The Lines Were Quick

Khaled Meshaal (NY Post/Reuters)

Last month there was a moment's trepidation when I booked a flight on Friday the 13th.

Bah! rational guys like me shouldn't let superstition rule their lives. I clicked the pay-and-submit button.

It was more than superstition that paralyzed some people with fear yesterday. Former Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal designated yesterday as the "Day of Jihad":

The former leader of Hamas called on Muslims to stage global demonstrations in support of Palestinians on Friday, and urged Arabs in neighboring countries to take up arms against Israel.

In the Bay Area some schools cancelled classes:

Schools and universities across the Bay Area said they were bolstering security measures — and in some cases canceling classes — amid so-far unsubstantiated threats of pro-Hamas violence.

Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto, Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City and South Peninsula Hebrew Day School in Sunnyvale said they would be closed Friday amid concerns that Jewish institutions could be targeted, Jewish Weekly reported.

Stanford Law School announced it would be holding all of its classes Friday on Zoom in the wake of students’ fears around safety on the “Day of Jihad.”

Just in case TSA had installed extra procedures, I showed up 2½ hours before the 8:20 AM flight. The caution was unnecessary as the lines were quick, and I spent an hour nursing a coffee and croissant before boarding.

We disparage law enforcement, the FBI, the CIA, and other alphabet agencies, but a point in their favor is that there has not been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Because of that record, there is still hope that the agencies can be fixed.

And yes, the flight went well.

Know Your Place, Peasant Developer

When bureaucratic channels and conventional protests fail, hunger strikes are used as a last resort. Normally they're a tactic of the poor and powerless; the strikers hope to garner media attention and elicit public sympathy.

The complexity of compliance with government red tape has made a Silicon Valley developer resort to a hunger strike. The circumstance was so unusual that it captured today's Mercury News headline:

Navneet Aron, founder and CEO of Aron Developers, says he hasn’t eaten since last Friday morning. He has spent every weekday since then camped out in City Hall with a sign proclaiming, “On hunger strike until death!”

He’s protesting the city’s decision to stop construction of 18 townhomes on North Fair Oaks Avenue after his team forgot to obtain an approval from Santa Clara County’s Department of Environmental Health. Aron worries that fixing the issue could take months, which could mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in delayed construction costs.

His sin is that he didn't get permission from Santa Clara County to install a required vapor barrier before doing it; his paperwork with the City of Sunnyvale is apparently complete.

At issue in Aron’s case is a sheet of plastic, less than an inch thick, installed beneath the foundation of his townhomes. The plastic, called a vapor barrier, is designed to mitigate health risks. It prevents toxins in the soil from rising as vapor through the foundation and into the home, potentially impacting the residents. Aron installed those barriers, but he failed to get the county’s Department of Environmental Health to sign off before he did so.

City spokesperson Jennifer Garnett wrote in an emailed statement that the city has no intention of letting work proceed until the county has given the OK. “Developers are ultimately responsible for having a compliant project. The city had to issue a stop work order because Mr. Aron failed to meet health and safety conditions for his project,” Garnett said.

I used to think that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now that the law consists of complying with dozens, if not hundreds, of regulations from multiple departments across different jurisdictions, ignorance of the law is assured.

"The city has no intention of letting work proceed until the county has given the OK." Know your place, peasant.

Ancien Régime 2.0

Apple's HQ (Rendering from the Economist 1843 Magazine)

Like some nouveau riche who distance themselves from their humble backgrounds, “Silicon Valley is having its Versailles moment”: [bold added]

The scale of the project rivals the ancient Egyptians’ monuments. Every piece of glass on the four-story exterior is curved, requiring special panes to be made in Germany – the largest pieces of curved glass ever manufactured. With a price tag of around $5 billion, [Apple's] may be the most expensive corporate headquarters in history. [snip]

Last year Facebook opened a new, 430,000-square-foot building in Menlo Park designed to embody the company’s informal culture. Resembling a giant warehouse, it is reputedly the largest open-plan office in the world. Meanwhile, Google is working on a zany idea for a new headquarters to replace its Googleplex, which involves constructing movable glass buildings. Other technology companies, including Nvidia, Samsung and Uber, will, collectively, spend well over $1 billion on new buildings that broadcast their success.

With world-changing innovations ever harder to invent, our latter-day Masters of the Universe are spending precious energy and enormous resources on building monuments to their grandeur. Let's hope that, like Versailles, 200 years after the monuments were built that tourists aren't the only beings on the grounds.

The truth is that individuals and institutions usually turn to architecture at moments of decline. This curious fact was pointed out years ago by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his 1968 best seller, Parkinson's Law....Parkinson considered buildings as an important barometer of corporate health, but as a negative barometer. "During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters," he wrote. "The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death."

Pride Goeth

A significant part of our portfolio is invested in Silicon Valley growth companies, but techies' attitudes may signify that another bubble is forming:

Silicon Valley's superiority complex....is an ugly thing to behold. As the tech industry has shaken off the memories of the last dot-com bust, its luminaries have become increasingly confident about their capacity to shape the future. And now they seem to have lost all humility about their place in the world.

Sure, they're correct that whether you measure success financially or culturally, Silicon Valley now seems to be doing better than just about anywhere else. But there is a suggestion bubbling beneath the surface of every San Francisco networking salon that the industry is unstoppable, and that its very success renders it immune to legitimate criticism.

We're not advocating more government oversight or control of the tech industry, which would make things worse. It would be nice, though, to see a little humility, some self-reflection, and yes, a little maturity. When the next bust happens, Silicon Valley will sneeze, but we'll catch cold. 

As the saying goes, only trees grow to the sky.

Barge under construction: a sign of arrogance, playfulness, vision, or just maybe
Google has too much money than it knows what to do with. (Examiner photo)

Correlation, Causation, or Coincidence

The high unemployment rate among new college graduates has been all over the news. If I were in that demographic, I would consider a move to the Bay Area, and not only because of assortative mating.

Item: South Bay Leads U.S. in Job Growth.

The South Bay has the fastest job growth of any of the nation's large urban centers, according to a survey by federal labor officials. Santa Clara County posted a 3.3 percent increase [bold added] in job growth over the one-year period that ended in April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The Houston region of Texas was in second place nationwide with a 3.1 percent increase in payroll jobs over the same 12-month period.

Item: San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area second in nation in college-educated adults.

The South Bay metropolitan area has the nation's second-highest proportion of college-educated residents -- 45.3 percent of adults 25 and older. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area ranks second in the nation only to the Washington, D.C., metro area, which has 46.8 percent of its population college educated. The San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont area ranked fourth, with 43.4 percent.

To be sure, the Silicon Valley unemployment rate of 8.4% is about the same as the national average and is nothing to get excited about. But it's significantly better than the California unemployment rate of 10.9%, and the trend is going in the right direction.