House of Eratosthenes

I can’t help but wonder how these Nostradamuses — Nostradami? — thought this stuff would all fit together. I suppose I should treat them with kid gloves, lest someone in my command chain happen to come across The Blog That Nobody Reads.

But the question just has to be asked. Progressive politics is all about destroying things when you’re pretending you’re building things. Just look at all the issues…everything they want preserved, is a destructive agent. Everyone they want protected is a destroyer. Whatever they want destroyed, is something that has been known in our history to preserve, protect, build and create. They always have some talking points to muddle the picture, but that’s it in a nutshell right there.

Technology is hip, and Obama is hip. Was that the connection? Our tech geniuses fell for that? Say it ain’t so, Joe. And now they’re surprised? Come again?

…Silicon Valley played a crucial role in the success of President Obama…and Silicon Valley naturally assumed that the new President would do the same in return.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way…

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive – smart, hip, a gadget freak – and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal – new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create – to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Humility is an ongoing challenge in technology. Everyone who’s built anything of any value, has had to struggle with this. But still, my incredulous question stands. You have the responsibility and authority to direct the kind of money that helped get Obama elected — and you couldn’t see this coming down the pike? How does one build a technology career with that kind of blind spot? Don’t you need some kind of aptitude for looking at something, figuring out why it does the things it does, and anticipating what happens if you put some kind of thing in some kind of state or place? Isn’t that an adequate high-level description of what high-technology work is, when you get down to it? How & why the blind-siding, then?

There’s an answer as we flip over to page two. It explains everything, and that isn’t a good thing because it’s a bad, bad answer…

…[W]hy did the big tech companies embrace such regulations as Sarbanes[-Oxley] and stock options expensing – even though they would cost them billions of dollars with no obvious gain? And why would they support a Presidential candidate who seemed to have little understanding of, or sympathy for, market capitalism and business?

Because it was the best strategy to crush the start-ups. And for the most part, that strategy has worked. High tech has only seen a handful of new companies go public in the last five years – compared to hundreds per year before that. Less noticed is that this means most hot new start-up companies, instead of enjoying an IPO and becoming rich enough to compete full-on against the big boys, now can only grow to a certain size then offer themselves up to be bought by the giants. What had once been hugely valuable competition has now been reduced to a farm system for acquisitive mature companies.

Hmmm…blame Sarbanes. Interesting idea, and I see merit in it.

Get in the fucking purse Where’s the Dan-Bricklin-Spreadsheet of the 21st century? Who are the Wozniak and Jobs of our new millenium? When and where did someone come up with a revolutionary new concept in how the everyday household organizes and looks at data? Since Sarbanes-Oxley I haven’t seen it. Yeah things are getting tinier and faster. That I can see.

But every new innovation that rounds a whole corner and brings us into a new world, seems to have to do with playing our collections of personal tunes. Someone please tell me we didn’t just start a century that will be devoted to that; from what I can see, that appears to be the case. Playing personal tunes, downloading personal tunes, getting electronically tattled-on by our own assets for downloading personal tunes illegally, and carrying dogs around in purses. Is that a complete rundown of our technological requirements in our modern age?

Geez. It’s like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in reverse, with “The Dawn of Man” at the end. Except this is REAL. That sucks.

Morgan,

That is the best link of the day so far. The real power of that essay by Malone is in the comment stream, which contains some exta-remely cogent observations about the relative maturity and insight of the Unicorn Generation, which often boils down to “I know obscure stuff about computers. You don’t.”

As the commenters point out, these kiddies put The One™ in office. Bills are coming due, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
- rob | 06/16/2009 @ 10:23
I personally vote for “Nostradami”. 🙂

Yeah, I see these progressives hell bent on tearing down the Western Civilization from which they sprang, with grandiose dreams of the Utopia they will create … as if it is all happening in some sort of vaccuum.

Especially with the apologies, placations, and otherwise trying to grovel our way back to popularity — they don’t seem to give a thought to the idea that even if Socialism DID work, their take the ionospherically high road approach in any conflict they didn’t manage to avoid will quickly lead to whatever they manage to build being torn down and replaced by throwbacks to pre-medieval times, and the precious few years they are able to spend congratulating themselves (and compensating themselves handsomely … after all, they deserve it like the politburo … for bringing about such an enlightened society even if they did have to croak a few right-wing kooks along the way) before they’re either putting on a hajib or growing a beard, or paying the jizyah — or trying to scream through the blood gushing out of the gigantic hole in their throats as they’re sawed through by giant scimitars in for the Akbar of Allah.
- philmon | 06/16/2009 @ 18:00
[…] ODDLY ENOUGH, The iPresident is Not Friendly to Technology …. […]
- Steynian 365 « Free Canuckistan! | 06/19/2009 @ 19:26

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The iPresident is Not Friendly to TechnologyTuesday, June 16th, 2009

The iPresident is Not Friendly to Technology
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009