Well, Detroit in 1955 was a good place to live if one could get a job in the automobile industry or could make a good living in a business that had auto workers as clientele. Detroit was a good analogue to the Silicon Valley that we now know -- a place of high wages, high real-estate values, and plenty of opportunity.
Here is one Detroit-made car from 1955:
![[Image: images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5CWIyK8PPv-3pA0Bdv-K...XHuK-KZ-3w]](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR5CWIyK8PPv-3pA0Bdv-KyL3VipEu-XJauR5F1Tz7_XHuK-KZ-3w)
"Ask the man who owns one". The slogan may be sexist by contemporary standards, but the year was 1955.
Packard made good cars in its day, but that day would soon come to an end.
But note that I compared Detroit in 1955 to Silicon Valley today, and that could be a good warning. Detroit priced itself out of almost every manufacturing activity not related to the auto industry (the biggest non-automotive manufacturing company based in Detroit was Borroughs Corporation, office machines), and when Detroit-area auto manufacturers lost dominance and even moved into other places in an industry no longer growing, Detroit was in big trouble. See also "coal" in Appalachia.
In view of the automotive industry in Detroit and the generational theory, I can imagine what might seem unthinkable -- that Silicon Valley could be like Detroit was in the mid-1980s. Losing dominance as an industry shrinks in relative share of the economy and decentralizing away from the area of its birth?
Oh, well.
Here is one Detroit-made car from 1955:
"Ask the man who owns one". The slogan may be sexist by contemporary standards, but the year was 1955.
Packard made good cars in its day, but that day would soon come to an end.
But note that I compared Detroit in 1955 to Silicon Valley today, and that could be a good warning. Detroit priced itself out of almost every manufacturing activity not related to the auto industry (the biggest non-automotive manufacturing company based in Detroit was Borroughs Corporation, office machines), and when Detroit-area auto manufacturers lost dominance and even moved into other places in an industry no longer growing, Detroit was in big trouble. See also "coal" in Appalachia.
In view of the automotive industry in Detroit and the generational theory, I can imagine what might seem unthinkable -- that Silicon Valley could be like Detroit was in the mid-1980s. Losing dominance as an industry shrinks in relative share of the economy and decentralizing away from the area of its birth?
Oh, well.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.