Still Economics---Re: [even more off topic] Re: More on dispatching by function return type

["Jon L White\(G\)" <address@hidden>]

re: "Re: [even more off topic] ..."

Well, yea, it's a new year, everyone's still either off skiing, or doing
whatever has replaced IAP study these days.  We digress from our mission.


Now, a "lights out" situation is far different from what is euphemistically
called an economic "correction."

The "lights" went out on many, many  American manufacturing industries as
they relocated their factories to third world countries (and alas, the
"lights" went out for most of the commercial Lisp industry during the
interval between Symbolic's demise in the early 1990's and Harlequin's
implosion in the late 1990's).  "Offshoring" is indeed encroaching into the
"softer" jobs now---customer support, coding, and eventually some
engineering---but overall Silicon Valley is still going incredibly strong.

For example, in the last round of Venture Capital fundings, SV still holds
the overwhelming lion's share in the USA (See
http://www.pwcmoneytree.com/moneytree/nav.jsp?page=region)  There are, just
as in all former days, new ISPs replacing old losers.   (Some say that 95%
of all new companies fail within 5 years.)  However, one msut admit that the
situation at SunMicrosystems looks grim, and the lights indeed have already
gone out for Netscape/AOL, and for almost all "dotcom" industries.   And for
the working poor, there is always the news that SV is doing with 20% fewer
employees in the HiTech sector than before the "bubble" that began bursting
in 2000.   Although congestion on the freeways seems a bit "less" than
before, the SV real estate market is still booming, and generally rising
much faster than other industries.  Sun/Apple/Stanford or not, it's still a
great place to live.


-- JonL --


P.S.  For those of you who remember the strategy that Lucid, Inc.  used to
name its various host machines (examples: Hindenburg, Krakatoa, Edsel,
Bhopal, BlackFriday,  ...) you might be amused to know that shortly after
9/11  I cast the name for just about the last server to come into
CommerceOne, an enterprise Sun server outfitted with a running Oracle
database.   It was called DOTCOM.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Marshall" <jrm@ccs.neu.edu>
To: "Mike Newhall" <mike@newhall.net>
Cc: "Jon L White(G)" <jonlwhite@sbcglobal.net>; <ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 6:15 AM
Subject: [even more off topic] Re: More on dispatching by function return
type


> Mike Newhall <mike@newhall.net> writes:
>
> > I was laid off from my dot-com job Friday September 15th, 2000,
> > along with the most of the rest of the company.  I felt like I
> > should turn out the lights on my way out of Northern California in
> > June of 2001.
>
> Weren't they already out?
>