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The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

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Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#81
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was going to be, but the CCP seems determined to deprive their innovative companies of oxygen and happy to make state controlled companies the favorites.

That is only relevant if you assume state-owned enterprises can't innovate.

SV started off doing work for the military. Manhattan Project was an "state enterprise", so was sending people to the moon. If a state owned sector is deemed strategic, and we can sleep soundly knowing that China definitely considers information technologies (h/w, infra, s/w, ai) as strategic, it generally does well in competent nations.

The fact of stagnating sectors in planned and/or centralized economies always seems to boil down to self-defeating incentives, possibly merely as one symptom of general bureaucratic malaise. To wit, no one had to dangle the incentive of wealth in front of the exceptionally capable men and women who were active in research and development in US in the heydays of the cold war. The nongeek (mostly military) people who shepherded cagey super smart people like Feynman apparently went through a trial and error phase before they figured out how to manage them. And lucky for the creative types, the bureaucracy involved was very much aligned with them in finding super cool new things. That's why we have DARPA. If China has its own version of DARPA, they clearly have the brains, and Chinese are if nothing else exceptionally creative people, with a proven historic track record of hacking. What ailed them historically was a bureaucracy that failed to see in, or obtain strategic benefit from, the inventions.

-Bureaucracies have been a problem to date- for humanity. (Even clerics can be conceptually viewed as 'ministry of god' bureaucrats, which is precisely what most of them are.) We haven't cracked this nut yet and imho it is an important one that is impeding human progress: we need them to get things done at large scale and in continuity, but they inevitably end up being the tail that wags the dog of society and state. The problem is of course the human in the equation (knowledge base, specialized language, meta-interactions) makes them impervious to correctives and purges. Possibly AI will finally help us get over this structural hump.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#83
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indianapolis is a three hour drive from Chicago which is the third most populous city in the US. Whereas Austin is over 1,000 miles from SF. (Once you're getting in a plane anyway, 1K miles vs. 2K miles doesn't make much of a difference.)

It has brutal winters compared to Austin.

For me, Austin's summers are brutal. Lots of people live in northern states where it snows. You get used to it. I would not in general make a decision about a job based on the weather.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#84
post #3

If you make a location unlivable, people won't live there in the future. Conversely if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future.

> if there's a place that people visit for vacations, people will live there in the future

meanwhile, in the real world:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-30/venice-is...

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#85
post #80
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree... The diversity runs about skin deep and that's it. Most people in their 20s and 30s are still children of rich/UMC parents. Very few people I have met in SV are from lower class families. Socioeconomically - it's a wildly monolithic culture. Extremely capitalistic as well to where many people cannot fathom anything that doesn't fall outside the purview of capitalism because they've been taken so strongly by i…

Young engineers don't move here because they want to date someone in a position of power or authority. They move here because they can work with, and date, interesting and attractive people. I'd agree that the diversity of economic backgrounds seems limited. Although I'd caution that people tend to attempt to hide parts of their background they feel will make others and themselves uncomfortable, so your perception ma…

They most likely move there either because some company offered them a pile of money or they want to start a company and there's more funding there.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#86

Hotelling's law and Nash equilibrium can partially explain why so many "next silicon valleys" haven't panned out. It's also interesting that the valley is in a jurisdiction with such pro-employee laws.

Wouldn't Hotelling's law just predict that wannabe-SVs would try to copy every aspect of the original SV? I don't see how that alone explains their failure.

I'd attribute the difficulty of creating the next SV partially to capital/talent concentration being a coordination game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game) - for any individual small developer, entrepreneur or investor, it makes sense to go where they have the best chances to thrive.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#87
post #23

There are few reasons why Silicon Valley is successful: 1) weather (no tornados, no super humid days, no snow) 2) proximity of great places (Lake Tahoe, Monterey, Napa valley, …) 3) good universities (Berkeley, standford, UCSF, …) 4) immigrants (especially south asian) are more welcome 5) big companies like Salesforce, Google, Facebook, etc. 6) support network: it is ok to be poor entrepreneur and hassle even you are…

Yeah I would say so. South Asian immigrants are very welcome, huge respect (fear even) for IIT graduates. Like yes the H1B visa system sucks, but it's indentured servitude essentially (not slavery, I ate at a restaurant with literal slaves like they stole their passports human trafficking, it was a rip-off too, that owner was shit to everybody in sight). H1B is akin to actual indentured servitude where whites paid for travel to America (like traveling to the Moon) and then committed to working for 7 years for the privilege. And there were rules on both sides, there were obligations for both, subordination for one but liability for the other, not very different from apprenticeship (it could be an apprenticeship), huge opportunity, and frankly not that many complaints overall, given the circumstances. Never heard horror stories, though obviously there are some. H1B is that. There are H1B horror stories, but come on they're more sought after than American citizens generally. Well in the military-industrial complex, there is a priority on citizenship, but somehow I never applied for a job there. Just didn't occur to me...well one time, they shunned because my resume got destroyed in a lynching and subsequent torture. In particular standing up to torture, employers sense that like veteran discrimination basically. But I applied to very few jobs, because of being like conditioned or something not to. Not capable, guess I should have spammed. Despite applying to many universities (not crazy for the time, but 7, on the high end, more work), and having good game in the dating market. I still can't transfer good game into actual money like eg sales, or networking, no idea why...can't make the necessary adjustments, at least not yet.

I'm looking back on any discrimination against South Asians...I don't know. Well for one thing, one interesting loophole in discrimination, is that there is white guilt about discrimination, as a group they know it to be wrong and they don't like carrying it out in abstract. When there is a stereotype-breaker, they go for it completely. So Asia lies north of the equator, meaning South Asians lie closest to the equator, more light but also more heat meaning less clothing more exposure to light, so what do you get? Darker skin, particularly in Sri Lanka. Born under an equatorial sun, as Harriet Beecher Stowe put it in Uncle Tom's Cabin. So the deal is they are dermatologically dark, like Fitsch type 5 (a scale from 1 to 6 measuring skin darkness and tanning in response to sunlight, not truly synonymous but close enough to be useful), but they're Indoeuropean, always known to be the same language group as eg the English and Norse. Known kinship, and the intent was to accept them, and they invented 0 come on, super smart great at chess invented that too.

So by now the desire in principle to accept them in combination with them working like crazy--the most basic way to hack discrimination--and in addition, outpacing other minorities in certain fields--like there was a blogger on Wall Street who talked about being East Asian on Wall Street, and compared it to being South Asian saying it was rough because there were I think no managing directors (MD's as they're called) on Wall Street that were breakaway successes. Whereas there were South Asians there were. (I think Indians, the article said BSD Big Swinging Desi, meaning Indian, vulgar yes Wall Street can be vulgar, dude it's all about alpha), and it maps out to what I saw when I was picking which tournament I would enter (another option was chess, I chose algorithms instead). It's a way for whites to not judge based on the color of people's skins. And further in Freakonomics an Indian sociologist did some polls in housing projects, ended up not getting killed because while not African he was dark too, not black, like in a gray area. OK they considered him gray. So that's how he was privy to the economics of the street drug market, and the tournament aspect of it.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#88
post #85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young engineers don't move here because they want to date someone in a position of power or authority. They move here because they can work with, and date, interesting and attractive people. I'd agree that the diversity of economic backgrounds seems limited. Although I'd caution that people tend to attempt to hide parts of their background they feel will make others and themselves uncomfortable, so your perception ma…

They most likely move there either because some company offered them a pile of money or they want to start a company and there's more funding there.

Precisely. "It's the economy, stupid". Among the employed and single in Silicon Valley, estimates are that there are three men for every two. It's an awful place to date, even beside the fact that nobody moves anywhere for the dating pool.

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#89
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has brutal winters compared to Austin.

For me, Austin's summers are brutal. Lots of people live in northern states where it snows. You get used to it. I would not in general make a decision about a job based on the weather.

Why not?

Why would anyone not consider climate when deciding on a place they'll be living?

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the US Heartland: Steve Case

#90
post #88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They most likely move there either because some company offered them a pile of money or they want to start a company and there's more funding there.

Precisely. "It's the economy, stupid". Among the employed and single in Silicon Valley, estimates are that there are three men for every two. It's an awful place to date, even beside the fact that nobody moves anywhere for the dating pool.

If there were a ton of high-paying tech jobs in Chicago that needed people to be local, a whole lot of people would buy a down coat and gloves and just deal with the weather, lack of nearby mountains etc.

I like the Bay Area. I'm even going there on a trip in a couple of days. But, at the end of the day, most people aren't basing where they live on the climate and recreational options (though those may make a difference at the margin).

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