
The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy - middle1
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/the-chinese-think-palo-alto-is-dumpy/
======
serf
I throw out any articles with an opinion as a premise that is based on a
nation as a singular entity.

"The Chinese say.." , "The Albanians do..", "The Americans think.."

Unless we're talking about nation-affecting issues or cataclysms here, let's
keep the national entity out of journalism, please. It's fine to say things
like "The people of Thailand are struggling with seasonal floods."

The WSJ[0] article that is linked in the techcrunch article even uses the
phrase 'Chinese entrepreneurs'. That makes more sense.

 _The Chinese_ did not form a nation-wide opinion about the quality of Palo
Alto.

/rantover

[0]: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-these-entrepreneurs-
silicon...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-these-entrepreneurs-silicon-
valley-is-like-lame-1516270601)

------
gpsx
America in general is pretty dumpy. For one thing we have not been spending
much money on infrastructure. I think Palo Alto is nicer then your typical
comparable cities in the US, but that is not saying much.

I think Silicon valley has changed in a different way. Young people now want
to get a safe, big paycheck at companies like Google, Facebook and Apple
rather than doing a startup. I suspect that hurts innovation. At the same time
maybe it will make some really big projects possible, like self driving cars
and big AI advances?

~~~
candiodari
> For one thing we have not been spending much money on infrastructure.

Or houses. Californians live in wooden shacks.

Or windows.

Or doors.

Or company interiors.

Or heating systems.

Or hotels (and let's not discuss motels).

(But there's many things much better about the US too)

You should try living in Western Europe and compare the small things. The
difference is staggering.

~~~
DrScump

      Californians live in wooden shacks.
    

Compare post-earthquake images from China to post-earthquake images from
California, and those "shacks" look a bit better.

~~~
candiodari
That explains the "wooden" part, but European wooden houses still look a lot
better and sturdier than Californian ones, or American ones in general. And
they do build that way even where earthquakes do happen.

And European ones especially vastly outperform American ones when it comes to
sound and climate isolation (warm or cold, doesn't matter).

The sad part is that those European wooden houses are considered amongst the
worst possible houses in Europe when it comes to isolation, again both where
it comes to sound and where it comes to climate.

------
hmwhy
This article really doesn’t add anything new or helpful to the conversation.
The message seems to be “chill, people, we have been doing okay and we still
seem okay, so we will be okay”, the relevant paragraph being:

> For all of the concerns of the press that there is a new brain drain in
> Silicon Valley, I think we can rest easy. Despite Palo Alto’s shabby look,
> lack of mobile payments, and lack of face-recognition software, America
> still has many, many desirable qualities. It’s safe and clean. Corruption is
> reasonably rare. Universities are still the best in the world. The
> bureaucracy around running a business is reasonably simple and well-trodden.
> Freedom of speech and expression is also strong.

There is effectively no additional information or arguments to support that in
fact all other references seem to contradict what the author is claiming.

I don’t know whether or not brains are really being drained—but if I were
doing business I would be wary of even the slightest possibility that sourcing
talent may become increasingly difficult, Chinese or not.

------
monksy
Who cares what these group of Chinese people think about Silicon Valley and
our tech sectors or the work ethic. Are we effective in creating technology?
Yes. Something is working. (There are a lot of criticism that I would have for
it, but being worried about some group of tourists having an opinion isn't one
of those )

~~~
TulliusCicero
Given how the startup center of mass moved from SV to SF, I think the bay area
secret sauce was not tied to Silicon Valley's suburban form.

------
hkmurakami
I mean PG called SV one big giant parking lot, and as a native who's lived
here my whole life, I absolutely agree, and I love my big ol' parking lot.

If they truly thing PA is dumpy, then they wouldn't be buying so many houses
in all cash deals you know. ;)

------
hbosch
I haven't lived in the Bay, but work takes me there relatively often from my
home in Seattle. Most often I've stayed in Palo Alto. Here in Seattle, I know
the neighborhoods are notoriously steadfast in keeping their villages
quaint... craftsmen-style homes (pepper in some modern cubic houses to taste)
with broad green yards and strict zoning laws, lest every neighborhood be
infected with the blight of more affordable condos and one or two decent
places to grab a drink. In Palo Alto I got a whiff of the same, albeit in
distinct Californian flavor. It's an allergic rejection of anything
cosmopolitan or urban. Nothing wrong with that but it's no surprise that
people would find it also distinctly unsexy.

My wife came down with me and we drove around with a coworker who lived there.
We explored Mountain View and Menlo Park too, got some In-N-Out. My wife
drooled at the big flagship Anthropologie at the weirdly-simultaneously dated
and high-end Stanford Shopping Center. We laughed at the $3 million 2-br ranch
houses on Redfin. Talked with our coworker about raising kids in a place like
Palo Alto, and he gossiped about how PAHS kids were killing themselves on the
train tracks – such a problem, they said, that there needed to be a security
guard stationed there to watch out.

We went to University Ave and took a walk. A pushy salesman tried to sell us
facial beauty products at $300/bottle, then we got accosted a couple doors
down by a rolly robot thing with a screen for a face. The guy who was video-
chatting through it was mute, possibly by some glitch. We reached the end of
the street after 10 or 15 minutes of walking; "is this it?". Meandered back
and walked into that JOYA restaurant for food and drinks. Sat between a tech
company party of some kind on one side, and two meek young guys practicing a
sales pitch for their startup on the other. We ate our mediocre food joylessly
and Uber'd back to where we were staying down on El Camino, at Dinah's Garden
Inn and went to bed early, hoping to get up early, which would let us get out
early... Menlo Park and Mountain View, too, just seem like they were all
clone-stamped from the same template: 6 blocks or so of faux-quaintess playing
host to little boutiques and high end eateries, but nothing much else. Maybe
they just aren't towns made for visitors, and maybe that's intentional.

------
gonyea
The entire South Bay is incredibly dumpy. One nice thing about the Chinese
system: No NIMBYs. Central planners keep the housing stock really high, and
that's great for social stability.

------
hprotagonist
maybe i’m just being nostalgic, but: good! maybe it should be dumpy. If it
gets too shiny it’s time to be truly worried.

in my experience, hackers and researchers do our best work in settings that
are less than ideal.

From Hamming’s “you and your research”:

 _This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions.
What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly
they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions
are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was
when they had practically shacks - they did some of the best physics ever.

I give you a story from my own private life. Early on it became evident to me
that Bell Laboratories was not going to give me the conventional acre of
programming people to program computing machines in absolute binary. It was
clear they weren't going to. But that was the way everybody did it. I could go
to the West Coast and get a job with the airplane companies without any
trouble, but the exciting people were at Bell Labs and the fellows out there
in the airplane companies were not. I thought for a long while about, ``Did I
want to go or not?'' and I wondered how I could get the best of two possible
worlds. I finally said to myself, ``Hamming, you think the machines can do
practically everything. Why can't you make them write programs?'' What
appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very
early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out
to be one of the greatest assets you can have. But you are not likely to think
that when you first look the thing and say, ``Gee, I'm never going to get
enough programmers, so how can I ever do any great programming?''_

------
deanCommie
It is.

Heck, the entire valley is.

~~~
woolvalley
Bankrupt stockton in the 'poor' part of town has better roads than mountain
view and cupertino. It's downright bizarre.

~~~
DrScump
You need to exclude state routes like El Camino Real from city comparisons;
those are Caltrans controlled. (Trying to get a broken magnetic loop sensor
fixed on ECR can be an adventure.)

------
bllguo
This kind of article is worthy of techcrunch front page? Maybe someone's
personal blog at best. The only value in this post is from the links to
Bloomberg and WSJ

------
plorkyeran
Are there people who don't think Palo Alto is dumpy?

