San Francisco tech nerds: Poor people are "trash" and need to "stay out"

[Indy Texas]

San Francisco is not a particularly nice place. If any more proof is needed, one only has to look at the Facebook postings of the startup techies who think they're God's gift to the world because twenty people have downloaded their app from the iTunes store.

Greg Gopman's rant went something like this...

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Remind me again how much better 90% of what Silicon Valley has done has made my life or anyone else's better. These are people who use other people's money to make "apps" that no one wants to use, that generate no revenue, and that produce no returns for shareholders. Find me a tech company that has actually had positive earnings per share over the past year. Find me a tech company that has paid a dime of earnings to their shareholders. Explain why anyone outside of the Bay Area should give a crap that you coded an app that lets people arrange for helicopters to take them to work because the icky, unwashed BART workers are on strike since your presence in the city has made living there unaffordable for them.

The media loves to demonize the real economy - oil, coal, natural resources, retail - things that provide tangible goods and services to people and create jobs for everyone from the rich to the poor. Maybe instead of protesting McDonald's and Wal-Mart for not paying their poor, unskilled workers as much as you'd like, or protesting oil companies that provide entry to the middle class for thousands of people who never set foot in college, liberals ought to protest the tech industry that creates zero jobs for anyone who didn't go to Stanford or major in computer science, produces zero shareholder value, provides no beneficial products or services to the economy as a whole, and that literally wishes poor people didn't exist.

[Indy Texas]

"The real economy" as a phrase should be taken out back and shot. Or alternatively learn something, anything, about the most basic economics and why tech companies making a lot of money is a good thing.

Did you not read my post? They DON'T make a lot of money. Zynga isn't making a profit. Neither is Twitter. Neither are 90% of the BS apps that these guys are duping angel investors and VC into forking over money for. I'm not talking about Apple and companies that actually make sh!t and do sh!t. I'm talking about the joke world that is the typical Valley start-up.

[Indy Texas]

Amazon is a unique case, though. There will be plenty of time to turn a profit once they've achieved world domination. Until then, I'll enjoy my access to cheap consumer goods.

Again, Amazon is not what I am talking about. To those who didn't bother reading the article (apparently everyone ITT), I will elaborate on what this guy actually does.

He is the founder of AngelHack which organizes "Hackathons" for web developers. What have these hackathons produced?

Something called Blurpi, which basically amounts to "a fun way to express your spirit for events, passion for causes, and love for brands. Snap a picture and make it instantly unique with a logo of your choice." Because taking a picture of something and then adding a logo to the picture is so totally hard you guys! If not for Blurpi, we would have no way of doing this! They basically invented the ability to add a logo to a photograph! They are masters of the universe!

And then there's Tennis Buddy, which allows you to "find a stranger to to play tennis with you in your area." Because no one has ever been able to find a tennis partner before the invention of Tennis Buddy. Joining a league at the country club didn't exist. Asking a friend to play tennis with you didn't exist. We owe these people our eternal gratitude for making the world a far greater place than it would have been without Tennis Buddy. How dare those disgusting poor people in San Francisco dirty up the place when they can't ever hope to make as vital a contribution to the world as the people who invented Tennis Buddy.

These people think what they're doing matters and it doesn't. They think they're "innovators" when all they are doing is creating redundant apps that fulfill no need that isn't already being met by something someone else already did. I pity the fools whose money is paying for these people to pretend to be doing something productive.

[Indy Texas]

Also - shouldn't the headline read "San Francisco tech nerd"? I'm not sure why you're taking your apparent hatred of an entire industry and assuming this one guy is representative.

(And yes, homeless people can be annoying, I don't think anyone's disputing that. No-one likes getting bothered by some crackhead looking for money. Not that that makes the guy's rant any less gross).

His San Francisco tech nerd friends are as hateful and contemptuous as he is.

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And I don't have hatred for an entire industry. I'm just circumspect enough to see how ludicrously overvalued it is financially, how nonsensical a lot of the ventures that money is being spent on are, and how absurdly inflated the egos of these people are when most of them have about as much positive impact on their city and the world as the homeless people they hate so much.

[Indy Texas]

Someone is an asshole because they're ignorant about poverty and happen to work in one sector of the economy transitions into the idea that everyone who works in that sector is an asshole and their entire sector is useless? What the hell kind of logic is that?

Now breathe. Look around you. You either typed that OP on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone all thanks to the tech industry you're decrying. You did so on the internet (tech sector) on a forum (tech sector). Hardware and software are everywhere. You are bathing in an ocean and cursing the water.

Sure, this guy's a twat waffle. Don't let it rub off on you. He lacks empathy and reasoning. He's privileged. Hate him and his words. His industry, though, benefits us all whether we like it or not, and there are plenty of good people there.

As I have already made a point to clarify in this thread, I am not damning every single enterprise that involves semiconductors. The neighborhood of the tech industry that this guy and others like him operate in has nothing to do with the companies that make the devices we are having this discussion on. And are you seriously going to compare the scientists and engineers who "invented" the Internet to the self-important tools who made this thing?

The difference between the two is like the difference between a bank lending money to a company to expand its operations, and a bank using that money to move derivatives around that do nothing to manage market risk and exist solely to generate fees and commissions for the bank itself. The first one creates economic value; the second one doesn't. When you criticize the second one, you're not implicitly criticizing the first one or "finance" in general.

When companies like Apple and IBM make a lot of money, it is by providing goods and services to customers that indisputably benefit them. The people of Blurpi and other similar firms have done nothing more than amassed absurd amounts of venture capital by assigning completely unrealistic valuations to their firms, generating no profits, and doing all of this by convincing themselves and others that "someday" they're going to create value. These people haven't even accomplished anything and the level of arrogance they conduct themselves with is completely unjustified.

So when the Randian techie I grew up with who now makes apps for a living and blithely suggests that somehow unemployment will vanish forever if everyone just "learns to code" brags on Facebook and Twitter about how wonderful his new app is - it's video calling - I want to tear my hair out and scream, "YOU DOUCHEBAG, WE ALREADY HAVE THAT! IT'S CALLING F@#$ING FACETIME! IT'S CALLED F@#$ING SKYPE! ARE YOU SERIOUSLY GETTING PAID FOR THIS S#!@!"

[Indy Texas]

Sure this Greg Gopman is a douche, but maybe it's not out of elitist bigotry, but out of fear--he fears his future competition.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/leo-the-homeless-coder-finished-his-app--and-you-can-download-it-right-now-195026043.html

See, once angel investors realize they don't have to shower people like Gopman with cash and fancy office space to create new product, instead giving the homeless cheap coding lessons to do it, then Gopman will be on the street with them--just another commodity. 

For a slightly different perspective on the homeless coder:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/leo-the-homeless-coder-finished-his-app--and-you-can-download-it-right-now-195026043.html

The homeless coder strikes me as yet another glaring example of the extent to which our childhoods determine who and what we become. Some people would like to assume that man is homeless because he's lazy or isn't smart and therefore doesn't deserve things like a roof over his head. And what happens when someone actually gives a sh!t about him and gives time and money towards helping him develop intellectually? He proves Edmund Burke's assertion that the most basic human sentiment that we all share is curiosity.

Compare the homeless coder to Bill Gates. When Bill Gates was growing up in his well-to-do suburban family, the parents at his middle school purchased a computer for the students to use - in the 1960s when this was no small financial task. Young Bill discovered that programming BASIC  and Fortran was actually pretty fun. But what if Gates' parents and his friends' parents weren't wealthy professionals who could afford such a lavish investment in their kids' futures? In all likelihood, if Bill Gates had instead been born to an assembly line worker at a Boeing plant, Bill Gates would today be a 58 year old aerospace factory worker worried that his job his going to get moved to South Carolina and that his union pension is in jeopardy. Someone else would have created something more or less like Microsoft and Bill Gates would be just another schmuck.