There’s not a drop of irony here. It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods. You’re not temporarily embarrassed millionaires - you’re just embarrassing.
The thing about Marc Andreessen is that of all VC-types of people he seemed like one with a modicum of tech legitimacy, given his history/role in the development of the web.
I was at UIUC shortly after he graduated and the general impression was that he basically just stole Mosaic from the University to create Netscape. Not sure that bestows him with any tech legitimacy. He's certainly a good businessman.
he could have been actively involved in creating Mosaic as a university project, and still be accused of leaving the university and stealing the software to create a new commercial product.
Well, Page/Brin's BackRub was basically a science citation index, yet here we're. Add FB into that collection too. Ideas are nothing (we all have a lot of them), execution is everything.
What if that legitimacy is merely a story crafted by his press department? It so obviously will help interacting with his target audience: devs who take pride in technical skills and knowledge.
Why do you give people who can easily afford to have a team craft an image the benefit of believing it? I categorically don't. Not because I am of bad faith, no, precisely because I trust people to do what's in their interest: make sure your fund gets to talking with your audience.
Is it so hard to believe that people with “technical skills and knowledge” can be hypocrites?
The fact is, pmarca’s engineering chops are not a conspiracy invented by non engineers. He did in fact create a brilliant piece of software (Mosaic and, at some greater distance, Netscape), and the technical elites of Silicon Valley saw this and are responsible for much of his wealth and influence.
But the mundane truth is that engineering chops do not automatically translate into virtue, tact, political acumen, investment prowess, or any number of other skills or positive attributes. It is understandable that engineers want to believe they are on a higher plane of human existence but the evidence is inconclusive.
No publicist tricked us into thinking Andreessen was a brilliant programmer, we tricked ourselves into thinking brilliant programmers are necessarily superhuman.
>It’s just mindboggling that HN prop these charlatans up like gods
Link to some examples? My impression is that many HN users are associated with the startup community, and therefore like what Andreessen or PG is doing, but I don't think they prop them up "like gods" or even demigods for that matter. You can like what someone is doing in one area (ie. startups/VC), without thinking they're gods or blindly believing whatever they say.
The power of marketing works best when least expected, and for some reason this data-driven fact-based engineering bunch is either just not (surprisingly!) not cognisant of the mechanics of investors using their brains and are gullible, star struck, almost willfully ignorant (seeing the lengths the innocence of the wealthy is sometimes defended). Or people are cognisant, and then must be participating in the charade, on the basis of greed; not biting the hand that feeds you is good exercise for pitching.
What other mechanisms could be at play for this worship?
Anyway thanks for your concise comment; it could not be more on point!
I frankly don’t want housing the kinds of people who can’t afford houses anywhere near me. I don’t say this publicly, but the council candidate who “protects home values” has my vote.
I agree housing affordability is an important problem. I am not willing to have so much as ruffians in the nearby grocery store to fix it though.
Just to give you another perspective, it seems like they're not building low-income housing, they're just building denser housing than is normal for the area ("multifamily overlay zones").
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, guessing that if they went ahead and these were actually built, the housing/rental prices of these units would still be ultra high. Yeah, housing is so bad here, they'd probably just to attract young tech workers or people with at least decent jobs.
I am sure we are relative ruffians to wealthy people. Simply could be the difference between executives and entrepreneurs to whiny employee types like myself.
As a parent I also prioritize cleanliness and low crime over pretty much anything else. The difference between Marc and I is that I don't pretend to not be a NIMBY. If this causes me to be labeled online as a sad frightened person, so be it.
Can understand this, as I own a home in the East Bay, but I fight the urge to be a NIMBY, because I've come to realize, it's not good for the area in the long run.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
It came as a surprise to me too when I first heard about it, but it kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people living at lower incomes (not necessarily poor, just low), and in the Bay Area, their biggest expense is rent. All it takes is for them to lose their job or incur a big medical expense and they can't afford their apartment. So a lot of people who would normally live in cheaper apartments are eventually forced on to the street.
Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.
Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.
There are regular employed people who are poor, prople who only male $100k per year and they don’t fit into your neighboorhood? Why not move out if you don’t like that part of the city evolve? Cities change over time, just accept that.
Unfortunately it seems to be quickly evaporating.