Right. Specifically Intel is a now high profit company that is losing out in all the new very high growth markets while there is danger of commoditization of their cash cows. For now, explosive growth in the cloud is pumping sales for server CPUs, but as the software industry learns to build complex software to take advantage of distributed computing, the highly profitable new Intel CPUs are offering less value to the customer.
The key here is there is nothing a CEO can do that will show traction and give positive financial over the next 8 quarters. So why would a "numbers guy" do anything but cut costs and avoid risks, so that the executive bonuses are maximized for the next two years?
Specifically Intel is a now high profit company that is losing out in all the new very high growth markets while there is danger of commoditization of their cash cows. For now, explosive growth in the cloud is pumping sales for server CPUs, but as the software industry learns to build complex software to take advantage of distributed computing, the highly profitable new Intel CPUs are offering less value to the customer. Intel is not even the best chipmaker in the world anymore -- they cannot compete for sales of lower power commodity CPUs.
The key here is there is nothing a CEO can do that will show traction and give positive financial over the next 8 quarters. So why would a "numbers guy" do anything but cut costs and avoid risks, so that the executive bonuses are maximized for the next two years? Maybe the shareholders will be happy. For now. But the danger is 3 years from now, everyone will point to the missed opportunities over the last ~8 years that led to stagnating profits with no hope of improvement.
Well, Apple may have been direct behind closed doors, for all we know. After the deal goes bad, they do not gain anything by overtly badmouthing Flextronics -- that only starts a pissing war that is a distraction for both companies.
But you are basically agreeing that Apple could easily find American companies harder to work with.
What that means for companies other than Apple is open to debate.
While all you say definitely has merit, Apple charges a premium for desktops that are optimized in various ways that are dependent on the precise form factor, in a way other electronics companies do not bother.
That Apple found the American manufacturer harder to work with, given their demanding style, is perfectly believable.
I am skeptical how very meaningful this lesson is for anyone who is not building a superoptimized premium phone/mobile device or who is not Apple doing what Apple does. As there is explosive growth in tiny devices that talk to our phones, it is a question worth pondering carefully, at least for some companies.
That is an interesting point. We will have an address for our mobile computer, but there is no logical reason it has to be a phone number or email address. That is an artifact of the phone cell system as we know it. Obviously "8G" or whatever that then exists will have to track mobile computers by some means, but messaging, voice, video will be registered to some service on the cloud that will do necessary forwarding.
I guess that is a question: Under the hood, what does these cell services use? What is actually necessary?
When I was a kid, we took phone calls seriously, and would jump to pick up the phone to be polite to the caller. That (perhaps overzealous) enthusiasm was a valuable social contract.
4 years ago, I turned off the ringer on my landline. I was getting 20x as many spam calls as real human beings that I know. I was even on the Do Not Call Registry already.
Now I have a new phone service that came with the fiber, and it filters out most spam, but I still leave my ringer off. I get emailed a note if someone leaves a message -- nothing but spam so far.
Nobody but a business answers their phone when it is a stranger. We just ignore unless a text comes in first, explaining why we should pick up. But we will eventually read the transcript of the message maybe.
The phone companies have successfully destroyed a huge amount of goodwill around their product. Gone.
The hands-on vocational programs were always expensive by certain measures, but not necessarily in how they showed up in the short term budget. They could run on a shoestring budget as long as the old man who had been there for decades and knew how to keep the equipment running for near nothing was around. When he retired in the 80s or 90s the principal & superintendent were faced with two choices: (1) find a replacement with the right skills, but that new person is only likely to sign on if given a real budget to upgrade/maintain equipment (where are you going to find the money?) (2) sell that equipment, but that gives you a few bucks to defray the costs of converting that giant shop classroom into two normal classrooms, and now you can brag about the improved college prep program you will roll out (the prep program might be baloney but at least you have two shiny classrooms to show off).
You raise an interesting point. One possible counterargument...
Do calculators that became graphing calculators that were replaced by smartphones make people more numerate in a meaningful way in real world situations? If that were the case, people would become more financially responsible as computers became more readily available, because understanding of the repercussions the numbers tell us would inform better decisions, right? Instead computers are being used to gamify us into better consumers, and that swamps the positive effect of more information for most people.
Is putting the interface in our skull going to automatically be better at improving humanity, by virtue of its intrusiveness?
But insiders may well be accurately gauging whether this is the tip of the iceberg and acting accordingly.
How would you or I know? The answer to a toxic culture is to raise the bar and make changes happen, not wallow in the details of how bad things are to entertain the masses and violate your employees' privacy.
While I think the AC you are responding to is wrong, I am not impressed with your arguments. Proficient readers of both languages can read the common words instantly and without effort.
What happens when you meet and uncommon word you are unsure about? In both cases, look at the pieces and guess. For English that is how the letters remind one of other words one knows. For Chinese, same idea except pictograms.
Both languages have their pros and cons. I suspect Chinese readers might be slightly faster under optimum conditions, but they are potentially suffer more for poor eyesight.
...collectively and jokingly called "Lesbian Dance Theory".
That sounds sexy. Boy, I am jealous of not being the 18 yo that women will confess to their partners years later "oh, I did experiment with a Y-chrom carrier, but it was college".
There are entire departments at some universities that would cease to exist if they had to justify their fancy barista degrees with post education returns.
Oooooo! Entire departments. Is that supposed to mean something? Eeny little departments open and close all the time, for all kinds of good and bad reasons.
Gender and Ethnic Studies departments will eventually all close, in the long term because enough new tenured faculty will be hired into the normal Lit and History departments that will hold nuanced enough views that such things become obsolete -- that will be for both good and ill, no doubt, but such is the way of things.
I guess what I said flew right over your head. No private company providing utilities of any kind should own private property on public lands, this naturally includes more than just ISP's, but it seems you don't get that.
Without a bit more concrete details on how that framework could work for the various kinds of utilities and telecomms, I do not think you have an argument here at all.
In the real world, these services are provided with a messy combination of public property, publicly owned easements, private property, privately owned easements, and various leases for all of the above, the exact details of which vary by state and county and city. And while you may have fine ideas of what a better approach would be, it actually has to apply to the world after the last hundred years of messy agreements already occurred, or the ideas do not have value to anyone in the real world. (Unless you can find a billionaire who will found a new city in the desert to try these ideas. I hear that not everyone has completely given up on Galt's Gulch in Chile.)
My guess is we have areas of both agreement and disagreement. But what I am hearing from you is still too fuzzy to be useful to me.
But since you brought that up as well. Let me ask you this. Would you rather face down a free-market monopoly screwing you over or would you rather face down a government monopoly screwing you over? One side gets to put you in jail for not doing what they tell you to do.
Ultimately you are dependent on gov't honesty and competence to some degree, even if not exactly the same in both cases.
In the case of more direct gov't involvement, I can vote with my vote.
In the case of less direct gov't involvement, I vote in the hope the gov't will protect me when my little startup is visited by hired goons who rough me up and smash my equipment.
That was not a theoretical concern, in the real world. There are two reasons that Hollywood is in California, BTW. First the land and (sun)lighting made it cheap. However there has a huge downside because all the top talent was over on the East Coast, especially NYC. Second reason is that Thomas Alva Edison, the holy saint of innovation, decided that the courts were not adequately protecting his intellectual property, so he hired goons to rough up moviemakers and smash their equipment. The distance to California suddenly became a plus, because little movie outfits were far away from the eyes of Edison.
The correct "free-market" control on capitalist monopoly is for the "consumers" to refuse to buy these product and to start up competing businesses... o wait... sorry you effectively prevented that proper "control" by letting the regulators do that for you and subsequently allowed them to be bought off by the industry to put in regulations that make it very difficult for you to challenge incumbents with new services making it difficult for even super rich businesses to compete.
The preferred "free market" solution does not automatically happen for free in all markets.
Telecommunications companies started off big, because they had to have the economic muscle to negotiate with many private and gov't entities to achieve a network of sufficient scale to be economically viable. At this size, pure free market solutions are fantasy.
Of course, we, as consumers, do have options. We could choose to not be a part of a cell system at all, and use apps that connect through wifi to make and receive calls. That is less convenient, but it can work.
Ultimately, privacy is not yet something enough customers care about. We are in an age where it is more important than ever to vote with our consumer dollars.
At the planet-wide scale have plenty of food, even if politics keeps the calories from getting to everyone who is hungry.
But at a practical human level, people seem to want to have jobs that do not involve tilling to soil, and those jobs seem to be in or near urban areas. I suppose we can march people off into the rural areas with guns pointed at their backs, but that is not a route I am interested in.
I want to see what can do to provide reasonable housing options near the jobs, housing that is economically and environmentally affordable. Cities and density and mass transit seem much more auspicious towards those ends than other choices.
And I emphasize that I am not trying to prevent people from spending their money on housing as they please. But we do not have to continue to encourage and subsidize sprawl by gov't policy -- no point in throwing more good money down that hole.
As I already said, I have no problem with people spending their hard earned money on whatever housing they choose.
That you prefer rural areas to live in is a perfectly fine thing. For you. But it is a solution that does not scale. Your provably wrong answers to big problems are quite unimportant to the topic at hand.
I have no problem with people spending their hard earned money on whatever housing they choose.
But what you describe does not scale, so there is no positive point in encouraging it. Beyond a certain point, we have people taking 70 minutes on what used to be a 30 minute commute, and then taxes get raised on everyone to add another freeway lane. But the commute does not get shorter with more lanes, we only get yet more sprawl to clog the same freeways.
In fact, the infrastructure to support sprawl is subsidized by general tax revenue. But individual little cities often do not care because they expect the state and federal gov't to help them out, and the lifestyle cost is spread around all the nearby cities, not just the one gaining the lion's share of the benefits of growth.
If it were a significant piece of choreography with a large chunk nearly directly copied, I would agree.
Fair use protects commercial intent, too. Just like a paid comedian can ape a sentence or two from any source and earn a paycheck for it, I would say a video game can "borrow" a move or two.
Eroding fair use is lethal to art works. It is already true that small budget documentarians have to bend over backwards to not accidentally have, say, Madonna music on the telly in the apartment be too noticeable, for fear of an easily won but too expensive to defend lawsuit.
Maybe you and I do not care about a big name game studio. But this cudgel will hammer the little guy a million time over, I can promise you.
When it comes to peacetime public safety missions, we could easily accomplish that at half the cost.
No, pretty much not. $14 trillion is almost the entire budget of the US military for the past 30 years. The US averages about 3% GDP on military spending, which is not in the top 20 worldwide.
I keep hearing about how small our 3.1% is and how threatening China's 1.9% is. Even with our frayed alliances, the US plus a handful of allies literally outspend the rest of the world by a factor of two. If the world is unsafe, it is not for lack of Made In USA weaponry in circulation, that is for sure.
Pretty much. The US has spent 4-5% of its GDP on military for decades. Are our US citizens safer for all these pricey foreign entanglements? No. We still lost Vietnam. We are more targeted by terrorists and murderers than ever before. We still handed over Iraq to Iran. We still let Russia waltz into Crimea. We are still side players in the fate of Syria.
The warmongers like to talk of the threat of China. But China is doing nothing more than all modern powers do: spends ballpark 2% or less. Because spending more is throwing money away.
The fact that forks happen mean that, theoretically, any cryptocurrency can print money faster than Zimbabwe ever did.
There is also a question fo Gresham's Law, and whether/how it might applied to cryptocurrencies.
While a cryptocurrency skeptic overall, I recognize the argument there is value in the network of players working a particular cryptocurrency. That implies that a currency has very real arguable value as long as you see it moving around.
But Gresham's Law suggests there is an unstable dynamic, that the "gold standard" of cryptocurrency, if ever achieved in a meaningful sense, will incentivize undermining itself in a manner that is potentially even stronger than fiat currencies. If a specific currency is stable and valuable, I want to hold it, and I want to fork it and use other lesser currencies as much as possible, thereby destabilizing my "best" currency.
There is definitely a lot of California bashing going on.
Sure, they do not HAVE to come here.
I do not want to oversell it, but, for certain business models common in both software and biology, the SF Bay Area is still the best location in the world. Yes, you may be paying double for the salaries. But if your business models suggests you will need to hire 200 experienced people quickly once you hit a key milestone, being in Kansa is suicide.
There are businesses that should grow organically and slowly, instead. And, perhaps, you would be better off a short distance from one of the many excellent large state universities, and recruiting cheap young talent that you train up.
California could very easily support more population by building higher density and significantly expanding public transit. There are lots of regions of the world with higher density that are nice places to live.
We have a big thick coal band from the Carboniferous period. We have oil wells found where ancient shallow seas did once reside.
So while I would not conclude Gold is entirely wrong, we need an explanation for why the oil and coal is not found in a very different pattern from the observed real world, in order to accept Gold's theory.
FYI: I think the idea that life was first created in warm porous rocks (and/or similar) to be likely true.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Specifically Intel is a now high profit company that is losing out in all the new very high growth markets while there is danger of commoditization of their cash cows. For now, explosive growth in the cloud is pumping sales for server CPUs, but as the software industry learns to build complex software to take advantage of distributed computing, the highly profitable new Intel CPUs are offering less value to the customer.
The key here is there is nothing a CEO can do that will show traction and give positive financial over the next 8 quarters. So why would a "numbers guy" do anything but cut costs and avoid risks, so that the executive bonuses are maximized for the next two years?
Specifically Intel is a now high profit company that is losing out in all the new very high growth markets while there is danger of commoditization of their cash cows. For now, explosive growth in the cloud is pumping sales for server CPUs, but as the software industry learns to build complex software to take advantage of distributed computing, the highly profitable new Intel CPUs are offering less value to the customer. Intel is not even the best chipmaker in the world anymore -- they cannot compete for sales of lower power commodity CPUs.
The key here is there is nothing a CEO can do that will show traction and give positive financial over the next 8 quarters. So why would a "numbers guy" do anything but cut costs and avoid risks, so that the executive bonuses are maximized for the next two years? Maybe the shareholders will be happy. For now. But the danger is 3 years from now, everyone will point to the missed opportunities over the last ~8 years that led to stagnating profits with no hope of improvement.
Well, Apple may have been direct behind closed doors, for all we know. After the deal goes bad, they do not gain anything by overtly badmouthing Flextronics -- that only starts a pissing war that is a distraction for both companies.
But you are basically agreeing that Apple could easily find American companies harder to work with.
What that means for companies other than Apple is open to debate.
While all you say definitely has merit, Apple charges a premium for desktops that are optimized in various ways that are dependent on the precise form factor, in a way other electronics companies do not bother.
That Apple found the American manufacturer harder to work with, given their demanding style, is perfectly believable.
I am skeptical how very meaningful this lesson is for anyone who is not building a superoptimized premium phone/mobile device or who is not Apple doing what Apple does. As there is explosive growth in tiny devices that talk to our phones, it is a question worth pondering carefully, at least for some companies.
That is an interesting point. We will have an address for our mobile computer, but there is no logical reason it has to be a phone number or email address. That is an artifact of the phone cell system as we know it. Obviously "8G" or whatever that then exists will have to track mobile computers by some means, but messaging, voice, video will be registered to some service on the cloud that will do necessary forwarding.
I guess that is a question: Under the hood, what does these cell services use? What is actually necessary?
Yup.
When I was a kid, we took phone calls seriously, and would jump to pick up the phone to be polite to the caller. That (perhaps overzealous) enthusiasm was a valuable social contract.
4 years ago, I turned off the ringer on my landline. I was getting 20x as many spam calls as real human beings that I know. I was even on the Do Not Call Registry already.
Now I have a new phone service that came with the fiber, and it filters out most spam, but I still leave my ringer off. I get emailed a note if someone leaves a message -- nothing but spam so far.
Nobody but a business answers their phone when it is a stranger. We just ignore unless a text comes in first, explaining why we should pick up. But we will eventually read the transcript of the message maybe.
The phone companies have successfully destroyed a huge amount of goodwill around their product. Gone.
The hands-on vocational programs were always expensive by certain measures, but not necessarily in how they showed up in the short term budget. They could run on a shoestring budget as long as the old man who had been there for decades and knew how to keep the equipment running for near nothing was around. When he retired in the 80s or 90s the principal & superintendent were faced with two choices: (1) find a replacement with the right skills, but that new person is only likely to sign on if given a real budget to upgrade/maintain equipment (where are you going to find the money?) (2) sell that equipment, but that gives you a few bucks to defray the costs of converting that giant shop classroom into two normal classrooms, and now you can brag about the improved college prep program you will roll out (the prep program might be baloney but at least you have two shiny classrooms to show off).
You raise an interesting point. One possible counterargument...
Do calculators that became graphing calculators that were replaced by smartphones make people more numerate in a meaningful way in real world situations? If that were the case, people would become more financially responsible as computers became more readily available, because understanding of the repercussions the numbers tell us would inform better decisions, right? Instead computers are being used to gamify us into better consumers, and that swamps the positive effect of more information for most people.
Is putting the interface in our skull going to automatically be better at improving humanity, by virtue of its intrusiveness?
Perhaps it doesn't, as outside observers.
But insiders may well be accurately gauging whether this is the tip of the iceberg and acting accordingly.
How would you or I know? The answer to a toxic culture is to raise the bar and make changes happen, not wallow in the details of how bad things are to entertain the masses and violate your employees' privacy.
While I think the AC you are responding to is wrong, I am not impressed with your arguments. Proficient readers of both languages can read the common words instantly and without effort.
What happens when you meet and uncommon word you are unsure about? In both cases, look at the pieces and guess. For English that is how the letters remind one of other words one knows. For Chinese, same idea except pictograms.
Both languages have their pros and cons. I suspect Chinese readers might be slightly faster under optimum conditions, but they are potentially suffer more for poor eyesight.
The only reason these exist is to promote progressive leftist totalitarian thought police.
Well, those departments need to exist because there are people who believe perfectly stupid stuff like you do here.
Yeah, they are often crappy departments. But they exist for a number of reasons, some of which are legit, others less so. IMO.
But if people are seriously going to claim the "only reason" like you do here, those departments have my support, yes.
...collectively and jokingly called "Lesbian Dance Theory".
That sounds sexy. Boy, I am jealous of not being the 18 yo that women will confess to their partners years later "oh, I did experiment with a Y-chrom carrier, but it was college".
There are entire departments at some universities that would cease to exist if they had to justify their fancy barista degrees with post education returns.
Oooooo! Entire departments. Is that supposed to mean something? Eeny little departments open and close all the time, for all kinds of good and bad reasons.
Gender and Ethnic Studies departments will eventually all close, in the long term because enough new tenured faculty will be hired into the normal Lit and History departments that will hold nuanced enough views that such things become obsolete -- that will be for both good and ill, no doubt, but such is the way of things.
I guess what I said flew right over your head. No private company providing utilities of any kind should own private property on public lands, this naturally includes more than just ISP's, but it seems you don't get that.
Without a bit more concrete details on how that framework could work for the various kinds of utilities and telecomms, I do not think you have an argument here at all.
In the real world, these services are provided with a messy combination of public property, publicly owned easements, private property, privately owned easements, and various leases for all of the above, the exact details of which vary by state and county and city. And while you may have fine ideas of what a better approach would be, it actually has to apply to the world after the last hundred years of messy agreements already occurred, or the ideas do not have value to anyone in the real world. (Unless you can find a billionaire who will found a new city in the desert to try these ideas. I hear that not everyone has completely given up on Galt's Gulch in Chile.)
My guess is we have areas of both agreement and disagreement. But what I am hearing from you is still too fuzzy to be useful to me.
But since you brought that up as well. Let me ask you this. Would you rather face down a free-market monopoly screwing you over or would you rather face down a government monopoly screwing you over? One side gets to put you in jail for not doing what they tell you to do.
Ultimately you are dependent on gov't honesty and competence to some degree, even if not exactly the same in both cases.
In the case of more direct gov't involvement, I can vote with my vote.
In the case of less direct gov't involvement, I vote in the hope the gov't will protect me when my little startup is visited by hired goons who rough me up and smash my equipment.
That was not a theoretical concern, in the real world. There are two reasons that Hollywood is in California, BTW. First the land and (sun)lighting made it cheap. However there has a huge downside because all the top talent was over on the East Coast, especially NYC. Second reason is that Thomas Alva Edison, the holy saint of innovation, decided that the courts were not adequately protecting his intellectual property, so he hired goons to rough up moviemakers and smash their equipment. The distance to California suddenly became a plus, because little movie outfits were far away from the eyes of Edison.
The correct "free-market" control on capitalist monopoly is for the "consumers" to refuse to buy these product and to start up competing businesses... o wait... sorry you effectively prevented that proper "control" by letting the regulators do that for you and subsequently allowed them to be bought off by the industry to put in regulations that make it very difficult for you to challenge incumbents with new services making it difficult for even super rich businesses to compete.
The preferred "free market" solution does not automatically happen for free in all markets.
Telecommunications companies started off big, because they had to have the economic muscle to negotiate with many private and gov't entities to achieve a network of sufficient scale to be economically viable. At this size, pure free market solutions are fantasy.
Of course, we, as consumers, do have options. We could choose to not be a part of a cell system at all, and use apps that connect through wifi to make and receive calls. That is less convenient, but it can work.
Ultimately, privacy is not yet something enough customers care about. We are in an age where it is more important than ever to vote with our consumer dollars.
At the planet-wide scale have plenty of food, even if politics keeps the calories from getting to everyone who is hungry.
But at a practical human level, people seem to want to have jobs that do not involve tilling to soil, and those jobs seem to be in or near urban areas. I suppose we can march people off into the rural areas with guns pointed at their backs, but that is not a route I am interested in.
I want to see what can do to provide reasonable housing options near the jobs, housing that is economically and environmentally affordable. Cities and density and mass transit seem much more auspicious towards those ends than other choices.
And I emphasize that I am not trying to prevent people from spending their money on housing as they please. But we do not have to continue to encourage and subsidize sprawl by gov't policy -- no point in throwing more good money down that hole.
As I already said, I have no problem with people spending their hard earned money on whatever housing they choose.
That you prefer rural areas to live in is a perfectly fine thing. For you. But it is a solution that does not scale. Your provably wrong answers to big problems are quite unimportant to the topic at hand.
I have no problem with people spending their hard earned money on whatever housing they choose.
But what you describe does not scale, so there is no positive point in encouraging it. Beyond a certain point, we have people taking 70 minutes on what used to be a 30 minute commute, and then taxes get raised on everyone to add another freeway lane. But the commute does not get shorter with more lanes, we only get yet more sprawl to clog the same freeways.
In fact, the infrastructure to support sprawl is subsidized by general tax revenue. But individual little cities often do not care because they expect the state and federal gov't to help them out, and the lifestyle cost is spread around all the nearby cities, not just the one gaining the lion's share of the benefits of growth.
If it were a significant piece of choreography with a large chunk nearly directly copied, I would agree.
Fair use protects commercial intent, too. Just like a paid comedian can ape a sentence or two from any source and earn a paycheck for it, I would say a video game can "borrow" a move or two.
Eroding fair use is lethal to art works. It is already true that small budget documentarians have to bend over backwards to not accidentally have, say, Madonna music on the telly in the apartment be too noticeable, for fear of an easily won but too expensive to defend lawsuit.
Maybe you and I do not care about a big name game studio. But this cudgel will hammer the little guy a million time over, I can promise you.
When it comes to peacetime public safety missions, we could easily accomplish that at half the cost.
No, pretty much not.
$14 trillion is almost the entire budget of the US military for the past 30 years. The US averages about 3% GDP on military spending, which is not in the top 20 worldwide.
I keep hearing about how small our 3.1% is and how threatening China's 1.9% is. Even with our frayed alliances, the US plus a handful of allies literally outspend the rest of the world by a factor of two. If the world is unsafe, it is not for lack of Made In USA weaponry in circulation, that is for sure.
Pretty much. The US has spent 4-5% of its GDP on military for decades. Are our US citizens safer for all these pricey foreign entanglements? No. We still lost Vietnam. We are more targeted by terrorists and murderers than ever before. We still handed over Iraq to Iran. We still let Russia waltz into Crimea. We are still side players in the fate of Syria.
The warmongers like to talk of the threat of China. But China is doing nothing more than all modern powers do: spends ballpark 2% or less. Because spending more is throwing money away.
The fact that forks happen mean that, theoretically, any cryptocurrency can print money faster than Zimbabwe ever did.
There is also a question fo Gresham's Law, and whether/how it might applied to cryptocurrencies.
While a cryptocurrency skeptic overall, I recognize the argument there is value in the network of players working a particular cryptocurrency. That implies that a currency has very real arguable value as long as you see it moving around.
But Gresham's Law suggests there is an unstable dynamic, that the "gold standard" of cryptocurrency, if ever achieved in a meaningful sense, will incentivize undermining itself in a manner that is potentially even stronger than fiat currencies. If a specific currency is stable and valuable, I want to hold it, and I want to fork it and use other lesser currencies as much as possible, thereby destabilizing my "best" currency.
There is definitely a lot of California bashing going on.
Sure, they do not HAVE to come here.
I do not want to oversell it, but, for certain business models common in both software and biology, the SF Bay Area is still the best location in the world. Yes, you may be paying double for the salaries. But if your business models suggests you will need to hire 200 experienced people quickly once you hit a key milestone, being in Kansa is suicide.
There are businesses that should grow organically and slowly, instead. And, perhaps, you would be better off a short distance from one of the many excellent large state universities, and recruiting cheap young talent that you train up.
California could very easily support more population by building higher density and significantly expanding public transit. There are lots of regions of the world with higher density that are nice places to live.
NIMBYism is really the problem here.
We have a big thick coal band from the Carboniferous period. We have oil wells found where ancient shallow seas did once reside.
So while I would not conclude Gold is entirely wrong, we need an explanation for why the oil and coal is not found in a very different pattern from the observed real world, in order to accept Gold's theory.
FYI: I think the idea that life was first created in warm porous rocks (and/or similar) to be likely true.