Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I just kept thinking of the train in Snowpiercer! If these excruciating dipshits were one third as smart as they think they all are they'd be working on addressing climate change, but no, they need to save themselves from the government first.

obviously governments are less important than mega-corporations and businesses. those will replace the government. also, we will have very fast pizza delivery.

getting flashes of Jennifer Government from all of this in addition to Snow Crash

https://www.fastcompany.com/40466047/two-ex-googlers-want-to-make-bodegas-and-mom-and-pop-corner-stores-obsolete

url makes me angry

it's a dumb idea anyway

Who the fuck wants to buy milk and bread from an automat

feel like part of the long game of automation is removing any jobs where people do multiple things, especially when one of those things is human interaction

what a horrendous scheme. i predict that high-quality, fine-grained data will reveal a spike in the sale of baseball bats, followed by a mysterious spike in brodega robot boxes reporting technical difficulties.

Something additionally obscene in the how they designed their logo after bodega cats, which are a cute social media feature their shitboxes would also destroy.

The idea is easily hated but it's also indicative of late capitalism really having nothing left to cannibalize but itself. And all the ideas people have left appear to be dumb ones wherein a failed concept from many decades ago is revived and promoted as if it now has a chance because smartphones.

Plus the idea that anything deserves a sheen of credibility because the men behind it are "ex-googlers" is pathetic. No offense to any ex-googlers around here.

legendary gypsy-punk band Google Bodega

lol

Who the fuck wants to buy milk and bread from an automat

isn't this how Japan works

tbf automats mainly died in US cities because inflation combined with the failure of dollar coins meant that appropriate prices no longer corresponded well to quantities of loose change people were carrying around. at least that's what i remember from some reading a few years back. IN THEORY there could be some kind of market for a resurgence of automats in the same places they always flourished - dense urban areas, train stations.

but they offered hot food, cooked recently by the staff behind the wall of vending boxes. essentially an alternative to white castles and other early fast-food chains. doing this for random groceries seems at best like a more elaborate version of the vending machine, with a much crappier selection than even the most limited actual bodega. and all the other negatives obviously. lol at the idea that for example, one of these at a gym could sell protein bars! like... um... gyms already sell that stuff dude.

also i've eaten from an automat in amsterdam, was pretty gross but that might just be a disjunct between my idea of good late-night drunk food and that favored by the dutch.

what late-night drunk doesn't love a bunch of slimy pickled fish slathered in some kind of ketchup sauce

with a side of fried gravy orbs

actually maybe they should partner with the soylent people on this. bolus of grey slime, get yer bolus of gray slime here

We share the opinion of everyone in the country

http://www.theroot.com/america-unites-momentarily-to-hate-this-stupid-ass-bod-1806099889

https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corner-store-silicon-valley

Logistics analysis

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/ashamed-to-work-in-silicon-valley-how-techies-became-the-new-bankers

good lord https://t.co/pg1VZdEtE1 pic.twitter.com/iNgoWytag9

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) December 11, 2017

Wait is that dude saying the real GDP is the friends we made along the way

— R. (@rickyslams) December 11, 2017

lol I was like why do I have deja vu reading this and then got to the link

I'm much less enthusiastic about Tim Harford than I was ten years ago but this recent article makes a good point, that it takes a generation to figure out how to optimally apply a new technology, and The Web is maybe halfway there. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694

I can't even begin to formulate a coherent response to this sam altman (y combinator douchebag) run-on sentence of a blog post but I'm going to use this moment to vent

ARGH JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK YOU IDIOT

I'm not linking it, but I am sure someone will, and it is one of the dumbest tone-deaf things I've read

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway?utm_term=.tmyDZ8Lqe#.tcPMrxg1w

ted chiang 👌

I tried to express some of the same sentiments regarding moderation, although not nearly as clearly, on the ilx twitter thread

Ted gets it

Yeah, this is a good essay

Excellent

ted chiang i luv u

it's a good essay until the conclusion which is "why can't capitalism just be a bit nicer?"

^
Exactly

enh i dunno if it’s ted chiang’s job to come up with a cure for the illness he’s diagnosed

one of chiang's first short stories is a duel between flowers for algernon dudes who keep upping their smart drugs until one of them becomes a messiah, so basically his cure is elon musk and jeff bezos should be popping nootropics until one of them saves the planet.

can we have them popping opiates until both of them leave the planet instead pls

given their private little space race they've got going, they're certainly trying!

enh i dunno if it’s ted chiang’s job to come up with a cure for the illness he’s diagnosed

I think the problem is that he kind of does. Either way, it's a good essay.

hey everyone’s fav juice entrepreneur is back!

The most prominent proponent of raw water is Doug Evans, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. After his juicing company, Juicero, collapsed in September, he went on a 10-day cleanse, drinking nothing but Live Water. “I haven’t tasted tap water in a long time,” he said.

Before he could order raw water on demand, Mr. Evans went “spring hunting” with friends. This has become more challenging lately: The closest spring around San Francisco has recently been cut off by landslides, so reaching it means crossing private property, which he does under cover of night.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html

lol @ "raw water".

I hike, so get to drink from natural springs in the mountains and it is always great water, but lake water is just as "raw" as spring water and it is nowhere near as good. hell, if this guy wants really RAW stuff he should gather water from small streams that run through pastures where cattle graze. I guarantee that would be very lively water!

raw water is a real clarion call to roll out the guillotines

or what SZ said: "Little known fact: Roman shopkeepers were using the terms mouth feel and flavor profile to describe aqua right before the empire collapsed."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTmxwEpWkAAsp9l.jpg

abysmal real names

that’s a risk i’m willing to take xp

As a mixed martial arts fighter, Mr. Buttram said he would fight for a couple hundred bucks, sometimes a few thousand, and worked security at a start-up, but his main hobbies were reading 4chan and buying vintage pornography, passions that exposed him to cryptocurrency.

those north korean ballistic missiles can’t come fast enough tbh

From last week:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2018/01/08/latest-trend-fashionable-nonsense-raw-water/

welcome to the future, where the rich live on mars and no-one on earth has a job but, thanks to elon musk, everyone has a flamethrower

https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/boring_company_flamethrower_2048x2048.png?w=738

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/27/elon-musks-boring-co-flamethrower-is-real-500-and-up-for-pre-order/