Right. There's still a better male:female ratio in SF than in "Man Jose". Subtract the gay guys from that and it gets even better. Trust me on this. For every girl that walks into a Silicon Valley bar there's at least ten guys with her. Your odds are much better in the city.
I'm calling BS to this whole line of discussion. Example - the biggest thing to hit the valley recently is Facebook, and it isn't in SF. The entire Start-up infrastructure is still located where it always has been - Palo Alto near Standford. The startups typically go where the money is, and where Square footage is cheaper. That ISN'T SF!
Thank you, we're aware that Palo Alto isn't SF. But it is one of the few places along the peninsula where you have something resembling a city street with cafes and bars and things to do and stuff.
FB isn't Silicon Valley. FB is one company. If you want to "call BS" then please cite your sources. A single company does not the valley make.
WTF are you talking about, exactly? Cars are a pretty immense financial outlay.
Not compared to buying a house in San Francisco (according to a quick Google search, a median price of $710,000 for April to June 2012).
I've only ever bought one car that cost more than $7,000, so I could buy a heck of a lot of them for the amount I'd save living somewhere cheaper and driving.
I know people that just buy condos in San Jose, get renters in, and then live in a rented apartment in the city. You can get some good deals because of the rent control.
Only fucked up and crazy people live San Francisco, If I were a start up and the only thing I needed was an internet connection, I would setup in Riverside --- Palm Springs or any where in the Coachella Valley--- where office space and housing is dirt cheap. Fuck paying to live in a "hip" city, it not hip is is just disgusting and expensive.
If you want to employ gun-toting rednecks then by all means set up in Hicksville. If you want the brightest and the best then you have to go where they want to live whether you like it or not.
I don't think SF is even really designed around pedestrian activity. If it were, it might have good transit! It's been sort of non-designed, really, with quite a bit of de-facto design for cars, despite their green image opposing them in theory.
It was a medium-sized city with an extensive streetcar network, and that worked ok. But then the population increased, the number of cars greatly increased (which also slowed down the streetcars), and nothing much was done to fix it. The only two real improvements were around 1980: BART made it so that you could get between the Mission and financial district easily, and the Market Street Subway cleared out a little street-level congestion in the worst area.
I disagree. The Sunset and Richmond are kinda suburban all right, but the rest of the city is quite compact and the bus service is pretty comprehensive. Shame about the surly drivers though. Something needs to be done about them.
I used to live in Nob Hill and I was able to walk downtown, to North Beach, to Pacific Heights, and to the great little strip of bars and eating houses along Polk. I never used my car all weekend. It was my commute to the valley that forced me to move back down here.
It takes about 45 minutes to commute between places actually in San Francisco, if you don't pick the right ones, thanks to SF Muni having barely had any improvement since the Market Street Subway was built in 1980. Could easily spend 45 minutes on the N-Judah...
That would imply that you live away out in the fog in the Sunset. Why would anyone without kids want to live out there?
Plus there's the fact that you can spend a lot more time being productive and relaxing. Whereas with flying you aren't going to get much done on the trip to and from the airport, you have the security ordeal to work through, sitting at the gate is seldom long enough to get anything meaningful done, nor is it relaxing. Flying is just waiting in lines, standing in tubes, painstakingly squeezing into another tube, compressing yourself into a steerage class seat, and being deprived of your electronic devices or any creature comforts for several hours. You're just anchored there and you daren't move.
God I have come to hate air travel! The only solace I ever get from it is when I fly with United and pay the $40 fee for extra legroom in Economy Plus.
I'm sorry to hear that their telescope snapped. Maybe they can glue it back together and add a reinforcing rod down the middle.
Hmmm. Let's investigate:
"The very first photos snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in and they look beautiful."
OK. Bit of a cumbersome sentence, might have looked better with a few commas,
"The very first photos, snapped with its 16 million pixel camera, are in and they look beautiful."
No, that's not quite right. How about:
"The very first photos snapped, with its 16 million pixel camera, are in and they look beautiful."
No, that's not quite right either. How about:
"The very first photos to be snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in, and they look beautiful."
A little longer, but better. But I think the summary got it pretty much right the first time from the point of view of accuracy. There was certainly no way it could have been interpreted as "the camera has snapped" unless you do a Sean Hannity and cut the sentence off halfway through.
That's the understatement of the century. The shortest trip is like 12 hours.
A lot of people make the trip by car, which is something like a 6-hour drive, whereas San Jose to LA by Amtrak is 10 hours.
Critics of the HSR don't seem to realise that it'll compete as much with cars (running on government subsidized roads) as with planes (landing on government-subsidized runways). Ask them what the cost of upgrading freeways and airport terminals to handle the projected future growth in California's population, compare that to the cost of HSR, and they'll give you a blank look.
It did not start to grow "MASSIVELY" until private industry got into it. There were not even ISPs then, because they were private industry. Just shut up and watch your compuserv.
It didn't start to grow "massively" until it was popularized by the World Wide Web. Who invented that? An Englishman working at that well known bastion of free market Americana: CERN in Switzerland.
I took Amtrak from San Jose to LA last month and had a great time.
Complimentary parking at the station right beside the terminal
No security ordeal
No having to be there an hour and a half before departure
Big reclining seats
Power outlets at my seat
More leg room than first class on a plane
Free to get up and move about whenever
No stupid restrictions on electronic devices (apart from going to the vestibule to use the phone out of courtesy to other passengers)
An observation car with panoramic windows, comfortable window-facing seats, and tour guides calling out all the sights that we were passing by
The dining car with great food served on a ceramic plate with steel utensils, and community seating where you get to sit with strangers and mingle
The cafe open all the time where you can go and top up on snacks or buy a blanket if you need one
Arrival in opulent Union Station where you feel like a traveler, not a potential terrorist
And I hear it's even more comfortable if you get a cabin, that gives you access to the lounge car where they have wine tastings and all sorts of entertainment.
It was great. If you're in no rush it's a great way to travel.
Airlines, eh? The ones that are operating on wafer thing margins after their bailouts? Flying is kept safer by heavy regulation by the FAA. Aircraft technology is developed not by airlines but by the plane manufacturers, which these days means Boeing and Airbus. Airbus gets government subsidies from its European government backers and Boeing gets the same (in the form of defence contracts) from its US government backers.
If Amtrak had even a fraction of the government subsidies that air or automobile travel was getting right now you'd be zipping between major cities on 120MPH+ trains like they do in just about ever other developed country. Amtrak is suffering because it has to rely on privately owned infrastructure that's held by the freight operators. And still Amtrak is a more comfortable service than any flight or long haul road trip. If it weren't for the slow speed (caused by the rickety state of the primitive privately owned tracks) I'd be using it a whole lot more.
This is what conservatives do. They gut public services to the point where they can't function to their full potential, and they say "look! Told you! Government can't do anything right!" Conservatives spend their time in opposition claiming that government is incompetent, and when they get into office they set about proving it.
That happened to me today, and worst of all Youtube didn't even give me the option of refusing to link to my G+ account. I clicked a link that quite clearly said not to do so, but it went and did it anyway. I have a good mind to delete my G+ account.
Betamax was technically better than VHS. Brunel's wide gauge railway system was technically better than the standard gauge. We all know what became of them. It's the scale of adoption that counts. A squillion people are now in the habit of living their lives through Facebook. They're not going to simultaneously migrate to G+ because of a few bells and whistles no matter how good they are. Sorry Google, you missed the boat on this one.
And *why* is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans, are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers... This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?
So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
The Brits have been pushing this kind of technology for decades (remember HOTOL?) but it seems to take a while for it to get any traction. Shame really, the potential is staggering. The demise of Concorde had more to do with its introduction coinciding with the oil embargo, it was conceived in the days of cheap fuel and its high consumption would have been less of an (economic) issue. I don't see any such issues with a hydrogen powered engine since producing hydrogen doesn't absolutely have to depend on hydrocarbons. I wonder if investors are just scared off by the Concorde experience.
Yeah, and space is just as big as the Atlantic Ocean too. Great comparison.
You're absolutely right. We must never ever compare one type of technological advancement with another because you can only ever compare two absolutely identical things before drawing any meaningful conclusion.
3...2...1... The species must go into space and colonize the Galaxy! With rockets.
Well it would be nice if we could use horizontal take-off space planes, but in the meantime rockets will have to do. Let's not forget that steam didn't exactly replace sail overnight.
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The gay city, right?
Right. There's still a better male:female ratio in SF than in "Man Jose". Subtract the gay guys from that and it gets even better. Trust me on this. For every girl that walks into a Silicon Valley bar there's at least ten guys with her. Your odds are much better in the city.
I'm calling BS to this whole line of discussion. Example - the biggest thing to hit the valley recently is Facebook, and it isn't in SF. The entire Start-up infrastructure is still located where it always has been - Palo Alto near Standford. The startups typically go where the money is, and where Square footage is cheaper. That ISN'T SF!
Thank you, we're aware that Palo Alto isn't SF. But it is one of the few places along the peninsula where you have something resembling a city street with cafes and bars and things to do and stuff.
FB isn't Silicon Valley. FB is one company. If you want to "call BS" then please cite your sources. A single company does not the valley make.
WTF are you talking about, exactly? Cars are a pretty immense financial outlay.
Not compared to buying a house in San Francisco (according to a quick Google search, a median price of $710,000 for April to June 2012).
I've only ever bought one car that cost more than $7,000, so I could buy a heck of a lot of them for the amount I'd save living somewhere cheaper and driving.
I know people that just buy condos in San Jose, get renters in, and then live in a rented apartment in the city. You can get some good deals because of the rent control.
Even if you keep an $8000 used car for 10 years, you've still got to pay for gas, insurance, and repairs.
You also get to go anywhere you like, at any time. Is that worth nothing?
Not having a car is fine if you plan to never do any significant travel. But the rest of the country is worth seeing.
Zipcar.
Only fucked up and crazy people live San Francisco, If I were a start up and the only thing I needed was an internet connection, I would setup in Riverside --- Palm Springs or any where in the Coachella Valley--- where office space and housing is dirt cheap. Fuck paying to live in a "hip" city, it not hip is is just disgusting and expensive.
If you want to employ gun-toting rednecks then by all means set up in Hicksville. If you want the brightest and the best then you have to go where they want to live whether you like it or not.
I don't think SF is even really designed around pedestrian activity. If it were, it might have good transit! It's been sort of non-designed, really, with quite a bit of de-facto design for cars, despite their green image opposing them in theory.
It was a medium-sized city with an extensive streetcar network, and that worked ok. But then the population increased, the number of cars greatly increased (which also slowed down the streetcars), and nothing much was done to fix it. The only two real improvements were around 1980: BART made it so that you could get between the Mission and financial district easily, and the Market Street Subway cleared out a little street-level congestion in the worst area.
I disagree. The Sunset and Richmond are kinda suburban all right, but the rest of the city is quite compact and the bus service is pretty comprehensive. Shame about the surly drivers though. Something needs to be done about them.
I used to live in Nob Hill and I was able to walk downtown, to North Beach, to Pacific Heights, and to the great little strip of bars and eating houses along Polk. I never used my car all weekend. It was my commute to the valley that forced me to move back down here.
It takes about 45 minutes to commute between places actually in San Francisco, if you don't pick the right ones, thanks to SF Muni having barely had any improvement since the Market Street Subway was built in 1980. Could easily spend 45 minutes on the N-Judah...
That would imply that you live away out in the fog in the Sunset. Why would anyone without kids want to live out there?
Plus there's the fact that you can spend a lot more time being productive and relaxing. Whereas with flying you aren't going to get much done on the trip to and from the airport, you have the security ordeal to work through, sitting at the gate is seldom long enough to get anything meaningful done, nor is it relaxing. Flying is just waiting in lines, standing in tubes, painstakingly squeezing into another tube, compressing yourself into a steerage class seat, and being deprived of your electronic devices or any creature comforts for several hours. You're just anchored there and you daren't move.
God I have come to hate air travel! The only solace I ever get from it is when I fly with United and pay the $40 fee for extra legroom in Economy Plus.
I'm sorry to hear that their telescope snapped. Maybe they can glue it back together and add a reinforcing rod down the middle.
Hmmm. Let's investigate:
"The very first photos snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in and they look beautiful."
OK. Bit of a cumbersome sentence, might have looked better with a few commas,
"The very first photos, snapped with its 16 million pixel camera, are in and they look beautiful."
No, that's not quite right. How about:
"The very first photos snapped, with its 16 million pixel camera, are in and they look beautiful."
No, that's not quite right either. How about:
"The very first photos to be snapped with its 16 million pixel camera are in, and they look beautiful."
A little longer, but better. But I think the summary got it pretty much right the first time from the point of view of accuracy. There was certainly no way it could have been interpreted as "the camera has snapped" unless you do a Sean Hannity and cut the sentence off halfway through.
"If you're in no rush."
That's the understatement of the century. The shortest trip is like 12 hours.
A lot of people make the trip by car, which is something like a 6-hour drive, whereas San Jose to LA by Amtrak is 10 hours.
Critics of the HSR don't seem to realise that it'll compete as much with cars (running on government subsidized roads) as with planes (landing on government-subsidized runways). Ask them what the cost of upgrading freeways and airport terminals to handle the projected future growth in California's population, compare that to the cost of HSR, and they'll give you a blank look.
It did not start to grow "MASSIVELY" until private industry got into it. There were not even ISPs then, because they were private industry. Just shut up and watch your compuserv.
It didn't start to grow "massively" until it was popularized by the World Wide Web. Who invented that? An Englishman working at that well known bastion of free market Americana: CERN in Switzerland.
British tabloid papers like The Sun always outsell the broadsheets like The Times. Does this make The Sun a more accurate paper?
I took Amtrak from San Jose to LA last month and had a great time.
And I hear it's even more comfortable if you get a cabin, that gives you access to the lounge car where they have wine tastings and all sorts of entertainment.
It was great. If you're in no rush it's a great way to travel.
Airlines, eh? The ones that are operating on wafer thing margins after their bailouts? Flying is kept safer by heavy regulation by the FAA. Aircraft technology is developed not by airlines but by the plane manufacturers, which these days means Boeing and Airbus. Airbus gets government subsidies from its European government backers and Boeing gets the same (in the form of defence contracts) from its US government backers.
If Amtrak had even a fraction of the government subsidies that air or automobile travel was getting right now you'd be zipping between major cities on 120MPH+ trains like they do in just about ever other developed country. Amtrak is suffering because it has to rely on privately owned infrastructure that's held by the freight operators. And still Amtrak is a more comfortable service than any flight or long haul road trip. If it weren't for the slow speed (caused by the rickety state of the primitive privately owned tracks) I'd be using it a whole lot more.
This is what conservatives do. They gut public services to the point where they can't function to their full potential, and they say "look! Told you! Government can't do anything right!" Conservatives spend their time in opposition claiming that government is incompetent, and when they get into office they set about proving it.
Sort of like how the Nomad was technically superior to the iPod?
Yeah. Still waiting for this wireless functionality that's supposedly necessary in a music player.
That happened to me today, and worst of all Youtube didn't even give me the option of refusing to link to my G+ account. I clicked a link that quite clearly said not to do so, but it went and did it anyway. I have a good mind to delete my G+ account.
Betamax was technically better than VHS. Brunel's wide gauge railway system was technically better than the standard gauge. We all know what became of them. It's the scale of adoption that counts. A squillion people are now in the habit of living their lives through Facebook. They're not going to simultaneously migrate to G+ because of a few bells and whistles no matter how good they are. Sorry Google, you missed the boat on this one.
Anyone who has worked in information technology knows of Gartner
No. Never heard of them.
Gartner is huge with over 5,000 associates
I never work for a company that refers to its employees as 'associates'.
You have kids under 7 with TVs in their bedrooms?!
And *why* is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans, are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers... This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?
So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
Wrong again. Steam did replace sail, diesel came later.
Well, that might not be impossible http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/
The Brits have been pushing this kind of technology for decades (remember HOTOL?) but it seems to take a while for it to get any traction. Shame really, the potential is staggering. The demise of Concorde had more to do with its introduction coinciding with the oil embargo, it was conceived in the days of cheap fuel and its high consumption would have been less of an (economic) issue. I don't see any such issues with a hydrogen powered engine since producing hydrogen doesn't absolutely have to depend on hydrocarbons. I wonder if investors are just scared off by the Concorde experience.
Yeah, and space is just as big as the Atlantic Ocean too. Great comparison.
You're absolutely right. We must never ever compare one type of technological advancement with another because you can only ever compare two absolutely identical things before drawing any meaningful conclusion.
3...2...1...
The species must go into space and colonize the Galaxy! With rockets.
Well it would be nice if we could use horizontal take-off space planes, but in the meantime rockets will have to do. Let's not forget that steam didn't exactly replace sail overnight.
Google+ users are more satisfied with the site
I'm sure they are. Both of them.