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What Silicon Valley Doesn't Get About People

24 pointsby misnamedover 7 years ago

1 comment

eevilspockover 7 years ago
&gt; the cobbler’s children have no shoes. (Or, regionally adjusted, the engineer’s children have no slide rules.<p>For an article that talks about &quot;the empathy gap&quot;, it lacks a lot of empathy to choose the weaker interpretation of &quot;the cobbler’s children have no shoes&quot;, that Silicon Valley isn&#x27;t taking care of its own house.<p>No, the real failure of empathy and morality is that The Haves buy shoes from have-not cobblers paying them so little that they can&#x27;t afford shoes for their own children. What&#x27;s worse, they are focused on making society more &quot;efficient&quot; by facilitating a race-to-the-bottom in worker wages (e.g. Uber) if not hoping to put them out of work entirely through automation (e.g. Bodega [1]).<p>The Haves send their children to private schools because of the quality teachers, who can&#x27;t themselves afford to send their own children to the school.<p>The haves hire immigrants to be nannies so that their children get full-time quality adult care (while they&#x27;re at work making the big bucks). The nannies can&#x27;t afford to do the same for their children. In other words, the nannies spend more time with The Haves kids than their own, and The Haves have no problem with that. [2]<p>The Haves buy a new smartphone every year that is built by people who work in sweatshop conditions for monthly pay that is less than what The Haves just spent on their phone.<p>Feel free to add to this list.<p>---<p>[1] <i>‘Bodega,’ the very bad startup that wants to kill mom-and-pop shops</i>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15272086" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15272086</a><p>[2] <i>The Cost of Caring</i>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11458399" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11458399</a>