Silicon Valley has turned their backs on those that would reduce their taxes instead of raise them and those that would keep Card Check as nothing more than a distant dream of some thug labor boss. They supported socialists like Obama because they were hip and they were cool, shunning those that support the free market ideas that are so critical to their industry.

For all the technical genius in the Valley, there sure doesn’t seem to be much political genius, as you would think it would be obvious that supporting labor-thug loving socialists would be contrary to their best interests.

Enjoy learning a hard lesson – but hey, at least you’ll be cool.

I can see how this will strangle tech companies from leveraging free-lancer workers and consulting companies….what a great idea.

Your online educated, self-taught, GED-having union programmer is on par with my degree having, company-educated programmer…so you have to pay your guy the same…

awesomeness is unions.

absurd.

De sad thing is that aww the Wingnuts have weft is theiw hate. How can you wish the deaf of 7 miwwion peopwe so easiwy. What kind of a pewson awe you? Just because a wegion, state ow a pewson does not shawe youw wawped view of the wowwd does not mean they desewve to die. Mewwy Chwistmas you wovewy pewson, uh-hah-hah-hah. ..

Anything that destroys the Bay Area is A-OK with me. AFAIAC, they can unionize the Silicon Valley *and* sue them all for racial discrimination on top of that. I don’t care – as long as the Bay burns!!

In my experience, the biggest difference that still exists is food. Every locality offers “local cuisine”, but you do have to look for it. And in some places, it’s expensive as all get out. My son is a chef in SF. Great city for great eats. In his restaurant I can slide by for about $100 for dinner for two and we don’t drink. And that’s not uncommon.

And WalMart (or any other biz) certainly has the right to procure the goods they sell on the best possible terms. That’s the free market. But DeepRedPatriot called them “patriotic”, and I can’t agree with that.

I guess what galls me the most about WalMart is what I call the “WalMartization” of America. And the folks from Bentonville are hardly alone in this. But it used to be that you’d travel around and find lots of local “flavor” — local cuisine, arts & craftsmen, businesses that spanned generations. Not so much anymore.

I travel a lot, and sometimes when I wake up in hotel room, it’s hard to know where I am. Is this Charlotte? Or Portland?

Then I hop in the rental car to scare up some breakfast, and can’t remember if I’m in Denver or Atlanta. And if you try smaller towns, you REALLY don’t know where you are. Emporia, VA, looks much like Apple Valley, CA — businesswise. Same businesses; same goods and services; and other than natural geography, little to differentiate them.

And that’s a real shame. It seems that many people don’t even know what quality is anymore — it’s either El Cheapo Crapo from WalMart, or very high-end stuff from Europe, and not much in between.

OK, now I’m sounding and feeling old, and I don’t think politics is going to change this, so I’ll leave it here.

By way of background, in a “previous life” I was an executive with a couple of firms that sourced consumer goods internationally. I built two factories in China in the ’80′s to produce products that were very labor intensive. The products were also very high end consumer goods – not “necessities” by any means – and the quality HAD to be at a very high level. Without boring you with details, I spent two years trying to source the product in the US, or at least in North America. I couldn’t get the same level of quality anywhere in NA, and the price, landed in my warehouse in PA, was nearly double my landed cost from China. Bottom line for me was that without China, we had no business.

That same situation applies to much of the low end product currently imported from China. There are exactly two options if you want to source low end stuff in the US. First, you go out of business because you can’t come anywhere near a reasonable price point. Second, you have a necessity where the price is not so much of an issue and you simply have to increase your price by what would be considered an astronomical amount. Pick one.

American business cannot compete with imports for labor intensive products. Of course, neither can the Japanese or Taiwan or Europe or most of South America or Canada.

This will be an old fashioned alley fight with no holds barred. And in the late-at-night-with-baseball-bats game, in a geeks v thugs battle, the geeks don’t stand a chance.

Personally, I’d pay a labor organizer to go after Progressive Insurance.

It’s “have sown”, not “sewed”.

The metaphor doesn’t work when discussing stitching something up; it is about planting seed.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.” Galatians 6:7-8 (KJV)

It’s “ExxonMobil”, not “ExxonMobile”. Mobile is a city in Alabama.

And since when is Cheap Chinese Imports Inc., aka WalMart (not “Wal Mart”), patriotic? I thought they abandoned all pretense of being patriotic when they stopped offering American goods first. Given that they were already well on the the path of the genocide of small town American businesses, it was no real surprise.

OK, that’s out of my system. I’ll NT myself now.

Unionizing IT jobs will only allow the incompetent workers to avoid getting fired and not protect the talented workers and force the talented workers out of a job. It also will corrupt IT and tie it to the mob ala Jimmy Hoffa.

Many workers don’t know that they have to pay union fees, and seniority trumps their civil rights. Many civil rights cases has had people lose their civil rights because they are forced to work on their holy day because people with seniority get that day off but not junior members due to the union’s bidding contracts. What you have with bidding contracts is legalized slavery as the union owns you body and soul and you do whatever they tell you to do. Which trumps your constitutional rights.

Folks in SV have actual job shills, they don’t need or want you losers telling them whether or not they can work. And if they don’t like their working conditions or long term prospects, there’s another job down the street. I keep getting job offers from the San Jose area, and I live in San Diego.