161–170 of 302 posts
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Who cares if your investors are from sv but you’re based elsewhere?
The investors care. Traditionally they wouldn't fund anyone who wasn't in easy reach. It's also easier to hire employees since they're all in SV.
Do investors not also want (competent) exceptions that stand out?
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Perhaps you are part of the problem? Maybe leaving would be best for both you and SF. I was born and raised in the area, and have watched as friends and family are forced out due to rising costs. These are folks who legitimately loved the area and were actively involved in their communities. And they get replaced by people who seem to only care about big paychecks and spend more time complaining about the area than a…
People are not leaving SF because tech employees are coming in. If nobody moved in, the economy would just get worse, housing wouldn't get any more available. The problem is that your parents go to every community meeting and get all the housing projects shut down to prevent "greedy developers". That's been happening consistently since the 70s.
I didn't say that. I literally said they are "forced out due to rising costs".
I am all for tech workers moving to the bay area if it suits them. What I don't like, is tech workers who show up and then just complain about how much they hate it here. If you don't like it here, either leave or get involved with your community and help us fix things (including YIMBY, which all of my friends and family support, for the record).
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The US has a lot of democratic risk but I have more hope for the country than Europe or Africa, because our economic policy is so much better. Europeans love their post-WW2 welfare states, but in practice their current governments react to everything with more austerity, and they're really anti-immigration.
US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality). Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.
There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
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Except in China. Which is my point. For every Uber there is a Didi. Microsoft there is a Tencent... Etc. but they don’t play at US scale, they play at China scale.
You are listing giants who are generaly state supported and largely copies of western tech. The thing is about having a rich ecosystem of small players innovating. That is what makes SV.
Copies of western tech? This is just propaganda the US tells itself. There is a lot of original tech in China. Where did they copy 5G from? Or their vaunted “social credit” system from?
I’m one of them. Left San Francisco due to the shitty weather, high crime, high rent, not much to do there, everybody is absorbed by their work, etc. I’ve been travelling and I’m currently wondering if I should come back or not...
This is a genuine question: have the tech companies done much to help out with the homelessness and crime rate? For example, through funding homeless shelters? I ask because I thought SF wasn’t a very nice city, due to the large scale of homelessness. Seeing how much money there was, I wondered why tech companies didn’t just throw money at the problem so that they’d have a nicer environment to live in. I know that ho…
https://rsmus.com/what-we-do/services/tax/state-and-local-ta...
I have been repeating the second part of this statement as a truism for decades as internet advertising keeps growing.
Apparently I have have been living it too because nearly 100% of the searches I make have zero targeted ads.
To the gatekeeper companies controlling the www today there appears to be no commercial/non-commercial distinction.
For these companies and all those who ride their coattails, data collection for the ultimate purpose of internet advertising is fair game anywhere and everywhere.
"Silicon Valley is a mirror of what is wrong with our economy and corporate governance, not the cause of it, or even the worst exemplar. (Tobacco, oil, and pharma companies vie for the top spot.)"
Tobacco, oil and pharma are all highly regulated industries. SV is highly unregulated.
It is curious to me why financial services did not make the the list of exemplars. Meanwhile the author then proceeds with a criticism of "casino capitalism".
Perhaps there are links between the rise of "casino capitalism" and the rise of the www as a promoted commercial prospect, in the late 1990s/early 2000's and again more recently.
It honestly doesn’t really matter to the world if “Silicon Valley” moves to another or multiple other locations. What’s far more important is, “does the ever-accelerating dominance of a small number of companies show any signs of weakness?” and this article doesn’t seem to think so.
A CEO of a large company in 1980 would be considered a small CEO in 2020. There are more employees everywhere and necessarily more layers of management (and the same goes for the startup/VC ecosystem, and the same goes for democratic structures which require more stringent rule so everyone lives on the same planet). Concentration is more a side-effect of population than any other trend.
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US economic policy is a result of the dollar being a world reserve currency. This is a unique privilege (usd being overvalued and liquid) and also a curse (inequality). Europe has quite a lot of internal migration and the US largely benefits from highly educated european and asian immigrants to SV. What makes europeans move is access to capital. It all comes down to the dollar.
Well, that's a theory, but it's not proven and we'd have to lose the status to do the experiment. There are countries with higher median wealth than the US and there are countries with a higher debt to GDP ratio - Japan and Canada have both. Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think, and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
All irrelevant.
> Really it just seems like printing money is much safer than people think
It is safer when your currency is the one most other countries are indebted in and buy their goods in. USD increasing in value causes economic crises around the world, USD decreasing in value causes economic booms around the world. All because countries are paying their debts in dollars.
> and everyone is just afraid of inflation because it happened once in the 70s due to an energy crisis.
A whole lot of things happened in the 70s. Like the USD going off the gold standard completely, other countries starting to get rid of it for this reason and the establishment of the petro dollar to get it under control again. The 70s showed how things start unraveling when USD status is threatened.
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> There's a reason why we have never seen a world leading tech company come out from anywhere except the US. Probably the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN.
Instead of calling OP ignorant, can you help us with world-leading tech companies that are not in the US? I can think of Tencent from China in terms of company valuation, but my impression is that Tencent's dominance is confined to China instead of the world.
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> - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet. Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.
Yeah, 5G is a real thing. It’s really fast and awesome! It involves both improvements in hardware and software. Huawei are the leaders in it. (Devastating to the narrative that China just copies everyone)