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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> It really seems like our first priority as a nation should be to dismantle this 'vetocracy' and let researchers perform studies, and teachers teach.

The housing is also really, really important: the Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York etc are some of the most productive parts of your country. If more people were allowed to live there [0], your economy could grow a lot. A bigger economy directly translates to lives saved.

To give a simple example: your highway engineering people work with a value of life of something like x million USD. Any improvement to safety that costs less than x million USD per life saved gets implemented. The value of x gets set in vague relation to how rich society is.

[0] No any one individual is directly barred from moving to SF, if they pony up enough money for rent; but the NIMBY climate effectively sets a limit on the total number of people allowed to dwell there.

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Location has almost nothing to do with the productivity of workers in Silicon Valley.

Okay, but then why do folks move there? My impression is that it’s mostly for work.

Companies mandate going to the office and remote work only became acceptable en masse after the pandemic?

Why would profit maximizing companies have those mandates, if location is not important?

Also: Google (for example) has offices in lower cost locations, too. Why do they keep the offices in Silicon Valley open at all, if location is not important?

If that's true there is no reason for Silicon Valley to exist in the first place.

But it does exist.

Im not much of english speaker so I wonder if my intuition is right here but its sounds like non sequitor. Why do You think there are no other possible scenarios which explains Silicon Valley existence? Like people herd mentality (even the high inteligent one are not resistant to it) or just simple power accumulation by few that make the decisions where to take up residency? With almost free capital and dollar as world reserve currency current Silicon Valley situation can be solvent by accident just long enough for people like You beliving it as not being irrational.

Google, Facebook, Apple etc already have offices in lower cost locations.

Why would they keep their high rent offices in Silicon Valley open?

Are you saying they decision makers are all irrational? They still have to compete in the market. Any company that could get equal productivity out of random locations could eat their lunch with a lower cost base.

> your highway engineering people work with a value of life of something like x million USD.

This is not currently nor should it ever be how civil engineering works.

https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

Good luck finding any engineering project which uses this.

Engineering projects select their safety features based on what funding is available for which features in a given community. I'm sure there's someone in the federal government somewhere who thinks anyone uses VSL guidance, but that doesn't make it so.

You might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_... more. It's how the NHS decides what interventions to fund. (A similar idea was demonised in the US as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel )

Why do you think decisions _should_not_ be made like this? How else do you want decisions to be made?

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