Monday, March 24, 2014

Silicon Valley: Time To Pop The Tech Bubble!

Fucking morons. When I was young we all hated the old, & deservedly so. Now the young deserve my unending contempt. (Maybe if young & old would stop fucking w/ me, no matter my age or theirs.) But just look at how idiotic these stupid idiots are.
And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many games (Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crappy Bird) and all those apps for what one start-up founder described to me as cooler ways to hang out with friends on a Saturday night.

Or take a company called Outbox, which cooked up the idea of charging customers $4.99 a month to collect, scan, and deliver snail mail to their e-mail account, a proposition for which it raised $5 million in venture capital. “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year. “It only works for people who come home at nine and go to work at ten and have everything else in life taken care of.” Which is to say, the most dynamic portion of the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy has taken it upon itself to replicate a service the U.S. government already performs quite ably. At least up until Outbox folded in January.
Jesus fuckingawddamn christ. How idiotically lazy can people be? I take the sloth/inertia cake & eat it too, but come on! Can we put some or all of these people to sleep?
When taken to its logical extreme, a tech sector that discriminates in favor of the young might produce an economy with some revolutionary ways of keeping ourselves entertained and in touch at all hours of the day and night. But it would be an economy that shortchanged other essential sectors, like, say, biotech or health care.

Before his thirtieth birthday, Mark Goldenson had already founded two tech start-ups, including an online game-show-playing company, for which he collectively raised more than $20 million. Both promptly failed. Finally, at age 30, he founded a company that helps people locate and receive psychiatric counseling online. It was an idea with potentially enormous social value in a country where millions have unaddressed psychiatric needs, but he never had more trouble raising money. “Sometimes investors ... paint with a broad brush,” he told me. “You’re more likely to make a hundred million dollars in another social network than taking a look at a weird tele-health thing.”
Priorities, people.

Oh, here's the motivation of one of the older losers portrayed:
He works all the time and is consumed by his company every second he’s away from it. For as long as he can remember, all he ever wanted to do was to build a start-up that would go public and send the stock tickers into tilt—the way Netscape did when he caught on to the start-up phenomenon back in 1995.
Still trying to "show mommy something," you shallow money-grubbing PIG? Jesus, use the above-mentioned start-up that helps fucked-up pieces of subhuman mongrel shit find mental health help, you sick fuck.

At last, an actual example of all sides on some inane issue or another "doing it," where "doing it" means existing as colossal assholes who need to be excised from the world, & probably the planet as well. Get the bulldozers going & push it all into the S.F. Bay.

3 comments:

mikey said...

God DAMN, am I tired of these bullshit media 'narratives' of Silicon Valley. And I'm a little irritated that Bouffant decided to buy into the bullshit mediat 'narrative' this time.

I've been in the Valley since '86. I've been working in 'StartUp Culture' for ten years. What do we build. Advanced distributed data managment platforms that allow for the processing and analysis of 'Web Scale' data. You know, like they use in Genomics and Climate modeling and public health. Pointless entertainment, I know.

What else? Oh, on demand virtual cloud-based compute infrastructure. You know, so a pharmaceutical researcher can build a 50,000 core supercomputer, analyze ten million proteins and turn off the supercomputer, all in seventeen hours for less than twenty thousand dollars. Try to build it the old way, you get ten thousand cores for two million bucks in two years. I know, just another Flappy Crappy.

What else. Oh yeah. Information security. We're all up in arms about cyber theft and cyber espionage and you know what? The old way of trying to PREVENT it isn't working too well. You might have noticed that the bad guys are winning. We're building a comprehensive security analytics platform that uses unstructured data from multiple resources to detect unusual and malicious activity on the network in real time, without having to know anything about the network or the vulnerability. Yeah, what good is hokey jokey shit like that, right?

Dude, they LOVE to tell these stories - they're click bait. But think about it - Silicon Valley isn't the interior decorator or fashion designer of the web, as much as they'd like to tell that story. Nope.

We're the fucking plumbers...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

The fake economy is bigger than the real economy. I couldn't sell my angry bird for one red cent and it was a real bird.

M. Bouffant said...

Yeah, Nixon's Plumbers Editor:
Aw, Gee-Zizz, can't a guy pull a few quotes describing the horror of humanity & painting people as short-sighted money-grubbing idiots & wrap it up w/ a call to murder, destruction & violence?

(Thought that's why I was here.)

And c'mon, no one said mikey personally is a V.C. douchebag. Indeed, knowing mikey may have a yr. or two on me, I was thinking his ability to get work in the S. Valley belies the narrative, but the reality is more like there are two Silicon Valleys, just as there are, at minimum, two Amurkas.

Need I clearly state that the mocking of the media goes w/o saying?

Meanwhile, the Bastard, (wooden) pecker in hand ...