Search Results for: palo alto

Silicon Valley Meets David Cross

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I first moved to the Silicon Valley in 1984. That was before……..well………pretty much everything. No Twitter, Facebook, Google. No Internet. Steve Jobs was about a year away from getting kicked out of Apple. The most sophisticated computer users (like, err, myself) were on 1200 baud modems dialing up to the likes of CompuServe.

Even so, the Valley back then was the home of at least a few riches. Intel, Apple, Hewlett Packard, and other public firms had flooded new money into the area, but in spite of that, it still had very much a homespun college town feel to it. If you just dropped someone into any given neighborhood in Palo Alto – – even the nicest ones, like Crescent Park or Old Palo Alto – – they might guess they were strolling a pleasant suburb in Ohio or Illinois.

I was somewhat shaken, then, to see this on the front page of our town paper:

0804-steak

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Airborne Access

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Hello, Slopers, from your airborne host. I am seven miles above the planet again, heading back to my beloved Palo Alto after a week-long vacation. It was a successful trip – – silver medal in hand, and plenty of good memories – – but, rut-loving creature that I am, I am eager to get back to my home office and return to my incredibly boring old self.

I have a big essay in my head I want to write on the plane, which I suspect I’ll publish Monday after the close, but in the meantime, I’ll just do a quickie post about the markets as they stand here on Sunday evening. (I took a wonderful photo of the cloud-tops during sunset, but I don’t want to bother hooking my phone up to the WiFi, so I’m not going to bother sending myself that image for this post).

Anyway, first up is the bond futures, which I am long by way of a big TLT position I entered early on Friday. So far, so good on this. This intraday chart doesn’t really show you why I bought them, but as the dollar continues to whither away, and Trump keeps screwing up left, right, and sideways, I have a feeling that the steady procession of interest rates higher simply isn’t going to happen.

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The Problem with Full Employment

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This is going to be very much a “First World Problem” kind of post, but here it goes.

Lately, I’ve noticed a problem here in town that I also noticed in 1999/2000 and 2007. Specifically, the lack of qualified,  motivated, or otherwise capable people in all manner of service occupations.

The cashiers at Whole Foods are getting increasingly sullen. The clerks at shops don’t seem to like what they’re doing. The high-tech workers are cranky and reek of entitlement. Downtown is littered with Help Wanted signs, but all the warm bodies are already at work.

This plays out even at high-end restaurants. The world-famous Nobu sushi restaurant opened in Palo Alto just a few weeks ago, but to the excitement of the citizens here. It joins other spiffy cities around the world as having a Nobu.

0718-nobu

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Ten Long Years Ago Today

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It seems like a lifetime ago (particularly considering how miserable the past eight years have been…….) but precisely ten years ago today, I put together a little video of the iPhone launch here in my beloved Palo Alto. As you will soon hear, the audio was pretty bad (I was only 2.5 years into blogging and wasn’t the polished blogger you enjoy these days), but it’s a kick seeing how, even then, the iPhone was a huge deal. (You’ll also notice I had an honest-to-God job with a real office, and that office was right around the corner from a cool little company called Facebook). Anyway, check it out……….

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