71–80 of 1001 posts
Other places have and will continue to develop, and that's great! But the center of gravity is going to remain where you can get face time with investors.
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There are great universities outside of sf and even the us. ETH zurich for example. In zurich you also have google, oracle and co. We also have high speed internet for cheap. And are able to fo worldwide business, even in a pandemic. And thats just switzerland. Not sure if there is any reason for sf once most startups moved sonewhere else.
One of the things that would maybe help Switzerland is to make English an official language (there are already 4 langauges, supporting English wouldn't be that hard). For me dealing with Swiss laws to make a company would make things much harder than for people who speak German well.
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Not municipalities but the state's labor laws are highly conducive to the tech culture and don't exist most places in the country. There's not much money for the startup crop that feeds big tech outside the Bay Area. It's all on Sand Hill Road. I can only speak for myself but I'll never live in a red state again. Not even Texas, it's not worth it. Even where I grew up (the purple midwest) is too socially conservative…
Unless you are a political junky reading news all day - what practically speaking is so intolerable about living there or your neighbors?
It's like how for most of my life I barely understood the mitigating measures women take in many situations where I don't even notice the situation.
Add to this the ridiculously high income tax burden and sales tax burden, and it becomes clear that raising children is also out of reach for most (particularly if you do not want to send your children to the piss-poor public schools in many areas.)
For singles also, particularly men (who comprise the majority of techies), things are pretty bleak: there is too much competition for women, and opportunities to date do not come by easily at all.
If homeownership and family formation are supremely hard, and so is finding a mate, what exactly is the rationale for continuing to live in the Bay Area? It seems to me that the Bay Area will become an in-and-out type of place (like Manhattan or some of the other New York boroughs perhaps), wherein you bust your ass for several years and decamp to a lower-tax (or better still, no-tax) jurisdiction to get on with the next phase of your life.
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“Better weather” I can’t help but laugh. One of five Mediterranean climates worldwide, built on apricot orchards, formerly home to one of the most diverse animal and again ecosystems before the arrival of whites. It’s really hard to beat the weather in Silicon Valley. It’s almost non seasonal, anything grows. The diversity currently of this area is very high, it’s the home of top universities, between the two cross p…
I think California has created this myth that constant sunshine = perfect weather. I personally like things like summer thunderstorms, snowy winters, mild cloudy days, and rain. It's definitely not bad weather, but the lack of variety and endless dry smoggy summer months can get pretty old.
This is what happens when a city neglects basic quality of life issues, and allows petty crime to thrive. It happened to New York in the 1970's and took roughly three decades to recover from. Good luck, San Francisco.
I think many people prefer petty crime to tech elites. With the upward pressure on rents over the last 10 years, even having your bike stolen every few weeks is cheaper than getting evicted and/or having to find a market rate dwelling. Of course, it's better to have neither exploding costs nor petty crime, but at the end of the day, dealing with petty crime is more affordable. EDIT: Getting downvoted to oblivion but…
The major obstacle to living in SV is the insane cost of homeownership that puts the (pretty commonplace) aspiration of living in one's own home with a nice yard out of reach of all but the richest (even being in the top 5% of incomes in the nation is no guarantee of being able to own a house in Palo Alto, for example.) With the recent passing of Prop 19, things get even worse: people who are looking to inherit homes…
What exactly makes them so bad?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Better weather” I can’t help but laugh. One of five Mediterranean climates worldwide, built on apricot orchards, formerly home to one of the most diverse animal and again ecosystems before the arrival of whites. It’s really hard to beat the weather in Silicon Valley. It’s almost non seasonal, anything grows. The diversity currently of this area is very high, it’s the home of top universities, between the two cross p…
I think California has created this myth that constant sunshine = perfect weather. I personally like things like summer thunderstorms, snowy winters, mild cloudy days, and rain. It's definitely not bad weather, but the lack of variety and endless dry smoggy summer months can get pretty old.
As it happens, tomorrow I’m putting in my 30-day notice to terminate my lease and leave the Bay. (And I’m paying 2 additional months rent in fees to do so) Not being tied to the office fundamentally changes the calculus of choosing where to live. There just aren’t good reasons to live here anymore for so many of us. Even if you enjoy the area, chances are you can get a better deal by moving just a bit further away. A…
Tech in SFBA reminds me of the Resource curse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse ). SFBA did nothing special to attract the wealth of technology companies, they effectively got lucky with Shockley/Fairchild/Traitorous 8 and the boom in technology that followed. It seems the local gov't have squandered an opportunity to truly capitalize on the gift they were given, and perhaps even done their best to jeopa…
This is ridiculous. The Bay Area, specifically Stanford and Berkeley, contributed to the WWII tech research initiative and then afterwards, Terman made Stanford Research Park which led to Silicon Valley.