9 ms·

Exodus of Silicon Valley

60 points by Reedx 6y ago

natrik 6y ago
This article reads like fiction with its emphasis on providing an exodus narrative, but this point stood out to me. >San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.
- hangonhn 6y ago
  I had the same reaction. It's nicely written but I don't know why I should believe its narrative anymore than any other ones. While the quote you cited sounds impactful, I don't understand the point of comparing those two numbers nor what inferences I should draw from it or how it makes this narrative more true than another. In the end, the piece just feels vacuous. It feels like a cheap imitation of some of PG's writings.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    If PG put his name in the byline, would you appreciate the piece more?
    - hangonhn 6y ago
      No. Why would that matter? My issue isn't who wrote it but rather its lack of any good arguments. It presents a narrative that the author tries to tie in with a Biblical story, which seems really superfluous and makes the whole piece feel very bombastic. PG's writings tend to be very "compact" and dense. The reason the comparison came to mind is that both writers are VCs and are talking about general trends in SV. Could be that I just prefer a certain style of writing.
gumby 6y ago
I first came to the Bay Area in the mid 80s, when Silicon Valley ended north of Menlo Park and San Francisco was an unrelated world, a residential city with people commuting south for the jobs, with needles on the street and homeless people crapping there too. By 89/90 when the tech boom collapsed, never to return (or so people said), the magazines were full of articles about how people were fleeing California, that the new world of modems would make remote work possible, and that would be the end. In other words, every decade the same article, over and over. Yawn. (Definitely there was a change in the late 90s when people came for the money rather than the sheer technical fun, but as that same impetus had produced SF in the first place (god rush of '49) it was hard to complain, even if it did change the culture for the worse. Sadly those people didn't all flee with the dot com crash nor the 2008 crisis. Well, we can't have everything.)
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Eloquent. Having lived through the exodus (I stayed) of the dot com crash, it feels a bit like that. Too many people trying to deny the reality that economics imposes on all things. It really does matter if you buy electricity for 25 cents a kilowatt hour and your net revenue of selling its work product is 20 cents you just can't keep that up. Like the Web 1.0 era, the Web 2.0 era has seen some pretty durable successes. Transactions over the medium are here to stay, they aren't "weird" any more. Your portal to technological offerings is not a "PC" any more, it is an increasingly obviously mislabeled "phone." Margins on communication "services" have been commoditized away and seem unlikely to ever return. I'm looking forward to the next thing, what ever it happens to be. The most fun is always the first third of a wave. The swell, the hint of powerful forces just under the surface waiting to be tapped, the anticipation of successfully getting enough ahead to start the adrenaline fueled ride. Never a dull moment in a place like this.
- aeternum 6y ago
  I hope the next thing is a renewed focus on the physical world. For the most part, humanity took a break from innovating significantly on transportation, housing, cities, biotech. Our ability to model and simulate the real world has improved exponentially, I'm optimistic about what can come from that. Lots of great minds have been focused purely on software but perhaps the shift back to hardware / physical things is starting.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Some are earlier than others (biotech is already a hot investment market, for instance), but I think we've been there for awhile. Just look at all the self-driving firms, car manufacturers, airbnb/housing startups, and agtech around the Bay.
  - Karrot_Kream 6y ago
    Indeed. For all the AI hype, scientific computing has made huge strides forward. Improvements in graphics cards and parallel algorithms have made large simulations and models of all sorts, not just deep learning, much more computationally feasible. I'm very excited to see the applications of all this new scientific computing.
Lammy 6y ago
> It’s time to build, yes. But it’s also time to leave. I wonder if the author intends to lead the charge, or if they might be staying? :)
loosetypes 6y ago
> San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus. Wow.
- grecy 6y ago
  That is more-or-less the case in all developed countries, it's just not talked about. (My friend works in addictions here in BC, Canada)
  - troelsSteegin 6y ago
    My estimate is that in the US COVID-19 will cause roughly 3X the number of drug overdose deaths this year. The drug overdose deaths from 2018 are about 67K, as reported by the CDC [0]. The US is at about 240K COVID-19 deaths, increasing about 1K/day. Of course, the US mortality from COVID-19 is an exception wrt other developed countries. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html
  - topkai22 6y ago
    That's not true in the US- CDC statistics are ~72000 OD deaths for 2019. The worst numbers I've seen are a 50% increase in OD deaths, so we can probably expect the 2020 numbers to come in at 105,000 or less. There are 220,000 COVID-19 deaths nationwide in the US so far. Horrible numbers eithier way, but there has NOT 4x the number of deaths from drug overdose in the US compared to COVID-19.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    I was intrigued by this statement, and, while it is true for San Francisco in particular, it is (despite rapid increases in recent years) unlikely to be even true for the US as a whole, let alone for other developed country. In fact, in the US alone, more people died of COVID-19 this year than died in the entire world of overdoses in 2017: https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use#deaths-from-substance-use-disorders https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use#deaths-from-substance-us... Switzerland, for instance, is on track for 3000+ COVID-19 deaths and is unlikely to exceed 150 overdose deaths.
vincentmarle 6y ago
I recently tried to rent a Budget truck to move my stuff out of San Francisco, the quotes were between $2,000-$3,000 [1] for my particular weekend (normally it's only about $400). It seems that everyone is trying to flee the city at once. [1] I just checked again, it's now $3,000-$7,000
- topkai22 6y ago
  Fly to Reno, pick up a uhaul truck. $140 for a 1 way ticket, about $300 in gas and mileage to get a huge truck back to SF. Of course, its also about 6 hours of your time, but hey.
- serjester 6y ago
  This seems insane. Are other people having this issue? Seems like a massive Uhaul arbitrage opportunity.
  - sct202 6y ago
    It probably depends on the pricing model. The rental truck company has to balance costs of relocating trucks back into SF after one is removed on top of the lost business of local moves where that truck could have potentially been used for multiple local moves during the time it's being repositioned to better markets.
- jjav 6y ago
  I just checked on https://www.uhaul.com/Reservations/RatesTrucks/ https://www.uhaul.com/Reservations/RatesTrucks/ for a few weekends in November, pick up in San Francisco, drop off in Sacramento. Rates vary from $300 for a 10' truck to $395 for a 26' truck.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  I’d just sell everything and start fresh somewhere else.
fairity 6y ago
Reminded me of PG's article on how to build the next Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html PG's thesis was building a new Silicon Valley requires a critical mass of nerds and investors in one physical location. Even with the rise of remote work, I think this still holds true. Everyone can move to random places around the US, but ultimately, I think they will feel lonely because they're not surrounded by other like-minded nerds. No magnitude of Zoom meetings can simulate the feeling of being physically surrounded by others like yourself. With no clear alternative for physical location, I think everyone will come back after shutdowns end.
- jariel 6y ago
  Nerds, investors, good weather, hard working technical migrants, weirdos (I mean that in a good way), a tolerance for failure + people who take basically irrational risks, a lot of 'new warm bodies' who take the koolaid, a hoard of very talented, operationally minded 'startup professionals' who know how to grow companies from Round A->E, and open-minded biz dev community who will entertain doing deals with small companies, and highly acquisitive M&A teams with massive budgets that provided 80% of the exits, and/or large financial institutions with frothy buyers to buy shares for IPO. Nowhere has that.
  - myrandomcomment 6y ago
    "a tolerance for failure" is a key point I believe in what you wrote here. I have spent a ton of time in Asia and feel I have a better then average understanding culturally than most Americans (at least that is what what my friends from their tell me, but who knows!) Failure in Asia a source of great shame. Here if you fail the VC ask you "So did you learn anything...good, here is some more money for your next thing." I think that a key difference is the view that failure is a lesson that helps you do better for the next time and not a reason to be ashamed.
- 01100011 6y ago
  You can't invent the next big thing in your garage when you can't afford a garage. Some of the things that made the valley( * ) a success are gone. I think the valley will live on, like it always has, but it will be different this time, just like each other time brought something different. The internet has now reached a stage where location matters less than ever. It is no longer necessary to amass engineers in one physical location. I think a lot of us would be more creative(albeit less focused and productive) if we were living on a piece of land with the time and extra money needed to play with the things we are good at. (*) The valley, not SF. The line is blurry but they are not the same.
eucryphia 6y ago
High tax rates redistributes people, not money.
kbos87 6y ago
It’s going to be very interesting to see what plays out at the end of the pandemic, assuming there is an end (I’m optimistic.) My hypothesis is that many markets eventually return to normal, but SF strikes me as one that may never be what it once was. The veneer of the place was already cracking for those that lived there or visited, and now it’s cracked for employers. Why stay and limit yourself to SF when you can source talent from everywhere, knowing that a partially or entirely distributed model can work? I can’t imagine real estate values ever return to their prior state in SF. It’s going to be painful for those that own there, but could be some strange sort of renaissance for the city.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- microtherion 6y ago
  > SF strikes me as one that may never be what it once was The history of SF is literally that it never reverts exactly to any of its previous incarnations. After the gold rush, it didn't return to being a sleepy fishing village, or whatever it was, after the 1906 earthquake, it didn't rebuild exactly as before, nor did it after the 1989 earthquake (where the rebuild only ended a few years ago). When you say "what it once was", are you referring to the Haight/Ashbury scene of the Summer of Love? The Church of Satan at its Heyday? The gay scene before the arrival of AIDS? SF before Web 1.0? SF before Web 2.0? SF DURING Web 2.0? I don't doubt that SF will be different a few years from now. It's not a given to me that it will be worse. And in fact, maybe letting some of the excess money evaporate and have some of the more opportunistic fortune hunters move on will create breathing space that will help SF hit its next groove.
  - kbos87 6y ago
    Very fair point - I should have said that I don’t see SF reverting to what it was characterized by most recently. I mean an unusual concentration of tech talent, sky high property values, and massive income disparities.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
medium_burrito 6y ago
Since we can all be remote, we can go to places that aren't full of drug addicts and anarchists and jihadis or whatever other deplorables that are cramping our lifestyle. Why don't we just occupy all the cafes in Chamonix, or take over Puerto Cabezas, or the seediest neighborhood in Montevideo? And then we can change it up every few years.
- s0rce 6y ago
  I vote for San Felipe next, see you there?
forthwall 6y ago
Anti SV vitriol grows and wanes throughout the year. I don’t think this is any telling for anything. >San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus San Francisco also has one of the lowest death rates and counts of COVID in the entire US for big cities. I’d say comments like these are also disingenuous to paint a picture of crazy peril. Overdoses are bad but the fearmongering is ridiculous.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  I agree with you. Also, on the same vein, "four times more" doesn't say much if it doesn't explicitly describe the absolute number. Is it 0.01% of the population, or 10%? Huge difference.
myth17 6y ago
Only for US citizens and Green Card holders. Hundreds of thousands of H1B immigrants stuck in forever Green Card backlogs stay where they are to comply with immigration laws.
ditonal 6y ago
I bought a house in San Francisco a year ago and it’s estimate has gone up 100k. I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve lived in by a mile. My SO works at Twitter and was shocked to see journalists say they were permanently WFH. What Dorsey actually said was that if managers approve certain roles can stay remote, but most managers plan to bring teams back to the office, with 2-3 day WFH being the most popular option. Rents went down downtown, because everything is closed. It’s a huge leap to assume that will stick and rents are still astronomical given everything is closed. I can’t tell you the reason, but people are just obsessed with this “end of San Francisco” narrative despite a ton of hard evidence to the contrary. I studied CS after the dotcom and people were convinced all programming jobs were going abroad since programming can be done anywhere, instead Bay Area engineering comp quadrupled. Now instead of going to Mumbai it’s going to Denver or Montana, doubtful. People saw companies like Reddit, Yahoo, and Twitter lay off all their remote workers. They saw Googlers in MTV get the most promotions. There is understands skepticism “this time is different.” It’s funny how there are so many articles about how Silicon Valley is leaving the Bay Area but not a single one about how Wall Street is leaving New York. People just get hung up on “code monkey work can be done anywhere “ and ride the media wave. There’s been a tech bubble waiting to pop and an exodus from Bay Area for 10 years now, in the minds of journalists and the blogosphere. In the real world, not so much.
- ryanobjc 6y ago
  The headline here says it all really: https://www.wired.com/story/remote-work-perks-until-want-promotion/ https://www.wired.com/story/remote-work-perks-until-want-pro... A colleague moved to an office in boulder. Everyone there is senior, and not leaving. No space to get promoted. All the big stuff that could get them promoted is already taken up. A different friend moved from a satellite office, and has now been promoted twice.
  - claydavisss 6y ago
    owning your home > promotion
- 6y ago
Diederich 6y ago
After 11 years at various tech companies in Silicon Valley, unwilling to spend a million bucks on a small house on a tiny parcel, I decided to leave early this year. So I left solid FAANG position and joined a fairly small but well established tech company based in San Francisco, but full time remote. I told them up front that while I currently lived in Mountain View, an hour south, my family and I were going to move to Washington State as soon as possible. This was June, a couple of months into the Covid19 lockdown. For 3/4 of the rent I was paying in Mountain View, we bought an big, beautiful home a few miles outside of Olympia, Washington on five acres of woods, where we enjoy stable, high speed Internet, privacy but also effectively more proximity to most things than we had in the bay area, where driving to Costco could take 30 minutes. Now we can get to anything we want in down time Olympia in 11 minutes, even though it's further away. Yes, I took a pretty steep pay cut, but it's been largely offset by no state income taxes, lower monthly living payments, cheaper food, cheaper electricity, etc etc. Oh, and I'm finally actually building equity in a property that would easily go more than $20M in the bay area. In the end, it was an easy decision.
- NewOrderNow 6y ago
  So your rich life became a little richer? To contrast that, I have been wanting to move to San Francisco since a little kid and can't and most likely won't make that possibility. I am greatly excited for people like you, who clearly don't care where they live and care about crap like family values and property, to leave so this place so it can become liveable again.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    > So your rich life became a little richer? Sure, it did. > ... don't care where they live ... We loved the bay area when we arrived in 2009, and we still do. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Southern California, and while I'm not personally a fan of socal, I think the state of California is one of the most amazing, remarkable places in the world. > don't ... care about crap like family values and property ... I'm not sure what you mean? When you say 'family values', can you be more specific?
  - 6y ago
ummonk 6y ago
“ San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.” - that says more about the handling of the epidemic (by far the lowest death rate of any city in the nation) than it does about the drug problem.
jedberg 6y ago
People will be back. SF has more than just offices for tech companies. I've lived here since 1996. I've seen the ebbs and flows of traffic/vacancy rates. There was an exodus in 2001 and another one in 2008. But the people always come back.
xmars 6y ago
Прощай немытая долина
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Left 30 years ago. Sold my old farmhouse near downtown San Jose (12th St), and bought a farm in Iowa with the proceeds. Never looked back. And never could have gone back. After getting off the land-price escalator, there was soon nothing I could hope to buy at anything like what I sold for. Anyway I never wanted to. I raised a family here on 80 acres of land in a new 2300 sq ft house I built in a cornfield, 15 minutes from a university town. Boys grew up hiking, biking, doing projects in the shop. Taking lessons from PhDs and doctors. Metalworking classes from Amish blacksmiths. Music lessons from well known performers and teachers. There's a whole world of interesting places and landscapes out there. Plenty of towns large enough to support whatever interests and entertainments you want. And all at a fraction of the cost, fiscal and emotional.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Most people don't have the "f*ck you" money you probably had, and/or the ability to be well off financially even if you moved to Iowa. Most people move to SV/SF in search of fortune. Sometimes they stay even after they found it.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Nah. The house in San Jose had appreciated (in 4 years!) such that it bought a farm in Iowa. Still working hard! And used connections from San Jose days to get contracts etc to keep working remotely.
josuepeq 6y ago
Leaving the Bay Area always seems like a good decision on paper for a brief moment; then my QA brain kicks in and I think about what life would be like elsewhere - based loosely on experiences I’ve had in the past living 20 of my 35 years in the suburban Midwest. In an alternative reality… Really happy with my new place! The first place I found, what a nightmare. I almost committed to buying that house until I remembered to check the high-speed internet situation. Since Skylink is not available yet and the previous owner did not have high-speed Internet, I called the local cable company. All they could tell me is that possibly there might be? There never has been service there, and they can’t guarantee that there will be. Phone company had 10 Mbps ADSL. Not to worry, I backed out in time. Working from home only works when you can work from home. Something now told me to rent instead. The house I found had 250 Mbps cable. This I confirmed with the previous renter. I’m going to put it to good use. We are in a pandemic and now I’ll be having to entertain myself. It’s winter, I’m new (again) in town, and the pandemic is keeping my from being more social. I guess there’s always Scruff from a safe social (digital) distance. I also consider the extra physical distance. This is not San Francisco. I love the idea of my more distant, comfortable life outside of California, but living in denser cities is much better for the environment. My greenhouse gas emissions footprint has grown significantly; especially around travel. I still drive an EV, that helps with my conscience. Maybe all logistics and shipping providers servicing my new home will do so too? Lots of new delivery truck EVs available now. Of course none are good as walking. I’m now a bit more dependent upon UPS/FedEx/Amazon for shopping online. The new address doesn’t have Amazon Fresh or Instacart available; and Prime Now is only available one zip code over. Every shipment takes two days.... I can make it work - but to do so, I had to get reacquainted with retail shopping. Trader Joe’s has one location 15 miles away, must go plug in now for tomorrow. I’ve got 100 miles of range; but it’s 30 degrees outside this week for the high (and we just got through a wicked snowstorm.) My cars’ range may take a hit. It is frustrating whenever I can’t get businesses to free up chargers blocked by cars. But what about snow? Last week the charger was blocked by a snow bank 8’ tall on the side of the parking lot with the charger. Seriously, I can’t be the only one in this town who needs to use the EVSE! I moved to SF happy I’d never have to drive 30 miles to get errands done again. In San Francisco, I could just walk; or otherwise it’d be less than 6 miles round trip. I shop at night after dinner. This town is not taking COVID-19 seriously. Lackluster mask usage, no social distancing. I am hoping that it won’t be as busy. I’ve got one comorbidity that I don’t want to test the limits of. I heard the regional hospital is out of ICU beds; but the bars are pretty full by the University. It’s like science doesn’t exist. People here have a common distrust of government. It makes sense that in a low tax state, the local government public health department is regarded with the same esteem as the other underfunded and underperforming city departments. On second thought, I think San Francisco doesn’t seem so bad after all. Eh who needs money, we can’t take it with us when we go. To each their own.
NewOrderNow 6y ago
Another human being that chooses to allow mediocrity to succeed. What a cunt
NewOrderNow 6y ago
Spoken like a spoiled rich cunt. Someone with a nice family and life comes in tells me how to life my fucking life. Fucking lie to society for your money cunt

60 points by Reedx 6y ago

This article reads like fiction with its emphasis on providing an exodus narrative, but this point stood out to me. >San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.

hangonhn 6y ago
I had the same reaction. It's nicely written but I don't know why I should believe its narrative anymore than any other ones. While the quote you cited sounds impactful, I don't understand the point of comparing those two numbers nor what inferences I should draw from it or how it makes this narrative more true than another. In the end, the piece just feels vacuous. It feels like a cheap imitation of some of PG's writings.
- dannyw 6y ago
  If PG put his name in the byline, would you appreciate the piece more?
  - hangonhn 6y ago
    No. Why would that matter? My issue isn't who wrote it but rather its lack of any good arguments. It presents a narrative that the author tries to tie in with a Biblical story, which seems really superfluous and makes the whole piece feel very bombastic. PG's writings tend to be very "compact" and dense. The reason the comparison came to mind is that both writers are VCs and are talking about general trends in SV. Could be that I just prefer a certain style of writing.

gumby 6y ago

I first came to the Bay Area in the mid 80s, when Silicon Valley ended north of Menlo Park and San Francisco was an unrelated world, a residential city with people commuting south for the jobs, with needles on the street and homeless people crapping there too. By 89/90 when the tech boom collapsed, never to return (or so people said), the magazines were full of articles about how people were fleeing California, that the new world of modems would make remote work possible, and that would be the end. In other words, every decade the same article, over and over. Yawn. (Definitely there was a change in the late 90s when people came for the money rather than the sheer technical fun, but as that same impetus had produced SF in the first place (god rush of '49) it was hard to complain, even if it did change the culture for the worse. Sadly those people didn't all flee with the dot com crash nor the 2008 crisis. Well, we can't have everything.)

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Eloquent. Having lived through the exodus (I stayed) of the dot com crash, it feels a bit like that. Too many people trying to deny the reality that economics imposes on all things. It really does matter if you buy electricity for 25 cents a kilowatt hour and your net revenue of selling its work product is 20 cents you just can't keep that up. Like the Web 1.0 era, the Web 2.0 era has seen some pretty durable successes. Transactions over the medium are here to stay, they aren't "weird" any more. Your portal to technological offerings is not a "PC" any more, it is an increasingly obviously mislabeled "phone." Margins on communication "services" have been commoditized away and seem unlikely to ever return. I'm looking forward to the next thing, what ever it happens to be. The most fun is always the first third of a wave. The swell, the hint of powerful forces just under the surface waiting to be tapped, the anticipation of successfully getting enough ahead to start the adrenaline fueled ride. Never a dull moment in a place like this.

aeternum 6y ago
I hope the next thing is a renewed focus on the physical world. For the most part, humanity took a break from innovating significantly on transportation, housing, cities, biotech. Our ability to model and simulate the real world has improved exponentially, I'm optimistic about what can come from that. Lots of great minds have been focused purely on software but perhaps the shift back to hardware / physical things is starting.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Some are earlier than others (biotech is already a hot investment market, for instance), but I think we've been there for awhile. Just look at all the self-driving firms, car manufacturers, airbnb/housing startups, and agtech around the Bay.
- Karrot_Kream 6y ago
  Indeed. For all the AI hype, scientific computing has made huge strides forward. Improvements in graphics cards and parallel algorithms have made large simulations and models of all sorts, not just deep learning, much more computationally feasible. I'm very excited to see the applications of all this new scientific computing.

Lammy 6y ago

> It’s time to build, yes. But it’s also time to leave. I wonder if the author intends to lead the charge, or if they might be staying? :)

loosetypes 6y ago

> San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus. Wow.

grecy 6y ago
That is more-or-less the case in all developed countries, it's just not talked about. (My friend works in addictions here in BC, Canada)
- troelsSteegin 6y ago
  My estimate is that in the US COVID-19 will cause roughly 3X the number of drug overdose deaths this year. The drug overdose deaths from 2018 are about 67K, as reported by the CDC [0]. The US is at about 240K COVID-19 deaths, increasing about 1K/day. Of course, the US mortality from COVID-19 is an exception wrt other developed countries. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html
- topkai22 6y ago
  That's not true in the US- CDC statistics are ~72000 OD deaths for 2019. The worst numbers I've seen are a 50% increase in OD deaths, so we can probably expect the 2020 numbers to come in at 105,000 or less. There are 220,000 COVID-19 deaths nationwide in the US so far. Horrible numbers eithier way, but there has NOT 4x the number of deaths from drug overdose in the US compared to COVID-19.
- microtherion 6y ago
  I was intrigued by this statement, and, while it is true for San Francisco in particular, it is (despite rapid increases in recent years) unlikely to be even true for the US as a whole, let alone for other developed country. In fact, in the US alone, more people died of COVID-19 this year than died in the entire world of overdoses in 2017: https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use#deaths-from-substance-use-disorders https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use#deaths-from-substance-us... Switzerland, for instance, is on track for 3000+ COVID-19 deaths and is unlikely to exceed 150 overdose deaths.

vincentmarle 6y ago

I recently tried to rent a Budget truck to move my stuff out of San Francisco, the quotes were between $2,000-$3,000 [1] for my particular weekend (normally it's only about $400). It seems that everyone is trying to flee the city at once. [1] I just checked again, it's now $3,000-$7,000

topkai22 6y ago
Fly to Reno, pick up a uhaul truck. $140 for a 1 way ticket, about $300 in gas and mileage to get a huge truck back to SF. Of course, its also about 6 hours of your time, but hey.
serjester 6y ago
This seems insane. Are other people having this issue? Seems like a massive Uhaul arbitrage opportunity.
- sct202 6y ago
  It probably depends on the pricing model. The rental truck company has to balance costs of relocating trucks back into SF after one is removed on top of the lost business of local moves where that truck could have potentially been used for multiple local moves during the time it's being repositioned to better markets.
jjav 6y ago
I just checked on https://www.uhaul.com/Reservations/RatesTrucks/ https://www.uhaul.com/Reservations/RatesTrucks/ for a few weekends in November, pick up in San Francisco, drop off in Sacramento. Rates vary from $300 for a 10' truck to $395 for a 26' truck.
cvhashim 6y ago
I’d just sell everything and start fresh somewhere else.

fairity 6y ago

Reminded me of PG's article on how to build the next Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html PG's thesis was building a new Silicon Valley requires a critical mass of nerds and investors in one physical location. Even with the rise of remote work, I think this still holds true. Everyone can move to random places around the US, but ultimately, I think they will feel lonely because they're not surrounded by other like-minded nerds. No magnitude of Zoom meetings can simulate the feeling of being physically surrounded by others like yourself. With no clear alternative for physical location, I think everyone will come back after shutdowns end.

jariel 6y ago
Nerds, investors, good weather, hard working technical migrants, weirdos (I mean that in a good way), a tolerance for failure + people who take basically irrational risks, a lot of 'new warm bodies' who take the koolaid, a hoard of very talented, operationally minded 'startup professionals' who know how to grow companies from Round A->E, and open-minded biz dev community who will entertain doing deals with small companies, and highly acquisitive M&A teams with massive budgets that provided 80% of the exits, and/or large financial institutions with frothy buyers to buy shares for IPO. Nowhere has that.
- myrandomcomment 6y ago
  "a tolerance for failure" is a key point I believe in what you wrote here. I have spent a ton of time in Asia and feel I have a better then average understanding culturally than most Americans (at least that is what what my friends from their tell me, but who knows!) Failure in Asia a source of great shame. Here if you fail the VC ask you "So did you learn anything...good, here is some more money for your next thing." I think that a key difference is the view that failure is a lesson that helps you do better for the next time and not a reason to be ashamed.
01100011 6y ago
You can't invent the next big thing in your garage when you can't afford a garage. Some of the things that made the valley( * ) a success are gone. I think the valley will live on, like it always has, but it will be different this time, just like each other time brought something different. The internet has now reached a stage where location matters less than ever. It is no longer necessary to amass engineers in one physical location. I think a lot of us would be more creative(albeit less focused and productive) if we were living on a piece of land with the time and extra money needed to play with the things we are good at. (*) The valley, not SF. The line is blurry but they are not the same.

eucryphia 6y ago

High tax rates redistributes people, not money.

kbos87 6y ago

It’s going to be very interesting to see what plays out at the end of the pandemic, assuming there is an end (I’m optimistic.) My hypothesis is that many markets eventually return to normal, but SF strikes me as one that may never be what it once was. The veneer of the place was already cracking for those that lived there or visited, and now it’s cracked for employers. Why stay and limit yourself to SF when you can source talent from everywhere, knowing that a partially or entirely distributed model can work? I can’t imagine real estate values ever return to their prior state in SF. It’s going to be painful for those that own there, but could be some strange sort of renaissance for the city.

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microtherion 6y ago
> SF strikes me as one that may never be what it once was The history of SF is literally that it never reverts exactly to any of its previous incarnations. After the gold rush, it didn't return to being a sleepy fishing village, or whatever it was, after the 1906 earthquake, it didn't rebuild exactly as before, nor did it after the 1989 earthquake (where the rebuild only ended a few years ago). When you say "what it once was", are you referring to the Haight/Ashbury scene of the Summer of Love? The Church of Satan at its Heyday? The gay scene before the arrival of AIDS? SF before Web 1.0? SF before Web 2.0? SF DURING Web 2.0? I don't doubt that SF will be different a few years from now. It's not a given to me that it will be worse. And in fact, maybe letting some of the excess money evaporate and have some of the more opportunistic fortune hunters move on will create breathing space that will help SF hit its next groove.
- kbos87 6y ago
  Very fair point - I should have said that I don’t see SF reverting to what it was characterized by most recently. I mean an unusual concentration of tech talent, sky high property values, and massive income disparities.
  - 6y ago

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medium_burrito 6y ago

Since we can all be remote, we can go to places that aren't full of drug addicts and anarchists and jihadis or whatever other deplorables that are cramping our lifestyle. Why don't we just occupy all the cafes in Chamonix, or take over Puerto Cabezas, or the seediest neighborhood in Montevideo? And then we can change it up every few years.

s0rce 6y ago
I vote for San Felipe next, see you there?

forthwall 6y ago

Anti SV vitriol grows and wanes throughout the year. I don’t think this is any telling for anything. >San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus San Francisco also has one of the lowest death rates and counts of COVID in the entire US for big cities. I’d say comments like these are also disingenuous to paint a picture of crazy peril. Overdoses are bad but the fearmongering is ridiculous.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I agree with you. Also, on the same vein, "four times more" doesn't say much if it doesn't explicitly describe the absolute number. Is it 0.01% of the population, or 10%? Huge difference.

myth17 6y ago

Only for US citizens and Green Card holders. Hundreds of thousands of H1B immigrants stuck in forever Green Card backlogs stay where they are to comply with immigration laws.

ditonal 6y ago

I bought a house in San Francisco a year ago and it’s estimate has gone up 100k. I rarely see needles unless I get pho in the Tenderloin, which is the neighborhood that some people seem to think is the only one in the city. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve lived in by a mile. My SO works at Twitter and was shocked to see journalists say they were permanently WFH. What Dorsey actually said was that if managers approve certain roles can stay remote, but most managers plan to bring teams back to the office, with 2-3 day WFH being the most popular option. Rents went down downtown, because everything is closed. It’s a huge leap to assume that will stick and rents are still astronomical given everything is closed. I can’t tell you the reason, but people are just obsessed with this “end of San Francisco” narrative despite a ton of hard evidence to the contrary. I studied CS after the dotcom and people were convinced all programming jobs were going abroad since programming can be done anywhere, instead Bay Area engineering comp quadrupled. Now instead of going to Mumbai it’s going to Denver or Montana, doubtful. People saw companies like Reddit, Yahoo, and Twitter lay off all their remote workers. They saw Googlers in MTV get the most promotions. There is understands skepticism “this time is different.” It’s funny how there are so many articles about how Silicon Valley is leaving the Bay Area but not a single one about how Wall Street is leaving New York. People just get hung up on “code monkey work can be done anywhere “ and ride the media wave. There’s been a tech bubble waiting to pop and an exodus from Bay Area for 10 years now, in the minds of journalists and the blogosphere. In the real world, not so much.

ryanobjc 6y ago
The headline here says it all really: https://www.wired.com/story/remote-work-perks-until-want-promotion/ https://www.wired.com/story/remote-work-perks-until-want-pro... A colleague moved to an office in boulder. Everyone there is senior, and not leaving. No space to get promoted. All the big stuff that could get them promoted is already taken up. A different friend moved from a satellite office, and has now been promoted twice.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  owning your home > promotion
6y ago

Diederich 6y ago

After 11 years at various tech companies in Silicon Valley, unwilling to spend a million bucks on a small house on a tiny parcel, I decided to leave early this year. So I left solid FAANG position and joined a fairly small but well established tech company based in San Francisco, but full time remote. I told them up front that while I currently lived in Mountain View, an hour south, my family and I were going to move to Washington State as soon as possible. This was June, a couple of months into the Covid19 lockdown. For 3/4 of the rent I was paying in Mountain View, we bought an big, beautiful home a few miles outside of Olympia, Washington on five acres of woods, where we enjoy stable, high speed Internet, privacy but also effectively more proximity to most things than we had in the bay area, where driving to Costco could take 30 minutes. Now we can get to anything we want in down time Olympia in 11 minutes, even though it's further away. Yes, I took a pretty steep pay cut, but it's been largely offset by no state income taxes, lower monthly living payments, cheaper food, cheaper electricity, etc etc. Oh, and I'm finally actually building equity in a property that would easily go more than $20M in the bay area. In the end, it was an easy decision.

NewOrderNow 6y ago
So your rich life became a little richer? To contrast that, I have been wanting to move to San Francisco since a little kid and can't and most likely won't make that possibility. I am greatly excited for people like you, who clearly don't care where they live and care about crap like family values and property, to leave so this place so it can become liveable again.
- Diederich 6y ago
  > So your rich life became a little richer? Sure, it did. > ... don't care where they live ... We loved the bay area when we arrived in 2009, and we still do. I spent the first 23 years of my life in Southern California, and while I'm not personally a fan of socal, I think the state of California is one of the most amazing, remarkable places in the world. > don't ... care about crap like family values and property ... I'm not sure what you mean? When you say 'family values', can you be more specific?
- 6y ago

ummonk 6y ago

“ San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.” - that says more about the handling of the epidemic (by far the lowest death rate of any city in the nation) than it does about the drug problem.

jedberg 6y ago

People will be back. SF has more than just offices for tech companies. I've lived here since 1996. I've seen the ebbs and flows of traffic/vacancy rates. There was an exodus in 2001 and another one in 2008. But the people always come back.

xmars 6y ago

Прощай немытая долина

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Left 30 years ago. Sold my old farmhouse near downtown San Jose (12th St), and bought a farm in Iowa with the proceeds. Never looked back. And never could have gone back. After getting off the land-price escalator, there was soon nothing I could hope to buy at anything like what I sold for. Anyway I never wanted to. I raised a family here on 80 acres of land in a new 2300 sq ft house I built in a cornfield, 15 minutes from a university town. Boys grew up hiking, biking, doing projects in the shop. Taking lessons from PhDs and doctors. Metalworking classes from Amish blacksmiths. Music lessons from well known performers and teachers. There's a whole world of interesting places and landscapes out there. Plenty of towns large enough to support whatever interests and entertainments you want. And all at a fraction of the cost, fiscal and emotional.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Most people don't have the "f*ck you" money you probably had, and/or the ability to be well off financially even if you moved to Iowa. Most people move to SV/SF in search of fortune. Sometimes they stay even after they found it.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Nah. The house in San Jose had appreciated (in 4 years!) such that it bought a farm in Iowa. Still working hard! And used connections from San Jose days to get contracts etc to keep working remotely.

josuepeq 6y ago

Leaving the Bay Area always seems like a good decision on paper for a brief moment; then my QA brain kicks in and I think about what life would be like elsewhere - based loosely on experiences I’ve had in the past living 20 of my 35 years in the suburban Midwest. In an alternative reality… Really happy with my new place! The first place I found, what a nightmare. I almost committed to buying that house until I remembered to check the high-speed internet situation. Since Skylink is not available yet and the previous owner did not have high-speed Internet, I called the local cable company. All they could tell me is that possibly there might be? There never has been service there, and they can’t guarantee that there will be. Phone company had 10 Mbps ADSL. Not to worry, I backed out in time. Working from home only works when you can work from home. Something now told me to rent instead. The house I found had 250 Mbps cable. This I confirmed with the previous renter. I’m going to put it to good use. We are in a pandemic and now I’ll be having to entertain myself. It’s winter, I’m new (again) in town, and the pandemic is keeping my from being more social. I guess there’s always Scruff from a safe social (digital) distance. I also consider the extra physical distance. This is not San Francisco. I love the idea of my more distant, comfortable life outside of California, but living in denser cities is much better for the environment. My greenhouse gas emissions footprint has grown significantly; especially around travel. I still drive an EV, that helps with my conscience. Maybe all logistics and shipping providers servicing my new home will do so too? Lots of new delivery truck EVs available now. Of course none are good as walking. I’m now a bit more dependent upon UPS/FedEx/Amazon for shopping online. The new address doesn’t have Amazon Fresh or Instacart available; and Prime Now is only available one zip code over. Every shipment takes two days.... I can make it work - but to do so, I had to get reacquainted with retail shopping. Trader Joe’s has one location 15 miles away, must go plug in now for tomorrow. I’ve got 100 miles of range; but it’s 30 degrees outside this week for the high (and we just got through a wicked snowstorm.) My cars’ range may take a hit. It is frustrating whenever I can’t get businesses to free up chargers blocked by cars. But what about snow? Last week the charger was blocked by a snow bank 8’ tall on the side of the parking lot with the charger. Seriously, I can’t be the only one in this town who needs to use the EVSE! I moved to SF happy I’d never have to drive 30 miles to get errands done again. In San Francisco, I could just walk; or otherwise it’d be less than 6 miles round trip. I shop at night after dinner. This town is not taking COVID-19 seriously. Lackluster mask usage, no social distancing. I am hoping that it won’t be as busy. I’ve got one comorbidity that I don’t want to test the limits of. I heard the regional hospital is out of ICU beds; but the bars are pretty full by the University. It’s like science doesn’t exist. People here have a common distrust of government. It makes sense that in a low tax state, the local government public health department is regarded with the same esteem as the other underfunded and underperforming city departments. On second thought, I think San Francisco doesn’t seem so bad after all. Eh who needs money, we can’t take it with us when we go. To each their own.

NewOrderNow 6y ago

Another human being that chooses to allow mediocrity to succeed. What a cunt

NewOrderNow 6y ago

Spoken like a spoiled rich cunt. Someone with a nice family and life comes in tells me how to life my fucking life. Fucking lie to society for your money cunt