Jason Calacanis, Kara Swisher, and Robert Scoble discuss this and more in the new This Week in Startups. I highly recommend watching it.
The chief topic was the overwhelming negative reaction, including within tech, to overly entitled whiny assholes in SF who think homeless are icky and that San Francisco apparently needs to revolve around their magnificence. The smashed windows on a Google bus in Oakland clearly show the rising resentment. Calacanis, who is unafraid on combat, ripped them up in Techbrats Goldberg, Shih and Gopman Do Not Represent Technology. Swisher said if her kids said what the techbrats did, she’d whack them upside the head.
The NY Times endorsing clemency for Snowden provided a starting point for discussion about the ever-intrusive NSA. Scoble said, hey if you’re a tech company and a judge says turn over all your email records, you’re probably going to do it. Swisher said she furred years ago this was happening. Everyone agreed there must be vastly more real and effective oversight of NSA.
Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg started and ran AllThingsD.com, a highly respected tech news site. It has just been folded back into the Wall Street Journal and they launched Recode.net, which looks to be excellent. Robert Scoble works for Rackspace as their Startup Liason Officer and has been covering Silicon Valley for 20 years. Jason Calacanis sold weblogs.com to AOL in 1995 and is a tech entrepreneur.
It, it was a lively discussion about a wide range of topics.
Those include: Some jerky blog posts that were written by some dopey techies about homeless people in San Francisco; the New York Times editorial calling for some kind of clemency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden; what’s up with our new website, Re/code; and other various and sundry techie things.