In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall going solo are inspiring ('Web 2.0' bubble prophecies aside), we hope he doesn't have dependents or any pre-existing conditions that need insuring.

If you don't think you need the loyalty, support and protection of a collectivized workforce, maybe evidence like repeated privacy SNAFUs, community organizers oblivious to diversity and VCs who hype blithely hype niches they've already invested in will shake any sense of complacency. At least we can count on the pranksters who welded a bong onto one of San Francisco's Burning Man-inspired public art sculptures to help foment a unified hipster-geek identity through shared interests like ironic humor and reefer.

It is hard to deny the appeal of benevolently dictatorial paymasters (especially with renumeration that tips the top-bracket scales) like Google. While deservedly garnering plaudits for moves like free PDF downloads from their scanned book library. But don't put too much stock in the power of automation, as Google's tone deaf news filter alogrithms can't compete with Yahoo's human-programmed brand, and psychographic profiling efforts which eavesdrop on open microphones certainly ratchet up the creepy factor past tolerable levels. And for a profitable company, they're less transparent than million-per-month losers like YouTube. Maybe we've been a little hard on valley values today.

To make up for all the possibly-jinx-inducing negative energy expressed, we'd like to positively recommend a blogger we recently met who offers an honest and personal perspective on playing the ponies. It's only because technology has enabled unique and captivating voices like Tote Board Brad to reach a public that we find all this nonsense ultimately worthwhile.

Photo of (l-r) Matt Marshall and Becky Buckman by Auren Hoffman.