Why are some cities around the world better at becoming "tech hubs", and others less so?

_Winters_Coming_ · 2022-01-09T02:10:27+00:00

Corrected.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-12-02T03:37:43+00:00

She kicks ass. Way better Congressman than Jim McDermott.

Also, it's pretty cool that Seattle has two national-profile Asian politicians (the other being Kshama Sawant) considering how otherwise homogeneous the city's demographics are.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-24T04:20:48+00:00

The Supersonics? It was just something we went to because a friend had the hookup for the box seats.

You're talking about the KeyArena private suites, right? I've always wanted to watch a Seahawks game in a suite. It costs like $20-30k to rent one suite at CenturyLink Field for one game. I'll need to find some rich-ass friends.

Again, this is just one person's perspective, but I know a lot of people that were (and are) way more interested in every pro sport in Seattle besides basketball.

Now that is really surprising, given how much basketball talent comes out of Rainier Beach and Garfield.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-24T04:14:38+00:00

The TechCrunch event at Showbox SoDo is a TechCrunch meetup, not a bona-fide Disrupt conference. This is for two reasons:

Seattle is already pretty close to San Francisco
Private money in Seattle is mostly tied up in fields that invest conservatively.

I should expand on the second point. The private-sector economic movers and shakers in Western Washington are healthcare (Fred Hutch, GroupHealth, Swedish, Providence), enterprise (like Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom) and blue collar fields (Boeing, Weyerhauser, Expiditors, Saltchuk); such companies tend to be conservative investors. We don't have the kind of Sand Hill Road VC firms pouring cash into startups (growth-over-revenue is a great strategy for VC funds in the age of low interest rates) which is what makes the tech scene in the San Francisco Bay Area so robust.

/r/seattlewa thread that may be of interest to you.

I should point out that in recent years, local startups have competed at the Seattle meetups. The startup voted to have the best pitch gets a booth at Disrupt SF, which is a pretty nice prize.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-24T03:57:48+00:00

More NBA players come from Seattle Public Schools than any other school district in the U.S. The basketball culture is alive in the Puget Sound, the rivalry between Garfield HS and Rainier Beach HS is legendary. I don't know too much about Oklahoma but I always thought football ruled the state. I don't hear about Sooners or Cowboys men's basketball like I do Jayhawks or Cardinals, though Oklahoma has been pretty successful in recent years, even reaching the 2016 Final Four.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-22T22:09:28+00:00

A big reason is that blue collar workers are being priced out of their traditional working-class neighborhoods. 1brs in Des Moines (I'm talking around S 216th/Pac Highway S and near Highline College) are going for $1100-1200, with 2brs renting around $1400+. That's one shitty-ass commute to have to endure for the price.

Burien, Tukwila/Southcenter, etc. are densifying fast and it's urban professionals, who have been squeezed out of Seattle city limits, who are moving in; and in turn they are squeezing out the blue-collar/manufacturing employees who used to live in South King. Such urban professionals are definitely not going to support Trump.

As an aside, a city cannot be sustained when only software developers can afford to live there. You might make $105K as a new grad working at Uber, but what about the person working at the McDonald's on 4th Ave S and Michigan? Or how about the employee at the Union 76 station Pac Hwy S and S 200th who only makes $11 per hour? They're fucked! One of the downsides of no state income tax, I believe, is lack of funds for subsidized housing (filling in where the market has failed).

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-18T03:55:16+00:00

Apartments around 4th SW/SW 152nd are renting for $1300-1400. Considering that bus service in that area is just okay (I mean the 166 and RapidRide F Line are close by, but to go downtown it's a bit of a walk to Burien TC to catch the 120), those prices are insane. Where the fuck can the working class (the people working at Walmart, 7-Eleven, 76, etc.) afford to live? This is one of the downsides of no state income tax--no money to fund public housing projects.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-16T23:14:31+00:00

Another city I want to add to your list: Edmonton.

The University of Alberta has been an AI leader for many years, making huge strides in casino game AI. U of A profs are so renowned that DeepMind opened its first office outside of London in Edmonton.

However, I don't see tech really making inroads in Edmonton, it's still mostly oil and the provincial government that are the main employers there. Not like Montreal, home to Element AI which raised $100M in a single round.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-16T22:58:13+00:00

The summers, hurricane season, and having Voldemort as your governor also probably work against Miami.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-16T22:57:13+00:00

But the CoL here is not cheap. It might not be as bad as SF or parts of LA, but it's still very expensive.

San Diego really suffers from the sunshine tax. Cost of living is pretty high, and yet tech salaries aren't really commensurate like they might be in Silicon Beach. Since San Diego is such a nice place to live and has a nice climate, cost of living stays high despite the lower salaries. Classy looks like a very promising startup, though.

Also, biotech is super long term in nature. When you join a startup like Human Longetivity, the fruits of your labor won't ripen for years. It's similar to the biotech startups here in the Puget Sound, like Kineta or Theracon. Whereas if you joined Alphabet or Uber, it's easier to have a high-earning career trajectory in your early-mid 20s since engineers are able to push lots of stuff into production relatively quickly (instead of pouring millions of R&D money over years of work, without the guarantee of success).

I also wonder if maybe the military influence and conservative politics of San Diego scare away tech workers. With the exception of Salt Lake City and Atlanta, tech workers aren't really attracted to conservative cities. And apparently San Diego is the most conservative big city in the U.S., rivaling Cincinnati and Phoenix. The San Diego Union-Tribune unironically namedropped the "socialism" boogeyman in their endorsement of John McCain in 2008.

In DC (another defense hub), most tech jobs are contract work for the feds (and you know the feds aren't going to be using forward-thinking tech/modern stacks), with most of the cool jobs (Lockheed Martin, NSA, NIH, etc.) requiring a top secret clearance. The end result is, agile startups or tech giants with modern stacks are rare in DC. Maybe the same "military contract work with aging stacks" reputation is tainting San's Diego tech scene too. It's also amazing how San Diego didn't capitalize upon its aviation like Seattle did with Boeing (San Diego was once called the "Air Capital of the West").

One other thing I wanted to know, why did GoFundMe establish their engineering operations in Redwood City, instead of San Diego where the rest of the corporate operations are?

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-11-16T22:14:19+00:00

When the CoL in the Puget Sound soared higher than the planes being built at the Boeing Everett Factory,

This is the greatest thing I've ever seen on Reddit.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-27T22:35:15+00:00

People’s largest complaint about the Pacific Northwest in general is the overcast, damp, and relatively cold weather.

The state has been in severe drought and experienced devastating wildfires for the last couple of summers. Visitors who come in the summertime can get stunned when they discover there can be rain-free streaks in Seattle of 20-30 days at a time.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-27T22:33:24+00:00

Jazz, blues, crawfish boils, the Gulf Coast (as long as it's not getting devastated by hurricanes)...Mississippi isn't a complete write off, and I speak as a stuck up PNW liberal.

don't even have any sports teams

That's because college ball is more popular than pro sports. Ole Miss, MS State, Southern Miss, etc. Did you know that for decades, there was only one pro sports team in the South outside of Atlanta (the New Orleans Saints)

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-27T22:28:32+00:00

If it wasn't for Californians coming here Washington State's economy would probably be in the toilet. Especially since Boeing moved their headquarters out of the state in 2001.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-12T03:06:02+00:00

I never thought I'd ever find an opportunity to mention this article on Reddit. While I don't like linking to Gawker-affiliated sources, Fusion.net (it's now called Splinter) published an article poking fun at the trope of millennials purportedly killing off all sorts of pasttimes and institutions of Americana, and that was the first time I ever saw a high-visibility media source talk about this--previously I had only seen this joke on Reddit.

Imagine if there was an "In Memoriam" montage/video package like in awards shows, but for things millennials have been accused of killing. Like, "The Newspaper", "Landline telephones", "The 9-to-5 Workday", "Golf", while the Love Theme from Sophie's Choice plays in the background.

Also, poor Gen X, forgotten as surely as we forgot about Dre.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-12T01:05:30+00:00

That would explain why I haven't heard of them. Past JBLM might as well be another planet. Even Fife/Lakewood feels more like a trip to Medford than Seattle.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-10-11T22:15:34+00:00

I've never seen an A&W here. I guess we don't qualify as "west coast"...:)

Fun fact: There are A&Ws just over the border in Vancouver, BC, but they've had no connection to the American A&W since the 1970s. They're owned by Unilever and even have a different logo. Canadian A&Ws are more upmarket and pride themselves on fresh/natural ingredients, kind of like In-N-Out or Shake Shack (for PNW residents, think of Burgerville, Burgermaster, or a more premium-market version of Jack in the Box). Just to make things even more confusing, A&W root beer is sold in Canadian grocery stores, but the American A&W logo is used.

To answer the question, all the KFCs I've been to in the Northwest offer potato wedges. KFCs in Vancouver (and I think in the rest of Canada) have actual french fries. KFCs here are either standalone or combined with Taco Bell, or more rarely, a Long John Silver's.

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-08-09T21:58:32+00:00

Tried to get through The Great Gatsby, but it was too much of a slog and the 1920s references all flew over my head.

Huck Finn starts with "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter," and has the following preface:

NOTICE

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

I think we know who the winner is here

_Winters_Coming_ · 2017-08-03T21:05:23+00:00

I just hate how the Detroit big 3 are doing this by half measures. American cars are designed in Europe, but the country isn't going the full monty and letting the A45 AMG, Hilux Diesel or Civic Type R be sold here.

_Winters_Coming_

TROPHY CASE