Slashdot Mirror
Why Republicans Won't Retake Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini, who counts Google as one of his clients, sketches out a way that the GOP could 'win back' Silicon Valley — but he gets smacked down by tech businessman Francis Cianfrocca. 'Patrick's basic thesis is that the VC firms that fund the Valley will rebel at being regulated by [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner, who is talking about increasing reporting requirements for both private equity and venture capital. Assuming I understand them both correctly, something tells me that neither Geithner nor Ruffini understand deeply what venture capital is all about.'"
The GOP just needs to embrace that aspect of the party more.
but let's summarize the summary. A political guy says people will come to his side because they wont like what a politician from the other side will do. A business guy says both political guys are clueless. What makes this a Republican issue? Sounds like a politicians are stupid issue. (And I already knew that.)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
You know I have politics blocked from my slashdot front page for a reason.
Any thing with GOP in the title is without a doubt politics.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The "business as usual" thing is what got us all into this economic mess in the first place. I don't see what the problem is with a little more regulation of all things financial. Sure, it may suck for a little while, but it's the price we have to pay for 30+ years of financial shenanigans.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
...something tells me that neither Geithner nor Ruffini understand deeply what venture capital is all about.
Ponzi schemes... Duh!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Actual venture capitalists are relatively few, and their business reporting practices obscured from the average citizen's eye. High-five/six-figure-salaried software engineers who'll have to pay their "fair share" of Obama's triple-the-national-debt package sooner or later (since, like all rich people, they obviously lied/cheated/murdered the lower classes to get where they are) are probably more common. Even in These Perilous Economic Times (tm).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Whew, it's been a while since I saw a story on Slashdot that made me feel good about being a Democrat and patted me on the back for my beliefs. For a while, I almost started thinking for myself. I'm glad this got posted today (especially after the big blow to PirateBay that depressed me all morning...viva la piracy!).
I'm not convinced that the overall political leaning of Silicon Valley has anything to do with the respective benefits of the parties on the industry. Rather, it just so happens that the industry is made up, largely, of people who live in a pretty liberal area. Silicon Valley leaned Republican back when California, itself, leaned Republican, and hasn't leaned that way since. I live in an southeast red state, and by straw poll, the people involved in the tech industry here have politics that pretty heavily reflect the general population.
Silicon Valley isn't up for grabs because San Francisco isn't up for grabs.
that the "us vs them" bullshit is ruining america in every measurable sense?
There's full blown media war between fox (right) and msnbc (left), and the victims are anybody with the ability to absorb two opinions, then form their own.
If you are registered voter for either party, you are a follower, a simpleton, and are part of the problem.
Vote for the MAN, not the PARTY.
Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that they, and only they, understand things like economics, the military, and science. Republicans successfully deregulated the banking industry. Republicans gave unquestioning support for the military. Republicans were the lone voice speaking out against immoral, dangerous and unproven stem cell and evolution based "science". Republicans, and only Republicans, will be able to meet the challenges of the next decade. Vote Republican, because we rule.
It's what he thinks someone might possibly someday do (this all seems to be premised on something Geithner said as a brief aside). Must be a slow news day.
How is this a troll? Its kind of a tough position for someone living on either a) Mommy and Daddy's money, b) Subsidized student loans, or c) Scholarships to be truly libertarian. Yet middle class white kids do take that hypocritical position while undergrads fairly often. Seems like a fair thing to point out.
My Babylon
of ted stevens, unfortunately the complexity of the tubes seem unnavigable at this time.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's hard to take seriously an article that makes no mention of Sarbanes-Oxley, which effectively closed the IPO market for venture funded start-ups.
Whichever party cracks that door back open has a shot at winning big supporters from Silicon Valley.
Apolitical? Research donations online, it's easy enough to do. Venture capitalist contributions are large, and in the last election cycle went about 2 to 1 in favor of Democrats.
Could that go to 1 to 1, or even 1 to 2, in favor of Republicans? Certainly, it's up for grabs. Every day employment falls in Silicon Valley, even more so.
There's no plausible reason I've heard or can think of to regulate VCs more closely. They don't pose any systemic risk in the way that lending, derivatives, or insurance can. They're one manifestation of the big virtue in a sea of mixed issues with capitalism: entrepreneurship. If you lose, you lose your money, the business ceases to exist. If you win, you make money (potentially lots of money) creating and selling a viable business. That's it. No bailouts. Investors lose, people may lose jobs, but there's nothing else for anybody to do. All the arguments for regulation that make a certain amount of sense in other sectors tend don't seem to apply well here.
Heck, even if VCs for some reason COULD pose systemic risk, it's a small enough part of the economy (yearly less than what we're probably going to end up loaning to the auto industry) that it probably still wouldn't.
Tweet, tweet.
The Bush era GOP embraced the religious lunatics so much that the rest of America were eventually turned off by them and kicked them out of office. Like any ousted party, their ONLY role in life is to get back into power, which means fooling enough people who they'd turned off before to vote for them again. For this, they will try what the polls tell them they need to try, regardless of their real plans when they get back into power. Those plans will no doubt fall back to mirror the religious lunatics who can be relied on to "vote God". The same applies with the party in power, their ONLY goal is to stay in power. Beyond that, everything is false promises and rhetoric.
I used to think the GOP were all about the rich, conservative middle / upper classes who seek to be allowed to profit from everything without any limitations, and let the poor carry the tax burden. I used to believe the Democrats were a slightly more socialist version of the GOP. I used to think Obamma would be willing to change a few things in the balance of corporation / government / people, but the more I see his decisions, the more I was right to think that the system IS broken and needs to be changed in favor of the tax paying US people.
Politicians deal in speeches. Speeches talk AT the people, not WITH them. Speeches are pre-planned rhetoric carefully worded to mean many things to many audiences as well as written FOR a specific audience. Speeches are rehearsed and performed; not unlike actors on stage in a play. Actors play roles which are not them, doing stuff they wouldn't do, saying stuff they wouldn't say. It's performance lying....and politicians wonder why they are never believed.
If you strongly identify with the Democrats decrying Republicans or the Republicans decrying the Democrats, could you please just re-examine why you're allowing either of the two dominant political parties control you like a mindless sheep. These guys are pretty much all liars and using you. Until Americans think for themselves and hold office holders of all parties responsible for their actions, all the rest of this is cheering at a football game and useless for solving real problems.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about liberal kids who've never had to work a day in their lives at a serious job and seen entire double digit percentages of the money they need to live on getting taken away to pay for the government programs they support. It's easy to be a socialist when you aren't one of the productive members of society paying for the socialist state.
In my experience, geeks are generally in favor of civil liberties, but also in favor of significant government provision of public services, such as high-speed rail, NASA, and funding for the National Science Foundation. Many also support significant regulation of markets, such as more vigorous enforcement of antitrust law, and institution of net-neutrality rules.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd like to bring the idea of venture capital firms into focus for a minute, and I think it may be important to Slashdot.
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/04/asleep_at_the_wheel_of_creativ_2.html
It *is* harvard business school, so perhaps a grain of salt is required.
Although others may not agree with me, there is an important point in both the Democrat article linked by the summary and in the link above: Venture Capital is not a systemic risk to the financial system. Why? The articles disagree on that point, but I tend to think they are not doing what they are supposed to, and the reason why they aren't might be worthy of a moment of cogitation (or whatever).
Haque makes the argument that one major reason the downturn has been so bad is that VCs have not done what they are supposed to for the last 15-odd years: Invest in risky technology and bring in the new companies/ideas as the old ones crumble, not try to be completely safe and make a a gazillion dollars! The new technologies, processes, and ideas that are supposed to sweep in and replace the old broken ones (is there anyone to replace GM, Ford, and Chrysler, for instance?) are not here, they're 5-10 years out, such as Tesla Motors. Venture capital is supposed to be the creative force behind our economy (please argue with me here), while the market determines the worth of the product created and ultimately leads to the destruction of companies that do not pass muster.
The reason we had this bubble is because there was no real blockbusters worth investing in. Something had to be mocked up to look like a good investment, not only Real Estate, but things like social networking sites. There was even a recent Slashdot article, I believe, on Facebook's issues. Why are we pouring money into things like this (I'll cover my opinion on that in a moment)?
Haque's argument also states that America was the only really booming economy in the world for the last 100 years because it was the only real venture capital country. I'm not sure I completely agree (it's obviously more complicated than that) but I wonder if the point isn't partly true. By deciding to not take big risks in technology and science, by not funding the education necessary for people to actually take those risks, and by creating a culture where style matters over substance, perhaps the state of Venture Capital firms (and even silicon valley) is a reflection of the mindset that has led to the current economy.
In that regard, I'm not sure any political party should really want to control them. How innovative are they really going to be without visionaries willing to take big risks for their visions?
Yes, I know there are visionary benefactors out there, but if there's a discussion to be had surrounding VCs should we tie it back into innovation since this is Slashdot?
Are there any people here involved marginally with VC (I know I have been recently and have a story for another post) that can give us some perspective?
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Psycho-Sociologists refer to it as "The Ayn Rand Phase."
The University of California, Berkeley is one of the cheapest public universities you can attend. For that reason, claiming that only rich kids go to Berkeley, or simply comparing them to the peers that go to Harvard is not only a stretch, but a lie. Many students I know at Berkeley (yes, I am a research associate there) are paying their way through college, since it's actually quite affordable.
"extreme political views of all stripes are most often held by those whose beliefs have not yet been challenged by real-world experience."
I'm with you.
"Most often this is due to youth and inexperience,"
You lost me.
Might be more true of libertarians and liberals, but have you looked at some of the raving Neo-Con lunatics on TV? Most of them are old gasbags with lots of the wrong kind of life experiences.
They just don't believe that government and society are the same thing.
Which is one of the problematic elements of the philosophy. By the time you have a sufficiently organized society -- even one that only does the main things libertarians claim they want it limited to -- you have something that's essentially government, even if it doesn't fit the concept of the modern state. In short, Libertarianism seems very much like it'd like to have society without any societal impositions, and it's pretty reasonable to doubt that's even possible.
Obviously you can have degrees to which a society imposes on its individual members, and I agree with the idea that it's worth working to minimize that. The problem is if you also want to curb the degree to which individuals can impose on each other, you have inevitable tension between those two principles. So far, I haven't seen a stripe of Libertarianism that acknowledges and engages that problem effectively.
Tweet, tweet.