Slashdot Mirror
Replace 'Tech' With 'Banks,' and We've Seen a Big Comeuppance Before (nytimes.com)
Nathaniel Popper, writing for The New York Times: When I moved to the Bay Area two years ago, it was with a sense of relief. Relief from New York winters and deteriorating subways, yes. But also relief after six years of covering Wall Street, an industry that had moved from one crisis to another after the financial crash of 2008, drawing the unending wrath of the public. In California I was joining a growing team of reporters covering Silicon Valley, which had quickly become the new engine of the economy. Just like Wall Street before it lost its luster, the tech industry had become the destination of choice for the top college graduates. I would be writing about a place where everyone was focused more on the future than on the past.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
Now, just two years after getting here, and a decade after the start of the financial crisis, I have a creeping sense of deja vu as I go about my job. Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals, quickly soured into an intense suspicion that manages to cross partisan lines, similar to what Wall Street faced after 2008 [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. As I have watched the recent parade of tech executives being grilled by Washington lawmakers from across the political spectrum, it has been eerily reminiscent of the combative hearings the big banks faced back in 2009 and 2010. As was true after the financial crisis, the backlash against tech rises out of a public awakening to the integral role that these huge companies occupy in our society -- with Facebook, Uber and Twitter playing the part that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase did a decade ago.
Same song, different verse. two industries too big to fail
How in the fuck is this at all the same? Oh, right, the main difference is that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and many others through a massive amount of investment into subprime mortgages riding on a housing bubble caused a massive recession as they failed to have the money to continue loans and required government intervention to avoid the risk of it slipping into a depression. Meanwhile, on the tech front, even if every major technological company's stock tanks, it should have a relatively marginal dip in mutual funds, although it could wipe wipe out investors who didn't diversify their stock portfolio.
So, on the one hand, systemic risk based upon absurd expectations results in a government bail out, new laws, and virtually no punishment. And on the other hand, virtually no system risk with no real chance of a government bail out, no need for new laws, and so obviously tech giants have a real risk of actually being punished. Because fuck the people who aren't critical who by extension aren't a fucking problem.
Too long, way too many words. The summary utterly failed to get to the point.
So, I didn't read it. Would anyone care to summarize properly?
The banks appear to have continued fucking everyone, so whatever their comeuppance was, it was not enough. Surely the response towards tech will be even weaker.
Maybe I missed the big comeuppance with the banks.
Is that the part where they got all our taxpayer money to cover their bad bets, nobody got punished, and they're laughing all the way to the bank?
The banks are still running everything. They got a bailout and they got to keep the properties on which they knowingly sold bad mortgages for which they got bailed out. We paid for those homes and didn't even get them. Tell me again about this "big backlash".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once a corporation gets big enough, it looses any soul it may have had. It's structural and systemic.
Tech is really boring these days. Back in the 90's when the net was taking off and interesting things were happening with computers (and a lot of tech companies still had some soul), one could at least naively believe in it. I did -- naively. I ran an Internet company -- I was "democratizing information" -- and thought I was doing social good.
It's all so about the money now even the naive can't believe it all.
This is an example of a false equivalence. The reason is that banking doesn't actually produce anything. Seriously, it doesn't make money, it just transfers money away from other people. Technology firms actually produce something, be it software or hardware, it's still something. Whatever that something is, it's going to keep being new as long as people have needs or desires. Sure, no one city lasts forever but it's a given.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The solution to the banking crisis was regulation and control, which in today's age likely drives technical solutions (need an data archiving solution that can pull records in X amount of time? IT solution....). Breaking up big banks? Great, more entities that need new datacenters, more bandwidth, new IT staff, etc...
In the tech industry, regulation and control begets more technology and will drive demand and innovation for smarter, more integrated solutions. Facebook will look at "regulation" as a coding problem and work around what ever limits or control are put in place. GDPR? Great, hire more coders and treat it like any other problem faced in IT.
If Facebook, Google, Amazon are broken up I can only see this driving demand for newer more innovative platforms and may even drive growth.
No sig here...
I feel both of these apply:
Investigative reporters find bad things when they actually start investigating something...
News Reporters trying to make a name for themselves only report the bad things when they investigate something...
So in other words, we can expect a few years of increased scrutiny, and then everything will be back to business as usual for the tech companies.
Why would Iease a usable interface when I can get an open source one?
Replace "Jews" with "Men" and you get modern 'intersectional' feminism.
Facebook is an advertising company.
Uber is a taxi service.
Twitter is an internet message board (ok, that's sort-of tech).
Google is an advertising company.
Actual tech companies aren't having the same troubles.
Facebook didn't MAKE you let them harvest every moment of your life for their profit.
Google didn't MAKE you use gmail so all the world's email is open to their data mining.
People need to learn to say "no". Not everything that's shiny is a good idea.
Nobody is going to hold your hand on the internet. It's time to put on the big boy pants and learn to make rational and informed choices.
Kind of a Trump to Pence situation, unless they both go for treason. Rope we've got. That's how Francis should have handled the pedos too.
this stuff goes in cycles in many industries
get used to it, bail and get a job in different area on the downward side
The press is having an insane moral panic. Literally, someone writing for the Times just compared Facebook -- whose big crime is that if you were clicking on links to Farmville quizzes back in 2010, then advertisers got a copy of your friends list -- to bankers who intentionally acted in a way the led to thousands of job losses and foreclosures. These aren't even in the same UNIVERSE of wrongs.
I like the cut of your jib and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
It's simple: power corrupts. It's not just about which sector or organization type (gov't, non-profit, conglomerates, etc.) It's Human Nature 101. Checks and balances are needed on everything. It's a rare accident that an entity with power stays nice, and may not continue*. Any org who claims they can self regulate should be whipped with a wet noodle.
It's also the case that the Internet has a bigger influence on our lives. Start-up antics hurt only a handful, but missteps with widely used services can have societal consequences.
* I resisted a longer dig at Linus Torvalds about his growing grouchiness.
Table-ized A.I.
What part of what is going on in tech has any similarity to the leveraged derivatives that caused the 2008 banking crisis?
Does anyone see Nintendo insuring Dell, and HP insuring Nintendo, and Apple insuring HP in a way that's going to collapse like a house of cards when Dell defaults on a loan? I don't.
With no way for anyone to really know what their exposure is when someone along the chain defaults?
Vulnerabilities and back doors that could take down a whole company or country? That sounds like so much FUD. I'm not sure that even Juan Pablo Davila even came close to sinking Chile, when he fat fingered a buy into a sell.
To be sure, Facebook and Zuckerberg have done their fair share in helping sink Democracy as we know it here in the US, and that's its own kind of disaster, but they had a lot of help from Breitbart, Faux News, and others outside of tech.
Some of the same arrogance perhaps, but these are two very different things.
I've managed to go my entire life without ever once finding any need for Facebook, Twitter, or even Uber which at least provides an actually practical service unlike the first two.
Good fucking luck going through life without ever needing a mortgage though.
Banks control all of the actual productive capital of the world. So-called "tech companies" like those listed aren't even actually tech companies, they just make products that use technology. The first two are comparable to makers of fucking video games. They make distractions, pastimes, nothing of any practical value. Uber uses technology to play an intermediary role connecting people to something of practical value, namely transportation.
Actual tech companies are the people who build the computers and, even more importantly, the people who operate the networks between them. The people who should be facing inquiries into their practices are the goddamn ISPs and the like, not bullshit fucking Facebook who could vanish completely tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Thanks, the Republican Party appreciates your support.
Just send a check to V. Putin, Kremlin, Mother Russia.
I don't utilize Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, Twitter, Snap Chat, Skype, Uber, etc. You have a choice up to a point that government otherwise says otherwise. The problems we have are not these companies. The problems we have are the result of consumers making poor choices, and then getting upset about companies conducting themselves poorly. Well, you have a choice. Utilizing violence to get them to do things the way you want is not the appropriate response. The appropriate response is to utilize different products from other companies that aren't acting badly. I utilize Mastodon instead of Twitter, I setup a server to stream a podcast instead of using YouTube, I buy near all my computers/electronics from a company providing and working toward giving users more control over our devices (ThinkPenguin), I use Start Page and Duck Duck Go over Google, I run LineageOS instead of Android, I utilize radios over cellular where I can, and Telegram and Matrix over Skype. I torrent and stream from non-monopoly controlled entertainment sources over Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video.
You have choices up to the point government gets involved to undermine those choices and until it has you have nobody to blame but yourself. Right now you can't blame most of these companies. Internet service providers you can blame on government because government and the people fucked up what would otherwise be a free market with competition and choice. You can blame government for fucking up the free market with copyright and patent law. You can blame governments for fucking up the transport system (ie medallions) and hotels (between hotel taxes, tenant laws, and regulations interfering with free markets and constructing both hotels and apartments in many cities). But outside of these sorts of circumstances you are your own enemy.
An unpopular thought, but we are heading for socialism, you better get ready for it. If it is the slow path of the Demos or the know path of socialist candidates, get ready for it. Read on: there are to many celebrities: “We have to say yes to socialism, to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing,” said Carrey.
Back to the 15th Century where you could buy indulgences from the Pope, to pay for your sins. Are we all sinner? And when did we start sinning? Or do you really buy into that???
You mean like Gnome3 instead of Gnome2?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Banks can cripple the economy but coastal techfags are crippling the entire nation with their 6-million-gender jihad against the Freedom to America.
"Admiration of the tech world has, in the wake of a growing list of scandals."
That's because people are desperate to be saved by non-humans. They want an app to change their world, not a person. They want a smartphone, not a philosophy. They would rather some form of modern technology revolutionize the simplification and security of their lives and possessions than accept that a comfortable life requires a lot of work. And they'll accept/believe a whole lot of BS just to ease their minds into believing that the great automated comfort is just a year or two away. It's mindless Futurism that's being fed by extreme political, economic, and social viewpoints constantly slinging mud at each other to the point where people would rather put a pox on both houses and leave the robots to rule.
And it's so blatantly mindless. From solar roadways/sidewalks, to supporting "disruptive technology" regardless of its harms, or putting a massive amount of faith in celebrity CEOs based on their futuristic sci-fi visions instead the real-world success of their work.
The author is right in that this happy blindness mirrors the run-up to the mortgage crisis because people *knew* that housing values could not go up forever and they knew that they would have to come crashing down because of BS investment methods. But they didn't want to miss out. They would rather blindly hope that the people who made and managed those financial instruments had somehow found the Holy Grail and everyone was going to get rich without having to work for it.
And then the lying game fell apart.
I always say that if economics, politics, or infrastructure is exciting enough to make the nightly news, something's broken. Those things should be boring. Interesting, but absolutely undramatic when they work well. And my god are people rabidly excited about social media, ride-hailing, dockless shared mobility, autonomous vehicles, and Tesla Motors specifically.
Not just the official $700 billion.
They got offered money from the fed for 0.01% interest. They took 14 TRILLION dollars. And loaned them back to the same government for 3.5%!
If that isn’t free money, then I don’t know what is!
Can you imagine just going to your city hall, and asking for a $50,000 "loan" at 0.01%, so you can go to the mayor, and lend it to him, so he can give you $1750 a year (minus $50 that go back to the city hall) for doing absolutely nothing? If that isn't some kind of theft, I don't know what is! Because remember where that money comes from. (Inflation is a way or lowering your wage.)
Now imagine EVERYONE in your city doing that, and being allowed to do that.
That is what this amounts to.
And the have the FUCKIN AUDACITY to call us moochers!
People who struggle like motherfuckers, to make ends meet, of which some have to lower themselves to becoming beggars and begging the state, just to literally not die. Who struggle, precisely because of the above flow of wealth, mind you.
What people are we, to then hate and blame ourselves for "failing" in such a system?
If the comparison stands, it is bad news: 10 years after the subprime crisis, big finance has spared significant regulation hardening. Will silicon valley enjoy the same situation?
If a community is big enough, everyone becomes a psychopath.
If it is really big, people even stop being able to empathize with groups, and become psychopaths towards them.
(Medically, psychopathy and sociopathy are the same illness. At least according to the ICD10 and me. That's why I'm using that word.)
This is why overpopulation and big states or even unions are such a problem. :/)
Frankly, I'm for going back to city states, and only loosely federating on a necessity basis. But the same must be true for all other organizations, especially corporations. Or it will tip the balance even more towards them. Because psychopath culture is practically the basis and be-all-end-all of western capitalism. (Not even by choice. As you can either act like a psychopath, or go bankrupt. "Your choice"
Can we please go back to the days where using the Internet required every user to pass a test? 8N1? 7E2? UART? There was a time when only smart people were allowed, and I miss it. I really do.
It must be really depressing when you can't base your career on sucking billionaire cocks all day.
Good. People should be suspicious. They'll still be mostly ignorant of what they're suspicious of, but it's an improvement.
They are currently trying to do massive influence on the political landscape - censoring political opinions they disagree with. This is a huge issue, and its being totally ignored by congress.. some are obviously complicit in its diabolical outcome. This should be a serious 25 year minimum criminal offense for convicted Tech CEOs who abuse their power over others free speech.
Covering Wall St., covering High Tech, it's all the same to a NYT reporter: it's not like their work requires any competence or insight into what they are reporting about, and it shows in their writing. I'm glad I stopped reading that rag a decade ago.
All of that is tech. The defining factor isn't electrons and fibreoptics, its the fact that working in that technology field involves working *on* that technology, not just with it. That's the difference between Twitter and a corkboard, not the subatomic particles that makes them both work.
But it's not about . . ."Cutting corners and saving a few minutes " . . . (although there's a minor aspect of truth in that)
Thing is, our change control, politics, beaureacy and p**s-poor testing are such that I need to write those things simply to be able to do my job. Ie: if you make me waste multiple months jumping through ninety-squillion (pointless, arbitrary, rubber stamped forms that even YOU don't read, let-alone understand) hoops in order to release a trivial change, then you better believe I'll backdoor it so next time I can just release without the waste and dramas. And since testing is . . . laughable . . . (it only "tests" the paperwork completion, nothing better) . . . then I'm home free
Yes, that defeats the avowed purpose, but it's honours the spirit or what we're really trying to do (even if that what the *cough* MBA politics want)
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
We don't hang people anymore. And doing your absolute best for the country regardless of competency is the furthest thing from treason. You have to prove intent to try someone for treason. The FBI proved that when they dismissed Hillary from wrong doing.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Now this guy started bubbling about "Tech", and I was expecting something exciting, like JIT compiling, superconductors, nanotech, quantum computing, that kind of thing. And then it dawns on you: "Facebook". "Uber". "Twitter". Duh.
This is not "tech", man. It's tech-fueled scam, exactly the same garbage JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers is.
Treason in your mind being what: not being Hillary? Not being the person you voted for? Not being a whiny participation trophy baby who can't wrap a tiny brain around the notion that a whole lot of people have different ideas about how things ought to work than you do?
You lost. You're going to keep on losing until you figure out why you lost. Your ideas don't work, trying to force people to think your way doesn't work, none of it works, so quit your tantrums and grow up.
We don't hang people anymore. And doing your absolute best for the country regardless of competency is the furthest thing from treason. You have to prove intent to try someone for treason. The FBI proved that when they dismissed Hillary from wrong doing.
Hillary was never accused of treason. She was investigated for criminal behavior and exonerated by a corrupt administration. Comey deciding that a crime hadn't been committed and therefore avoiding the grand jury was criminal in itself.
Grand juries determine whether a crime was committed based on an investigation and either refer it for prosecution or not. It wasn't Comey's job to subvert the standard process. And he did it twice. Clumsily.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
A NYT's article? So, the ramblings of a 20 year old that doesn't know shit, basically. I doubt he even knows how to pronounce "San Tomas Expressway" correctly.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
for small definitions of "largely". Parts of it were legal, just poorly thought out (and still in existence today). Likely being able to leverage something like 30$ for every 1$ you had on hand (or whatever it is now). It use to be less, but lobbied, and changed for the sake of market "liquidity".
What caused all the destruction was using the above, to knowingly buy derivatives of dirty mortgages, that everyone knew was bad, which were packaged by institutions that also knew they were bad, but everyone refused to believe the bubble would ever pop, and in the end they were to big to fail.
Which of course was enabled by the regulations that let banks also do all that silly sub-prime lending in the first place foisted upon people who should have known better, but were also believing that the bubble would never pop and that housing prices would forever increase.
The first in last were "legal" in that they were lobbied for by the banks, and regulation lessened to allow for it. The middle part, I'd say wasn't so legal. However I'm guessing difficult to prove, and at least on the parts of banks, plausible deniability based on the institutions providing the fake ratings. All a very circular complicit package if you ask me.
Even now, ask yourself, are housing prices so high because people have access to huge loans, or do people need to get huge loans because housing prices are so high. The reason is the loans. Well why the big loans? Because banks make all their money off debt, which interest rates low, they need to loan more to make the same amount of money... I mean it is a super complex question with a pretty simple answer really.
As to why interest rates are so low, well I'm not sure of the answer really. Were they artificially lowered by countries trying to promote growth in a previous recession enticing people to spend more with easy access to capitol? Then a deal done with banks later because the low rates were crippling the banks bottom line so regulation was lessened as a result? If so it has had some unintentional results, in that most of that money has ended up in an unsustainable housing market, with all the debt owned by banks, all teetering on the edge.