* But the primary reason that the Bay Area beat the East Coast metros for tech supremacy is because California courts don’t enforce non-compete agreements. This makes it far easier for workers to jump from firm to firm, dispersing innovation. Best practices tend to spread quickly raising the average quality across all firms.
The reality is that 99%+ of non-competes don’t exist for their explicit legal purpose. The notion that a 22-year old college graduate is somehow essential to the existence of the enterprise is laughable. Non-competes exist as small print so that large corporates can use their extensive legal departments to discourage workers from looking for higher-paying jobs. Thus keeping wages down.
If any state wanted to compete as a major tech center, they’d adopt California’s policy and recognize non-competes as restraints of trade. But it’s highly unlikely: corporate lobbyists would obviously be opposed, Democrats have no interest in labor issues affecting white-color workers, and Republicans would somehow conceptualize it as anti free-market.
* The comparison between the two urban areas on the immigration front is even worse than it looks, and goes beyond illegal immigration from Latin America. Immigration to each place from outside the Western Hemisphere looks very different. In the Bay Area, you get high-IQ, high-productivity, “symbolic analyst”-type workers drawn by the tech industry. LA’s immigrants (not counting illegals from Latin America): more likely to be cutthroat small-businessmen, or out-and-out scammers, from the Middle East, former Soviet Union, and other low-trust, institutionally weak societies. This is increasingly a factor in doing business in the LA area, and is probably going to be an increasing factor of life other places that follow the LA demographic and urban model: count the silver and don’t risk more than you can afford to lose when you get ripped off. Places like the Bay Area may look like Star Trek. Places like LA will look more like the souk or bazaar.
* It’s partly that Southern Californians believe in individual taste, usually with unfortunate results. Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills is hilariously non-cohesive. The movie business meant that rich moguls would call in their set designers to design their mansions and tell them whatever crazed inspiration would come to mind to distinguish themselves from their neighbors : e.g., Think 12-bedroom Tongan hut!
I can recall visiting Florence, Italy in 1980 and realizing with a shock that centuries of Florence citizens had cared about what their ancestors had thought about design and tried to put up building that complemented the great buildings that were already there in order to make the entire city a unified work of art rather than each building as an assertion of ego and whim as in Los Angeles.
* Reverse snobbery is at war with admiration for architectural standards protected by well thought out regulations that protect quality of life. Reverse snobbery always settles for the safe middle ground which in a production/consumption culture based on human rights minus high culture apparently leads to a surfeit of duller, poorer people.
* Southern California has become like Italy south of Rome, while northern California has become like northern Italy. Once you acquire a large population of low-IQ black or brown people, your region becomes economically unremarkable and stays that way for hundreds of years.
But I’m not betting against the drooling and voracious real estate market. After seeing what’s happened to many coastal areas of the US in the last 30 years, I doubt LA can avoid hardcore gentrification. It has a good location, good weather, plenty of culture, and certain areas of the city are noticeably cheaper than others. The Hispanics now giving the boot to the blacks may have inadvertently cleared the way for younger whites fleeing expensive areas like San Francisco to give the boot to the Hispanics, move in, and start gentrifying the place well beyond the economic reach of any brown or black person in California.
Whites won’t move into a black area, but some of them have no problem with Hispanic areas. Once the wedge is in the door, other whites are more likely to follow once an affordable neighborhood becomes safer and the public schools whiter.
* As a Bay Area native (actually born in SF), this whole idea of Frisco beating out LA strikes me kind of amusing. When I was a child we were actually jealous of LA, because it got all of the attention, and why not, successful sports franchises, Hollywood, all of those rock groups on the Strip, etc., while SF could barely muster 750 K people (I think it’s still around there) and no one paid attention to us. That’s how it seemed, anyway.
I started to notice a change in the late ’70′s, before I left. I think it was because SF became the site of a larger financial sector. At any rate, that’s when things seemed to become more expensive and perhaps more decadent. The general vibe you were supposed to have was loyalty to the Bay Area, and a respect for its seafaring/prospecting roots, which also involved broad tolerance for weirdos and eccentrics. The general sense was that the economy was depressed because Harry Bridges had destroyed it as a port city during the longshoreman’s strikes.
But by the late ’70′s that had all morphed. Financial centers were everywhere, prices were rising, gays, who were once tolerated as “our weirdos” became practically oppressive (hence, PC evolution), bean sprouts started turning up in tunafish sandwiches, and the overgrown small town loyalty of the old days turned into the smugness ever since, usually by people who weren’t even natives.
In terms of development, remember there’s only so much you can do with all the hills around, and the threat of another devastating earthquake. It’s true that they didn’t build subdivisions all over Marin or Mt Diablo or the Berkeley Hills, but but that would be hard work to do so, and because of the configuration of the land, there would be a lot of traffic bottlenecks wherever you built. It’s not surprising that most of the expansion has been on the bayshore peninsula, the bayshore East Bay, and the San Jose area: nice and flat.
Again, I think the financial sector and then the fortuitous siting of the computer sector is what has made SF a winner. And that’s a rising tide that floats all boats.
* The fortuitous circumstance of Stanford and the pioneers of electronic circuitry being located in Santa Clara was critical in making the Bay Area the tech capital of the world but San Francisco was the banking and finance capital of the West Coast. Bank America, Wells Fargo,Crocker bank and the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange were in SF. Southern California was savings and loan territory.
There was also the LA smog. I well remember people in Northern California refusing to take jobs in LA because of it. It was unnerving to be unable to see more than a few blocks down the street on a sunny day and toss in the burning sensation in one’s eyes and other deleterious health effects I wouldn’t underestimate the adverse impact smog had on Southern California’s economic development at this critical time when California transitioned to a post industrial economy.
While LA kept the film and entertainment industry it is really not that big of an employer. I’ve read that the entire film and TV industry accounts for fewer than 250,000 jobs nationwide.
* It’s not just “blacks and poor Mexicans” who are being priced out of LA, at all.
As far as downtown LA in particular, many people with good-paying professional jobs (disproportionately white and Asian) are also having trouble affording to live here.
And by the way, there are still plenty of obnoxious, intimidating, rude Africans all over downtown LA, many of them homeless. So one can have the privilege of paying $2,000 to $3,000 per month in rent and still being aggressively panhandled and sometimes harassed by the Bruthas on a daily basis, smelling urine on the sidewalks, and having trash float by.
* If he [Steve Sailer] starts hustling now, he can get it [novel] out in time for the thirtieth anniversary of The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Wolfe’s novel is often said to have captured perfectly the vibe of the go-go Reagan ’80s.
What’s a good title for a book encapsulating the zany zeitgeist of the multiculti transformative Obama teens? The Brushfire* of the Inanities?
*How does this plot sound?
In August 2012, with the president’s re-election campaign about to heat up, a Mexican laborer casually tosses a cigarette onto some trash that he dumped on the ground. His carelessness sparks a raging wildfire that torches large parts of Southern California.
The police launch a massive manhunt for the accidental arsonist. They find him hard at work, scrubbing toilets in a stadium at which a heavily-attended, nationally-televised college-football game is being played on Labor Day. When they swoop in to arrest him, he runs into the crowd and tries to make his escape. A white cop shoots at him, but misses.
At the moment that the cop fires the shot, the game is in its final moments. The home team’s star black running back is making an 82-yard rush for a game-winning touchdown, and the crowd leaps to its feet in anticipation.
The bullet hits a 300-pound black woman, standing on the edge of a balcony in the nosebleed section, in the head. Her body falls to the ground. Incredibly, she lands atop the running back as he rushes by below. The impact leaves him grievously injured. He does not make the touchdown, and the home team loses the game.
The angry (mostly-white) crowd turns on the cops. One cop misfires his gun, killing an 82-year-old white man, sitting in a seat on the 50-yard line, who happens to be the team’s biggest booster. In the ensuing chaos, the Mexican immigrant escapes.
(All of this is broadcast live as part of ESPN’s exclusive prime-time coverage of America’s favorite pastime.)
Overnight, an overworked Filipina nurse at the hospital accidentally administers an overdose to the paralyzed running back, killing him.
This incident sparks massive BLM-type protests around the country, and opens up fissures between blacks, Hispanics, and Asians that threaten to split the Democratic anti-white-man coalition. Black anger is stoked by the attorney general, who makes a series of inflammatory speeches.
The president attends the black football star’s funeral. There, his brilliant Jewish chief-of-staff meets the black football star’s hot-and-slutty-but-not-totally-brainless Hispanic girlfriend. They begin having a torrid love affair – a relationship driven solely by his lust and her greed. He draws up a plan to parlay her inadvertent fifteen minutes of fame into a political career.
In the weeks before the election, she headlines a series of rallies designed to draw blacks *and* Hispanics to the polls to END (Eliminate Nefarious Discrimination) the Hate and EARN (Eradicate All Racism Now) a Brighter Tomorrow. (Hispanic turnout at the rallies is disappointingly low, but black turnout is even heavier than expected.)
Her career is threatened when, on the Friday before the election, her father-in-law (a white, mentally-unstable bodybuilder transitioning into transwomanhood) goes berserk and shoots up the biggest EARN rally to date. (Ironically, it is being held in the same stadium as the fateful football game.) He escapes. A massive manhunt fails to find him.
The Democratic Party now threatens to burst apart at the seams.
On Sunday evening, the girlfriend makes a dramatic prime-time speech in which she tearfully claims that her father-in-law was physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive toward her, her mother, and her sisters for years and that she is a victim of white-male racism and sexism. At the end, she announces that she is bisexual.
This speech stops the political hemorrhaging, but the election is now too close to call.
On the day before the election, a white computer nerd living in Los Angeles uncovers documents suggesting that the whole sequence of events, beginning with the wildfire, is a black-ops scam designed by the president’s chief-of-staff and implemented by the CIA. The operation is designed to create enough chaos in the country to give the president a pretext to suspend the Constitution and cancel the election.
The final twist in the plan is this: On the morning of Election Day, the girlfriend will attend an END/EARN prayer breakfast with a bunch of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton types. The deranged transsexual bodybuilder – a CIA operative – will set off a bomb at the event, and issue a declaration that he has struck the first blow in the Great Patriotic War* for White Supremacy. The crime will spark massive race riots, disrupting voting all across the country. The president will declare a state of national emergency, institute martial law, announce that he is postponing the election “until calm returns”, and establish dictatorial rule.
As the nerd is about to post the documents on his WikiLeaks-ish site, henchmen burst into his house and start shooting. They blow up his house.
He barely escapes with his life and the documents (on a USB stick) and hops in his old, beat-up car, with the henchmen hot on his trail. He has no phone or computer, having had no time to grab either, and he cannot stop, even for red lights. He must keep on driving, or die.
CIA operatives issue a false report that the nerd is, in fact, the deranged transsexual bodybuilder, and that he killed three police officers while making his escape. The cops pursuing him are given orders to eliminate him with extreme prejudice. (These orders come directly from the president’s chief-of-staff himself.)
Within minutes, the cops’ pursuit of the nerd turns into a massive televised chase.
As fate would have it, at the very moment that the cops are about to stop the nerd once and for all, the Mexican immigrant who started the wildfire, drunk out of his mind, is driving home on the same freeway, but in the opposite direction. When he sees the dozens of police cars and helicopters, he assumes that they are coming for him, freaks out, and loses consciousness. His car swerves across the median and plows into the police car directly ahead of the nerd’s car; both cars erupt in a massive fireball. The nerd, his reflexes honed by many lonely nights playing video games, swerves to the right at the last second and careens down into a ditch. The cops on his tail simply plow head-on into the wreckage. The chain-reaction crash leads to a 152-car pileup.
When the nerd comes to, he is shaken but unhurt, and he realizes that, in the confusion, he has a narrow window of opportunity to escape.
After a few frantic seconds, he finds the USB stick and makes his getaway mere seconds before the car explodes. After peering through several windows of a nearby apartment building, he spots a laptop. He smashes the window, grabs the laptop, and runs to a nearby McDonald’s, to access its free WiFi.
Crouching in a bathroom stall, he finds that the WiFi is agonizingly slow – almost as bad as an early-’90s dial-up connection. It will take several minutes to upload the 100K worth of documents, and the upload page hasn’t even finished loading yet. But he dares not leave.
Preoccupied by his bandwidth troubles, he fails to notice that the stall next to him is now occupied by a petite Filipina – the same Filipina who administered the overdose to the football player at the hospital. He also fails to notice that she is holding a syringe, and that she is reaching under the stall, preparing to stab the syringe into his leg…
What happens next? You’ll never know, unless someone writes an ending.
*In the end, the U.S. government will expose the bodybuilder as a Russian operative, giving the president an excuse to launch World War III.
* My guess is that Asians can tell that Conquistador-Americans have Miami locked up tight via ethnic nepotism and won’t play fair with Asians, much less let Asians get away with ethnic nepotism.
