I'm a lifetime nerd and a tech startup founder. Some of my best friends work at Google, facebook, Apple, etc., but I'm very sympathetic to the folks who are ang

I'm a lifetime nerd and a tech startup founder. Some of my best friends work at Google, facebook, Apple, etc., but I'm very sympathetic to the folks who are angry about the situation in SF. The industry culture in the valley is extremely insulated from the real world, and it shows in everything. At bars and cafes, the conversation is the same old echo chamber; re-affirming the world changing nature of the next Snapchat copy. In a world with so many huge problems, so many smart people exerting so much effort and spending so much of other people's money on trivial things is the rule not the exception, and it's sad (of, if it doesn't make one sad, it makes one angry). You can't escape it. It's actually one of the reasons I bought a motorhome and hit the road...I've only been back to the valley once since I left four years ago. The valley is depressing to me, for all the reasons so many find it full of optimism. I'm not optimistic when some of the brightest minds are expending their efforts on imitation of trivialities. America is looking like a class war again for the first time in a long time. And, the folks comfortably in the middle don't realize they're siding with the folks up top, either through inaction or through conscious choice to serve those interests (even if they're only middle class by SF standards and have much more in common with poor folk than with the .1% that effectively own everything). This is why there's so much anger. San Francisco has always been expensive and most regular folk there have always been renters. But, it's becoming impossibly expensive for huge swaths of people and the hope of surviving in SF as anything other than a wealthy white (or Asian) male engineer is fading fast. This article has some good ideas. People in the valley should get out of that echo chamber regularly and do something real in their community. Come up with something else to talk about now and then. But, I don't think it will solve the underlying problem; lower and middle class people are realizing the world isn't what they thought. The odds are simply stacked against poor folks in America (and stacked against escaping being poor), and they're worst in places like San Francisco and NYC. The churn in wealth that is supposed to happen in a market economy isn't happening anymore, if it ever did. It's been locked down hard by a very few, and the rest of us are merely renters and debtors, with no real say in the system. And, the idea I see that "they should just move" is missing the point...this problem isn't a San Francisco problem. It is nationwide, and San Francisco is just the canary. It's happening in every major city in the country.