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Comment by monoideism | Hacker News Reader

The dispersal of bay area tech workers will be good for the country, if we can avoid breaking down in the immediate future.

SV had become a total thought bubble, with the average tech worker having either no conception or a very negative conception of how most of the country lives outside of the large urban areas.

Moving into areas with lots of moderates or conservatives will be a good learning experience. I don't expect people to change their ideology, but I do expect much more tolerance from them than what I've seen in recent years.

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Of the US population 80% lives in urban areas. While bubbles are relative to experience it is fair to say the higher percentage is the one more representative.

Small cities and suburbs of large metro areas (which account for a large proportion of that %) are very different culturally.

Nearly all my colleagues and friends here in the Bay Area are from somewhere else.

So this idea of a totally isolated bubble is a fiction made up on few facts to sell a story.

And most people are fairly tolerant - except of the intolerable few who wish to destroy tolerance. Again more made up stories.

It's a pretty massive thought bubble, at least for the professional class. It has a massive number of highly paid, white, left-leaning people. Opinions outside of that bubble are met with "I didn't know people like you existed!".

If that's not a bubble, I don't know what is.

The Bay area and tech is not predominantly white. While hispanics and black people are underrepresented, Asians (both south and east) are dramatically overrepresented.

In addition, Bay area people are from all over the country and from diverse backgrounds.

In contrast, rural communities tend to be highly homogeneous both in terms of race and life experience.

An exception doesn't disprove the rule. Go walk around any upper income neighborhood in SF. It's mostly white. Sure, Asian make up a good percentage, but it's mostly white at the upper echelon.

And sure, people come from all over the country, but they gravitate here because the SF bubble aligns with their own views. And if your views don't align, you learn pretty quickly to keep your mouth shut.

And sure, rural communities have their own issues, but you can have a much more diverse perspective going to any number of "fly over country" cities in the US.

According to Wikipedia, the 2018 ACS estimated SF is 40% White, 5% Black, 34% Asian, 15% Hispanic, and 5% mixed race.[1]

Are you really surprised that sharing a party with white nationalists makes you an outcast in a city as diverse as San Francisco?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#....

I grew up in an area with conservatives. I remember the slurs I was called quite clearly. I don't need to go back to that experience. Give me a break with a comment like this.

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