The Bay Area struck a hard bargain with its tech workers.
Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn’t like you. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook. Or if your office was in the city, maybe it was in a neighborhood with too much street crime, open drug use and $5 coffees.
But it was worth it.
Living in the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world was what mattered. The city gave its workers a choice of interesting jobs and a chance at the brass ring.
That is, until the pandemic. Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easier. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school.
They fled. They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida.
That’s where the story of the Bay Area’s latest tech era is ending for a growing crowd of tech workers and their companies. They have suddenly movable jobs and money in the bank—money that will go plenty further somewhere else.
But where?
The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving. Some cities have set up recruiting programs to lure them to new homes. Miami’s mayor has been inviting tech people to move there in his Twitter posts.
I talked to more than two dozen tech executives and workers who have left San Francisco for other parts of the country over the past year, like a young entrepreneur who moved home to Georgia and another who has created a community in Puerto Rico.
Here are some of their stories.
Ah, the Normal Life
“I miss San Francisco. I miss the life I had there,” said John Gardner, 35, the founder and CEO of Kickoff, a remote personal training startup, who packed his things into storage and left in a camper van to wander America. “But right now it’s just like: What else can God and the world and government come up with to make the place less livable?”
A couple of months later, Gardner wrote: “Greetings from sunny Miami Beach! This is about the 40th place I’ve set up a temporary headquarters for Kickoff.”
Remote personal training happens to coincide well with remote life, but he said his startup’s growth this past year was also due to his leaving the tech bubble and immersing himself in more normal communities, a few days at a time.
The biggest tech companies aren’t going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring. Apple’s flying-saucer-shaped campus is not going to zoom away. Google is still absorbing ever more office space in San Jose and San Francisco.
New founders are still coming to town.
But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27 percent from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7 percent, a number not seen in a decade.
Though prices had dropped only slightly, Zillow reported more homes for sale in San Francisco than a year ago. For more than a month last year, 90 percent of the searches involving San Francisco on moveBuddha were for people moving out.
Twitter, Yelp, Airbnb and Dropbox have tried to sublease some of their San Francisco office space. Pinterest, which has one of the most iconic offices in town, paid $90 million to break a lease for a site where it planned to expand. And companies like Twitter and Facebook have announced “work from home forever” plans.
“Moving into a $1.3 million house that we saw only on video for 20 minutes and said yes,” wrote Mike Rothermel, a designer at Cisco who moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado, last summer. “It’s a mansion compared to SF for the same money.”
The amount of room they have felt surreal after various Bay Area apartments. He told me they have so much counter space, they can keep appliances like the food processor in the kitchen itself.
And then the people around them—neighbors—started doing something strange. They brought cinnamons rolls and handwritten welcome notes.
Wait, No Income Tax?
“We’re selling our house and moving out of SF. Where should we go and why?” Justin Kan, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Twitch, asked on Twitter in August.
Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of software company Palantir, which moved from Palo Alto to Denver, wrote back: “Come to Austin with us. Growing tech ecosystem and Texas is the best place to make a stand together for a free society.”
Also: no state income taxes.
Austin, population 1 million and the Texas city most would say is closest in spirit to the Bay Area, has long had a healthy tech industry. Computer giant Dell is based nearby. The University of Texas is one of the top public colleges in the country. And the music scene is eclectic and creative.
Now the local tech industry is rapidly expanding. Apple is opening a $1 billion, 133-acre campus. Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook have all either expanded their footprints in Austin or have plans to. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and one of the two richest men in the world, said he had moved to Texas. Startup investor money is arriving, too: The investors at 8VC and Breyer Capital opened Austin offices last year.
Some of the favorite gurus of tech workers are already there, like Tim Ferriss, life-hacker, who left for Austin in 2017, and Ryan Holiday, whose writing about stoicism is influential among the startup set.
Sahin Boydas, the founder of a remote-work startup who had lived in San Francisco and its suburbs over the last decade, saw all of that. He looked at his wife and two young children, working and learning from home while crammed into a Cupertino rental that had seen better days. Much of the late summer, the air was full of smoke from wildfires. For days, electricity would go in and out at his house.
“You start to feel stupid,” said Boydas, who is 37. “I can understand the 1 percent rich people, the very top investors and entrepreneurs, they can be happy there.”
So he and his family moved to Austin. For the same price as their three-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, they have a five-bedroom home on an acre of land. For the first time, Boydas has outdoor space. He just acquired two rabbits for his children. Sure, it’s (very) hot, but he’s ready for it.
“We’re going to get a cat and a dog,” he said. “We could never do that before.”
And it’s not just the cost of rent that is lower—the water bill is lower; the trash bill is lower; the cost of a family dinner at a restaurant has fallen significantly. Boydas said he hadn’t even known about the taxes.
“I run payroll for myself, and when I saw zero, I called the accountant like there’s an error—there’s no tax line here,” he said. “And they were like, ‘Yeah there’s no tax.’”
Keyan Karimi, a start-up investor who recently fled San Francisco, in Savannah, Ga., on Dec. 18, 2020. “I had no idea how much was going on here,” Karimi said of Savannah. (Stephen B. Morton/The New York Times)
Nevermind the Mosquitoes
“Ok guys hear me out, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami,” tweeted Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund, which invests in startups.
The mayor of Miami wrote back last month: “How can I help?”
Now there is a very vocal Miami faction, led by a few venture capital influencers, trying to tweet the city’s startup world into existence.
The San Francisco exodus means the talent and money of newly remote tech workers are up for grabs. And it’s not just the mayor of Miami trying to lure them in.
Topeka, Kansas, started Choose Topeka, which will reimburse new workers $10,000 for the first year of rent or $15,000 if they buy a home. Tulsa, Oklahoma, will pay you $10,000 to move there. The nation of Estonia has a new residency program just for digital nomads.
A program in Savannah, Georgia, will reimburse remote workers $2,000 for the move there, and the city has created various social activities to introduce the newcomers to one another and to locals.
“We try to make the transition easy,” said Jennifer Bonnett, vice president of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Savannah Economic Development Authority, whose program started in June.
Keyan Karimi, 29 and a startup investor, took Savannah’s invitation to move there (though he didn’t ask for the reimbursement).
Seeing the inequality of billionaires in San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood and the homeless camps down the hill ground on him. So Karimi went home to his parents house in Atlanta to ride out some of the pandemic. Then he detected something strange. The city he thought was boring had gotten pretty interesting. Or maybe he had just never noticed before.
“I had no idea how much was going on here. I was sort of myopic,” he said, pausing and correcting himself: “No, I was arrogant.”
Karimi started looking at Zillow and studying the Southern cities he had ignored. He likes old houses and wants to fix one up. Savannah has a lot of those. So just a few months after leaving his $4,000-a-month one-bedroom in San Francisco, he’s working with the local business development group to put together a maritime innovation center in Savannah to invest in and guide shipping and logistics startups. He bought one of those old houses.
Savannah has one of the largest ports in the country. “No one knows that,” Karimi said. “I figure we can do something with that.”
The only downside is mosquitoes, he said. “I get eaten alive.”
There are 33,000 members in the Facebook group Leaving California and 51,000 in its sister group, Life After California. People post pictures of moving trucks and links to Zillow listings in new cities.
The founder of both groups, Terry Gilliam, is planning to take members on a house-hunting road trip through eastern Tennessee this spring with stops in popular post-San Francisco destinations. One tour will be Chattanooga, Knoxville and Johnson City.
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,” Gilliam said.
Gilliam, who met his wife when they worked at a Bay Area Chili’s restaurant, said she wouldn’t let the family move yet. And so the Pied Piper of the California-bashing Facebook community is still in Fremont, on the eastern end of Silicon Valley.
The Gang’s All ... Here Now
“People always get pissed at me when they hear birds in my Zoom,” said Ed Zaydelman, a longtime leader in San Francisco’s Burning Man community (and former New York City club promoter), who is forming an entrepreneur community in Costa Rica.
“And I say, ‘Come join.’”
If San Francisco of the 2010s proved anything, it’s the power of proximity. Entrepreneurs could find a dozen startup pitch competitions every week within walking distance. If they left a big tech company, there were startups eager to hire, and if a startup failed, there was always another.
They could live jammed into a rambling Victorian with fellow nerds who—thanks to the popularity of polyamory—were having a lot of sex. More money was made faster in the Bay Area by fewer people than at any other time in American history.
No one leaving the city is arguing that a culture of innovation is going to spring up over Zoom. So some are trying to recreate it. They are getting into property development, building luxury tiny-home compounds and taking over big, funky houses in old resort towns.
“All these people want to do is this live-on-the-land stuff, but it’s not as easy as people think,” Zaydelman said.
He calls his new development company Nookleo, and he is building five tiny-home communities for remote workers. The little houses cost between $30,000 and $40,000. Each compound has four to six homes, a small organic farm, a yoga deck, a swimming pool and a kitchen clubhouse. Two clusters are already underway in Costa Rica, with Mexico and Portugal next.
In Puerto Rico, Gillian Morris, founder of travel app Hitlist, is also recruiting. Her San Francisco breaking point came after her roommate was attacked on their street, and she did a sort of gut check of herself over whether the street scenes and feeling of danger were worth the high rent. She moved to San Juan in 2019, even though it also has a crime problem. But now she lives in a huge house in the middle of the city.
“I have 12 people leaving San Francisco over the next three months to join a co-living community I set up,” she said. “It’s amazing here.”
And for the Baja-leaning, there is Bear Kittay, a co-founder of Good Money, an online banking platform. Now Kittay, another longtime fixture of the Burning Man festival turned developer, is building a property for the new digital nomads.
“The things that make this city ill are not within my control to change,” he said of San Francisco. “A lot of people are choosing to go to places where there’s opportunity, and maybe it’s a place that is more conservative and there can be an integration of dialogue. Or a place where they can live closer to nature. That’s what we’re doing.”
Nikil Viswanathan, who co-founded blockchain startup Alchemy, recently fled San Francisco. He said that there was no reason anymore for him or his colleagues to be there, and that he had always wanted to live on the beach. So now he does, in San Diego.
But the expats still find one another. Not long ago, he stumbled on a cluster at a party.
“I knew it was an SF crew because when I walked in because they had the full dual monitor with the ergonomic keyboard on a standing desk,” Viswanathan said, adding that conversation revolved around the lower cost of living. “One of the SF guys was like: ‘I just had a burrito for $6. It was amazing.’”
The last burrito he had in San Francisco cost $15.
They Won’t Necessarily Be Missed
Longtime Bay Area residents may well say good riddance to people like Viswanathan. People who distrusted the young newcomers from the start will say this change is a good thing. Hasn’t this steep growth in wealth and population in a tiny geography always seemed unsustainable?
These tech workers came like a whirlwind. Virtually every community from Morgan Hill to Marin County has fought the rise of new housing for the arrivals of the last decade. Maybe spreading the tech talent around America is smart.
Locals have also seen this play before. Moving trucks come to take a generation of tech ambition away, and a few years later moving trucks return with new dreamers and new ambitions.
After the dot-com bust in 2001, there were fallow years before the latest, long-lasting boom—just as there were fallow years after the PC industry consolidated a decade earlier. That led to the dot-com boom. It is the circle of life in the Bay Area.
And those who are staying are digging in. “When 12 friends left, it felt like powerlessness,” said Diana Helmuth, a 32-year-old writer and marketer in Oakland. “Like these forces were too big. The forces of the world felt too big.”
Now, though, she is hardening toward those who say life is better somewhere else and were in town only for a job. “I say, ‘Great, goodbye, have a great time somewhere else.’”
Copyright 2021 The New York Times Company
You can’t beat the weather in California! Plus, you can be a the beach one moment and skiing 4 hours later. What’s more, Democrats run the state house, senate and Governors office. Heck, Democrats run the whole state! It’s almost a socialist utopia, so why in the world would anyone want to leave?
Reading the examples of the newer tech people here featuring the typical gross ignorance of so much of the rest of the world, the like-speak, and all the rest make me groan again for how badly things have gone in California, not just in San Francisco. That ignorance includes that of how much growth and related concerns have mushroomed if not exploded in Austin years before the uptick in Californians moving there that’s in recent news. More importantly, as described already in a Times article published some time ago about IPO beneficiaries relocating, they’re threatening to do (add) to Austin what they have done to San Francisco already.
Both articles in the Times have plenty, plenty of comments about the moves, and particularly about that San Francisco repeating itself.
We left CA 2 years ago. We were fed up with the traffic, lack of services and the competition for resources – roads, restaurants, parking, whatever. And do not get me started talking about income and property taxes.
We moved to a lower taxed state and are super happy. I work remotely, and my partner is retired. We gave up 24×7 sunshine, but in exchange, our regular bills are lower. We pay between 8 and 10 cents a kilowatt. Our water bill is $25 a month. Our unlimited garbage bill is $70 a quarter.
This year, 2021, our property taxes were reduced by about 20%, and our electric rate by a very very modest .02%. I will take any reduction I can get.
And, we live spitting distance to a big river, with a bike trail.
And, legislature is part time, 3 months a year.
The tech industry pushed generations of San José locals out of the area and replaced them with tech employees, scammers… The life in San José was higher quality before these tech people were fully here. The last 15 years have been the worst. Thank you Coronavirus and thank you God! ? I know you are reordering the world, and you are not done! I told you all from the beginning many were going to die from this pandemic and this will continue. Break Google and Facebook up! Bye tech people ? we won’t miss you!
> What is going to explode is the exodus of business because the CA Supreme Court just ruled that the ABC tests regarding contractors and employees are retroactive.
Hooray! More free money!
The more I study the behavior of progressives, the more convinced I am that their DNA is the same as primitive foragers.
They have no fundamental concept of time or money, and think that they should be get anything they want by foraging in the forest.
Finding something in the pockets of rich people, businesses, or the government welfare bureaucracy is just like finding it in the forest. It’s FREE!
> We moved to a lower taxed state and are super happy.
Your gloating isn’t making people in California feel any better.
They’re likely to hunt you down and live next to you.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-new-corporate-tyranny
Cynthia R.: Yes, the overcrowding is noticeable — crowding and LINES everywhere.
Attending it is the heightened stress level, and with degradation, worse behavior.
I noticed the difference long ago on a road trip north. Once to Grants Pass, it was noticeably less stressful, then much farther north, much less. It was in reverse on the way back, with the stress (and some crowding) up a bit to where it was noticed in Grants Pass, a warning of what was to come. (The crowding and queues and stress are to be found also, for example, in Dallas with the much greater growth that has happened in recent years, including more cars on the roads and worse driving.)
And to think there are density advocates that in effect want much more (worse).
Fexxnist: The latest tech (Internet, Google era, more toward southern Peninsula than Santa Clara and Sunnyvale plus Cupertino and some Peninsula activity) is worse than the older tech, which already overran the place by the Eighties (cycle failures at Central & Lawrence Expwys) and included startup jackpot striving.
It’s worse now, with true dirtbag and self-centered, even psychopathological or amoral behavior, and bigger, worse hordes than ever, social-failure Millennials in huge numbers, included. (Pillars of their San Francisco neighborhoods they are not, to say the least.) Does San Jose really want to be like Amazon in Seattle, or tech in San Francisco?
The “players” and so many of the contestants or (more politically in tune) participants you can call boom-town rats, gold seekers or diggers, or another suitable term, carpetbaggers. And they think they put the South Bay and the residents on the map and bless the ground on which they walk, if pressed.
This, while their behavior and lack of basic geography or knowledge of major cities outside California, for example, is appalling.
Real paradise was lost by the 1980s in the South Bay, but the Fall hasn’t ended.
S. J. Kulak: Michael Lind — notable again, public interest Progressive (old, capital P) approach, included (what lefties have somewhat wanted with internet service providers, incidentally).
But there’s more. Consider the two well-known forms of a post-war term viewed positively by many through the earlier 1960s, but viewed negatively before today’s Big Tech, and consider what the term can convey now:
Technocrat(s); Technocracy
Big Tech is enmeshing itself with Obamaites and Biden people, Dem DC people.
We’ll be giving them our money in other ways for other things before too long, and it’s not just governments everywhere using Amazon to purchase their supplies and even do shipping later.
The same goes for state and local government.
It’s not the Beatles:
https://weblogibc-co.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/The_Four_The_Hidden_DNA_of_Amazon.pdf
What I wrote is disjunct, which may have been a fault.
Michael Lind has a long history, and also of note there is the old capital-P desire to regulate telecommunications (telephone and telegraph) as well as other businesses “affected with the public interest” thus justifying regulation. In plainer language by today’s liberals, it’s seeing a number of industries or businesses as public utilities. (The harder-core wanted such businesses taken over by government.)
In an earlier time, bigger faith in government post-war included the well-schooled technocrats who knew best and would solve all our problems from government posts.
That leads us (that part maybe not revealing itself overtly) to Big Tech or Big Data today, with cruder and uglier characteristics. Tech lobbying already is well-known as well as forays by tech into government. There’s a good deal of lobbying by Amazon and others. There are also people from these big tech companies who have worked with and in the Obama administration and with other Democrat heavyweights. Imagine the power the big four companies have now and what they could and might do when more well-enmeshed, or embedded, into government.
Plenty of liberals, especially to the farther left, are aware of this.
https://prospect.org/power/biden-stiff-arming-big-tech-would-be-good-politics-policy/
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-tech-biden-insight/big-techs-stealth-push-to-influence-the-biden-administration-idUSKBN28V170
And in our times state and local governments often are an afterthought to many, but these can be swayed, too, of course.
Mr Before,
My attempt to post these items was an attempt to show that both sides are waking up to the fact the US is broken. And everything is broken. Even a crazy Ron Paul door to door walker like myself has to eventually come to the realization that principles design for a agrarian county of highly independent population of 3.5M is far far different than a country of 330M atomized, alienated, obedient subjects grinding out 10 days a month to fund the most deadly and out of control military know to man kind.
Voting doesn’t work.
Rights outlined in the constitution are pulled apart on the daily and the few government powers stitched together in it are multiplied and fortified.
The IRS has global reach, but almost nothing we pay taxes on helps people or is useful. Even social security is a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, who are disproportionally richer. Now the FTB wants to put in wealth taxes and follow you around the country, for what? Better roads, cleaner parks, no. Pensions and salaries to pay people that fail you and your kids every day.
And now the veil is off, we are prisoners in our own homes, businesses arbitrarily shut down, kids locked out of schools, and the US passport is now almost worthless. Why, because science? There is no science that said any of this worked when they started.
This is not a Dem vs GOP thing, or a white vs non-white thing, or a battle of the sexes. This is the government putting its boot on your neck and there is NOTHING you can do about it and there NOTHING is getting better as a trade off.
Things are only getting worse for you and that will accelerate. If you’re not digging tunnels out of here, I have no sympathy for you.
Esteven, excessive lobbying if not a constitutional act it is a act against public policy. This is particularly true when this excessive lobbying has resulted in Sam Liccardo becoming the advocate of Google granting tax breaks and other favors. It is an act of public policy when this excessive lobbying has resulted in big time stratification forcing locals out of the homes their families had for generations due to high cost of living. It is an act of public policy when more disadvantaged local families moved to Modesto, Merced…and now engage in super commuting weekly or even daily. Others have to live with relatives here in San José during the week and go back to their families during the weekend to cheaper cities and countries (rent, home ownership). This is the tremendous harm the tech industry has caused to San Jose and the Bay Area. The economic boom has been for the affluent and those coming to the US under the “world talent” idea. This “world talen” idea has been used by Indian CEOs even in the senior care industry. It appears people need to be world talented to change diapers and assist seniors with simple tasks. Then they can apply for green card and eventually citizenship. Meanwhile, the “non talented” farm workers have to be forever the undocumented and unwanted person in this country. I personally know few Indian CEO engaging in this behavior and reported one to the SEC. These are the people who engage in excessive lobbying. All these behavior are against public policy. It favors foreigners at the expense of the local people. All of the above are experiences I have personally witnessed…
You think you want to Texit?
I give Texas 5 years before it’s the toilet bowl that is California.
If you’re gonna move, make it count.
Canada has a great future, keep in mind these prices are less than 75000 Canadian. You never know, you live there long enough and they may give you a passport. Certainly if you are a GOPer you may even qualify for asylum.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/304-Shaw-St-Herbert-SK-S0H-2A0/2080842092_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/214-3rd-St-N-Cabri-SK-S0N-0J0/2076962188_zpid/
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/406-Dufferin-St-Govan-SK-S0G-1Z0/2083363934_zpid/
Alberta is pretty nice!
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/222-1st-Ave-N-Champion-AB-T0L-0R0/2087437920_zpid/
Why pay for thermogenic therapy, just go hang out in your back yard for 20 minutes a day and the fat will literally peal off!
Anybody have a suggestion on how I can convince my wife to want to buy something up in Canada, can’t get her on board yet.
Bill Gates now owns the largest portfolio of farm land in the country.
“Gates’ portfolio comprises about 242,000 acres of farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across 19 states”
hahahahaha
Google, Amazon, Facebook won’t be far behind.
Farmland and po’ people housing, that’s the future son. Plastics and tech are yesterday’s news.
They will carve you out 400 sqft cell, pipe you in food they grew, prep’ed and delivered, and healthcare will be “telemedicine” resulting in the writing of pharmaceuticals scripts delivered via drones. They will charge the government $60K/subject annually to cultivate you like cows with built in 3% increases yoy.
You will own nothing! and be happy!
You got what you are all begging for, you certainly have earned it!
Freedom is a failed experiment.
I’m not depressed, I am just calling like I see it. Actually, I have never felt better and more clear on what needs to be done.
While not in Bill Gates’ league, I too have farm land enough for my family and friends to live off of, two wells, propane generators with timber acreage. People up here sell their cows and pigs by the quarter and most of the energy is hydro.
I also dig tunnels out of the US as my full time job, with bank accounts and property in multiple non-western countries. 2021 will be my biggest year in evacuating my wealth from the cancer that is the US dollar, all legally of course.
Universal freedom is a failed experiment on people like you and those who beg for their own enslavement to the rich/government, which is now clear are the same entity. Aristotle was right about slavery, I just hope your masters treat you well. I will pray that they do.
Exactly SJ Kulak, and this is why is so important that Corporations are defined as corporations not people. But this is where the extreme republicans come to play since they do not want corporations, business to pay their fair share of taxes. Those on far left are the same and even in support of excessive lobbying. In the last election in California, it was shown far left and far right have the same goal in favor or supporting corporations not the people. The vote of Californians in the different local and state measures favored corporations not the people. I am sure Trump was proud of Californians’ vote. This is another task for the centric Republicans and Democrats.
“This is another task for the centric Republicans and Democrats.”
I wish you luck, but the masses are so psychologically damaged by the 20 years of gaslighting IV’ed into their brain, I’m not sure you have a chance. I’ll take the selfish way out and continue to shadow our overseers strategy and min/max my freedoms with trade-offs, albeit hiding in cracks and crevices. Pigs get fat but hogs get slaughtered.
Once you win and I hope you do, you can line me up next to Bill and friends, but I generously give you one chance in a hundred, so I’m happy with were my chips lie.
I think maybe the Enlightenment was a false god, the best we can hope for is Christendom. Even you still cling to the idea that there is a difference between Biden, Harris, Trump, and McConnell. There isn’t, that is all theatre. About 100 people own 330M people without much effort in disguising it.
My point was that Big Tech is getting even bigger by enmeshing themselves in government. I mentioned lobbying, too, but that doesn’t indicate they should be treated differently than other lobbyists. On the other hand, tech’s embedding itself into government, today where it can be regulated, tomorrow in procurement, is a separate, bigger issue (while the lobbying and campaign contributions continue).
In addition to procurement, there are IT contracts to be won (as with the Pentagon and the Amazon experience already) and putting governmentd data (state and local, not just federal) onto “the cloud,” meaning remote storage, namely Big Tech’s or Big Data’s storage. And you thought they were learning about you and “monetizing” you and your life already.
Of course wealth taxes are coming, with other things out of “necessity” when government employee retirement costs rise. Up to recently it was just Wolff and maybe some others in Boston chattering about it, but now Warren has mentioned it for the feds, and Bonta proposed it locally for the state, including exit tax provisions they’ll try unless prevented by courts.
What can be worse, and aid social engineering, and boost Big Tech’s profits? A project like what’s in China, that’s what. (No hukou system yet, at least, but the tech as well as the “social credit scores,” they’d try it.) Western countries, including English countries, do it? Yes. The UK has so many cameras they’re in movies sometimes now, the hero having to avoid the cameras. If tech can lobby for it here in the States, sure. Just pieces of it (in troubled metro areas, for starters) mean big bucks.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/953515627
Mr. Before,
I think this is where the “vaccine” comes into play.
An mRNA “vaccine” does not trigger your body to manufacture it’s own antibodies, it injects itself into the DNA->RNA-protein process chain and constructs proteins that neutralize the ill effects of the virus. In a world of ever mutating and challenging viruses, such as AIDS, SARS, etc. that may the most effective and prudent approach.
But it’s like the no repair policy on iphones, your body isn’t fixing itself. And the mRNA injections will naturally evolve into a subscription service. They won’t “social credit score” initially, what they will do is let the masses force them to deny anyone who they consider deployable.
Why give a white supremist the juice jab? That kind of thing.
And of course if you don’t have the latest update, you won’t be able to attend classes, travel, etc.
I think vaccinations as we knew them are history or soon to be history, like you really won’t own your own phone, you won’t have the ability to kickstart your own immune system.
OMG ? you guys are re-directing the main subject, so let’s refocus! F@ck u Google, F@ck u tech industry! Leave The Bay Area NOW!
Interestingly, this exact article appeared in the NY Times a few days ago, and similar articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times and other places. The message seems to be “Oh No, People are LEAVING,” and also, separately, “We must continue building tall rental buildings because people will be back!” One wonders, who is so upset? Developers? Presumably not tech CEOs because, as noted, a large portion of company talent can work elsewhere. The whole thing is kind of silly because, if people really leave, then there won’t be so much of a housing crisis. Rents will be lower (oh those poor poor apartment owners …), schools will be less crowded, etc., so those folks remaining, though perhaps making less, will have more space and improved opportunity. But. Everyone manages to forget a few things. There are at least 5 major universities in the SF Bay area (UCB, Stanford, UCSF, UCSB, U of Santa Clara, not to mention the Cal State schools). Even if digital tech companies disappear (digital tech, BTW, is approaching becoming “mature”) it will only be a few years before brand new opportunities will sprout from those universities – my guess would be climate change mitigation will be big. Bye bye silicon, bye bye 0 or 1, and “Hello!” whatever comes next. Color me supremely unworried about “everybody” (whoever they are) “leaving.”
> NOPE no free money, it was EARNED by WORK.
They agreed to work for the money they were paid.
They weren’t slaves.
The extra money the corrupt courts are going to force businesses to pay is FREE MONEY to the recipients.
It’s not just tech leaving the S.F., the Bay Area, the state, just tech making the news recently. What’s more important is what’s related, namely WHY they are leaving. When people retire, nowadays they routinely leave out of state, not to the Foothills, Central Coast, other getaway places, or just to the Central Valley. (If you had family in the Bay Area and in Southern California, Fresno would be great.) Again, WHY? (Same for families leaving.)
It includes cultural and political attitudes that have made push factors outdo pull factors elsewhere often, and this New York Times article and the one preceding it (Uber, Lyft, etc., IPO beneficiaries among them going to Austin) not only degrading the culture where they go, but bringing the other baggage with them, doing to those places what they did to San Francisco as well as to the Valley, that some still hope for San Jose’s western downtown (like Amazon in Seattle, too).
Many were already sad to see the valley become like L.A. and Orange County by the 1980s, but now there’s the later tech personae, amorality, and gold rush phenomenon especially while it’s hot.
S. J. Kulak,
Something related to it is possible if Medicare for All becomes infected (yes, pun intended, but the metaphor once again is correct) by evolving “progressive” politics. Some of us thought of it back in 1992 with the possibility of HillaryCare (fascist HMO-based “alliances” then, which made the full-public activists angry). Namely, you could still get health care, but you’d have to pay for it yourself if injury arose from non-PC activities, for example. That’s in addition to politicizing the concept of “futility” and withholding health care to the old or very ill arbitrarily.
“Your Medicare [or citizen ID] card and voter registration card, please.”
(Of course, by then your voter registration will be on the gov ID card or record in the Cloud identified by your thumb print or iris scan. heh)
Post-1992, actually, after the 1992 elections
> Actually these companies were caught doing anti-trust hiring practices just prior to the shift to contractors The story is titled “ Apple, Google, others settle antipoaching lawsuit . . . .
Didn’t I tell you that Google, Facebook, Twitter and the tech oligopoly were monopolists and deserve to be busted up?
You never listen to me. You treat me like I’m some tiny little inconsequential pissant.
Hopefully, Parler’s lawyers will smash Big Silicon Valley Tech like a pinata and LOTS of loot will spill out to redress and repair some of the horrific damage that the techies have done to the freedom and dignity and rights of so many Americans.
Mr Bubble,
And Apple. I remember this back in the Jobs’ days. I applaud any entrepreneur or business person that fights in the market and wins, but ALOT of these bay area creeps resort to rent-seeking and use their position to extract cheaper labor and BS “government” incentives and gravy trains. Elon Musk with EV and solar incentives that push a broken technology, Bezos and the CIA data warehousing BS, and of course all the BS the banks pull.
From where I sit, Apple/Google are the biggest threat as they control the screen that dominates so many people’s face, with Bill Gates a close second because he thinks he can, and has in many ways, shape the future of the human race. Even if he has good intentions, it is too easy to deceive yourself to have so much power in one persons hands.
A rent seeker calling out rent seekers. Classic.
collecting rent and rent seeking are not the same thing
had I had the power to constrain housing supply, sure
had I kept San Jose property after rent control knowing rents would only go up faster, sure
i have no power to control the market to extract profit, i offer my product in the equilibrium set by the participants
You don’t know what I offer or where I offer it or for how much I offer it.
And other than my vacation rentals, which are absolutely fabulous, nothing I rent is luxury
But what I do rent long term is clean, safe, and convenient to jobs and education at about 20% the MHH Income.
My conscious is very clear on this and what I do with my money and time is among the most noble pursuit one can endeavor on.
median household income idiot
and again you dont know what the hell you ramble on about
i have many units that rent for 6000 a year