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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Abandon the Bay Area.

It seems to me that ethnocentricity is rampant in the bay as a sub cultural norm. For example the Bay Area is big on tolerance, but if you choose to voice political concerns that challenges the area’s popularity you will be silently shunned and ignored which counter-intuitively is intolerance. As a solid example review the firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla. This kind of self-satisfying inward-facing deceptiveness allows any manner of isolating justification, such as ageism. In other areas wisdom and experience are rewarded commodities.

The Bay Area is also stupid expensive. You will make less money elsewhere but be instantly more wealthy. I would need to multiply my salary x3 to live the same in the Bay Area with a House half the size.

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From everything I've seen, heard, and read on HN, the Bay Area isn't really big on tolerance.

It's big on virtue signaling specific kinds of tolerance towards certain groups, but that's about where it ends. Apparently people past middle age aren't one of those groups.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but those are my observations as a 3rd party - I have no skin in the game.

I think it depends on the type of company. I've never worked at a startup but it wouldn't surprise me if they tend to avoid older workers. I work for a larger company in the Bay Area and there are plenty of older workers (myself included). Anecdotally I've also known of older workers succeeding at other large Bay Area companies.

Apparently people past middle age aren't one of those groups.

If Zuck had said whites or Asians or men “are just smarter” he would have been flayed alive, but he was (is?) brazenly ageist and not a murmur. That’s Silly Valley in a nutshell.

Don't worry...he will be old soon.

Laughing into his billions while his age cohort struggles thanks to people like him.

Eich's donations to causes restricted the freedom of his employees. That's generally considered a "no-no" when it comes to being liked by your employees. Shockingly, they may even protest it.

Perhaps. The issue here is should somebody be completely destroyed for a difference of opinion? In the Bay Area the answer is a resounding yes.

Tolerance is a comforting and popular term in the Bay Area. What people there are actually seeking is the enemy of tolerance: harmony. I really don’t care about people’s silly justifications for not seeing the difference, because either way it’s generally a personal delusion, a self-deception.

"The issue here is should somebody be completely destroyed for a difference of opinion?"

Calling it a "difference of opinion" is really masking the entire thing. He was saying that, not only are LGBT people not deserving of the same rights that he had, but that we should be able to vote on what rights they have. Can you see how dehumanizing that is?

And I cannot take your bit about "tolerance" seriously when we're talking about someone who, themselves, was not showing any kind of tolerance.

Tolerance is appreciation of disagreement, so it really seems that you are misusing that term to qualify something not stated.

> The issue here is should somebody be completely destroyed for a difference of opinion?

I've seen Eich doing a lot of things in business (and posting around here) since the dust-up; I don't think he was “completely destroyed”.

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