#Silicon Valley Power

[santaclaralocalnews]

Not only does Santa Clara pay its police the second-highest average salary in the state, it has also been offering its utility employees increasingly cushy salaries. While Silicon Valley Power (SVP) only added 29 employees from 2015 to 2023, it doubled its payroll over the same period. This trend mirrors citywide spending. In 2015, SVP paid its 178 employees $21.9 million in salary, according to Government Compensation in California. By 2023, that number had ballooned to $44.6 million. That year, SVP employed 207 people. Read complete news at svvoice.com.

[mcbitchtits]

man it's like. impossible to buy a dumb phone now. i had an old LG brick in hs (like. virgin mobile? maybe?) and you could top it up and it cost $.25 to make a call or $.10 to text and otherwise you could just forget it in a drawer and i guess plans like that don't exist anymore and barely either do dumbphones.

[rwpohl]

apple park, cupertino

[mangled-by-disuse]

it's because people, especially in the past few decades, LOVE the idea of the asshole genius

it's a great story, that being smart makes you a dick. it means that if you think you're smart, you can be as much of a dick as you want, and if you don't think you're smart, you can tell yourself, hey, at least i'm not a dick.

(The same principle underlies the idea that beautiful people must be stupid or cruel - but that one is less two-sided, because we no longer believe quiiiiite as strongly that beauty conveys inherent moral worth, whereas we ABSOLUTELY believe, as a society, that intelligence conveys absolute superiority.)

But if you acknowledge that hyper-intelligent, hyper-focused, hyper-competent people can also be nice and fun to be around, then, like... what's your excuse? If Sherlock Holmes, the platonic ideal of a smart brainy very-clever-smart-intelligent person, can also be a kind and sympathetic person, then, like, maybe you're not a dick because you're secretly a superior being who is attenuated to every strand of quivering data.

Maybe you're just a fucking dick.

Just started reading Sherlock Holmes and all the adaptations are wrong. This man is a delight. He gets excited about hemoglobin and is ecstatic at the thought of Watson as a roommate. He purposefully forgets how the solar system works so he has more room in his brain for crime. He shows Watson the dirt stains on his trousers and he can tell what part of London they come from based on color and consistency. (As far as i can tell Watson didn't ask, Sherlock just gets back from walks and tells Watson about the stains unprompted.) The text specifically says "Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with." Why does every adaptation make him unpleasant and rude, he's literally just eccentric. He's such a goober, I love him.

[takshila45]

Master the Art of Chip Design: Learn from Top Layout Training Experts in Bangalore

[robpegoraro]

Thirty years of traveling on and off for work is apparently not enough practice to stop me from being a doofus and leaving home with my laptop charger still plugged into an outlet there.

[boof-chamber]

[godloveyell]

Actually if this is to be believed, ChatGPT is hemorrhaging money due to its users.

[msclaritea]

It is disturbing how MSN is trying to create another Tech genius hero myth. Sam Altman is no better than Thiel or Musk. He wants to be wealthy, and weild power. Before making him a trillionaire, the public really should try to figure out what his values are, if any.

[santaclaralocalnews]

With Santa Clara’s power company’s boom in growth, the utility is ramping up a variety of projects this year. At its most recent meeting, the Santa Clara City Council heard a bi-annual update from Silicon Valley Power (SVP). In 2024, SVP saw two new peaks, topping out at 722 megawatts, nearly scratching the system’s 750-megawatt capacity. Manuel Pineda, chief electric utility office, said SVP employees expect the city’s power consumption to double in the next decade. Read complete news at svvoice.com.

[chamerionwrites]

"It's resentment about being bullied by jocks" okay and? I'm afab and thus excruciatingly familiar with the worst kind of High School Quarterback TM and the worst kind of fake-gamer-girls rape-jokes-at-the-dnd-table boys-only-sign-on-the-treehouse incel. Bullies come in all shapes and sizes and even social statuses I promise you

While I'm airing my unpopular opinions imho people who make hating on sports a whole personality trait (see: unironically contemptuous use of the term "sportsball") are at least as irritating as people who make enjoying sports a whole personality trait. At least the sports-enjoyers are demonstrating sincere passion for something as opposed to seething & coping about the fact that their experiences are not universal

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/03/states-rights-trumps-wrongs/#mamdani

As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope's embers, and fan them into the flames of change. Trumpism is a coalition of people who hate each other, who agree on almost nothing, whose fracture lines are one deft tap away from shattering:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

The vast unpopularity of Trumpism presents endless opportunities for breaking off parts of his coalition. Take noncompete "agreements": contractual clauses that ban workers from taking a job with any of their employers' competitors for years. One in 18 Americans has been captured by a noncompete, and the median noncompete victim is a minimum-wage fast-food worker whose small business tyrant boss wants to be sure that she doesn't quit working the register at Wendy's and start making $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at McDonald's.

The story of noncompetes is bullshit from top to bottom. The argument goes, "Your boss invests heavily in training you, and lets you in on all his valuable trade-secrets. When you walk out the door and go to work for a competitor, you're stealing all that training and knowledge. Without noncompetes, no boss will invest in the knowledge-intensive industries that are the future of our economy."

Now, like I said, the vast majority of people under noncompetes are working low-waged, menial jobs with little to no training, and no proprietary trade secrets to speak of. Which makes sense: workers with less bargaining power end up signing worse contracts. That's half the case against noncompetes.

Here's the other half: the most IP-intensive, profitable, knowledge-based industries in America operate without any noncompetes. California's state constitution bans noncompetes, which means that every worker in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is free to quit their job and walk across the street and join a rival.

If Hollywood and tech are examples of industries that "can't attract investment," then we should be shooting for every sector of the American economy to be so starved for capital. Silicon Valley's origin story is based on the ability of key workers at knowledge-intensive firms to quit their jobs and go to work for a direct competitor: the first Silicon Valley company was Shockley Semiconductors, founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing silicon transistors.

Shockley literally put the "silicon" in Silicon Valley, but he never shipped a working chip, because he was a deranged, paranoid eugenicist who ran such a dysfunctional company that eight of his top engineers quit to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Then two of the "Traitorous Eight" quit the Fairchild to start Intel, and the year after, another Fairchild employee quit to start AMD:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

This never stopped. Woz quit HP and Jobs quit Atari to start Apple and the tradition of extremely well-capitalized companies being founded by key employees who quit market-leading firms to compete with their old bosses continues to this day. There are many things we can say about AI, but no one will claim that AI companies – especially not those in California, where noncompetes are banned – have trouble attracting investment. Half of the leading AI companies were founded by people who couldn't stand working for Sam Altman at Openai and quit to found a competitor. Just last week, Altman flipped out because Mark Zuckerberg poached his key scientists to work on competing products at Meta:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/28/meta-four-openai-researchers-superintelligence-team-ai-talent-competition/

Knowledge-intensive industries are provably compatible with a system of free labor where workers can work for anyone they want. You know who understands this? The lawyers who draw up employment contracts with noncompete clauses in them: the American Bar Association bans noncompetes for lawyers! Every law firm in America operates without noncompetes!

Everyone hates noncompetes. They are bullshit, and only get worse with time, as the largest companies in America metastasize into sprawling conglomerates, they compete with everyone. Who isn't a competitor of Amazon's?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Biden's antitrust enforcers hated noncompetes, too. Former FTC chair Lina Khan held listening tours and solicited comments to hear workers stories about noncompetes, developing a record that she used to create a rule that banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

America's oligarchs weren't happy. They sued to overturn the rule, and got a nationwide injunction (you know, those things that Trump's illegitimate Supreme Court claims are unenforceable) that suspended the FTC rule pending a full hearing.

It's clear that Trump's FTC is going to walk away from this fight and let the rule die. Trumpism is wildly unpopular, and this is no exception. Americans overwhelmingly support banning noncompetes, but Trump's richest donors are terrified of another Great Resignation and want to keep us indentured to their shitty companies, so Trump's FTC will sell us all out.

But that's not the end of things. As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, states and local governments can pass their own noncompete bans, and they are:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-07-02-ftc-noncompete-state-regulation-workers-wages/

Take NYC mayor-in-waiting Zohran Mamdani: unlike Trump (and the Democratic Party's billionaire wing), Mamdani campaigned by offering to create policies that are popular, including a ban on noncompetes. New York City has two distinct groups of workers who are screwed over by noncompetes. One of those groups is Wall Street finance bros, who work for some of the most legendarily toxic assholes to ever draw breath, and are overwhelming bound by noncompetes that will all become null and void the day Mamdani dons his sash.

The other group of workers Mamdani will liberate are those at the very bottom of the income distribution, from fast food workers to gig workers to doormen, who are victims of some of the dirtiest noncompete clauses in America, including "bondage fees":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Big cities are filled with workers who are getting screwed by noncompetes and every city government has it in their power to liberate every one of those workers (who are also voters).

States can do even better. There are already four states that ban noncompetes, two of them blood red: California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Other states place significant restrictions on noncompetes, including Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. Nevada bans noncompetes for hourly workers, Idaho only allows them for "key employees"; Louisiana limits noncompetes to two years, and NJ bans noncompetes for domestic workers.

Up and down the country, in states blue and red, noncompetes are unpopular, and banning noncompetes is popular:

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-support-ftc-ruling-would-ban-non-compete-agreements

Oregon just banned noncompetes for doctors and other health workers, as part of a sweeping, bipartisan law that banned the "corporate practice of medicine":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights

Oregon's in good company: noncompetes are banned in the health sector in 32 states, including Arkansas, Indiana and Colorado.

Lina Khan's FTC developed an irrefutable evidentiary record about the abusive nature of noncompetes, proving that industries can attract capital and field successful companies without them. States have it in their power to step in where Trump has betrayed American workers. This isn't the most efficient way to protect workers – that would be a federal ban on noncompetes – but it will still get the job done, and it will weaken the Trump coalition, which is barely holding together as it is.

[wilwheaton]

Here we witnessed the President and Vice President of the United States, supposed leaders of the free world, berating and belittling the leader of a sovereign nation fighting for its very survival. This wasn't just a breach of decorum; it was a repudiation of the principles that have underpinned global stability for generations. In that moment, the mask slipped, revealing the true face of a leadership so divorced from reality, so consumed by its own narratives, that it can no longer distinguish between allies and adversaries, between democracy and authoritarianism. But what makes this moment truly chilling is not just the behavior of these particular individuals. It's the realization that this event is the logical endpoint of the ideas we've been discussing. This is what happens when Yarvin's neoreactionary thought infects the highest levels of government. This is the real-world consequence of treating democracy as an outdated operating system, of viewing international relations as nothing more than a game of power to be won by the most ruthless player. In that Oval Office, we saw the collision of multiple dangerous ideologies: the crude nationalism of Trump, the technocratic authoritarianism of Silicon Valley, and the cynical realpolitik of those who believe might makes right. It's a toxic brew, one that threatens not just American democracy, but the entire post-World War II international order.

Clear Thinking v. Curtis Yarvin - by Mike Brock

[wildwren]

the fact that this episode explicitly linked the severance procedure to reproductive biotech is almost too on the nose in the most chilling way. if you know anything about the sort of techno-delusional eugenic breederism that's taken over silicon valley, ideas which are unequivocally supported by musk and others among the world's most powerful men, at a time when tradwife-ism and enforced performance of conservative womanhood is back in the norm, and when the use of reproductive technology is purposefully ensuring that men continue to benefit socially and financially from women's oppression instead of helping to lighten the burden of suffering women experience from childbearing...holy fuck holy shit. severance took no prisoners. im gonna be sick

[mewvore]

we're getting diminishing returns on graphical fidelity in games. The latest apple device is a fraction of a percentage more powerful and costs as much as a down payment on a car. We need to just stop doing new tech for like 10 years, let everyone just take a breather and reset the tech clock. I'll even take just 5 years, thats about enough time for silicon valley to collapse

[mariacallous]

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.

5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.

6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.

7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.

13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.

15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”

16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.

17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”

18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

20 They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly.

There is much much more to say on all of the above and that’s my plan. But please do share this with anyone who needs to hear it.

How to Survive the Broligarchy: a new podcast

A month ago, I was feeling floored: at the moment in which everything I’ve been warning about for the last eight years suddenly became overwhelmingly real, I was also being dislodged from my journalistic home. The Guardian, my seat of operations for the last 20 years, the last nearly ten of which have been focussed squarely on this subject, has done a deal, in the face of fierce opposition from its journalists, to give away a core part of the organisation. More than 100+ journalists will leave the organisation, including me.

This week, the Guardian confirmed that the last edition of the Observer would be April 20 and my 20-year employment with the organisation would be terminated then. The same day, Tortoise Media, the new home of the Observer, wrote to tell me that they would not be offering me a contract. But now, instead of feeling floored, I feel energised. You’ll hear some of that energy, I hope, in this first episode of the new podcast that I made a pilot for this week. It’s embedded at the top of this newsletter and - when I figure out the backend - will be available on Apple and Spotify and everywhere else too. I have an idea that I explore in this first episode with two people much smarter than me that this might be the start of a journey to a creating a independent, open, collaborative transparent form of ‘live’ journalism.

My investigation of big tech, power, politics, the weaponisation of data, foreign interference, Russian oligarchs and social media has always traversed subjects and specialisms. I’ve drawn on the expertise of so many people along the way and in trying to understand this moment, I realised they are not only the people I want to speak to now, they are also the expert voices that everyone needs to hear. My idea is to make these conversations public and to build a community - a feedback loop - contributing ideas and suggestions and, hopefully, networks of action.

I’ve been doing some of this work with the Citizens, the non-profit, I founded back in 2020 (sign up to their newsletter here), but there is a small ray of hope, in the midst of the current crisis, independent media is in a huge moment of growth and the green shoots of a non-corporate, non-oligarch owned media system are springing up everywhere. I’m hugely grateful to the 55,000 people who’ve signed up to this newsletter so far but there’s so much more we can do.

I’d been kicking around this idea for a new podcast for the last few weeks and then a call with my friend, Claire Wardle, spurred me into action. Claire is a professor at Cornell, an Ivy League university in upstate New York, where she studies as as she puts it “our crazy information environment”. I first met Claire when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee back in 2017 and then we re-met at the TED conference in Vancouver in 2019 where we were both due to give talks and hung out in between paralysing bouts of fear and imposter syndrome.

That TED talk led to a years-long lawsuit for me. And Claire, who founded a non-profit called First Draft that co-ordinated newsrooms and researchers to fight mis- and disinformation, has also found herself under attack. She and more than 100 other researchers in the field have been subpoenaed by a congressional committee who accused them of being part of the ‘censorship industrial complex’.

It’s these sorts of attacks that are now coming for so many other people. My ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ column, above, was intended as both a handbook - how do we protect ourselves? - and a manifesto, how do we fightback against these companies? And that’s the ethos of this podcast too, bringing together a network of people who have the knowledge we need for this next stage.

Claire and I decided this first conversation should be about how the media is covering this moment and its inability to shake off the “business as normal” framing of the authoritarian takeover of the US government.

I include a voice note from Roger McNamee in the first episode, a tech investor - he introduced Mark Zuckberg to Sheryl Sandberg - who’s now one of the most trenchant critics of both Silicon Valley and the media. And Mark Little, an Irish foreign correspondent turned tech entrepreneur (one of his claims to fame is being aquired by Rupert Murdoch), who’s pioneered new media models joined us to talk about solutions.

The best and most enjoyable journalism I’ve done in recent times is two investigative, narrative podcasts. Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring debuted in December at number one in the Apple podcast chart and the BBC’s Stalked is currently sitting at the top of the true crime and series charts.

And what Mark pointed out, which I hadn’t thought about before, is that it’s the “process” of these real-time investigative podcasts that young listeners like. And it’s true that what we’re doing in Stalked is really punchy: this week, we name the suspect who we believe to be Hannah, my ex-stepdaughter’s, cyberstalker, something the police abjectly failed to do. In Sergei, we uncovered a UK government cover-up of foreign interference. We’re doing both of these live, transparently, and showing our workings.

As Mark teases it out, this is the impulse behind this podcast pilot too. It’s also a “true crime” story: democracy has been murdered and there’s a serial killer on the loose. It’s a race against time to prevent the perpetrator devastating the US beyond repair and racking up a bodycount in Europe. (If you can’t or don’t want to listen to it, there’s a transcript here.)

If that all sounds a bit weird and experimental but also ambitious and unlikely, I’d have to agree. But the whole point is that we have entered a wholly dangerous new era and we need new ways of communicating, of doing journalism, of storytelling, of reaching new audiences. It may very well not work in which case I’ll try something else but I’d love your feedback in the comments below. If you have ideas for collaborations or building this network, you can email me at survivingbroligarchy@proton.me.