That looks great. More countries should have this kind of initiatives, so we could have technology to spread worldwide, instead of getting concentrated into a single high-cost area of the world.
This isn't true? Real estate prices in Shanghai and Beijing are lower (in absolute terms) than SF and NY. Relative to local incomes they're probably more expensive though.
Shanghai and Beijing are (I believe) more expensive than Chicago or Atlanta in absolute terms.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that all real estate ownership in China is limited to 70 years for residential buildings, and that is one reason why so many Chinese invest overseas - to build capital over generations.
The lease applies to the land on which the apartment is built. The 'owner' of the apartment building cannot grant you a lease that goes beyond the period remaining on the land lease. So you get 70-x.
But not sure what will happen when these leases begin to expire.
You can find a 90 sqm apartment in Beijing for $800k, 1 million if it’s in a brand new building. And Shanghai is much worse than BJ. It is definitely comparable to Seattle, if not San Francisco.
Given such an anemic stock market, everyone invests in real estate instead, leading to a massive bubble not seen since Japan in the 80s.
Ignore our highly restrictive zoning for the majority of the city, and the booming giants we have from Boeing to Amazon crowding the region. Many of the people I grew up with have moved from Capitol Hill, Ballard & West Seattle to Marysville, Tacoma and Issaquah due to the housing crisis pricing them out of the city.
Condo complexes are practically never built due to our state liability laws, and the only apartments being built are premium units, as once you deal with the zoning requirements and end up with 20% of your building's floor space getting lopped off, that is the only thing that can profitably be built.
Seattle does have many other housing problems. However, I was outbid by all-cash Chinese buyers in Bellevue and Sammamish, as well, when looking for a house.
Have you looked at the zoning code in Bellevue or Sammamish? Its likely much worse than Seattle's, I know Kent's zoning is positively wretched, mandating that more than half of any commercially zoned property be paved for parking. How can you have density when you zone it away?
I have heard rumors of Chinese people buying up real estate, but I have never seen it in Bellevue. i live on a street with expensive homes, only 1 out of say 30 around me is owned by a person who appears to be of Chinese descent. Where is the evidence for this?
With all due respect, that sounds a bit like whataboutism. Or the false logic behind "I won't vote because I don't want to choose the lesser of two evils."
It seems to me that once we reach adulthood we spend most days choosing the lesser the of two or more evils.
While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story?
While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story?
I don’t know how convinced I am by this any more. Between the many wars, the torture, and slavery in the largest prison system on Earth it’s harder to argue. I still don’t want to live in a China, but I don’t want to live in the US either.
The difference lies in the citizens' ability to fix the problems. Florida, my state, has a problem with not returning voter rights to convicts once they get out. There is a group spearheading a correction. The governor isn't too keen to help, but the people can exert their will and correct the issue. Hard to do the same in China.
In China the power to “reform” an issue is in the hands of a very few political elites. In the US it’s in the hands of a very few wealthy elites. It’s true that you can hope to have some influence through lobbying in a way that would be unthinkable in China, but it requires connections and vast sums of money.
If you try to challenge power structures in China directly they roll over you with tanks. The last time people em masse did the same in the US they were beaten, lynched, killed, jailed, firehosed and attacked with dogs.
Well, yes and no. It's true that the US is more an oligarchy that a democracy, but the people have the possibility to vote with their wallet. The US literally takes the direction its people choose to consume, because the corporation have so much power, and they are only interested in things they can sell.
In theory, but the wallets of a few hundred families are deeper than everyone else’s combined. All it takes then, to make “vote with your wallet meaningless” is to introduce one or two major divisions in society and the elites can rest easy knowing they control lobbying as well. It would take a society-wide alliance to fight the influence of the Koch brothers, George Soros (and of course about half of the population only wants to fight one of them and not the other). When you factor in the money and power of corporations like Goldman Sachs and Exxon... well... don’t bother.
I'm the first person to criticize the US, but I've been to the US and to China, and no, it's not the same level.
A higher percent of the US population enjoy a lot of freedom and comfort than the chinese population. In China, only the very rich have what the american middle class has. Also the US hasn't been employing children to manufacture things on his soil for a while (well, it does delegate that to China, but it's another debate).
So no, definitely not on the same scale.
But if I had to pick which one is the most dangerous for the world, I'd pick the US. They are very aggressive, they always have been, and they think they are the best country in the world and that everything they do, no matter how bad, is justify because of how awesome they are.
If you read some of the comments of the threads, you'll see that some people completely dismiss their military activity like it's nothing. Like was is not a huge terrible deal. Like they had to do it, and it was right.
My favorite is "we only invaded Irak twice".
So yeah, for WWIII, the US is definitly in my favorite pool. Especially with their social and economical crisis, that will be easier to distract from using scape goats and guns than to solve.
Your questioning is weak. The parent spoke of an "oppressive government like China". Can you say that the US is oppressive? Sure, that can be argued ad nauseam, despite e.g. the courts being used to challenge or block most of the president's executive actions.
Can you say the US is on par with China,? No, that's ridiculous. See: any of the above articles.
The us govt can use these to try to intimidate companies but see how google, etc, resist them. see how apple refused to decrypt phones or add features the us govt wants to use to decrypt them. contrast that with china, that would never happen.
This is a false equivalence, China is objectively much worse.
At least America doesn't jail or kill its political activists and journalists, doesn't have what is effectively a dictator for life, doesn't directly control all media in the country, has a semblance of real democracy, doesn't keep it's states by threatening them with military action, doesn't overly and actively censor it's citizen (although it does spy on them).
Whataboutism is a powerful disease of modern discourse. Pretty soon we will start letting killers go because John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer killed more people.
I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy, but the result is a race to the bottom where any other example negates any criticism. Nobody is perfect so if you have to be perfect to criticize no criticism is possible.
> I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy
That's quite a good analysis.
And it's literally the case here. OP was going all "white knight", being judgmental and saying how could people help such a bad country as China.
Which is both a limited view and hypocrisy at it's finest. I'm veggie, but I don't stop being friends with meat eating people, although I do consider it something cruel.
The world is not black and white.
It's not because we don't know it's not a proper civilized argument. It's because it was not meant to be an argument in the first place. Just a way to keep OP in check.
The trouble is that I always see the inverse too: people deflecting any criticism of American foreign policy by citing other countries with worse human rights records.
I don't think the US is involved in mass imprisonment [0] and organ harvesting [1] of innocent people. We're talking about hundreds of thousands being locked up for holding beliefs the CCP doesn't like. And it's happening today.
Yes, airstrikes typically happen in what US calls war zones. Typically weak countries without allies that are willing to do anything in response. Anyway, what were you tryin to say?
I don't think that U.S. is lead by some evil forces that target civilians. . I'm trying to say that you should expect the worse in wars regardless who's fighting or how weak/strong they are(see WW1/WW2).
That's why people should avoid wars. Syria could have avoided the war but it preferred to keep the dictator in place. Too bad that it ended-up with the worst deal: a revolution, a war and the same dictator at the helm..plus a huge debt to Vlad.
The US incarceration rate is rapidly declining and has been falling for ten years.
The US is pursuing drug legalization and decriminalization and is widely seeking to soften its approach overall. China is doing no such thing and has no interest in such, they regard drugs across the board to be completely opposed to their system's values.
The US is pursuing the end of its failed mass-incarceration policies, with wide-spread bi-partisan support. China is aggressively clamping down on its people in just about every possible manner. It's so aggressive at this point, it's difficult to keep up with all the stories pouring out of China about a new repression/restriction.
The US maintains extremely high degrees of freedom of speech, demonstration, expression, religion, movement. Yes, it's obviously not perfect on any given thing, that hardly needs said (and it's better at some things than others, for example it remains world-class on freedom of speech protections).
China has almost none of that and is persistently revoking the gains that had been made.
One need merely compare the vast, endless protest of Trump's Presidency and many of its policies, the terrible things that have been said about him and his family, the violent threats that are routinely made toward him across social media, the nude statue, the giant protest ducky, and on and on and on. Or, eg most media being stacked against him (~90% of all stories being negative; or just see: Colbert and Kimmel and the things they've said, which would get you immediately put into prison in China or worse).
Now contrast that with how China treats Xi, from protests (lack thereof) to media. Or to simplify, see: Winnie the Pooh. You can't even say bad things about Mao in China, that's enough to get you put into prison. Feel free to call George Washington a devil slave owning piece of trash, all day long, all over the Internet, if you like.
The US legalized gay marriage and has made vast strides over the decades in regards to equality for gay persons. China actively tortures gay people in trying to convert them and censors gay culture.
The US has millions of Muslims that have assimilated fairly well into its culture and laws. Conflicts between US non-Muslims and US Muslims are rare, despite the US being overwhelmingly a Christian/Catholic nation. No purges are occuring, no culture eradication is occuring, no mass detentions are occuring; mass killings of Muslims did not occur after 9/11. China is torturing Muslims and seeking to wipe out Muslim culture in the Xinjiang region.
What China is doing in Xinjiang is Guantanamo x1000, literally. Except Guantanamo was overwhelmingly directed at terrorists and battlefield combatants (and yes it failed at that premise on many occasions). What China is doing is targeting all Muslims because they're Muslims. And they may just be getting warmed up, if the history of dictatorships is any indication.
Trump ran on a platform of decreasing the US military's expanse and the involvement in war in the Middle East. He routinely points out the stupidity of what the US has done in the Middle East in the past, no other President has dared to say such things. He just had to be talked into staying involved in Syria by the Europeans. The American people increasingly poll that they'd like to see a draw-down of the US military on the global stage, less entanglement rather than more; Americans are beyond war weary.
China is going the opposite direction. They're violently annexing vast territory from other nations, persistently threatening Taiwan (with violent annexation seeming like an inevitability), and seeking global expansion for their military.
Factually we don't have an accurate count at all on just how vast the torture camps are in China ('re-education camps'), how many people they're putting into prison, and how many people they're executing.
US has one of the biggest jail population in the world, which also exhibits a big social bias toward black males.
Then it has the biggest military budget in the world, despite the fact no country has attacked it for centuries.
But it did invade Irak, while lying about the WMD and against the vote of almost the entire world.
Before that it used drugs to finance big entities, funded dictatorships and dropped the second bomb on Japan during WWII, ignoring that the first one did the job.
It also consider it's own population as a threat, recording everything it communicates.
Just because it doesn't do the same mistakes as another countries doesn't mean it's doing things right. You would be living in China, you would rationalize what the state does, just like you do because you are in the US.
I could do the same speech about France, my own country. Education first goal is to avoid repeating mistakes, but it works only if you can recognize how much mess we have done, or are currently doing.
> despite the fact no country has attacked it for centuries.
It's odd how you say this but then also write about WWII and japan later on.
Also I think you're making an arguement based on fallicies, the person you are responding to is referencing things happening currently. You are referencing things that happened in previous generations, aside from the first point which is valid though certainly a bit odd to compare to organ harvesting. Perhaps a better comparison would be to China's treatment of Tibetans and the US prison population. I'm not sure. I don't really care either way, just pointing out how stupid and pointless both of your arguments are.
I have found that most US people are brain washed by their government. It is something that looked to me quite familiar to North Korea but worked on a different way. People in North Korea/China are brain washed by censorship. People in the US are brain washed by bombardment of information.
This makes the US a credible "free" country while it can control the people. So it can say "but hey you can say anything you want here". Well, you can. But it is worthless if nobody is listening.
The US has figured out that the censorship system is weak. If someone tries to funnel information, your system collapses. The freedom system is strong, because in order to survive your bombardment of information has to be stronger than anyone else. So it is a superior system immune to enemy attacks as long as you can keep pace.
Russia has figured that and is actively trying to move opinions using armies of online guerillas. They are basically bombarding information with their writing on different online forums.
Why don't you try taking my comment in the context of the entire thread and practicing a little critical thinking? You are not playing my game and your comment is a rehash of the parent post. Congrats. Also great job capitalizing "IN" to emphasize it.
Most of US media, both traditional and social, is critical of our government nearly every day right now. The government's clearly not in control of the barrage of information we face everyday.
Some have argued that people in the US are brainwashed by the media, but that theory can't explain how Trump won.
Well the real power is not in the POTUS in the US. So the presidential election are a good way to divert attention and focus blame while bigger entities do their job.
Partially in the administration, partially in big entities like the CIA/NSA, companies. But behind those is a handful of very wealthy people. And they never make the news.
> I have found that most US people are brain washed by their government.
The wonder and the beauty of the American system is that we brainwash ourselves. (In fact, I think most people in government would prefer that Americans were a bit more grounded in reality, not electing Yosemite Sam and whatnot.)
If you want to understand how America really works you have to watch "Deadwood" (the HBO series. I'll elaborate if asked.)
> But it is worthless if nobody is listening.
Bullshit. It's infinitely harder for a society to change if people are thrown in prison for even bringing something up. You or I may not like something about the U.S. but I would argue that its government is objectively better than e.g. the CCP, which tries to actively control "history". Here in America we can, however slowly and painfully, process our shit (and we have some messed up shit to get through.) But if the Chinese people can't even talk about e.g. Tiananmen Square..? That's effed up.
US it's not jailing its own people for holding beliefs the government doesn't like. If China is doing that to its own citizens, what should other countries expect from China?
US has its own issues but as long the people are free to talk about them and hold FREE elections I'm sure they can/will find solutions.
Do you fancy a ruler for life? Go to China or other such countries that I won't name! Live a life ruled by people you can't even speak bad about even if they make your life miserable.
Your comments are egregiously wrong about no one attacking the us for centuries. Japan pushed the US into WW2 with the Pearl Harbor attack, among many other attacks. Yes, the US did some attacking, notably invading Iraq, but only twice! Afghanistan attacked us, basically, on 9/11/2001. We were all but openly at war with Germany. How can you say no one attacked us for centuries? How can you get this sooo wrong?
And no one should dispute that the us has way too large a prison population, one of the sad ways we are superlative.
First, pearl arbor was during a war that was running for 5 years aready. It's not like japan took the agressive initiative here. And that's not an attack of america in general. Have you seen any japan plane bombing the us cost ?
Secondly, only twice ? What kind of argument is that ?
And you went to war on vietnam. And afghanistan. You've been at war non stop after 1945.
Then you talk about nine eleven, which is a terorist act, not another country attacking. Juste an isolated act, and as usual, the us over reacted.
Other countries in the world are targets of terrorist attacks too. Do you thing we go wiping out a country where the bad guys are hidding because of it ?
Just the fact you are justifiying the war monger attitude like it's a casual brunch is scary to me.
But it also makes my point about america vs china. China is terrible. But america is a bully in this world.
I was being sarcastic when I said the us attacked "only" twice. Iraq 2 especially was a massive and horrible mistake, millions of people were affected, who knows many died, how many lives were ruined.
Japan did take the aggressive initiative. Hawaii was part of the US of course, although it was a territory. Late in the war Japan did shell the west coast from a submarine [1]. Japan didn't have to attack the US.
If we're talking about private American VCs, the "logic" doesn't apply. Your comment would only apply if we were talking about US government investment. The problem with your comment is that in China there isn't a public/private divide, or it's very blurry.
Since it's all the same, maybe we should advocate the US pursue the same tactics and methods the CCP utilizes --I bet if the US went that route, people would not say, whelp, there is no difference, yeah, I welcome us becoming more like the Chinese gov't.
There may be some tiny overlap in some areas, but in my estimation, it's massively and significantly different and equivocating is highly misleading.
It is not clear any longer that in the near future most new software technology will still originate in the US.
It appears that the first author of about 50% or more of accepted long papers at ACL 2018, a top NLP conference, is a Chinese. (I didn't count comprehensively as there are > 200 papers, but I counted from a substantial sample.)
Yes, an NLP conference is far from a comprehensive sample of software technology. That is why my first sentence was quite tentative. Nevertheless, the data could be a harbinger for a more widespread phenomenon to come (US researchers used to dominate many, perhaps most, top AI conferences).
The point is not mainland China will dominate software technology. It is that the US may no longer be dominant.
Feel free to add other data to contribute to substantive discussion.
(or american born chinese, or british born chinese, etc etc. almost nobody can get a chinese citizenship, plenty of smart people get american citizenships)
Some more/better data: I added up the number of university researchers who publish in top AI conferences (according to csrankings.org) between 2017 and 2018.
Here are rough/approximate numbers of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent:
US 770
Canada 92
Asia (including China) 340
China 240
Europe 280
Australia + New Zealand 86
South America 12
The world excluding the US 810
So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top conferences in AI.
(AI is the field I'm interested in. Feel free to look into other fields.)
An issue with the data is that some researchers in larger regions (Asia/Europe) may only choose to publish in their regional conferences instead.
The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts the number of people who are capable to advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by the number of highly capable international graduate students who choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability).
I can’t help but think this best aligns with US immigration system. US take in huge amount of international students, but don’t have a reliable (no, lottery-based work visa with a ~50% SLA is not reliable) and easy way for top graduates to work. Instead, policies that were made tens of years ago in fear of US jobs stolen by foreigners are still effective and the same mindset influence many Americans.
This is just an effort among many to attract talent in the US, and at this point any country who doesn’t make this kind of effort is basically leaving free money on the table.
Absolutely correct. US immigration system has deep rooted racism against Chinese and Indians. (Indians who apply for green card today will get it only after 70 years or so).
India has modified its policies to focus more on bringing VC money to its shores. Walmarts takeover of Flipkart is a result of that. Our company in Bay area moved few employees to Mumbai (while still paying them bay area salary. No kidding).
One of the most difficult problems we have in Michigan and the Midwest in general is that a large percentage of our most talented developers leave the state upon graduating college to go to work for the Silicon Valley giants.
If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and they want to do a startup. What if Michigan had an accelerator in Silicon Valley, one where it's native VC's and angel investors had first crack at funding these companies with the provisio that they move back home?
Was warm enough for Henry Ford, The Dodge Brothers, William Durant, Herbert Henry Dow, Louis Chevrolet etc. Maybe some thicker skin and a harder winter would benefit folks ;)
At that time, Silicon valley didn’t exist and California was barely getting mass migration. About a century later, now even the car industry seems to move toward California..
Doesn't seem like a good thing to me, with the cost of real estate, energy and labor in California, building sprawling manufacturing plants for cars probably won't work. Plus the margins on building cars are very low at high volumes - not something SV is used to.
California started getting gold rush migration far before the car industry started flourishing. Silicon Valley is now essentially the heart of the modern gold rush, but of course not everybody will be lured there.
I'm not sure what's the point you're making with the gold rush migration, but most of the population to California came after Model T, and it was during and after the World Wars that California saw much of its population growth. Michigan had more population than California up until 1930s.
I believe the population growth has contributed to the growth of Silicon valley significantly. There seems some feedback loop between the population growth and the industry growth.
They were from a different part of the industrial era when the area was more desirable. There is a funny cycle to labor and skill labor level relative demand. Near the start skilled artisans were being disrupted and displaced by factories set up to use the unskilled masses who were previously doing things like making money off of digging through street trash for resellable goods like rags and bones. While labor conditions were often frankly horrible they often sadly were still an improvement.
Later automation reversed the trend to favor skilled labor to administer machines as being better quality and cheaper than mass cheap labor.
The point being then they had to cater to the bulk of their labor. I do not know the precise history of the region but farm families tend to produce an excess of people with larger family sizes than suburban or urban families.
> If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and they want to do a startup.
As a biological Michigander (Detroit) that now identifies as Californian, my friends and I have anecdotally experienced the opposite. Lack of opportunity was of course a factor. However, the major con for us was the entrenched segregation. I had amazing parents who did their best to teach me not to judge people by their race. But growing up as a black kid from the city who had friends in the burbs, you see a lot of ugly shit. I have bad memories of places like Howell (which still, if I'm not mistaken holds annual KKK rallies) and there are still lots of areas not far from the city where it still isn't safe at night.
Like everywhere else, gentrification is picking up steam. But it isn't as much as an issue since increasing tax revenues far outweighs maintaining communities in a city that had an epidemic of vacant houses. City services have vastly improved and it is heartening to see more diversity in my old neighborhood as whites and others no longer have as much fear of the city, but it's slow going as the scars from the 60's are still evident.
Don't get me wrong. I still appreciate the natural splendor and experiencing the rhythm of the four seasons. I spent this past winter there and it was actually unexpectedly refreshing (if you have someone to shovel your snow). I did end up tacking on 20lbs. That I had to travel 7 miles to find Mexican food that wasn't Taco Bell is a deal breaker for me.
One thing I noticed on my last trip back home is just how much of the Detroit metro area's economy is still driven by staid, stuffy dynastic enterprises such as the old Big Three, health care firms, same old top law firms with the kids now running the show. A lot of the so-called startups are spinoffs that are wholly owned or seeded by Quicken Loans via Rock Ventures. People still have that mindset that work consists of getting a job at a large firm and they aren't as willing to work for startups or become entrepreneurs.
There haven't been any Klan rallies in Howell for a very long time. However the children of those Klansmen still reside in Howell and cast a long shadow over the town. For reference Howell is a small town of 9,500 people mid-way between Detroit and Lansing.
Detroit's revival owes a big debt to Dan Gilbert's (Quicken Loans/Cleveland Cavaliers) purchase of a big chunk of the downtown and his funding of dozens of startups. But the majority of startups now in Detroit aren't funded by Gilbert though he's still a major influence.
It took forty years for Detroit's destruction. We're only on year eight of the road back. Next time you're in the 'D' checkout Bamboo CoWorking center on Woodward. You will meet lots of early stage startups https://www.bamboodetroit.com/ . Gilbert's startups are in the Madison building on Broadway just off Grand Circus near the Opera and Tiger stadium. That entire neighborhood is full of startups. Before 2010 none of it existed, the buildings had been empty for thirty years or more.
Ann Arbor has a huge startup scene. Anchors are Ann Arbor Spark and the Tech Brewery. Much smaller scene in Lansing, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids but it's progressing.
After seeing so many past failed attempts at revitalization (New Center Area, People Mover, etc.), it is refreshing to see a sustained turnaround. What was most surprising on my last trip back was the amount of activity in the downtown area on nights and weekends. Foodie joints, micro-breweries, all 4 major sports teams, casinos and all kinds of other places have popped up. I remember the State Theatre and the Shelter were the only things going on dtown.
BTW - Are you involved in the startup scene in the D?
I'm a fifth generation Detroiter but I'm based in East Lansing now where I went to school. But I have a lot of friends working in startups in Detroit and I get back once a month. Also ran a civic hackathon (Code Michigan) with the state in Detroit for a few years that was held at both the Madison and the Grand Circus https://www.grandcircus.co/
It's not just the Klan. Racism is A problem, but far from the only problem. I grew up in the Lansing area and the majority of my extended family still lives in Michigan. When I look back at the state, the entire state government is corrupt and regressive. I see laws passed to restrict voting rights, civil liberties, and environmental protections. I see high school students in towns near where I grew up flaunting signs making fun of slavery for prom. I see no signs of progress, and many of regression. It's not the kind of environment where I'd want to live, much less raise a family. I've had job offers to move back to Michigan, but I have zero interest in it. The cost of living where I am keeps growing, but I'd rather have a lower cost of living here than live like a king in Michigan (not that the tech jobs in Michigan pay "live like a king" wages).
They leave the Midwest because any company they'd want to work for in that region is run with a tech averse MBA mindset by people who don't understand how to turn software into a business. In the Midwest there is a culture of anti-innovation when it comes to high tech. So when it comes time to find a fun job there is just no comparison between there and SV.
I moved to the Midwest last summer for a Tech job in Urbana/Champaign Illinois. I also worked in Mountain View (silicon valley) while contracting at Google. I find the tech scene in Urbana/Champaign to be much more vibrant: lots of good technical meet ups, lots of university/industry interactions and conferences, etc.
And the cost of living here is very low. Perfect place for a startup.
> I find the tech scene in Urbana/Champaign to be much more vibrant: lots of good technical meet ups, lots of university/industry interactions and conferences, etc.
You had trouble finding “technical meetups, university–industry interactions, conferences, etc.” in the Bay Area?
I find that the problem is the opposite: there is so much going on that it’s hard to keep up with it.
The difference is that I work in the research park next to the University and many of the meet ups are within walking distance or a few miles away with little traffic. And I live 5 or 6 minutes from work. In Mountain View, I worked from 6:30am to about 4pm to reduce my commute time. Going out again to fight traffic to get to a meetup was not so appealing.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s, great place then. Now too crowded, too much traffic - for my tastes.
I think Paul Graham covered a similar scenario about 10 years ago in one of his essays and pointed out that it will mean a strong negative selection for these startups - people who would leave from the place where stuff happens, to place where it doesn't, just to get some cash are probably not interested in much else but in consuming the aforementioned cash.
It's a problem for everybody. My last client literally hired me in France, to work from my bedroom, because they couldn't find the expert they needed in the Bay area. Despite being quite expensive for a French, I'm still cheaper than the competition there. It's crazy.
Longing to return to Midwest is just nostalgia. It's usually for the "losers" The ones that are doing well in the Valley don't long to return. It's usually the one's struggling.
I'm in Michigan btw. I won't say there's a talent shortage here, but folks here are not as driven as those in the Bay. We are too conservative. Hell, I just posted that I'm hiring for my startup and the languages are golang for backend and typescript for frontend. I was told that using Go is a risk for Michigan. :-/
I will never advice a young person with time on their site to come back to the Midwest, Midwest is for raising families not building a startup.
That is simply an overgeneralization. I work with two very talented engineers from “Red America” and they are eager to leave the Bay Area and get back to a place where people drive trucks, listen to country music, and hunt and fish. Their plan is likely going to be to work until their early 40s and then just retire to there.
Yes, retire, but not start a startup. I don't have a problem with Michigan, I actually like it and won't mind retiring here. But for tech startup, it's really frustrating.
China is going to win this one, because US VCs want to "exit". Big Chinese companies are quite happy to keep ownership as the company becomes operational and profitable. They want revenue, not valuation.
I might be touching a sacred pearl in these parts, but in many ways, the US start-up system incentivizes the wrong things, as you say, just getting an exit. A more valuable thing for people with capital to shoot for is sustained or long-term value (revenue is one of those things I guess).
That is definitely the vibe I get most of the time I read something non technical about a startup. In general a lot of startup resources (not just money but raw intelligence of really smart people) get pulled into frivolous things and when you add short term value seeking on top of that, it's not a recipe for improving humanity.
Indeed, the tech world (and to some extent, the business world more generally) is a stark reminder that there is no longer any social pressure against being a "sellout."
This doesn’t match the fact that Chinese startups and recently IPOd tech companies have much much higher valuations and P/E ratios (for the latter) than in the west. If you are looking at primarily operating income, China is actually a horrible place to be. If you want to speculate however, well, that is what everyone else is doing there.
The reason why IPO'd companies have higher valuations in China is because the stock market is controlled by the government. So instead of just giving the SEC a number of financial documents to prove you're not fraudulent and getting a stock broker to help you sell your stock, you do all of that and more to hopefully get put on a waiting list. And once you're on the waiting list, which has maybe around 600-700 companies, there might be some 300 IPOs a year. Out of the 10,000+ that want to go public. The Chinese government really cares about how the stock market is performing (up and to the right, right?) and they try to source some of their legitimacy from these economic gains.
In theory, if they let companies IPO when they wanted, supply and demand shows that the price of stock generally goes down. So all the capital that would have gone into other things in the market, like let's say undervalued tech companies, instead goes toward buying a handful of tickers which have inflated value because there's nothing else people can invest in.
Now as for valuations, PE and VC firms in China get a lot of money from the Chinese government which doesn't exactly need to see a huge return on investment since they're more focused on deploying capital in industries which the government identify as important (like AI). And so firms will invest at greater multiples and with larger amounts of money.
I think the "exit" can have many positive externalities. Where would we be if Steve Jobs or Elon Musk didn't take the exit? I think the serial entrepreneur mentality is to our benefit. We also have people like Bezos who have managed to do many amazing things within the same company as well..
Jobs founded NeXT before Apple. Musk's first big venture was PayPal (well, X.com if you want to get technical) which was bought by eBay. If these individuals stuck with the companies they founded, Apple, SpaceX, Tesla, etc. may not have existed.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadShanghai and Beijing are (I believe) more expensive than Chicago or Atlanta in absolute terms.
But IIRC the first of those 70 leases has yet to expire, so we don't know what will happen when they do.
But not sure what will happen when these leases begin to expire.
Given such an anemic stock market, everyone invests in real estate instead, leading to a massive bubble not seen since Japan in the 80s.
China's authoritarian government's policy is world domination, and I don't think we should be helping them.
Condo complexes are practically never built due to our state liability laws, and the only apartments being built are premium units, as once you deal with the zoning requirements and end up with 20% of your building's floor space getting lopped off, that is the only thing that can profitably be built.
And just because you are better on some part does not mean you should say "how come you can do such thing ?".
We all do terrible things. You know how come. That's not making anything better.
It seems to me that once we reach adulthood we spend most days choosing the lesser the of two or more evils.
While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inm...
edit: as an immigrant to the USA, I sometimes feel like I am much more appreciative of the relative freedoms in the USA than folks born here.
I don’t know how convinced I am by this any more. Between the many wars, the torture, and slavery in the largest prison system on Earth it’s harder to argue. I still don’t want to live in a China, but I don’t want to live in the US either.
If you try to challenge power structures in China directly they roll over you with tanks. The last time people em masse did the same in the US they were beaten, lynched, killed, jailed, firehosed and attacked with dogs.
A higher percent of the US population enjoy a lot of freedom and comfort than the chinese population. In China, only the very rich have what the american middle class has. Also the US hasn't been employing children to manufacture things on his soil for a while (well, it does delegate that to China, but it's another debate).
So no, definitely not on the same scale.
But if I had to pick which one is the most dangerous for the world, I'd pick the US. They are very aggressive, they always have been, and they think they are the best country in the world and that everything they do, no matter how bad, is justify because of how awesome they are.
If you read some of the comments of the threads, you'll see that some people completely dismiss their military activity like it's nothing. Like was is not a huge terrible deal. Like they had to do it, and it was right.
My favorite is "we only invaded Irak twice".
So yeah, for WWIII, the US is definitly in my favorite pool. Especially with their social and economical crisis, that will be easier to distract from using scape goats and guns than to solve.
Can you say the US is on par with China,? No, that's ridiculous. See: any of the above articles.
> "...or anyone else involved in human rights violations."
My point is that the original argument is a simplistic argument. Not that US government is the same as China's government.
At least America doesn't jail or kill its political activists and journalists, doesn't have what is effectively a dictator for life, doesn't directly control all media in the country, has a semblance of real democracy, doesn't keep it's states by threatening them with military action, doesn't overly and actively censor it's citizen (although it does spy on them).
I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy, but the result is a race to the bottom where any other example negates any criticism. Nobody is perfect so if you have to be perfect to criticize no criticism is possible.
Not saying that’s the case here on HN, or in this particular thread. But it is still something to be aware of.
That's quite a good analysis.
And it's literally the case here. OP was going all "white knight", being judgmental and saying how could people help such a bad country as China.
Which is both a limited view and hypocrisy at it's finest. I'm veggie, but I don't stop being friends with meat eating people, although I do consider it something cruel.
The world is not black and white.
It's not because we don't know it's not a proper civilized argument. It's because it was not meant to be an argument in the first place. Just a way to keep OP in check.
But yeah, that's a big fail.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
The US incarceration rate is rapidly declining and has been falling for ten years.
The US is pursuing drug legalization and decriminalization and is widely seeking to soften its approach overall. China is doing no such thing and has no interest in such, they regard drugs across the board to be completely opposed to their system's values.
The US is pursuing the end of its failed mass-incarceration policies, with wide-spread bi-partisan support. China is aggressively clamping down on its people in just about every possible manner. It's so aggressive at this point, it's difficult to keep up with all the stories pouring out of China about a new repression/restriction.
The US maintains extremely high degrees of freedom of speech, demonstration, expression, religion, movement. Yes, it's obviously not perfect on any given thing, that hardly needs said (and it's better at some things than others, for example it remains world-class on freedom of speech protections).
China has almost none of that and is persistently revoking the gains that had been made.
One need merely compare the vast, endless protest of Trump's Presidency and many of its policies, the terrible things that have been said about him and his family, the violent threats that are routinely made toward him across social media, the nude statue, the giant protest ducky, and on and on and on. Or, eg most media being stacked against him (~90% of all stories being negative; or just see: Colbert and Kimmel and the things they've said, which would get you immediately put into prison in China or worse).
Now contrast that with how China treats Xi, from protests (lack thereof) to media. Or to simplify, see: Winnie the Pooh. You can't even say bad things about Mao in China, that's enough to get you put into prison. Feel free to call George Washington a devil slave owning piece of trash, all day long, all over the Internet, if you like.
The US legalized gay marriage and has made vast strides over the decades in regards to equality for gay persons. China actively tortures gay people in trying to convert them and censors gay culture.
The US has millions of Muslims that have assimilated fairly well into its culture and laws. Conflicts between US non-Muslims and US Muslims are rare, despite the US being overwhelmingly a Christian/Catholic nation. No purges are occuring, no culture eradication is occuring, no mass detentions are occuring; mass killings of Muslims did not occur after 9/11. China is torturing Muslims and seeking to wipe out Muslim culture in the Xinjiang region.
What China is doing in Xinjiang is Guantanamo x1000, literally. Except Guantanamo was overwhelmingly directed at terrorists and battlefield combatants (and yes it failed at that premise on many occasions). What China is doing is targeting all Muslims because they're Muslims. And they may just be getting warmed up, if the history of dictatorships is any indication.
Trump ran on a platform of decreasing the US military's expanse and the involvement in war in the Middle East. He routinely points out the stupidity of what the US has done in the Middle East in the past, no other President has dared to say such things. He just had to be talked into staying involved in Syria by the Europeans. The American people increasingly poll that they'd like to see a draw-down of the US military on the global stage, less entanglement rather than more; Americans are beyond war weary.
China is going the opposite direction. They're violently annexing vast territory from other nations, persistently threatening Taiwan (with violent annexation seeming like an inevitability), and seeking global expansion for their military.
Factually we don't have an accurate count at all on just how vast the torture camps are in China ('re-education camps'), how many people they're putting into prison, and how many people they're executing.
Then it has the biggest military budget in the world, despite the fact no country has attacked it for centuries.
But it did invade Irak, while lying about the WMD and against the vote of almost the entire world.
Before that it used drugs to finance big entities, funded dictatorships and dropped the second bomb on Japan during WWII, ignoring that the first one did the job.
It also consider it's own population as a threat, recording everything it communicates.
Just because it doesn't do the same mistakes as another countries doesn't mean it's doing things right. You would be living in China, you would rationalize what the state does, just like you do because you are in the US.
I could do the same speech about France, my own country. Education first goal is to avoid repeating mistakes, but it works only if you can recognize how much mess we have done, or are currently doing.
It's odd how you say this but then also write about WWII and japan later on.
Also I think you're making an arguement based on fallicies, the person you are responding to is referencing things happening currently. You are referencing things that happened in previous generations, aside from the first point which is valid though certainly a bit odd to compare to organ harvesting. Perhaps a better comparison would be to China's treatment of Tibetans and the US prison population. I'm not sure. I don't really care either way, just pointing out how stupid and pointless both of your arguments are.
Beside, japan never attacked the us soil.
I'm underlying all this because i want to point out the us is a very agressive country with an history of violence internally and externally.
That's not to deny the positive things in america nor the good that it did for the world or the comfort and freedom a lot of it's population enjoy.
It's just that tye later should not make you forget the former. If you can't see both, you are blind of one eye.
This makes the US a credible "free" country while it can control the people. So it can say "but hey you can say anything you want here". Well, you can. But it is worthless if nobody is listening.
The US has figured out that the censorship system is weak. If someone tries to funnel information, your system collapses. The freedom system is strong, because in order to survive your bombardment of information has to be stronger than anyone else. So it is a superior system immune to enemy attacks as long as you can keep pace.
Russia has figured that and is actively trying to move opinions using armies of online guerillas. They are basically bombarding information with their writing on different online forums.
A. brainwashed by decades of anti-US propaganda (the source of which is generally Russia or the Soviet Union)
B. Paid Russian/Chinese shills
We say that america has done and is doing terrible things as well.
But i can play your game too. Look :
IN my experience, people that have your opinion are generally :
- brain washed by decades of pro us propaganda.
- paid by the nsa / gun industry shills
Why don't you try taking my comment in the context of the entire thread and practicing a little critical thinking? You are not playing my game and your comment is a rehash of the parent post. Congrats. Also great job capitalizing "IN" to emphasize it.
Some have argued that people in the US are brainwashed by the media, but that theory can't explain how Trump won.
The wonder and the beauty of the American system is that we brainwash ourselves. (In fact, I think most people in government would prefer that Americans were a bit more grounded in reality, not electing Yosemite Sam and whatnot.)
If you want to understand how America really works you have to watch "Deadwood" (the HBO series. I'll elaborate if asked.)
> But it is worthless if nobody is listening.
Bullshit. It's infinitely harder for a society to change if people are thrown in prison for even bringing something up. You or I may not like something about the U.S. but I would argue that its government is objectively better than e.g. the CCP, which tries to actively control "history". Here in America we can, however slowly and painfully, process our shit (and we have some messed up shit to get through.) But if the Chinese people can't even talk about e.g. Tiananmen Square..? That's effed up.
US has its own issues but as long the people are free to talk about them and hold FREE elections I'm sure they can/will find solutions.
Do you fancy a ruler for life? Go to China or other such countries that I won't name! Live a life ruled by people you can't even speak bad about even if they make your life miserable.
And no one should dispute that the us has way too large a prison population, one of the sad ways we are superlative.
Secondly, only twice ? What kind of argument is that ?
And you went to war on vietnam. And afghanistan. You've been at war non stop after 1945.
Then you talk about nine eleven, which is a terorist act, not another country attacking. Juste an isolated act, and as usual, the us over reacted.
Other countries in the world are targets of terrorist attacks too. Do you thing we go wiping out a country where the bad guys are hidding because of it ?
Just the fact you are justifiying the war monger attitude like it's a casual brunch is scary to me.
But it also makes my point about america vs china. China is terrible. But america is a bully in this world.
Japan did take the aggressive initiative. Hawaii was part of the US of course, although it was a territory. Late in the war Japan did shell the west coast from a submarine [1]. Japan didn't have to attack the US.
I agree that the US is a bully.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
There may be some tiny overlap in some areas, but in my estimation, it's massively and significantly different and equivocating is highly misleading.
It appears that the first author of about 50% or more of accepted long papers at ACL 2018, a top NLP conference, is a Chinese. (I didn't count comprehensively as there are > 200 papers, but I counted from a substantial sample.)
http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/
Added:
Yes, an NLP conference is far from a comprehensive sample of software technology. That is why my first sentence was quite tentative. Nevertheless, the data could be a harbinger for a more widespread phenomenon to come (US researchers used to dominate many, perhaps most, top AI conferences).
The point is not mainland China will dominate software technology. It is that the US may no longer be dominant.
Feel free to add other data to contribute to substantive discussion.
Here are rough/approximate numbers of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent:
US 770
Canada 92
Asia (including China) 340
China 240
Europe 280
Australia + New Zealand 86
South America 12
The world excluding the US 810
So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top conferences in AI. (AI is the field I'm interested in. Feel free to look into other fields.)
An issue with the data is that some researchers in larger regions (Asia/Europe) may only choose to publish in their regional conferences instead.
The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts the number of people who are capable to advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by the number of highly capable international graduate students who choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability).
http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...
This is just an effort among many to attract talent in the US, and at this point any country who doesn’t make this kind of effort is basically leaving free money on the table.
India has modified its policies to focus more on bringing VC money to its shores. Walmarts takeover of Flipkart is a result of that. Our company in Bay area moved few employees to Mumbai (while still paying them bay area salary. No kidding).
If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and they want to do a startup. What if Michigan had an accelerator in Silicon Valley, one where it's native VC's and angel investors had first crack at funding these companies with the provisio that they move back home?
Ex: ~1000$ an acre. https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_histori...
I believe the population growth has contributed to the growth of Silicon valley significantly. There seems some feedback loop between the population growth and the industry growth.
Later automation reversed the trend to favor skilled labor to administer machines as being better quality and cheaper than mass cheap labor.
The point being then they had to cater to the bulk of their labor. I do not know the precise history of the region but farm families tend to produce an excess of people with larger family sizes than suburban or urban families.
As a biological Michigander (Detroit) that now identifies as Californian, my friends and I have anecdotally experienced the opposite. Lack of opportunity was of course a factor. However, the major con for us was the entrenched segregation. I had amazing parents who did their best to teach me not to judge people by their race. But growing up as a black kid from the city who had friends in the burbs, you see a lot of ugly shit. I have bad memories of places like Howell (which still, if I'm not mistaken holds annual KKK rallies) and there are still lots of areas not far from the city where it still isn't safe at night.
Like everywhere else, gentrification is picking up steam. But it isn't as much as an issue since increasing tax revenues far outweighs maintaining communities in a city that had an epidemic of vacant houses. City services have vastly improved and it is heartening to see more diversity in my old neighborhood as whites and others no longer have as much fear of the city, but it's slow going as the scars from the 60's are still evident.
Don't get me wrong. I still appreciate the natural splendor and experiencing the rhythm of the four seasons. I spent this past winter there and it was actually unexpectedly refreshing (if you have someone to shovel your snow). I did end up tacking on 20lbs. That I had to travel 7 miles to find Mexican food that wasn't Taco Bell is a deal breaker for me.
One thing I noticed on my last trip back home is just how much of the Detroit metro area's economy is still driven by staid, stuffy dynastic enterprises such as the old Big Three, health care firms, same old top law firms with the kids now running the show. A lot of the so-called startups are spinoffs that are wholly owned or seeded by Quicken Loans via Rock Ventures. People still have that mindset that work consists of getting a job at a large firm and they aren't as willing to work for startups or become entrepreneurs.
Detroit's revival owes a big debt to Dan Gilbert's (Quicken Loans/Cleveland Cavaliers) purchase of a big chunk of the downtown and his funding of dozens of startups. But the majority of startups now in Detroit aren't funded by Gilbert though he's still a major influence.
It took forty years for Detroit's destruction. We're only on year eight of the road back. Next time you're in the 'D' checkout Bamboo CoWorking center on Woodward. You will meet lots of early stage startups https://www.bamboodetroit.com/ . Gilbert's startups are in the Madison building on Broadway just off Grand Circus near the Opera and Tiger stadium. That entire neighborhood is full of startups. Before 2010 none of it existed, the buildings had been empty for thirty years or more.
Ann Arbor has a huge startup scene. Anchors are Ann Arbor Spark and the Tech Brewery. Much smaller scene in Lansing, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids but it's progressing.
BTW - Are you involved in the startup scene in the D?
And the cost of living here is very low. Perfect place for a startup.
You had trouble finding “technical meetups, university–industry interactions, conferences, etc.” in the Bay Area?
I find that the problem is the opposite: there is so much going on that it’s hard to keep up with it.
I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s, great place then. Now too crowded, too much traffic - for my tastes.
I'm in Michigan btw. I won't say there's a talent shortage here, but folks here are not as driven as those in the Bay. We are too conservative. Hell, I just posted that I'm hiring for my startup and the languages are golang for backend and typescript for frontend. I was told that using Go is a risk for Michigan. :-/
I will never advice a young person with time on their site to come back to the Midwest, Midwest is for raising families not building a startup.
In theory, if they let companies IPO when they wanted, supply and demand shows that the price of stock generally goes down. So all the capital that would have gone into other things in the market, like let's say undervalued tech companies, instead goes toward buying a handful of tickers which have inflated value because there's nothing else people can invest in.
Now as for valuations, PE and VC firms in China get a lot of money from the Chinese government which doesn't exactly need to see a huge return on investment since they're more focused on deploying capital in industries which the government identify as important (like AI). And so firms will invest at greater multiples and with larger amounts of money.
Huh? Neither of them did. They stayed and built up their companies.
Er, no.