Silicon Valley

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its related technologies — machine learning and the metaverse — represent a watershed in the evolution of the global economy. Like other such shifts, its emergence is likely to favor certain interests, notably a handful of technology giants, the media and a small cadre of highly skilled programmers. Everyone else faces economic danger, certain to roil domestic and international politics in coming years.  read more »

The technological revolution once promised a new era of expanded democracy and enhanced opportunity. Instead, we face today a reality that blends the worst aspects of George Orwell’s Big Brother and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World controllers.  read more »

Sometimes a story takes a number of years to ripen. And sometimes two or three stories merge in unexpected ways. I just had a moment of convergence when new infill development, sub rosa adaptation, and wartime migration all collided.  read more »

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) and its predecessors serving San Jose and Silicon Valley have spent more than $7 billion (in today’s dollars) on rail transit.  read more »

Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism examined the three devastating ideologies that led to the undermining of European democracy in the 1930s. Today, democratic life is also under threat – and there are also three basic forms that this authoritarian threat takes.  read more »

Back in the early days of California’s ascendancy, the state was described as “the Jews’ early paradise”, a place where the lack of social norms, and enormous opportunities, were ideal for enterprising people  read more »

Amid all the hysteria, technological wreckage and gallons of spilt ink, artificial intelligence’s most potent legacy is yet to be discerned.  read more »

The state of California Department of Finance (DOF) has issued interim population projections indicating that in 2060, there will be 39,508,000 residents in the state.  read more »

The state Department of Finance (DOF) has reported, in its official population estimates, that California continued to lose population during calendar year 2022  read more »

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.  read more »