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That Was The West That Was
May. 29th, 2006 11:32 pmFrom last Thursday until today, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lifecollage and I were away in the San Francisco Bay Area on vacation. There was much doing and shlepping and conversing and other such things, but I don't feel like listing them right now.
Observations: A few notes from the trip.
California is a complete state filled with "have it your way". There is very little of the "we're all in this together" you'd get in denser regions of the country, or those with harsher weather. Social rituals to smooth mundane daily interactions just aren't as necessary. More on that below.
It is still possible to terrorize California drivers with Boston driving skills.
It's easy to look at the tech culture of the bay area and say that tech people in the bay area have no work/life balance as we know it in the northeast; but that's not precisely true. It may at first glance look like a bit of "let's all act like friends until business gets in the way" hypocrisy; but that's somewhat misleading. It's just that the boundary is a bit more fluid.
The finance and insurance companies of the northeast are built on the bedrock that allows the start-ups of the bay area to grow in tectonically unstable soil.
I'm a city boy, but I couldn't imagine living in SF. Its infrastructure is just too dysfunctional in too many ways. The alternative (some random subdivision in the peninsula) scares me just as much, though.
Contrary to what I thought before breakfast on Saturday, *French* cuisine is the one with the tiny portions, *not* Californian. All I needed is one bigger-than-my-head omelet to correct that one.
The Toyota Camry is a very Beige car. It has all of the personality of a sewing machine, and I don't mean one of those $2000 Japanese sewing machines that do everything but pick out the fabric for you. The handling is a bit loose, and its center is vague. That being said, it's the fastest version of Beige I've seen yet.
If one is driving fast enough southbound, it doesn't feel like one is driving down a highway, as much as one is dropped down from the top of the road. I will note that going 93mph on I-680 is one circumstance where that can be said to happen.
I forgot how quiet gasoline engines could be.
Walking up to the State House in Sacramento and touching it was a very odd experience. Given how alienated I've felt from state and (especially) federal government over the past 6 years or so, it felt *good* to actually be able to walk up to a building that contains the governing body for the 7th largest ecnonomy in the world and confirm that it physically exists, as opposed to it being some locked-down and inaccessible phantasm, as is my current image of the Capitol Building in DC.
The next conservative friend I have who tells me that I live in "Taxachusetts" will be beaten over the head with California. Repeatedly and a lot. After that, they will be beaten over the head with the 26 states that have a higher average state/local tax burden than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Following *that* beating, I will tell them that they are wrong.
As I walked intoxthread's office, I noticed the smell of outgassing industrial carpet. The last time I smelled that particular smell was 15 years ago when my father was doing consulting work for a small tech startup in Palo Alto. That smell will always be associated with "promising new tech startup" for me.
Note to self: I will not get offended when a tech person's immediate reaction to "I work for a university." is "You're in semi-retirement, then?" Oh, screw that. Of *course* I'm going to get offended by it. I'm just going to politely nod, smile, and then decisively correct them.
Seeing someone essentially start their social life from square one at age 60 is a hard thing to watch sometimes, but it makes me incredibly happy, all the same.
And one big one, to finish it off:
Here's the theory. If one grows up in the northeast or the midwest, there's an overriding thought process that goes something like "If I don't make arrangements for myself, the winter is going to come, and I'm going to die." To my mind, this has a small bias on everything one does, from building community, to social conventions, to many other sorts of value judgements. Having to "buckle down for winter" provides an implicit penalty for failure, i.e. "If I screw up often enough, winter is going to come, and I'm going to die." The west coast has no such implicit penalty for failure, and I believe that that has a small but profound effect on social and work behaviors.
So, that being said, for a long time I knew that there were several differences between the west coast's" no penalty for failure" thought model and the northeast's "buckle down for winter" thought model, but I couched all of them in terms of the more stolid and reliable mien of the northeasterners vs. the flakiness and easy life of the Californians. It never occured to me to look at it in terms of the idea that tech people in the bay area really do think that anything is possible, because they don't build in the assumption that they have to hunker down for the winter. It makes them less... afraid, in a way. The contrasts between Silicon Valley and Rt. 128 in Boston make a bit more sense now, but there are a couple of books to read on the subject before I firm up my thoughts on it.
lifecollage and I were away in the San Francisco Bay Area on vacation. There was much doing and shlepping and conversing and other such things, but I don't feel like listing them right now.Observations: A few notes from the trip.
California is a complete state filled with "have it your way". There is very little of the "we're all in this together" you'd get in denser regions of the country, or those with harsher weather. Social rituals to smooth mundane daily interactions just aren't as necessary. More on that below.
It is still possible to terrorize California drivers with Boston driving skills.
It's easy to look at the tech culture of the bay area and say that tech people in the bay area have no work/life balance as we know it in the northeast; but that's not precisely true. It may at first glance look like a bit of "let's all act like friends until business gets in the way" hypocrisy; but that's somewhat misleading. It's just that the boundary is a bit more fluid.
The finance and insurance companies of the northeast are built on the bedrock that allows the start-ups of the bay area to grow in tectonically unstable soil.
I'm a city boy, but I couldn't imagine living in SF. Its infrastructure is just too dysfunctional in too many ways. The alternative (some random subdivision in the peninsula) scares me just as much, though.
Contrary to what I thought before breakfast on Saturday, *French* cuisine is the one with the tiny portions, *not* Californian. All I needed is one bigger-than-my-head omelet to correct that one.
The Toyota Camry is a very Beige car. It has all of the personality of a sewing machine, and I don't mean one of those $2000 Japanese sewing machines that do everything but pick out the fabric for you. The handling is a bit loose, and its center is vague. That being said, it's the fastest version of Beige I've seen yet.
If one is driving fast enough southbound, it doesn't feel like one is driving down a highway, as much as one is dropped down from the top of the road. I will note that going 93mph on I-680 is one circumstance where that can be said to happen.
I forgot how quiet gasoline engines could be.
Walking up to the State House in Sacramento and touching it was a very odd experience. Given how alienated I've felt from state and (especially) federal government over the past 6 years or so, it felt *good* to actually be able to walk up to a building that contains the governing body for the 7th largest ecnonomy in the world and confirm that it physically exists, as opposed to it being some locked-down and inaccessible phantasm, as is my current image of the Capitol Building in DC.
The next conservative friend I have who tells me that I live in "Taxachusetts" will be beaten over the head with California. Repeatedly and a lot. After that, they will be beaten over the head with the 26 states that have a higher average state/local tax burden than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Following *that* beating, I will tell them that they are wrong.
As I walked into
xthread's office, I noticed the smell of outgassing industrial carpet. The last time I smelled that particular smell was 15 years ago when my father was doing consulting work for a small tech startup in Palo Alto. That smell will always be associated with "promising new tech startup" for me.Note to self: I will not get offended when a tech person's immediate reaction to "I work for a university." is "You're in semi-retirement, then?" Oh, screw that. Of *course* I'm going to get offended by it. I'm just going to politely nod, smile, and then decisively correct them.
Seeing someone essentially start their social life from square one at age 60 is a hard thing to watch sometimes, but it makes me incredibly happy, all the same.
And one big one, to finish it off:
Here's the theory. If one grows up in the northeast or the midwest, there's an overriding thought process that goes something like "If I don't make arrangements for myself, the winter is going to come, and I'm going to die." To my mind, this has a small bias on everything one does, from building community, to social conventions, to many other sorts of value judgements. Having to "buckle down for winter" provides an implicit penalty for failure, i.e. "If I screw up often enough, winter is going to come, and I'm going to die." The west coast has no such implicit penalty for failure, and I believe that that has a small but profound effect on social and work behaviors.
So, that being said, for a long time I knew that there were several differences between the west coast's" no penalty for failure" thought model and the northeast's "buckle down for winter" thought model, but I couched all of them in terms of the more stolid and reliable mien of the northeasterners vs. the flakiness and easy life of the Californians. It never occured to me to look at it in terms of the idea that tech people in the bay area really do think that anything is possible, because they don't build in the assumption that they have to hunker down for the winter. It makes them less... afraid, in a way. The contrasts between Silicon Valley and Rt. 128 in Boston make a bit more sense now, but there are a couple of books to read on the subject before I firm up my thoughts on it.
