Mike Solana

3. Environment is hostile to small biz. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have to wet sign, snail mail 2 forms, pay 7x the cost of straps in filing fees, wait months to find out that your “lace permit” has been declined.https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1472427243171319808 …

4. Privilege and success, instead of something to be mindful, have become something to be ashamed of. I have thought for a long time that Atlas Shrugged is an unrealistic straw man full of contradictions. I never thought I’d live in a society that actually approximated it.https://twitter.com/eddiekimx/status/1474812516475670528 …

5. While uncertainty on the upslope can be an excellent crucible for opportunity, a shining city devolving into bureacracy is the opposite: a symbol of decline. I think it’s more inconvenient to live in San Francisco or Oakland than when I lived in Chennai or Bombay growing up.

6. I consider paying taxes a privilege and honor, but you have to agree with the philosophy of where it’s being spent. In the US, every state is undertaking its own experiment. The CA experiment was audacious. But when experiments failed, we didn’t pull the plug… we kept going

7. Virtue signaling over virtue seeking; neuroticism over optimism. A well-intentioned person can step one foot out of line and is instantly met with a “how dare you.” When did we stop being optimistic, and so steeped in our own neuroticism? When did we trade hope for guilt?

8. Merit, achievement, and success are becoming a lost cause.https://twitter.com/Scott_Wiener/status/1360641927859765249 …

In summary: the Bay Area, instead of harvesting the golden eggs, bled the magical goose dry. Instead of taking that boundless spirit of optimism, tax windfall, abundance of resources, and channeling it into the greatest city-state the world has ever known… we fucked it up.

Then the pandemic arrived. As everything went online, the mirage was stripped away. Ideas now stream over the web as freely as movies. And so, the idea of living somwhere for purely professional reasons feels as quaint and nostalgic as my DVD shelf.