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Duolingo To Silicon Valley Workers: Move To Pittsburgh, Where You Can Actually Afford a Home (venturebeat.com)

As the cost of living continues to rise in Silicon Valley, tech companies in other parts of the country are getting more aggressive in pitching workers to move to their cities for a better quality of life. From a report: This week, the language-learning platform Duolingo put up an ad along San Francisco's US Highway 101, encouraging residents to move to Pittsburgh where the company's headquarters are based. In Pittsburgh, you can both "work in tech" and "own a home," the ad touted. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told VentureBeat in an email that the company was prompted to put up the ad after realizing that most of its Pittsburgh employees who relocated to the city cited the low cost of housing as one of the deciding factors.

Von Ahn said that 85 percent of the company's Pittsburgh-based employees moved to the city from somewhere else. The company has 110 employees, the majority of whom work out of Pittsburgh. "One [employee] who recently joined Duolingo moved from the Bay Area and ended up buying a house almost immediately," von Ahn said. "He said he never would have been able to do that before, but here in Pittsburgh, he found a reasonably priced home on a large plot of land and jumped on the opportunity to be a homeowner and have a huge yard for his dog."

4 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. CA is not the USA by AHuxley · · Score: -1, Troll

    What does CA have that no other part of the USA has? What keeps the SJW brands management paying so much just to stay in CA?

    Many parts of the US have very low cost power, great internet, nice homes in good parts of a city.
    Housing and site expansion are lower cost.
    Other states have wealthy cities with good education, are safe, clean and have nice weather all year.
    Populations that are ready for work. States without a need for CA level tax rates. No need for your brand to help pay CA tax rates to cover massive illegal immigrant support costs.
    State and city governments all over the USA would offer amazing tax deals to get your brand into their states.
    Other states university systems often still graduate on merit. Imagine getting support staff who graduated having the real skills they say they do.

    Is the very fact that parts of CA are so expensive the reason why the SJW brands like CA?
    The staff have fooled the shareholders and owners into paying for decades of their CA lifestyles?
    Why don't shareholders do the math to show their brand could make more money and pass back larger profits in many other better US states?
    Find out who is keeping your brand in CA and paying so much tax.
    Move to another state and start enjoying your brands wealth again.
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    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    1. Re:CA is not the USA by Bruce+Perens · · Score: -1, Troll

      So, do you think all of the people you don't like because they're SJWs, and who you think didn't graduate their college on merit (which is BS) would really want to live next door to you? They're out here because people they live next door to are more like them. Lots of them are established with their companies, and could telecommute from where you live - if they wanted to.

      Our taxes aren't that much higher. Nor is the price of food or fuel, I've spent lots of time in Middle America and have done more than enough shopping there.

      Housing is expensive because everyone wants to live here, and because the U.S. government provides essentially unlimited credit for housing so that anywhere it's in demand, the value will be kited beyond many people's lifetime incomes.

      And yeah, it's really nice that I can take a nice walk on a path that tourists come from around the world to see, and which happens to be in front of my house, and it was warm and sunny here today, and I will drive for a few hours on Tuesday and ski good snow, and any performer I'm interested in is probably coming here several times a year.

  2. Only the beginning by thePsychologist · · Score: 0, Troll

    People with a six-figure salary complaining about silicon valley living costs would have an easier time of it if they didn't have children.

    This kind of phenomenon is only the beginning. The cost of having children is going up, and it will continue to do so until the population reaches an equilibrium. It has to happen sometime.

    That's not really a bad thing, though.

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    "What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  3. Re: That's racist! by DrLudicrous · · Score: 1, Troll

    What a load of cherry-picked statistics. All of which ignore the systematic biases that have been in place for centuries against people who have more melanin in their skin. See? No ad hominem attacks. A simple dismissal of. Specious argument as just that. If those arguments carried any water, why arenâ(TM)t they making in-roads in a more public forum? Answer: because they are terrible, racist arguments that reach false conclusions based on overly sparse, unrepresentative data points.