The Socialist Robbery in Progress in Silicon Valley.
I dare the next tech bro to claim they are a libertarian.
The Silicon Valley Bank debacle is a rolling disaster. The list of problems is mind-boggling. No Chief Risk Officer onboard, why not? Do the smartest people in the room have this covered? Obviously not. SVB did not have a customer loan base (VCs throw money at the start-ups for free so they did not require loans or credit lines), so they stuck massive amounts of cash into long-term [up to 10-year notes] T-bills and bonds at a fixed interest rate while everyone knew the rates were going up! They locked in cash at 1% as The Fed telegraphed for over a year huge interest rate increases. Seemingly, the executive management at SVB does not have the common sense to run a laundromat (hence they were relieved by the FDIC) or maybe even a bar. Yep. A dive bar literally may be beyond their management skill set.
The government has waded into the morass not to seize the means of production, but it has stepped in to decide who gets the government-sponsored, ergo socialist, coverage of their assets after making their own egregious mistakes. This is maybe not pure socialism, but it definitely is government insurance exclusively for the rich, wealthy, and well-connected. This is Corporate Socialism (Corporatism) run amok, welfare for the wealthy. If a historically black university needed a bailout, the answer would be an unequivocal ”No!” from the very start. We need more funding to stabilize Medicare or Social Security? The answer is just not “No!” Instead, the Nationalists announced plans to destroy both programs overnight with nothing private or public to replace it. The wealthy investor class needs to be protected against their own horribly bad decision-making and even worse money management — so make it rain on the wealthy investors?!? What?!?
Oh, and they decided as a group to run towards the banking cliff like a slice of lemmings. This same situation could have happened without SVB having a cash crunch or a bad yield spread. This could have happened because the Sauron of Silicon Valley woke up in a bad mood and ranted on Twitter about how he was going to move money out of SVB. The same thing would have happened. This was a classic bank run organized in a chat room with emojis.
It went something like this in a Slack channel:
Something is up bro! 🎱
SVB 🖕💩
💰🚛🏦🏧💵💱
Disruption! 🤪😝🤩
🍸?
Then boom, $42B was withdrawn and more than one bank was at risk.
Did you know that ninety-five percent of all SVB deposits in FDIC-insured accounts were far above the $250,000 insurance limit? The bank management and regulators were not the only bad actors in this scenario. The customers, the techies, and the glorious entrepreneurs, who are allegedly the smartest people in the room, well, they are actually fucking morons. Take Roku who had $457M in a checking account at SVB. The government has announced that all deposits will be insured, therefore the FDIC has, with a snap of the gauntlet, raised the insurance limit on deposits from $250,000 to a whopping and f! unbelievable half a billion dollars. Why? The rich and wealthy were at risk.
Calling all cars! Calling all cars!! 211 — armed robbery in progress. The suspect is fleeing in a white Telsa, California plates, driver is a white male, 30s, overeducated, overconfident, but still tends to be a mama’s boy despite his bluster, wearing a sleeveless down vest, company logo on a black t-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and slip on shoes. He should be considered dangerous as he has no clue how life and the economy should actually work beyond free VC cash, a foosball table, and government bailouts… Stand by for further…
I have been living and working in Silicon Valley since the late 90s. The place is The Wild, Wild, Wild West but Dr. Loveless is played by a self-absorbed anarchist high on Molly shouting “disruption” every seven minutes. Don’t get me wrong: I love technology and the fact I found a career where I get to do my favorite thing, solving puzzles, is pretty cool. But sometimes the personas of this industry drive me crazy.
I like being in the area and I do truly enjoy working with technology. Besides, being in the military and paramilitary involves getting attacked and even shot at on occasion. That very rarely happens in tech outside an FPS game in the breakroom. My tech work has included working at a national lab, start-ups, small-to-medium local businesses, and consulting for a national food distributor, two large non-profits, and a private university. Now I work at a classic Big Tech corporation working with data. If you don’t work in tech or have never visited Silicon Valley, I recommend you watch the HBO series Silicon Valley. That series is hilariously very real, like the way musicians see Spinal Tap and go “too real, dude”.
That is not to say Silicon Valley does not have any problems. Silicon Valley is replete with issues and some of those issues annoy me to no end. The biggest one is building and marketing what is called The Internet of Shit. Tech products that have absolutely no real-world use, meaning, or value. Talking refrigerators? Annoying. Smart juicers? Can’t squeeze the bag of fruit slush yourself?!? Self-driving software that runs over cyclists and blows through intersections? Dangerous overreach. Kitchen ovens that won’t even turn on because the oven can’t connect to Wifi?? That’s just introducing failure for absolutely no good reason. A water bottle that glows if you have not taken a drink recently? Ah, maybe you aren’t thirsty?!? $120 toasters that work no better than the $13 toaster I bought in 1986? Thanks for asking me to waste money. GTFOH.
Every techie come disruptor claims to be a libertarian. Now, you can self-identify however you wish, yet most of the libertarians, especially after SVB, are clique libertarians. Probably only became one after one of your work friends went on a diatribe about Milton Friedman, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Sowell over a few vodkas one night, so suddenly, everyone is an edgy libertarian by association in the Valley.
My former blog was named ‘(my name) - Groovy Libertarian for President (then the election year)’. I wrote the last thing for nearly 12 years. I often identified myself as somewhere between Ike, Penn Jillette, and two hippies growing a shit ton of weed.
A few years back, I took an online test at I think the University of Pennsylvania on political identification. The survey was about 150 questions that ran the gamut of political thinking. My results were plotted on a typical X Y graph, the horizontal went from Liberalism to Conservatism and the vertical went from Libertarianism to Authortarism. I scored 0.1 Left/Liberal and 9.9 Libertarian, hence the Groovy Libertarian moniker. So I am a Centrist with strong attention to individual freedom and liberty. Adults, for the most part, should make their own decisions with the least government interference as reasonably possible. I tend to agree with the Liberals (without all the whining of late) on most social issues (equal rights, equal treatment, equal opportunity …but not equal outcomes) and social support issues (education, healthcare, taking care of seniors). I tend not to agree with the fringe far-left quasi-communists just as I don’t care for the far-right Nationalists. I dislike and see Corporatists (Corporate Socialism) as destructive and corrupt. Socialism (you know Socialism Socialism) is not an answer to any problem, it is just screeding for attention and an unachievable utopia.
I scored so highly on the Libertarian side of things due to several issues surveyed. I will note that I do think these variables were over-weighted as even I don’t think I am that Libertarian to be nearly an anarchist. But libertarian in the end, for sure.
I am 1000% against the drug war. The State has declared war on use and personal behavior, not abuse and criminality, and then the government ignores the abuse and wags a finger at the addicts, especially after FDA-approved opioids became the #1 problem. The dumbest possible way to handle that problem space is yet another war. The drug war is a complete oligarchic and racist failure they just keep doubling down on to make Americans’ lives as miserable as possible. I truly think prohibitions do not work, and they are attempted at holding the populous moralistic hostages to broken and unachievable policy. Drug-free America?!? Caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine are all drugs (and they have lobbyists). We will never get with reality on this issue in my lifetime. It is as much of a government scheme as it is a shameful policy failure, it is just a ruse for attention. Look! We are doing something!
I think adult prostitution should be 100% legal and managed by the health department and the CDC.
I think the government should not be in the business of marriage and marriage licenses. I can write a contract with my spouse over a glass of champagne. I don’t need to have a government bureaucrat assigned as our marriage babysitter. Tax benefits for being married? Nonsense. Social engineering using a mix of bad government, voodoo, and Calvinism? No, thank you to the point of fuck off. The right-wingers know the solution to their gay marriage angst: Get the government out of the marriage business. If you don’t like gay/queer marriage or even polyamory, don’t get gay married in a group ceremony. Viola! Your problem is solved. Now STFU. Under US law, marriage is a contract. You can stop with the voodoo and the balderdash of sanctity anytime now. The history of marriage shows the reality that marriage, until recently, was exclusively about property and inheritance, including holding your wife as property. Time to get to modernity folks.
Our foreign policy is a disaster and involves even human rights problems (including for our own troops). I don’t think the CnC should be able to send troops to war without a proper and constitutional war declaration that includes a war tax on the wealthy to help pay for the military adventurism. Do I think the federal government has a proper role in creating and maintaining a professional Army? Yes. It is the use of the Army I have problems with all the time.
Banking privacy (drug war again, we are all drug traffickers when we want to move $100), and the right to travel (from the TSA, Stateline border checks for women’s immorality, or internal border checks) are offenses against the individual the way they are “managed” by the State. The right to carry cash has been chipped away at, yes, a US dollar in your pocket — roadside robberies by the cops are commonplace, and it’s commie bullshit.
The bank bailouts of 2008 were a coordinated larceny targeting the taxpayers on behalf of the criminal suspects with lobbyists who created the problem in the first place.
I think people are responsible for their own conduct and actions, and third parties should never be held accountable for someone else’s behaviors or actions. That’s the drug war in a nutshell. The government insists on punishing everyone through some level of demeaning enforcement (TSA groping searches, “stop and frisk,” asset seizures that have become roadside robberies, etc.). You don’t beat on pain patients at the pharmacy in your drug war because Purdue Pharma is street-dealing opioids. (Yes, that happened here locally. A guy got the shit kicked out of him for daring to have, drum roll please, a valid prescription from a licensed doctor.) Ever try depositing $100 into your daughter’s college checking account just to be told you are a drug dealer trying to launder money? Yep, that happened to my wife!
Individual rights have been trampled since Reagan and doubly so since 9/11. The government treats the average American as if they exist for one reason: To be surveilled by the government. Police at every level of government are armed with military weapons, spying gear, cellphone hacking units, and on and on. Government grows in fear of its own citizens even when the citizen is not doing anything illegal.
Now explain how the “libertarians” of tech are being anything but crybaby socialists in the SVB debacle. The smartest ran to Twitter to demand being made whole by the government they claim is holding them down through excessive regulations. FDIC just decided on a whim that the deposit insurance would be increased by a factor of 2000. Why? The investment class was at risk from their own laziness and stupidity, so the government must step in.
What should be happening is the proper processes of capitalism when things go bad: bankruptcy, receivership, and liquidation.
Hypocrisy is holding on line 1, bro.