Silicon Valley: Abandoned
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
There's a catch though... have any of you folks actually seen these buildings? They're not exactly in nice neighborhoods (I actually used to work next to one of these). Most of them are over the 101 which means it'll be a 15-20 minute drive to downtown for food. While it's true that Google is also past the 101, they can also afford to hire their own chefs. An apartment off of San Antonio/University/MenloAve/Castro/etc. seems preferable.
The other bit of trouble is that they're all large office buildings. Are they set up so that they can be rented out by a small shop? I'm pointing at the Yahoo campus buildings in particular.
Cheap office space in a dying empire that smart people are increasingly leaving because its citizens are too shortsighted to realize their economy will collapse if they don't pay for what they've purchased, too racist to let in the next generation of innovators, too stupid to educate their own kids, and too apathetic to fix the problem.
Cap-and-trade is probably the last chance to fix the economy of the valley, and frankly it's not looking good right now.
With every cycle (I have seen them all), the Valley takes new shape in its economic drivers, and it will likely do so again this time around. But the tech revolution has fundamentally changed world commerce and is not about to slow down. The Valley remains its epicenter, in spite of any bleak short-term issues.
Early-stage startups (my area of specialty) have not slowed but rather increased in the past year, and their quality is up (very often driven by immigrants or first-generation children of immigrants - this is a big change from 25 years ago). The venture-backed part of the startup world has been on hold and will largely remain so for the time being. In time, it too will emerge again, but this will depend on an eventual opening up of the IPO market.
The Valley will survive and emerge stronger than ever, in my view. Opportunities for those seeking to launch new startups are as good as they ever have been (and office space is cheap and plentiful, and certainly not just in large office buildings but everywhere).
Which seems more likely in twenty years:
A) The CA/US debt, education, and political problems will be fixed
B) In the near future Boris Johnson or some other politician who 'gets it' is able to convince their government to pass a series of bills that create the same economic/social conditions that created SV, and over the next twenty years this new area catches up to and surpasses SV despite SV's current massive advantage.
As for education, IIRC it was one of the top three issues for every presidential election between 1964 and 2000 and virtually nothing changed. For the past two election cycles it hasn't even been one of the top five issues, and there's no evidence that it's coming back in 2012. The fact is that the vast majority of CA/USians can't read English proficiently, that is well enough to compare and contrast the viewpoints in two different newspaper articles. This means the vast majority of our population is completely useless in the modern economy. Not only are we making zero progress toward fixing this, but there is zero will to fix it. And even in the past when there was tons of will to fix it, it still proved unfixable.
As for the CA/US debt, the vast majority of citizens STRONGLY support increasing the debt. A black-gay-atheist would have a better chance at winning the south in the 50s than a presidential candidate who supports the kind of tax increases needed to fix the debt.
As for our other political problems, our policies are completely based around made-for-TV soundbites and not academic research. That's why our infrastructure is crumbling, we support torture, we're destroying the value of the dollar, etc. And I see zero sign of this changing.
As much as I love SV-- and I still intend on moving there-- let's face the facts, the chances of someplace else catching up to SV are vastly better than the chances of fixing the problems facing the US.
California Landmark NO. 836 PIONEER ELECTRONICS RESEARCH LABORATORY - This is the original site of the laboratory and factory of Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909 by Cyril F. Elwell. Here, Dr. Lee de Forest, inventor of the three-element radio vacuum tube, devised the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator in 1911-13. Worldwide developments based on this research led to modern radio communication, television, and the electronics age. Location: In sidewalk, SE corner of Channing Ave and Emerson St, Palo Alto
Radio technologies preceded and prepared the way for electronics and semiconductors, and it was fueled with risk capital.
It's not misleading in raising the bar to areas/regions that want to be the next Silicon Valley and don't have an entrepreneurial substrate and appropriate ancillary services (e.g. attorneys, accountants, banks, that understand startups and entrepreneurs) to form a viable ecosystem.
I don't think the 100 years is misleading, if it had happened somewhere else (e.g. Boston) I think it would still have involved the same antecedents: major universities, risk capital, electronics firms...It may also have been important that it was primarily agricultural land that was pushed aside, if there had been other active industries they may have preferentially competed for the same talent.
Three good books I rely on for this analysis are
"Understanding Silicon Valley" by Kenney http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Silicon-Valley-Entrepren...
"The Silicon Valley Edge" by Lee, Miller, Hancock, and Rowen http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Valley-Edge-Innovation-Entrepr...
"Regional Advantage" Saxenian http://www.amazon.com/Regional-Advantage-Culture-Competition...
How about option C) SV continues to thrive as a worldwide center of innovation no matter how jacked the rest of CA and the US gets? The only way I see this not happening is if the US completely clamps down on immigration (right now it's a giant pain but still navigable for a large number of immigrants).
The only international tech centers that I've ever heard anyone mention seriously were Tel Aviv (but unlikely b/c of security issues), and Singapore. Not sure how immigrant-friendly the high tech Asian economies (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S. Korea) would be (Japan certainly isn't).
Much more likely would be a barely-across-the-border city like Vancouver or (don't laugh) Tijuana. With the ridiculous life science cluster in San Diego, Mexico could have a place where any international scientist could get into easily and collaborate with the existing cluster. It's a beautiful opportunity for regulatory arbirtage of a positive kind. What other opportunity does Mexico have to become a center for super high end research?
(although wouldn't call Chinese officials politicians, so your point technically stands)
Silicon Valley had none of that before Shockley and the Fairchildren (AKA tha Traitorous 8) rolled into town back in '57. Was that truly a one-off? The world's a big place.
Cap-and-trade is intended to increase govt control and pass out goodies to well-connected folks. It's unclear how either of those will "fix the valley". (Yes, there are well-connected folks in the valley who will benefit, but ....)
That being said, creating a system that assigns a monetary value to each ton of carbon will still create the biggest economic boom in US history. What's more, like the dotcom boom it will be one that anyone can participate in, not just those who are well connected to the government or whatever.
The increased demand for carbon licenses does not come out of thin air. Someone does pay for it - while reducing other expenses!
In the U.S., we have no shortage of "useful" production, and no shortage of not-very-useful production (see also: Cougartown).
Reducing pollution is useful production. I appreciate the idea that we'll assign a cost to traditional externalities whose cost is usually foisted on society at large, at which point the market will be forced to find new ways to decrease those costs.
The increased demand for carbon licenses does not come out of thin air. Someone does pay for it - while reducing other expenses!
It will also force incumbent, stagnant industries to invest in research and development, and disperse wealth more broadly, both of which pay significant future dividends beyond simply a reduction carbon output.
"force to invest" concedes the argument that these "investments" don't make any economic sense absent artificial costs, aka a govt mandate. As a result, the resources used by these "investments" would have been better used elsewhere.
You're twisting an out of context quote to provide a stupid strawman worthy of attacking with your worldview.
... these "investments" don't make any economic sense absent artificial costs, aka a govt mandate.
There are real costs to pollution (pollution is not 'artificial'), but those costs are levied against communities (and world) without any recourse against those who externalize them.
I quoted your whole paragraph. The only context that I left out was what you were responding to, which people can easily see above. If there's some context "missing" that changes what you wrote into something that withstands scrutiny, that's because you never wrote it.
However, feel free to provide that missing context now.
Or, maybe you can point out how I'm wrong. You know, provide some evidence supporting "stupid". I'll help. If you're "stupid" as "you're mean, I don't like you, and I'm not going to respond to your arguments", I'll agree.
Stupid, as in: In the context of the sentence, the use of "force" was clearly in terms of market forces, and didn't "concede" anything about the rationality or reality of investing in cleaner energy and processes.
It's clear that any discussion with you devolves into responding to ridiculously irrational devices of rhetoric, so I'll stop here.
This market isn't free - the price is forced by govt. You remember govt - they're folks who shoot you if you don't do what they want. (They're not the only folks who will do that, but ....)
Without that threat of force establishing a price, there would be a lot less investment.
You may like the price established, but that doesn't change the fact that the price would be different without the threat of force, and there would be a lot less investment.
> ridiculously irrational devices of rhetoric
Since when does pointing out how govt mandates work qualify?
Ah yes, the proles and their bad taste. They're so dumb that they pay for their stuff and are embarrassed to ask for subsidies.
Everyone knows that the best people rely on thugs to get resources.
Speaking of thugs, where's the omlet?
Um, no. The broken window analogy applies whenever you artifically impose costs. Let's rewrite the above to see why.
Right, well first we have to decide that the products and services created by the increased need for glass cause by the glass-corp smashing windowsare a good use of our country's talent and resources. That's an entirely separate debate, but once we've already decided that then the broken window analogy no longer applies.
An input cost to production (energy) will rise in price. This will increase the cost of goods and services. This is basic economics. This new "market" is a drain on other parts of the economy in both money and talent.
Seems like a rehash of the broken window fallacy.
Unlike with the broken window fallacy, you're not just breaking a window and creating jobs to create that same window again. The jobs created are actually going to make an entirely different set of products that the market wasn't creating before due to a flaw in the way the market was designed by the people who set it up.
That's also why assigning value to carbon is different than assigning value to restaurants. Because of the way the market was designed we have the roughly the right number of restaurants, but way too much carbon.
The important thing to realize is that the market didn't just happen, it was designed by people, and it can be designed differently. In the same way that we don't allow people to, say, dumb garbage in a public park just because they may want to under some idealized market fantasy, we shouldn't allow people to dump unlimited carbon in the atmosphere either.
The market is a tool, invented by people, as the most efficient way to distribute resources to those who value them the most. But as a tool, we need to understand how it works, where it breaks down, and how to apply it effectively to create the kind of society we want to live in. We can't just treat it as some kind of religious construct, where it's magically going to write the laws, vaccinate the children, clean up dogshit from the street, etc.
That's why cap-and-trade is so good, because it uses the power of the market to create the kind of society we want to live in. (As opposed to those who argue that we should live in the kind of society the market wants to create, whatever this means, frankly I have no idea and I don't think the people who advocate it have thought it through enough to realize that it literally doesn't make any sense, it's just empty words.)
So your argument (if valid) would seem to support equally well an economic benefit from a broken windows policy.
It's possible that a carbon tax might stave off a future disaster, but that's vastly different from creating "the biggest economic boom in US history". That's nonsense. A carbon tax will harm our economy, though perhaps not as much as the predicted disaster to come.
Similarly, a "no dumping garbage" law would also not create an economic boom, even if it is less harmful than garbage filled parks.
Interestingly enough, I wasn't referring to the explicit graft, but now that you mention it....
> What's more, like the dotcom boom it will be one that anyone can participate in, not just those who are well connected to the government or whatever.
Wrong.
Read the damn thing. That's not how it works. That's not even how the theoretical best version works.
Cap and trade is a bunch of folks wandering around saying "that's worth $" and "you owe $". The excuse is carbon, but there's no actual connection between carbon and where those folks utter those sentences and the dollar figures.
Don't believe me? Notice that we're not charging immigrants. We're not charging parents. The accounting for agriculture is impossible.
One way to distinguish folks who actually care about carbon from folks pushing some other agenda is to bring up nuclear. If nuclear is their top short term priority, they're serious about carbon. If it isn't, they're using carbon to push another agenda.
And no, it doesn't take a long time to get nuclear on-line. What takes a long time is people-imposed constraints that add nothing to safety, efficiency, etc If those constraints are more important than carbon....
Another way to go if you have established connections with some larger companies that have downsized is to sublease some cubicle space from them. You lose some of your own identity by being in the middle of a bigger company, but sometimes it can be super cheap and you get some of the amenities of a bigger company like not dealing with phones, internet, security systems, etc. The company wins by offsetting some of their costs (or getting a tiny bit of equity) and just filling up some cubicles has a positive impact on a company's morale.
CRE sucks, but it sucks less in that area.