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Silicon Valley Stays Quiet As Washington Implodes
dcblogs writes "In a better time, circa 1998, Cypress Semiconductor founder and CEO T.J. Rodgers gave a provocative speech, titled 'Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington D.C.' This speech is still important to understanding the conflict that tech leaders have with Congress, and their relative silence during the shutdown. 'The metric that differentiates Silicon Valley from Washington does not fall along conventional political lines: Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, right versus left,' Rogers said. 'It falls between freedom and control. It is a metric that separates individual freedom to speak from tap-ready telephones; local reinvestment of profit from taxes that go to Washington; encryption to protect privacy from government eavesdropping; success in the marketplace from government subsidies; and a free, untaxed Internet from a regulated, overtaxed Internet.'"
Stay strong apathetic non-voters. Don't bother. It's cool. Or whatever.
You know why the NSA was able to search social graphs and emails so easily? Because all of those pro-freedom Silicon Valley companies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and so on) had already built infrastructure for doing so for the purpose of selling adverts. The NSA just piggybacked on existing system to look for other information. If Silicon Valley had really cared about individual freedom, Google would have been pushing federated, decentralised services with no single point where you can insert a tap. Instead, what has happened since we've learned about the NSA's involvement? Google has replaced federated XMPP in GTalk with non-federated XMPP in Google Hangouts.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There is no such thing as what "silicon valley wants". It's not even a valley and it is definitely not made of silicon. But, that's beside the point. He basically makes it sound as if everybody there is libertarian without mentioning the word, but it is far from the truth. People who matter are involved with the government up to their necks, including all the things he says silicon valley is against: eavesdropping, subsidies, protectionism, non-free internet. All major tech companies maintain nice and expensive lobbyists in Washington. Not that I blame them, they have to live in real world and deal with the biggest and most powerful gorilla in the jungle and that is the government. And it's getting bigger.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The only difference is which rich assholes get richer.
The tech companies want to be given the ability to do anything to make a profit. The government wants to be given the ability to do anything to spy on us.
It's douchebags on both sides fighting for their piece of the pie -- we all get fucked over in the end.
Without a government that is forcing you to give your money to someone, those "assholes" have to compete with others for the privilege of serving you.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
What "competition"? Maybe in your libertarian fantasy world. But here in the real-world, powerful corporations collude, buy monopolies, crush any smaller competitors--and generally do everything to ensure that there is no real competition, and never will be. The "free market" is a bunch of horseshit shoveled to gullible suckers.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Eh, why so cynical? Look at history: there's good things to come out of every bad thing and bad things that come out of every good thing. Perhaps this will shock people into realizing that gerrymandering isn't something they can ignore. Perhaps tea party voters will start to question whether forcing people to buy healthcare is actually at all similar to fascism. Perhaps actual small government conservatives will take back control of their party, and we can actually cut wasteful spending rather than just cutting taxes and pretending that makes sense.
Don't say the sky is falling simply because you could see one way in which it COULD fall. For one thing, it's not going to cancel it's plans to fall simply because you discovered them. If the shutdown causes the worst to happen, you'll be able to say "Told ya so!' and everyone else in your shantytown will roll their eyes. If it doesn't, you just stressed yourself out, made everyone more cynical about politics, and less likely to take steps to prevent your prophecy from coming true.
Granted, the chances of anyone reading your post doing anything about it are really low anyway... Fuck, I think I just talked myself into looking up my house of reps number and considering calling them.... goddamn desire not to be a hypocrite...