rrrrtttt

The glorious state of California has the highest taxes in the nation and is the home of the tech industry. If wealth isn't trickling down, it's because it is being wasted.

Presumably, Google's core business has better return on capital than real estate, or else Google would have become a real estate shop.

Cray nowadays is purely a government contracting shop (think healthcare.gov in terms of technology chops).

Reading Hacker News, I get the impression that tech startups are the only sector of our capitalist economy that has transcended the profit motive and is apparently serving a higher cause.

In my small corner of numerical computing, pretty much every name I know on the east coast who doesn't hold a university position has moved to Yahoo Research in recent years. So at least their research lab does not seem to experience a brain drain.

I can't see how arXiv helps with the outlined problems. The goal of publishing is getting a stamp of approval from your peers, which you can then bring to hiring or promotions committees to buttress your case. Arxiv merely helps you put your paper online, which I would argue is a trivial problem (and has been so since the personal university homepage was invented).