The author bashes ride sharing and home rental apps then goes on to talk about how we should improve markets. Both of these served to discover the real market value of things (taxis are garbage and people were forced to use them so now people flock to uber/lyft/whatever, rent control is literally an attempt to regulate that something is worth less than it is).
Then the author asks the ominous "do we want a 150mph thing driving itself"? Self-driving cars are still in development and they are already safer than people. Planes travel 500mph and they fly themselves. A spacex rocket flies itself.
I'm starting to think this author is a bit daft and is just reducing things to, "I don't like the change that is happening because it's scary. I'll stick to my horse and buggy."
Regulation of markets has a purpose. You might disagree with it, how it was implemented or say that it's not keeping up with reality but that doesn't mean that skirting regulation doesn't give us just another flawed market.
People don't seem to understand that we have entered the information age. The challenges are increasingly not technical, but in really understanding the what you're doing.
Very frequently regulations are blunt hammers that solved one problem and created many more. The people attracted to politics that actually make these rules normally have almost no grasp of economics and pass rules that are completely brain dead. I'm happy companies are willing to take risks to challenge obviously stupid protection rackets.
> Both of these served to discover the real market value of things
- Airbnb served to discover that someone always pays the cost of negative externalities.
- Uber served to discover the above, plus that in an environment with low interest rates and significant underemployment, a company can run losses indefinitely while paying peanuts. Calculate the net wage next time you take an Uber, accounting for their cut, depreciation, and a (generous) 75% utilization. That's only feasible at a loss while using funny money to pay desperate people. The Uber app is excellent, credit them for that. They were in the right place and time and executed very well on mobile+geolocation. But they've discovered nothing about market value.
(not interested in the "blah, blah, AI, logistics company" magical thinking. People who say that have short positions in Uber. Uber is Twitter: they could have been a profitable mid-size company making an excellent living selling all sorts of mobile service provisioning; in a capital crunch they cannot afford to pay drivers a market-clearing wage and pay back their over-inflated expectations)
It's just a silly comparison overall. A car (electric especially) can't go 150 mph because of kinetic energy, fuel density and drag. If you deal with these things by putting it in a controlled environment, getting an external power source and grouping vehicles you've built a train.
Context matters. It's not the same when the context is different (a.k.a "abstraction's downside" - comparing apples and oranges made easy by ignoring - abstracting away - the differences as if they don't matter, without bothering to show that's true).
Yes, the vast majority of problems startups aim to solve are really "first world problems". All those "help us changing the world" snippets you find even in job offers here in HN, are naïve in the best case, and insulting in the worst.
On the other hand, it's unfair to expect them to take the role of "society's saviors": many of the real problems should be the domain of governments and policy.
Expecting for-profit, private companies to solve those it's a huge cop-out and unrealistic.
For a long time now, entrepreneurs have been solving the 'convenience' problem, as they have found that it what makes them the most money.
It's not about solving important 'problems' for most - it's about how they can make the most money, and that is usually by providing more convenience to people.
This is, of course, how business works in a capitalist society - the issue is that the problems they solve are often marketed as being the most important, whereas they're just selling a dream.
I'm sure they would solve the major problems if they could and there was sufficient money in it - look at how the drugs companies operate - but this is (and has always been) about money.
Amazon are running their competition for better robot picking - are they also running competitions for how to help people whose jobs are replaced by robots ?
Silicon Valley has a single role - to make (more) money for those people investing into it. That's all. There's little to no philanthropy, and when there is it's generally from people who are already far wealthier than is required to live (an excessively comfortable) life.
Seems obvious, really. The people who have the money to pay others to solve problems for them are likely to have already had all their basic problems taken care of.
Tangentially reminds me of Dave Rossum, founder of synthesizer company E-mu systems, who jokes that the problem with building a business on selling to musicians is that your customers are always broke.
Halfway through your comment I thought of the analogy to drug companies, which solve problems like impotence rather than Ebola because the people with impotence have lots of money and the people with Ebola don't. Worse than even solving the so called first-world-problems, they invest a fair amount of time on "evergreening" which is basically fraud or at the very, very best rent-seeking. Yet, you then used them as an example of an industry solving the big problems.
I meant to use them as an example of monetising the solution of problems - but not necessarily solving problems for money.
They find that they have solved a problem (not necessarily the one they were looking to solve) and then make huge amounts of money in selling the 'solution'. Of course, the majority of their solutions are also for problems of convenience - easing the symptoms but not curing the problem.
I apologise if it came across as supporting them - I am certainly against the monopoly of big pharma, in the same way that GMO is also capitalising on convenience.
Do you find such reductionism to be actually useful outside of self-congratulations for posting politically correct rhetoric? Or, although I doubt it, do you actually believe that's an accurate and intellectually honest summary?
I keep meaning to start a blog that catalogues the many random and bizarre things that are accused of being "politically correct" on HN, but it's the first time it's actually happened directly to me.
Which bit of my comment is politically correct? Or, assuming you're using it in the modern meaning of "something I don't like", I'm still not sure what bit of my comment you didn't like.
Yes, to re-iterate, I think the incentives of drug manufacturers are tilted in many ways including a) towards drugs that serve wealthy customers, b) towards drugs that will be taken every day for the rest of their lives, c) towards drugs that can be protected by patents.
I further think that some of the behaviours in the industry tend towards the unethical, e.g. evergreening a patent-free drug and then using the well catalogued failures of modern science to "prove" that it's better than the patented drug by leaving any negative findings in the file drawer and only publishing the positive ones, and then doing things like withdrawing the older drug from sale and bribing doctors to use the newer drugs.
Appropriately enough, I've taken a medicine which as one of the side effects, can cause permanent impotence or loss of orgasm, as well as suicide and many other bad things.
It would appear that the evidence for that drug actually being effective in what it seeks to treat is controversial. It seemed clearly better till they realised that the drug companies weren't releasing the studies that showed it in a bad light. Effectively tossing a coin and only revealing they had done so when it matched their preferred outcome.
Never having sex again because you're dead sucks more.
Comparing the relative severity of problems, and saying that one is worse than the other, in no way implies that therefore the other problem isn't also a problem.
"many of the real problems should be the domain of governments and policy"
I think one of the issues illustrated in the article comes from the fact that Silicon Valley companies, in the name of "innovation", often say that their innovations are apolitical, which is never the case.
When Uber becomes the fare-setter for drivers and the government let them push their drivers below min wage, it is a political process.
It's not unfair to expect people shouting about changing the world (implication: for the better) to be working on things that change the world (for the better).
While certainly not all of them, and maybe not even a majority, there are a lot of loud voices of pro-capitalist boosters who absolutely expect that for-profit, private companies to be the only way to solve real problems and save society.
"People sometimes build software that sometimes have undesirable outcomes, so I have broad and vague concerns towards all software being build. Hey, why can't people instead build software that contributes towards other broad and vague (but this time good!) outcomes instead?"
SV has these costs because people come here to work for tech companies solving tech problems. A great way to eliminate those costs would be to force everyone to work on those lame problems with known technical solutions (at which point anyone looking for a technical rather than political challenge would just leave).
The solution to housing problems is to build more housing. Period. There is nothing interesting there. The only reason it hasn't been done is because it's blocked politically by current home owners that "don't want the feel to change".
>The solution to housing problems is to build more housing. Period. There is nothing interesting there. The only reason it hasn't been done is because it's blocked politically by current home owners that "don't want the feel to change".
The interesting problem would seem to be convincing home owners to want the change. Here's one innovative perspective on the issue:
Certainly there could be others as well. It seems like a lot of people are locked-in to the position that nothing can change unless we get a political coalition together to force the existing homeowners into a situation they don't desire (without properly compensating them). What has been/could be done to make them partners in the growth instead? What kind of new financial structures/contracts could be invented to deal with the types of issues that have been traditionally solved with "eminent domain"?
>What kind of new financial structures/contracts could be invented to deal with the types of issues that have been traditionally solved with "eminent domain"?
True, there is room to innovate there, but that's mainly political work. As a software engineer I have next to 0 interest doing that.
I was hoping to inspire thoughts of non-political solutions involving input and new ideas from economics, finance, sociology, etc.. Maybe some of these new ideas could come from someone with a software engineering background looking at things from a new perspective (networking theory, distributed systems, machine learning, etc.).
Economics and sociology require politics for anything meaningful to happen. You might be able to develop some interesting financial instruments, but they will still require politics to get them adopted.
What attracts me to tech is the fact that I can build things without regard to all of that. I'll admit it's selfish, but frankly life is too short to waste on something I don't care for.
I guess I've failed to express myself adequately, I'm looking for ideas that minimize the politics needed to get them adopted. Like it doesn't take politics to propose a $1 trillion buyout of least expensive homes in SF, which you would then use as a starting point to get the zoning laws changed to enable higher density construction.
>Like it doesn't take politics to propose a $1 trillion buyout of least expensive homes in SF,
It takes politics to actually push the idea to anywhere beyond the back of a napkin exercise. Once you even go into the question of who should pay for it, that's politics.
A friend of mine recently left London for a gig in SV, and I've heard nothing but complaints. The weather is lovely, but rent is insane, his new apartment is a shithole (and that's coming from a Londoner), and the commute is insane.
As an outsider looking in, it makes me laugh to see a bunch of smart people "changing the world" when they live quite uncomfortable lives themselves. I'm sure it's fulfilling to work on hard problems and try to create cool products and services, but it's surprising to see so much brain-power and willing in one place that is in desperate need of what appear to be quite basic services.
I was almost hit by an Uber driver who shouldn't have been on the road so, while I love this new taxi stuff, I have first hand experience with real negative externalities.
I was almost hit the day after a blizzard in Maryland this past January. My street had more than a foot of snow and was impassable for non-trucks. I was out walking my dog and there were dozens of other people playing and shoveling when an Uber driver in a small sedan came barreling down the street. I jumped out of the way while he went another 20 feet before he got stuck. I took a picture of his plate and yelled at him for driving recklessly. Before telling me to f-off he told me that 'if he slowed down he would have gotten stuck'. Being from a Northern state and knowing how to drive in snow, I was flabbergasted by the recknlessness of this. I contacted Uber and they assured me that despite endangering the health and safety of people, they gave the driver a stern talking.
I haven't stopped using Uber (though I use Lyft more now) but it wouldn't surprise me if that driver was operating an unsuitable vehicle in an unsafe manner because of the incentives created by surge pricing. These are real risks and costs which are not born by Uber and we shouldn't stick our head in the sand or shout down those who point them out as Luddites. It also doesn't mean we should get rid of these services.
Then the author asks the ominous "do we want a 150mph thing driving itself"? Self-driving cars are still in development and they are already safer than people. Planes travel 500mph and they fly themselves. A spacex rocket flies itself.
I'm starting to think this author is a bit daft and is just reducing things to, "I don't like the change that is happening because it's scary. I'll stick to my horse and buggy."