way toward solving the problem of global warming by building an iPhone app that tells people how much carbon they're using on their daily commute.
Also, it seems like for a lot of people I know, living in the Bay Area long enough asymptotically makes the probability that they believe something like "the most pressing problem facing mankind is that AIs will enslave us all" approach one.
This is one of those nights where I'm talking to myself, isn't it?
That Packer article didn't seem all that bad on the surface. I mean, there's not much more than surface, but eh. The Tkacik article seemed ok too. Everything's ok. I'm ok. Ok?
Oh, right, there was an OP. There were articles in the OP. Maybe I should look at them.
Now that I've read the linked articles, I think I disagree with the OP. I thought Packer very clearly knew his targets were odious. It doesn't read like a puff piece to me at all. It's all about how self-absorbed the Silicon Valley elites are and how little their idea of political engagement is connected to reality. But it's late; maybe nosflow's reading is the right one.
I see barely ANYTHING positive in the Packer article, far from being a puff piece. Paragraph after paragraph of techies being encouraged to talk until they say something oblivious or pompous. Lots of outside commentators expressing their concern about the obliviousness and pompousness of techies. Lots of worried commentary about inequality and the frivolous use of vast wealth. The author shaking his head at regular intervals about how oblivious these people are, that they think their problems resemble at all the problems of the outer world.
The underlying themes are that these guys are oblivious to the triviality of their parochial concerns, they have no knowledge of how either government or capitalism works in the real world, they have no knowledge of the problems that real people face, their libertarianism is weirdly naive, they are the ultimate exemplar of the increased inequality in our society, and their obsession with making things look FUN is both naive and parochial. Making it all the more annoying that Tkacik decided to write a "review" that looks like a Matt Taibbi impersonator blathering about a Thomas Friedman impersonator.
46: Yes. Although her review is about his book, and not having read his book, I don't know how far I can extrapolate from his article. Still, my sense from the article is that he's someone who has his head in the right place. The Tkakic article reads like the sort of not-really-an-argument piece that can be a perfectly good way to savage someone like Friedman who your audience will already know about and kinda hate, but isn't really the way to convince anyone of anything they didn't already believe.
pwnt. It took a while to write 46 because I started trying to incorporate quotes from the article, but gave up in a rage because of the thing that websites do now where whenever you copy and paste something it is augmented with a paragraph of text telling you to read the article you were just reading.
Also, when I wrote "But it's late; maybe nosflow's reading is the right one", I was doing that thing I tend to do where I make some halfhearted gesture even though what I really think is "whoa, that is totes wrong in an unambiguous way". I should stop doing that, 'cause it's kinda disingenuous. I think it's some awful academic norm I've absorbed, to try to avoid saying outright that something is wrong.
I prefer your academic norm of saying "I am right and I am definitely right. You may be right too, somehow, I gues." to the one in my discipline, where we say "This data supports a preliminary hypothesis which would suggest that I might potentially be right."
I've slogged through the Packer article, and I agree with essear and neb. The article is designed to make the people in it look like tools, without outright calling them tools. Newsom comes off particularly badly.
Insomnia prompted to read the articles in the OP. I agree with the late 40s-early 50s numbered comment consensus, whatever the Packer article is it's not a puff piece. I should caveat this comment by saying that I found the Tcasklasck (sp) article literally incomprehensible, so maybe Nosflow was right that it's excellent #physicsslam.
i thought the Packer article was overlong and suffered from an excess of "showing not telling" that relies on your audience following a series of baseline assumptions that you have not spelled out. This is possibly the thing that most annoys me about the New Yorker.
I found the Tkacik article lazy and personality-focused in a way that I don't typically associate with her writing. Usually I like her stuff a lot.
Possibly I am just grouchy.
it's a regular failure mode of hers; she's usually pretty keen on argument by juxtaposition, and when the organisation breaks down, you get word salad.
Seriously, what is the point of the multi-paragraph passage about Eric Weidner? It looks like an extended experiment with Extreme Guilt By Association Tactics Volume Five: The Catch-22, from which I concluded that not just are liberals contemptible for ignoring the wise words of Hernando De Soto just because he used to be a right-wing asshole, liberals are also contemptible if they DO listen to him now because he isn't actually saying anything he wasn't saying 13 years ago when he was a right-wing asshole. Aha! Bunch of dumb comfortable liberals.
And was he really a major public figure speaking about the MERS mortgage registration network anyway? Just odd.
56.1 The New Yorker pays by the word.
I still don't know what to make of MERS. It was intended to replace a system that was pretty sclerotic. It seems like a shortcut that would lead to exploitation by hurried greedy lenders, but I can't work out who lost money as a consequence.
I still don't know what to make of MERS
Kissinger said the USSR was Upper Volta with nukes; I say the US is like a big Guatemala that every so often invents jazz, the Liberty ship, or Google.
The underlying themes are that these guys are oblivious to the triviality of their parochial concerns, they have no knowledge of how either government or capitalism works in the real world
Basically I think Witt is right about this (in 54). Essear, your physics postdoc with his idiotic ideas about global warming and iphone apps: do you think the people in Packer's article come off as tools to him?
57: When MERS screwed up the docs so that there wasn't clear ownership of the note, the lender lost money.
Local governments lost money. Registering and keeping track of titles is a big source of income for them, I think.
Essear, your physics postdoc with his idiotic ideas about global warming and iphone apps: do you think the people in Packer's article come off as tools to him?
Hey, he IS one of those people. That's like asking if Roger Ailes thought the people in "The Selling of the President 1968" come off as tools.
Well, I mean, there are people like those people who aren't already one of those people. I guess I just wanted to see something more ruthless. And more explicitly ruthless.
60. OK, interesting but still puzzling. Are the lenders opposed to MERS then? Does MERS admit to having screwed up when they both a) genuinely fuck up or b) cut corners ?
60 -- I wonder just how much money was really lost on account of this confusion.
Huh, my earlier comment got eaten. To 58, cadastral registries run by central governments are IME more reliable and rigid. But these exist in places where the mortgage system is such that young people can't easily buy a place to live-- no long term mortgages, very high down payments, which means that effectively parents buy the young couple a place when they want to and can afford it.
To be fair to the "physics postdoc with his idiotic ideas about global warming and iphone apps", I know a buncha honest-to-nelly Cassandras-since-the-1970s tenured on the IPCC testify before Congress climate scientists who think we need every last *sliver* of seemingly stupid little behavior tweaks, because we aren't going to get a big policy change until it's possibly too late, and every shift in behavior and dependency now is worth it.
The shorthand for this is the proportion of the Senate representing states dependent on coal, which is large. 48, maybe?
I don't think anybody knows where the emergy of cellphones, or of the Internet of Things, balances out against more efficient use of built stuff, should we achieve that.