Category: Computers

Silicon Valley and the rest of the Greater Frisco Bay Area has always been one of the highest-cost of living areas in the world, but it’s enjoyed a productivity advantage over the rest of the US of 94%. When you factor high Silicon Valley costs into productivity, however, the area slips behind some fairly humble competitors, according to a shocking new study:

But with the cost of living factored in, the region’s advantage over the nation shrank to 31 percent in 2002. Only two years before, the Bay Area’s cost-adjusted productivity edge had been 43 percent. Moreover, the region had slipped into third place in the productivity race, behind Boise, Idaho, and Austin, Texas, after taking the cost of living into account.

It’s pretty sad when you can’t keep up with Texas, given the intellectual pretensions you find among Bay Area residents, but Frisco assemblyman Mark Leno is on the case, with the kind of forward-looking and visionary plan you only get from the nation’s best and brightest: raising the car tax in Frisco.

“Look, we paid the fee — which is 2 percent of the value of the car — from 1948 to 1998 without a word of debate or contention,” said Leno, D-San Francisco. He pointed out that the rollback was meant to last only as long as the state enjoyed good times.

Those poor Texans won’t even see this coming.

Esteemed venture capitalist Tim Oren points out that the Internet doesn’t dictate political values:

“People’s media” like blogs are bring more voices onto the net, and more readers to them, untrammeled by big media. That’s good. But those who think the removal of big media means the newly empowered will start singing ‘Kumbaya’ and turn into anti-Bush, anti-war ’emergent democracy’ citizens are indulging in wishful thinking, and we now have evidence to that effect. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Joi.) These newly empowered participants actually have to be persuaded. And that’s a very good thing, too.

This observation was motivated that frequent net-use is a non-predictor of preference in the Bush/Dean matchup. In the last presidential election, regular users of the ‘Net were actually more likely to vote for Bush than for the loser:

Fiorina and Barrett told Congress that US tech jobs have to go offshore
on account of the crappy educational system in this country:

Warning that the U.S. lead in high technology is in serious jeopardy from competition from other nations, they outlined a long-term agenda to improve grade-school and high-school education, double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences and form a national policy to promote high- speed broadband communications networks, as Japan and Korea have done.

Sen. Boxer has offered to fix the schools, but it was people like her that broke them to begin with, with their insistence on soft subjects like self-esteem and emoting sessions instead of actual science and math education, and their insistence on affirmative action for middle-class white women to the detriment of actual academic standards. But education isn’t really the issue that motivates off-shoring, costs are. I’ve never heard a tech industry manager say he wanted to move software development to India in order to increase quality, it’s always to lower costs, and labor costs are driven by cost-of-living. The major components of COL are housing and taxes, so the more government involvement we see in education and technology, the worse we can expect that equation to get.

So, the problem with the American worker isn’t lack of training, it’s the cost of living in places like California and New York, and no amount of federal pork is going to fix that problem. The alternative to moving low-value jobs such as customer service to India and China is to move them to lower cost-of-living areas within North America, such as the drizzly Northwest and the Sunny South. Boxer and her ilk lose if that happens too, alas.

(edited Saturday noon)

While earthquakes kill tens of thousands in Iran, America takes steps to limit the damage caused by quakes not just by clever building, but by damage mitigation in the ground itself:

In a magnitude 8 temblor, streets in the red could be rendered quicksand by liquefaction as the quake briefly scrambled saturated soils. Buildings could come crashing down.

San Bernardino is trying to head off the peril. Tincher drove from his office to a shopping center. In the parking lot, behind a barbed wire-tipped fence, a pump as big as a pickup truck was pulling water from the ground and sending it through pipes and storm drains to the Santa Ana River.

The pump and others like it are lowering the water table to keep San Bernardino on solid moorings (Orange County is buying the excess water).

The city is halfway toward its quake-ready goal of siphoning out 25,000 acre-feet of water annually, the amount used by 50,000 households.

“It’s kind of a unique problem,” Tincher said.

Not so unique it doesn’t have application world-wide, mullahs permitting.

What’s the Internet, really? Martin Geddes knows:

Which brings us to our old friend, the Internet. In many ways this is the Wal-Mart of data communications. It’s hideously inefficient at real-time communications. Every penis extending spam packet needs to be delivered at the same speed as my webcam with the oldies back home.

Just as Wal-Mart is a hideous place, so is the Internet, but it’s just good enough for plain folks, and there’s a lot more of them than there are of us toney high-tech elitists.

So as we figure out how to build and pay for more advanced networks, we should probably realize that the Internet, for all its many flaws of concept and execution, won’t go away any time soon.

While Clark County is booming, Silicon Valley is still sucking wind, according to the illustrious Mercury News:

The county’s unemployment rate remained unchanged from the revised September rate, 7.6 percent, according to the state Employment Development Department’s monthly report. This meant 69,300 county residents were unemployed in October.

So the nation is adding jobs, the state of California is adding jobs, but Silicon Valley is sitting still. I can see why, given some of the pitches I’ve heard from Valley startups recently. Buyers of hardware and network systems aren’t as gullible as they used to be, so Valley VCs and startups need to wise up just a tad and stop promising the moon when all they really have is a trip to Idaho.

Clark County, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, City of Hippies, is one of the most economically depressed areas in the entire country. So why are local officials cheery about the jobs picture? Because there’s a local hiring boom:

Fifteen businesses either relocated or expanded in the county with the help of the development council since January. Of those, 13 shared details of their operations, and together they are generating about $21 million in annual payroll with average pay of $38,800 a year per job. The county’s average wage is $31,000.

“We declare the recession over in Clark County,” said Bart Phillips, development council president, at the group’s annual membership meeting in Vancouver. “It’s evident in our numbers. Clearly businesses are looking ahead to a growing economy.”

This is happening in a county with an unemployment rate of 8.9%. So Paul Krugman, Howard Dean, John Edwards and other Dem party hacks who ask where the jobs are should please look here. Many of Clark County’s new jobs are in the services sector, the kinds of jobs that are supposed to be moving offshore; this apparently means “off the shores of the Columbia River” from over-taxed Oregon and California.

ARP NewArch Project: Future-Generation Internet Architecture.

Jay Allen has fixed his MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin so that it can find and remove the Lolita spam that’s been infecting Blogistan of late. I’ve installed it, and it works like a champ.

Jesus Christ, look at this attempt to bring more foreign tech workers into the US:

WASHINGTON — Proposals to allow more high-technology foreign workers into the U.S. are gaining ground on Capitol Hill, despite complaints that plenty of Americans are available to fill the jobs.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) is pushing a plan to circumvent the 65,000 cap on so-called H-1B temporary worker visas by expanding exemptions, according to Senate aides familiar with the discussions. The talks mark the first time influential senators are pressing for a temporary increase in the limit. While it is unclear the effort will succeed, his effort paves the way for a full airing of visa-overhaul legislation that has already been introduced and will likely be considered after Jan. 1.

The last-minute effort to modify the visa rules as the congressional session winds down has been prompted by growing concern among U.S. multinationals and high-tech companies that the current cap will prevent thousands of expert foreign workers from entering the U.S. next year. In addition, immigration lawyers, officials and technology trade groups from India, and major U.S. tech companies are pushing to raise the annual visa limit to more than 100,000. Any rule changes likely would be attached to a must-pass appropriation bill.

This is seriously out-of-touch.