How liberalism is enslaving Ireland as a colony of Silicon Valley

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/how-liberalism-is-enslaving-ireland-as-a-colony-of-silicon-valley-1.3597453

by raleighm • 8 years ago

35 17 8 years ago

yters• 8 years ago

It is very ironic that modern tech is becoming the very dogmatic and repressive regime it claims to replace.

Right now there is a big push to move all the US gov IT to the "cloud" which either means Google Cloud or AWS. What happens when a corporation possesses all our personal data? Perhaps Google's end game is a bit more political than we realize.

lallysingh• 8 years ago

Oppressed turns into oppressor, you always turn into your parents, etc. Essentially when power shifts most models of proper behavior don't. Just the few that the newly-in-power disagreed with.

aerotwelve• 8 years ago

We should just send our tax dollars directly to Google and Amazon; the treasury will just be a middle man after a certain point.

Coming soon: AWS FOIA

freeone3000• 8 years ago

Your houses are expensive and multinational corporations aren't paying tax. What in the world does that have to do with marriage equality or abortion access? Do theocracies have higher tax rates?

scythe• 8 years ago

The article tries to make a connection between Ireland's status as an international tax haven and the high price of rent in Dublin. I can't elucidate a chain of deduction that would imply this, but the overall structure seems to be roughly low taxes therefore inequality therefore housing crisis, but the second implication is false -- as a key example, China has inequality as high or higher than Ireland and no housing crisis. The reason Ireland has a housing crisis is most likely that, just as in the rest of the English-speaking world, they've made it illegal to build enough housing to meet demand.

smallnamespace• 8 years ago

China absolutely has a 'housing crisis' in the sense that house prices have skyrocketed past what a good dual middle class income can possibly hope to save for.

First-tier city real estate has comparable price per square area as NYC, London, or the Bay Area, while the average income in China is still a third or a fourth what it is in the West.

adventured• 8 years ago

China has had a housing crisis for a long time. [1][2][3]

China definitely has radically higher inequality than Ireland. Plausibly no large country in world history has ever had greater inequality. They span from their top 1% which is nearly as rich as the 1% in the US, down to their bottom 20% which are among the poorest people on the planet ($1-$3 per day poverty).

[2013] "China Has the Most Unaffordable Housing in the World"

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/china-h...

"From June 2015 through the end of last year, the 100 City Price Index, published by SouFun Holdings Ltd., rose 31 percent to nearly $202 per square foot. That's 38 percent higher than the median price per square foot in the U.S., where per-capita income is more than 700 percent higher than in China. Not surprisingly, this has put homeownership out of reach for most Chinese."

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-24/why-china...

"But the impressive size and wealth of the propertied class belies the growing strains plaguing new home buyers. The country now has some of the least affordable housing markets in the world. The ratio of median home price to median income, a common measure of affordability, in most first-tier cities has soared to higher than that of London."

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/opinion/chinas-real-estat...

sgt1012• 8 years ago

Markets fail : without intervention economic activity aggregates and centralises. There are three responses that are possible. 1) You can "let the market sort it out" - but in the limit you end up with Mexico City and a very hard issue of transport and quality of life in the suburbs. In addition "the market" will optimise to local optima... Flats are built with 1 or 2 bedrooms because that's what young professionals want, or can afford. In London if all new builds were mandated to be built as multiple (min 4) 3 large bedrooms (325m^2) units, the demographics and loci of the current market would be very altered, family life would become more practical for many and there would be much less of a flight to commuting and more community in places like The City and Westminster. 2) You can say no to more housing and the untrammelled market and do nothing (or little) to deal with the over demand; this means that you have a "nice for the elite" city (Manhattan, London, Dublin) that lots of people would love to live in but few can afford. 3) You could* intervene with state planning and move some of the locus of economic activity to other centres. For example in Ireland a high speed rail line could connect Dublin and Belfast and could alter the economic balance between the two (of course they are in different countries and soon different economic systems!) In the UK investment in the transport infrastructure in the Northwest (for example high capacity urban rail links between Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Bolton and Preston) could create an alternative focus to London and enable substantial relief for the current housing crisis because the urban infrastructure required to house people at a high quality of life (schools, colleges, parks, leisure centres, restaurants, theatres, culture and community) exist.

My point is that letting the market build housing is an effective intervention up to a point; but it's not the only option by a long jaunt.

sgt1012• 8 years ago

Also market led building will result in a further transfer of wealth to land owners...

ggm• 8 years ago

ICT workers have higher disposable income and outbid Irish nationals your counter question should be "oh, like in S.F." or do you disbelieve the effect of ICT work on bay area rents?

EngineerBetter• 8 years ago

Thought-provoking. It seems a convenient decoy of massive tech companies to encourage as much personal freedom as possible, whilst being complicit in limiting the economic freedom of those outside of our Hacker News, coders' salary bubble.

gurumeditations• 8 years ago

Gay rights = lack of affordable housing? This is a big heap of nothing. He seems to be complaining that while Ireland has thrown off the old oppressive Catholic way, the new liberal way of personal freedom has failed to bring economic freedom with it. No point or suggestions, just complaining.

polotics2• 8 years ago

You miss the point of the article I think:ensuring fairness and equal trwatment for people of all sexual orientations is an old subject matter that should have been done and dusted a long time ago. Loudly celebrating an overdue Irish catch-up whilst stealing billions in sorely missed public services that would materially and not just symbolically help those same people of all sexual orientations can be understood as a very evil, albeit rainbow-colored, ploy.

polotics2• 8 years ago

Also there is a clear point: make the FANGs pay fair taxes.

mg794613• 8 years ago

Although being a 'leftie' myself, the writer of this article has no problems applying tactics that would make fascists turn green of jealousy. Any attempt to argue with facts are served off with 'misogynistic'. That's not how you debate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Nagle http://zero-books.net/blogs/zero/angela-nagles-state-regardi... http://zero-books.net/blogs/zero/our-response-to-charles-dav...

phnk• 8 years ago

I failed to see much fascism in the links above, unless one equates fascism with a plagiarism dispute.

alphabettsy• 8 years ago

It seems like a tremendous overstatement to invoke themes like colonialism and slavery when talking about socio-economic change that doesn’t even begin to reflect the horrors coming from the history of those things.

How liberalism is enslaving Ireland as a colony of Silicon Valley

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