Silicon Valley

The Independent Republics of Big Tech Are the Biggest Threat to Democracy

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The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute "best practices" for countering disinformation.  read more »

Foreign Threats Demand a Muscular Domestic Response

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With our natural resources, our productive capacity, and the genius of our people for mass production we will...outstrip the Axis powers in munitions of war.
Franklin Roosevelt, Message to Congress, Jun 10, 1941  read more »

The Tech Breakdown

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The record meltdown of Meta stock earlier this month suggests turbulence in the tech world and a difficult period ahead for the company formerly known as Facebook. But even as Meta’s stock has fallen, the record profits being posted by fellow oligarchical tech firms Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon indicates that Silicon Valley’s hegemony is far from over.  read more »

The Zaibatsu-ization of America

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Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.  read more »

Silicon Heartland

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Intel announced plans to build two new semiconductor (chip) manufacturing plants in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area on January 21. In announcing the largest private-sector investment in Ohio history, CEO Pat Gelsinger told Time magazine (which managed an exclusive “scoop” on January 20). “We helped to establish the Silicon Valley,now we’re going to do the Silicon Heartland.” This will be the first Intel chip manufacturing plant in the Midwest.  read more »

Report: Restoring the California Dream

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This newly released report examines how the California dream can be restored for California's middle- and working-class families. An excerpt follows:  read more »

California's Economy is Weaker Than it Looks

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Whisper it, but the $45 billion surplus Gavin Newsom has projected for California next year isn’t quite what it seems. In fact, the bulk of that surplus is largely due to the earnings of a few giants such as Google, Apple and Meta (formerly Facebook), as well as a handful of IPOs.  read more »

California's Keenest Competitors for Tech Jobs are Blue Western States

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For a generation, California has seen more of its residents and companies head elsewhere, but has found a way to respond, at least in terms of wealth creation, by constant innovation. But today, the Golden State’s hold on the elite reaches of the economy is slipping in ways that could threaten the state’s long-term prosperity.  read more »

Only Interior Counties, San Benito, Riverside and Monterey Grow in 2021

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Preliminary county population estimates just released by the state Department of Finance show that California’s population decline is persisting and accelerating. The state lost 173,000 residents over the year ending July 1, 2021. The Department of Finance reports that there were 56,500 Covid related deaths over the same period, which would account for about one-third of the population loss. Net domestic migration dropped to the lowest rate in a decade, down 277,000 --- more than the population of Marin County.  read more »

Our Neo-Feudal Future

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America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, and the construction of a vigorous anti-discrimination apparatus that putatively ensures equal rights and status—a rigid new social order with feudal elements has come into view.  read more »