The rest of the tech world probably rejected it because of point 1- why provide those leeches with any public support, make them get jobs as greeters at Walmart mechanical Turks like other productive people.
If there's one thjng I associate with tech darlings like Theranos and Lending Club it's good governance.
Is there any way to convince Congress to support* Thiel's floating libertarian paradise? I think that it would be a really great test case of his revolutionary ground breaking creatively disruptive idea here. Once he proves how well it works out in the middle of the ocean then he could come back here and people would totally support him!
*Mandate, use military force to ensure that he do it, whatever
Theranos is a lovely example of the stupidity of Silicon Valley. AFAICT their entire business model consisted of doing medicine without oversight from the FDA. How does anyone fall for that?
I've been pushing a one-point insane national reform for years on the internet. Where's my profile article?
4: Remember the late 90's? Endlessly hyped companies with no real plan for profits, skyrocketing real estate, etc. It's back, baby.
5: come on, Halfordismo is more than just a single bullet point. It's a well-worked out comprehensive programme of governance.
While Theranos didn't provide a device to Hopkins, Walgreens got a prototype, and members of Dr. Rosan's team set it up in a cubicle.
The prototype came with kits to perform esoteric tests that other labs and test makers apparently didn't offer, producing results such as "low" and "high" rather than numeric values.
As a result, Walgreens couldn't compare results from the Theranos machine to any commercially available tests.
Eric Schmidt's first day in office.
"I've fired all of the government employees. Now I'm ready to address the American people. Call the television networks and turn on the camera in the Oval Office. Uh . . . is anyone around who knows how to call the networks and turn on the camera?"
Two weeks later:
"No, I can't address the hostage crisis today. I have to print, sign, and mail the two million pension checks to all of the former government employees."
11.4: I think the new computer system he created overnight by brilliance would direct deposit all of those checks in those people's accounts for him with absolutely nothing going wrong ever. Nothing going wrong and no mistakes ever being made is what makes computer based systems superior and more reliable than having actual people doing it.
Just to clarify for anyone who hasn't clicked through, Eric Schmidt himself is not proposing that he be made CEO of America. That is the wish of Justine Tunney, anticapitalist, self-described "champagne tranarchist", Google engineer, Occupy Wall Street veteran and (arguably) co-founder, and creator of online petitions that attract two signatures.
Yes. Justine Tunney is a horrible person. It's unfortunate that she's also a good programmer so her neo-reactionary views are given more credence than they should via her Google (NY, I believe) employment. It's absurd to assign her views to "the tech industry" in some general sense.
Why does an anticapitalist want America to have a CEO? Should I devote more than 30 seconds of my attention to this madness?
Are rich people crazier now than they used to be? Has anyone done a study of changes in the lunacy of the ruling class over time? Can you give out an award for "history's most bonkers elite"?
The article isn't about rich people. It's about middle-class people who want to be ruled by rich people.
Calling Rene Girard a conservative academic puts him on the wrong scale, I think.
I guess it does talk about Thiel at the end. I got too depressed to finish it in the middle.
Schmidt himself, far from wanting to be CEO of America, wanted Barack Obama to be president, and donated and campaigned energetically to make it happen (he's now on a couple of science and technology advisory boards, one for the White House and one for the Pentagon).
His big political idea is renewable energy: in 2008 he said "The strongest position I have taken from an economic point, with Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama, has been to try to solve all of our problems at once. And the easiest way to do that, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and over time attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. The Google calculations, which we announced about a month ago, indicate that over a 22-year period, you can save a trillion dollars by investing in these technologies, including plug-in hybrids, and thereby reduce our reliance on oil."
So, not obviously nuts.
16: My anecdotal impression is that the rich tech libertarians really are crazier than your garden variety rich people, or at least they're more will to say crazy things in public.
15: because she is an amazingly talented troll, and no.
If William Gibson hasn't written a book about chan trolls taking over a major political party and having a field day of trollery, now's their chance. The whole Dark Enlightenment movement is run by people who seem to posit that if Thomas Carlyle were alive today, he'd be haunting /r/theredpill and producing some really dank memes.
Now's their chance s/b now's Ajay's chance.
The whole Dark Enlightenment movement is run by people who seem to posit that if Thomas Carlyle were alive today, he'd be haunting /r/theredpill and producing some really dank memes.
Paul Ford recently described Thiel's notes for his Stanford class (& how the fuck did Stanford descend so far into prostitution that it wound up hosting Thiel?) thus: "His writing (teaching?) style is almost hilariously bleak and contemptuous: like J.G. Ballard and George Bataille collaborating with Geoffrey Moore".
I've been following these morons for a while. It should be no surprise that they love love love this year's Republican nominee.
BBC radio did a programme the other week called Silicon Valley Values, which touched on many of these issues. Not much that would be news to anyone here, but I did chuckle when Tim Draper, explaining why government should "get out of his hair", pointed to how Chinese crowdfunding sites can "do so much more for their citizens and make so much more progress because they are unfettered by the regulatory environment". I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the interview took place before China's largest crowdfunding site was revealed to be a Ponzi scheme.
27 last seems unduly generous. Venture capitalism as actually practiced seems close to Ponzi scheme much of the time.
"Invest in my unprofitable company in a nonexistent market and receive the exclusive right to sell shares in my company to others!"