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Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 9y agoSecond sentence starts with: > We have a summer home ... Is this common for people living inside the tech bubble?
- maxxxxx 9y agoNo. It's common for rich guys. It has nothing to do with tech.
- pault 9y agoSteve Blank isn't common: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank
- tomrod 9y agoAh, that makes sense. Thanks pault.
- bergie 9y agoDepends where you are. In Nordic countries it is pretty common. A lakeside cottage was quite affordable in the 60s so most middle-class families would have one, now often shared by a few families of grandchildren.
- atomical 9y agoHe's worth $2.5 billion.
- ghaff 9y agoNothing to do with the tech bubble except insofar as there are a lot of good salaries there these days. It probably depends on the area but in my experience on the east coast it's fairly unremarkable for a family to have a ski condo or beach house.
- lagadu 9y agoNothing to do with tech, I'd say it's mostly an mid/upper class trait; at least in Europe.
- rmason 9y agoWhen I was growing up here in Michigan it wasn't at all unusual for a worker on the line at GM, Ford or Chrysler to have a summer cottage up north on a lake. Now it's extremely rare for even two income upper middle class couples to do the same. A lot of those cottages are now owned by people from out of state who visit a few weeks per year. Folks who live the rest of the year in NYC, Chicago and Boston.
- PeterisP 9y agoWith the real estate trends being the way they are, that may be more affordable as you think. Real estate in the big cities is sky high, but as people are moving there, other places are getting more and more empty and thus cheaper. Buying a summer house for me would cost ~5% of my main residence cost, and it'd likely be larger. A fun anecdote from a local insurance company handling rural areas - they insure houses for no more than the market value (obviously, so there'd be no motivation for arson), and if a house gets a major fire, that doesn't cover the replacement value (cost of repairs or reconstruction), not even close. So a surprisingly common solution/consequence after an insured fire is simply buying a comparable close-by house+land for the insurance money, since that's much cheaper than rebuilding the original one. Obviously that's not feasible in the long term, but those areas can go on for decades without needing to build a single new house as there are much more houses than families due to people moving to cities.
- quickthrower2 9y agoThat's negative land value. Doesn't bode well for investment though, but more of a depreciating luxury like a weekend car.
- maxxxxx 9y agoHe should rename this to "Working outside the millionaire bubble". Plenty of people in tech feel the squeeze too. What it comes down to is that a lot of people with money have lost touch with the rest.
- samstave 9y agoOh but dont worry - tens of thousands of tech millionaires will be heading up to burning man to show just how in touch with humanity they are. /s-ish
- vostok 9y ago> He should rename this to "Working outside the millionaire bubble". Calling it a tech bubble or even a millionaire bubble is bordering on offensive. Sure I'm probably in a tech bubble and I'm probably in a millionaire bubble, but I'm not in Steve Blank's billionaire bubble. Compared to Steve Blank, I'm hurting financially. > What it comes down to is that a lot of people with money have lost touch with the rest. Have people with money ever been in touch with the rest?
- maxxxxx 9y ago"Sure I'm probably in a tech bubble and I'm probably in a millionaire bubble, but I'm not in Steve Blank's billionaire bubble. Compared to Steve Blank, I'm hurting financially." That's exactly my point. He is trying to bond with all tech people but most of us make OK money but we are far from his position in life. Reminds me a little of polticians talking "folksy" while they probably never ever interact with working class.
- vostok 9y agoYeah I agree with you. I'm sure he interacts with the working class, but let's not lose sight of the fact that he has as much money as 2500 millionaires.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 9y agoPeople in tech rarely feel the squeeze to the degree that those in service / manufacturing industries do.
- fiatjaf 9y agoThere are other bubbles.
- whipoodle 9y agoNo need to leave SF to escape the tech bubble and encounter those being left behind. Look closer.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoAgreed.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoLeaving SF means that the cultural and societal environment is different. Going to places like these means that the technology, money, hope, and jobs are physically far away and beyond livable reach; places where people wonder why anyone would ever live in SF.
- 60654 9y ago> Most people aren’t in tech or law or teaching in universities; they fall solidly in what is called working-class. They work as electricians, carpenters, plumbers, in hospitals, restaurants, as clerks, office managers, farmers, etc. I'm surprised that he's surprised by this. Even in SV you can have a reality check, if you just deign to strike up a conversation with the cooks and the bus drivers and the janitors who work all around you. No need to take a road trip to the summer house to have this epiphany, just open your eyes.
- philsnow 9y agoThe author doesn't express surprise at this. The quotation and surrounding text are just a dispassionate description, probably intended for people (unlike the author) who rarely if ever step outside the sv bubble. Which part made you think this was an "epiphany" fit the author?
- trynewideas 9y agoHe's not surprised. The point is that SV culture is designed around intentionally obfuscating people who aren't in tech or law or academia behind apps and services. Yes, obviously, those people live and work in parts of SV, just like anywhere else. But SV is built around not having to see or interact them as human beings who have lives and problems outside of the narrowly scoped tasks people in the bubble hired them to perform. Thus the entire bubble metaphor that was the point of the article.
- JoshMnem 9y agoAdditional idea: do some volunteering outside of the tech industry.
- PeterisP 9y agoThe author expresses that they meet the people in a different context. Sure, you see bus drivers doing their job, but you're not talking with them about life while they're at the wheel. In the tech bubble, chances are that the cook and the bus driver and the janitor just works there - they don't live there (because they can't afford it), they don't go to diners and pubs there much, it's as if they live in a different society that just "visits" that world during work. In the semi-rural area, they were part of the same society, in the tech bubble they're two separate societies increasingly growing apart from each other.
- johngalt 9y agoBeing outside the tech bubble is hardly a desolate wasteland. Certainly many of you have friends and family outside of tech circles, and already know this. Tech is certainly a nice field filled with opportunity, more than many other professions at the moment, but there are often massive downturns in tech which make other careers suddenly seem much more compelling. Not to mention that no one asks if a 40 year old building engineer is still capable of being a building engineer.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoI can't take this kind of piece seriously anymore. The decrying of an out of touch elite is a cliche. This problem isn't getting any better because 1 it's a hard problem and 2 political gridlock keeps us from modernizing economic policy one way or another. Most the people in the tech bubble I know are keenly aware of their relative advantage. They want something done about income inequality. A lack of awareness is not the problem here.
- whipoodle 9y agoIt feels extremely cynical to me. How can you not open your eyes? Every time I visit SF I see people who are so obviously going through hard times. It's not only the people living a pastoral fantasy sipping phosphates at the soda jerk who are worth thinking about.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoEdit: I see that I didn't understand your comment actually, I agree. Privation is a rural/urban problem. I'm not sure you read my entire comment. As I said toward the bottom, income inequality is a serious concern to me. I'm from a rural community and the individual struggles I see there are very upsetting. But most people I talk to in tech are not in a bubble. They are aware of how hard it must be for people and want solutions. The problem is we have two roughly equally sized political factions with mutually exclusive ideas on how to solve it that are pretty hostile to compromise.
- ianai 9y agoI don't think it's the two sides that are the problem. They're symptoms of multiple problems. The voting system itself created a duopoly. One side of that duopoly has moved to extremes over the last 30+ years and dragged the other side with it. We need a way out of the two party situation.
- isostatic 9y agoThe US has no extreme in the mainstream political left - Clinton, Obama, even Sanders are no more extreme than Macron or Blair. You don't even have a Corbyn figure, let alone someone like Maduro.
- EmGoldstein2 9y agoThere are two main reasons for this: 1. Ever increasing regulatory burden (basically increasing government) 2. Ever increasing self-imposed diversity burden within corporations (few productive people dragging up a bunch of SJW redistributors)
- 1_2__4 9y agoReplace this with "coal bubble" in WV, "oil bubble" in SD, "Hollywood bubble" in LA, etc. etc. etc. or just title these "20-something learns there's a world outside their immediate environment and boy howdy is it different."
- quest88 9y agoSteve is well past his twenties.
- gammarator 9y agoSteve Blank is not 20.
- mythrwy 9y agoYes, but he is worth 20 something hundred million dollars. That kind of makes him a 20 something.
- tpallarino 9y agoGenuinely laughed out loud.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- HillaryBriss 9y agoBut today, Americans are less mobile ... some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on. this is what i think about every time a politician, journalist or economist says that the answer for all these workers is government funding for "job training."
- bmwe30is 9y ago>Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on. There's some texture and nuance to this statement. I remember on NPR, they interviewed a lady whom mentioned similar sentiments; her and her husband had built a family, worked in the blue-collar industry (precision machining) for decades, and now were losing their jobs. She also mentioned that they had been living in a small town for a long, long time. That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same. People are stuck on this idea of living and dying in the same city once they buy a home or have children. That just isn't the case anymore. Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).
- refurb 9y agoI'm also convinced that a willingness to relocate plays a huge role in upward mobility. In the past decade I've moved eight times, not always for a new job, but always for new opportunities. However, I do acknowledge that it's easy to say that as a young single person. Marriage and children make that a lot harder, but not impossible. I moved as a child a number of times. Maybe that's why I don't find it so hard to do as an adult?
- sidlls 9y agoMobility and a willingness to learn new skills in the context of an established citizen and family is entirely different from the context of an immigrant family in almost every case. Moving is generally very expensive, and proportionally more so for those with lower incomes. The "nomadic" lifestyle you mention actually isn't normal, even today.
- R_haterade 9y ago>That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same. How do we build any kind of community with so little permanence? If we can't bond with our neighbors, we become these empty, atomized husks floating from one economic opportunity to another. Put another way, how can a village raise a child if there's no village, no permanent-ness, and eventually none of the social accountability that communities enforce?
- throw-away-- 9y agoA counterpoint. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-the-myth-of-american-innocence https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-t...
- seshagiric 9y ago"....but it’s easy to see why they might feel as if no one in Washington is living their lives...." As an non-American I personally think this is why large number of working class voted for Trump, and something Clinton either missed or did not give importance to.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vostok 9y agoI don't think Trump lived a working class life before becoming president.
- ganoushoreilly 9y agoI don't think it was about that, it was about him being someone from outside the establishment that they perceive as being out of touch. I've still not met anyone that's pro trump and believes most of what he was promoting. Sadly the most common response I get is "I wasn't voting for Hillary, so I voted Trump". I truly believe these Americans feel they are are in desperate circumstances and someone from the outside that even acknowledged them, let alone claimed solutions, was bound to grab their attention.
- vostok 9y agoI feel like Trump is also pretty firmly part of the establishment. In my mind, the real reason people voted for him is that he said things that people were thinking. This seems to be something that nobody wants to admit.
- icebraining 9y agoThis seems to be something that nobody wants to admit. Lots of people have said that. Even Hillary Clinton - that's what the "deplorables" comment was all about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables#Speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables#Speech (both "halves" fit with what you're saying)
- jordache 9y agoew NE rural culture is so unappealing to me. I don't live in a tech bubble, but the Mtn West.. so much better.
- darod 9y agoI wonder how long it will take for this thought to fade from Steve's mind once he returns to SV. It's easy for people come to these realizations after getting outside of their comfort zone but just as easily return to the status quo. I think one of the biggest myths about tech in general is that it's here to help people. It's really not. It's job is to remove barriers to make workflows more efficient, typically to the detriment of people, as they generally are that barrier. Once a company gets a robot/computer to do what a person does it's next logical step is to layoff those workers. You don't have to go to your summer home to see people are having hard times. You just have to walk down Market Street.
- isostatic 9y agoBut this is a good thing. In our Delhi office, each elevator has an attendant who's sole job is to push the button of the floor you want. This means less space in the lift for passengers, and lifts being taken out of commission because there's nobody to push the button. Removing this job (by having the technology to allow passengers to select their floor themselves) means improvement for the users. The same applies to shop checkouts - I'd far rather go through an automated checkout rather than deal with a person at a till, faster and less distracting from what I'm doing. Same thing with buying things from amazon rather than going to a legacy shop, watching a movie on Netflix rather than renting a video from blockbuster, or returning library books to a computer rather than a person. The problem comes when those who lose the jobs lose out - the guy who's job is to push a button I can easilly push myself, or the taxi driver who's job vanishes when the computer does the driving instead. We deal with those issues by education (so people can do better jobs that aren't automated), and social safety nets. If a robot can do your job, it's a terrible job. You may need it with our current economic system, But that isn't a good thing.
- ghaff 9y agoSelf-service is a mixed bag. Yes, I like ATMs and Netflix (or Redbox). But I hate self-service at grocery stores especially if I'm buying produce etc. I'm not a big fan at home improvement stores much of the time either.
- bsaunder 9y agoThis is the use case for universal basic income. Its largely not their fault for their current economic situation. They played by the rules. They worked hard. If we could only remove the "necessity" of a job and the puritan shame of unemployment to live a moderate life of meager means. People should be encouraged to contribute to society not to simply "get a job".
- microcolonel 9y agoThe solution to some people getting played by the system surely isn't to play everyone even more by that same system. I figure UBI will look like it's succeeding for ~10-20 years, then we'll see what the real impact of it is (as people grow up with it). There's also little consensus on how comfortable the basic income should be; I get the impression that if it is too comfortable, you'd be a fool to work, if it's too uncomfortable, the bleeding hearts will call everyone a nazi until it's made too comfortable.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoUBI is welfare with a different name. The results will be the same. Some people will sit on their asses and never work a single day but the majority of the population would keep working. The extra money would become meaningless because prices would adjust to accommodate it. We have to keep in mind that you can't just create money and hand it out and make everyone rich. If everyone had 10x as much money prices would end up going up 10x. The supply of real goods you can use that money for hasn't changed. The huge increase in demand would lead to a supply crunch and much higher prices. The money we're giving out for UBI has to be taken from someone else. What UBI is calling for is wealth redistribution, something I'm in favor of. But people seem to think it's magic around here. If we pillaged the top 1% and distributed their wealth evenly the entire rest of the population would get close to a 100% raise. That's how filthy rich the top 1% are.
- GavinMcG 9y ago> The extra money would become meaningless because prices would adjust to accommodate it. That's not actually supported in the literature.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- humanrebar 9y ago> There isn’t an app to fix this. Well, we could make it socially important to make remote work possible. The geographic concentration of tech thought and culture has been at least partly intentional. Early internet culture seemed eager to do exactly the opposite. The inefficiencies of colocation were problems ripe for innovation. If tech workers could live in small towns more easily, they'll have middle-class-squeeze conversations with friends and family, not just overhear other people having these conversations at local shops when they visit.
- irq11 9y agoWe could also make it socially important to spread the tech industry across the US, instead of trying to cram everything in the eastern third of San Francisco.
- Animats 9y agoWell, we could make it socially important to make remote work possible. The trouble with remote work is that if everything you do goes in and out over a wire, much of it can probably be automated. Remember call centers? Phone support?
- peterwwillis 9y agoOne of the main reasons I don't live in SF is the conversation. The first time I visited, I heard tech talk in bars, cafes, on street corners. If I can't get a beer or a coffee or take a walk without hearing about work, it's not for me.
- base698 9y agoIt's not all about you Louise!
- asteli 9y agoI was on BART a few weeks ago and had two tech dudes strike up a conversation about JIRA directly across me, shouting over the din of rail noise. It can get obnoxious.
- quickthrower2 9y agoJIRA ... the bane of our lives!
- unknown_apostle 9y agoWorking class people are being subjected to ultra efficient hypercapitalism, as in Uber drivers discovering they worked for free when they need to purchase a new car. Meanwhile Wall Street has been bailed out 2 times in the last 15 years alone with monetary policy. How many people went to jail? (And they haven’t learned a thing, on the contrary and quite spectacularly so.) If you want to know where the tech bubble comes from, don’t think about the talent pool in SV. Think 2008 and central banks. It's not normal for investors to accept visionaries wasting endless billions for years on end. Except when the availability of capital appears infinite and risk appears almost non-existent. In contrast, a big group of people stagnate and even get squeezed. Not rich enough to enjoy the high life of the zero/negative yield world. Or to overcome decades of inflation. Not poor enough to just give up and go on food stamps. Ultimately, it’s not about a tech bubble. It’s about a credit cycle on steroids, held together with spit, rope and gum and massive moral hazard. Who gets access to the funny money first? And who will be left holding the bag?
- dvdhnt 9y agoYou've clearly articulated an ideal I've felt for over a year but couldn't convey completely. Thank you!
- koonsolo 9y agoThe whole credit card system in US is made to rip off "stupid" people, extremely so. Nobody writes about that, probably because everyone from US thinks it's normal, and nobody from the rest of the world knows about it. But that system is made to screw all the people who are not good at personal finances.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoIt's built to screw poor people. If the choice is between getting another credit card or losing your apartment you end up in a lot of debt.
- losteric 9y agoThe root cause of most American problems is poor public education. We're still over-emphasizing passing grades over effectively growing new American citizens... Personal finance is rarely offered and never mandatory, yet we collectively bare the burden of financial ignorance. The same applies to other subjects like statistics or civics.
- k__ 9y agowhich is good,so there are more people to sell to.
- alkonaut 9y agoAlso new note for 2017 is that "economic anxiety" doesn't mean "economic anxiety" anymore. Need a new term for that now.
- nitwit005 9y agoIt would be nice if "the problem" was simply that people lived in a bubble and didn't understand. That would be a relatively easily solvable problem, but this is not the case. Sure, people can be isolated from the experiences of others, but the overwhelming majority of us have friends and relatives working normal jobs. A lot of empathy does exist. Empathy alone does not lower the rent, or cause those "good jobs" to reappear.
- RealityNow 9y agoThe paradox of capitalism is that business interests (capital) are in direct opposition to workers' interests. Businesses are incentivized to reduce costs, which means paying workers as little as possible, squeezing as many hours out of them, and laying them off as soon as they're not needed. Sure everyday workers are sometimes the customers as well, but that's becoming less and less the case. Google and Facebook don't make their money off you, they make them from advertisers working on behalf of businesses. Real estate developers in Manhattan don't make money building affordable middle class housing (hence the non-existence of such developments), they make them off luxury high-rises targeting the wealthy. Combine that with technological advances and globalization allowing increasingly consolidated corporations to replace workers with robots/software and move jobs overseas, and the end result is that wealth is more concentrated, the economy is more concentrated (plutonomy), and your average Joe living in rural New England just doesn't matter as much to the vault-holders in an economic system where we only see each other as dollar signs. No amount of retraining or "bootstraps" is going to bring the jobs back. It's just not possible to compete with the corporations and their larger moats and bankrolls. The only option is to work for them, or perish. These corporations aren't building anymore satellite offices in rural areas or opening up to remote work (due in part to the increasingly competitive job market), so the only option is to move to expensive cities with chronic housing supply shortages. These rural areas are as economically useless to the wealthy elites who run the show as the homeless people camped outside their offices. Anybody who claims we're not ready for a UBI yet is living in a bubble.
- CPLX 9y ago> No amount of retraining or "bootstraps" is going to bring the jobs back. It's just not possible to compete with the corporations and their larger moats and bankrolls. This, frankly, is patent nonsense. And this sense of learned helplessness is a specifically American affliction. There really just isn't a reason why there can't be reasonably compensated manufacturing jobs, or why corporate and industrial policy can't help depressed rural areas. As anyone who's traveled across Germany or Switzerland is well aware. As a society we choose policies that concentrate wealth in this way. The point of view you're expressing -- that this is inevitable and unstoppable -- is not at all fact, but rather the product of decades of public relations by vested interests in this country.
- epx 9y agoI do this regularly - go to the countryside, sleep in a hotel of a very small city, take pictures of abandoned buildings in once-thriving communities that died because the railroad station no longer has passenger service, or because most people migrated to cities. I don't live in SV, but it does help to put life into perspective the same.
- foxhop 9y agoI work remote for Silicon Valley type companies but live in a location very similar to the author's New England vacation home. I try to buy locally and often joke that I'm slowly siphoning money out of the tech bubble and re-purposing it here. All joking aside many parts of this country are struggling and I think we need to come up with more local solutions.
- nibstwo 9y agoIf you feel guilty enjoying the product of your work, you were probably doing pointless zero-sum work that did not need to be done. It is fine to say you want other people to be economically empowered, but the amount of guilt flying around here is incredible. Why not apply the constraint of only doing things that actually benefit other real humans at the start of your career, and feel good when you end up being successful at whatever constrained but moral venture you undertake. Feeling guilty about it accomplishes nothing. We made the collective bargain to build a technological society, we cannot go back now. Fix the real problems and it won't feel dirty.
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- davidreiss 9y agoEven within the tech world. Most of the tech world exists outside the tech bubble. The tech bubble is concentrated around a few select cites.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago> It’s good to spend time outside the bubble I disagree. The only thing marginally good about being outside of the bubble is pulling up to a gas station and getting sandwiches, chips, candy and drinks for $4.32 total and being able to pay for it with a credit card without worrying about a $10 minimum. But if you've adopted celiac disease you are SOL.