Congratulations Garry! Your blogs were my inspirations when I was running my startup. I always remember this line:
“The ideal startup team involves really two major roles — builder, and hustler. I used to say it took three roles (designer, engineer, hustler).....In reality, I think designer / engineer can be abstracted to builder”.
> they out themselves as either evil or stupid
???
kind off topic, but I am curious what other people in SF think about this statement. I don't live there, but I find it surprising and dubious that the extreme anything is also "the establishment", not saying it's not possible but seems unlikely to me.
I served in the Marine Corps. I've had some exposure to Palantir's 'offerings'. It's a fucking nightmare of a company, morally and ethically, and it always has been.
Specially, that Facebook suffocated voices of Trump’s advisors who opposed the lockdown.
“Social media, particularly Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, was actively suffocating voices, including mine, that dissented from the accepted COVID narrative. By August, Facebook told the Washington Post they had taken down seven million posts “for spreading coronavirus misinformation.” Meanwhile, Wikipedia crafted smears and distortions of my background and then locked it to edits”. —Dr. Scott Atlas, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America
So too in SF, outside of cali they would be considered extreme (left, right, you pick) but in SF they are the establishment.
Not passing judgment on whether that’s right or wrong just saying that’s what that line could mean.
Doesn't come across evil to me unless by evil you mean just not mainstream left, which might be the correct in the valley.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
My issue with Thiel is his hypocrisy: he warns about surveillance AI and how it's evil, which is just rich, since he founded Palantir and holds shares of Clearview.
"The extreme left in SF politics (which in SF = the Establishment)"[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/stevemushero/status/1461013669114892288
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/donald-tr...
If your viewpoint is so myopically constrained by a single data point, I don't know what to say.
I find intellectuals from all corners of political spectrum to be interesting. Usually, when people dismiss intellectuals not for their arguments, but by some ostensible thinly veiled morality or the media zeitgeist; it is already an indicator that something interesting is out there. Anyways, all I am saying is that Peter is not evil in any stretch of the definition as the media portrays him. He is just not your typical conformist thinker.
[1] They only paused after Jan 6th, they were happily donating to both parties: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-corporate-go...
Do you remember why Thiel invested in Confinity which became PayPal? Because he thought a digital wallet could lead to “the erosion of the nation-state”. If it's not self evident to you why that's a bad thing perhaps read https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
Max Chafkin argues that Thiel “has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.” continued with “Palantir, his second company, popularized the concept of data mining after 9/11 and paved the way for what critics of the technology call surveillance capitalism”.
And of course there was gawker. No, what gawker did was not right but Thiel's reaction was not right either. That's some straight up vigilante BS.
etc
As far as I know the 'monarchy' dude is Yarvin. I'd be surprised if Thiel had publicly committed himself to anything so sophomoric, and it would be interesting to see an actual example.
If you want a proper critique of Thiel, proper as in properly sourced/researched, not opinions of what someone has made up in their mind: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
San Francisco gets a lot of press as being radical, but the government strikes me as pretty middle-of-the-road and wealth-focused. i can't think of a policy here that would be out of place in any other sensibly run city in the US. And we're definitely to the right of places like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. And that goes back a long way; CA's current governor was a centrist mayor here back in the day.