I’m a libertarian at heart, and as such, I believe that, with few exceptions, pretty much the worst entity to handle any task is a government body. Therefore, over a decade ago, when Californians were sold a pipe dream about a high-speed rail (HSR) that would whisk them from San Francisco to Disneyland in just 2.5 hours, I rolled my eyes.
I didn’t keep my eye-rolling private. Five years ago, in this post, I mentioned the HSR project:
Recently I read an interview with a fellow who said the most influential book he had read was Coming Apart by Charles Murray. I immediately bought the book and am halfway through it. I wanted to write you a review of the book, then I discovered that I had already done so six years ago! So I think my brain must be “coming apart”, but I’m going to be a lazy sumbitch and just reprint the review here, because I think it’s important:
I just finished reading the best-selling Coming Apart by Charles Murray. I confess to not having heard of the book until I saw it in the store, but the cover of a champagne glass and a crumpled beer can instantly suggested to me that I was going to enjoy this new examination of the United States and its sociological disintegration of the past half-century.
(more…)Back in 1979, when I moved from Louisiana to the Bay Area in California, I was asked a lot of strange questions, such as if I knew anyone in the Ku Klux Klan. People seemed to think that every white person from the south hated blacks and that we were all a bunch of fiery rednecks.
I didn’t understand this, even at a young age, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had been around black people all my life, including being raised by a black nanny, and second, the kids in Moraga, California sured seemed a whole hell of a lot more homogenous than where I came from. If anyone should be asked about racial integration, it was them, not me.
(more…)Over the past quarter-century, locales all over the world have tried to ape the success of Silicon Valley. There’s been Silicon _________ of all kinds, like Prairie, Gulch, Swamp, etc. But the secret sauce of Santa Clara Valley, which I suppose is a combination of Stanford, venture capital, and about half a century of momentum/inertia, seems to keep 94301 in the pink.
I’m in Georgia at the moment, and this morning I went into a well-reviewed coffee shop to get some drinks for the family. The guy mentioned it was a shared workspace, and he just rented out the corner. While he made the drinks, I wandered around the place, curious to see what it was like.
Preface to all parts: 2018 was an extraordinary year for the Slope of Hope, now entering its 14th year in business. There were over 2,000 posts in 2018 alone, and I have extracted for you those I consider the best 1% which were not already included in my compendium Silicon Valley Babble On. For those who want to support the site, I encourage you to open up a brokerage account at tastyworks or subscribe to a Slope membership.
Here are the posts for this portion, in chronological order:
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