Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

absolute hero imo

Man stole https://boingboing.net/2019/03/24/evaldas-rimasauskas.html?fbclid=IwAR0zPBGWxFPt3EWa9chp9eQdVhsjJJ8KNpshFUe2n2qPwj9EOeRa3m_hwDQ22m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills, which the companies dutifully paid

jeezus

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/24/evaldas-rimasauskas.html?fbclid=IwAR0zPBGWxFPt3EWa9chp9eQdVhsjJJ8KNpshFUe2n2qPwj9EOeRa3m_hwDQ

as much a hero as anybody who commits corporate fraud, i guess

that's fucking balllllller

ok finally found the theranos doc. was good but well over long and a bit unsatisfying since the story itself isn't over.

it had enough content not in the book to be interesting on its own

the emotional reaction of the fortune magazine (lol) reporter pausing and eventually choking out the word “horseshit” was great

holy shit at that boingboing link. ?!????

Dude I would settle for defrauding Facebook for like 100 grand

fake invoices. that's all. that is GOOD MONEY. ffs. that's like... think of the number of people that money has touched, the lives wrapped up in it. you know tons of it is still squirrelled away. either transformed into other enterprises, or property registered through interlocking shell companies, not to mention all the more personally grubby behaviour it's probably enabled

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-product-shutdowns-are-damaging-its-brand/

amadeo makes some good points here

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/now-its-microsofts-turn-for-an-anti-diversity-internal-revolt/

Don't know why I went into the comments on that article but I did and even though I generally expect the worst I never expected this kind of thing:

Or maybe women aren't the ideological monolith that you seem to think they are? My wife is going into STEM (she's majoring in web design) but she's opposed to women's suffrage (meanwhile I'm not).

I'm going to charitably assume that this person doesn't know what "women's suffrage" means.

women's sufferation

found the followup post after much wtf-like reactions to that post:

Correct, I don't see why that's so baffling though? Back when suffrage was gained it's likely that the majority of women didn't even want it at the time: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/05/did ... -the-vote/

That's certainly changed since, but there are still plenty of women (my wife being one) who believe that women as a whole vote in ways detrimental to society.

I have no doubt that women can be better at misogyny than men

for whatever "better" means in this context

also, cool, web design gets to be STEM now

imagine paying $200 million for a company that thinks cheddar is the cheese has holes in it pic.twitter.com/DUsIc60TQE

— bobby finger (@bobbyfinger) April 30, 2019

It was a strategic logo decision, bobby.

— Melissa Rosenthal (@MelisOnCheddar) April 30, 2019

Good point.

A piece of Cheddar would have been a flat, orange block.

— Melissa Rosenthal (@MelisOnCheddar) April 30, 2019

not just any old logo decision, a STRATEGIC logo decision, checkmate haterz

maybe the holes are mouse nibbles

or perhaps you are rich and at one of those restaurants where a clever chef tries to trick you into thinking you are eating a different type of cheese. maybe they also place the hole filled cheddar cheese onto a bag of air that blows pepper jack smell on your face.

the holes are where the money goes

only if u want a UTI

Fetch me my brown shirt! pic.twitter.com/LjovKlwU0G

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) May 7, 2019

to be fair it would be a brown hoodie

Read this ending and died dead. https://t.co/WjTMbBtRm9 pic.twitter.com/6VoNFjgOY4

— Mark Bergen (@mhbergen) May 15, 2019

holy shit that whole piece

I still don't completely get the entire coworking space model and I'm not sure my confusion is wrong

i think it's like working in a coffeeshop except there's no coffee and there are more successories posters around??

at an absolute base level coworking spaces are decent for people who do remote work in an area away from a company's main office or have their own business and need somewhere to occasionally work around other people, socialize, and use office facilities like a conference room

working in one 100% of the time makes less sense, because traditional offices generally have seating you're meant to be in more hours of the day, and if you're lucky you get more than a couple square feet of space. coworking is like... a long table and a less-ergonomic chair and you sacrifice personal space for notional amenities

I work in an indie coworking place now and I have had a month in a WeWork. For remote people they are good as an idea. The vibe in WeWorks is weird and not pleasant. And in a corporate finance sense WeWork is a real estate Ponzi scheme grift on SoftBank as far as I can tell.

'my superpower is change'

love how the article goes on about all kinds of shit without ever explaining what WeWork actually does. good indicator what they actually do.. is beside the point

i thought that was a deliberate choice since the ceo is such a knob

i have been hunting for like 30 mins to find ilx's original YTMND thread, but maybe we never had one?

anyway, pour one out for an internet thing that was great and is now dead and impossible to imagine seeing its like again.

i did find what i think is its first mention here:

I pointed this out on another thread, but best site ever: www.yourethemannowdog.com< br>
My friend used to have his alert be a clip of Mike Patton asking "Safeway?", which he blurted out randomly in the middle of a Mario Bros. cover.
― Vinnie, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

HOLY SHIT. I've never seen such brilliance. Oh my god, that's almost as good as Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
― Ally, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guess what's STILL around

http://superbad.com

I still don't completely get the entire coworking space model and I'm not sure my confusion is wrong

― mh, Wednesday, May 15, 2019 8:29 AM (one week ago)

i think it makes the most sense for people who live in areas where the cost of renting private office space would be ridiculously expensive, and their homes aren't really suitable for some of their work: either because of size or sharing with others (including small children). People that pay for co-working space because being around other people typing on laptops and checking their phones is comforting to them or increases their productivity ... I do not understand these people, like this is the opposite of me.

like if I had to do the co-working space thing, I would be spending so much time on ilx and facebook posting about all the awkward, stupid and annoying people in the co-working space rather than doing my own work

I’d bookmark that thread.

xxp no, that is the part that completely makes sense

The entire part where 90% of their marketing is about start-up weirdness and sub-TED talk stuff and whatever the hell the wework guy is on about all the time, that is the nonsense

also why do most of the pictures look like ergonomic nightmares

i think the ergonomic nightmares are definitely related to the sub-TED talk stuff

it's more about the idea of a comfortable chair

maybe they also want to disrupt chairs

xp to goole: in that post, I said I already posted it in another thread! So there must be an earlier mention of YTMND unless I was lying, which is a very real possibility

Also, this may be the first time I was first at anything

so I was working for a blockchain startup until recently. technically I still "work" there - they haven't fired me or laid me off - but they stopped paying me and two other people at the beginning of May. the three of us were the only employees being paid; the senior staff had gone without since mid-January and a host of technical workers (and at least one lawyer!) since a little after that. they raised a fuckton of money about a year and a half ago but blew threw the vast majority in less than a year, largely on trips, big salaries (incl at least one hefty severance package), and stupid marketing stunts. since mid-October (a little after I was brought in full-time; I'd done some work for them as a contractor), we've been hearing that new sources of funding are "just being held up by red tape" etc. the three of us were told that should there end up being any difficulty in making payroll, we'd be told in advance; another lie, and they wound up getting a couple weeks' worth of free labor out of us. we're filing a claim with the ministry of labor to get that covered but idk what sort of timeline we can realistically expect anything to happen in

anyway the really wild part is that a number of coders, graphic designers, marketers, and other skilled workers have been working for free for *months*, and the way they've gotten away with this is:

1. selling employees and contractors on the potential value and utility of the technology and its potential use cases, including "social impact" applications
2. promising said employees etc. that WHEN (not if) funding inevitably comes in, they'll be offered (cash) bonuses and/or (token) equity (they made us an offer to come back to work that included both; we didn't bite as it was strictly conditional based on said ever-elusive funding coming in)
3. once senior/c-level staff had committed to forfeting a salary, they quietly started informing other employees about it, thus normalizing working for free / subconsciously making people feel like assholes if they had the temerity to insist that getting paid on time / getting paid at all was too much to ask. if you've never had the experience of being paid for a job whilst you're surrounded by people who aren't....well, it's weird, and bad, in a lot of ways that are tough to articulate.

would it surprise anyone to learn that the CEO's background is in multi-level marketing?

anyway I don't regret it cause I got in at the right time (I was well-paid) and got out just slightly too late and I met some excellent people. but man if you're ever gonna consider working for a startup, make sure you *really* do your homework.

how many employees were there total, at peak?

tough to measure for a variety of boring reasons but I'd say about 15 employees and a constellation of contractors. at least one of the firms we worked closely with ended up having to lay off a number of staff because we stiffed them.

(15 not including execs)