Granted, I've only passed through, but there were no homeless people shooting drugs in the middle of downtown, it was clean, apparently schools are quite good, and being in a middle of the country you can get to some more exciting places easily enough.

When somebody was trying to recruit me there, looking at the offering range and housing prices, I could fly myself to the French Laundry pretty regularly, and still come out ahead.

Fins approval.

This sounds a little bit too defensive, really.

There's nothing wrong in living in SV, as long as you like it. Or liking it. It is wrong to try to make it out as if it were the best place fro everybody; or even everybody in "computers". It's quite demonstrably not, just like it's not quite that engine of innovation, especially world-changing innovation it used to be.

I didn't say this is for everyone. Choosing where to live is a personal choice. Just like living in Chicago and having less tech options and very hot summer, a very rough cold is not for everyone. The myth that SV is no longer the hot bed of innovation is also flat out wrong. If you tell me it's Denver or Austin or Seattle we can just look at the last companies to come out of these places vs SV.

Well, exactly. It's not for everyone.

You also seem to be conflating companies (sure, it is easier to start a company in a place where you can get finding for almost anything, no matter how harebrained it is) and innovations. The way I see it, Web was an innovation (not from SV). A first browser that a normal person could use and would want to use was an innovation (flyover country). Showing that the Internet could be safely and reliably used for commerce (at least for a time)? Not SV either. These were world-changing innovations. Stripe or AirBnB? Not so much.