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Occupy Silicon Valley


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#1 stocks

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Posted 09 January 2014 - 05:13 PM

Protesters in San Francisco have blocked and in some cases vandalized buses meant to shuttle techies from their pricey digs in chic Bay Area neighborhoods to the campuses where they work.

The success of high tech is stoking a backlash. The Silicon techies no longer look to a lot of people, especially in the ever-critical Bay Area left, like the good guys:


It’s hard to see the sector as benign after a long list of revelations about worker safety shortcomings, tax avoidance schemes and privacy scandals. And it’s difficult to think of companies as virtuous when they contribute to trade groups deliberately distorting science or fund ads praising the Keystone oil pipeline.

“Many Valley companies engage in a kind of confused progressive rhetoric, but there is little reason to believe that these companies have small-l liberal values,” [Chris Hoofnagle, director of the information privacy programs at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology] said in an email. “The political agenda of Valley companies is not much different from the oilmen or the bankers. Tech, oilmen and bankers fund the same reactionary kooks in Washington that deny global warming and carry water for tobacco companies.”

That these same companies would suck the soul out of the Bay Area, as some worry they are doing, feels like a weird and painful betrayal—both to the techies who like to think of themselves as benign and progressives, and to the hipster left who thought that this corporate wave would be different.


http://www.the-ameri...-in-the-valley/
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#2 stocks

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Posted 09 January 2014 - 05:33 PM

Silicon Valley Is Living Inside A Bubble Of Tone-Deaf Arrogance

Former AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman apologized last week for a series of posts on Facebook in which he said that homeless "trash" had no place in the "heart of our city," San Francisco. He wrote:

"The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it's a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that's okay."

(It's ugly, class-war stuff. But Gopman isn't alone.)


Startup founders feel entitled to hate the poor:

Peter Shih, founder of a payments startup called Celery, wrote an infamous blog post in August about all the things he hates about San Francisco. Among his dislikes: the homeless, the transvestites, the women, and the cyclists.

His animus was similar to Gopman's in that he suggested there was a difference between "normal" people, like himself, and the poor, who don't have the same rights to certain neighborhoods that he does: "The difference between crime in SF versus crime in NYC is that the areas in which it happens are in much closer proximity to where normal upstanding citizens frequently travel. Imagine taking The Bronx and just having it take a [bleeeep] in the middle of Manhattan, that's kinda what the Tenderloin is like all the time," he wrote.




Read more: http://www.businessi...2#ixzz2pwWKbw7u
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#3 stocks

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Posted 10 January 2014 - 11:17 AM

When risk vanishes, so does creativity - MSFT/Nokia

When management and employees alike feel the security of dominance and near-monopoly, they are free to indulge in bureaucratic infighting and loss of focus. When risk has been vanquished, there is no compelling need to keep in touch with the market and customers: dominance/monopoly means they have to take whatever we provide and like it.

"To be effective and well compensated (within Microsoft), employees don’t need to be good at their jobs, they need to be good politicians. This turned Microsoft from a technology company into the U.S. Congress and therefore its software products started to resemble legislature by Washington’s finest — bulky and full of pork."


Tech darlings Samsung, Google and Apple are also huge companies with plenty of political jockeying and wasted resources--it goes with bureaucratic bloat




http://www.oftwomind...e-risk1-14.html
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#4 stocks

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Posted 18 January 2014 - 09:55 PM

Protesters in San Francisco have blocked and in some cases vandalized buses meant to shuttle techies from their pricey digs in chic Bay Area neighborhoods to the campuses where they work.

The success of high tech is stoking a backlash. The Silicon techies no longer look to a lot of people, especially in the ever-critical Bay Area left, like the good guys:


It’s hard to see the sector as benign after a long list of revelations about worker safety shortcomings, tax avoidance schemes and privacy scandals. And it’s difficult to think of companies as virtuous when they contribute to trade groups deliberately distorting science or fund ads praising the Keystone oil pipeline.


Google is hiring security guards to protect its work buses in San Francisco following protests over tech workers driving up city rents

San Francisco Google-workers travel to the office in plush buses with free games and wifi.
The buses have now been fitted with what appear to be security guards fitted out with earpieces.


In December, the window of a Google bus in Oakland was shattered and a photo taken by one of Google's employee passengers showed two people in front of the bus holding a profane anti-Google banner.

Other protests have been peaceful but disruptive, with activists temporarily blocking the corporate buses. One other Google bus in Oakland was targeted in December, plus a third bus at the same stop where the men with earpieces were observed this week.

Another commuter bus, believed to be taking employees to Apple Inc, was also targeted in December.

'They're bound to take steps to protect their workers,' said Mike Danko, a personal injury lawyer in San Mateo, California, a San Francisco suburb.



Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz2qoE7AI5Q
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#5 stocks

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Posted 23 January 2014 - 04:56 AM

Facebook will lose 80 percent of users, says Princeton study

The fad is ending.

Using epidemiological models used to study the rapid spread of disease, the researchers found that Facebook has "already reached the peak of its popularity and has entered a decline phase."

How bad will it get? Facebook will lose "80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017," according to the researcers. To explain why social networks are like infectious diseases, the study pointed to similar research done with ideas.

Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological model ... Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea
and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of “immunity” to the idea.



http://www.nbcnews.c...eton-2D11972165
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#6 stocks

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 08:50 AM

The push by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to expand the number of visas for high-tech foreign workers is an attempt to dilute a lucrative job market with
cheap, indentured labor.


H1-B Visas: Clever Trick for Cheap Tech Talent

I have a hard time understanding the notion that there's a severe need for more workers from abroad when wages for these jobs rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. You see stagnant wages for high skilled workers, when these
companies tell you that they desperately need high skilled workers. Why not raise wages to attract those workers?

In February 2013, Matloff published a report through the Economic Policy Institute, which came to two somewhat controversial conclusions about foreign students that graduate through U.S. programs.

He found that "on a variety of measures, the former foreign students have talent lesser than, or equal to, their American peers."



http://www.inc.com/e...ap-labor.html/1

Edited by stocks, 27 January 2014 - 08:52 AM.

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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#7 Rogerdodger

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Posted 27 January 2014 - 06:51 PM

Silicon Valley billionaire compares treatment of America's rich to Nazi persecution of Jews...

'Progressive Kristallnacht'...

Edited by Rogerdodger, 27 January 2014 - 06:52 PM.


#8 stocks

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Posted 28 January 2014 - 09:42 AM

Apple Inc. AAPL shares could see a near-40% fall

following disappointing earnings reports, said Bert Dohmen, president and founder of Dohmen Capital Research Institute, in an interview with CNBC on Monday. Declining profit margins and a
lack of technological innovation are behind his call. "Apple hasn't had any technlogical innovations since Steve Jobs left, and this is a company that's getting beaten by its competitors," Dohmen said.


"Now, we hear the next big item (iPhone 6) is going to have a larger (screen) size. Samsung has had that for two years." Dohmen said they have been recommending investors don't buy the stock since
six days after the top at $705 in September last year


http://www.marketwat...;dist=bigcharts
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#9 stocks

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Posted 29 January 2014 - 05:42 AM

The irony of it all. Silicon Valley counterculturalists have become a tool of the surveillance state.

What was once an anti-government tech counterculture is now a loyal tool of Uncle Sam’s massive domestic snooping schemes. Yes, of course, the techsters have become very rich tools, and they are as plugged into DC and politics (especially Democratic politics) as any railroad robber baron of yore.

In the words of Joel Kotkin, a centrist author and economic development expert:

For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush's ‘axis of evil.’ In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.


http://www.breitbart...hno-Determinism
-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#10 stocks

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Posted 10 February 2014 - 04:16 AM

The great growth cycle of Silicon Valley is ending. It lasted 36 years (1978-2014)

They can kiss their techno-toys and gossip-enabling software goodbye. The fall is going to be very painful for them - and for California.
-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.