The growing divide between conservatives and Silicon Valley is no accident. In a recently released survey of over 600 tech founders, I and my co-authors identified fundamental philosophical differences between Trump voters and technologists. Namely, Silicon Valley is about as “globalist” as it gets, supporting both free trade and immigration much more than the typical self-identified Republican.
While there is plenty wrong with our immigration system, the policy that protected undocumented children (‘Dreamers”) is something that should make Americans proud.
The Trump Administration is reportedly planning to scrap a popular immigration policy for startup entrepreneurs, according to the Wall Street Journal.
I have been experimenting with an obscure Obamacare alternative that I believe holds an answer to declining health and, more importantly, is something that Congress should protect as it considers overhauling the nation’s healthcare law.
The White House has just hired one of the most effective and innovative political servants that I have known in all my years as a tech writer.
My neighbors in Silicon Valley are outraged over two pieces of news that seem entirely contradictory to me.
Median rent in San Francisco has skyrocketed above $4000 a month. Ben Carson’s HUD can play a vital role in stopping this anti-market behavior.
Some evidence that Trump supporters can be skeptical of globalization but not racist.
Donald Trump may be even more popular than traditional polls are showing.
The Chinese government has just passed a security law that reportedly could require technology companies to hand over encryption keys to private data. The law is so controversial that President Obama personally raised concerns about it to President Xi Jinping.
Apple is formally opposing a proposed UK law that requires tech companies to provide a way for authorities to access encrypted messages. The software giant has prided itself on communications so secure that not even it can read some messages. Under so-called “end-to-end encryption,” only sender and receiver have the capacity to unscramble a message.
During the Democratic debate in New Hampshire, front-runner Hillary Clinton called for a “Manhattan-like project” so that law enforcement could track terrorists through encrypted communications.
House GOP and Democratic leaders just inserted a sweeping surveillance bill into their 2,009-page, late-night 2016 budget deal.
Many commercial drones, including those purchased over the holidays, must now be registered.
With the rise of Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, there’s a sinking suspicion that the traditional 9-5 job is being replaced by flexible, independent contract work. But, despite the existence of multiple billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups hiring an army of independent contract workers, economists have had difficulty finding any evidence that Americans were more likely to be self-employed.
The tech elite are teaming up to protect humanity from evil Matrix-like artificial intelligence. Elon Musk and a team of Silicon Valley elite have reportedly pledged more than a billion dollars to construct artificial intelligence that benefits mankind, rather than enslaves it.
Lack of work-life balance may be a feature—not a bug—at the world’s top companies. Glassdoor just released its annual list of “Best Places to Work,” based on its database of employee reviews.
My favorite email application, Mailbox, is shutting down in February, so I am scrambling for an alternative. Fortunately, Mailbox’s trailblazing features have been widely adopted by many of its competitors, so there are plenty options. My favorites are Google’s Inbox and Microsoft Outlook. (Yes, Outlook works for iPhone and Gmail users.)
The heated battle over cultural insensitivity at Yale University has a new victim: Science.
Indeed, even The New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman–an unabashed supporter of government intervention into the market–dedicated an entire column to highlighting the role of housing restrictions and inequality.
One of America’s most expansive spying programs came to an end over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Google has censored hundreds of thousands of links to comply with European “right to be forgotten” regulations. A new transparency report reveals that the search giant has complied with 348,508 of the 1,235,473 URLs that users have requested be removed from search results.
San Francisco is a living crystal ball of what happens when a city refuses to build enough housing to accommodate the dense clustering of high-tech and service workers natural to modern industries.
(Ferenstein Wire)—Silicon Valley is coming after unionized industries. A top investor in the Valley, Paul Graham, lit up Twitter, tweeting, “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups. (I don’t mean in simply paying people less, but rather that industries afflicted by unions are sclerotic so have left lots undone.)”
(Ferenstein Wire) – Over the last decade, Silicon Valley has become an extraordinary force in politics, but they’ve bewildered the DC establishment with their bizarre loyalties. Tech titans are the arch nemesis of labor unions on a series of fronts, from high-skilled immigration and the taxi industry to free trade and their aggressive funding of union-less public charter schools.
Early election results show that San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to reject a law limiting Airbnb in the city.
Airbnb has made headlines for reportedly spending a whopping $8,000,000 to defeat a San Francisco proposition to restrict short-term rentals. That translates into roughly $40 per voter of advertising from Airbnb alone, not including supporting tech lobbies.
Silicon Valley’s “coding bootcamps” are a cottage industry of fast-track private vocational schools for graduates looking to enter the competitive tech industry as software engineers, data scientists, and other in-demand jobs. Many coding bootcamp graduates who hold college degrees in areas notorious for slim earning potential (like English majors) and are now fully employed in the tech industry making a lot more money.
Former White House spokesperson and current public relations lead, Jay Carney, just published a blistering response to the New York Times’ investigation of Amazon.com on Medium.
The White House reportedly wants to shell out a whopping $700,000 for standing desks. While it’s true that sitting all day long has debilitating health effects and it’s smart business to keep employees healthy, it’s an extraordinary amount of money to pay for something that can be recreated with a free cardboard box.
At the first Democratic Presidential Debate, we learned there is at least one consensus belief among all the presidential candidates: whistleblower Edward Snowden should be punished.
Big tech companies are safeguarding billions of dollars in offshore tax havens, according to a new study. Apple alone, the biggest offender, is stashing $181B in revenue with an estimated tax burden of $59.2B. In other words, Apple’s taxes could pay for nearly the entirety of President Obama’s plan for free two-year community college (an estimated $60B).
(Ferenstein Wire) – The tech industry, now one of the largest private sector lobbying forces in Washington DC, hasn’t had much to say as Republicans scramble to find a new Speaker for the House of Representatives. But now, Congress’s geekiest member, Representative Darrell Issa, is “considering” putting his hat in the ring and has turned heads in the well-heeled tech halls of D.C.
(Ferenstein Wire)—The technology industry is scrambling to understand how it will continue business in Europe, after the continent’s high court struck down a privacy agreement that protected U.S.-based companies operating abroad, known as Safe Harbor.
Japanese officials have greenlit an experiment to roll out driverless taxis in 2016, with the aim of commercial availability by 2020. The pilot will be offered to about 50 people in the Kanagawa region south of Tokyo.
During a townhall with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new historical fact about one of Silicon Valley’s most valued companies.
The FTC is apparently concerned that Google may be unfairly promoting its search engine on their popular Android mobile operating system.
A technical glitch during New Year’s Eve turned out to be an information treasure trove for Uber. Last New Year’s Eve in NYC, the surge pricing algorithms failed and didn’t allow Uber to incentivize more drivers to get on the road with higher pay, just as partygoers rushed to call drivers; only 1 in 4 of users who wanted a driver actually got one.
Since Uber began getting regularly hammered in the press for its aggressive political tactics and potential legal violations, the once outspoken CEO hasn’t given the public much direction about the future of the multibillionaire transportation company.
The White House just released a controversial scorecard system for the nation’s colleges, leveraging aggregated tax income data to rank colleges by how much graduates actually earn.
