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Saturated Solution

Rick — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:35:27 +0000

After my recent trip to the Bay Area to report a PBS story about labor in the tech sector, I was struck by this (h/t Sullivan):

“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”

The Wired piece cites the “billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of” which also struck me, as did similar ads on Caltrain.

Timothy Lee argues the problem is housing. He has a point: San Jose and parts of the Peninsula seem ripe for higher-density development.

But I think Lee misses something when he refers back to the original Wired piece’s formulation — that “the natural resources of the startup world” are “people, real estate, and support services”. Isn’t capital one of those “natural resources”? And isn’t it possible that what Hartz (the VC profiled in the Wired piece) means is an overabundance of capital? Can the VC market allocate resources efficiently when there’s an overabundance of those resources?

Idiotic New York conventional wisdom

Rick — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:04:19 +0000

It’s bad enough having to hear Boomers drone on about how New York has lost its edge. These tend to be folks who rarely leave Manhattan and have almost certainly never been to, say, an illegal Todd P show in Bushwick, surrounded by naked dancers and kids doing lines in plain view. Distressingly, though, this loss-of-edge notion has gone global:

“I’d hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitized away in New York,” said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.

Ms Adler, please contact me before your next visit, and I’ll show you a thriving “alternative art scene”. In Brooklyn. Which is still, last I checked, part of New York.

Dear MTA:

Rick — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 05:25:20 +0000

You’ve added recorded announcements along the L line, regularly updating passengers about how long it’ll be until the next train in each directions arrives. That’s great.

But at the terminus at Eighth Avenue? They’re irritating. Because, according to the announcement, a;; trains arrive “on the Eighth Avenue-bound track”.

i don’t know what that means. I’m already at Eighth Avenue. Every train that arrives — on whichever of the two tracks — is bound for Eighth Avenue.

And so your announcement means nothing to me, and only serves to irk me. Which means that I tune it out. Which means that I’m less likely to take any of your other announcements seriously.

New Post on Infrastructure

Rick — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:42:58 +0000

I have a new post up at PBS’s Blueprint America blog (I’m reporting for the project) on the best of infrastructure posts online from the past couple of weeks.

Another foray into the NYC comedy scene

Rick — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:12:24 +0000

We went to another standup event tonight, our second in the past three months. It was an evening of African-American comedians, and it exceeded expectations. The standout was the closer, an albino African-American.

Come to Milton Keynes

Rick — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:36:13 +0000

My friend Ron Pyke apparently had his first encounter with the UK town, even though he’s lived in England for years. The town is disconcerting, down to the fake livestock.

The first time I encountered the phrase “Milton Keynes” was in the title of a Style Council song. And, like Ron, I thought it was a fusion of disparate ideas. He thought it was John Milton crossed with John Maynard Keynes. I thought it was Milton Friedman crossed with Keynes.

The difference says something about our personalities, but I’m not sure what.