My brief experience of Silicon Valley in the 90s was that people there didn't give an inch or a damn. Now 25 years later I guess those people have been raising kids.
This Is Silicon Valley
71–80 of 227 posts
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, I'd like to point out that if you have a family, and have settled into a sort of more standard family life, SV is great - if you can afford it. If you're a young(er) single person, my god literally anywhere else is better to live. For example - if you're on Tinder, use the "passport" feature to set your profile to NYC for two days. Let me know the number of matches you get.
I was living in Zurich and before Tinder I had no idea how much difference can my sexual value be between cities. I really wish I knew that my dating life would have been so much easier if I move to NYC.
Dating in Silicon Valley is legitimately awful. It's staggeringly bad.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#73> So, I’m leaving.
Implied: in the hopes of finding a place/community where her penchant for social and larger scale issues are top of mind.
I understand her complaint, which comes from being a well-off Upper Middle Class person with liberal values, but frustrated by inability to move the needle. Yes, this is Silicon Valley. But this is every liberal city. (minus the high school pressure tho.)
I wish she would tell us where she is moving to. She should move to Sacramento. Close enough to SV, and she can hate on all the weekend Tahoe traffic. But where she can find a group of soulmates that care about and are actually doing something about the social issues she cares about.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#74>In my liberal arts college, conversations varied dramatically, from British literature to public policy to moral philosophy to socioeconomic inequality. Compare this to my product management program filled with new grads, where even social conversations revolve around tech — whether it’s spilling the hottest gossip on the new VP, plotting how to get “double promoted” from a Level 3 to a Level 5 product manager in ex…
Politics became the new religion for a lot of people and they act a lot like religious zealots - they feel very strongly about their worldview and will defend it, and at the same time, they're not interested in other points of view. So, just as it was never wise to discuss religion in a work environment, now it's better to not talk politics.
This is the bubble we should be talking about.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#75Interesting juxtaposition of non-PC "black" and PC "latinx" in the same sentence! Surely that says something about the author although I'm not quite sure what.
Black is not non-PC.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#76I'm gonna offer a slightly different perspective: SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium. There is a distinct lack of culture, of nightlife, of arts and humanities - even in San Francisco. We're a mediocre land of strip malls and suburbs masquerading as an international destination. Go to any other city and tell me that it's not MORE vibrant (Chicago, LA, NYC, Miami, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Houst…
I agree about the lack of culture, but I'm not sure it's much better anywhere else in the US. I used to love NYC for its out-there, underground cultural options, but now it just feels like a mall geared for tourists.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Checking out your profiles on other social media, looks like the only thing you ever do is code related, so of course this article goes over your head. Nothing in this article says "look how tough we have it". It's a thought provoking piece on how broken an entire city is, and just how tone deaf people like you are to all of it. You're so busy worrying about code and lack any sort of empathy with others that you can'…
I think it's a little invasive to go out of your way to find someone's social media profiles to help prove a point in a thread on a hacker news post
Googling is invasive? Interesting...
pot/kettle/black again
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#78Its a rant but I'm also surprised at how she writes "people's perfect life". Whats perfect about San Francisco, that has such a low demographic representation of family, the city is super dirty, people live with 6 figure salaries live in terrible housing conditions. Maybe google gets to shelter their employees from a lot of the cruft of SF, but walk 2 blocks away from the google offices in SF and you'll get yelled at…
I also look at this as - individuals have so much wealth, along with these companies, yet no one is doing a single fucking thing to help the homeless. Facebook and Google could reverse their negative PR so quickly if they actually put some money meaningfully toward the problem, not into fake tax shelters for their founders.
How would you solve it? I think it's a really tough problem and a significant fraction of the homeless population has serious mental health problems. I live in a city (Salt Lake City) that did a great job fixing its homelessness problem... for a couple of years. Now it's worse than it has ever been. Partly this is because more homeless people are coming to the area because they've heard about how great the resources here are. The problem with trying to solve homelessness is that most things that work to solve it incentivize more homeless people to move to the area that is solving the problem. At least that's what it seems like to me.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#79I'm gonna offer a slightly different perspective: SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium. There is a distinct lack of culture, of nightlife, of arts and humanities - even in San Francisco. We're a mediocre land of strip malls and suburbs masquerading as an international destination. Go to any other city and tell me that it's not MORE vibrant (Chicago, LA, NYC, Miami, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Houst…
> SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium.
For lifestyle, yes. For the opportunities in tech, there's no place like it. Before you name the other not quite as good tech hubs, yes there is opportunity but not like there is here.
Re: This Is Silicon Valley
#80I'm gonna offer a slightly different perspective: SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium. There is a distinct lack of culture, of nightlife, of arts and humanities - even in San Francisco. We're a mediocre land of strip malls and suburbs masquerading as an international destination. Go to any other city and tell me that it's not MORE vibrant (Chicago, LA, NYC, Miami, Austin, Portland, Seattle, Houst…
I agree about the lack of culture, but I'm not sure it's much better anywhere else in the US. I used to love NYC for its out-there, underground cultural options, but now it just feels like a mall geared for tourists.
Brooklyn, Miami (wynwood), Chicago, Austin, Portland (WEIRD!), Seattle, LA (creative as all hell) - it is better elsewhere. Even midwestern cities (Pittsburg, Cleveland, etc - really great!)