"Building costs money, but the whole planet's technology business is centered in Santa Clara County, down the road from that other Gold Rush town, San Francisco."

It's an outlying concern, and I'm all for transforming Silicon Valley into to a metropolis (so long as it doesn't remove too many of the green preserves of the Peninsula and South Bay), but this sentence made me think of one long-term threat to development in the Bay, especially high-rises: earthquakes. Wouldn't the possibility of the Big One preclude too many skyscrapers from being built? And is it safe for the bulk of the tech industry to be located at such an area?

The counterpoint, of course, is cities such as Tokyo and Taipei, which already have been dealing with this issue on even larger scales.