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Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

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Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#271

Post by opportune »

WalterGR wrote: post #124
opportune wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably most people I work with in their 30s or 40s are multimillionaires.

Yeah? On paper, 401k, or elsewhere? Where have they worked and for how long? Because in my experience, the “everyone who works at a FAANG is a multi-millionaire” meme is 100% bullshit. Especially when I read things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336029

I never said everybody is, but I do think most people who have been at FAANG or companies that pay in the same ballpark like trendy late stage pre-ipo companies for 10+ years are or are close (especially if we define multimillionaire as >2m networth including 401k and house equity, and include household wealth for married couples).

My other comment you linked I still stand by. But you don't need to be IC6/L6/E6, refreshers and equity appreciation are very powerful if you are lucky enough to get both.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#272

Post by kortilla »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #220
kortilla wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers This is just an ignorant hot-take though that once again blames upper middle class tech employees for a housing problem caused solely by bad govern policies. There is no “domination” here considering that tech employees are well. 21 percent [1] are now considered tech jobs and the FAA…

> Governments are starved of revenue by giant companies that have mastered the art of tax avoidance. Your rebuttal appears to miss the point that O'Reilly makes. First: This page [1] shows business tax is about 1B of 6B total for San Francisco. In most cities in the United States, business tax is a relatively small part of total tax revenue. Most cities derive the largest proportion of tax revenue from property taxes…

The lost national taxes in the US are effectively irrelevant for his point though. The despair in the Bay Area has nothing to do with federal funds. More importantly, federal funds haven’t been dictated by federal revenue in decades. In the US the federal government just accumulates debt whenever it wants at historically low interest.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#273

Post by astrange »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #218
astrange wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Housing is cheaper when the economy is worse. See Berlin.

That's not sustainable, you're just living on scraps because a lot of other people have made bad decisions in your favor. They're not going to keep investing after that, and of course it's bad for the people who moved out - this is a cause of gentrification.

Tokyo, Vienna, Singapore are examples of cities with good housing policies. Although for Vienna's to get started all the landlords had to die in WW1, and then the planners died in WW2.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#274

Post by onethought »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #221
onethought wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing you haven’t been to Shenzhen. Where everything you mentioned is, and growing.

> Proximity to a delta of good universities What good unis are in Guangdong (GD) province? The most famous ones I know are in Shanghai and Beijing. From my limited experience with hiring in Shenzhen, almost no one was from GD, nor went to uni in GD. Most went to uni in Shanghai or Beijing. > The foundational organizations I think the OP is referring to big gov't research (DARPA, etc.) that is the backbone of technolo…

DARPA was based in Virginia... so not sure what SV history you are referring to.

Yes Guangdong is the technology zone for China, it receives both state funding, state run incubators and special economic status.

But in essence they have both highly skilled hardware engineers and software engineers which is like SV of old. Where as current day SV is dominated by software, where they ship the manufacture of things to Shenzhen or Taiwan.

As far as universities, you have Sun Yat Sen University in GZ one of the top tier universities in China. And yes a whole lot of internal migration from the north to the south. Shenzhen growing from 70k to 10mil in 40 years is an insane population movement

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#275

Post by dang »

NeverFade wrote: post #115
dang wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need to come up with better examples than nationalistic flamewar comments like that one and its parent, both of which were correctly flagged by users. The only problem I see with flags in that hellish thread is that there weren't enough of them. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ? Between that case and this one, it seems like it would be good to calibrate your sense of wh…

I presented a coherent argument against an Antisemitic comment which you admit has no place here. At the time I posted my response, the Antisemitic comment was not flagged, in fact it was highly upvoted and visible. My own comment got abusively flagged by the same brigade which upvoted the Antisemitic comment I was pointing out. And you are justifying this. Now I made this comment, which is entirely innocent. Is ther…

There's a rule against making unsubstantive, inflammatory comments, especially on divisive topics.

Everyone underestimates the provocation of their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimates the guilt/provocation of others' comments by a similar factor. That leads to a 100x distortion, so it feels everyone else is getting away with outrageous shit while the rule-enforcers are picking on you completely unfairly. This is a standard bias—I assure you that the other side feels exactly the same way. If we stay in that perspective, the forum will burn to a crisp and that's not an outcome which serves anybody.

The only way out of this is to recognize the bias and work to overcome it in oneself. I think if you re-read your posts in that spirit, it's pretty easy to see how they weren't as coherent and innocent as you say—from my perspective they were very similar to the other unsubstantive/inflammatory/flamewar comments and all that is happening here is routine moderation.

Let's take your above post as an example. No doubt you have very coherent, cogent thoughts about this topic but what did your post actually say? First it repeated what the other person said, then it went straight to snark ("I understand that we need to rudely dismiss everyone who left NorCal") and then to personal attack ("maybe let's try to maintain some semblance of connection to reality?"). If you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it should be easy to see that this is not the sort of comment that we want on HN. I'm sure that if a third party had posted that, this would be obvious to you, especially if it were about some unrelated topic that you don't feel so strongly about.

It's common for people to assume that their comment expresses their thoughts—their solid, substantive ideas on an issue—when in reality their comment has done nothing the sort. This is an easy mistake to make because to each of us, our own thoughts are transparently present, and we can just assume them. However, nobody else (with the possible exception of any gifted mind-readers among us) has any clue what those thoughts are unless you express them explicitly, and it doesn't matter how insightful or clever or right you are if your comment consists of snark and attack. To be a good HN contributor, you should therefore (1) express your solid thoughts explicitly, and (2) drop any snark and attack.

As for Antisemitism, you've made a pretty dangerous and damaging claim here, which is neither true nor fair, nor does it serve the cause you're supporting. I'm not going to take it personally, but in my view you should try to be more careful about throwing such grave charges. When you do it casually or unjustly (and you did both here), you cheapen them—and you can also really hurt people.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#276

Post by onethought »

ubertoop wrote: post #260
onethought wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, your right: - largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption - 5G (still no SV grown solution there) - Most advanced solar manufacture - biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear - biggest investor in space based technology and delivery If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.

This list includes no genuinely new innovations except for maybe 5G. You are listing that China is a major manufacturer, which is true. The OPs point was that China has a record of stealing IP from the US, which is also true. Listing manufacturers in China doesn't disprove this point. So please, if you'd like, a list of genuine technologies who's origins can be traced to China... I'll be waiting.

So WeChat, and 5G. Should be discounted because they don’t support your point, and you will wait for others? Got it!

- Facial recognition on banking transactions.

- Tele Health rolled out via their ubiquitous home grown social network

- AI drones policing temperature and mask wearing

- real-time automatic translation hardware and software.

- Chinese based text input via keyboards

- Chinese voice recognition (a different problem to tonal languages)

By all means point out where they stole those things from

Then when you can’t do that, check out their space program, their capability easily surpasses NASA and is competitive with space X. Which given they are banned from even the iss where did they steal that from?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#277

Post by caslon »

busterarm wrote: post #267
caslon wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley's value is in innovation. Oracle doesn't innovate, and Amazon's in Seattle anyway. There's really nothing that matters as far as any of the cloud companies; they're valueless.

Was. Now it's just a myth that people perpetuate. What SV has now is a bunch of greedy people looking to give money to ideas. It's not that SV technologists are innovators anymore, it's just that they are in proximity to money. Now the business people and their greed and money are leaving SV en masse. What does it have left?

"give money"

This isn't what happens.

SV worked fine before there was money there, they'll work fine after. No VC is going to stop throwing money with conditions at people in the Valley, because they're not stupid, and they know how to make more. They're just going to tell other people to leave.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#278

Post by NeverFade »

dang wrote: post #275
NeverFade wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presented a coherent argument against an Antisemitic comment which you admit has no place here. At the time I posted my response, the Antisemitic comment was not flagged, in fact it was highly upvoted and visible. My own comment got abusively flagged by the same brigade which upvoted the Antisemitic comment I was pointing out. And you are justifying this. Now I made this comment, which is entirely innocent. Is ther…

There's a rule against making unsubstantive, inflammatory comments, especially on divisive topics. Everyone underestimates the provocation of their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimates the guilt/provocation of others' comments by a similar factor. That leads to a 100x distortion, so it feels everyone else is getting away with outrageous shit while the rule-enforcers are picking on you completely unfairly. This…

Let's look at the post I was responding to:

> The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers.

That is very dismissive of a long list of entrepreneurs who contributed so much to the Valley. I'm not even a Musk fan (I'd never work for him, for example) but he came up as a clear example of someone on that list who is objectively still in a very strong phase of his career and could easily have more and greater impact for years to come.

I did find OP's dismissal rude to these entrepreneurs, but considered my stronger argument to be the counterfactual nature of the claim that Musk has "peaked".

Thus I pointed out that claiming Musk has "peaked" is factually detached from reality. Even if you disagree, my argument clearly pertains to OP's claim (i.e. that all these entrepreneurs have "peaked") and not in any way to OP as a person.

Finally, I've been contributing here for two years now. In this time, I saw many, many snarky comments, and made a few too. I've never seen a comment flagged for snark.

Then I participated respectfully in a discussion, where I spoke out against Antisemitism, and my comment got flagged. It was the first time I got flagged in two years. Then almost immediately multiple other comments of mine got flagged.

Then I made this comment, which seems normal based on all the comments I've seen here before, and it got flagged, and you got involved.

The only reasonable way to interpret this situation: the same people who started frivolously flagging me before are still flagging my comments. You noticed a flagged comment, get involved, and tried to backward-rationalize why after two years I'm suddenly a troublemaker. First because I mentioned Musk (no rule against that). Then because I used snark (very common here, and again not forbidden by the rules). Then because I supposedly made a personal attack (I didn't).

As for Antisemitism, I only ask you to imagine yourself as a Jewish person reading multiple comments about how Israeli Jews are using "many dirty tricks", constantly and intentionally war mongering, mocking and insulting other nations and their people out of wicked spite, are universally murderous and blood-thirsty, "steal land", have no rightful place in this world - all echoing classic Antisemitic narratives about Jews.

And these comments aren't just downvoted and flagged - they are often upvoted and visible. Then you speak out against that racist bias, and you get flagged. Then you try to continue to use the site as you've done before, and suddenly 2/3 of your comments get flagged and mods start addressing you as a troublemaker.

How would you feel?

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#279

Post by TedShiller »

ulfw wrote: post #84
TedShiller wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Hence the wrong focus in the article. It’s like if Bill Gates leaves Seattle. Nothing happens because Gates is done in his career.

Bill Gates is not done at all. In fact he is doing more and better things for mankind with his career now than he did when he ran Microsoft.

Sure, but Bill Gates leaving Seattle would not impact the Seattle tech industry at all.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#280

Post by TedShiller »

ulfw wrote: post #81
TedShiller wrote: post #13

The people that he mentions at the beginning of the article who have left have all peaked in their careers. The real loss would not be of people who have peaked leaving but of people who haven’t peaked yet leaving.

LOL yea. That's exactly the SV problem. Lure a bunch of inexperienced young people who give away their best years to a corporation in hopes of becoming rich. Very few do. The vast majority spend their money on NYC-level high taxes and rent.

You gotta play to win. Yes, not everyone can win the lottery, that's true.
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