I just wanted to add my two cents... A month or so ago, I filed my first FOIA request. I requested some non-sensitive statistical data from an office associated with the Dept of Defense. Despite the banality of the data I was requesting, because it was related to the military and the shear volume of it (over 10M records), I was expecting some foot dragging. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. The very next day, the FOIA officer emailed me and then followed up with a phone call. She kept me apprised of the status of my request and about three weeks later, the data was FTPed to me. She even found someone to answer some questions I had about the formatting of the files.

I was fully expecting a more adversarial process considering the reputations of FOIA requests. But I learned that FOIA officers seem to care a great deal about facilitating requests. Just wanted to give kudos here where some is due.

Detroit? Yeah right, you need to have money to attract money.

I was previously part of a tech start-up that grew out of research at the University of Michigan. The founder tried like hell to get funding but no one would listen to someone based in the Midwest. And no VC in this state understood the industry well enough to risk the amount of capital we needed. Eventually he got the VC needed from a couple of places in the Valley, conditional that the corporate HQ be based there (so they could keep an eye on their money and handpick the leadership). So we had most of the engineering going on in Michigan while the sales/marketing/leadership rubbed elbows in Cali. It was a very inefficient system. But you had the engineers who refused to relocate to CA and the bigwigs who refused to move to the Midwest.

There was always this odd tension between the two offices. The Cali guys treated us like we were some backwater boys who didn't know how to run with the big dogs. We viewed them as pretentious mercenaries. Anyhow... I'm rambling. Point is that while I really dislike the Valley culture, I don't think that Midwest is ready to compete with it.