Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
It must suck to live in a third-world state.
Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
11–20 of 237 posts
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#12As every year goes by, the Bay Area seems more and more an inbred cesspool of narcissism. (Never mind the ridiculous cost of living, crime problem, homeless people, and pitiful public transport)
Good place to visit but... well, no need to live there!
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#13> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?
The impact of carpooling is minimal and there are much more efficient ways at public transportation. Carpooling is a band-aid unlikely to reach the critical mass required to turn around the nightmare that public transportation is.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#14> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps. Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story. The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup. $1.2 billion…
> Is there evidence that this problem actually exists?
and later on:
> but it's ultimately a boring business that sells routers.
The use of the word "boring" should answer your question. There was a time in the valley that stuff was far-out, interesting, and cool. I know, hard to believe, but I saw it happen, ancient history that it is.
But hey, there was a time when being a mechE building cars was the ultimate in cool. Things change.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#15> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?
Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic?
Here are three frequently voiced objections:
1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private companies not be subject to the same sort of democratic decision making on how to use the local public roads and bus stops?
2) Some people moved to the city in part because of the knowledge that the private bus system would be there. Without those buses, they would have chosen somewhere else precisely because the lack of parking would have made the commute impossible. It's hard then to say that each bus replaces a dozen cars, when those people might not be there if there were no buses.
3) If getting cars off the road and reclaiming commuting time were paramount, then why not rezone the areas around Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. for medium density housing, like SF-style row houses, instead of the current preference for suburban detached housing? Then people could walk or bike to work in a matter of minutes. The densities for SF, MV, and C are 17K, 6K, and 5K/sq mile respectively, so there's plenty of opportunity for local population growth. Instead, the local (and democratic) resistance to zoning change in those smaller cities causes increased prices and bus traffic elsewhere, but the people in SF have no way to push back and cause the zoning laws of the smaller cities to change.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#16> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps. Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story. The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup. $1.2 billion…
I don't think Cisco's problems are a lack of engineers. If it is, they can always pay them more, or train their managers to be good leaders.
I agree - every time I hear, "People aren't going to work in X?" I wonder if there is a systemic imbalance, or something else at work.
If consumers want to pay for apps, who are we as central planners to say otherwise? Maybe we shouldn't subsidize these things, but let the market decide.
You could argue we should be funding basic research, but that's not routers.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
We are talking about California where they didn't build an extensively sufficient subway system.
Whenever you can land at an airport and take a train (BART) into the heart of the City in under 30 minutes you've got a subway system. BART could always be better (loop the Bay or go across the Golden Gate) but it is a real Subway system.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#18This article make it seems that all infrastructural problems lies in the hardware world.
The younger generation do care about problems that lies beneath the application, but a lot of those problems deal more with software than with hardware these days.
Besides that, we've been moving to a open source infrastructure, where a larger number of companies that depends on softwares develop them in a collaborative way, we have moved from the proprietary paradigm that existed in the 90's. A simple texting app may depend on some innovative database to scale, and will contribute to it's development.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#19> The other night I was studying late for a midterm exam — I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University —
Heh, nice name-dropping.
Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
#20> The backlash in recent months against the self-involvement and frivolity of the new guard has actually been a long time coming. Instagram photos of opulent tech holiday parties have been lambasted, Google buses blockaded In what universe is a carpooling system that gets dozens of cars off the road and allows each passenger to reclaim ten working hours a week classified as frivolous?
Have you not been following any of the discussion about this topic? Here are three frequently voiced objections: 1) If the city decided to put a new bus route outside of your house, with a bus every 10 minutes for the morning and evening rush hours, then you would expect there to be public meetings where people can voice concerns about the routing, increase in large traffic, noise, and so on. Why should private compa…
I think you need to look up the definition of the word "frivolous".