technology -v- culture ... and whatever else is on our minds today

After my recent trip to the Bay Area to report a PBS story about labor in the tech sector, I was struck by this (h/t Sullivan):

“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”

The Wired piece cites the “billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of” which also struck me, as did similar ads on Caltrain.

Timothy Lee argues the problem is housing. He has a point: San Jose and parts of the Peninsula seem ripe for higher-density development.

But I think Lee misses something when he refers back to the original Wired piece’s formulation — that “the natural resources of the startup world” are “people, real estate, and support services”. Isn’t capital one of those “natural resources”? And isn’t it possible that what Hartz (the VC profiled in the Wired piece) means is an overabundance of capital? Can the VC market allocate resources efficiently when there’s an overabundance of those resources?

This is a good idea. But then I see that, “The TAP website is facilitated by Microsoft,” and I think … Astroturf!

My new PBS podcast examines Big Pharma’s rush to find a sex drug for women. It’s a kind of preview of a piece that should air on Need to Know on June 11 or 18.

This week’s topic is the finale of Ashes to Ashes, with some thinking about the future of digital media, of course. Earlier episodes on vulnerable voting machines and l’affaire iPhone are online. And yes, we’re working on getting it syndicated to iTMS. That ain’t so easy in the PBS world.

Per suggestions from my friend Rufus Blooter (and others), I’ve started to dig into Banksy‘s … I mean Banks‘s work. The Player of Games was Rufus’ initial suggestion. I enjoyed it and loved the idea of The Culture, but found the characters flat and the prose uninspiring. Now I’m working through Use of Weapons, and finding it to be a much better read — better-rounded characters, prose that sings, and a structure that heightens the narrative arc.

In other words, what’s the value of the cloud when the cost of storage is declining precipitously? Or, conversely, what’s the point in buying lots of storage — however cheap it is — when we all have access to the cloud pretty much whenever and wherever we want?) Last year, my pal Sandy Pearlman and I discussed this during a session at the Future of Music Coalition‘s annual Policy Summit in Washington DC.

Below the fold, I’ve posted an essay Sandy wrote to set up the topic, followed by a couple of responses:

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Proof that April Fool’s jokes can take on lives of their own.

My pal zim posts on this bit of linguistic archaeology. Me? I’m skeptical. I suspect that this is a bit of fellow friend Rufus Blooter’s observation that a lot of science reporting is pants. In this case, basic issues are left underexamined, e.g. when the researchers report that “stick” is an English word that’s likely to atrophy and die on (relatively) short order, do they mean the noun or the verb? They’re two quite different things. And there’s little sense in the BBC piece that underlies zim’s post about whether the researchers take into account the fact that while English is an Indo-European language, it’s no longer spoken exclusively in European (or Subcontinental) confines. Which is to say, it’s North American and global and hence quite likely evolving … differently.

Campaign ads are not automatically newsworthy. Certainly not worthy of time on newscasts until they’ve proven themselves so. That’s called “free airtime”, y’all. That is all.