Uber and Lyft are the Hatfields and the McCoys of ordering cars on your telephone—if the more affluent Hatfields had $1.5 billion in venture financing to the McCoys' piss poor $332 million. Now the feud the companies started in San Francisco has traveled 3,000 miles without losing any steam.

Never, ever forget: the Silicon Valley insider crowd is exempt from the rules and norms of the rest of the citizenry. TechCrunch excitedly reports on a new app called "Fixed," which will help San Franciscans automatically kill parking tickets, whether or not they deserve it.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and internet poet laureate, has officially been high off the fumes of his own shit for too long. Today he took the stage at the National Retail Federation expo in New York, and preached nutso visions about sales receipts.

Y Combinator, that mecca for hardcore hackers running on pure Paleo and possibility, has lost one of its own to the dead pool. The door-to-door laundry service Prim, which let San Francisco denizens mimic the perks of their corporate brethren by barking "DO MY LAUNDRY" for $25/bag, is no longer in business.

When children are about old enough to stop vomiting on themselves, we teach them that instant gratification is bad—one of the simpler vices. But if Uber has its way and explodes into the big fat company of its own pipe dreams, it will make it OK for us to demand anything we want, whenever we want it.

The bullshit industry has never boomed harder: Harvard biz student Ryan Allis, the "CEO" of a "company" called "Connect," wants you to know about a "conference" he's organizing. He was kind enough to spam everyone he knows and try to swindle his classmates.

In most corners of our planet, five guys with office jobs wouldn't be a gathering worth buying a ticket for—you could just show up to a bar, or batting cage. But in tech-land, five guys aren't five guys—they're a conference waiting to happen.

Most crazed collections of likeminded nuts have something you could call an agenda. Maybe it's "startup assholes drinking wine on a mountain," or "lizard people are real," or something. But I have absolutely no fucking clue what "Camp Mighty" is about.

Someday, we'll be able to replace the public good with some sort of app or Twitter-connected mug—but for now, tech's strategy seems to be just ignoring notions of "society" and "cooperation." For many powerful figures in Silicon Valley, the federal shutdown was proof they don't need to care about you.

Silicon Valley alchemy doesn't just create dazzling new things—it dazzles us into thinking mundane old ideas are new again. Take the idea of hauling away someone's dirty clothes: at LA startup Washio, you're actually a "kickass laundry ninja." What a difference a smartphone makes.

As young technologists become more convinced they're on the verge of improving the entire human condition, they find society unfit. They go to privately owned mountains, or in this case, a giant boat voyage across the eastern hemisphere. Self-importance, hundreds of kids from UVA, and no escape.

Behold the era of software companies that are literally disgusting: Goldbely, with the name and business sense of a cartoon Bond villain, just snagged a big check for an unfathomably unappetizing idea. For only $100, you can get an authentic Philly cheesesteak shipped to your Silicon Valley office, and then puke.

During one of today's TechCrunch Disrupt interviews, no one pretended to jerk off, and no tit jokes were made, as far as we can tell. But a prominent set sat down to discuss Bitcoin, and painted a vision of society they think is within our reach:

Sometimes, beneath the sleaze and oblivion, you get the sense that techies do want to help others. But without basics like empathy, reason, or humanity, the startup community struggles to help its fellow man—and we wind up with things like this, a business analysis of the homeless shopping cart.

Dear Miss Disruption, I’m a thirty-five year old married man. My mother-in-law thinks I’m not good enough for her daughter. She never has a kind word for me. She never insults me to my face but she’s always making off-hand “jokes” about how I’m not “manly” or how her daughter “married a woman."

Tim Draper, by any cursory Wikipedia skim, is a successful man. He's reaped enough through his venture capital endeavors to create his own zany vanity "school," where wannabe Zuckerbergs and Brit Morins pay ten grand apiece to learn startup brilliance. It sounds even crazier when you hear him speak:

After FWD.us, Zuck's next quasi-philanthrophy will be Internet.org, an endeavor to get more poor people on the internet—with the hope, of course, that they'll become Facebook users. The long con.

If you're part of the elite Y Combinator startup cabal, you recently received this list—"57 startup lessons"—in your inbox. There are a few bits of decent, generic advice. It's also a tidy explanation of why startup creators are making terrible mistakes over, and over again.

A lifetime spent tackling problems that don't exist can leave one wanting more. Perhaps, as Silicon Valley stalwarts realize attaining and facilitating bourgeois comfort isn't the noblest cause, they'll need more vanity projects like Charity: Water, an opportunity to show the internet just how generous they really are. African kids are perfect for Instagramming.

There is a tech bubble because the people making the things are unable to relate to the people who should be using the things. Judgment is run through a series of prisms, mufflers, and tubes filled with iced coffee—and the people who invest the big money think something like this is a good idea: