Jonathan Blow

This is an interesting article but I disagree with it on several points. San Francisco was never the capital of “tech” — that was always the South Bay. SF became trendy recently because the south ran out of office space and 2nd-dot-com-boom twentysomethings wanted nightlife.

The actual “tech” cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Cupertino etc are all *much* better run than SF. So as many problems as I have with “tech” culture, and I have many, inability to interface with local government is not really one of them.

If anything, SF shows that if people do not have the pragmatic reality-based mindset that generated the wealth, then if given the wealth, they will vote for non-reality-based policies that flush it down the toilet.

I used to like SF — lived there a long time — but the problem is, I remember when it was way better than it is today, so it is very hard to like now. And personally, my life tactic has been to observe that “change from within” people almost always fail, and act accordingly.

The way to show that your thing is better is just to let the lame-ass people be lame-ass and go do the better thing, uncompromisingly. The lame-asses’ thing will fall apart and yours, if it is good, won’t. Then you don’t need to have 10000 useless arguments.

In fact this is what is already happening. San Francisco is the worst part of the entire Bay Area now. If “tech” were a drain, Mountain View would look like Hamsterdam, but it’s the opposite.

All that said, I agree with the article’s stance that SF’s decline bodes poorly for the future of the USA. For that reason, and for image purposes (probably many Americans think SF is the home of “tech”) it would be a good idea to fix it. That just seems impossible.

How has SF declined? I only spent a couple days there in 2018, but it seemed fine-- what did I miss?