Bill Rogstad
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

A wonderful article. You’re right, diaspora does sound like a condition an antacid tablet might remedy, just like meniscus sounds like a type of pretty tropical fish that darts in shimmering schools, not a part of your knee. Be that as it may, it’s certainly discouraging here in Silicon Valley. Not everyone is in Tech. I will never own a home in the Bay Area. This is partly due to choices I made in the past and also due to the eyewatering prices that bear no relation to the quality of the physical structure you are trying to convince a bank to buy and then let you live in. Whatever the reason, it’s deflating to ones sense of the world to know you won’t be taking part in a venture that tends to strengthen communities and encourage responsibility. At least that was some of the original reasoning behind the government’s tax code and subsidies that benefit homeowners. Now it just gives tax write-offs to people who don’t need them and indirectly taxes, through gas taxes and car repair, the middle income person who commutes to Mountain View from Tracy or Hollister. It’s funny to reach an age where you don’t recognize the motivation of many new people around you. San Jose is like a gold rush town with people pouring in to pan for seed money or placer mine the real estate market. Everything has been commodified and resale value makes people conservative and boring. Also, the slowly increasing temperature of the water the commuter frog finds himself boiling in and his or her accomodation of it (what choice do you have?) is a form of collective insanity you don’t shake off, I would imagine, until you’re sitting alone at a stop sign in Genoa, Nevada.