Your antipathy towards Facebook has been very well documented, but at this point it's getting a bit silly how you go out of your way to deny credit. I work on Messenger, and I am proud that we've maintained and grown reliability as a means of communicating despite a huge spike in usage. We and Whatsapp make up a huge percentage of the global messaging market, the two most used messaging platforms in the world, We are also a pretty sizable portion of the global Real Time Communication (calls and video chat) market. The usage of both of those shot straight up when covid started, and despite having to stop data center production and roll out whole new covid themed products for better RTC it has all gone very smoothly in messenger. The WhatsApp people are similarly quite proud of their work, and rightfully so.
You can do the "Facebook newsfeed is bad" takes and frankly I don't disagree. But we are a large company that does a lot of things, and a lot of very smart people worked their asses off to ensure some very useful, market leading products worked even better with hugely increased usage.
I don't work for FB but I am a SWE at a FANGMAN, and I think you overestimate what SWE options exist outside that group without taking at least 2 of:
1. Taking a massive paycut,
2. relocating, and
3. accepting that most of your talent will be wasted.
In the NYC metro, the only place I can take my skills without a major career downgrade is... finance, specifically HFT/quant funds/some hedge funds. Not exactly making the world a better place.
If you're at FB and have been in this business for very long, you've noticed that nearly all startups in the last 10 years are generally: built to be acquired, structurally unprofitable, incapable of ever meeting FB compensation, and sometimes just outright frauds/scams. Tesla is a bit interesting as it adds subsidy arbitrage and 80s-era stock games to the mix.
Knowing all that, where do you think FB employees will go, other than another FANGMAN company? Quite simply, the market forces of the 80s-10s led us here. Those forces began hollowing out local news in the 80s and gave us nationalized politics via cable news, well before the rise of FB. America is seemingly incapable of rewarding prosocial behavior at any scale, and if you take a technocratic stance, you should focus on that root problem and not telling FB employees to quit.
That is also probably at the root of Matt's point. People at Facebook are contributing to the increased power of a company that does massive amounts of global harm. Regardless of what niche area of the company you work at, you are still part of that problem. I live in the Bay, I do not come from money. You can live here just fine without a SWE salary from Facebook. The adage that you need $200k plus to live in the Bay is tried and ultimately false.
Also, to #3, I think that is the point as well. By working at Facebook, your talent is wasted. It's amazing how embedded in that comment is the very self declaration that your talent is being used in a worthwhile way.
To respond concretely to "wasting talent" at Facebook: my point is not about whether your skills are making the world better or not.
Rather: it's about being able to keep your skills fresh and relevant while the treadmill of technology marches on. These companies are diversified, technologically. Example: I haven't learned machine learning yet, but I have set aside two weeks this December to use my company's resources for learning ML - and those resources are of a quality unmatched outside of our peer group.
That's why I say your "talent will go to waste": you go from access to most cutting-edge technologies to working with maybe 1 or 2 of them, and never getting a chance to learn the rest from the best. If the technology you bet on stops delivering value to the industry, you are now positioned behind everybody who stayed diversified.
It's kind of like asking everyone at Goldman Sachs to quit and work for community banks and credit unions.
If you find yourself telling people to take less money for nothing in return, you must know you'll need leverage. Moral outrage is not leverage.
It is American policy that leads to extreme concentration of wealth in FANGMAN companies. We laid the wires connecting everyone and we repeatedly bet the whole country's finances on monetizing those wires.
Even if you bullied everybody into quitting FB, you'll just be moving the problems, employees and revenue elsewhere. Cut the wires, nationalize the wires, or fix American monetary and fiscal policy so five companies don't get the lion's share of all investment dollars in the hunt for yield. Until you fix the root these problems will continue.
Hello :) Engineer here working in the social good space. For jobs on climate change, check out https://climatebase.org/. For Political jobs in the tech space, https://www.all-hands.us/. Also, things like Presidential campaigns usually pay well (6 figures for software engineers).
I don’t really understand your point here, given the critiques leveled at FB. Nobody is denying the technical competence of FB. Nobody, though, can credit them with policy competence.
All you’ve addressed is the former when what is obviously at issue is the latter.
"We invest a ton of effort, from thousands of brilliant people, to create a _high-quality_ disinformation machine" is not a good argument in defense of Facebook. Yes, it is high quality. It's beautiful, it has the best people. (To paraphrase one of its chief beneficiaries.) Rupert Murdoch was _actively trying_ to profit from misinformation. FB just stumbled into the business, but they haven't shown any serious interest in trying to move towards remaining profitable while actually shutting off the misinformation.
Ezra Klein had a riff about this in relation to Twitter a few months back, saying basically that Twitter and Facebook actually should stop pretending that speech on their platform is free, because it's plainly not. You can have your post censored by some algorithm, with no human review. They need to start holding big-name users and publishers to MUCH higher standards. And if they get blowback from bad-faith people on the right, well, too f***ing bad. Yeah, they can't manually review everything from nobodies, but they _could_ do that for the top thousand or even ten-thousand sources.
Just as a counter point, I use a number of different messaging products in work and personal life and I can't say I've really ever experienced any significant failures. Hangouts, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Messenger, Whatsapp, SMS, etc. I'm sure that there is a lot of development happening behind the scenes and good job for making everything work in a massive uptick in demand, but I would argue that is it pretty hard to make the argument that a major problem in society is a lack of reliable text or video messaging.
my read on anti-fb takes is that they are more like, "fb engineers do really impressive technical stuff with skills that could be transferred anywhere, so why do it for a company that has large negative societal costs?"
it's not discounting quality work, it's acknowledging and predicated on the high quality of the workforce
I just want to say, I am a big fan of messenger. My coworkers and I live all over the country, as traveling technicians. Messenger has become our default way of communicating with each other. We have our internal Microsoft teams, but it’s just not as convenient.
Additionally, my son lives in Scotland. Messenger is the way that we communicate, video call, and call.
The only other app that comes close is WhatsApp. But Americans have not adapted it in mass yet.
My issue is with Facebook and all social media companies is that they spend a LOT of effort making the platform addictive. I understand why they do it, but it's kinda like Big Tobacco manipulating nicotine levels.
A major problem with Facebook is the amount of disinformation and misinformation that spreads on the platform. All large social media networks face this problem, and some are better about moderation and standards for content restrictions.
Like if anything giving credit there casts newsfeed decisions by leadership in an even worse light, since the rest of the company is in fact profitable and making very good products that do in fact improve people's lives!
I don't have facebook and I'm fine with my messaging capabilities. But people who do use messenger are more like to use the (your term) bad feature Newsfeed. Still seems like Facebook is the problem.
Speaking to the IT bit, I live in a remote, isolated rural county in the northeast corner of Minnesota, between Lake Superior, Canada and Boundary Waters. We have 5,200 people total spread over a huge area. More than 10 years ago, we secured a grant-loan package under Obama's stimulus program to develop a fiber-optic system that would bring high-speed broadband to everyone on the electrical grid. Until then, we all depended upon undependable dial-up or satellite with its latency defects. Fortunately, we did not have a commercial provider to protest, so we were given the go-ahead. It was actually a bad "stimulus" because it took way too long for that. But it provided us a level of broadband service that is the envy of much of Minnesota. We enjoyed it in a prosaic way until the pandemic hit. All of a sudden, folks in the Twin Cities discovered they could work from the beauty and relative safety of Cook County. Plus, distance learning, while not terrific, was at least not a technological challenge. It is too early to tell what the lasting impact of covid+broadband will have on our community, but I suspect it will change us in some important economic and societal ways.
Virtual city/county meetings are *infinitely* better than sitting around waiting for the thing you care about to happen. In high school I was paid to film a very small cities council meetings for local access and I can say with certainty nobody tuned in, and nobody came just to watch.
But with this I can tune in, make dinner, and virtually mute myself which is way better than physically muting myself.
The bit about the desirability to blunt anti-billionaires sentiment strikes me as a bit short-sighted. Your frequent pragmatic posture that contends that “good things are good,” feels ill-suited to considering second order impacts. The democracy-distorting effects of massive wealth inequality should really not be undersold.
I don’t think anybody with the idea for DoorDash or Zoom would be disinclined to found them if they could count on a net worth only $400M, and the very real wealth transfer effects of gig economy work should not be rah-rah’d as the glorious dynamism of capitalism.
Look, I'm not trying to make any strong claims about tax policy. I think it's almost certainly true that higher taxes on the rich would not end innovation, and if we spent the money in a halfway intelligent way we could get more innovation.
What I'm saying is that narratives that paint the founders of and investors in these big successful companies as the Big Bad of our time are mistaken. These companies are successful mostly because their products are good.
I don’t think there’s anything super-contentious about any of that. I will say that while they aren’t the Big Bad of our time, we shouldn’t expect them to be the Big Heroes. The expectations that Musk will save us, or that Zuckerberg is an enlightened shepherd of democracy are bad, and the cult of the founder should probably be shelved.
The fall of Adam Neumann might prove beneficial to that realignment.
One might even argue that corporate taxes incentivize companies to invest in research, because if trying to pay out dividends or executive salaries will result in 90% of the funds leaking away to taxes, why not shoot for the moon on research in the hope of creating a profitable new line of business?
I wonder if you might not be framing this as a of straw-man argument. I mean, products can be good and their inventors can be bad actors. The two are not mutually exclusive. The Robber Barons of the 19th century produce some pretty useful things too, like the transcontinental railroad. I never took slogans such as "every billionaire is a public policy mistake" as statements on the usefulness of the goods or services they produce but as criticisms of inefficient tax systems and labor regimes.
It would change the risk profile though for both the founders and the VC funds. Far less capital would be placed. There are probably 10+ good reasons Silicon Valley exists here and not elsewhere. Most luck. But tax structure is a factor.
You call out purchase commitments as "a proof of concept for the kind of thing we could be doing in the clean energy space", but we've already been doing this for at over a decade in clean energy! It's the entire reason why solar and wind are cheap now! I participated in the early solar market in California that was centered entirely around state mandated purchases of solar electricity; they added a couple of twists in the bidding process to try to encourage price competition but the core idea is the same. Those mandates still exist today, have been greatly expanded, and were absolutely critical in taking solar from being a very expensive source of electricity to a shockingly cheap one.
Economists don't talk about these programs much because their models work better with carbon taxes but to spur sector specific innovation you need policies that target a specific sector. Achieving the same ends with a carbon tax would have been incomprehensibly expensive.
Credits based on car efficiency and zero-emissions vehicles are also plainly the only reason why a company like Tesla has survived - their books are highly questionable, but the billions in credit sales to other car manufacturers are very real.
Best thing about this is it can be pursued at a state and local level. If you're careful about writing procurement standards, there's not even a political downside for big cities to just stop buying non-electric vehicles. If police departments could convince Ford to keep making Crown Victorias forever, no reason to think they couldn't convince them to build more electric cars too.
"These kind of gains are badly overlooked by “populists” who think you can promote economic equality by starving the labor market of immigrant workers in some kind of desperate plot to trick central banks into sustaining full employment."
I get what you are saying here - the real cause of getting closer to full employment in the Trump era was lax monetary policy, not his immigration restrictions - but attempting to trick central banks is not where populist support for immigration restrictions comes from, obviously.
They oppose immigration because they don't like immigrants and think they're stealing their jobs. My mom (a Trump supporter who is an immigrant herself) reports that many times massive amounts of H1b immigrants would be hired at the company she worked for and then she'd get laid off. Others just don't like immigrants because they are different.
I don't think we can fix people who hate immigrants, and they're a minority in America anyway. But anytime layoffs happen directly as a result of immigrants coming in, that's a policy failure, not "innovative companies realizing efficiencies by shifting their human capital to lower-cost resources" or however corporatists like to justify policies which lead to layoffs of American workers. Do that enough times, and you get someone like Trump elected who shuts it all down.
My brother works alongside many H1-Bs supporting a major telco's operations for years (by way of a contracting firm, naturally). He gets paid more than the H1-Bs do, and they regularly get squeezed into working far longer hours because the contracting firm threatens to end the contract early.
People like my brother who see this going on and share their honest assessment of the situation with anybody who will listen - they aren't reactionaries. They're people with functioning brains and hearts.
I teach a high school class called Computer Science Principles, which is mostly an intro to coding class but also teaches how computers and the internet work, and explores the impact of technology on society. I’m going to assign the first couple of paragraphs of this as reading for them today. Teenagers could use a little perspective on how much the world has changed in the last 30 years- how could they know unless we tell them?
The progressive position gets real sticky when the root cause of the failure is union power. I don't know how you solve that cleanly. Bankruptcy was needed for GM to get out from under their pension liabilities but that was catastrophic for retirees like my grandparents who were forced to downsize and greatly adjust their retirement plans.
Simple rule. Labor Unions/Private Unions good. Public Unions bad. We conflate them.
I work with Union Millwrights, Pipefitters, Laborers, etc... they are by far and away superior to non-union labor. They are more expensive, but they use their power to negotiate deals, and their main advantage is they provide a great training and apprentice program. (even though their is a dearth of kids wanting to go into this area).
Private unions are also a great idea, its basically capitalism as its best. The workers using their power and influence to make as much profit as possible... but there is the underlying buffer that they have to temper demands to ensure the employers stay open. Its a negotiation.
Public unions don't have to worry about this. They have no competition. They are effectively their own bosses, since they have significant voting blocks.
I disagree. If there was a state owned power company that employed millwrights and pipefitters, I don't understand why you would not want them to have an independent union.
A lot of state socialist governments in the 20th century thought that having public unions was redundant and got rid of them and I think we can all agree it was bad. But the Nordic states have large public sectors and those guys are unionized and that seems good
Power companies normally only employ operators and a few maintenance guys. Except for some bigger Nuke or Coal sites. And state owned power companies are notoriously inefficient (I work in the industry) compared to private ones. They are common in South America, but that's a whole different system.
I don't think Nordic public unions are as big as you think.
But quite simply, the Nordic countries have other cultural advantages that make them not quite a good comparison for the United States.
TVA is one of my customers. It’s a Federally owned corporation. Run like a private corporation. Has to compete on the market partially. They are not as efficient as Duke, Alabama Power, etc... Electricity bills in their area are higher than others. But overall they are fairly well ran.
Advantages is the wrong word maybe. Their smaller population, and a culture of cooperation (I just read an article about it... they have a word for it in Sweden... can’t remember what it was) lend themselves to a larger more efficient public sector.
The United States has different advantages. We excel in our diversity and greater immigration, which helps our competitive nature and makes the US a great place to say... develop vaccines. We are more dynamic.
I would love if our police and teachers were as efficient as the TVA.
I’m unsure how MTA is run. Why it isn’t as efficient as TVA.
Nordics have an incredibly high social trust in each other and the government that goes back before their welfare policies. The Nordic system of mass unionization and deregulation relies on unionization rates 40-50% higher than not just the US but across mainland Europe.
Social trust is a good phrase. We could get into a whole debate about how you build it. I lived in Europe for about 12 years. The Netherlands was incredibly efficient. Also high social trust. Man I loved it there.
A lot of state socialist governments got rid of private unions too, along with private enterprise, so the comparison really makes no sense. The Nordics are also far more heavily unionized than most of the world. Germany has a similar rate of unionization as America, not the Nordics.
The issue is that if you have no public sector unions everything starts getting contracted out. Then the companies that win the contracts are often not the ones doing the best job, but the ones who know how to win contracts.
If its more efficient? Why not. When I speak about Public Sector Unions, I'm mainly speaking about Fire, Police and Teachers (and obviously the MTA). All areas which aren't easily contracted out.
But... I think its likely the MTA would be run better as a private entity. Maybe...
I think you nailed it. Nuance is required here. Unfortunately it seems the default progressive position is Union Solidarity.
I'm probably more skeptical of the private unions that you but I'm biased. I adjacently worked on shutting down the Siemens breaker factory in Bellefontaine, OH. One of many shut down in the 2000s. It was moved to Juarez. I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing details of the union negotiations but with hindsight it's hard to see how shutting the factory down was the best solution for everyone.
This is pretty ironic. I work for Siemens Energy. We are hampered by the German unions. Most of the profit and markets are in the United States and the rest of the world, but we have a certain drag being a German company. I was hoping when Siemens energy split off, we would become American-based. But splitting off is allowing our company to renegotiate in Germany.
Given that a lot of these issues tend to revolve around pensions and other future liabilities, I would maybe argue that this could be seen through a short term / long term lens. Current management (in business, local govt, etc.) are much more willing to concede on payouts in the future than anything they have to fund now. Even when the negotiations are made in good faith, if future growth doesn't meet expectations then you are left with a massive shortfall. It strikes me that if requirements were added that pensions all had to be on a defined contribution / fully funded basis, then a lot of these issues might go away (though union workers would likely have much less attractive retirement packages so it isn't in their interest to support a fully funded option and business/govt wouldn't necessarily want a fully funded option since they have to be setting aside the funds now).
I agree that a major problem is that their has long been incentive for both parties to kick the can down the road and increase pension and other retirement benefits. Perhaps we'll learn that defined-contribution plans are the way to go instead of defined-benefit, but it's a complex issue that we'll continue to see play out in various iterations over the decades.
I don't think that's so much about unions as about entities (public or private) promising future pensions to lower present costs. There was a lot of resistance to defined contribution plans, as moving risk onto workers; but it actually reduces risk, by avoiding the situation you describe.
One thing to note about NZ is their biggest export (by far) is tourism. They are enduring enormous economic sacrifice in order to stop covid. And their size doesn't let them take on unlimited debt to ease the pain.
I get annoyed whenever someone mentions NZ as a barometer for Covid Response. It's all based on a border closure policy that makes Trumps policies look like open borders. It's just not practical for any other country to really have copied it. Add to that their small population and lack of any significant density and they had everything going for them.
I think you’re mistaken about density. New Zealand has a low population density but people aren’t spread out evenly. It’s population is 4.8 million but 1.6 million live in Auckland for example.
^ this. Go to South Auckland and tell me that NZ is a low density country. And yes, international tourism is an export. Foreign capital is exchanged for domestic goods and services. Certainly NZ's success would be hard to copy elsewhere, but it wasn't really attempted in US (as you mention, Trump's border policy was weak). NZ's success involved massive sacrifice and should be applauded.
They totally did a good job. But there’s very few places that could duplicate it. And let’s face it, they’re just a well run country. They don’t have to deal with all the Covid deniers we do.
That’s true. But imagine how much worse it would be in North Dakota if they were dense. I wonder how much weather is a factor there. Colder climate, everyone coming inside.
The 2 Dakotas have more confirmed cases than all of Japan...why on earth are we still talking about density as a particularly important factor in spread?
Lots of differences between the US and NZ that make us not able to replicate their response in full, but certainly limiting travel across borders was possible and not unreasonable. The concern about Trump's border policies was that they were facially racist and, as our host points out, not practical for growth in normal times.
For what its worth, I think what we've seen nationwide at this point indicates that high density living is not a prerequisite for COVID community spread.
I was in South America during the Ebola outbreak. When I travelled back to the US they had a detailed screening questionnaire at customs and a process to isolate people with potential symptoms. I remember at the beginning of the travel shutdowns several journalists returning from overseas said there was no screening at all.
I was working in Brazil during Carnival. I was wearing masks back in February... I was early on to the Cove it is going to be terrible train. I remember thinking to myself, it is going to be bad in Brazil.
But yes, the United States screening at airports sucked.
It’s an online math program they’re using for my son’s kindergarten class. It’s a great way for the kids to get practice in with the common core math excercizes their teacher shows them.
I'm a pandemic at-home educator for my 10 and 11-year old; I quit my job and have stayed home to educate my kids. Online programs offer instant feedback on work with clear explanations. They open up significant opportunities to accelerate learning of the fundamentals, giving students time to work on problem-solving, tackling complex problems, finding their passions, innovation, collaboration, etc. Learning tech and a good teacher is an amazing system. Zearn is good. https://beastacademy.com/ is great.
"I quit my job and have stayed home to educate my kids." This is the flaw with online learning, you need to either quit your job to become an educator, or teaching assistant. Good luck if you are a single parent.
This is probably worth the $8 this month. Our school uses iStation and we used Dreambox over the summer. As someone that really likes math, the stuff kids have access to today is really cool.
“One difference, of course, is that we don’t have a pro-virus lobby.”
Sure we do, it’s called the Trump Administration.
Good post though. I thought it was pretty shocking that the House decided to hold antitrust hearings on Big Tech (and release a complete and total mess of an antitrust report) during a pandemic which saw public trust in and appreciation for tech skyrocket. There are plenty of strong arguments that we should better regulate tech (though antitrust isn’t one of them), but the politics of taking a bold public stance against the companies that are keeping us relatively sane throughout this nightmare we’re living in seemed really bad and probably set back the cause of better tech regulation for a while to come.
You do not address the deflationary impact of technology adoption, which I suspect is a significant driver of current economic trends. I've been a programmer for 20 years at multiple stops, and my employers have generally hired me to increase efficiency by substituting software for labor. For example, in my current job we replace expensive kerosene with cheap solar lanterns in off-grid sub-Saharan Africa by providing software to financialize the capital tied up in the lantern. The result is that lighting services get cheaper. Before that, it was using batteries to displace fossil fuels. Before that, it was reducing the cost of making special effects in movies. The general theme is: tech companies pay me a high salary, consumers get similar goods and services at lower prices, and various forms of labor and fossil fuels (themselves extracted from the earth with great amounts of labor, durable goods, etc) are displaced.
Then there's the famous image of all the machines an iPhone replaces.
The successes around the vaccine really confirmed for me a lot of what Mariana Mazzucato has written about the systems of innovation approach to research and development and the role of governments in actively balancing the risk-reward nexus. Specifically it strikes me that the approach here -- investment in a "portfolio" of researchers allows for broader and riskier research; specific institutions to build opportunity space; clear guidance for commercialization markets and process-- were all effectively employed and seem adaptable to green energy space.
Democrats need to find a way to synthesize the point that immigration is a net benefit to the country into a more "populist" message. I am convinced by David Shor's analysis of the 2016 election that Obama -> Trump voters were mostly motivated by the campaigns' emphasis on immigration. Trump's populism here will persist within the views of the electorate and I suspect be codified as a pillar of Republican policy. Any attempt at a technocratic point here, like an X% increase of immigrants correspond to a Y% increase of productivity/innovation/etc. is not going to cut it I'm afraid.
Projecting out elections for the foreseeable future (a fraught task admittedly), this is a existential question to ponder: Democrats will need to court rural white voters! Hope to see this tackled in the blog.
I don't think there is any opposition to bringing in the best and brightest. The Trump admin recently announced that the H1-B lottery would concert to essentially a sealed bid auction. The highest paid would get their visas first. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from usual suspects trying to keep from saying they reason they use it is to drive down wages.
In all cases the objection is to, as Bernie would say, using immigration as a Koch funded plot to drive down wages.
Right, however this is precisely the question I posed. While consensus (mostly) exists that immigration of the tail of high achievers is a net benefit, the second order benefits of less targeted immigration discussed in the article is strongly polarized.
I think your statement serves as a nice example of the problem - the putative downsides of immigration are acute, it's easy to point to shuttered factories and low wages as results of immigration. The upsides of immigration are diffuse and thus lend themselves to more longform arguments which make it hard to campaign on.
On your tech thing:
Your antipathy towards Facebook has been very well documented, but at this point it's getting a bit silly how you go out of your way to deny credit. I work on Messenger, and I am proud that we've maintained and grown reliability as a means of communicating despite a huge spike in usage. We and Whatsapp make up a huge percentage of the global messaging market, the two most used messaging platforms in the world, We are also a pretty sizable portion of the global Real Time Communication (calls and video chat) market. The usage of both of those shot straight up when covid started, and despite having to stop data center production and roll out whole new covid themed products for better RTC it has all gone very smoothly in messenger. The WhatsApp people are similarly quite proud of their work, and rightfully so.
You can do the "Facebook newsfeed is bad" takes and frankly I don't disagree. But we are a large company that does a lot of things, and a lot of very smart people worked their asses off to ensure some very useful, market leading products worked even better with hugely increased usage.
Here’s where we agree — a lot of very smart people work very hard for Facebook.
You guys should go get jobs someplace else!
I don't work for FB but I am a SWE at a FANGMAN, and I think you overestimate what SWE options exist outside that group without taking at least 2 of:
1. Taking a massive paycut,
2. relocating, and
3. accepting that most of your talent will be wasted.
In the NYC metro, the only place I can take my skills without a major career downgrade is... finance, specifically HFT/quant funds/some hedge funds. Not exactly making the world a better place.
If you're at FB and have been in this business for very long, you've noticed that nearly all startups in the last 10 years are generally: built to be acquired, structurally unprofitable, incapable of ever meeting FB compensation, and sometimes just outright frauds/scams. Tesla is a bit interesting as it adds subsidy arbitrage and 80s-era stock games to the mix.
Knowing all that, where do you think FB employees will go, other than another FANGMAN company? Quite simply, the market forces of the 80s-10s led us here. Those forces began hollowing out local news in the 80s and gave us nationalized politics via cable news, well before the rise of FB. America is seemingly incapable of rewarding prosocial behavior at any scale, and if you take a technocratic stance, you should focus on that root problem and not telling FB employees to quit.
Exactly you should do #1.
That is also probably at the root of Matt's point. People at Facebook are contributing to the increased power of a company that does massive amounts of global harm. Regardless of what niche area of the company you work at, you are still part of that problem. I live in the Bay, I do not come from money. You can live here just fine without a SWE salary from Facebook. The adage that you need $200k plus to live in the Bay is tried and ultimately false.
Also, to #3, I think that is the point as well. By working at Facebook, your talent is wasted. It's amazing how embedded in that comment is the very self declaration that your talent is being used in a worthwhile way.
To respond concretely to "wasting talent" at Facebook: my point is not about whether your skills are making the world better or not.
Rather: it's about being able to keep your skills fresh and relevant while the treadmill of technology marches on. These companies are diversified, technologically. Example: I haven't learned machine learning yet, but I have set aside two weeks this December to use my company's resources for learning ML - and those resources are of a quality unmatched outside of our peer group.
That's why I say your "talent will go to waste": you go from access to most cutting-edge technologies to working with maybe 1 or 2 of them, and never getting a chance to learn the rest from the best. If the technology you bet on stops delivering value to the industry, you are now positioned behind everybody who stayed diversified.
It's kind of like asking everyone at Goldman Sachs to quit and work for community banks and credit unions.
If you find yourself telling people to take less money for nothing in return, you must know you'll need leverage. Moral outrage is not leverage.
It is American policy that leads to extreme concentration of wealth in FANGMAN companies. We laid the wires connecting everyone and we repeatedly bet the whole country's finances on monetizing those wires.
Even if you bullied everybody into quitting FB, you'll just be moving the problems, employees and revenue elsewhere. Cut the wires, nationalize the wires, or fix American monetary and fiscal policy so five companies don't get the lion's share of all investment dollars in the hunt for yield. Until you fix the root these problems will continue.
Hello :) Engineer here working in the social good space. For jobs on climate change, check out https://climatebase.org/. For Political jobs in the tech space, https://www.all-hands.us/. Also, things like Presidential campaigns usually pay well (6 figures for software engineers).
Or: https://80000hours.org/articles/earning-to-give/
"Software Development not at Facebook" is a better job. :)
I don’t really understand your point here, given the critiques leveled at FB. Nobody is denying the technical competence of FB. Nobody, though, can credit them with policy competence.
All you’ve addressed is the former when what is obviously at issue is the latter.
"We invest a ton of effort, from thousands of brilliant people, to create a _high-quality_ disinformation machine" is not a good argument in defense of Facebook. Yes, it is high quality. It's beautiful, it has the best people. (To paraphrase one of its chief beneficiaries.) Rupert Murdoch was _actively trying_ to profit from misinformation. FB just stumbled into the business, but they haven't shown any serious interest in trying to move towards remaining profitable while actually shutting off the misinformation.
Ezra Klein had a riff about this in relation to Twitter a few months back, saying basically that Twitter and Facebook actually should stop pretending that speech on their platform is free, because it's plainly not. You can have your post censored by some algorithm, with no human review. They need to start holding big-name users and publishers to MUCH higher standards. And if they get blowback from bad-faith people on the right, well, too f***ing bad. Yeah, they can't manually review everything from nobodies, but they _could_ do that for the top thousand or even ten-thousand sources.
Just as a counter point, I use a number of different messaging products in work and personal life and I can't say I've really ever experienced any significant failures. Hangouts, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Messenger, Whatsapp, SMS, etc. I'm sure that there is a lot of development happening behind the scenes and good job for making everything work in a massive uptick in demand, but I would argue that is it pretty hard to make the argument that a major problem in society is a lack of reliable text or video messaging.
my read on anti-fb takes is that they are more like, "fb engineers do really impressive technical stuff with skills that could be transferred anywhere, so why do it for a company that has large negative societal costs?"
it's not discounting quality work, it's acknowledging and predicated on the high quality of the workforce
I just want to say, I am a big fan of messenger. My coworkers and I live all over the country, as traveling technicians. Messenger has become our default way of communicating with each other. We have our internal Microsoft teams, but it’s just not as convenient.
Additionally, my son lives in Scotland. Messenger is the way that we communicate, video call, and call.
The only other app that comes close is WhatsApp. But Americans have not adapted it in mass yet.
My issue is with Facebook and all social media companies is that they spend a LOT of effort making the platform addictive. I understand why they do it, but it's kinda like Big Tobacco manipulating nicotine levels.
A major problem with Facebook is the amount of disinformation and misinformation that spreads on the platform. All large social media networks face this problem, and some are better about moderation and standards for content restrictions.
Like if anything giving credit there casts newsfeed decisions by leadership in an even worse light, since the rest of the company is in fact profitable and making very good products that do in fact improve people's lives!
I don't have facebook and I'm fine with my messaging capabilities. But people who do use messenger are more like to use the (your term) bad feature Newsfeed. Still seems like Facebook is the problem.
Speaking to the IT bit, I live in a remote, isolated rural county in the northeast corner of Minnesota, between Lake Superior, Canada and Boundary Waters. We have 5,200 people total spread over a huge area. More than 10 years ago, we secured a grant-loan package under Obama's stimulus program to develop a fiber-optic system that would bring high-speed broadband to everyone on the electrical grid. Until then, we all depended upon undependable dial-up or satellite with its latency defects. Fortunately, we did not have a commercial provider to protest, so we were given the go-ahead. It was actually a bad "stimulus" because it took way too long for that. But it provided us a level of broadband service that is the envy of much of Minnesota. We enjoyed it in a prosaic way until the pandemic hit. All of a sudden, folks in the Twin Cities discovered they could work from the beauty and relative safety of Cook County. Plus, distance learning, while not terrific, was at least not a technological challenge. It is too early to tell what the lasting impact of covid+broadband will have on our community, but I suspect it will change us in some important economic and societal ways.
Cook County - the tip of the Arrowhead. No better place in the United States, I'm pretty sure.
Virtual city/county meetings are *infinitely* better than sitting around waiting for the thing you care about to happen. In high school I was paid to film a very small cities council meetings for local access and I can say with certainty nobody tuned in, and nobody came just to watch.
But with this I can tune in, make dinner, and virtually mute myself which is way better than physically muting myself.
The bit about the desirability to blunt anti-billionaires sentiment strikes me as a bit short-sighted. Your frequent pragmatic posture that contends that “good things are good,” feels ill-suited to considering second order impacts. The democracy-distorting effects of massive wealth inequality should really not be undersold.
I don’t think anybody with the idea for DoorDash or Zoom would be disinclined to found them if they could count on a net worth only $400M, and the very real wealth transfer effects of gig economy work should not be rah-rah’d as the glorious dynamism of capitalism.
Look, I'm not trying to make any strong claims about tax policy. I think it's almost certainly true that higher taxes on the rich would not end innovation, and if we spent the money in a halfway intelligent way we could get more innovation.
What I'm saying is that narratives that paint the founders of and investors in these big successful companies as the Big Bad of our time are mistaken. These companies are successful mostly because their products are good.
I don’t think there’s anything super-contentious about any of that. I will say that while they aren’t the Big Bad of our time, we shouldn’t expect them to be the Big Heroes. The expectations that Musk will save us, or that Zuckerberg is an enlightened shepherd of democracy are bad, and the cult of the founder should probably be shelved.
The fall of Adam Neumann might prove beneficial to that realignment.
One might even argue that corporate taxes incentivize companies to invest in research, because if trying to pay out dividends or executive salaries will result in 90% of the funds leaking away to taxes, why not shoot for the moon on research in the hope of creating a profitable new line of business?
You know, like this: https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html
I wonder if you might not be framing this as a of straw-man argument. I mean, products can be good and their inventors can be bad actors. The two are not mutually exclusive. The Robber Barons of the 19th century produce some pretty useful things too, like the transcontinental railroad. I never took slogans such as "every billionaire is a public policy mistake" as statements on the usefulness of the goods or services they produce but as criticisms of inefficient tax systems and labor regimes.
It would change the risk profile though for both the founders and the VC funds. Far less capital would be placed. There are probably 10+ good reasons Silicon Valley exists here and not elsewhere. Most luck. But tax structure is a factor.
Innovation is good. Massively distributed well-being at current technological levels is better.
(Not applicable to carbon capture, other environmental tech.)
Www.wired.com/story/gospel-of-wealth-according-to-marc-benioff/amp
You call out purchase commitments as "a proof of concept for the kind of thing we could be doing in the clean energy space", but we've already been doing this for at over a decade in clean energy! It's the entire reason why solar and wind are cheap now! I participated in the early solar market in California that was centered entirely around state mandated purchases of solar electricity; they added a couple of twists in the bidding process to try to encourage price competition but the core idea is the same. Those mandates still exist today, have been greatly expanded, and were absolutely critical in taking solar from being a very expensive source of electricity to a shockingly cheap one.
Economists don't talk about these programs much because their models work better with carbon taxes but to spur sector specific innovation you need policies that target a specific sector. Achieving the same ends with a carbon tax would have been incomprehensibly expensive.
Credits based on car efficiency and zero-emissions vehicles are also plainly the only reason why a company like Tesla has survived - their books are highly questionable, but the billions in credit sales to other car manufacturers are very real.
Best thing about this is it can be pursued at a state and local level. If you're careful about writing procurement standards, there's not even a political downside for big cities to just stop buying non-electric vehicles. If police departments could convince Ford to keep making Crown Victorias forever, no reason to think they couldn't convince them to build more electric cars too.
You'd need a lot of cooperation to make it work though.
Some hard boards that could use some boring? Progress could be slow.
"These kind of gains are badly overlooked by “populists” who think you can promote economic equality by starving the labor market of immigrant workers in some kind of desperate plot to trick central banks into sustaining full employment."
I get what you are saying here - the real cause of getting closer to full employment in the Trump era was lax monetary policy, not his immigration restrictions - but attempting to trick central banks is not where populist support for immigration restrictions comes from, obviously.
They oppose immigration because they don't like immigrants and think they're stealing their jobs. My mom (a Trump supporter who is an immigrant herself) reports that many times massive amounts of H1b immigrants would be hired at the company she worked for and then she'd get laid off. Others just don't like immigrants because they are different.
I don't think we can fix people who hate immigrants, and they're a minority in America anyway. But anytime layoffs happen directly as a result of immigrants coming in, that's a policy failure, not "innovative companies realizing efficiencies by shifting their human capital to lower-cost resources" or however corporatists like to justify policies which lead to layoffs of American workers. Do that enough times, and you get someone like Trump elected who shuts it all down.
My brother works alongside many H1-Bs supporting a major telco's operations for years (by way of a contracting firm, naturally). He gets paid more than the H1-Bs do, and they regularly get squeezed into working far longer hours because the contracting firm threatens to end the contract early.
People like my brother who see this going on and share their honest assessment of the situation with anybody who will listen - they aren't reactionaries. They're people with functioning brains and hearts.
I teach a high school class called Computer Science Principles, which is mostly an intro to coding class but also teaches how computers and the internet work, and explores the impact of technology on society. I’m going to assign the first couple of paragraphs of this as reading for them today. Teenagers could use a little perspective on how much the world has changed in the last 30 years- how could they know unless we tell them?
The progressive position gets real sticky when the root cause of the failure is union power. I don't know how you solve that cleanly. Bankruptcy was needed for GM to get out from under their pension liabilities but that was catastrophic for retirees like my grandparents who were forced to downsize and greatly adjust their retirement plans.
Simple rule. Labor Unions/Private Unions good. Public Unions bad. We conflate them.
I work with Union Millwrights, Pipefitters, Laborers, etc... they are by far and away superior to non-union labor. They are more expensive, but they use their power to negotiate deals, and their main advantage is they provide a great training and apprentice program. (even though their is a dearth of kids wanting to go into this area).
Private unions are also a great idea, its basically capitalism as its best. The workers using their power and influence to make as much profit as possible... but there is the underlying buffer that they have to temper demands to ensure the employers stay open. Its a negotiation.
Public unions don't have to worry about this. They have no competition. They are effectively their own bosses, since they have significant voting blocks.
I disagree. If there was a state owned power company that employed millwrights and pipefitters, I don't understand why you would not want them to have an independent union.
A lot of state socialist governments in the 20th century thought that having public unions was redundant and got rid of them and I think we can all agree it was bad. But the Nordic states have large public sectors and those guys are unionized and that seems good
Which union should have the right to shut down this hypothetical power company to secure a better contract?
I think a public or private union should have the same right to strike and bargain...
That's nice. How long do you think everyone else will be willing to sit in the dark and freeze in solidarity with your position.
I don't understand. Do you think people who work at power plants, both public and private, should not be allowed to unionize or strike?
Power companies normally only employ operators and a few maintenance guys. Except for some bigger Nuke or Coal sites. And state owned power companies are notoriously inefficient (I work in the industry) compared to private ones. They are common in South America, but that's a whole different system.
I don't think Nordic public unions are as big as you think.
But quite simply, the Nordic countries have other cultural advantages that make them not quite a good comparison for the United States.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is a billion dollar a year company with 10,000 employees. They seem fine.
Also, what kind of cultural advantages do you think the Nordics have over America?
TVA is one of my customers. It’s a Federally owned corporation. Run like a private corporation. Has to compete on the market partially. They are not as efficient as Duke, Alabama Power, etc... Electricity bills in their area are higher than others. But overall they are fairly well ran.
Advantages is the wrong word maybe. Their smaller population, and a culture of cooperation (I just read an article about it... they have a word for it in Sweden... can’t remember what it was) lend themselves to a larger more efficient public sector.
The United States has different advantages. We excel in our diversity and greater immigration, which helps our competitive nature and makes the US a great place to say... develop vaccines. We are more dynamic.
I would love if our police and teachers were as efficient as the TVA.
I’m unsure how MTA is run. Why it isn’t as efficient as TVA.
Nordics have an incredibly high social trust in each other and the government that goes back before their welfare policies. The Nordic system of mass unionization and deregulation relies on unionization rates 40-50% higher than not just the US but across mainland Europe.
Social trust is a good phrase. We could get into a whole debate about how you build it. I lived in Europe for about 12 years. The Netherlands was incredibly efficient. Also high social trust. Man I loved it there.
A lot of state socialist governments got rid of private unions too, along with private enterprise, so the comparison really makes no sense. The Nordics are also far more heavily unionized than most of the world. Germany has a similar rate of unionization as America, not the Nordics.
Police unions are really toxic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html
The issue is that if you have no public sector unions everything starts getting contracted out. Then the companies that win the contracts are often not the ones doing the best job, but the ones who know how to win contracts.
If its more efficient? Why not. When I speak about Public Sector Unions, I'm mainly speaking about Fire, Police and Teachers (and obviously the MTA). All areas which aren't easily contracted out.
But... I think its likely the MTA would be run better as a private entity. Maybe...
I think you nailed it. Nuance is required here. Unfortunately it seems the default progressive position is Union Solidarity.
I'm probably more skeptical of the private unions that you but I'm biased. I adjacently worked on shutting down the Siemens breaker factory in Bellefontaine, OH. One of many shut down in the 2000s. It was moved to Juarez. I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing details of the union negotiations but with hindsight it's hard to see how shutting the factory down was the best solution for everyone.
https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2008/11/10/daily30.html
But sometimes unions have to learn the hard way, private unions, which is why I said it’s a negotiation.
More specifically, protectionism in Germany causes things like that to happen another places
This is pretty ironic. I work for Siemens Energy. We are hampered by the German unions. Most of the profit and markets are in the United States and the rest of the world, but we have a certain drag being a German company. I was hoping when Siemens energy split off, we would become American-based. But splitting off is allowing our company to renegotiate in Germany.
Given that a lot of these issues tend to revolve around pensions and other future liabilities, I would maybe argue that this could be seen through a short term / long term lens. Current management (in business, local govt, etc.) are much more willing to concede on payouts in the future than anything they have to fund now. Even when the negotiations are made in good faith, if future growth doesn't meet expectations then you are left with a massive shortfall. It strikes me that if requirements were added that pensions all had to be on a defined contribution / fully funded basis, then a lot of these issues might go away (though union workers would likely have much less attractive retirement packages so it isn't in their interest to support a fully funded option and business/govt wouldn't necessarily want a fully funded option since they have to be setting aside the funds now).
I agree that a major problem is that their has long been incentive for both parties to kick the can down the road and increase pension and other retirement benefits. Perhaps we'll learn that defined-contribution plans are the way to go instead of defined-benefit, but it's a complex issue that we'll continue to see play out in various iterations over the decades.
I don't think that's so much about unions as about entities (public or private) promising future pensions to lower present costs. There was a lot of resistance to defined contribution plans, as moving risk onto workers; but it actually reduces risk, by avoiding the situation you describe.
One thing to note about NZ is their biggest export (by far) is tourism. They are enduring enormous economic sacrifice in order to stop covid. And their size doesn't let them take on unlimited debt to ease the pain.
I get annoyed whenever someone mentions NZ as a barometer for Covid Response. It's all based on a border closure policy that makes Trumps policies look like open borders. It's just not practical for any other country to really have copied it. Add to that their small population and lack of any significant density and they had everything going for them.
And is tourism technically an "export"?
I think you’re mistaken about density. New Zealand has a low population density but people aren’t spread out evenly. It’s population is 4.8 million but 1.6 million live in Auckland for example.
^ this. Go to South Auckland and tell me that NZ is a low density country. And yes, international tourism is an export. Foreign capital is exchanged for domestic goods and services. Certainly NZ's success would be hard to copy elsewhere, but it wasn't really attempted in US (as you mention, Trump's border policy was weak). NZ's success involved massive sacrifice and should be applauded.
They totally did a good job. But there’s very few places that could duplicate it. And let’s face it, they’re just a well run country. They don’t have to deal with all the Covid deniers we do.
Yes but even Auckland is a pretty suburban city. Christchurch definitely is. I was actually raised there until 10.
I was comparing density more to places like New York City.
the current outbreak in NoDak suggests that density isn't critical to the virus taking hold.
That’s true. But imagine how much worse it would be in North Dakota if they were dense. I wonder how much weather is a factor there. Colder climate, everyone coming inside.
The 2 Dakotas have more confirmed cases than all of Japan...why on earth are we still talking about density as a particularly important factor in spread?
Lots of differences between the US and NZ that make us not able to replicate their response in full, but certainly limiting travel across borders was possible and not unreasonable. The concern about Trump's border policies was that they were facially racist and, as our host points out, not practical for growth in normal times.
For what its worth, I think what we've seen nationwide at this point indicates that high density living is not a prerequisite for COVID community spread.
Yes, tourism is an export.
I was in South America during the Ebola outbreak. When I travelled back to the US they had a detailed screening questionnaire at customs and a process to isolate people with potential symptoms. I remember at the beginning of the travel shutdowns several journalists returning from overseas said there was no screening at all.
I was working in Brazil during Carnival. I was wearing masks back in February... I was early on to the Cove it is going to be terrible train. I remember thinking to myself, it is going to be bad in Brazil.
But yes, the United States screening at airports sucked.
I also like have COVID has shown that making an impact on Global Warming really is possible!
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/10/tackling-climate-change-seemed-expensive-then-covid-happened/
I’m an educator in Philly. Say more on Zearn math...never heard of it.
It’s an online math program they’re using for my son’s kindergarten class. It’s a great way for the kids to get practice in with the common core math excercizes their teacher shows them.
I'm a pandemic at-home educator for my 10 and 11-year old; I quit my job and have stayed home to educate my kids. Online programs offer instant feedback on work with clear explanations. They open up significant opportunities to accelerate learning of the fundamentals, giving students time to work on problem-solving, tackling complex problems, finding their passions, innovation, collaboration, etc. Learning tech and a good teacher is an amazing system. Zearn is good. https://beastacademy.com/ is great.
"I quit my job and have stayed home to educate my kids." This is the flaw with online learning, you need to either quit your job to become an educator, or teaching assistant. Good luck if you are a single parent.
Broadly speaking, I'd assume this is generally a problem with home schooling, not just online learning.
Pandemic aside (I recognize that's a very big aside), that statement alone feels like a really good reason to fund public schools.
This is probably worth the $8 this month. Our school uses iStation and we used Dreambox over the summer. As someone that really likes math, the stuff kids have access to today is really cool.
It's not just kids... the college level stuff available free today compared to 2010 from places like edX is unbelievable.
“One difference, of course, is that we don’t have a pro-virus lobby.”
Sure we do, it’s called the Trump Administration.
Good post though. I thought it was pretty shocking that the House decided to hold antitrust hearings on Big Tech (and release a complete and total mess of an antitrust report) during a pandemic which saw public trust in and appreciation for tech skyrocket. There are plenty of strong arguments that we should better regulate tech (though antitrust isn’t one of them), but the politics of taking a bold public stance against the companies that are keeping us relatively sane throughout this nightmare we’re living in seemed really bad and probably set back the cause of better tech regulation for a while to come.
You do not address the deflationary impact of technology adoption, which I suspect is a significant driver of current economic trends. I've been a programmer for 20 years at multiple stops, and my employers have generally hired me to increase efficiency by substituting software for labor. For example, in my current job we replace expensive kerosene with cheap solar lanterns in off-grid sub-Saharan Africa by providing software to financialize the capital tied up in the lantern. The result is that lighting services get cheaper. Before that, it was using batteries to displace fossil fuels. Before that, it was reducing the cost of making special effects in movies. The general theme is: tech companies pay me a high salary, consumers get similar goods and services at lower prices, and various forms of labor and fossil fuels (themselves extracted from the earth with great amounts of labor, durable goods, etc) are displaced.
Then there's the famous image of all the machines an iPhone replaces.
The successes around the vaccine really confirmed for me a lot of what Mariana Mazzucato has written about the systems of innovation approach to research and development and the role of governments in actively balancing the risk-reward nexus. Specifically it strikes me that the approach here -- investment in a "portfolio" of researchers allows for broader and riskier research; specific institutions to build opportunity space; clear guidance for commercialization markets and process-- were all effectively employed and seem adaptable to green energy space.
Democrats need to find a way to synthesize the point that immigration is a net benefit to the country into a more "populist" message. I am convinced by David Shor's analysis of the 2016 election that Obama -> Trump voters were mostly motivated by the campaigns' emphasis on immigration. Trump's populism here will persist within the views of the electorate and I suspect be codified as a pillar of Republican policy. Any attempt at a technocratic point here, like an X% increase of immigrants correspond to a Y% increase of productivity/innovation/etc. is not going to cut it I'm afraid.
Projecting out elections for the foreseeable future (a fraught task admittedly), this is a existential question to ponder: Democrats will need to court rural white voters! Hope to see this tackled in the blog.
I don't think there is any opposition to bringing in the best and brightest. The Trump admin recently announced that the H1-B lottery would concert to essentially a sealed bid auction. The highest paid would get their visas first. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from usual suspects trying to keep from saying they reason they use it is to drive down wages.
In all cases the objection is to, as Bernie would say, using immigration as a Koch funded plot to drive down wages.
Right, however this is precisely the question I posed. While consensus (mostly) exists that immigration of the tail of high achievers is a net benefit, the second order benefits of less targeted immigration discussed in the article is strongly polarized.
I think your statement serves as a nice example of the problem - the putative downsides of immigration are acute, it's easy to point to shuttered factories and low wages as results of immigration. The upsides of immigration are diffuse and thus lend themselves to more longform arguments which make it hard to campaign on.