[rvz]

> Just about all of silicon valley seems to have run the longest and broadest grift we've seen.

I would say nearly all of Silicon Valley tech startups. Around 90% them are a complete SaaS grift and are also eternally unprofitable and are very good at losing money.

Hence why they are solely dependent on begging for VC money every month to pump the pyramid scheme that recently collapsed a week a ago. We saw which startups were affected and would have instantly been bankrupt had it not been for them beggeing to the government for a totally-not-a-pseudo-bailout scheme to 'save' them.

To see who was caught in the fallout, we needed catalyst events such as the start of the market crash in November 2021, the collapse of crypto in 2022 and now in 2023, a large tech bank (SVB) becoming insolvent and failing.

> It's incredible that since 2008 it actually seemed immensely easier to skirt regulations and laws (under the banner of 'innovation'), and not just in finance.

Now the grift has continued to spread into the AI hype squad with everyone and their bots spinning their own ChatGPT SaaS startup. Don't be surprised to see them falling like dominoes since the real winner in this AI hype is OpenAI. Not the startups built around it.

[agentgumshoe]

Indeed, VC's loaded with 'free' money pumping whatever idea could bring in the consumers enough to keep a narrative spinning.

I haven't seen any particularly strong profitability case for ChatGPT and the like yet, unless you call ad dollars from promoting "ChatXX does this amazing trick!" as proof.

People barely even questioned the ludicrous wages being thrown around in silicon valley, supported by 'funding rounds' and silly valuations of future growth.

But, it all sucks because the people that will lose are the last-in-chain investors and the to-be-unemployed. Not the VC crybabies currently out there complaining about their need for protection by the establishment they protest.

[lanstin]

Yeah. I used to work outside the valley, until 2008. I moved to San Jose to work with friends I worked with from Netscape.

Until I moved, I earned five figures, you know a bit more each year, and was happy. I had a house, a big spacious house by San Jose standards, and a nice town with friendly friends and so on. When I started in SV, they raised me to USD 120,000 and the HR recruiter literally apologized for it not being more. Since then it has gone up about four x, for no really good reason that I can see, since it is fun work I would do for much less. Only when you get into profit per worker does it make sense.

And that isn’t due to some moral failure entirely, but something about the weird asymmetries that networked technology seems to facilitate. One little neighborhood, but services and products for dozens or hundreds of countries. Each time a country is added to the network, the winner takes some more.