Well I would submit we (and by we I don't mean me as an American but research administrators of the CERN member states) most definitely do think this stuff through. CERN does a lot of work besides LHC (although LHC is their key experiment at the moment) so a new collider isn't necessarily make-work for them.
It is really, really difficult to be intelligent in this type of thing because of so many "interests" at the table. The amount of money the USA has spent on the nuclear weapons program since the 1940s is approx. 1 Trillion USD (inflation adjusted). Sure, you can make a good argument the nuclear weapons program kept the cold war cold, but 1 trillion?
I think it is a false dichotomy because the "limited resources" is self-imposed more than anything. Of course we can't invest infinite dollars, but we can invest enough we can sustain meaning research programs into all the areas you suggest (and we do).
I get what you're saying, and people have been making the same arguments since the very beginning. In fact, when Ernest Lawrence was trying to build his first cyclotron (and thus jumpstart high-energy physics) he asked the local power company (PG&E) for funds and they responded in a very similar way to your response. Luckily, Lawerence was able to get the money, a Nobel prize, and pave the way to a new era in team-based science.
To answer a couple of questions, you're right that it is unclear if a new collider would turn the physics world on its head. It would certianly produce large numbers of Higgs particles and therefore make studying the Higgs much easier. It could also rule out many potential string theories (and theories on supersymmetry). If it did find supersymmetric particles that would be earth-shattering, as it would overturn the current standard model and would hold the promise for un-imagined future technologies.
As for whether you need a larger collider, yes, basic high-school physics can show that only a larger diameter will let you further increase the energy at the interaction point (assuming a circular hadron collider).
Now, you ask is this worth investing in, instead of, say, biomedical or genetic research. I think this is a false dichotomy. The answer is we should invest in both and all. Besides increasing our knowledge of physics, accelerator research has led to a huge number of useful technologies that were invented along the way. For example, high energy physics were among the first "Big Data" applications and dealing with this data led to the World Wide Web. In addition, breakthroughs enabling digital cameras, clean energy, materials science, and bioimaging have been made possible in the last few decades based on experience gained building these kinds of accelerators. I think there are benefits here and this is work worth doing.
"The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It's] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players."
Wow, a champion accepting de-throning with dignity and grace. This kind of demonstration of humility, self-respect, and good old-fashioned sportsmanship is so lacking in the public sphere and I was moved by it. If Neubauer has children, I hope they're proud of him right now, because I sure am. What a class act.
I wonder what Uber is playing at. I get that they're trying to "get big fast" because it did work for Amazon, but Amazon lost far, far less money than Uber is losing and they are in markets with much greater barriers to entry.
off topic: uber drivers are always hanging out parked across my driveway (taxis NEVER do this)... usually they move when I honk but on Saturday this guy kept trying to inch forward think I could get into my garage if he just moved six inches forward. I had to honk and make all these gestures... pissed me off.
The summary is conflating two related, but distinct things here: 1. the ability to place features on a wafer at dimensions less than 7 nm, and 2. the ability to manufacture large quantities of highly reliable transistors with features less than 7 nm.
While 1. is a necessary condition for 2., it is far from sufficient.
The article itself doesn't discuss GF for good reason, since GF dropping out of the "end of Moore's law" race is irrelevant. However, the article wondering why IBM is investing here while it is de-vesting from semiconductor manufacturing misses the point. This is about development of new tools and technologies, not to squeeze one more node out of Moore's law.
These nanotechnologies can be highly useful in lots of areas distinct from chipmaking, for example, the article talks about light sense which could be very important in continuing advances in neuroscience and physical chemistry (to name too examples). There is REAL MONEY in healthcare and these type of new sensors could potentially revolutionize science and practice in many bio-facing areas.
IBM has gotten out of the chipmaking game and this announcement in no way implies it is getting back in.
I live in a pretty busy part of San Francisco and see Cruise vehicles all the time. A couple of months ago a homeless "adventurer" (as in the young guy with a skateboard and a pitbull who camps out next to the Muni station, rather than the middle aged guy with a shopping cart muttering to himself) decided he wanted to f with the car at a big intersection. He stood in front of it and spread his arms and legs out as if he were a big target. The car pretty much freaked out make tiny, halting movements, until a few seconds later the driver took over.
My point is, I wonder how they are going to deal with this type of thing. San Francisco, which is pretty much ground zero after Mountain View for self-driving cars, is also chock full of a-holes.
No I'm not shorting the stock. I don't own any company stock of any company. She's been driving around with a broken roof for about three weeks and she lives in Silicon Valley so I don't think the location is the problem.
I have a coworker who is from the former USSR. His take on Tesla is that the current output is gonna suck and warranty repair is going to eat them alive. He tells me that at the end of the fiscal year often factories would be under pressure in the USSR to up their output, and no one wanted what they made (which wasn't actually good quality to begin with).
I have a good friend who just got a Model 3 a few weeks ago. She needs warranty service (not Tesla's fault in this case, a pinecone fell on the car and smashed the roof glass) and can't get an appointment for months. Not sure if this is a lack of spare parts or if they are flooded with warranted work. By the way, she let me drive the car and it is a LOT of fun.
DARPA is well known for its high-risk, high-reward approach to innovation. I'm sure the program manager involved knows full well that QI probably doesn't exist, but he or she has enough esteem for the investigators it was determined a good investment, just in case it turns out to be real.
They could also be offering some life support to a research group they want to keep together, but doesn't have a clear project. This is done all the time.
When people are saying they need people to fill "COBOL jobs" they aren't actually looking for COBOL programmers. There are looking for people who are willing to jump into excruciatingly painful dead-end jobs dealing with obsolete technology and working just to keep something afloat.
I had an internship with a Fortune 500 company (not a tech company) working on COBOL software in the late 1990s. The COBOL part was easy. It is a pretty simple (but verbose) language and doesn't take long to learn if you've seen FORTRAN, Ada, or BASIC. What *was* really hard was learning how the reporting and monitoring systems worked (we were basically gathering data from food production machines, reporting and archiving it).
Basically, everything in this division was run on old IBM mainframes (actually new mainframes/minicomputers emulating old operating systems... MVS and AS/400 or something). You didn't have a command line where you did your compile and link stuff... oh no, you had to submit jobs in a very finicky format using the mainframe's JCL (job control language). It was heavily customized for no good reason (that I could tell) so only a few of the really acidic and unpleasant old-timers could help you get your stuff going. You couldn't look this stuff up on your own because it was basically macros built upon macros from I'm guessing the early 1970s.
Anyway, this internship was soul destroying. Like the worst job I ever had. I worked my ass off and barely accomplished anything because the simplest thing was so hard and no one knew what the hell was going on. Every so often a "consultant" from HQ (we were a remote site in a different state from the headquarters) would come, install something, and then he (always a he) would leave while everything broke. Even though my internship was to develop a specific piece of new functionality, I spent most of my time figuring out what was going wrong and patching it.
So technically, I have COBOL experience now, but really I have a bit of experience bashing my head against a custom one-of-a-kind wall, and that experience isn't transferable.
To add insult to injury, it wasn't even a high-paying internship. The only good thing about this company was the culture was everyone was out the door at 4PM (hours were strictly 8AM to 4PM). Once I stayed to 6:30PM to fix a production server that was mangled by a messed up JCL card. (Oh god, the JCL cards. Of course they weren't punch cards because this was the 1990s, but you had to format the commands AS IF THEY WERE FREAKING PUNCH CARDS I guess because they were reusing old punch card parsing code. So, if you put a JCL mnemonic in the wrong column, the job failed. I wish I were making this up, I really do, but I'm not.) Anyway, I stayed till 6:30PM one night and the plant manager was so excited with my "can-do" attitude that he gave me a "golden nickel" which was one free lunch at the plant cafeteria. Yes, this was six months of my sorry life.
I'm still on Office 2010. I don't understand the point of these "upgrades" (Google just did the same thing to gmail). Basically all they do is make me re-learn an interface I'm already comfortable and in return they introduce zero useful functionality.
I guess a few years ago it was a big innovation to use all caps in the menu headings?
I'm not sure what the excitement is about, but lots of airports I've been to have Autonomous Trams. SFO in San Francisco, for example, has an autonomous tram that goes several miles from the BART station to all the terminals. I've also been in similar trams in Atlanta, Oakland, and I'm sure other places.
> Nope. Please note, crgrace doesn't even try to argue why SV is moving, ensuring he's just regurgitating what he's believed since he was younger. Unsurprisingly, he's both created the idea that SV tech migration myths existed since before the Gopher protocol was finalized and then concludes with his own red herring about how well SV is doing (which he claims to live in).
I'm not sure I fully understand your comment. I'll ignore the rude aspects and respond to your substantive points.
I have read multiple articles (in the newspaper and in magazines) growing up about how people were abandoning SV. Are you claiming I made them up? I'm confused. There are also books about this. For example, in "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari", there is about half a chapter about how Silicon Valley was collapsing. (this book is from the mid 80s).
When I was graduating college in the mid 90s, the big news was AMD was moving their fabs from Sunnyvale to Austin, TX. True, Austin is now a tech hub but SV has grown even more. For years tech companies have been trying to move to cheaper areas, but SV keeps ticking. For example, in the mid 80s it was BIG news that Intel was building its new fab and moving so much of its engineering force to Portland from Santa Clara. There was a lot of doomsday feeling on the news here at the time (I was in middle school). I remember being afraid when some talking head on the news was prognosticating housing prices were about to crater since my parents had just bought a home. Their home is a craptastic 3bd ranch house on a busy street. My Dad bought this house in the mid-80s on one income and it is worth almost $800k now.
The tech outmigration myth is only "kind of" a myth. It isn't an either-or; it's both. Lots of tech jobs are being moved to other states and countries. This is true and is the source of all the doom and gloom. HOWEVER, more jobs are being created due to company growth and, more importantly new companies, than are being lost. THAT is the myth.
And I didn't claim to live in SV. I live in San Francisco (is which effectively in SV, but not really). I grew up in the East Bay, about 30 miles north of SV.
If I misunderstood what you were expressing, sorry!
This is old news. I've been hearing this story (and it's true about out-migration) my whole life. I remember when I first saw a big article about the "Hollowing Out of Silicon Valley" or something similar in the early/mid 1980s. The article was about how semiconductor and electronics manufacturing was the main employment driver in the San Jose area and the offshoring of manufacturing to Asia, coupled with high housing prices, was going to turn San Jose into Detroit by 1990. Didn't happen.
Interestingly, the article was mostly true. There aren't many (just a few) fabs left in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley has mostly turned into Software Valley (and swallowed up San Francisco). What the article didn't anticipate was the combined strength of an innovative culture and importing the best of the best in the world to contribute. I think the cliched term is "Creative Destruction".
Every since the early 1990s I think more Americans leave California than move here. However, at least in the town I grew up in, it was mostly low-skilled Americans moving out and high-skilled moving in (which has led to SERIOUS gentrification). This effect, coupled with a lot of high-skilled foreign immigration, had made my area more dynamic than I've ever seen it.
When I was a kid, we had no ethnic food beyond Mexican and Chinese in my town. Now we just opened a Burmese restaurant to go along with the 20 other cultural restaurants. I think that's a sign of progress.
My whole life (and I'm in my 40s) California was a "Liberal Cesspool of Business-Hating Over-Regulation, one step away from a spectacular collapse". And yet, here we are, doing better than ever.
The Nazis had an actual thought-out plan to use starvation to kill. Usually communists starved people due to incompetence (although not always, for example in Ukraine).
I have a similar story that is even more annoying. I had my valid registration.sticker stolen off my car and got a ticket for not having the registration sticker. I tried to fight it as well. No dice. I would have had to spend a day in court and *maybe* get the fine thrown out. In the end I just paid it. So, apparently in my city you can get fined for being a crime victim.
I live in San Francisco and am raising a family (three kids) in the City. It's a nice place to raise kids. Lots of educational opportunities, entertainment, playgrounds and the like easily accessible.
The cost of living is high, yes. But if you're in tech (like me) the salaries more than make up for it. Do you know what metro area has the largest disposable income on average? The Bay Area. So, even taking into account the higher cost of living, you STILL end up with more money in your pocket than most other places. Why else would you see so many Telsas, Porches, and Masteratis around if everyone was living hand-to-mouth to pay their rent?
This question reminds me a lot of people who say "Music was so much better in the 1990s" or "Comic books are garbage now but they are so innovative in the 70s". Basically these people were more passionate about their hobbies (music, comics, computers, or whatever) when they were young than they are today. Therefore, anything going on "back in the day" was - almost by definition - so much more amazing than the pedestrian stuff we have today.
I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous. In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, we've had a huge resurgence of neural nets, we have rockets that can land themselves (!), actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy), self-driving cars, actually cool VR, electronic communications becoming ubiquitous, cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi), electric vehicles becoming mainstream, a technology for currency that is actually threatening to upset the applecart, and on and on and on.
I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++. Those days have NOTHING on today.
Where I live there are constant problems with people stealing packages from porches and front doors. Seems to me drone delivery would make things even worse because they wouldn't have any way to fight this. In my building, the drivers have our garage code so they can put packages securely in the garage. Seems like this wouldn't be possible with drones.
I would say SF is a bit unique in how extreme the disparity is. We have the highest property crime rate in the nation and also the highest housing prices (even higher than NYC).
What is different between SF and say, Raleigh, NC (where I lived for several years before I returned to the Bay Area) is that in Raleigh house painters, teachers, and store managers can afford to buy a small house or condo reasonably close to the city. That just isn't possible in SF. So you have a situation where those folks are an hour away, and in the city you have $100k+ professionals and minimum wages folks in public housing and lots of street people.
There is a constant war under the surface between AirBnB and the City of San Francisco. It is absolutely taking rentals off the market and increasing marginal rent. It is also being taken over by commercial operators.
The City is trying to regulate but AirBnB spends more than 10X on advertising (at least on the two ordinances we voted on).
I'm really of two minds here. I've used AirBnB on vacation and enjoyed it, but I do understand the damage it is doing to the City. It is kind of like Uber in that way. It is very complex and wrapped up in all kinds of issues like Rent Control, Prop 13, the Ellis Act (allows condo conversions in the City, and opponents say it throws the vulnerable out of housing).
It's not easy or clear what is going to happen (or should happen).
Slashdot Mirror
Well I would submit we (and by we I don't mean me as an American but research administrators of the CERN member states) most definitely do think this stuff through. CERN does a lot of work besides LHC (although LHC is their key experiment at the moment) so a new collider isn't necessarily make-work for them.
It is really, really difficult to be intelligent in this type of thing because of so many "interests" at the table. The amount of money the USA has spent on the nuclear weapons program since the 1940s is approx. 1 Trillion USD (inflation adjusted). Sure, you can make a good argument the nuclear weapons program kept the cold war cold, but 1 trillion?
I think it is a false dichotomy because the "limited resources" is self-imposed more than anything. Of course we can't invest infinite dollars, but we can invest enough we can sustain meaning research programs into all the areas you suggest (and we do).
I get what you're saying, and people have been making the same arguments since the very beginning. In fact, when Ernest Lawrence was trying to build his first cyclotron (and thus jumpstart high-energy physics) he asked the local power company (PG&E) for funds and they responded in a very similar way to your response. Luckily, Lawerence was able to get the money, a Nobel prize, and pave the way to a new era in team-based science.
To answer a couple of questions, you're right that it is unclear if a new collider would turn the physics world on its head. It would certianly produce large numbers of Higgs particles and therefore make studying the Higgs much easier. It could also rule out many potential string theories (and theories on supersymmetry). If it did find supersymmetric particles that would be earth-shattering, as it would overturn the current standard model and would hold the promise for un-imagined future technologies.
As for whether you need a larger collider, yes, basic high-school physics can show that only a larger diameter will let you further increase the energy at the interaction point (assuming a circular hadron collider).
Now, you ask is this worth investing in, instead of, say, biomedical or genetic research. I think this is a false dichotomy. The answer is we should invest in both and all. Besides increasing our knowledge of physics, accelerator research has led to a huge number of useful technologies that were invented along the way. For example, high energy physics were among the first "Big Data" applications and dealing with this data led to the World Wide Web. In addition, breakthroughs enabling digital cameras, clean energy, materials science, and bioimaging have been made possible in the last few decades based on experience gained building these kinds of accelerators. I think there are benefits here and this is work worth doing.
San Francisco is decent (not amazing, but decent). My wife and I both use it to commute and to make weekend trips downtown, to the airport and so on.
"The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It's] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players."
Wow, a champion accepting de-throning with dignity and grace. This kind of demonstration of humility, self-respect, and good old-fashioned sportsmanship is so lacking in the public sphere and I was moved by it. If Neubauer has children, I hope they're proud of him right now, because I sure am. What a class act.
But make it up in volume.
I wonder what Uber is playing at. I get that they're trying to "get big fast" because it did work for Amazon, but Amazon lost far, far less money than Uber is losing and they are in markets with much greater barriers to entry.
off topic: uber drivers are always hanging out parked across my driveway (taxis NEVER do this)... usually they move when I honk but on Saturday this guy kept trying to inch forward think I could get into my garage if he just moved six inches forward. I had to honk and make all these gestures... pissed me off.
The summary is conflating two related, but distinct things here: 1. the ability to place features on a wafer at dimensions less than 7 nm, and 2. the ability to manufacture large quantities of highly reliable transistors with features less than 7 nm.
While 1. is a necessary condition for 2., it is far from sufficient.
The article itself doesn't discuss GF for good reason, since GF dropping out of the "end of Moore's law" race is irrelevant. However, the article wondering why IBM is investing here while it is de-vesting from semiconductor manufacturing misses the point. This is about development of new tools and technologies, not to squeeze one more node out of Moore's law.
These nanotechnologies can be highly useful in lots of areas distinct from chipmaking, for example, the article talks about light sense which could be very important in continuing advances in neuroscience and physical chemistry (to name too examples). There is REAL MONEY in healthcare and these type of new sensors could potentially revolutionize science and practice in many bio-facing areas.
IBM has gotten out of the chipmaking game and this announcement in no way implies it is getting back in.
I live in a pretty busy part of San Francisco and see Cruise vehicles all the time. A couple of months ago a homeless "adventurer" (as in the young guy with a skateboard and a pitbull who camps out next to the Muni station, rather than the middle aged guy with a shopping cart muttering to himself) decided he wanted to f with the car at a big intersection. He stood in front of it and spread his arms and legs out as if he were a big target. The car pretty much freaked out make tiny, halting movements, until a few seconds later the driver took over.
My point is, I wonder how they are going to deal with this type of thing. San Francisco, which is pretty much ground zero after Mountain View for self-driving cars, is also chock full of a-holes.
No I'm not shorting the stock. I don't own any company stock of any company. She's been driving around with a broken roof for about three weeks and she lives in Silicon Valley so I don't think the location is the problem.
I have a coworker who is from the former USSR. His take on Tesla is that the current output is gonna suck and warranty repair is going to eat them alive. He tells me that at the end of the fiscal year often factories would be under pressure in the USSR to up their output, and no one wanted what they made (which wasn't actually good quality to begin with).
I have a good friend who just got a Model 3 a few weeks ago. She needs warranty service (not Tesla's fault in this case, a pinecone fell on the car and smashed the roof glass) and can't get an appointment for months. Not sure if this is a lack of spare parts or if they are flooded with warranted work. By the way, she let me drive the car and it is a LOT of fun.
DARPA is well known for its high-risk, high-reward approach to innovation. I'm sure the program manager involved knows full well that QI probably doesn't exist, but he or she has enough esteem for the investigators it was determined a good investment, just in case it turns out to be real.
They could also be offering some life support to a research group they want to keep together, but doesn't have a clear project. This is done all the time.
If they can stop spam robocalls, how the hell are they going to stop bots?
When people are saying they need people to fill "COBOL jobs" they aren't actually looking for COBOL programmers. There are looking for people who are willing to jump into excruciatingly painful dead-end jobs dealing with obsolete technology and working just to keep something afloat.
I had an internship with a Fortune 500 company (not a tech company) working on COBOL software in the late 1990s. The COBOL part was easy. It is a pretty simple (but verbose) language and doesn't take long to learn if you've seen FORTRAN, Ada, or BASIC. What *was* really hard was learning how the reporting and monitoring systems worked (we were basically gathering data from food production machines, reporting and archiving it).
Basically, everything in this division was run on old IBM mainframes (actually new mainframes/minicomputers emulating old operating systems... MVS and AS/400 or something). You didn't have a command line where you did your compile and link stuff... oh no, you had to submit jobs in a very finicky format using the mainframe's JCL (job control language). It was heavily customized for no good reason (that I could tell) so only a few of the really acidic and unpleasant old-timers could help you get your stuff going. You couldn't look this stuff up on your own because it was basically macros built upon macros from I'm guessing the early 1970s.
Anyway, this internship was soul destroying. Like the worst job I ever had. I worked my ass off and barely accomplished anything because the simplest thing was so hard and no one knew what the hell was going on. Every so often a "consultant" from HQ (we were a remote site in a different state from the headquarters) would come, install something, and then he (always a he) would leave while everything broke. Even though my internship was to develop a specific piece of new functionality, I spent most of my time figuring out what was going wrong and patching it.
So technically, I have COBOL experience now, but really I have a bit of experience bashing my head against a custom one-of-a-kind wall, and that experience isn't transferable.
To add insult to injury, it wasn't even a high-paying internship. The only good thing about this company was the culture was everyone was out the door at 4PM (hours were strictly 8AM to 4PM). Once I stayed to 6:30PM to fix a production server that was mangled by a messed up JCL card. (Oh god, the JCL cards. Of course they weren't punch cards because this was the 1990s, but you had to format the commands AS IF THEY WERE FREAKING PUNCH CARDS I guess because they were reusing old punch card parsing code. So, if you put a JCL mnemonic in the wrong column, the job failed. I wish I were making this up, I really do, but I'm not.) Anyway, I stayed till 6:30PM one night and the plant manager was so excited with my "can-do" attitude that he gave me a "golden nickel" which was one free lunch at the plant cafeteria. Yes, this was six months of my sorry life.
I'm still on Office 2010. I don't understand the point of these "upgrades" (Google just did the same thing to gmail). Basically all they do is make me re-learn an interface I'm already comfortable and in return they introduce zero useful functionality.
I guess a few years ago it was a big innovation to use all caps in the menu headings?
I'm not sure what the excitement is about, but lots of airports I've been to have Autonomous Trams. SFO in San Francisco, for example, has an autonomous tram that goes several miles from the BART station to all the terminals. I've also been in similar trams in Atlanta, Oakland, and I'm sure other places.
> Nope. Please note, crgrace doesn't even try to argue why SV is moving, ensuring he's just regurgitating what he's believed since he was younger. Unsurprisingly, he's both created the idea that SV tech migration myths existed since before the Gopher protocol was finalized and then concludes with his own red herring about how well SV is doing (which he claims to live in).
I'm not sure I fully understand your comment. I'll ignore the rude aspects and respond to your substantive points.
I have read multiple articles (in the newspaper and in magazines) growing up about how people were abandoning SV. Are you claiming I made them up? I'm confused. There are also books about this. For example, in "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari", there is about half a chapter about how Silicon Valley was collapsing. (this book is from the mid 80s).
When I was graduating college in the mid 90s, the big news was AMD was moving their fabs from Sunnyvale to Austin, TX. True, Austin is now a tech hub but SV has grown even more. For years tech companies have been trying to move to cheaper areas, but SV keeps ticking. For example, in the mid 80s it was BIG news that Intel was building its new fab and moving so much of its engineering force to Portland from Santa Clara. There was a lot of doomsday feeling on the news here at the time (I was in middle school). I remember being afraid when some talking head on the news was prognosticating housing prices were about to crater since my parents had just bought a home. Their home is a craptastic 3bd ranch house on a busy street. My Dad bought this house in the mid-80s on one income and it is worth almost $800k now.
The tech outmigration myth is only "kind of" a myth. It isn't an either-or; it's both. Lots of tech jobs are being moved to other states and countries. This is true and is the source of all the doom and gloom. HOWEVER, more jobs are being created due to company growth and, more importantly new companies, than are being lost. THAT is the myth.
And I didn't claim to live in SV. I live in San Francisco (is which effectively in SV, but not really). I grew up in the East Bay, about 30 miles north of SV.
If I misunderstood what you were expressing, sorry!
Hi Gil! I didn't know you read Slashdot!
This is old news. I've been hearing this story (and it's true about out-migration) my whole life. I remember when I first saw a big article about the "Hollowing Out of Silicon Valley" or something similar in the early/mid 1980s. The article was about how semiconductor and electronics manufacturing was the main employment driver in the San Jose area and the offshoring of manufacturing to Asia, coupled with high housing prices, was going to turn San Jose into Detroit by 1990. Didn't happen.
Interestingly, the article was mostly true. There aren't many (just a few) fabs left in Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley has mostly turned into Software Valley (and swallowed up San Francisco). What the article didn't anticipate was the combined strength of an innovative culture and importing the best of the best in the world to contribute. I think the cliched term is "Creative Destruction".
Every since the early 1990s I think more Americans leave California than move here. However, at least in the town I grew up in, it was mostly low-skilled Americans moving out and high-skilled moving in (which has led to SERIOUS gentrification). This effect, coupled with a lot of high-skilled foreign immigration, had made my area more dynamic than I've ever seen it.
When I was a kid, we had no ethnic food beyond Mexican and Chinese in my town. Now we just opened a Burmese restaurant to go along with the 20 other cultural restaurants. I think that's a sign of progress.
My whole life (and I'm in my 40s) California was a "Liberal Cesspool of Business-Hating Over-Regulation, one step away from a spectacular collapse". And yet, here we are, doing better than ever.
The Nazis had an actual thought-out plan to use starvation to kill. Usually communists starved people due to incompetence (although not always, for example in Ukraine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan/
I have a similar story that is even more annoying. I had my valid registration.sticker stolen off my car and got a ticket for not having the registration sticker. I tried to fight it as well. No dice. I would have had to spend a day in court and *maybe* get the fine thrown out. In the end I just paid it. So, apparently in my city you can get fined for being a crime victim.
I live in San Francisco and am raising a family (three kids) in the City. It's a nice place to raise kids. Lots of educational opportunities, entertainment, playgrounds and the like easily accessible.
The cost of living is high, yes. But if you're in tech (like me) the salaries more than make up for it. Do you know what metro area has the largest disposable income on average? The Bay Area. So, even taking into account the higher cost of living, you STILL end up with more money in your pocket than most other places. Why else would you see so many Telsas, Porches, and Masteratis around if everyone was living hand-to-mouth to pay their rent?
What percentage of high-achieving, middle income students attend the most selective school? Is it more or less that 3%?
This question reminds me a lot of people who say "Music was so much better in the 1990s" or "Comic books are garbage now but they are so innovative in the 70s". Basically these people were more passionate about their hobbies (music, comics, computers, or whatever) when they were young than they are today. Therefore, anything going on "back in the day" was - almost by definition - so much more amazing than the pedestrian stuff we have today.
I would say the idea that there were more exciting developments 30 years ago is ludicrous. In the last few years we have virtually the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips, we've had a huge resurgence of neural nets, we have rockets that can land themselves (!), actually useful brain-machine interface (for example deep-brain stimulation for epilepsy), self-driving cars, actually cool VR, electronic communications becoming ubiquitous, cheap single board computers that even a child can use (e.g. Raspberry-Pi), electric vehicles becoming mainstream, a technology for currency that is actually threatening to upset the applecart, and on and on and on.
I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s and was deeply passionate about technology. I was excited about the Amiga, Unix, and C++. Those days have NOTHING on today.
Where I live there are constant problems with people stealing packages from porches and front doors. Seems to me drone delivery would make things even worse because they wouldn't have any way to fight this. In my building, the drivers have our garage code so they can put packages securely in the garage. Seems like this wouldn't be possible with drones.
How is Amazon addressing this?
I would say SF is a bit unique in how extreme the disparity is. We have the highest property crime rate in the nation and also the highest housing prices (even higher than NYC).
What is different between SF and say, Raleigh, NC (where I lived for several years before I returned to the Bay Area) is that in Raleigh house painters, teachers, and store managers can afford to buy a small house or condo reasonably close to the city. That just isn't possible in SF. So you have a situation where those folks are an hour away, and in the city you have $100k+ professionals and minimum wages folks in public housing and lots of street people.
There is a constant war under the surface between AirBnB and the City of San Francisco. It is absolutely taking rentals off the market and increasing marginal rent. It is also being taken over by commercial operators.
The City is trying to regulate but AirBnB spends more than 10X on advertising (at least on the two ordinances we voted on).
I'm really of two minds here. I've used AirBnB on vacation and enjoyed it, but I do understand the damage it is doing to the City. It is kind of like Uber in that way. It is very complex and wrapped up in all kinds of issues like Rent Control, Prop 13, the Ellis Act (allows condo conversions in the City, and opponents say it throws the vulnerable out of housing).
It's not easy or clear what is going to happen (or should happen).