Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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You cannot do that. Taylor Swift is what she is not because she it better at music, dancing, or looking sexy, or sleeping with the record label executives (I don't know anything about her: the above list are the common things done to get positions like her, but not necessarily what she has done). What Taylor Swift is that is special is that nearly everybody knows about her (I'm a rare exception) - you can talk about her to strangers and have something in common because you know her music.

If you want great live music you can find that in a 1 in 10 bars around the country. (less if you want original music instead of covers). Likewise if you want to watch a dancer, though perhaps a different venue. If you want anyone sexy you can see sex better at a local strip joint. If you want to sleep with someone you can pick someone up in any bar (you probably couldn't sleep with Tayler Swift even if she was the type looking for a one night stand). However the shared experience of being a Tayler Swift fan is not something you can find if you stick to the local scenes. That national/international shared experience can only belong to a few people at any one time and no amount of schools, talent shows, scouting... can change that.

It may not be a perfect analogy but I disagree that it's completely invalid. Use some imagination to make it work, e.g. with institutional support instead of having just local acts now there is Taylor, and Beyonce, and a few dozen other famous musicians.

Not everyone can live in San Francisco, but there exist other equivalent "nice places" of which there are too few.

That is the point: There is only one San Francisco. If you insist on living there you will have to pay the price. If you can move across the bay you can get a different price - is this the entire bay you could move across from or is the north/south side better? Or maybe you can move to a suburb of Omaha there are some nice ones, but most of us couldn't even name one (most of us wouldn't even think of Omaha if asked to list world cities)

Likewise if you need a famous musician there isn't room for everyone to know 10,000 different musicians. However if you can accept any musician there are 10,000 great ones to choose from.

But there's tons of places where the cost of housing is going up. If everybody was uprooting from Philadelphia to go to NYC then only NYC's prices would go up.

It seems to me that we already have multiple Taylor Swifts so having even more shouldn't be a problem. For many people, the school system is the reason why they own the house they do.

In my experience, many of the schools self-report having pretty bad math/reading comprehension amongst their students. I'm not picking a house based on it being "the best" or the one "I hear about the most". I picked it based on it actually having good outcomes. If other districts had that too I would've considered theirs.

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