6 ms·

When I think of the Midwest these days, I think of St Louis/Ferguson. I think of the price for housing and how it reflects demand. I live in Seattle, so my vi

by pnathan 12y ago

When I think of the Midwest these days, I think of St Louis/Ferguson. I think of the price for housing and how it reflects demand. I live in Seattle, so my viewpoint is slightly different, but, eh. I used to live in a rural place, and I don't plan to go back, for a long time, if ever. Let me pick apart this article a bit, and demonstrate how skew these high points are from things I care about. * Housing cost. That's where the pay difference comes in. And my $800/mo in student loans doesn't change if I live on the coast or in the middle of nowhere. So it's actually better for me, because the proportional cost of fixed payments goes way down. * Broadway shows, okay. But wouldn't you rather be in a vibrant place where creation happens, than be the "second hand"? * Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour? * Sportsball. Meh. * Foodwise, my mind was blown by the quality difference between St. Louis and Seattle/SF when I visited recently. Maybe I hit the wrong joints, but STL had terrible food. Absolutely shockingly worse. I'll have to shake down some people for more reccs next time. * Seattle is incredibly friendly and polite. Drivers in the city are probably the friendliest I've ever come across. While it retains the historical Scandinavia reserve, people are really just decent here in general. SF is famous for its collaboration between businesses. * I don't even understand the idea of wanting to turn off work on a daily basis. I left that attitude behind me when I last worked fast food. The 9-5er attitude is "yuck". * The author is generally ignoring the intense network effects of having zillions of nerds in the same city. --- Anyway. Not that TFA is wrong. But its priorities are very skew from mine. I want to live in a place where technology is a significant lifestyle, where nerds are your neighbor, where programmers aren't weirdos. I want to live in a place with tons of cultures colliding and the resultant froth. I want to live in a place where there are new companies forming weekly. I want to live in a place where the optimism is in the air, where young people are flooding around the town with new ideas, new thinking, and crazy things no sane adult would do, and tech is in the heart of all that. Where the next thing is being done at 3 in the morning fuelled by coffee, math, and being young and foolish. Maybe that means I never will leave Seattle/SF/The-next-big-thing until I retire, but I'm okay with that.

BrandonM 12y ago
* Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour? This one is bullshit. Plenty of bands came from Ohio, including OAR, the Foo Fighters, and the Black Keys. IMO, the live music scene in Columbus is way better than SF, with a diverse group of talented bands playing every night of the week.
lotharbot 12y ago
* "Seattle is incredibly friendly and polite" My ten-year residence in Seattle (U District, Lake City, and Burien/Tukwila) led me to use terms like "passive-aggressive", "frigid", and "unaware". Seattle drivers are particularly terrible -- they'll force a line of 20 cars to stop just so they can "politely" let someone in who would have been able to turn just fine ten seconds later when all the cars had passed; they're perfectly willing to inconvenience multiple other people in order to be superficially polite to one. If there's a space in front of them, they'll speed up, getting right on the bumper of the car in front of them -- even if there's plenty of room to pass -- and then follow closely, as if they just can't stand being more than a few yards behind the next car. (This particular passive-aggressive maneuver is so distinctive that I once identified a vehicle on the interstate in Kansas as "drives like they're from Seattle" from a distance, confirming from the licence plate when I got closer.) I also noticed that everyone in Seattle was polite to my face, but the majority of long-term friends I made while in Seattle were from other places. The people who turned out to be fake friends were mostly the natives. That's not to say that Seattle entirely sucks. It was a neat place to live, and there are a lot of good people there. But I find it interesting how differently we perceive the same social scene, and how that contributes to my being much happier far away from there.
- pnathan 12y ago
  I'm an introvert: I have few friends, but close ones. The Scandanavian "Seattle Freeze" suits me to a T - surprisingly so! But I can easily understand how people who prefer other interaction modalities would find it aggravating.
hueving 12y ago
>I think of the price for housing and how it reflects demand. You should think supply instead. San Francisco is quite small geographically. It doesn't take much demand to drive the prices quite high under those conditions. Most places in the Midwest can grow in any direction as necessary. >* Broadway shows, okay. But wouldn't you rather be in a vibrant place where creation happens, than be the "second hand"? >* Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour? As someone involved in tech all of the time, I frankly don't care if I'm "where the creation happens", and most people I know don't. You don't have to be where art was originally made to enjoy it and to argue otherwise is pretty stupid.

by pnathan 12y ago

BrandonM 12y ago

* Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour? This one is bullshit. Plenty of bands came from Ohio, including OAR, the Foo Fighters, and the Black Keys. IMO, the live music scene in Columbus is way better than SF, with a diverse group of talented bands playing every night of the week.

lotharbot 12y ago

* "Seattle is incredibly friendly and polite" My ten-year residence in Seattle (U District, Lake City, and Burien/Tukwila) led me to use terms like "passive-aggressive", "frigid", and "unaware". Seattle drivers are particularly terrible -- they'll force a line of 20 cars to stop just so they can "politely" let someone in who would have been able to turn just fine ten seconds later when all the cars had passed; they're perfectly willing to inconvenience multiple other people in order to be superficially polite to one. If there's a space in front of them, they'll speed up, getting right on the bumper of the car in front of them -- even if there's plenty of room to pass -- and then follow closely, as if they just can't stand being more than a few yards behind the next car. (This particular passive-aggressive maneuver is so distinctive that I once identified a vehicle on the interstate in Kansas as "drives like they're from Seattle" from a distance, confirming from the licence plate when I got closer.) I also noticed that everyone in Seattle was polite to my face, but the majority of long-term friends I made while in Seattle were from other places. The people who turned out to be fake friends were mostly the natives. That's not to say that Seattle entirely sucks. It was a neat place to live, and there are a lot of good people there. But I find it interesting how differently we perceive the same social scene, and how that contributes to my being much happier far away from there.

pnathan 12y ago
I'm an introvert: I have few friends, but close ones. The Scandanavian "Seattle Freeze" suits me to a T - surprisingly so! But I can easily understand how people who prefer other interaction modalities would find it aggravating.

hueving 12y ago

>I think of the price for housing and how it reflects demand. You should think supply instead. San Francisco is quite small geographically. It doesn't take much demand to drive the prices quite high under those conditions. Most places in the Midwest can grow in any direction as necessary. >* Broadway shows, okay. But wouldn't you rather be in a vibrant place where creation happens, than be the "second hand"? >* Same for music. Do you want to be in the place where creation happens, or a pit stop on the tour? As someone involved in tech all of the time, I frankly don't care if I'm "where the creation happens", and most people I know don't. You don't have to be where art was originally made to enjoy it and to argue otherwise is pretty stupid.