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2017-07-17 Home Front: Culture Wars
Today's Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons.
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2017-07-17 05:02|| || Front Page|| [1 views ]  Top

#1 One can point to universities, museums and parks that were left behind by the robber barons of yore. Today, we don't see the tech oligarchs doing the same. Instead they create charity foundations to increase their own wealth and self-aggrandizement.
Posted by JohnQC 2017-07-17 07:09||   2017-07-17 07:09|| Front Page Top

#2 No, the robber barons were not trying to "change the world," they were trying to get rich, no care whether steel, coal, oil and railroads made things better or worse, unless that was a selling point. Suckerpurge ain't no Henry Frick, as far as advancing the country as a whole goes...
Posted by M. Murcek 2017-07-17 07:36||   2017-07-17 07:36|| Front Page Top

#3 So, worse, as in not advancing anything that helps the common man. Yeah, they are...
Posted by M. Murcek 2017-07-17 07:39||   2017-07-17 07:39|| Front Page Top

#4 And instapinhead is an elon musk cultist, so it's startling he would pass this article along...
Posted by M. Murcek 2017-07-17 07:40||   2017-07-17 07:40|| Front Page Top

#5 Tech firms had once been prodigious employers of American workers. But now, many depend on either workers abroad of imported under H-1B visa program. These are essentially indentured servants whom they can hire for cheap and prevent from switching jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs in Silicon Valley, and many corporate IT departments elsewhere, rent these “technocoolies,” often replacing longstanding U.S. workers.

Bingo!
Posted by Besoeker 2017-07-17 07:41||   2017-07-17 07:41|| Front Page Top

#6 Speaking of coolies, we won't address who help the Central Pacific make it to Promontory Summit, Utah. The technology of the day, travel time from Atlantic to Pacific would fall from as much as six months, down to one week. Orders of magnitude.
Posted by Procopius2k 2017-07-17 08:19||   2017-07-17 08:19|| Front Page Top

#7 After 1865, possibly as many as 700,000 able bodied men absent from the railroad building labor pool might have created something of a need.
Posted by Besoeker 2017-07-17 08:22||   2017-07-17 08:22|| Front Page Top

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