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San Francisco is not in Silicon Valley. It has a smaller population than San Jose, and Santa Clara County has a larger population than SF and San Mateo counties combined. SF and San Jose are further apart than DC and Baltimore.
The idea that super woke SF is somehow driven by IQ meritocracy seems very odd.
Leaving aside the fact that taking Gates to task for spending on inexpensive but highly effective interventions does not seem to be very trenchant criticism, the Gates Foundation is rather famous for its efforts to reform US K-12 education, esp re small schools, and programs like the Gates Millennium Scholarships.
Moreover, why should we assume that Gates is representative of "programmer ubermenches"? The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation seems to spend most of its money in the US, and though it is hard to tell geographically where much of the Google Foundation's spending goes, much clearly goes to US recipients.
Silicon Valley is a suburb of San Francisco. The ‘Bay Area’ is the San Francisco Metropolitan Area. This is what city means everywhere, including the US, regardless of the name of the local municipality (eg. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are obviously part of Los Angeles). That San Jose
San Francisco is the oldest and most important major city on the West Coast. If you live in San Jose and are not a 10th generation native or Mexican-American, you are there because of an agglomeration of wealth that San Francisco begat. San Francisco is also the cultural center of Silicon Valley, the financial center of Silicon Valley, the tourism and visitor center of Silicon Valley etc etc etc. And of course many ‘Silicon Valley’ companies do indeed have their headquarters or significant office space downtown, or at least did until recently.
So yes, Silicon Valley does have responsibility for San Francisco. When some game developer or software engineer or whatever attends a conference at the Moscone Center, in the center of the capital of Silicon Valley/the ‘Bay Area’, and they find it a shithole surrounded by disgusting psychotic homeless people shitting and taking drugs on the street, that is their impression of Silicon Valley. That Palo Alto suburban streets where a 3 bedroom picket fence house costs $5m are ‘fine’ isn’t really relevant.
As for the laughable assertion made by some tech people that they have no power over San Francisco because it’s under the thumb of wokes, San Francisco is and has long been one of the most corrupt cities in America. Silicon Valley tech people have (collectively) trillions upon trillions of dollars of capital, more than any other upper class anywhere else in the world. They could grease the palms needed to save the city if they wanted to, progressive city councilors are hardly incorruptible.
It is not the oldest major city on the West Coast, or even in California. San Diego is older. And it obviously is not the most important city, because Los Angeles is.
Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are both surrounded by the City of Los Angeles (well, technically West Hollywood is a separate city) and have populations vastly smaller than Los Angeles (1/100th of the size of Los Angeles in the case of BH, and 1/30 in the case of SM). In contrast, SJ is larger than SF, is 40+ miles away, and is the center of its own metro area
So, if someone believes something stupid, that makes it true?
I'm certainly aware that, in the present day, Los Angeles is larger than San Francisco (whether it is more important is debatable, according to AI twitter San Francisco is the most important city in the world).
To see the outsized importance of San Francisco to American perceptions of the West, it's important to have some historical context. The Wikipedia page on the 1880 census includes a list of the largest cities in the United States in that year. San Francisco is in 9th place with a population of 250,000, by far the largest city on the West Coast. The next largest city on the West Coast is Oakland, in 51st place, with a population of 30,000 or so. There are no other West Coast cities in the top 100 cities in the US in that year. "The last [] before San Francisco" entered the popular lexicon of the Wild West (even Red Dead Redemption pays homage to it at times). San Francisco was for many years the only substantial American settlement West of the Rockies. It played a central role in the US' relationship with Asia, and with the Pacific (and Western South America) in general. It is probably the only West Coast city to be in the top 10 in terms of their importance to American history (depending on how you feel about Hollywood).
According to the 'San Diego History Center', the population of San Diego in 1880 was...2,637 people. Major city indeed.
Again, just because someone believes something stupid, does not make it true.
No one disputes that. But it irrelevant to your absurd claim that SF is in Silicon Valley, and that it is a product of Silicon Valley. In fact, it tends to refute that fact -- SF's role in the world long predates the development of Silicon Valley. The population of SF in 1950 was 775,000; its population is now is only about 13% more, at 873,000. In that same time period, San Jose's population rose from 95,000 to 1,000,000.
Huh. As an outside I always had the impression SF had at least a couple mil running about. That's a surprisingly low number in my eyes.
In American cities the nature of local government (and the fact that wholesale reorganization from above is very rare) means that many cities are not in fact cities. Los Angeles is a famous example - important districts of the city (like Santa Monica, Long Beach, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood) are not technically part of the city of Los Angeles. The county has 88 cities and unincorporated area (another largely American invention) which together make up the city. That city, in turn, is part of the wider 'metropolitan area' that includes a large number of other towns and cities in neighboring counties. So in LA, only 4 million of the 10 million people who live in Los Angeles actually live in Los Angeles (city).
The San Francisco Bay Area has about 8 million people. Travel distances within the Bay Area are similar to those within other recognized highly sprawled cities. In many other countries, Oakland and SF would be one city, for example, as they are an unbroken (except by water) urban area. The Houston metropolitan area, for example, is larger than the entire Bay Area.
Ah, I was dimly aware of that, but thank you for explaining the larger picture.
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For details, see the Census Bureau's map of municipalities, urban areas, and micropolitan/metropolitan/combined statistical areas.
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This is geographically false. Silicon Valley is in South Bay. If Silicon Valley is a suburb of anything, it's a suburb of San Jose. Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino are all in the San Jose - Sunnyvale - Santa Clara MSA. Sand Hill Road runs right near the MSA border.
San Francisco gets more press because San Jose isn't an interesting city. But it's much more connected to Silicon Valley than SF.
But this is kind of the point. San Jose is in many ways a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and the wider surrounding suburbs. It has a downtown in the way that, say, Indianapolis has a downtown, a few towers surrounded by parking lots. San Francisco, even today, is (much) more important to state politics, even though San Jose was once the state capital, many of the state's most significant political figures, incuding the current governor, came through San Francisco. San Francisco is the cultural home of the tech elite who live in the Bay Area, it's home to more michelin starred restaurants, sports arenas, better hotels, international conferences, the most expensive urban real estate in the region (I don't even think San Jose has an affluent downtown neighborhood of detached houses like Pac Heights in SF), more good private schools, more in the way of galleries, theaters, orchestras, opera and cultural venues and so on. Nobody outside America has even heard of San Jose, such that people who live there would generally say they live in San Francisco or the [San Francisco] Bay Area. Minus the largely white and east asian bedroom community (much of which is in tech) who technically live within the city's boundaries, San Jose is a largely Hispanic and Vietnamese city with almost zero cultural or social significance to the wider state or even country. Wikipedia even makes clear that the 'Bay Area' is officially short for the San Francisco Bay Area, because every substantial settlement in it was built (or largely expanded) around San Francisco's role as the capital of 'The West' since the early/mid-19th century.
So I think it's relatively fair to describe Silicon Valley as part of San Francisco's wider metropolitan area, in colloquial terms.
San Francisco is not, fundamentally, important because of its Michelin stars, ballets, operas, media, literary artifacts, or galleries. It's certainly the best you'll get within 300 miles, but if those things are what you're looking for, you certainly know cities that crush it on all counts. (In state and federal politics it indeed plays a massively outsize role.) No one flies out to San Francisco to see Lohengrin.
What makes the Bay Area Important is tech and capital; without it, San Francisco would be Portland-level in terms of influence. And for tech, until very recently, the epicenter was in Silicon Valley, which is a bit amorphous but I'd call the geography spanning from roughly Stanford on down. Apple, Cupertino. Oracle, Redwood City (some would object this counts, too far north). Cisco, San Jose. Adobe, San Jose. Sun, Santa Clara. Intel, Santa Clara. HP, Palo Alto. Netscape, Mountain View. Yahoo, Sunnyvale. Later on, Google in Mountain View and Facebook in Menlo Park (another relatively northern outpost). Also, pretty much every VC of note has their offices within a mile or so of each other on SHR: it wasn't as if it was San Francisco airdropping money onto nerdy engineers down south. And most of the tech elite live near where they work: Meg Whitman Atherton, Zuck Palo Alto (albeit after a stint across the street from Mission Dolores), Sundar Los Altos Hills. Pac Heights has more names like Getty or Hellman than tech CEOs. Even in terms of schools, the best private school in SF doesn't really hold a candle in prestige compared to those in the South Bay (Harker, Castilleja, even some public schools like Paly or Gunn).
This provided the initial capital and technical skills that underlie San Francisco's nascent technical ecosystem, which only really started in earnest in the late 2000s. SF has a couple of important, successful companies based there (Salesforce, Uber, Twitter, etc.), but the giants only keep relatively small outposts in the city. And, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic are based there, along with a respectable percentage of Google's ML researchers (though most are still expected to take a shuttle down south to MTV three days per week), but it remains to be seen how that will develop.
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Yes, Silicon Valley has a very odd pattern where in some sense San Jose behaves as a suburb to the towns with tech company offices. This does not make the valley a suburb of San Francisco. Nor do any of the other things you've mentioned.
No, it's the San Francisco Bay Area because it's located around the San Francisco Bay. South Bay was pretty much farms, until Stanford built his university (on his former farm). Shockley founded his company in Mountain View, Fairchild was San Jose, Intel in Santa Clara, etc. San Francisco wasn't invovled.
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