Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
This essay attempts to address a rarely asked question: How did Silicon Valley, one of the greatest centers of wealth and brain power on Earth, embrace climate alarmism? Silicon Valley insiders are smart and successful people. By “Silicon Valley insiders,” I mean the founders, owners, venture capitalists, executives, and software professionals of the so-called tech companies located not only in the Silicon Valley, but elsewhere in the U.S.
Cognitive biases affecting understanding of the sciences
1. Silicon Valley insiders are educated and experienced in the software side of computer sciences but rarely in the kind of sciences that are directly involved with climate topics, such as physics, biology or energy engineering.
2. Software professionals tend to have a habit of not RTFM (and are proud of it). Software and Internet billionaires also might lack the time to RTFM.
3. Hardware design and manufacturing requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, and engineering. However, within the last 25 years most of the hardware manufacturing and even design that put the word “silicon” in Silicon Valley went offshore. In the last ten years, Silicon Valley has been doing very little outside software development (including firmware,) graphic design, marketing, “content,” and finances.
4. In contrast, software-centered computer sciences knowledge is very small in volume compared to the natural sciences, such as physics. One might even say that there is a 80/80/80 rule: 80% of what 80% of software engineers and architects use can be studied in 80 months. And this is the same pool of knowledge, shared by all these intelligent professionals. One cannot even remotely compare that body of knowledge to that of physics. It wouldn’t make sense to try to calculate how many months it would take to study all applied physics, or even one of its many branches (geophysics, atmospheric physics, nuclear physics, etc.) Consequently, smart minds with a software background easily fall into believing misleading “greenhouse” explanations by climate alarmists.
5. Software sciences are also everchanging. Ideas that haven’t been in circulation within the last five years just don’t matter. For example, one can be an excellent software engineer without ever hearing about the Turing machine, proposed and analyzed by Alan Turing in 1936. Can someone become an aerodynamic engineer without ever knowing Newton’s laws?
6. Developers of video games use realistic physical models and work hard to make them produce 60 frames per second. It is hard for them to believe that self-appointed “climate scientists” can cook up alarmist climate models designed to produce a physically incorrect output every 6 years.
7. Success is known to breed hubris and arrogance. Many SV insiders are extremely successful.
Cognitive biases affecting politics of the Silicon Valley businesses
8. It’s possible that some SV insiders (just as many politicians) confuse the “Internet opinion” (comments, tweets, subreddits etc.) as reflection of the US public opinion, when it’s more reflective of the leftist echo-chamber. Much of this content is written by college faculty and students, individuals with extra time on their hand and people living outside of the US. Most Silicon Valley companies are “Internet companies.” The Internet transcends international borders, so SV insiders seem to be blind to the dangers of global governance agendas, and some may even embrace them. A clear example of this is the promotion of the “United Nations Global Goals” on the Google’s U.S. front page. This is offensive to those who do not want to be subjects of the UN or any global governance. Climate alarmism has a very strong global governance component.
9. Silicon Valley is a suburb of San Francisco, a notorious Leftist stronghold, and includes Berkeley. Many SV insiders lived in this atmosphere long enough to imbibe its “values” and do not question its strong agendas, including climate alarmism. Add to this the prejudice that liberals are smarter and more educated than conservatives.
10. I suppose SV insiders find it hard to believe that the speech of climate realists could have been suppressed to such a great degree in this country. I could not believe that, too.
Possible Financial Motives
11. Silicon Valley companies do a lot of business abroad, including content business, from web search to news. Many SV companies derive more than 70% of their revenues from sales abroad. In doing so, they must obey local laws and satisfy demands of foreign governments. These demands may be political or ideological. Foreign laws and political demands seem to influence the thinking and actions of Silicon Valley companies. For example, Germany’s government demanded Facebook remove or filter out “fake news.” Immediately after, Facebook announced an initiative to do similar things (flagging “fake news”) in the U.S. Not surprisingly, all announced fact checkers are left-leaning, and some of them are notorious purveyors of fake news. Most foreign governments and political parties are either enthusiastic supporters or even instigators of climate alarmism, and might have heavily influenced SV insiders.
12. I hope none of these tech companies attempted to acquiesce demands of foreign governments or other foreign (including international) political entities regarding the content they provide in the US.
13. Of course, many tech companies are notoriously linked with the Democratic Party. This might be a consequence of the factors listed above, or it might have been a condition for success under Democratic administrations. For example, Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt was on Obama’s 2009 transition team before he went on to take a position in his science and technology advisory council.
14. Some SV insiders might be, as Richard Lindzen said, “newly minted billionaires who find the issue of ‘saving the planet’ appropriately suitable to their grandiose pretensions.”
California derived its early growth from the oil, soon becoming the national scientific leader. Now, it is comprised of little more than Hollywood, software, Jerry Brown, and collapsing infrastructure. Massachusetts, California and New York, the states that were once leaders in science, technology, and education, are now leaders in climate obscurantism.
This article focuses on the root causes of the climate alarmism conquest of Silicon Valley and its timeframe before 2014. Examples of recent actions by Google and Facebook simply illustrate earlier trends.
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I think what will have affected them most is that they haven’t given CO2 and its effects much thought at all. For a long time many of us assumed that the science was all true. It was only when we paid it enough attention and it jarred with what we already knew that we investigated further. One of the reasons I became concerned by the science was because I actually started thinking about my own CO2 footprint rather than assuming I’d do something about it tomorrow… or next week. I already knew that renewables were rubbish and I though ‘this is going to be almost impossible and very, very expensive’. Silicon Valley high fliers don’t have to worry about expensive. Their salaries isolate them from worrying about their utilities bills, and energy is a relatively small expense for their businesses. They will be less aware of the risk of power cuts, you really can run computers on solar panels and batteries. Why would they bother to consider what happens to a steel mill or something similar when the power goes off or the prices sky rocket. If their raw materials go up, they just add the cost to their products and/or buy from somewhere green is just a colour.
Likewise, I started from the assumption that government would never do what was really needed. So, I sat down and started working out what was really required. The answer (before I factored in how much energy is needed to produce the things in the first place) was that we need bird-mincers on every hill in Scotland. And we needed something like 100 pump storage schemes, and we needed to control people’s use of power and we needed to be pretty draconian on driving, heating, etc.
I then started to tell other people in the Green party about what they were actually proposing – and because I quickly realised they were total brainless morons (I eventually realised that many thought a “wind generator” was a couple of metres across), I thought I ought to do a bit more digging to check out the whole subject…
In retrospect I’ve realised that there are two types of people who get on: the useful gormless idiot “sidekicks” and the hypocritical amoral ba.stards who get to the top.
And yet Scotland is well on the way to getting all its power renewably, and there are few bird deaths… more Eagles killed by trains and more Harriers and kites shot than killed by wind turbines (and thankfully we’re only talking tens of birds from that!)
Yeah and if I jump in the air for a brief time I’m flying. It’s the reliability of the thing that’s key.
All renewables need a well stocked fossil fuelled or Nuclear back up 24/7. In the case of Scotland it’s the UK. Funnily enough those fossil fuel power stations won’t run on the off chance we need them and ask for subsidy for the down times. So we not only pay green subsisides we now pay everyone subsidies. The upshot is very expensive energy or a shortage of power as the South Australians could talk about. And don’t quote pilot studies – they mean nothing. Tell me when something is running full scale and not losing money hand over fist.
Nobody will take you seriously if you only show half the picture.
Scottish Sceptic, I suspect that the wave and tidal renewables will suffer from the same bloody flaw. I think the recent failure of the tidal scheme due to ‘false sonar’ of seals and dolphins was atually the result of them being attracted to the dead fish, much the same way birds of prey were attracted to small bird strikes.
Scotland’s environment is being destroyed by so called renewables. And climate scammers sell the idea that massive cluttering of the landscape with kilometers of giant windmills is “green”. And the indoctrinated prefer that to low visibility safe and renewable natural gas or the zero carbon tiny footprint of nuclear. Heavy weather will take out or doldrums will stop the spinning. Will the penny finally drop as the Scots look around and see their formally world class beautiful landscape turned into an industrial park of useless broken giant machines? Not if the Griff’s if the world continue their eyes closed brain off style.
Scotland only survives because it is connected to other countries that haven’t gone completely nuts in regards to power generation.
Griff,
Why would Scottish bird and bat mincing machines kill fewer rare and endangered species than those elsewhere, such as in Switzerland, where each death engine massacres 14 to 29 birds per year?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350267/Rare-bird-white-throated-needletail-killed-wind-turbine-crowd-twitchers.html
http://windbyte.co.uk/birds.html
Griff,
Scotland gets 96% of its energy from fossil fuels. And most of the rest is hydro.
http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0046/00469235.pdf
You are truly a mine of misinformation.
A steel mill in Linz, Austria is looking at pilot scheme for converting to renewably produced hydrogen gas power…
http://www.voestalpine.com/group/en/media/press-releases/2017-02-07-voestalpine-siemens-and-verbund-are-building-a-pilot-facility-for-green-hydrogen-at-the-linz-location/
It is in the financial times too, billed as the future of steel, if you can get thru paywall
The energy deficit of that project makes it a scam.
“The future of steel”? Hilarious. Too early for April fools, Griffy.
I find the reasons given a bit armchair philosophical, however it is a phenomena that needs explaining. I would suggest:
1. Groupthink
2. Fear of non-conformity
3. Government subsidy & cronyism
It’s the disengagement between the modeling world and the observations in the real world. You must reconcile the difference…….towards the measurements/empirical data and make timely adjustments in your models to dial in what you should be constantly learning from the real world.
Failure to do that has resulted in an increasing disparity in climate science between groups,who base their belief system on physical laws represented in models and those who give more weight to observations.
This is why us observational meteorologists have such a great number of skeptics. Those of us that have been objectively analyzing the weather/climate during the past 40 years, can see its featured the best conditions for life in the last 40 years. Other than an increase in heavy rain events from an atmosphere that can hold a bit more water vapor(and slightly warmer oceans) the extreme weather during this period is nothing that stands out as being very unusual………..while models continue to project weather and climate into the land of unprecentended.
That should say the last 40 years have featured the best conditions for life “in the last 1,000 years”.
“How did Silicon Valley, one of the greatest centers of wealth and brain power on Earth, embrace climate alarmism?”
The more you earn, the more likely you are to feel guilty about how much you earn and therefore consume, and thus the more likely you are to become a green nutter.
Perhaps their belief in solar is based simply on the fact that it’s silicon based also. The ascendency of the computer in every aspect of American life was based on advances in the electronics and the gigantic reduction in their cost and size. I remember when I was
working in the programming dept of Westinghouse in the late 1970’s and we were all excited at the prospect of getting an additional 3/4 of a million extra megabytes of memory for our mainframe. Cost : over $500,000. Today a megabyte probably costs a small fraction of a penny and is 1000 times faster and more reliable and is powered by a 100,000 times less juice, and is likely way more than ten thousand times smaller and lighter. Software, on the other hand, is no doubt just as expensive today as it ever was, perhaps more so. It is overwhelmingly the hardware’s advances that mattered, not
anything occurring in the software side of things. Facebook is hardly a supreme example of human ingenuity. It is a simple-minded, rather silly method of disseminating mostly
incorrect information, and suppressing ideas not liked by the Facebook operators. It is a step backward in many ways. Zuckerberg, the accidental billionaire who still wears tee shirts to avoid criticism, has not produced any concepts of value in the past 10 years,
and is a lapdog of the left wing pols.
+100
“A clear example of this is the promotion of the “United Nations Global Goals” on the Google’s U.S. front page. This is offensive to those who do not want to be subjects of the UN or any global governance. Climate alarmism has a very strong global governance component.”
climate alarmism may actually be the brainchild of the UN just as ozone depletion was. It serves their purpose.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2794991
It is. See my earlier article UN Unleashed Climatism
Global warming fad stared in the 80’s and took off in the following decades.
Most of the SV entrepreneurs grew up with the idea that the GW is endangering ‘civilization as we know it’, adding the ‘fact’ that the main culprits are huge multinational oil companies and moguls running them, made the idea of saving the world from the ‘ugly, dirty and polluting’ monsters very attractive to the young minds.
Some grew out of it, but many stuck with the idealism of their youth.
Aside from their philosophical and political roots, as pragmatic business people, their facilities and products have a very small greenhouse gas footprint. So government-imposed GHG controls, renewable energy, or carbon taxes will have little impact on them. It is easy to virtue signal for business/market share gain when you feel none of the pain.
It’s like food product advertising. A company can print “Gluten Free” on the package of their product that in nature would never have had gluten in the first place, but “gluten free” sells, even to people who have no gluten sensitivities. The same can be said for many products advertised as GMO-free.
I haven’t seen RTFM in print before. I guess it means Read The F’ing Manual. Correct?
Surveys of ethics in the IT industry have shown disturbing results. The morals that prevail there are markedly different from those in most other industries.
Read the fawning interview with Besos to get an idea of corruption on a pedestal.
sill Val karaoke : Isaac Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics / slavery :
https://www.google.at/search?q=isaac+asimov+3+laws+of+robotics&oq=isaac+asimov+3&aqs=chrome.
condensed the decalogues 10 principles, condensed Augustinus 12 ‘deadly sins’
to mexican cartels 3 founding principles :
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&q=augustinus+deadly+sins&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0
You could ask the Province of Ontario the same question. The “gang green” is still spreading.
People who consider themselves informed tend to respect the well written voice of authority. Here in Ontario all three political parties along with the majority of the educated class have accepted the academic climate narrative.
Over ten years ago our current government implemented the Green Energy Act with the intent to control greenhouse gases from fossil fuel emissions and reduce the imagined impact of Anthropogenic Global Warming. The act enabled them to replace coal fired power (one third of base load generation) with wind/solar powered generation. Since then “peak” power rates have tripled. The unnecessary cost of refurbishing old nukes, the investment in wind/solar including the additional cost of gas powered back-up and the “give-away” of excess “alternative” power to competing jurisdictions together have added over $50billion (my guess) of growing debt to the treasury….it’s a train wreck.
Still, we are OK, both province and country are well run and blessed with an educated population, good infrastructure, good health-care along with abundant energy, mineral and natural resources wealth.
Eventually the carbon dioxide “climate scare” will find its place alongside all the other doomsday predictions that have come and gone, IMHO of course, only time will tell.
An underlying piece of the intellectual infrastructure was the corrupting impact the lack of critical thinking regarding the environmental movement claims about things like the scope of the proble, nuclear energy, and natural resource depletion. It allowed an apocalyptic mentality to develop that was tailor fit to climate clap trap.
The Universities should be leary of the CAGW scam as well, what if the politicians take some biased poll, start saying “the science is settled” on other topics, and move funding to roads, tax relief, or welfare?
Educators today have set the metric to be scores on a standardized test. Students are rewarded for accepting whatever is presented to them by the teachers, the learned ones. There is little emphasis on encouraging students to challenge that authority, intellectually. After these students graduate, many will continue to believe whatever the learned people say, essentially letting others do their thinking for them.
‘Thinking Fast & Slow’
If you are interested in the topic & reading this blog you are probably overcomplicating the issue.
Were I betting man, I’d bet that all who comment here think about the issue, and devote enough time to it to get beyond their “fast brain” response.
For dedicated software engineers and fellow travelers….the kind who sometime wake up in the morning asleep at their desk amidst warn wine and cold pizza, it goes like this….
What do you think of global warming?” “I dunno.” “Computer Models” (magic word in environment) “show we’re doomed”. Yeah? Yeah? “Well, OK”. Cognitive bias. Check. Confirmation bias. Check. Peer approval. Check. Google confirmation. Check. Add to knowledge base and move on. Total time two minutes.
Since nothing in the engineers personal experience will challenge this view — he/she/??? believes. Like the snowflakes that make up an avalanche, a tiny weight to the imagined 97%.
If a few of the leaders of this herd change their mind, the sheep will follow. If you live and work in the tech bubble, it’s just not important.
2 minutes for science, two weeks to design a new emojii. Life in the valley.
Here’s to common man:
https://youtu.be/c2zurZig4L8
I think the core reason why Silicon Valley Embraced Climate Alarmism is political. Being from California mostly they identify with progressive Democrats. They on the average despise conservative Republicans. They hence knee jerk oppose anything Republicans stand for.
Without actually studying the issue Climate Change sounds like science and proper progressive main line thought. They see Republicans as people who deny man landed on the moon, vaccinations are effective or evolution is a natural process. Most Progressives I have debated know nothing about Climate Change and don’t think there is any reason to learn the particulars because it is proven science and not worthy of mental energy expenditure for something already decided.
If we are ever to change the Silicon Valley folks way of thinking there will have to be a separation created from some of the other debates that seem reactionary anti-science.
Yes, I think if climate scepticism is ever to make progress it needs to stop endorsing any and all viewpoints which are opposed to climate change…
It can’t both be cooling rapidly towards an ice age and warming, but not enough to make any difference…
all the whacky made up science ideas about what does produce warming can’t be true at the same time and the allegations of untruth need some real substance…
The UN is not bent on eliminating anybody.
Argue on the science, using science and it might just get somewhere?
Denouncing people who have no argument with the science as leftists… c’mon, really? I don’t believe most of you ever met a real leftist.
Okay, great. here is the most pertinent graph of this whole AGW meme, and if you can understand it, which almost no one does, it shows co2 will have a minimal effect on daily minimum temp. And without this, increasing co2 is not an issue.
It’s all shown in this one graph.
You keep posting this graph micro but it is very unclear. You’ve got three variables and only one scale. And irrelevant text plastered all over it – what has Dungog and Nerrigundah got to do with CO2? Rhetorical questions.
How can it be “pertinent” if , as you say “almost no one” understands it. I know what you’re trying to purvey but if no one understands it what is the point in continuously posting it?
Micro6500. To be honest, I never really looked at it before as there was no attempt to explain it. The one axis is because all the three graphs use the same scale, but it could be labelled F/%/W/m2. The X axis could do with a time scale, which would help us orient on night/day.
The huge daytime positive radiation we presumably ignore as they are off scale. Everyone knows it gets warm in the day, so we are looking at the night time parts.
As the sun sets the energy balance becomes negative. Radiation is lost to space as IR. OK so far. As the night progresses, the surfaces cool down, so the energy loss rate slows down – becomes more positive.* That is as we would expect, all else being equal.
We also have the RH and temperature plots. What these seem to be showing is that as the temperature falls, the RH rises, even for the same amount of water in the atmosphere. The RH goes up not because there is more water valor, but because the lower temperature the saturation is at a lower temperature. Hence *relative* humidity increases.
I see nothing to suggest a connection with CO2 at all. In fact, it is interesting but does not inform us of much except that things cool at night an get hot in the day.
A more detailed analysis using the numbers may reveal more – for example, is absolute humidity rising or falling? We simply do not know from the diagram.
*That is another use of the “becomes more acid” type of language. The numbers are becoming more positive even though they are still negative. I used the term naturally and it seems an obvious use of language to me. Maybe it does not seem so to others, and they would assume I was being duplicitous. I can assure them that their suspicions are unfounded. People use this type of language often without any intention to deceive.
The label is a good idea, and that x axis has been a pain, as there’s data every 6 minutes, and I can’t see to convince excel to put a useful scale on it.
Yes, I think this is why it wasn’t really examined.
But these guys did. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL019137/pdf
But I’ve been pointing an IR thermometer up under clear skies for 3 years now, and the optical window isn’t in equilibrium, far from it, it’s still just as cold. As shown here, as an example
Yes, but what also happens at 100% rel humidity, it has to condense water vapor out to cool any more, while at the same time ti sky is 80 to 100F colder.
Since the reduction of cooling isn’t from equilibrium, And the net radiation measurement shows it’s actually a switch to a lower cooling rate, a step, a RC discharge would have a near exponential decay, as the paper shows to the the case.
What the paper failed to do was find correlation between temp, and either humidity, so passed it by.
But I’ve worked in electronics my whole life, and was a simulation expert for a living for near 14 years, I know a regulator when I see one, and this is a switching regulator, that is controlled when rel humidity goes from ~70 or 80% to 100%. And it’s input is a temperature function, that make this a (poor quality) temperature regulator. And you can see that here.
There’s a 98% correlation between min and dew point.
And I know all of this because transistors have the same nonlinear input to output transfer function, and correlation code has to account for this, or it fails.
The interesting part is land surface temps follow water vapor, which is set by where the warm water in the oceans are, and it moves around. This El Nino is a perfect example, warm water vapor blows inland, dew points goes up, min temps follow, when cool dry air blows in, it’s cold.
That is why the NH warmed in 2000, the AMO turned positive, and more warm water vapor blew over NH continents, as soon as the AMO turns negative, the temp is going to drop again, just as it drops after an el nino.
Actually we could be cooling towards an ice age while warming, but not enough to make a difference.
It all depends on which time scale you are looking at.
For crying out loud Griffie, do you have work over time to prove how simple you are?
Socrates 450 B.C.
retarded to ‘ecological diversity’:
https://youtu.be/gaukPDbZJ9w
Slightly off topic but on lunchtime news in the U.K. There is a “you couldn’t make it up if you tried” story about Aberdeenshire Council in Scotland planting trees in the middle of a children’s football park pitch “to increase biodiversity”. Bemused residents are receiving an apology as the stupidity of these actions begins to dawn on the council. I wonder what kind of biodiversity they ever thought would be created? The Aberdeenshire area is pretty but bleak and muddy park fields are limited in the range of wildlife they can sustain in the cold most of the year climate of east Scotland.
Perhaps they envisioned the eventual arrival of, to borrow a famous phrase, herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically over the Aberdeenshire plains.
I wonder if Anthony would consider creating a MOONBEAM tag we could post absurd eco-loon stories like this on for our collective amusement. But then it would probably get too much material.
SV wants immigration. They seem to value immigrants over Americans. Anyone who can, with a straight face, tell its customers to bug off when it comes to jobs but buy up when it comes to sales can probably be made to believe anything. Once that kind of thinking becomes entrenched, science goes out the window and group think and profits become king.
There is also the belief (maybe true) that humans simply can no longer exist without tech. Therefore, SV is the grantor of life. Without it, we die. So belief in other ideas that control life, say global warming, becomes very easy. Once you are the arbitrator of continued human existence, one can become convinced of many fallacious arguments.
Lastly, there is the “protect your own” that is seen in doctors and police and other groups hiding the errors and bad behaviors of their members to save face or whatever. It’s simply forbidden to speak out against any colleague or anyone in a similar field. PhD’s are expected to back all PhD’s or else it might make them look bad. After all, they spent a lot of time and money getting the degree. How dare they question anyone else who did the same?
I think it’s all money, they are bringing in H1B visa’s with Masters degrees, and very likely paying them a lot lot less than they would anyone else.
Worse is we keep training them to take our jobs.
But I think that is going to change.
SV doesn’t want immigration, it wants employees. It also has customers outside the USA. Many people favor a free market.
Another point is that when it comes to software, it doesn’t matter where the programmer lives, he’s still competing with American programmers.
The only difference is what country is he paying taxes to.
Yes employees that will work for a lot less than the locals with the same skills. The prize of moving to America is quite valuable.
And you better believe it is being used there(SV).
So the solution is to hire them and keep them over there where they can work for even less because the cost of living is lower?
How does that help American programmers?
It probably doesn’t help American programmers, except that they are also consumers so can buy software cheaper. But is there any special reason why a company should be set up to help American programmers? That sounds more like a trade union than a company.
Let us be honest. A few years ago I became aware of various surveys of US tweens and teens. Their aspirations were for the most part not ones involving STEM. We can’t point the finger at any one entity here. I recall when I was in college. There sure were a lot of people majoring in keggers / The Greek System / getting Mrs degrees. The “hard majors” were not impacted. I never had trouble getting into any classes. There were no waiting lists.
It might be nice to have a rough estimate of how much money these silicon creatures lost by overbelieving in dangerous climate change and the sustainability of so-called ‘renewable’ energy.
========
A good pass at a tough topic! Having grown up and lived in the valley for most of my life, I’ve watched first-hand as the region has evolved from a set of mixed views to a set of extreme left views. So that’s the atmosphere that all the new startup types breathe when they land here and get working on their companies. The floods of vc money that’ve washed over the region – first in the dot com days and now with hadoop, social media, big data and green – have created what my friends and I call “the reality distortion field” – where a different reality takes hold. One where economics are powered by wishful thinking. Don’t like your girl/boyfriend? There’s an app for that! Carbon dioxide poisoning the world? There’s an app for that! And so on. So all the young ones arrive here and soak up the unreality, then start to live it. Add to that the older generations who are jaded and about money who see radical green as the path to lots of bankable green (Al Gore manages the largest green vc fund in the valley btw), and we have the perfect brew for sv to embrace radical environmentalism.
Has something to do with influx of the “creative” types from Hollywood and Madison avenue, who do marketing and the “content.”
You can’t blame it entirely on the fluff merchants. I’ve been on many rides with the local Wheelmen (cyclists and Green fit together like a silk glove and a hand) and there are many total geeks among them. Check out the realm of the richest geeks – Woodside. Bikes outnumber cars on any given Saturday. Many of those folks came from a hardware / EE / physics background. And yet, they are deep, deep Green.
Yes, they are blending with the environment. And believe in the “settled science.”
Add to that 80somethings like my Mom who were in peace marches and other protests during the 60s, contributed untold sums to enviro orgs, and still to this day vote Green.
For the last 32 years, I’ve been selling them design and design management tools, and know a few of those hardware designers, and they are still in the US. Now most of it is build overseas, and IMO what we’ve done with IP is a travesty.
+1