driving is not that awful of a soul crushing experience, either. The drive is frankly not very important or noteworthy compared to the destination.

It's not the driving, so much as it is all the stuff that has to be wiped out to make room for huge freeways and parking lots. But it's also the driving. When you have a highly populated area where everyone drives, you get sprawl, and with sprawl comes longer commutes. It is not uncommon to have longer than an hour commute in the Bay Area. Two hours a day in traffic isn't soul crushing? Maybe you've just never experienced anything better.

Soul crushing is urban, like your neighbor's kid was in the crossfire got shot and died, or your car/house/garage was broken into for the fifth time, or you were mugged again, etc.

WTF are you talking about? Have you spent any significant time in San Francisco? We're not all living The Wire out here. I lived there more than a decade and never experienced any violent crime. There is some bad shit going down in the Bayview / Hunters Point area, but in 10 years I never went anywhere near there. My experience in the Richmond District is about as far removed from urban gangbanging as any suburbanite's.

Hey the Sunset is a happening place! 9th and Irving.

I would expect someone who grew up in the city to figure out how to get from Lake Merced or wherever to the part of town where there is stuff going on. You don't find yourself in the ghost town part of San Francisco by accident--the locals have to work really, really hard to keep fun stuff from infiltrating.

There are suburbs and there are suburbs.

Evanston, IL, is a pre-WWII suburb where you can take the El into Chicago, and can walk to the park, to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bookstore. There is a mix of detached single-family homes and apartment buildings.

The suburb where I grew up in California is 30 miles outside of Sacramento. You can walk to... well you can walk to another house. If you want to go anywhere else, you have to drive. Most people commute more than 45 minutes to work. There is a mix of large detached single-family homes and larger detached single-family homes. (Because the locals will scream bloody murder if anyone attempts to build apartment buildings. Something about "property values" and making the community accessible to skeezy people such as singles, childless couples, and people who can't qualify for a mortgage.)

If you grew up in a suburb like Evanston, I understand where you're coming from. If you grew up in a place like I did and loved it, I must conclude you do not have a soul to be crushed.

I just have to make sure... you're talking about San Francisco, right? I lived there for more than a decade and never felt particularly unsafe, so I'm not sure what city you're talking about with this "extremely high crime."

no parking so only locals are allowed

This seems to be what your complaint really boils down to. Just take transit. Eventually you might find you prefer a 20-minute bus ride to an hour commute from some soul-crushing suburb, and you will start to appreciate the urban amenities that are available to you that are impossible for a car-dependent suburb to offer.

I grew up in San Fran and let me tell you, after hours its a ghost town,

Huh? You might want to travel outside a 3-block radius of the Transamerica building.

Lost in these articles about all the virtues of areas outside Silicon Valley is the fact that the capitalization of Silicon Valley venture capital firms is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitors in New York City and Boston. Nowhere is even close when it comes to throwing money at startups. Where does Phoenix rate? It doesn't. If someone has a brilliant startup in Phoenix, and they manage to wrangle some venture capital, the first thing their investors will do is move them to Silicon Valley so they can keep tabs on them.

If I need information about something, I go to Wikipedia before I go to the "official" website. That tells you all you need to know. Wikipedia provides the information you want without a lot of cruft. Nothing ugly about that.

Do you really believe there are a lot of Shakespeare-spouting extemporaneous haiku poets who get played by the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag? Science and math are included amongst the liberal arts, you know.

Ah, whatever. I get tired of being condescended to by engineers who would never hack it in a rigorous liberal arts program. The world needs engineers, yes, but if you look at the architects who designed Chicago, or the scientists who built the atom bomb... these were not narrowly educated men. They studied art, music, literature. social science. If all you aspire to be is a draftsman, then fine, go to trade school. University degrees are devalued when they're given to people who haven't really studied anything beyond a narrow career specialty.

You know what the world doesn't need? More drones who are trained to produce X quantity of widgets, but who lack the broad education to fully participate as citizens in a democracy.

Look at any thriving democracy and it becomes clear: The majority of its citizens have good liberal arts educations, and are not merely trained for what their employers require.

Huh? Northwestern is divided into separate "colleges," but they're all on the same campus and students can take courses from all of them. There is nothing (aside from lack of social skills) preventing a student in Tech from spending most of his free time with theater majors.

Of course the theater / Radio / TV / Film majors tend to drop out and head to Hollywood after a year, so there's that.

...unless you want to say something that might get you in trouble with your boss, your family, someone's lawyer, the government, or anyone else. Then you should just shut your mouth if you know what's good for you.

There's this thing called the First Amendment?

I doubt the authors of the Constitution meant for the right to free speech and press to be conditional on identifying oneself--given that their their letters advocating the Constitution were penned anonymously.

I think in the USA, a lot of the on-campus housing was built 30 to 100 years ago, when the university was considered a surrogate parent for the still impressionable students ("in loco parentis").

Times have changed--dorms are now mostly coed, for instance, and there is usually no "house mother" watching to make sure everyone gets in by curfew--but we still have these old buildings, and we've run out of space to build new ones, and living on campus for at least a year or two is considered a mark of a good quality undergraduate experience. If all of the double rooms were converted to singles, it would be harder to fit everyone on campus.

When I went to school in the '90s, I shared a room for my freshman year, moved to a single room in my sophomore year, then moved to a shared apartment off campus as an upperclassmen. I think this is still a fairly typical arrangement.

In hindsight, though, I can't believe I survived sharing a room for even one year. "My girlfriend's coming over, can you find somewhere else to sleep?" seemed like just a normal conversation at the time, but in hindsight, I was paying a lot of money for that room I only had the use of for 4-5 nights a week!

...to accept a friend request from someone they've never heard of? Is this why all the kids have 600 FB friends despite their actually pretty limited social circles?

For a while there, everybody used the Netscape browser and the Netscape portal page was the first thing everyone saw. That is, until Microsoft got around to making a better browser and the Apache server ate Netscape server's lunch. I believe Mark Zuckerberg was around 10 years old at the time.

Remember when they were trying to guilt their users into upgrading to Netscape Gold for like $30-40? Hilarious!