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Tech Workers Think Silicon Valley and Startups Are Losing Their Luster (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Quartz report: The job site Indeed.com found Silicon Valley's hold on tech workers is slipping as opportunities, and the cost of living, changes the equation for living and working in one of the priciest places in the country. "There is more opportunity for tech professionals in more places than ever before," wrote Terence Chiu, vice president of Indeed Prime by email, citing cities such as Austin, Boston, Seattle, and New York City. "Obviously the San Francisco Bay remains the largest tech hub [but] what has made it so attractive has also made it expensive." Indeed's most recent survey of professional tech workers found more than 66% of tech workers say living and working in Silicon Valley is either "not that important" or "not at all important" for a career in technology. Just 12% consider it "very important." Opinions were split on generational lines. About half of millennial tech workers say it's important (26.5%) or very important (19%), but the number declined to 10.2% among the Boomer generation. "Seasoned talent is often searching for opportunity elsewhere," stated the report. New employees may see the high cost of living as an acceptable tradeoff for building up a reputation and experience in the Bay Area, but that seems to fade over time.Recently, Google co-founder Sergey Brin advised people to not come to Silicon Valley to start a business for the very same reasons.
A supposedly intelligent person claimed that blacks are at least as intelligent as whites because they are so ‘innovative.’ His example was that blacks would take an old steel oil-drum (which whites considered to be rubbish) and turn it into something useful – a steel drum. Leaving aside whether or not a steel-drum band of muds is, in any way, shape or form, ‘useful,’ let’s look at his argument.
The white man had made the steel oil-drum as a means of transporting oil around the world. This involved creating an industrial technology, and developing mining industry to a point where oil wells could be sunk in the North Sea (or Gulf of Mexico), and crude oil successfully removed. Then a world-wide trading network had to be established. Let us gloss over the need for international economic transactions, international credit and banking, electronic money transfers, telephonic and satellite communications, and the stable economies and governments needed to make this possible.
Instead, let’s look at the need to produce oil tankers to transport the oil. The need for computers to navigate the ships, the level of technology needed to produce the ships, the schools needed to educate those who will serve on the ships, the engineering skills and training for those making them.
Let us now think about the products kept going by the oil. The plastics, the chemicals, the cars, and so on. And all this on a world-wide scale, over generations. And we haven’t even touched on road and rail systems, intensive farming and refrigeration to feed those in the industrialised cities, the factories, the building trade, power generation, written and computerised record keeping, or a thousand and one other things, all associated with the world oil production and trade.
And of all this, the oil drum is a minor by-product, a practical but simple and fairly primitive form of storage whilst in temporary transit.
And if, by some chance or accident, one of these oil drums washes up on the shore of dusky Africa, what do the native inhabitants do? Use it in their own oil industry? No. Use it as a spring-board towards future development? No. They turn it upside-down and hit it with sticks! Call me pedantic, but that doesn’t make them my equal. Not one of the dozens of items I listed above has appeared in Africa, ever. Not even writing. A continent surrounded by ocean, watered by massive lakes and rivers, and the black natives never dreamt a sail. Thousands of miles of flat grasslands, and they never fashioned a wheel, nor domesticated animals. Surrounded by stone, they never constructed a building better than a hut. Acres of diamonds and the world’s largest gold fields, and they never glanced at them until shown their beauty by white men. And all this for tens of thousands of years, thousands of generations living with no change, no progress. But they are our equal.
OUTSIDE AFRICA
And what of the rest of the world? When the Negro has been moved he has made no progress. Educated by whites, perhaps trained woud be a better description, as whenever he is left to his own devices he immediately falls back into barbarism, and destroys everything he has been given. Take the island of Haiti, in the West Indies. Settled by the French, and mainly French Nordics. In the 1700’s they had a system of public sanitation in the capital, water-flushed toilets and excellent public hygiene. Then came the French Revolution, and a ship full of muskets, gunpowder and musket balls arrived (it is still not known where from), to be handed out to runaway slaves, and the majority of the whites were butchered. Today, 200 years later, there is no public sanitation in Haiti, no sewage system beyond emptying buckets into the road, and hasn’t been from the day the blacks took over.