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Comment by dbul | Hacker News Reader

Blog entries like this make me feel truly educated. I could visit my grandparents in Weston, MA and regurgitate, "the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions" and my grandmother would reply, "Ah, someone who is educated!" Whereas if I had said, "GZip encode your hypertext," she would be the uneducated one.

So education is relative. Perhaps if I give in and move to the Bay Area my education will be richer than I would ever have imagined.

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i don't think i understand your comment, but it was pretty entertaining, nonetheless.

It was casual. But truthful in sentiment. You can see it as ironical in that I was educated by the Internet and not by being in the Bay Area. Yet, being in the Bay Area, making the right friends, and appropriately asking the right questions and exchanging ideas may prove more useful than the Internet, sometimes. (After all, the Internet is still by your side if you need it.)

I'm about to skedaddle from the Bay area, and can't say it's really worth the expense of living here. You know when people start spouting off about the supposed virtues of living in an area they're probably in real estate; at the very least, they likely have financial interest in property. At least the Internet does one thing very well, and that is expose greed and stupidity. With such a high concentration of greed (high rents) in an area, it's not surprising to find such a high concentration of stupidity. There are at least 49 other states far more deserving of my tax dollars.

It's getting kind of lame being among people who want to divide their attention. I imagine being in the Bay Area I would find at least a few souls willing to spend Friday night programming hard core than carousing.

Honest question: are you on drugs, or not a native English speaker?

Coffee. I know English well enough to understand the term "ad hominem."

Which is Latin :-)

Which was the joke, right?

Heh, sorry, I didn't mean offense - I just found your train of thought a little opaque, but certainly in an interesting way!

Either way, I don't think knowing to GZip your pages counts as "education" any more than knowing how to put a horse shoe on a hoof or how to facilitate a corporate merger does.

He's (she's??) a little confused by moving to the Bay Area or not. He feel's he's educated by classical standards but still has technical knowledge. He has experience learning technical/IT knowledge from the Internet, and values such knowledge, but thinks by being in the bay area, that such knowledge can be accrued faster. He doesn't like the greed he finds in the Bay Area, and is basically trying to justify the loss of potential technical knowledge by leaving (or not even going) through weighing it up against his classical knowledge that his grandmother values more than he does.

Tip: stay out of the Bay Area but not too far, maybe to San Jose and keep in touch with a few buddies, but not to those who you truly don't like.

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