i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• everyone i know is brokenhearted, i don't believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. i think the only thing that can save us is us. and i do think rage is a component that's necessary here: a final fundamental fed-up-ness with the bullshit and an unwillingness to give any more ground to the things that are doing us in. to stop being reasonable. to stop being well-behaved. not to hate those who are hurting us with their greed and psychopathic self-interest, but to simply stop letting them do it. the best way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to make them irrelevant. recommended
• how the other half works: an adventure in the low status of software engineers, there was a time, perhaps 20 years gone by now, when the valley was different. engineers ran the show. technologists helped each other. programmers worked in r&d environments with high levels of autonomy and encouragement. to paraphrase from one r&d shop's internal slogan, bad ideas were good and good ideas were great. silicon valley was an underdog, a sideshow, an ellis island for misfits and led by "sheepdogs" intent on keeping mainstream mba culture (which would destroy the creative capacity of that industry, for good) away. that period ended. san francisco joined the "paper belt" cities of boston, new york, washington and los angeles. venture capital became hollywood for ugly people. the valley became a victim of its own success. bay area landlords made it big. fail-outs from mba-culture strongholds like mckinsey and goldman sachs found a less competitive arena in which they could boss nerds around with impunity; if you weren't good enough to make md at the bank, you went west to become a vc-funded founder. the one group of people that didn't win out in this new valley order were software engineers. housing costs went up far faster than their salaries, and they were gradually moved from being partners in innovation to being implementors' of well-connected mba-culture fail-outs' shitty ideas. that's where we are now
• the problem with founders, the secret of silicon valley is that the benefits of working at a startup accrues almost entirely to the founders, and that's why people repeat the advice to just go start a business. there is a reason it is hard to hire in silicon valley today, and it isn't just that there are a lot of startups. it's because engineers and other creators are realizing that the cards are stacked against them unless they are the ones in charge
• the pitchforks are coming… for us plutocrats, we rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. it's simply not true. there can never be enough super-rich americans to power a great economy. i earn about 1,000 times the median american annually, but i don't buy thousands of times more stuff. my family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. i buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most american men. i bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants i am wearing as i write, what my partner mike calls my "manager pants." i guess i could have bought 1,000 pairs. but why would i? instead, i sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn't do the country much good. so forget all that rhetoric about how america is great because of people like you and me and steve jobs. you know the truth even if you won't admit it: if any of us had been born in somalia or the congo, all we'd be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. it's not that somalia and congo don't have good entrepreneurs. it's just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that's all their customers can afford