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Comment by Medicalidiot | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine lived in the bay area for a bit and ended up leaving because he couldn't handle the virtue signaling. From his experience a significant amount of people would talk about helping low socioeconomic folk, oppression, or any other in vogue topic but never actually do anything. These would then be the loudest voices lobbying against having a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. He's living in Denver now which has a similar problem but on a palatable scale, according to him.

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My summary of civic philosophy in the Bay Area: "Think liberally. Act conservatively."

In addition to San Francisco I've lived in the US South, the Northeast an in Europe. And out of all those regions I feel the Bay Area has been the most conservative and discordant. It's really a shame how a combination of the Byzantine legal processes and small cadres who know and shape the system have created a tyranny of the minority in the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular.

The culture is fairly different between the South Bay vs. San Francisco. South Bay is largely full of immigrants living the American dream: they work hard at a FANG during the day, buy an expensive suburban house to go home to at night, take their kids to parks and cultural attractions on the weekends and do their best to make sure they get into a good college, and otherwise mind their own business. Basically like the rest of America but less white. SF has many more people who like to stick their nose in other people's business to enact radical social change. It also has more genuine diversity and weirdness. SF is where people like to do large-scale social experiments, the South Bay largely sticks to large-scale technical experiments.

This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).

Very true, just go on Nextdoor in the Bay area. The same person who "fights" for social justice for the oppressed is the person who posts "How do I get rid of the homeless tents in front of my house?".

How would you know this?

I'm genuinely curious how you are seeing Nextdoor activity outside of your own Nextdoor neighborhood, given that How Nextdoor limits participants by neighborhood and verifies addresses before you can even read postings. I can't even find an option to see other neighborhoods. As my mom was dying and I was helping to find resources and later sell her stuff, the only way I could get access was to register with her address and then wait for the coded postcard.

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