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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Many are based in Miami. It’s a place where young marketing types have embraced a vision of what the internet is actually for that is at odds with Silicon Valley’s: less a utopian escape from reality than an infinite expansion of its strip malls.

I am glad there is a honeypot for people like this so they won't move here (SV or even SF)

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Aversion to sex work aside, how’s this different than some of what’s done in Silicon Valley? Uber will happily extract the remaining equity in your car as you teeter on the brink of homelessness at which point DoorDash will be happy to make you your own boss. Maybe I’m just jaded because it’s hard to find a place to rent wherever there’s a booming market for Airbnb rentals.

Yeah, SF has become all about money since 2000 (well, since the gold rush 150 years ago) and is the kind of place that spawns the ubers and airbnbs, but SV is still quieter and mostly tech. It just doesn’t get the same press because new high speed interconnect isn’t a consumer item, nor is it as photogenic.

My aversion is against people paying for that. Prostitution is legal in my country but strip clubs and similar businesses are far less popular it seems. There is also a negative stigma against those visiting such places. Not sure if that is a bad thing to be honest. Of course Uber and DoorDash are exploitative too, probably even worse for workers. Most people probably don't do a serious calculation for car ownership and maintenance. Likewise I have an aversion against people using these services too and then complain about low wages. An Uber might be cheap but you might dearly pay for it later.

If you haven’t lived in either place, it’s difficult to understand. Capitalism abounds in both, but is expressed in very different ways in each place. The cultures are just wildly different. As a native Californian, I find Florida’s culture to be smarmy and tasteless, with people shamelessly flaunting designer labels and consuming conspicuously. Being seen is super important to a lot of Floridians. (It also goes a long way to explain why Donald Trump enjoys living there; he fits right in.)

Southern California (as influenced by Hollywood) has a bit of this problem too, but it’s far less acute by my observation.

In my experience it's the Californians I have known who were smarmy and tasteless, from both cities in California. Your comment is a great example of the snooty attitude those of us from flyover country have been tolerating our entire lives as it flows from our TV screens.

What you described is a sub culture of Miami. It doesn't describe anyone in Florida north of West Palm Beach, and completely disregards the Cuban-American population in Miami itself.

Or are Cuban Americans not representative of "real" Miami? Because if you forget about the Cubans, my wife is going to have to say something to you in rapid Spanish that you won't enjoy, even if you only understand her tone

To be fair, GP was quoting a comment specifically comparing Miami and SF, although the comment you reply to lost that distinction.

I agree it’s overly simplistic but that sub culture of Miami certainly exists and is very visible, just like SF isn’t entirely tech.

I’m from neither FL or CA, but have lived (for 5 years+) in both S Florida, SV / SF, and a brief stint in LA. The cultures from all these places felt like two sides of the same coin. Compared to my native slice of fly over America, the flaunting and virtue signaling were pretty overwhelming

I’d agree, it matters not whether the surrogate for a person’s missing personality is a designer label and a lime green Lamborghini or a second home in Sonoma and ayahuasca trips to burning man.

The difference is the conspicuity. One is private and discreet behavior (as long as they don’t brag about it), the other flamboyant and gaudy.

flaunting and virtue signaling exist here in flyover, sometimes it's a different set of virtues but they are definitely flaunted.

it's not different, gumpy just thinks it's different.

The bay area’s aversion to any libido-inducing-anything was a mistake.

“Lets exclude people to make it more inclusive!” really hits a peak there and a lot of people don’t buy it

I’m glad to see this smoothing out geographically, especially since a lot of the same people move to Miami and partake in its allure and inclusion of body-focused participants in tech as well as sex workers

> The bay area’s aversion to any libido-inducing-anything was a mistake.

Uh, what? True, Silicon Valley has been more sedate in that regard, but SF has been / remains the home of everything from Kink.com to the SF Sex information library, to mainstreaming sex toys (e.g. good vibrations) and feminist sexuality (Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, among others) to the sex side of the Castro. The dildotronics “movement” to the degree it really existed was an SF/Well/Mondo2000 effort.

If anything it was the weirdos who flooded SF starting in the 2000 boom who tried to squash it.

In the 2010s people excised all the gogo dancers and atmosphere models and any woman monetizing her body from tech events, without asking their opinion on anything. Privileging one kind of woman’s thoughts over another.

Many of the performers were very thrilled to be at a specific company's events and were excited to make it an addition to their CV, their contribution mattered. They were not treated as individuals, they were treated only as a symptom of male preference and that their view didn't matter because they didnt have a cognitive heavy trade.

Miami is not going that direction. Its great. Call out these libidoless segregationists.

SF is the city with its own app for tracking human shit on the sidewalk right? How would these people make it worse.

Feces is harder to track when it is ambulatory.

My friend’s Uber was held up for $10k+ worth of stuff in broad daylight 5 minutes from SFO yesterday. The cops never even showed up.

Whatever people could be coming in from Miami can’t be any worse than the people presently robbing and defecating SV into an early grave.

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