Hacker News Reader

Comment by bischofs | Hacker News Reader

Was warm enough for Henry Ford, The Dodge Brothers, William Durant, Herbert Henry Dow, Louis Chevrolet etc. Maybe some thicker skin and a harder winter would benefit folks ;)

View on HN

At that time, Silicon valley didn’t exist and California was barely getting mass migration. About a century later, now even the car industry seems to move toward California..

Doesn't seem like a good thing to me, with the cost of real estate, energy and labor in California, building sprawling manufacturing plants for cars probably won't work. Plus the margins on building cars are very low at high volumes - not something SV is used to.

California is huge and has plenty of cheap land as long as you don't need to live next to the ocean.

Ex: ~1000$ an acre. https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/

California started getting gold rush migration far before the car industry started flourishing. Silicon Valley is now essentially the heart of the modern gold rush, but of course not everybody will be lured there.

I'm not sure what's the point you're making with the gold rush migration, but most of the population to California came after Model T, and it was during and after the World Wars that California saw much of its population growth. Michigan had more population than California up until 1930s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_histori...

I believe the population growth has contributed to the growth of Silicon valley significantly. There seems some feedback loop between the population growth and the industry growth.

They were from a different part of the industrial era when the area was more desirable. There is a funny cycle to labor and skill labor level relative demand. Near the start skilled artisans were being disrupted and displaced by factories set up to use the unskilled masses who were previously doing things like making money off of digging through street trash for resellable goods like rags and bones. While labor conditions were often frankly horrible they often sadly were still an improvement.

Later automation reversed the trend to favor skilled labor to administer machines as being better quality and cheaper than mass cheap labor.

The point being then they had to cater to the bulk of their labor. I do not know the precise history of the region but farm families tend to produce an excess of people with larger family sizes than suburban or urban families.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com