#By Silicon Valley

[msclaritea]

These paid buffoons have been dragging the Black community down into the dirt, by acting as voices of truth, and all just to help provide more cover and distraction for the NFL. I know they're not the only ones, but they also gave free promo to Tyler Perry by pretending....PRETENDING to go after him. But, really, what is just a bunch of bought off talking heads going to accomplish against a man who is still getting one deal after another for his toxic films, while sitting in his billion dollar mansion, on a hill. Not much!

And during all of this, repeatedly exposing the public and very likely, children to graphic, violent porn. I say, we are truly living in post racial world when THIS MANY Black and POC, like #Valderrama are willing to do so much to uphold a sick system run by sick men, that ultimately hurts their own communities. The NFL and Silicon Valley are in league, have been and that explains why so many football blogs on Twitter are constantly involved in Hate Spamming and general attacks, including the ones against Disney for years. Because Sports Betting uses AI.

The Entertainment Industry stopped hiring real actors, real comedians and real musicians. Instead, they hire Propagandists, now.

#Shannon Sharpe #SHAY SHAY #Monique #Kat Williams #Tyler Perry #Oprah Winfrey #Lee Daniels #Paid Buffoons For Hollywood and the National Football League #Sports Betting Trolls #Sports Betting YouTube Trolls #Sports Media Online #NFL #America Is Being Turned Into A Country Of Addicts #By Silicon Valley #Elon Musk #Norman Peltz #Beckhams #Sheldon Adelson #Las Vegas #Disney Attacks #Hollywood Gay Mafia #COS #Freemasonry

[mysharona1987]

#science #capitalism #silicon valley #democrats #republicans #politics #Socialism #dystopia #lol

[kropotkindersurprise]

February 10, 2024 - A crowd in San Francisco surrounds a Waymo self-driving taxi and burn it down. [video]

#direct action #san francisco #usa #silicon valley #waymo #vandalism #fire #gif #2024 #anti-capitalism #driverless car #skateboard #google #cyberpunk

[reasonsforhope]

"The California state government has passed a landmark law that obligates technology companies to provide parts and manuals for repairing smartphones for seven years after their market release.

Senate Bill 244 passed 65-0 in the Assembly, and 38-0 in the Senate, and made California, the seat of so much of American technological hardware and software, the third state in the union to pass this so-called “right to repair” legislation.

On a more granular level, the bill guarantees consumers’ rights to replacement parts for three years’ time in the case of devices costing between $50 and $99, and seven years in the case of devices costing more than $100, with the bill retroactively affecting devices made and sold in 2021.

Similar laws have been passed in Minnesota and New York, but none with such a long-term period as California.

“Accessible, affordable, widely available repair benefits everyone,” said Kyle Wiens, the CEO of advocacy group iFixit, in a statement. “We’re especially thrilled to see this bill pass in the state where iFixit is headquartered, which also happens to be Big Tech’s backyard. Since Right to Repair can pass here, expect it to be on its way to a backyard near you.” ...

One of the reasons Wiens is cheering this on is because large manufacturers, from John Deere to Apple, have previously lobbied heavily against right-to-repair legislation for two reasons. One, it allows them to corner the repair and maintenance markets, and two, it [allegedly] protects their intellectual property and trade secrets from knock-offs or competition.

However, a byproduct of the difficulty of repairing modern electronics is that most people just throw them away.

...Wien added in the statement that he believes the California bill is a watershed that will cause a landslide of this legislation to come in the near future."

-via Good News Network, October 16, 2023

#united states #us politics #right to repair #planned obsolescence #enshittification #big tech #iphone #sustainability #ewaste #consumer rights #electronics #good news #hope #california #silicon valley

[liberalsarecool]

We have to end this capitalist construct.

#silicon valley bank

[smarmy-yet-satisfying]

I hate it here

Let this be a lesson against believing politicians lies.

Keeping wealth concentrated in the 1% is the end goal of capitalism.

They will do whatever is necessary to keep the working class desperate and dependent on the system that impoverishes them.

#at what point to wh break out the guillotine #i’m so serious #capitalism #late stage capitalism #silicon valley bank #bank bailout #corruption #corporate corruption #corporate greed #eat the rich #tax the 1% #tax the rich #government bailout

[probablyasocialecologist]

We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco. But we know enough to understand that this is an explosive milestone in the growing, if scattershot, revolt against big tech. We know that self-driving cars are wildly divisive, especially in cities where they’ve begun to share the streets with emergency responders, pedestrians and cyclists. Public confidence in the technology has actually been declining as they’ve rolled out, owing as much to general anxiety over driverless cars as to high-profile incidents like a GM Cruise robotaxi trapping, dragging, and critically injuring a pedestrian last fall. Just over a third of Americans say they’d ride in one. We also know that the pyrotechnic demolition can be seen as the most dramatic act yet in a series of escalations — self-driving cars have been vocally opposed by officials, protested, “coned,” attacked, and, now, set ablaze in a carnivalesque display of defiance. The Waymo torching did not take place in a vacuum. To that end, we know that trust in Silicon Valley in general is eroding, and anger towards the big tech companies — Waymo is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google — is percolating. Not just at self-driving cars, of course, but at generative AI companies that critics say hoover up copyrighted works to produce plagiarized output, at punishing, algorithmically mediated work regimes at the likes of Uber and Amazon, at the misinformation and toxic content pushed by Facebook and TikTok, and so on. It’s all of a piece. All of the above contributes to the spreading sense that big tech has an inordinate amount of control over the ordinary person’s life — to decide, for example, whether or not robo-SUVs will roam the streets of their communities — and that the average person has little to no meaningful recourse.

#silicon valley #self driving vehicles #autonomous vehicles #self driving cars

[odinsblog]

"We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor."

—Martin Luther King Jr.

#politics #banking #privatized profits #socialized losses #capitalism #mlkjr #halli is cool #svb #silicon valley bank #privatized profits socialized losses

[marypsue]

There’ve been a few responses to/reblogs with tags on my post about DIY clothing embellishments that basically boil down to ‘I’d love to do this but I’m scared it’ll turn out bad/I’m not a good enough artist’. And I get it, I really do! I also want my art things to turn out nicely. But also...making it badly is sort of the point of punk DIY. 

Listen. We live in a world that would dearly love to charge you a subscription fee for breathing. The bastards are doing everything they possibly can to figure out how to turn art - stories, visual art, music, textile/fibre art, sculpture, crafts and creations of every kind - into a neat, discrete, packageable commodity, a product they can chop up into little pieces and stick behind a paywall so they can charge you for every drop of it you want to have in your life. 

The whole sneering idea that ‘everybody wants to be some kind of creator now’ and anything less than absolute mastery right out the gate is somehow shameful and embarrassing is a tool those bastards are using. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that only a set group of people can create and control art, and everybody else has to buy it. 

But art isn’t a product. Art is a fundamental human impulse. Nobody is entitled to a specific piece of art (which is where this message gets skewed into pitting people who love art against the artists who make it, while the bastards screw us all and run away with the money). But making art belongs to everybody. We make up songs and dances and stories, and paint things, and make clothes, and embellish them, and carve flowers into our furniture and our lintels and our doorframes, and make windows out of tiny pieces of coloured glass, and decorate our homes and our bodies and our lives with things we make and make up, simply for the love of beauty and of the act of creation. Grave goods from tens of thousands of years ago show that ancient hominids gave their dead wreaths of ceramic flowers, tattooed their bodies, beaded their shoes. Making things for the sake of beauty and enjoyment is one of the most ancient and human things we can do. 

The idea that we can’t, that we have to buy shit instead, because art is a product and you have to have the bestest prettiest most perfect product, is the enemy of joy. It’s the death of culture. And it means that, instead of whatever it is that you cherish and enjoy and value, you get whatever inoffensive (and to whom is it inoffensive?) bland meaningless samey-samey crap that the bastards want you to be allowed to have. What are you missing and what are you missing out on, if you don’t make or modify or decorate anything for yourself, if you don’t think you can because the product at the end won’t be polished or perfect or marketable enough? What do you lose? What do we lose? 

It is a desperately vital and necessary thing for you to make shit. For you to know that you can make shit, that you don’t have to just lie back and take whatever pablum the bastards want to force-feed you (and charge you through the nose for). That the bastards need you more than you need them. 

Become ungovernable. Be your own weirdly-endearing punk little freak. Paint on a t-shirt. Sing off-key in the shower or at karaoke night or at open mic night. Make up a story where you get to meet your favourite fictional character and you guys hug or fuck or punch each other in the face. Make art. Do it badly. Do it frequently. Do it enthusiastically. Do it for love and joy and creativity and fun and the spiteful joy of thumbing your nose at some smug motherfucker with a Swiss bank account who wants to track your heartbeat and location for the rest of your life in order to automatically pump AI-generated beats matched to your mood into your earbuds for a small monthly subscription fee of $24.99/month. It is literally the only way we are ever going to have even a chance to save art and our own lives from the bastards. 

So. Paint that t-shirt. 

(Also support artists where you can, and buy your music from Bandcamp.)

#this post brought to you by: me being so so sad about zoomers having crafts and Making Thing With Your Hands Badly stolen from them #also by me listening to a radio show on How The Sony Walkman Changed Music And Where It's Going Next #ready for the san andreas fault to open up and swallow silicon valley whole forever folks #anyway. followers i am getting down off the cafeteria table now.

[digitalfossils]

Silicon Valley Engineer (1989)

#80s #silicon valley #futurism #vaporwave #aesthetic

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Yet more examples coming out of the massively partisan political bias hardcoded into Google's AI program Gemini:

#google #woke ai #google gemini #us elections 2024 #silicon valley #propaganda

[pencilbrony]

Cult of the Lamb but more messed up

Block chain-based healthcare tech startup of the lamb

#not pony #concept #fantasy #design #startup #rise and grind #cult of the lamb #cotl #game #silicon valley

[kropotkindersurprise]

September 2, 2023 - a San Francisco local disables a Cruise self-driving car. If you live in a place where Silicon Valley bullshit like driverless cars or autonomous delivery robots or doorbell cameras are becoming commonplace it might be a good idea to follow the example of this trendsetter and start carrying around a skimask and a hammer, just in case. [video]

#direct action #driverless car #cruise #usa #san francisco #vandalism #black bloc #anti-capitalism #technology #silicon valley #gif #2023 #inspiration #anti-car #cyberpunk #driverless cars #anti-surveillance

[rhyperographer]

For anyone wondering what happened to make Silicon Valley Bank here's the TL:DR:

SVB had very few consumer loans. Their investment base was primarily government bonds. A government bond is basically a loan to the gov at a fixed rate for a set period.

Their liability base was primarily consumer and investor savings.

They made money on the difference between what they were paying people in interest for their savings, and what the gov was paying them for the bonds.

They were then investing their profits into startups and tech businesses.

Then the loan rate rose, the interest rate on savings went up in the market, and to stay competative they had to put their rates up. They can't reclaim their investments as startups don't have the money to give back. The rate rises, their profits shrink, and they go boom.

#Silicon valley bank #Finance #Economics #Banking #What happened here was very specific to them #Lack of diversity in their asset and liability base

[probablyasocialecologist]

After nearly 15 years, Uber claims it’s finally turned an annual profit. Between 2014 and 2023, the company set over $31 billion on fire in its quest to drive taxi companies out of business and build a global monopoly. It failed on both fronts, but in the meantime it built an organization that can wield significant power over transportation — and that’s exactly how it got to last week’s milestone. Uber turned a net profit of nearly $1.9 billion in 2023, but what few of the headlines will tell you is that over $1.6 billion of it came from unrealized gains from its holdings in companies like Aurora and Didi. Basically, the value of those shares are up, so on paper it looks like Uber’s core business made a lot more money than it actually did. Whether the companies are really worth that much is another question entirely — but that doesn’t matter to Uber. At least it’s not using the much more deceptive “adjusted EBITDA” metric it spent years getting the media to treat as an accurate picture of its finances. Don’t be fooled into thinking the supposed innovation Uber was meant to deliver is finally bearing fruit. The profit it’s reporting is purely due to exploitative business practices where the worker and consumer are squeezed to serve investors — and technology is the tool to do it. This is the moment CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been working toward for years, and the plan he’s trying to implement to cement the company’s position should have us all concerned about the future of how we get around and how we work.

[...]

Uber didn’t become a global player in transportation because it wielded technology to more efficiently deliver services to the public. The tens of billions of dollars it lost over the past decade went into undercutting taxis on price and drawing drivers to its service — including some taxi drivers — by promising good wages, only to cut them once the competition posed by taxis had been eroded and consumers had gotten used to turning to the Uber app instead of calling or hailing a cab. As transport analyst Hubert Horan outlined, for-hire rides are not a service that can take advantage of economies of scale like a software or logistics company, meaning just because you deliver more rides doesn’t mean the per-ride cost gets significantly cheaper. Uber actually created a less cost-efficient model because it forces drivers to use their own vehicles and buy their own insurance instead of having a fleet of similar vehicles covered by fleet insurance. Plus, it has a ton of costs your average taxi company doesn’t: a high-paid tech workforce, expensive headquarters scattered around the world, and outrageously compensated executive management like Khosrowshahi, just to name a few. How did Uber cut costs then? By systematically going after the workers that deliver its service. More recently, it took advantage of the cost-of-living crisis to keep them on board in the same way it exploited workers left behind by the financial crisis in the years after its initial launch. Its only real innovation is finding new ways to exploit labor.

#uber #gig economy #silicon valley #paris marx #taxis

[phonographica]

Raven Kane & Klaus Netzle - Silicon Valley (1984)

#album art #raven kane #klaus netzle #1980s #silicon valley #retro futurism #vaporwave #retrowave #synth #synth pop #grid