iPhones and unprotected sex
By
Dave Winer on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 1:34 PM.
You might get an STD if you have unprotected sex, but even the smartest people from time to time throw caution to the wind. In the heat of the moment.
Look, no one likes it when you shout Fire in a movie theater when everyone is really loving the movie. But if there's a fire you should probably ignore people's prefs and shout anyway. Like the people who said it was a bubble when housing prices kept going up, when we're fighting two wars but feeling no pain at home. Something was wrong with that picture.
Something is wrong with today's picture too. There isn't room for every college undergrad to drop out and start a new company. VCs that encourage this, and it seems they all do, are no better than mortgage brokers that put immigrants who couldn't speak English into McMansions.
All these fake startups need us to let them have our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into AAA securities. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don't think there's going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.
All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.
It's all connected. The fact that they're pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they're not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.
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