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Comment by downerending | Hacker News Reader

This is being couched as a spat over the lockdown versus Tesla production, but I wonder if it's not part of a larger picture, which is that the Bay Area has become a harder and harder place to do business, because of economic realities.

It'd be nice to see technical work spread away from the hotspots and across America. Concentrating it in a few places makes for a surprisingly miserable existence.

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The reason Tesla is in Fremont is not for proximity to Silicon Valley, which has not benefited Tesla in any way. They are in Fremont because they could move into an already-built Toyota assembly plant and hire abundant local autoworkers.

Close proximity to a large volume of people with $100k salaries and who strongly signal that they value reducing their carbon footprint was not factored in when he first started selling premium electric vehicles nearby? That's an interesting hypothesis.

There’s no reason to have a factory there. It’s not as if Apple manufacturers iPhone in California, or anywhere near it.

Hm, I can’t claim to be an expert, but my first thought is that the logistics of transporting thousands of iPhones is very, very different from transporting thousands of cars.

It is. You can build parts of a car anywhere in the world. But because the cost of shipment will be so high you have to build the car in the same part of your continent if not the same country or state.

There was no significant shipping/logistics advantage to manufacturing cars in Australia.

After 30 years of increasing imports when government subsidies ended so did local manufacturing. Most cars sold in the country are now built in Thailand, South Africa, Japan, Europe and increasingly the USA - without any kind of huge price jump over locally produced vehicles.

Likewise no expert, but at the price point cars sell at, I doubt the cost of shipping vehicles was a primary concern. Consider that Australian vehicles are made everywhere except Australia, even commodity cars, and Australia is notoriously expensive to ship to.

We even had factories here, but they were too expensive to run. It's cheaper to ship them from overseas.

Do people buying the cars really care where it was made? I'm sure Tesla would have sold just as many if they were made in say, North Carolina.

For those not aware, the plant used to be called NUMMI which was a joint venture between Toyota and GM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI). There had been an GM plant there since the 60s, many Corollas were built there for the CA market. Many things about NUMMI were very interesting but eventually GM went bankrupt and Toyota moved Corolla production elsewhere.

There was a good This American Life episode about the NUMMI plant https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

California is still the best place to start a startup, because the ecosystem and early adopters are so important.

But Tesla is not at that stage: it was able to create a new factory in China in half a year, and already has a strong brand recognition, so California has its pros and cons.

Overhyped. California, particularly SV may be the best place to start a company if your "early adopters" are other SV people, tech industry, etc.. Cities like Atlanta represent a much more realistic, general-purpose market. In the social media age, I don't think there is much special benefit in SV early adoption mindset. Most consumers are savvy enough today.

It also enables free moving of talent between companies that only further allows great companies to be built. It’s very hard to build a high-tech company in Tulsa, say, if the total numbers of available superstars are low.

Tesla building HQ in Silicon Valley enabled it to get types of people he never would have otherwise. Few are leaving Google to go to GM, for example.

Assuming remote work doesn’t become the new normal.

A lot of those superstars would love to get out of California if they would get the same salary in absolute amount. Usually companies make the mistake of ,,adjusting for cost of living'', and then of course they will find most talent in the most expensive cities.

I disagree, I think people underestimate the social cost of uprooting your life, leaving all of your friends and families, and moving into an area that often has beliefs counter to your own

There's already examples. Epic will pay you top tech level salaries in the middle of nowhere, where you can live like a king. Superstars seem to be staying put.

Epic systems (?) because levels.fyi says otherwise.

> I disagree, I think people underestimate the social cost of uprooting your life, leaving all of your friends and families, and moving into an area that often has beliefs counter to your own

You mean how a lot of people do to move to SV in the first place?

Epic will also make you work with proprietary older tools and languages that leave you lacking if you were to leave in search of another job. Ever heard of MUMPS?

Epic does use newer stuff now too, btw. .NET for instance.

I don't know Epic, but Basecamp pays SF rates for remote workers, and their retention statistics are far above average.

,,Middle of nowhere'' is a bad place anyways, I'm sure that there are more fun places than Mountain View for young guys to live their single life or to buy their dream family house.

And yet probably 1/3 of SV engineers are immigrants, who have done some serious uprooting to be here.

It's interesting how that looks from outside the USA. The first time I went to Mountain View I got a shock. I was young and naive, fresh off the boat from Europe, and I'd been told it was the "City of Mountain View". So I didn't bother renting a car. I figured I'd just take the train.

For a lot of people living in the Bay Area is kinda like living in the middle of nowhere. You have to drive for over an hour, often much more if the highways are jammed, simply to reach the nearest actual city. It appears Epic is based in Verona, Wisconsin, which is about 2hr 20 mins from Chicago. So a bit further out for sure, but not so radically different that it'd completely change your life, I guess.

Of course if you live in SF and then commute to work, it's different, but that's a pretty miserable experience.

I can't drive, so Uber was a lifesaver in the Bay Area.

There are probably few other single cities that would be as competitive, even if most people would rather be elsewhere (they’d all be different places).

After seeing how other states, and populations, have been handling and reacting to the shelter in home policies, I doubt I'll be moving out of CA anytime soon.

I just hope the folks I know for example in Texas are able to stay safe.

... because they've been too aggressive, or too passive? I'm still in the "there shouldn't be a lockdown for healthy people under 50" camp (since IFR is so low for that demographic), but I could see people being mad at states for the opposite reason, too.

Texas is already opening up. Not sure about other states.

People under 50, including kids, may not die in high numbers but they can still make others sick.

As far as I'm aware, there's three ways that a lockdown can save lives - one is to reduce deaths caused by an overwhelmed health care system, another is to delay things until a paradigm shift occurs (for instance, a vaccine or miracle cure), and the third is to stomp out the disease entirely.

The first has been achieved - with a small margin in NYC, but far larger margins elsewhere.

The second will take another year at the most optimistic.

The third would also take a year+ at current lockdown effectiveness levels - but I'd expect mass disobedience before then.

* * *

And that is why I'd prefer to have lockdowns lifted for lower-risk populations. Yes, people in contact with the old or at-risk should stay in lockdown - but that does not mean that college students, or young families, or a variety of other groups should not return to normal. The more people that are infected, the lower effective r_0 drops (this is how herd immunity works) and the sooner the world can be made safe for at-risk populations.

The fact that this might also let the US avoid an economic downturn that makes the Great Depression look merciful is also a major plus. (Current US unemployment is estimated at around 20% - the Great Depression peaked around 25%)

There is the alternative that many countries are attempting, which is to reduce the number of cases and increase testing capability until it is tractable to do case tracking and quarantine only the infected.

The trouble is, this isn't even remotely close to feasible. In order to find a useful proportion of cases via testing, you need to test pretty much everybody with cold-like or disease-like symptoms or maybe even just pretty much everybody, and contact tracing only helps if you have some other way to find most of the active cases in order to trace their contacts. That's why experts in publications like the New York Times keep insisting that the US needs to test people on a scale orders of magnitude larger than any other country has managed, including the ones that are starting to reopen.

(Readers don't realize what a big ask this is because the articles carefully don't mention this - most people are left with the false impression that it's just doing what other countries have already managed, and that the only reason the US isn't doing this is because the leadership is incompetent or even deliberately covering up the number of cases.)

> The trouble is, this isn't even remotely close to feasible. In order to find a useful proportion of cases via testing, you need to test pretty much everybody with cold-like or disease-like symptoms

I was surprised how at quickly my local health authority got to this point. A couple months ago, they had flat-out stated that it would be impossible for the foreseeable future, but cold/flu symptoms have decreased over a regular year by an order of magnitude, they expanded testing to everyone with any symptoms a couple weeks ago, and even with carpet bombing contacts in outbreak locations they're still only running testing at about half capacity.

The new HQ will likely be in Austin. There is already a lot of engineering talent there.

Admin & production would move to Texas, but I would imagine Tesla would keep an office in CA for electronics.

Said HQ in the tweet, guess we’ll see how serious he is.

BTW, I'd love if Tesla moved to Tulsa, just for name similarity.

I mean, if you're going for "excentric billionaire", then GO for it!

And, of course, hire Tulsi Gabbard to run the place!

It's hard to build a plant in areas without a competent workforce. Look at the Tesla Gigafactory debacle in Nevada. Years late, problems with Panasonic, huge thefts, large scale drug dealing in the plant.[1][2]

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-tesla-panasoni...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-tesla-employee-says-gigafact...

The "free movement of talent" sword cuts in multiple directions. The Bay Area is so expensive that a lot of people who didn't start out there simply cannot move there. At least without seriously down-grading their quality of life.

In theory, companies there would offer enough compensation to make it at least a wash with candidates' current situation, but in my experience, they don't.

I live in the Bay area - I cannot find a single thing appealing about this place except 1 - weather. But that can be had at many cities in California.

Things that suck in Bay Area:

1) People. I don't like to hang with AI engineers and arrogant people. Humbleness is hard to come by here. This is usually brought up as a positive, I couldn't disagree more.

2) Homelessness - Some areas feel like it's Somalia

3) Unkept, unmaintained infrastructure - Pretty much pot holes everywhere, roads ruin tyres and rip apart suspension systems, even if a road is recently built, it has major quality issues. Infrastructure in Bay area is below par that of places like China, Korea, Japan, EU, Switzerland, England, and pretty much any developed country and many parts of the US. Texas has the best roads IMO. I've been to all these places and infrastructure (Alameda county) just reeks of awful people running this place, lack of care for quality and attention to detail, and perhaps mismanagement of funds.

3) Housing - self explanatory

4) Bang for the buck - Cost of living does not match the standard of living. People automatically assume that cost living is proportional to the quality of living. Not even close in the bay area.

5) Micro-analysis of Food culture: I cannot go out and hang with people without someone trying to analyze between 4.8 and 4.9 stars on Yelp. You forgot the purpose of us getting together. This probably exists everywhere in major cities, not just the Bay area.

6) Transit - sucks, expensive and unmaintained. Rampant theft on BART, you generally feel unsafe.

7) Traffic - before this pandemic, it was difficult to go anywhere without taking 3 hours off.

8) Crime - I've had my car broken into 4 times (the city) in the course of 8 months.

9) Way too many laws - Regulation in California will cut you by thousand cuts. Wanna grab a lot and build your own house? Good luck with 18,000 pages of law that govern what you can and cannot do with your land. This is the same in Oregon and Washington state.

10) Wanna form an LLC? $800/year. Why!? What costs are involved in providing a registration for a company? It is $50 in some states, free in many other states.

11) Taxes - I am a centrist and IMO california has way too many taxes (count) and way too much (amount) of your income, property, tolls, estate, utilities, etc. I am fine with high taxes if that results in a better quality of life, but I feel like I am robbed off.

12) Extreme sensitivity towards race, gender, minorities, etc. Shops like this should not exist: https://www.shopwomenmade.com/ - Yep, this is in Berkeley. This is a hot topic but IMO ultra liberalism is playing into their own agenda.

13) Intolerence to anything but extreme left in politics. Oh god, you're doing exactly what extreme right is doing - not listening to other views.

Why the hell am I here? I am looking to get out of the bay area and never return, even for pleasure. SF Bay Area is one of the worst places to live IMO having lived in half a dozen cities in the US and expat in Asia.

Advice to entrepreneurs in the bay area: Find a place in other parts of California, it's a gorgeous state with many cheap cities - perhaps you can help build those small cities into better communities. If Magic Leap can form a 3000 people tech HQ in Ft. Lauderdale in Florida, I am sure you can attract talent in Monterrey, Redding, Bakersfield, etc.

I've lived around California my whole life and overall I like the state but these criticisms are pretty much spot on. Californians, especially the ones from San Fransisco, are wildly egotistical (though San Fran is famous for it). I think a lot of our people view the state's wealth as some kind of affirmation of their ideals, they don't have any concept of how much of our wealth is due to markets that are mostly just geographic luck. In the same spirit, we constantly talk about living wages while making little effort to ensure that businesses which interface with illegal immigrants are held to the same payment standards we claim are a moral imperative for everyone else.

I do love the state, I think that outside of San Fransisco most Californians are pretty laid back. But it bothers new how often we seem to high road the other states for the sake of spite these days.

I agree with so much of what you say, but the people aspect is more nuanced than that.

Yes, there's a staggering number of people in the Bay Area who think they're gods gift yet have essentially average intelligence, they confuse understanding code with understanding the world.

At the same time there are many humble people, ambitious yet realistic people and extremely skilled people in the Valley. It's the centre of the tech world for a good reason.

For some years I worked for Google out of Switzerland. For me and many other people this was the perfect balance. Working for Americans, especially the sort that make companies in SV, was an inspiring experience. The can-do, "what hard thing shall we tackle next" attitude is one that's frankly difficult to find elsewhere. They'd just throw themselves into a challenge without even stopping to think about what could go wrong; the sunshine of the state was like the sunshine in their minds. Not surprisingly there are a lot of failed and zombie startups in the Valley as a result, but that's still better than in most places where there just aren't any at all.

On the other hand, I was quite satisfied with the much higher quality of life in the Swiss office. You could walk out of the door at the end of the day and stroll in a few minutes to a beautiful lake with an actual mountain view, go for a swim, barbecue with friends in a well maintained public park, dry off, utilise the spotlessly clean and free public toilets, and within a few minutes walk be in the city centre in bars and restaurants. Crime was virtually non-existent thanks to the fast response times of the police, who were nonetheless invariably friendly and hands off, so people would routinely just leave all their stuff on the shore when going for a swim without worrying about it. I once forgot my coat in a bar and then failed to pick it up for a week, when I went back it was still there, hanging right where I left it.

I wouldn't want to live in the Valley but I'm always happy to work with people who do.

>The can-do, "what hard thing shall we tackle next" attitude is one that's frankly difficult to find elsewhere. They'd just throw themselves into a challenge without even stopping to think about what could go wrong; the sunshine of the state was like the sunshine in their minds.

Amazingly good insight. I originally started working for a Bay Area company exactly because companies elsewhere have a tendency to shrug their shoulders and give up without trying, when faced with difficult problems. It's maddening. Half the battle is thinking you can beat a problem - if you give up before trying, you've already lost.

I'm also not exactly smitten with the area, but the attitude is unbeatable and in part why SV will continue to lead the world.

A lot of your points about the roads and housing etc are true, but about how you don’t like the people? Maybe you just have lame friends

A friend is someone that I enjoy being around, share ideas and interests, and be a good companion. By definition, my friends cannot be lame, can they?

I doubt any of the engineering team at Tesla - the part of Tesla that is actually in Silicon Valley, rather than just Silicon Valley adjacent - are going anywhere.

Intel moved their sizable R&D operations to Oregon in the 80s and 90s. It is a well-trodden path to move manufacturing-heavy companies out of the Bay Area.

Huge layoffs in those offices, though.

Huge layoffs are happening everywhere, especially in industries that depends on consumers doing well.

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