The problem with transaction fees is there's no way to properly market them-- theoretically the higher a transaction fee you pay will give you a higher quality of service, but in practice the terms under which your transaction is processed are completely voluntary. It might happen, it might not, and it's definitely in the interests of large mining guilds to run up the price, and the large guilds are very effective at locking out upstarts. A cartel of two of them would easily control a majority of the blocks that get signed onto the chain, and thus set the price of transaction processing.

Given that Silicon Valley is mostly what it is due to its startups

Hrm, I'd say the the Valley is what it is mainly due to California's education spending in the 60s and 70s, and the presence of a very large and important land grant university in the city, those things are what caused the startups. It certainly wasn't due to Palo Alto's state and municipal tax situation, if that was a factor, Google would have been founded in Austin.

If labor laws become too problematic, then Silicon Valley becomes Detroit

Trade unionism is what workers do when the law is too friendly to employers.

The Detroit issue is important, it'll depend ultimately on how workers in SV decide to organize -- if they create a guild-like system, like a German works council system, things will probably be just fine.

One of the problems is that the number of people who are actually eager to work under these conditions is quite large.

I work in the film industry and the problem is really similar -- this is why Hollywood has a guild system. It's really the only way to make sure that there's any reward at all for being good at your job and sticking with it; it also makes things like health care and retirement planning much more portable and less dependent upon employers.

There's a collective action problem, particularly in businesses where the work isn't a commodity, where high-skill labor exists and employers may want to hire it, but competition with other firms on prices keeps their margins low, and thus keeps them from ever being able to afford it. It just becomes easier to hire whatever is churning out of the school system, burn those people out, and then move on to the next group. You can make a lot of money but it's not sustainable, eventually the employers in such a trade will tend to turn to collusion or lobbying to keep high-quality competitors out of their market (many national film industries work this way, like Italy's and Spain's).

Stipulated.

This is simply a consequence of the fact that tech startup remuneration schemes just don't work anymore, and people have been coasting for the last decade hoping the 90s would come back, and they just aren't. You can't just take programmers who would make over six figures in the market, pay them a pittance and stock, and then never have the stock pay off -- this'll work the first few times, but not for years.

We also can't ignore the fact that, though we measure "innovation" in the number of startups that are founded, a lot of these startups are just really dumb, unsustainable ideas that would be much better off being developed by larger companies (if at all), and the whole reason its a startup, and not a MS/Apple/Google R&D project, is to give the founders a big payday from VC funding rounds, and to give the venture capitalists a big payday off of some patent the company will file. Yay intellectual property! It's just a big rent collection scheme dressed up as entrepreneurship.

Tech startups are rarely designed to make money, they aren't really supposed to, they are really just a fiction to get the connected parties as much cash as physically possible before the whole thing burns out. It's been a scam for a decade, but a lot of tech people are deeply emotionally invested in the system, because it means catered meals and beers in the fridge and Ferraris for everyone up and down the Camino Real and satisfies their deeply-held emotional belief that being a computer nerd entitles you to vast wealth and privilege, because you're "reinventing the world" or some such nonsense.

A very similar thing happened in the film industry between the early twenties, where it was basically a gold rush from the end of World War I to the invention of sound film, and there were hundreds of little fly-by-night producers making movies left and right, and there was tons of "innovation" in the sense that a lot of content was getting made, but everyone under the producer was making nothing. Then everyone unionized.

A lot of tech will say in Silicon Valley, it's just too close to Stanford and all the good people. But, they'll actually have to be paid for the work they do, in money and not in magic beans.

Sports, voting, etc are ALL yes or no answers with very very limited possible ways to get there. Real science on the other hand frequently involves situations where the answer isn't really known and the possible ways to get there are infinite

That's about right. There's a sort of basic ontological fallacy in an article like this. Just because we can construct a question like "To what extent is climate change responsible for the cost of disasters?" it doesn't necessarily follow that it can be answered quantitatively, or that it even has a meaningful answer. Basically the article is two or three graphs and a bunch of qualitative analysis-- it's punditry in scientistic drag.

Running the numbers can never tell us what we have to do, right and wrong aren't subject to cost-benefit analysis. Always be wary of people that try to apply such logic, considering that the wrong thing to do tends to be the cheaper thing.

There's a difference between "is" and "aught." We hold people responsible for failing to do as they aught, not for what they are.

GitHub relies on Git, not the other way around.

Eh... GitHub is a huge brand presence for Git, if we consider Git as a business concern. I'm certain a lot of people elect to use Git because they know that they'll be able to host it with GitHub. If we lived in a world where BitBucket had been the more aggressive first mover, I'm sure things would be different.

The other thing Git has going for it is Linus, but just because Linus uses $X DVCS doesn't mean that people are clamoring to use $X. Very few people need to pull kernel diffs and Linus is atrocious at marketing.

No no, you misunderstand. The Civil War was over slavery as an agrarian, quasi-manorial system of farm labor. The north was fighting for the much more palatable capitalist wage slavery :)

With a union, it doesn't matter if you're any good at your job or not, the only question is how long you've been there.

This really depends on the union. Entertainment unions in the US don't run on seniority-- a lot of craft guilds don't, the SEIU and many of the newer Change to Win unions don't put as much weight on seniority, even the UAW has come around over the last few years (though I would note that seniority, in principle, didn't hurt the US auto industry for the decades it was the world juggernaut.)

Unions, in my experience, promote mediocrity.

Not in Germany, or Scandinavia, or Canada, or even the United States between 1930 and 1980. Militating against your perception is the fact that unionized jurisdictions uniformly have higher median real incomes and standards of living.

Everybody's got an anecdote about some union chicanery, politicians have been eating out on "lazy union bosses" stories for 30 years. Everybody's also got an anecdote or two about CEO salaries and corporate greed. Anecodotes notwithstanding, the data tells us one is a much bigger problem for our society and our economy than the other.

And that is different from how we would expect her to approach a male engineer she was trying to ensnare exactly how?

Why is it that a woman "ensnares" a man? Have men no self-control? Or is male infantile sexuality simply "the law of gravity" as you seem to claim in OP?

I think the problem is the implication that a woman being bossy is code-switching, but a man being a "cocksucker" isn't. Calling your boss a cocksucker generally isn't meant as a challenge to their authority per se, and being a "cocksucking asshole" is normative for high-status males in many parts of society. Women being "bossy" is never considered normative, though, it's always transgressive.

Also the term isn't as important as the behavior itself. It's not that women get called "bossy," it's that they get called bossy for merely exercising their authority.

Right, but apps you write on your Tivo can't run on a GNU/Linux installation or an Android installation. You have three platforms now. The API is the platform, and Tivo has the Tivo API, Android has its own toolset and libraries, and X11 is a third.

All of them will probably support very basic command-line software with just a recompile, but if you're coding a finished app with a UI and the sort of interaction with high-level services users expect, you're going to be writing three different apps.

There's some variation on the "Only old people in Korea..." Slashdot meme in this.

What, because anybody who's rich is in danger?

Or because now the CIA/NSA/Fed/Bavarian Illuminatus/Zeta Reticulans will "get" him or some such nonsense?