"Pacific Standard Time (PST) aka Pacific Time Zone runs down the Pacific Coast of Canada and the United States of America. It is sometimes referred to as Pacific Coast Time or West Coast Time. It includes the cities of Seattle WA, San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA, San Diego CA & Las Vegas NV" (source)
The latest episode of Pacific Standard Time has been published on Duellanti magazine. Another look at the Silicon Valey (part two of two). This story is a mash-up of Paul Graham's brilliant 2006 talk at XTech ("How to be Silicon Valley") and my own experiences. This piece could be retitled: "The Rich and The Nerds" aka Richard Florida meets Freaks and Geeks.
Here's my favorite passage from Graham's speech:
"If you want to attract nerds, you need more than a town with personality. You need a town with the right personality. Nerds are a distinct subset of the creative class, with different tastes from the rest. You can see this most clearly in New York, which attracts a lot of creative people, but few nerds.
What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, where people walk, but not smiling. When I was in grad school in Boston, a friend came to visit from New York. On the subway back from the airport she asked "Why is everyone smiling?" I looked and they weren't smiling. They just looked like they were compared to the facial expressions she was used to.
If you've lived in New York, you know where these facial expressions come from. It's the kind of place where your mind may be excited, but your body knows it's having a bad time. People don't so much enjoy living there as endure it for the sake of the excitement. And if you like certain kinds of excitement, New York is incomparable. It's a hub of glamour, a magnet for all the shorter half-life isotopes of style and fame.
Nerds don't care about glamour, so to them the appeal of New York is a mystery. People who like New York will pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment in order to live in a town where the cool people are really cool. A nerd looks at that deal and sees only: pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment.
Nerds will pay a premium to live in a town where the smart people are really smart, but you don't have to pay as much for that. It's supply and demand: glamour is popular, so you have to pay a lot for it.
Most nerds like quieter pleasures. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. A nerd's idea of paradise is Berkeley or Boulder." (Paul Graham, 2006)
Click on the thumbnails to read the article (in Italian):
Previous episodes:
Pacific Standard Time #1
Pacific Standard Time #2
Pacific Standard Time #3
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