I've been really impressed with SLC when I visit, and my brother recently moved there from LA. It's got a lot going for it and is quite appealing for tech, giving housing prices, a culture of reasonable working hours, and access to nature. SLC is also becoming more cosmopolitan, and the region seems like it is generally run quite well.
Unfortunately, there's also bad pollution. The valley makes SLC prone to pollution and especially inversion layers in the winter and ozone in summer. You'd expect mountain air and you get that sometimes, but other times it's as bad as or worse than major cities elsewhere.
One of the downsides of being a red state is less will to address environmental concerns like this. It's been slowly getting better due to car emissions standards (which Utah has no active involvement in), but there's still a lot of pollution sources that need addressing. There's an active refinery in town, at least one big mine across the valley, tons of trucks and trains passing through the region, and the airport is being expanded.
Given the air is also extremely dry in the winter, I can't see myself moving there, despite it hitting a lot of my criteria for places to live. Were they to get their environmental house in order I'd say it's one of the best places to live. I hope someday SLC realizes its just not geographically destined to be an industrial hub, and makes responsible choices to shift away from that.
> One of the downsides of being a red state is less will to address environmental concerns like this.
This is patently false. Some of the most beautiful states in the country are home to "red" policies, and there isn't any evidence to the contrary that being "blue" makes anything better, considering some of the most polluted states in the country are blue.
California, for example, you might think has beautiful parts because of "being blue", but California wasn't always "blue", and it wasn't until the 90s where it started consistently going blue...which means the majority of it's natural beauty was designed and led under "red" leadership. Same for Colorado.
There is plenty of "red" environmental think tanks these days. Mostly everyone agrees the environment is worth protecting, just disagree the ways of going about it. Check out the American Conservative Coalition, for example, which argues for a more reasoned approach to tackling climate change, one that many here would find agreeable, such as including natural gas as a transitional energy source off oil and coal, and utilizing nuclear power. https://www.acc.eco/
> California, for example, you might think has beautiful parts because of "being blue", but California wasn't always "blue", and it wasn't until the 90s where it started consistently going blue...which means the majority of it's natural beauty was designed and led under "red" leadership.
Not at all true. It's true California used to be a Republican Presidential stronghold that flipped very quickly to the Democrats in the 90s, without much competitive period in between. But it has had Democratic state legislative majorities consistently since the 1950s (with Republicans holding the Assembly speakership less than 5 years and the Senate Presidency Pro Tem less than 2 years since 1957.) Democrats have also dominated most statewide Constitutional offices besides the Governorship since about the 1970s, with the Governor's office not seeing the same kind of of super-long-term one-party domination.
> Not at all true. It's true California used to be a Republican Presidential stronghold that flipped very quickly to the Democrats in the 90s
That's exactly what I said?
Either case, let's not forget, even with how "blue" we think California is, there is still more registered republicans in California than Texas, obviously due to California's sheer size in population. That would mean regardless of specific outcomes, republicans were very much involved at all levels of government.
I think they were addressing general mistrust of climate science and stubbornness to act against human driven climate change or even recognize its existence let alone prioritize environmental concerns like mine tialings and other pollution. In red states, run by conservatives who consider climate science a conspiracy and environmental regulations antithetical to business, this philosophy common. Many of these states (and blue ones too) have low population, no major urban sprawls or cities, and minimal pollution sources near people like chemical plants, refineries, and mines.
SLC is in a red state that generally follows GOP talking points on these issues and has not acted strongly to protect air quality in the area. Polling in the state suggests people do support climate science though. If the city took action like LA/CA to improve emissions standards, implement better public transit to replace commuter cars, and pressed local companies and industry to limit emissions it could get an early start and a rising taxable population to fund these programs.
Because they are politicians! It's their job to act stubborn and pander to their bases, especially in today's winner-take-all environment. They don't actually say what they mean or believe. They only say things that test well with their base and keeps them in power and re-elected. They focus-group most every position they even think about holding, and for the most part stick to blue-meat/red-meat issues.
The sad reality is, if you are a republican with deep convictions that anthropomorphic climate change is the top existential threat in our world, you cannot talk about this publicly (Just like if you are a Democrat with deep convictions about the sanctity of life, you better keep that shit to yourself). Moderates have been booted out of each party.
What they say, and what they do are usually (99.9% of the time) two entirely distinct realities.
> One of the downsides of being a red state is less will to address environmental concerns like this.
Practically speaking... what would you expect that they do about it?
As a California native, I've seen just how bad short-sighted environmental regulation can be. And it's not like pollution isn't an issue in Los Angeles or the Central Valley, both of which enjoy a strong geographic advantage compared to SLC.
So, what sort of regulation could the state pass that would mitigate the problem? Given the geographical and economic constraints.
As a California native who grew up in LA, I'm extremely grateful for California Air Resources Board [1], which set standards for air quality that helped LA reduce some pretty terrible historic pollution issues, despite growing significantly over the same period [2]. CARB has also been important to fighting climate change by creating a model for other states and nations to follow.
LA is definitely not geographically advantaged when it comes to pollution, given it is a big basin. I'm not sure who wins the geographically disadvantaged olympics, but SLC and LA are more alike than not in this department.
Utah could adopt CARB's stricter air quality standards for one. They could also shutdown or limit pollution sources, including those from home heating. And they could reduce the growing sprawl by encouraging density and public transportation. I'm not a regulatory expert so I can't give you more specifics than that, but it's not like these things aren't possible.
Salt Lake already looks to have a better AQI than LA[1][2], though, and pretty much every new car sold is 50-state compliant (which includes CARB).
So, Utah has already effectively adopted CARB standards, and the rest of your suggestions fit in the same category -- I don't see them making a difference, or being feasible.
Good point about how CARB standards have gone national, didn't realize that shift had occurred. CA isn't standing still though and will be requiring zero emissions trucks [1], which I'm not sure other states will be as ready to follow. Hopefully it'll get fleets to simply switch over.
Ya LA is still struggling mightily, especially inland. SLC metro area is a tenth of LA (1.2mm vs 13mm) and growing faster, so these forces may even out. Geographic destiny is hard to overcome.
(Thanks! I wish we could go back to those simpler times) :)
>Unfortunately, there's also bad pollution. The valley makes SLC prone to pollution and especially inversion layers in the winter and ozone in summer. You'd expect mountain air and you get that sometimes, but other times it's as bad as or worse than major cities elsewhere.
I had no idea about this, wow. What causes it? Just the fact that it's in a valley? I've been to SLC only once to visit some friends, but I guess I didn't really notice (was only driving through).
Kabul’s geography resembles an elevated bowl much like Oregon’s Crater Lake. Just like the SLC area Kabul’s air pollution problem is magnified during the winter.
In some ways, mid-winter Kabul reminds me a lot of Blade Runner. It's 9:30 pm, pitch black outside, the air is choking with dust and smog from people burning literally everything possible to stay warm. Visibility is less than a city block. You're rolling through an area with some neon lit wedding halls and suddenly there's a giant lit up billboard with 4G LTE mobile phone advertising on it next to a dozen artificial plastic fuschia/green/blue neon lit palm tree in front of a banquet hall. You drive onwards, your colleague in the passenger seat clutching their rifle between their legs, barrel resting on the floor.
Yeah, it's just the geography that causes it. It's enclosed on three sides by the Wasatch, Traverse, and Oquirrh mountains which causes cold air to be trapped there. The Salt Lake metro area isn't much different from other cities of similar size and makeup when it comes to actual emissions. It's just that those emissions stick around sometimes during a couple of weeks in the winter. Because of this, Utah meets all the annual mean PM 2.5 EPA requirements but fails the 24-hour limits (we have occasional very bad days but most days are good).
Unfortunately "its just geography" is kind of one of the talking points for not really addressing the problem. Although true, concerted reductions in pollution have happened when there was political will to make it happen (mostly through the federal gov. / EPA clean air regulations).
Ogden and Provo are some of the worst offenders for per household air pollution emissions. Like many western cities they have longish commutes (everywhere) in large cars (trucks / suv's) with a high number of cars / household and almost non-functional public transport system. For the Salt Lake Metro area, per capita carbon emissions doubled between 1980 and 2015 because of increasing sprawl. Air regulations here are spotty for personal vehicles and I'm guessing almost non-existent for commercial vehicles. Oh and the state governments solution to this is to push a publicly subsidized "inland port" that will bring increased truck and rail traffic to the valley. The leaders of these tech companies are starting to point out that terrible air pollution for parts of the year is hurting recruitment so it seems like as the money flows into this sector maybe there will be political will on the state and local side to address some of these issues.
LA and Beijing have the same inversion problem. I think Denver does as well, but I’ve never experienced one there. Seattle has an anti-inversion (clouds get trapped between mountain ranges on all sides, pushing them up into rain, which keeps the air fairly cleaner than it should be).
My family lives north of Salt Lake and it does indeed get pretty bad, especially in the winter. I declined a job a Utah valley last year and the pollution was a major driver in that decision.
I agree with the GP about the air pollution. I also find the Salt Lake reeks in the summer. When I would go with my dad as a kid on his business trips, the smell in the summer was really off-putting. I think it's the same problem Mexico City has. Salt Like City is in a bowl, and there's no coastal winds to blow the pollution away like the bay area has, so the pollution just lingers. I do think it's a really clean city on the ground though and Park City is so close and really amazing for Skiing / Snow Boarding. The national parks in Southern Utah are also top notch.
More specifically, it's the smell of brine shrimp decaying on the lakeshore. But it's actually not a common occurrence for the Salt Lake stink to be present in the city itself. OP was just lucky!
Except the Los Angeles basin is open to the ocean for a good portion of it. And the other side has a valley that leads to the IE, where pollution seeps and sits.
It’s the complete opposite of the two other examples in that list.
Inversion means warmer air is above cooler air - it's inverted from normal where temperature decreases with altitude and leads to a very stable atmosphere with little convection. So the air on the ground stays there.
Winter in SLC and Utah County brings an inversion layer that traps polluted air from the ground up to about 8000 feet above sea level. That pollution causes all sorts of respiratory issues. Speaking from experience - it’s awful. No lotion in the world fixes it.
It doesn’t help that gas are two levels octane lower than in other places (so standard gas is 85, not 87), Denver does the same thing.
I lived in SLC for a few years and it’s ok. In fact, I know of no other cities with 24 hour coffee shops, which is great when you want to code and write all night. But I have no feeling to return, it’s nice but kind of boring.
> It doesn’t help that gas are two levels octane lower than in other places (so standard gas is 85, not 87), Denver does the same thing.
That’s due to high elevation. There’s no need for higher octane. I’m at the same elevation as Denver and my car requires 93 but the highest I’ll find is 91 which is just fine.
I find it interesting how so much of the article was concerned about diversity. It seems like SLC is punching above its weight class when it comes to startups even though it's not as diverse as the writer would like it to be, which raises the question as to whether diversity is necessary in order to succeed and grow even larger.
The thing that strikes me as especially interesting about our drive for diversity is that it’s based on the premise that if you hire people who look different, then you will very likely get people with heterogeneous viewpoints, which will make an organization stronger. I think this absolutely makes sense provided you sample evenly from all races, genders, etc; however, what I suspect is happening is that organizations that sort of worship diversity end up selecting from each race, gender, etc only those people who are similarly obsessive about diversity, and this selection bias erodes much of the purported benefit of diversity.
Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity, and consequently they end up with lots of racial and gender diversity but minimal viewpoint diversity (of course the degree of homogeneity is not uniform across these institutions, but this doesn’t detract from my point).
Diversity is originally about diversity of thought, experience and knowledge. Things that actually affected the way a problem was approached and how innovations occur.
Since then it's been perverted into being about superficial immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color, which is now, ironically, contributing to more racial discrimination and less meritocracy than before. It's a clear example of the "road to hell being paved with good intentions".
The modern zeitgeist appears to disregard individualism in exchange for group identity. Thus by having diversity of group identities you are supposedly getting diversity of thought. Each group bringing their own backgrounds and experiences, with all members within a group adhering to the narrative of said group. I find the whole thing exceedingly racist but even that term has been redefined so here we are.
By focusing on diversity like this you are elevating these immutable characteristics beyond the importance of individuality, pre-judging what people will bring to a team based on things like skin color or gender. It seems like racism has just gone full circle. I'm sure I will get downvoted to hell as this is a very unpopular take.
I think a lot of measures are taken out of concern for optics and without consideration as to whether they are addressing the underlying causes or merely the symptoms.
First there’s the pressure of “we have to do something now and it has to be externally apparent”, the choice to go with the most outwardly visible change, then other organizations following suit, and soon it becomes mandatory with everyone convinced they are working on resolving the underlying problem.
However, even if the underlying causes behind socio-psychological dynamics that fuel discrimination and xenophobia are unlikely to be best addressed through eliminating the symptoms of it by enforcing diversity via the very mechanism of discrimination by external in-born traits, that action may still help address some adjacent core problems (for example, somewhat reducing the income gap correlating with certain such traits).
Suppressing symptoms doesn’t necessarily lead to understanding the root causes, and in fact may do the opposite as relieved symptoms leave the impression of successful treatment.
Of course, to reiterate, in this case the ‘treatment’ is likely addressing the root causes of adjacent problems, and in dire circumstances even a temporary relief could be worth it, so I would not call against it.
My worry is that as one particular way of addressing discrimination (through applying discrimination, no less) becomes the default, it’s cargo-culted and there is very little incentive to understand and fix the underlying issues that said discrimination is a symptom of—which (underlying issues) may well fester until they manifest themselves as a new, possibly worse symptom.
> The thing that strikes me as especially interesting about our drive for diversity is that it’s based on the premise that if you hire people who look different, then you will very likely get people with heterogeneous viewpoints
No, it's not. It's about social justice and corporate citizenship. Viewpoint heterogenity and other arguments of private benefit have always been secondary arguments.
> Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity
AFAICT this isn't increasingly true of either, though it's perhaps slightly increasingly true (with different favored viewpoints) within individual media firms rather than the media as a whole. The argument that it is increasingly true tends to come from supporters of what was, until recently, the dominant ideology in those institutions and all of society, and is more about that viewpoint no longer being as strongly favored than increasing homogeneity.
>It's about social justice and corporate citizenship. Viewpoint heterogenity and other arguments of private benefit have always been secondary arguments.
it's more akin to a sales tactic
compare the shift in preeminence from "free software" to "open source." the pioneers make a moral/ideological argument why doing such-and-such thing is an imperative, get visibility and carve out a niche, but don't achieve mass adoption. bit later, the strivers show up and argue such-and-such actually just makes good business sense, and this proves interesting and palatable enough to get fully institutionalized
or, say, the shift from "gay liberation" to "gay rights." the argument in the 60s and 70s was that we're inherently subversive entities whose lifestyles by their very nature go against the status quo. by the 00s the dominant line is if only we had these and those legal rights, the final obstacles to our complete willing assimilation into the status quo!
as "diversity" continues its transition from ideal championed by believers to administrative function served by a professional class, it will continue to mutate in a way that benefits those who implement it
It seems like we have different perceptions on all counts, especially that this observation is just from certain supporters of a particular ideology. Interestingly, in my view, this is the one thing that liberals and conservatives can actually agree on.
> if you hire people who look different, then you will very likely get people with heterogeneous viewpoints, which will make an organization stronger
I know studies have shown this at the organizational level, but has there been much work teasing apart cause and effect? You can make a case that organizations welcoming of different viewpoints outperform for that reason, and they attract and retain diverse people for the same reason.
I don't agree with the parent's tone, but I don't think the parent was claiming that "racism and sexism" were equivalent to "intellectual diversity"; I'm not sure how you got there. I also don't think it's very interesting or relevant to speculate about the parent's motives for their observation, especially to use pejorative language like "ax to grind".
Diversity is not a requirement for economic success or profitability, specially when you exist in a non-diverse local ecosystem and shutting down minorities doesn't negatively impact your ability to tap local talent. It may impact growth prospects, as companies need to expand and open offices in other places.
Being inclusive is, however, something I consider right and, for some, doing the right thing is more important than maximizing profits.
I'm not sure they're not "doing the right thing". They can't hire who isn't here, and Utah is not a demographically diverse place. (Yes, they can recruit nationally, but for cost reasons, everyone starts by recruiting locally.)
I haven't seen any sign of any of these tech companies "shutting down minorities". From what I've seen, if the right candidate is a minority, they'll hire them without blinking.
I live in Portland, OR. It was actually illegal for Black people to live in Oregon until well into the 1900s. That is partly why so few Black people live here. My company has been trying to hire more Black people, but it is really difficult when none apply since so few live around here and all the other companies are also trying to become more diverse. If you are a programmer who is also Black, please consider moving to Portland.
Great message to put someone in a box "if you're black and a programmer we need you to fill our diversity quota so uproot your life and come here so we can virtue signal and post pictures of you on LinkedIn"
Hire good people, don't deny them on the basis of their immutable qualities. Don't pick someone because they look a certain way, but because they can do the work.
I have tried multiple times to hire a friend, who is black, because he is good (and not because he's black), and have failed every time because his cultural support structure is simply not there. That's not his problem, and honestly, it's not the Valley's problem, it's just a factr.
It took me a long time to understand this, but I realized, there's lots of places I wouldn't move, either, even for a good opportunity, because my expectations about the culture is some places and not others.
There is a rate of migration now and then, but honestly, there is a serious geo problem. Some people go where the jobs are (born here, but grew up out east), some won't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It seems worth noting that having low diversity doesn’t mean you are shutting down minorities; “diversity” isn’t a natural state of affairs; it requires intentional investment to cultivate. You probably didn’t mean to imply the contrary; I just wanted to be explicit.
Black people couldn't participate fully in the LDS church, as a matter of policy, until 1978, and the church has published materials suggesting against interracial dating and marriage in the last 20 years. Combined with governmental policies like redlining of majority black neighborhoods, I think it's fair to say that the lack of diversity in Utah isn't the natural state of affairs, and required intentional investment to cultivate.
> Black people couldn't participate fully in the LDS church, as a matter of policy, until 1978
True, and deplorable. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28). It seems the LDS church was rather late in getting the memo.
Still... that was 42 years ago. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that that's why there are so few blacks in Utah today. (And even pre-1978, you could live in Utah without being LDS.)
> Combined with governmental policies like redlining of majority black neighborhoods, I think it's fair to say that the lack of diversity in Utah isn't the natural state of affairs
Redlining is also deplorable. But did it happen in Utah? I ask because I'm not sure Utah has any majority-black neighborhoods.
And even then, for there to be redlining, the blacks have to already be here. If they came here, they couldn't buy a home because of redlining? As opposed to anywhere else, where they... also couldn't buy a home because of redlining? Or is the claim that Utah had redlining later than everywhere else?
I don't see the logic for your redlining claim to have any relevance to the question of why Utah is not diverse.
> It seems a bit of a stretch to say that that's why there are so few blacks in Utah today.
Does it? Because to me it doesn't seem like much of a stretch at all to suspect that being entirely unwelcoming to black people would discourage black people from moving there (and encourage black people already there to leave at the earliest opportunity).
I'm not an expert on Utah or on racism, but I know that SLC and Ogden, both cities in Utah, had HOLC maps with redlining.
There were Black people in Utah before the LDS church. There were Black slaves owned by members of the LDS church until slavery was made illegal, and there are and were Black Mormons since the time of Brigham Young. Per the below link, there might have been more that came or stayed on in Utah, if the area had been more welcoming, but discrimination in housing, work opportunity, and arguably in the LDS faith had an impact.
As best I can tell, Utah never had a particularly big Black population, and many many racist policies kept it that way. I suppose you could argue that that's natural, but I don't see it.
> Of course it does. How is it that Utah is almost all white?
Utah can be all-white for entirely nefarious reasons and yet it doesn't follow that any given company (or other organization) in Utah lacks diversity for its own nefarious reasons. It's entirely plausible and likely that the company in question sampled without racial bias from its own hiring pipeline and consequently the company's racial demographics resemble that of its hiring pipeline.
As for why Utah's population is mostly white, I'm guessing the biggest factor is that a predominately white religious sect settled it. I'm sure there's some racial oppression involved as was common at the time, but I don't imagine that that was a particularly strong driver of Utah demographics. However, I could be wrong and it still wouldn't affect my original thesis.
> In the natural state of affairs, since we now have the ability to move around the planet faster than we reproduce, entropy would have the world be an even distribution.
I'm not actually sure that we can move around the planet faster than we reproduce. This is perhaps true for the wealthiest 1% or so of the global population. Moreover, to the extent that it's true, it hasn't been true for long enough to expect some global homogeneity absent discrimination. Absent any segregating forces (malicious or benign--more on benign segregating forces below), it would probably take millennia to get some discernible global racial uniformity. Further, there are benign segregating forces--for example, people of all racial groups tend to exhibit a preference for living in communities which share their language, culture, religion, and traditions (note that the standard group generalization disclaimers apply--this doesn't apply to every individual in the group and it doesn't suggest that this force is uniform across racial groups, etc). Similarly, the nations with the most gender freedom exhibit the least occupational gender diversity and the nations with the least gender freedom exhibit the most occupational diversity.
Utah was a moderately unforgiving desert settled by members of a white church (the majority of members’ families had recently immigrated from Britain or Scandinavia).
That church also was not particularly welcoming to Black people and expressly for as slavery.
You didn’t have Black people moving there to join a pretty culty religious group, and you didn’t have slavery, so there was very little influx of diversity.
Not to be pedantic about it but there actually was slavery (to your point though, not nearly as widespread as it was in the East) Brigham Young declared it legal right after a black member from Boston made the trek into Utah. As soon as he heard Brigham Young say that he packed up and left. He only stayed for like a month.
Edit: I’m not certain off-hand if it was made legal-legal or if Brigham just said it was doctrinal, imagine the effect would be pretty much the same either way at the time.
> Brigham Young believed that slavery was ordained of God, and accepted slaves for tithing.
It’s not like there’s an intellectually honest way of getting a ban on slavery from Christian Scripture. Mohamed was over 600 years later and substantially more liberal with regard to slavery than was the norm before him and his religion didn’t ban slavery either. The Abrahamic scriptures aren’t really ambiguous on this. God does not object to slavery as such.
When one claims to have a direct line to God and receive modern revelation, it would be expected that maybe they would see the writing on the wall, and I dunno, not enslave people?
The problem was that they were actively writing new scripture that supposedly had equal (if not more) weight than both the Old and New Testament.
Brigham did way worse than that to black people. Brigham Young and most other Mormon leaders, believed that the(ir) scriptures justified the subordination of black people because they were descendants of Cain or of other biblical figures who had sinned egregiously.
Slavery in Utah lasted 10 years and included very small number of Afroamerican and Native American people so certainly economic success of Utah is in no significant way connected to slavery.
> Of course it does. How is it that Utah is almost all white? ...
For the same reason why Utah is largely LDS, of course. Namely, it was largely white LDS who bothered to actually settle the place. It's a bit weird how some people find something nefarious in any perceived "lack" of diversity, as if founder effect, etc. was not a thing.
I don't think we can call Brigham Young's attitude and plethora of horrible statements about the African American race as anything OTHER than nefarious. It's systematic racism that "officially" ended in 1978 when blacks were finally allowed to hold the same priesthood as white 12 year old boys could hold. (and the "higher" priesthood level that 18 year old white boys can hold which also is a prerequisite for entering the LDS Temple). With that said, this systemic racism is still a thing as we've yet to see a member of the 12 apostles have anything other than white skin.
So, sadly, "nefarious" seems to describe it exactly.
There are at least a couple black people in the quorum of the seventy. The seventy have similar roles for the church in their corners of the world they watch over as the apostles do over the whole world. I know it may not be very diverse from modern US standards. But just recently a Hispanic born leader and Chinese leader are now part of the quorum of the twelve. Which was I believe a good step for diversity for the church.
Diversity can go pretty far before some are happy. I assume people may not be happy until there is a non-white skin prophet. There were plenty of those in ancient times I’m sure with the Lamanites and all (Book of Mormon reference). Or maybe even some will take the Ginsburg approach of until there are 12 non white skinned apostles then we “might” have to stop worrying so much about diversity.
I’ll give you a bit of The Churches Doctrine in the following so if you aren’t too keen on religion you can feel free to skip, but these are by no means all stances of the church but mostly my own wisdom I’ve gathered from scripture reading and Gospel study over the years.
Honestly I love diversity of all kinds. I love diversity of thought too. I also really like unity of purpose. I believe that diversity isn’t the most important goal the Church has. We church members believe that Zion has come at previous times and will come when the people are of one heart and one mind. I’m sure that doesn’t mean we don’t have diversity in any given respect such as different thoughts but when it comes down to it we unify in purpose much like Christ, God, and the Holy Ghost are one in purpose to further the Salvation of men in fact that is who we strive to unify with. Despite our mistakes we are able to improve and make that at-one-ment of purpose due to Christ’s Atonement (otherwise as the Book of Mormon states men[/women] were fallen and no good could come of them). I haven’t studied the Bible as much as the Book of Mormon, but at least in the Book of Mormon it states that prophets themselves make mistakes I mean I guess there’s examples of that in the four gospels such as when Peter denied Christ or when Judas betrayed Christ and many other examples of imperfect principles and even flat out mistakes such as with King David committing adultery with Bathsheba and his mistakes covering it up the way he did. I’ve learned else where in Gospel teachings that they don’t always speak for the Lord in their actions. The gospel also teaches each man is given the Light of Christ to discern for themselves whether something be good or evil. You feeling those things as “nefarious” is likely correct. Bad and toxic culture and the sins of our fathers as well as our own can really lead us away from God and the Truth and even prophets are fallible in that sense. This is not to degrade them just to say that they too can be fallible. Prophets have a divine purpose and most of them have gotten very close to the character of Christ at least in terms of what men can do. We are all fallible in those senses we all sin and we believe the only perfect sinless man was Christ. But also I recognize these people are called of God and that Christ is at the head of the Church. Despite those at the head of the Church much like we do may at times make mistakes though often when they do they given the degree of mistake will be removed from their station.
A tech forum may not be the best place for this discussion, but, you brought it up, and I've considered how I might answers so, you may never see this but...
I think your use of David here is a great example of where we may disagree. David absolutely sinned with Bathsheba, and subsequently killed her husband to cover it all up. Yes, that was an example of very bad leadership. But, do you get what happened after that? Nathan the prophet visited him and told him the truth about his wickedness. It cut him to the heart! He repented and sought forgiveness. He wrote Psalm 51 (go and read it) as a lamentation of his wickedness. Contrast that with Dallin H. Oaks' assertion that the Church does not apologize: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/06/18/their-church-may-... That is not an isolated or off-handed comment. It's one of the most un-Christ-like displays I've seen lately. In this way, I don't know who those guys the first presidency are following, but it's not Jesus Christ.
Its an extension of systemic racism in the country going back centuries, which is what the parent is referring to.
That said, I don't personally expect every Utah resident to spend all their resources on diversity nor do I expect many are in the position to. That said, the argument that passive participation in an unjust system is tacit approval of that system isn't so far fetched.
> Its an extension of systemic racism in the country going back centuries, which is what the parent is referring to.
I'm not sure this is true in Utah's case, and anyway it misses the point (Utah could be white for entirely nefarious reasons and we would still expect any given colorblind institution in Utah to be similarly white).
> That said, the argument that passive participation in an unjust system is tacit approval of that system isn't so far fetched.
It's entirely possible that one is:
* unaware of the injustice
* unsure of what can be done to help
* already helping in a different capacity
* spending one's resources otherwise making the world a better place (including potentially addressing worse injustices or just trying to provide for one's family, community, workforce, etc)
* etc
This "if you're not for my pet issue, you must be against it" isn't doing anyone a service.
Indeed. And at least for African Americans, the Great Migration was from the South to major industrial cities (Detroit during the automobile boom, LA during WW2 for the war effort).
Without a huge draw of good paying jobs I’m not sure you’ll see a lot of diversity since no ethnic group has a lot of incentive to move there.
> Namely, it was largely white LDS who bothered to actually settle the place.
I mean, this is eliding a lot of history, none of it pleasant and with no convenient villains. Mormons themselves were more or less forced there; they forced enslaved people to come with them making Utah the first western area with African slavery; they accidentally and purposely, violently displaced indigenous people who also actually settled there; and Mormonism held racism as a core precept much longer than most US religions.
"Nefarious" is a sadly accurate summary of two centuries of Utah history.
As the former head of HR at Apple said in the past but got fired for is that there are multiple forms of diversity and they have validity for particular reasons, however, to succeed as a business you mostly need diversity in thought (the opposite of groupthink), but there is also the social dimension of diversity which needs addressing if there are forces that are artificially affecting the dynamics.
That said, Japan, China and others have been very successful without having to import much external talent. And there are places with more social diversity than the US such have not done well, though there are examples of very diverse places that do extremely well too (Singapore and to a lesser degree Malaysia). So success is probably more aligned with economic policies and other policies weigh less.
Singapore presents itself as "very diverse" but people will regularly be surprised if you have a western appearance and speak with the same accent as everybody else in the city.
It's not really comparable to the US (or the UK or commonwealth countries or much of Europe) in that way.
>> China has 'imported' a ton of IP and many people from other countries have gone to China and made fortunes setting up clones of non-Chinese businesses.
The writers at very least need to take into context the population at large. Germany is not super diverse, neither is Utah. Hence, it will feel different than LA.
Ironically, this is the 'Coastal Writers' being guilty of not respecting diversity (!) in that, not every place is like NYC or LA.
That doesn't mean Utah is off the hook for not being fair, or for concerns about systematic issues, but Utah is literally less than 2% Black. So that's a starting point.
I'm pretty empathetic to issues of unfairness or discrimination, but I lose interest when I see a ham-fisted or lack of contextual elements on the part of writers.
Someone noted that Utah has a highly educated workforce - a lot of places do, that's not enough to make a 'Valley'.
I think that such places will be great for Tier2 tech, by that I mean, tech that is an end product, not tech used by other techies.
Shopfiy in Ottawa, is an example. Ottawa has 'great schools' super B+ competent work force, the most safe and stable place in North America. But not nearly the depth needed to make a Google or MS. Wix. Survey Monkey. I can see Stripe maybe happening out of the Valley. Though I often wonder what the difference would be - maybe Shopify needed to 'start' elsewhere but if it was now a fully SF company I wonder where they would be.
But the 'centres' of social networks I think will remain in the big cosmo areas, and 'core tech' will mostly remain in the valley, other than little dots here and there, that usually get eaten up anyhow.
It seems like most of these startups are not succeeding though innovation rather they are "just" executing well. '“the consumerization of enterprise.”' ?
Having spent 10 years there, I can say this is true. There’s not much innovation, just solid business execution and sales, sales, sales. The proliferation of ambitious former missionaries is a driving factor for this cultural element.
if you want to grow outside of your domestic market it's a significant help to have as much possible information available to you when you build something, diversity is simply a way of information discovery. One of the most trivial examples being the soap dispenser that didn't detect black hands. If you have someone with dark skin on your team you discover it right in development.
"diversity is simply a way of information discovery"
This is one of the arguments given, and it makes a whole lot of sense, so much so, it's hard to negate. But in my years of business experience, I don't believe it's true.
Having Engineers of 'XYZ Heritage' will not really in any way help you 'think differently' vis-a-vis the XYZ market. It just doesn't work that way.
Now - having Engineers 'born and raised' in a certain part of the world - yes, that can possibly make a difference. It's no surprise that Vancouver has a lot of 'ties' to APAC.
Paradoxically, when you start a business, generally you want to hit the very narrow segment of your best possible followers, in which case, diversity may be the opposite of important: you want to nail a demo, that may or may not be related to diversity.
The primary advantage, I believe, of diversity, actually has nothing to do with diversity. I have mostly come to believe that most of it doesn't matter materially - what matters - is that companies and individuals have an opportunity to connect with one another. A young, white, CEO may simply be unwilling to look beyond his network and local horizons to find, for example, a lot of women. It's the issue of gender that will help the company, rather massive talent pools overlooked.
So having internal biases agains 'certain types' results in just missing out on talent, not so much on some 'special thing' that those candidates bring. Mostly.
The need for diversity is not a means to succeed and grow, it's a directive for redistributing wealth and power from those populations who already have it to those who do not.
Diversity as being good for capitalism is red herring.
The big economic growth success stories of the last 50 years were in China and East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam. Some of the least diverse places on earth. Many of these wont accept immigrants from other backgrounds at all, although they might accept low wage agricultural workers.
Economic growth in the US over the same period was mediocre, with declining productivity, and in Europe, it was anemic.
There is just no evidence that nations which focus on diversity in and of themselves have had better economic outcomes.
Now it does make sense that if you are in a large multi-ethnic society then you will be at a disadvantage if you only hire from one group, since good people are hard to find, so why limit yourself to just a small subset of the population. This is less important for a small company than a large company that really needs to cast a wide net. So not intentionally excluding subgroups of your population makes economic sense.
But I'm not aware of any evidence that being more diverse than your population will improve outcomes.
>Many of these wont accept immigrants from other backgrounds at all, although they might accept low wage agricultural workers.
This is not true. In the case of Japan, so long as an employer there is willing to sponsor your visa, you'll have no problems immigrating there or becoming a permanent resident.
I said "last 50 years", which means since 1970. If you think that WW2 was still a meaningful factor in economic output in 1970, you are in a very small minority and are making some very unusual claims.
Korean truce was announced 13 years before 1970: that's the distance between 2020 and the last recession. Taiwan's northern territories were still being shelled. Vietnam war was still ongoing. China just stopped the campaign of exterminating sparrows and intelligentsia.
Hungary has successfully created incentives to raise their birth rates for example. The Hungarian government doesn't want to rely on mass immigration to sustain the country's population it seems. You don't need imported diversity for more jobs - you can just create very "un-diverse" people yourselves, which will work those jobs once they've grown up.
If other Western nations like the US would seriously get behind an idea like this, with all the power of the media and various propaganda outlets, they, too, would quickly see a cultural shift towards rising birth rates. Unfortunately the people in control don't want this to happen.
Whether ever-continuing growth to chase the 0.3% higher GDP each year is desirable, is another topic though.
So I live in Utah been here for most of my life and been involved in the Utah start up scene, and quite frankly I've been wondering why Utah has been at the top of more tech hub lists. The fact of the matter is you have a very edicated population with two major universities a younger population and a government that looks favorably on business. I'm surprised it took anyone this long to notice. I think there are two factors that work against the traditional SV perception in Utah.
Both of them stem from teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ( of which I am a member) the first is the emphasis on families. A commonly heard refrain is "no success can compensate for failure in the home", this emphasis on family doesn't always meld well with eh working 80-100 hours a week, FAANG obsession mentality that is caricatured as part of being an SV startup.
The second is also another teaching of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that counsels it's memebers to avoid excessive debt. Whereas the entire SV startup mentality is get as much VC as you can and blow through it as quick as you can to fuel growth hopong you can claw your way out later. As data point on this until a while back I was working at ones of Utah's biggest, hottest most profitable startups as one of the first employees. The CEO didn't take out a bunch of business loans or get VC, he had owned quite a bit of property and liquidated it all to start the company.
Now the objection will be that everyone in Utah isn't a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, however the culture still is pretty pervasive.
That being said there are exceptions to every rule and things are changing. But most importantly.
There are too dang many of you coming to Utah and filling up my mountains and desert stay out find somewhere else live.
As someone outside looking in who's skied there once and know a few people from there or lives there:
1. Big pay differential. This is probably why it only hires locals for the most part.
2. Mormonism is ascendant, and the tech industry is mostly non-religious. You hear stories about it can stifle your social life your not mormon or don't wish to participate in mormonism. Like if your kid marries a mormon and your not mormon, well you're not going into the temple to participate in the marriage ceremony levels of soft social exclusion.
I've lived in the bay area, startup to big co. And 80-100 hour weeks are fairly uncommon in practice unless your working in a very small startup fighting for its life. Along with having a family being anything much of a real problem.
Overall I find it unfortunate that equity financing is looked at as debt, vs the joint venture with the rich that it's more like. Nothing wrong with bootstrapping, but it's obviously limiting as you pointed out.
I live in SLC and work in the Silicon Slopes and as a non-Mormon and latino I'm positive I've been passed on promotions because I can't relate enough to the management which is overwhelmingly white, middle-aged and Mormon so you can guess that they pay attention to the other white Mormon's accomplishments because they see each other on Sundays too.
I also experienced this kind of bias at my first tech job in Utah. If you talk to any non Mormon in Utah they will have a story of bias in employment, housing, education or community due to religion. It’s incredibly pervasive.
Totally agree with this as a non-Mormon living in Utah. The culture is pervasive -- largely in a good way IMO. We moved here from California (ahem, sorry for filling up your mountains and desert) and love it. It's totally normal to have a family in your twenties, head out of the office at 5:00 sharp, and make friends hanging out with the kids in the mountains. Even as an ex-coastal democrat I am totally fine with the Mormon "compassionate Republicans" like Romney, Huntsman, and Cox. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else at this point. Now if we can just figure out traffic in the Cottonwoods.....
> Now if we can just figure out traffic in the Cottonwoods.....
This problem is actually the main reason I haven't moved to SLC yet. So much of the draw there is about being able to get up into (and out of) the mountains quickly, and during ski season (as you know but other readers might not) it can get really terrible. Like worse than I-70 west of Denver terrible
I have tried the ski bus approach, but had a frightening experience of being on one of the last buses down on a crowded day when LCC went into an interlodge event. I have heard a lot of proposals for solving the problem, from gondola to restricting car access and pushing people toward the buses, but so far I think there is no end in sight?
The traffic in the Cottonwoods is not that bad as long as you avoid the weekends particularly powder days and holidays. But if you head up to any of the cottonwood resorts midweek there's not really any traffic. I often ride Park city on busy weekends instead of in the Cottonwoods because Park city is better able to handle the crowds. But if your trying to do a weekend day in the Cottonwoods get up and in the canyon early before the conga line starts.
I hate to say it because Alta is maybe my favorite place on earth, but I just avoid them now. We moved up to Summit Park area (just over the pass, in Park City school district) and ski Canyons, plus a lot of backcountry in the Wasatch back. The cottonwoods are getting loved to death and I don't see a great solution -- widening the LCC road and adding a dedicated bus lane would work, but it's a narrow canyon and I'm not sure it's even possible.
If only we could figure out a way to work out a technology/innovation culture that lets people work with laser-like focus on a productive 40 hour work week, have lots of time with their friends/familiar/hobbies, but without the religious part. And without a huge percentage of community social activities revolving around one particular religious ideology.
This is anecdotal based on my experience in both the Bay Area and SLC, but the pay differential is extreme at the top end, and practically nonexistent in the middle bands. That is to say, the kind of developer who might be able to command a $400K+ salary in the Bay Area may be able to get $200K in Utah. But if you qualify for the kind of position that pays $150-180K in the Bay Area, maybe at a startup with equity, you'd get about the same in Utah, maybe a little less. But you can buy a really nice house in Utah for $500K.
That rings true to me - mostly just due to the companies present. I was near $400k in CA, and now around $200k here in Utah. But frankly, the lifestyle you can afford here on two >$100k salaries is ridiculous.
I'm not in your (or anyone's) church but I agree, looking from the outside, that there's a lot about LDS culture that would seem to promote sound business practices and de-emphasize risk.
But I'd also say that "be present for your family" and "don't amass personal debt" should be universally seen as good, and at least in theory they are, certainly by most religions or other broad groupings of humans.
I wonder instead: why not take more risk if you have a massive community to back you up in case it doesn't work out?
I mean, maybe you don't want to take that risk on "selling personal data to advertisers" because the community might not want to back you up, but if you're doing something basically moral, wouldn't a strong community be able to subsidize positive risk and thus yield better results on average?
> There are too dang many of you coming [...] and filling up my mountains
I'm from rural Northern California and I say the same thing a lot. Especially in the last 20 years. :-)
As a former member, I still choose to live here over anywhere else (my employer has given us the option - and I can't imagine a place I'd rather live) I'll agree that the church's focus on hard work, clean living, family atmosphere, abstinence from drugs and alcohol provide quite a net-positive for industrious people. I feel completely energized by the tech scene here, but I do get concerned that if we keep trying to rush toward being SF, we'll end up with million dollar 3 bedroom homes and folks living on the streets.
We have a huge advantage over SF in that we actually let developers build more housing (and also have plenty of space to build more) Im always so confused when I go to the Bay area and realize the density is much less than Utah.
While I see people pushing more and more down into American Fork, Lindon, etc I find it strange that they rarely push North. Pluralsight was in Station Park in Farmington, but I believe they've also moved to Provo.
I think the question is more, "why not set up in the northern part of Salt Lake valley to be able to pull in people from Davis/Weber county?"
There is certainly plenty of people that live up there, seemingly just as many as live in Utah County. Is it that there is a dearth of them that have the skills tech companies are looking for? Are there governmental/policy reasons keeping companies away? Is it because BYU is in Utah County and WSU/USU are that much worse at providing potential hires than BYU/UVU are?
I don't know the reason but it does seem weird to me that there is so much push into Utah County and seemingly nothing to the north.
While I did sincerely consider putting a "(more)" in my statement, our level of homelessness comes nowhere near SF or LA. Not that I don't consider it an issue.
Non-Mormon in Utah. I grew up here. In high school, I felt excluded. I felt like all the social activities centered on the Mormon Church, and I was left out. I resented it, deeply and for a long time.
Eventually I realized: Maybe it was just because I was a nerd. Maybe it wasn't the fault of the Mormon Church at all.
As a non-Mormon, I haven't been unwelcome anywhere, ever. There still is a bit of a feeling of being an outsider, but it's not like "no promotions for you" or anything. I've been treated fairly everywhere I've been. (Disclaimer: I'm male, white, straight, and cis. I don't know enough to speak for the experience of those who are not.)
The Mormons have been engaging in white flight from Salt Lake City proper and heading further and further south. The current tech bubble area near Lehi is a perfect example, just ten years prior they were all moving 10 miles north to Draper and Riverton towns but now those are too diverse too.
Good article for the most part. I was amazed when I moved here from Santa Monica a.k.a. Silicon Beach at how much startup and VC activity there is. Even down in Provo which I'd probably call the southern terminus of Silicon Slopes I overheard VC pitches at the next table in the restaurants every day at lunch. There is a lot of hustle and prosperity going on out here. Provo is also a very Mormon town in a Mormon state, containing BYU and also their missionary training center. Despite that I haven't found the cultural shift too jarring, though I will say the liquor selection in the state-run stores is a little lacking. Overall it seems like a very healthy and industrious community and I don't doubt it will continue to grow as the previous centers of tech innovation in America start to run into some very hard limits in terms of housing, cost of living, density of young well-educated workers, and overall lifestyle quality.
I lived in Utah for 8 formative years (moving in from another country). I must say that growing up there and not being a part of The Church was very culturally jarring, even though I wasn't in Provo. Here is a good summary of our treatment as the only non-religious family in our neighborhood:
We regularly brought cookies for Christmas to everyone on the street. When seeing surrounding houses shoveling snow, we would offer to use our snowblower to help. But when my mother fell on the driveway while struggling with two garbage bins and shouting for help, not one neighbor came out - not even the very pious bishop's family next door. She laid there in filth, and no one came.
My mother is an engineer. Her experience in Utah tech was a constant drain on her mental faculties (read: suggestive comments from her male colleagues, pointed questions about the welfare of her children, etc.). Coming from the country we did, she was used to it, but I still found it amazing to see in America. In a very large Utah company, a line was crossed and she filed an HR complaint about an individual. This individual had little technical ability, but was known to be very religious and ingratiating to superiors. On the very same day he took a higher position, he laid my mother off - that's after ten years with the company, and every year her performance was commended with a raise, even when many other employees in the company started seeing years without raises! She was a stellar employee, but this individual's first action as manager was retaliation against the only female on the team for one HR complaint.
Eventually, we could not take it and all left the state - I left as soon as I turned 18, my mother in now an engineer in a different state. After more than 8 years, we were still treated like strangers in our own neighborhood.
The cultural shift doesn't feel too jarring on a visit - it's barely perceptible. But years of it starts to feel like social shunning.
When I was a lot younger, I worked at an older high technology company in SLC and I mostly loved it. My co-workers were mostly great, the company was the best in its field (though was about to die, I'll get to that), I love the SLC area and Utah in general. I still have friends, mormon and not, from my time there. My direct management was kind, giving, open and knowledgeable and probably the best I have had in my career.
However... the company had a really bad nepotism problem that resulted in protection and favoritism for mormons, and it was a cancer. I worked for the core part of the company, but they had multiple business units. There was an entire business unit that was falling apart because it was absolutely infested with incompetent LDS nepotism hires mostly in the management chain. It had apparently been a problem on and off for a decade+ but had recently started going really wrong when certain people had gotten into positions of authority. Within a few years, the company was effectively dead and had given up a bunch of its lines of business. All of the really good people I knew personally fled and went on to really amazing careers - and a lot left SLC due to the experience.
Now.. the company might have died anyway. There were a lot of transitions at the time that took out the early high flyers. Certainly there were clouds on the horizon. But the immediate cause of death seems pretty clear.
This was in the 90s, SLC was nice then as a place to live but is even nicer now - bike lanes downtown, etc. The air quality in the valley leaves a lot to be desired, the state government could easily clean that up if they wanted, and that's a problem. What stops me from moving back is the risk of social isolation for non-mormons and the nepotism. SLC proper is just under 50%, now, I think, but Utah county is 86% and the state as a whole 68%. It's a concern for them - they worry, "what if I get sick and need hospital care?" and wonder if they'll get the same level of treatment, they wonder if they'll ever be a tier-1 friend with half the population, etc.
Housing: The problem is that Provo and Salt Lake both sit in valleys with pretty steep mountains around them. There's not that much more room left to build more houses on. (Provo has some, south of it, and the Salt Lake Valley has some on the southwest quadrant, but they're getting somewhat close to maxed out.) So housing prices, while currently not that bad by the standards of the rest of the tech hubs, may not stay that way for long.
Only in America could a person consider Salt Lake City "full" or too dense. The area is an enormous sprawl with almost no density. It's true that there are some mountain ranges, but there are plentiful passes that lead into adjacent large valleys. They only way you run out of room is if everyone needs a suburban McMansion.
True on both counts. But to build dense apartments,you'd have to tear down existing stuff (for the most part). That's not an impossible obstacle, of course, but it would take rezoning. I don't know how easy that is to do here.
And yes, there are other valleys. Summit County isn't great, though, partly because it's very expensive (ski resort country), and partly because the valleys are very small. There's Tooele Valley to the west, but access is a problem (the valley is west of the Salt Lake Valley, and runs north-south, but the only connection is at the north end). There's the valley Nephi is in, south of Provo. (Maybe 10 years ago I considered buying some land on the northern side of this valley, on the idea that it would eventually become subdivisions.) I wouldn't want to live there and work anywhere north of Provo, though. And Utah doesn't (yet) have the mindset to accept two-hour commutes.
So yes, you're right. And yet... it's going to take either zoning changes or long commute times, and I'm not sure what the appetite here is for either.
> That's not an impossible obstacle, of course, but it would take rezoning. I don't know how easy that is to do here.
Depends on what dimension you're measuring. Technically? Easy, at one point most of the US didn't have strict zoning, and most peer nations have nothing like this, it's hardly necessary. And usually these cities allow for apartments somewhere in the city, even if it's a small strip of land, it's not some unknown concept.
Politically? Hoo boy, that's a hard one. Because most Americans who live in these areas hate anything other than super low housing density.
Much of the original reason Silicon Valley took off as a tech hub where New York, Chicago and other dense cities failed, was that it appealed to engineers with families, who wanted a stable place to raise kids in comfort.
If SLC is trying to be the next SV, there's no reason to emulate cities which tried and failed to be tech hubs. Model against the winners.
Or, it took off because California had rules preventing non-competes.
Look at the tech hubs currently. Other than SV proper, you have SF, Boston, NYC, Seattle. The sprawlier, housing cheaper major cities like Phoenix or Atlanta aren't really in there.
Average household size in the Mormon heartland of Utah (3.3) and Idaho (2.6)[1] are much higher than many places in the developed world (and even the hinterlands of the US).
It's unfortunate that this has lead to zoning where a population density in Salt Lake is 700 people per square km and in Boise is 1,000. Meridian, ID the rapidly growing outer burb of Boise has a density of 1.3K.
They are working on plans to extend the rail lines farther south, which eases commutes and opens up more space for housing. We're seeing suburban neighborhoods go in as far south as Santaquin, because the jobs are also moving south... you can get tech jobs in Provo, not just Lehi or SLC.
Also, as far north as American Fork, you can still find patches of open fields that have not yet been developed. The entire town of Vineyard barely existed a few years ago, and still has space to grow. The towns south of Provo are slowly getting more high density housing, and updating their master plans to accommodate more apartments and townhomes.
The space for new housing will max out someday, but we are not there yet.
Salt Lake City is not very dense though. Even downtown is mostly relatively low-rise buildings, maybe 4-6 stories. A few skyscrapers would do wonders for housing capacity. Based on the time I've spent there, SLC is actually a very nice place.
The only thing that concerns me is that the Great Salt Lake is slowly going the way [1] of the Aral Sea [2]. One of the things that makes SLC a bit more interesting and hospitable than the surrounding desert is the snowy mountains all around it and the moderating effect of the big nearby lake. Replace that lake with a dust bowl and you end up with something less compelling.
That would probably mean apartments, but Mormon families still tend to be very large (very very large by the standards of non-Mormon families) and they typically want large backyards for their kids. Maybe someday that will change, but not soon enough to make a material difference in our lifetimes.
I think you'd be surprised. Mormon families are still larger than average, but there are plenty of Mormon families with just one or two kids. Not to mention that there are going to be plenty of "pre-kid" adults, or empty nesters around, and they need homes too. What reason is there to make most of the land exclusively single-family homes on big lots?
2. You can still have access to a backyard with multi-family housing. Where I live now in Munich, you have lots of small (or large) apartment complexes with shared backyards that kids play in all the time.
3. There's all kinds of ranges of housing in between "single family home with large front and back yards" and "massive apartment block surrounded by sea of asphalt". Duplexes, 4-plexes, and townhomes all make for increased density.
In any case, why not loosen the regulations and let the market decide? If there really isn't demand for apartment buildings, then developers won't build them, since they like money and all.
I live about 20 miles north of SLC. The home prices are still great up here (from about Centerville, up to South Ogden) There's also some room for growth. Although I am concerned about cities like Syracuse that have built awfully close to the Great Salt Lake.
Full disclosure: I graduated from BYU, but I left Mormonism over 15 years ago. I still have a lot of active Mormon in-laws in the area, so I still visit SLC at least once a year. I know several people working in the tech industry there.
There was no shortage of talent at BYU, but the lack of diversity on every front in the engineering programs was stark. Engineering programs were almost entirely composed of white men. In the hallways and labs of the Clyde Building, I heard a lot of sexist jokes. For example, "I'm dating someone who's going for her EE -- Elementary Education!"
Looking back, I now realize it was really quite hostile toward female students. They often weren't taken seriously since the graduation rate for women at BYU was (and still is) horrible, and they were constantly asked out on dates by their classmates. Saying "no" too often would get them a "reputation," and I know of at least a couple who got a talking to by their bishops (male Mormon religious leaders) about the importance of dating so they could get married and start a family.
Of course BYU itself is almost entirely Mormon. The only engineering students I knew who weren't Mormon were graduate students from oversees who probably didn't fully understand what kind of environment they were getting into when they accepted their scholarship for whatever program they were getting into.
Since I visit Salt Lake fairly often I have a few contacts in the area who, shall we say, don't quite "fit the mold" for the kind of people you usually see there. It's really a chronic challenge for them to always be hit with microaggressions, both personally and professionally. You don't even have to look really that different for it to happen. A male wearing an earring, a visible tattoo, or something a bit flamboyant about your clothing can impact your ability to be included. And gods help you if you aren't religious and find yourself in a company primarily headed by active Mormon leadership. You can expect to be courted and invited to join at first, but once you make it clear that you aren't gonna convert, you're going to have an uphill battle in the inclusion front from that point on.
That said, when I'm ready to start a tech business of my own, I'd really really like to be able to do it in the Salt Lake area. The problem is that I'd want a healthy amount of diversity among my co-workers, and the easiest way to go about doing that is to hire at a place where the diversity already exists.
Does SLC have an some advantage over the Denver metro area? It seems like both are pretty comparable yet the Denver has more room to grow; pollution is a huge problem in SLC. SLC may be a bit cheaper but I think it's catching up fast due and Denver is quite a bit more diverse and has a lot of cheaper suburbs.
Perhaps I'm comparing Apples to Oranges but I've just always been surprised by the relative interest in SLC compared to the Denver area, at least by HN metrics.
To be totally frank, the Mormons in SLC would probably view me as a corrupted, effete coastal leftist/liberal. And I would similarly have a real culture fit problem joining a company there. I'm not even remotely going to consider relocating to a place like Boise or Salt Lake City for a number of political and religious reasons. I know a number of people in the Pacific Northwest who feel similarly.
Can we just stop calling every place with a few startups, the next Silicon Valley ? Just as the article said, Utah startups didn’t even raise combined $1bn in 2017, where SV companies routinely raise 30-40bn every year. It is just another bit player to write some articles about
It's a fair point, nobody should be confusing the Salt Lake City area for Silicon Valley. Trajectory matters though, Utah is obviously doing well. Their annual venture capital raised has increased by roughly 300% in ten years and is likely to continue climbing.
To put $1 billion into perspective, it's more VC than these countries have per year:
Interesting, I had to look this up but for population density[0]:
* California: #17, 251/sq mile
* Utah: #46, 36/sq mile
I sort of doubt California's population density is the decisive thing here, but I agree that Utah's performance is impressive. Especially regarding VC, it would be fascinating to know how much of the money invested in Utah is from Utahns who made it big outside of Utah. In that it might (I randomly speculate) be more like some other countries than like other parts of the USA.
Comparing to European countries is not apples to apples, as Europe may rely on different avenues of funding. An apples to apples comparison will be comparing to other US regions. Where, I don’t believe SLC even cracks the top 10. After SF, San Jose, NYC, Boston, Seattle, LA, San Diego. Austin, Denver, Chicago etc
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-23/the-geogr...
I relocated to SLC recently after taking a new position in my company. It has been a very positive experience so far. Tech scene is bustling, a number of interesting meetups. From a geographical perspective, the mountains offer incredible opportunity for adventure. A mix of desert to high alpine.
I’ve lived numerous places domestic and abroad, and haven’t seen anything quite like the accessibility to adventure as is found in SLC. Trail/mountain running, numerous ski resorts, Park City (of Winter Olympics fame), rock climbing, mountaineering and backcountry skiing, etc. All within 20 minutes drive.
It’s surprisingly amazing how close to the city you can be and yet feel so far away. You can get ~6,000 feet above the valley within a few hours run/hike and see moose, mountain goats, porcupine, etc.
Also interesting is the number of outdoor gear companies that have offices here. Petzl, Black Diamond, Backcountry, etc.
I've interviewed in SLC before and the biggest problem with their startup scene is the complete lack of diversity. Otherwise it would be amazing to live near those mountains. I'm just not interested in working at a company with so literal cultural and racial diversity.
As a person of color and someone who is interested in moving to SLC for more affordable cost of living I am interested. Can you elaborate more? What is it that you found negative? I worked at firms with lack of racial diversity where I was literally the only non white person but didn’t have much problem other than of course not being able to relate in some off the work conversations and socializing aspects of it.
I thought SLC is now a lot more diverse than it was 10yrs ago partly cause the housing pressure in other big cities.
SLC is a great deal more diverse than it was 10 years ago. As an anecdote I moved here four years ago and I've overheard conversations in more and more different languages as I walk around the downtown area. My circle of friends is probably more diverse than it was when I lived in LA since it's largely people who moved here for the University of Utah or SLC-based tech jobs. Also, I believe SLC is at least 30% Hispanic, but it's pretty segregated both geographically and culturally.
The rest of Utah is lily white though, and the tech scene (its centroid is somewhere between SLC and Provo) still feels heavily white and Mormon. I didn't used to mind as much because we would travel to CA once a month, but with the COVID travel moratorium I'm really missing diversity of all kinds.
Definitely more diverse than it used to be, but not like other large cities; Hispanic and Pacific Islanders are the two fastest-growing non-white groups, iirc.
I work at a tech company in Utah and it really cannot be understated that the Mormon culture sweeps into literally every aspect of Utah. Not saying that’s negative, just that it exists. Me and my ex and non- Mormon coworkers had to beg management to let us have a happy hour for example, they had to change company policies to even allow us to do it.
As a non-mormon Utahn that lives in California; the reason things are so well in Utah has nothing to do w Mormonism and more to do with a focus on value creation as opposed to social issues, regulations, and taxes.
California has been working very hard to kill it's golden goose for a long time. Reasonable people are going to other states.
> California has been working very hard to kill it's golden goose for a long time. Reasonable people are going to other states.
People have been saying that sort of thing since the '90s, if not earlier. If California has been working so hard for so long to ruin things, why are we still talking about places being the next Silicon Valley, and not the next Austin or the next Research Triangle?
Well perhaps it helps to think of it in terms of raw numbers. California is bleeding about 60,000 people per year just to Texas. My city in Texas is averaging a growth rate of about 22% decade over decade having doubled since 1990 to surpass San Francisco in population and will likely surpass San Jose in about 15 years. On pace with the population growth is growth in diversity and average household income. That means that as the population increases the wealth distribution and access to purchasing and property increases for more people than naught.
It’s not all peaches and cream in this fast growing city though. The tremendous growth results in colossal strain on traffic and infrastructure, but ownership of a large house with a yard is available to most people. That’s not such a big deal when you’re single, but it’s huge when you have kids. The demand for increased economic security likewise dramatically increases when you have kids.
California is growing in population though, but very slowly and without equivalent growth in wealth per capita. That is largely a result in personal wealth primarily tied to home ownership and home ownership declining generationally in California.
I take from your comment that you are less concerned with raw numbers and more concerned with vanity labels and trends. If you are a well funded founder perhaps California remains the place to be, but the numbers indicate it’s no longer the epicenter of economic growth that it certainly was in prior decades.
If there is anything I would say is going to hurt California Even more (frankly it already is), it’s available affordable housing and the ability to build it. I understand that Prop 13 (I believe it to be 13) was passed for reasons that felt very real at the time, but it’s created a system that devalues heavily the otherwise natural churn of home ownership.
I don’t personally think it’s taxes, or any particular brand of politics (per se, as I know this is a political issue, I just mean relative to this), but that, in essence, that is destroying California slowly from the inside. Both Oregon and Washington are similar politically and Oregon is very close in taxes but they aren’t seeing any population outflows like this. I firmly believe it’s due to the issue of housing before any other factor.
I’m trying to gather more data to back my assertion but all personal experiences of people I know and others I’ve met who have moved have cited this as one of the major or the single biggest reason for having moved
I believe you are correct. You may find the work "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George of interest and what has come to be known as the Land Value Tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Prop 13 is killing California, repealing it and replacing it with a Land Value Tax, in my opinion, would fix it.
> I take from your comment that you are less concerned with raw numbers and more concerned with vanity labels and trends
Yes, exactly. I collect vanity labels and make little stickers out of them for my fridge.
What a completely useless thing to say. You have no idea what my thoughts are based on one sentence and a half so keep your ad hominems to yourself please.
All you are saying is that California is way too expensive thus people are leaving. Yes, we all know that. Now, why are people unable to live in California? And how should it be fixed? Those are the real questions. And there are reasonable arguments to make for many different theories, which was my point above.
If a solution is actually important I would suggest looking harder at the raw numbers and less hard at being offended. The problem isn’t that California is too expensive. That is a problem at present but the real concern is slowing growth and declining projections, which is a future problem. Colorado, which is seeing high growth, is also very expensive, which suggests costs of living are not solely to blame.
It doesn't make any sense because the "bleeding" that is such a big meme for the nation's conservatives considers only domestic out-migration. The reason there is so much of it is because a lot of Americans can't compete economically with international elites who have been flooding into California. Net domestic migration has been negative in California since 1991, with the exception of the year 2000. Net foreign migration, and net overall migration, has never been negative in recorded history.
> because a lot of Americans can't compete economically
That’s an assumption not directly based on numbers. Yes, the net in migration to California is largely from non-domestic people. That could be due to exactly the reason you provided, or it could also be the result of less movement freedom tied to visa sponsorship, or a variety of other factors. Many of my tech coworkers in Texas are non-citizens under visa sponsorship who, given the choice, have stated they prefer the Midwest due to a variety of economic conditions (not just cost of living).
True, my statement incorporates facts not in evidence. Net domestic migration to California is positive for high educational attainment (bachelors and higher) and positive for high incomes (50k/year+). It's negative for low educational and lower incomes. Basically the state attracts high earners and refuses to build housing, so someone has to leave. That's the competition.
Speaking of unsupported anecdotes, it makes sense that the people you meet in the middle of the country express a preference for being there. That's pure selection bias. In terms of revealed preference, the states that are getting more than their per-capita share of California out-migrants are Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington.
> My city in Texas is averaging a growth rate of about 22% decade over decade
Not to detract from your overall comment, but that's only just under 2% year on year growth - that's pretty low for a city? (Not trying to imply that faster growth is good, just that you've framed it as rapid growth - a big exodus - and it's.. Not ?)
There are only 37 cities in the US greater than half a million people and only a tiny fraction of those grew by more than 20% over the last decade. The largest two of those are both in Texas and none are in California.
If a city is able to consistently grow at 2% per year it will only take 20 years and a few months to be 50% larger due to compound interest and only 35 years to double in size.
> I take from your comment that you are less concerned with raw numbers and more concerned with vanity labels and trends.
In this context, I care about trends that happen over the course of decades and labels that become popular in recognition of those trends. I don't know why you're bringing up "vanity".
Silicon valley was built over 80 years. Obviously it's going to take more than 20 years for it's decline to be visible but it's clear to me that it's very far along
> People have been saying that sort of thing since the '90s, if not earlier.
And it's happening: people are fleeing the state.
"California likely to lose congressional seat for first time in history after 2020 Census. Californians moving out lead to cut in Golden State’s political clout."
"other states like Texas are expected to gain as many as three new seats"
> And it's happening: people are fleeing the state.
Poor people are leaving to other parts of the USA slower than rich people are moving in from other parts of the world; California has net in-migration despite net domestic out-migration. This is bad in terms of domestic political power, of course, but it's directly a consequence of economic success.
It has lower net growth than many other parts of the country, but that is not just a matter of migration but also the lower natural growth rate that usually accompanies greater wealth. And it's not one of the places actually shrinking because people are actually fleeing, not being displaced by richer people—there are a number of states where that is true, but CA isn't one of them.
> Check again. I left. many of my buddies at Google left.
I'm familiar with the statistics, the issue gets raised here every couple months or so. You and your friends from. Google aren’t the whole universe. Sure, some well-off people leave and some less well-off people move in, but that's not what is dominating the aggregate statistics.
"Deseret was proposed as a name for the U.S. state of Utah. Brigham Young—governor of Utah Territory from 1850 to 1858 and president of the LDS Church from 1847 to 1877—favored the name as a symbol of industry. Young taught his followers that they should be productive and self-sufficient, a trait he had perceived in honeybees."[1]
Hard disagree. I live in Utah, grew up here, and there's an absolute population boom going on right now because of tech. It's one of the reasons our unemployment rate is so low. Tech has been good to the valley but it's not without its trade-offs. Houses in West Valley that only a few years ago would have sold for $120k-$150k are closing for to $300k+.
Hopefully the state can get ahead of this problem and prevent the same issues we’ve seen in Silicon Valley. Housing is largely a red tape/nimby issue and not a real estate issue.
The main problem is most of the livable land is concentrated in the ‘wasatch front’ mountain range, and the valleys running north south along it. This keeps the available developable land within drivable distance permanently constrained.
We don't have much red tape but we definitely get a lot of nimbyism from the LDS church and its members. They have a stranglehold on our state that most people don't understand. I hope we're able to keep rents from ballooning, but I'm not optimistic.
People with similar belief than you about "value" (really, only money) creation and regulations/taxes are going to other states.
This has nothing to do with being reasonable. Someone perfectly reasonable could think better safety nets and less inequality is a worthy trade-off for less growth.
It's not just about potentially different priorities about growth versus safety nets. It's also a question of whether you believe that you should double down on the policies that have made California and New York among the hardest places to live for the middle and lower middle class.
In places like California and York, so much money meant to go to "better safety nets and less inequality" actually goes to providing secure middle class lifestyles for college educated white people. California, for example, is drowning in teacher pension debt despite having some of the highest state taxes in the country. But over 60% of California teachers are white, in a state where just 23% of schoolchildren are white. So when people look at white-hispanic test score gaps (California having among the largest gaps in the country), and vote for more education funding, the actual impact on reducing inequity is extremely attenuated. Likewise, on housing policy, people act very concerned about it in New York and California, but how much money and legislative effort goes to actually providing housing for people who need it, versus paying salaries for college-educated administrators and bureaucrats, versus propping up housing prices in middle/upper middle class racially segregated neighborhoods?
I'll note that LA teachers are demanding that as a condition for schools reopening, charter schools be shut down: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-26/citing-c.... Charter schools are, of course, a policy that's supported by the majority of the black and hispanic people that actually have kids in the school districts. (White Democrats are the only group where a majority oppose charter schools and vouchers.) This is a really telling illustration of what the real priorities are.
If, for the taxes Californians and New Yorkers pay, they actually got a robust safety net, good schools, and good transit, I imagine that a lot fewer people would leave.
I'm not forgetting about that. I'd bet if New York and California public services were run as efficiently as The Netherlands or Germany (producing good service for the dollar), people would not only not be leaving, but would be willing to spend more money in taxes in those states.
Moving from Utah to California is moving from one of the worst states for equality to the best. There is no trade-off needed regarding inequality, and I doubt there is one needed for safety nets either, Utah is unsurprisingly progressive in that area.
I'm in Seattle now, but when I moved, I considered California or Utah as places to work. The reason were purely driven by the geography of the land itself. Both California and Utah are beautiful places. And they have cities which are fun and interesting to live in.
California turned me off, because it just seems like it has reached max capacity, there's just too many people living there. Utah lost to Seattle for other reasons.
I guess my point is, I think all I cared about was the geography and temperature profile, and the lifestyle the place would bring me. The actual company I'd work for came after these.
So in my opinion, Utah is doing well because of its geography, same for California. People just like it there.
"...I guess my point is, I think all I cared about was the geography and temperature profile, and the lifestyle the place would bring me. The actual company I'd work for came after these."
This approach/reasoning is too often overlooked. Smart and capable people get to pick and choose where they want to live.
Mormons in Utah had access to free education and cheap housing. These things are huge. I know a bunch of Mormons and Formons (former Mormons) who moved there because of a free Brigham Young University education and stayed to work at (and help found and build) local startups because housing was cheap.
Edit: perhaps not "free" education but as-near-as, for any American. That free education was only available to Mormons.
Yep, “as-near-as” free is right. A semester’s tuition at BYU is $3k for Mormons, and it doubles to $6k for non-members (though that’s still pretty cheap, relatively)
Alan continued to teach at BYU, so he was in a perfect position to recruit BYU's best computer science students. He was a tough grader, and anyone getting an A in one of his classes was a candidate for a job offer. When Alan found students with exceptional talent, he and Bruce would offer them part- time jobs and put them to work on one of the programming projects. By the time they graduated, their work had helped the company grow to the point where we could afford to offer them good salaries. Eventually we used Alan's old grade sheets to search for good programmers who had already graduated.
40 years ago Mormons were making startups in Utah.
I actually work remotely for a boise company and they pay me a LA salary. Boise is getting pretty hot though still small. They have loads of cool conferences and start up weeks, but of course it's all been shut down this year.
I was there a few years ago to check Boise out as maybe a place to live. Nicest/cleanest downtown I think I've ever seen. Didn't end up making the move but I seriously thought about it.
Wordperfect. Fun little epilogue - Wordperfect founder Alan Ashton used some of his fortune to establish Thanksgiving Point[1], a group of attractions in Utah including museums, a garden, a golf course, and some restaurants and shopping. The area is in biking distance from the offices of many Utah tech companies in Lehi City. I just moved to a home in the same neighborhood and it's really nice! We got a year pass to the attractions for the whole family for like $300 and bike over to something a few times a week with the kids.
WordPerfect and Novell. There are several other names that have affiliation with Utah as well. The University of Utah is Alan Kay's Alma Mater. It's just a fantastic place for tech.
I doubt this comment will go over well, but I'll mention this small but important cultural fact anyway: Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints no longer refer to themselves as Mormons or Latter-Day Saints. Only Saints.
It may seem like minutia, but Saints (of whom I am one of them) worship Christ. Mormon, on the other hand, is one of many mortal prophets from ancient Americas and also the editor/compiler of the Book of Mormon.
If you know just that alone, it'll probably score you points with the Saints that you meet. :)
The trouble is that "saints" or "Saints" already has a meaning, which is not "members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints".
(In fact, it has multiple long-standing meanings, of which that is not one.)
I'm not saying you aren't entitled to call yourself that: of course you are. But you shouldn't expect other people to go along with it, any more than if you decided to call yourselves "Good People" or "Scientists" or "Turks".
Of course this problem occurs over and over, because groups of people love to give themselves self-congratulatory names. Sometimes they succeed: consider "Democrat[ic]" (in US politics) and "Orthodox" (in Christianity and in Judaism), for instance. But it makes me sad every time.
> When referring to Church members, the terms "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," "Latter-day Saints,” "members of the Church of Jesus Christ" and "members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ" are preferred. We ask that the term "Mormons" and "LDS" not be used.
... so in fact "Latter-Day Saints" is apparently perfectly OK, and "Saints" simpliciter isn't even one of the options they mention.
(But of course this is a guide for those associated with the CoJCoLDS, not an attempt to legislate what language others should use. I don't think you're likely to have much luck getting anyone else to refer to the doctrine and practices of the CoJCoLDS as "the restored gospel of Jesus Christ", for instance.)
Any place that homogenous has deep racism and sexism waiting for you just underneath the surface.
For me, this makes it a hard pass.
It’s not even about the benefits of diversity, as I’m a white male and would fit right in as long as I kept my mouth shut. It’s about the huge downsides to a culture that values conformity and enforces unwritten, arbitrary rules to ensure future conformity.
Utah and Mormonism are pretty interesting in both good and bad ways socially and culturally. I grew up as a Mormon in Utah and still live and work here. I don't really practice the faith anymore (finishing off my coffee as I write this!) but most of my family including my wife does.
Culturally, Mormons are a bit like the conservative south, except remove alcohol, add a higher respect for formal education, and crank up that 'protestant work ethic' to 11. Not that southern conservatives are lazy, but I think there is more of a culture of enjoying some downtime with iced tea in the shade in the South than there is among Mormons. There's also a bit of a culture of natural distrust of authority figures in the south - especially highly educated 'Ivy Leaguers.' There's less of that in Mormonism. Mormons pride themselves on being highly successful outside the church, whether in politics, business or academia. This can create huge problems for people who don't feel like they measure up, especially for women who are expected to be perfect housewives and homemakers while also supporting their husbands careers and doing valuable, secular community work. Often while their husbands work full time and then spend their off days (and all of their disposable cash) doing an MLM side hustle. Although, as the article notes, Mormon women are highly involved (dare I say preyed on) by MLMs as well - There are MLMs for everything from cleaning products to beauty products to sex toys, all aimed directly at women.[2]
The Mormon church does a pretty good job of teaching it's younger members (mostly just the boys, unfortunately) some basics of leadership and organizing group work efforts. These leadership rolls are mostly 'on the rails' - the church provides careful instruction of how to organize and lead to make these responsibilities approachable for the novice. Members are expected to speak in front of large and small groups from an early age, for example, and to preside over small groups of others near their own age in youth programs. For that reason lots of business efforts in Utah can just kind of coast on those same learned principles. There's already a shared cultural subconscious understanding of how groups of people 'should' work together, which overall makes things easier to get off the ground than trying to build these organizational structures from scratch.
The obvious downside (at least for me, I think some people experience this as a positive) is that every day at work feels a bit like a day at church. The people look like same, are often dressed the same, the meetings run in basically the same format, it's all very homogeneous.
I recently spent three years working for a company based in San Francisco. For me this was a breath of fresh air - the company was quite diverse among races, genders, sexual orientation and identity, etc. I didn't feel like I was sitting in Elder's Quorum meeting during daily standup[1]. I'm back at a Utah company now and while I don't have any problems with the company overall the feeling like I'm looking in the mirror at everyone I work with is stifling.
Since stepping away from full activity in the church I've started to realize that these social structures are the main reason why a lot of people stay in the church. Somehow that had never really occurred to me, although it seems obvious now. For whatever reason in my personal life my social circle, educational and professional prospects, even romantic prospects were never really rooted in the church. But for many (most?) people who grow up in the church this is not the case - if they left the church they'd be losing not only a huge part of their own identity, but severing social ties and souring important life opportunities. For many people this is the glue that holds their lives together. I suspect this is true for most religious communities. (Or even non-religious ones, like the tech community in general, which has many of it's own problems - and yet we stay!)
The other even more surprising thing I've learned since leaving is that a lot of people - both those currently in the church and some who have left - say that one of the main things they enjoy(ed) / value(d) about church attendance is the music. This is honestly weird to me because the music is about the most boring, generic, church organ+out of tune singing you can imagine. Even as a very young child the hymns were among my least favorite parts of church service. To each their own.
[1] An in-joke for the other Mormons reading this. Elder's Quorum is the men's group in the Mormon church. This group meets every Sunday during church service (except during the pandemic, service is still mostly suspended world-wide). This group is specifically for men aged 18 through ~retirement age, which in the most populated parts of Utah overlaps with the group of men who are mostly employed at tech companies. This group is also specifically tasked with helping others in the community as needed, like helping people move or helping elderly folks with yardwork, etc. Overall these meetings end up feeling a lot like corporate meetings and vice-versa IME. The corresponding women's group is called the Relief Society.
> But for many (most?) people who grow up in the church this is not the case - if they left the church they'd be losing not only a huge part of their own identity, but severing social ties and souring important life opportunities.
Yeah, a huge reason why I didn't question church teachings earlier in life was fear of losing those social connections. I knew that to a huge percentage of my deeper social network, leaving the church would mean becoming one of the lost, the fallen, the apostate. And the church is very good at getting you to police your own thoughts, especially if you're a people pleaser on some level.
> Culturally, Mormons are a bit like the conservative south, except remove alcohol, add a higher respect for formal education, and crank up that 'protestant work ethic' to 11.
Historically Mormons are Yankees. If you look at an ethnic map of the US Utah is one of the few places that still has a plurality of people of British descent. I think Utah is sort of a time capsule of how the northern states were like before the waves of immigration that arrived after the Civil War.
Mormons in my hometown vastly outnumbered Catholics. The joke was that Catholics could barely manage singing in unison, but Mormon hymn books were printed with four parts.
I don’t have an opinion on this either way, but this seems like an interesting observation. I would be interested to hear downvoters’ specific objections.
also didn't downvote, but clearly there are confounding variables (fertility also correlates with poverty, for example)
There is a common argument that X social group has a lot of children, thus they'll become a greater proportion of the population over time (typically applied to developing countries, immigrants etc). These arguments are flawed because humans don't really work this way, and adopt k vs r selection depending on environment.
I don’t think the parent claimed that beliefs are genetic or even that they are 100% heritable; only that conservative, religious populations have higher fertility rates and consequently the next generation will disproportionately come from a conservative, religious background. Many liberal atheists also come from conservative religious backgrounds, for example. This much at least doesn’t seem very controversial to me.
I'm so tired of those fake problems, when Silicon Valley started was majority white, one day the victimhood mindset will end and everybody will not find excuses to do things.
> It's like saying "Delhi is too Indian"
No, it’s like saying “Delhi has too many Hindi speakers” or “Delhi has too many Brahmins” or “there are too few Muslims in Delhi” or “Delhi isn’t doing enough to combat colorism”.
> or "Beijing is too Chinese"
No, it’s like saying “Beijing relies too much on unregistered rural hukou holders who effectively form an invisible underclass unable to build wealth” or “Beijing is mistreating its growing African minority” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinas-racism-is-wrecki...).
Perhaps you should educate yourself on the real and pervasive socioeconomic, class, and racial divides present in any country, just like in the United States, before proceeding to make reductionist analogies.
Perhaps you shouldn't embarass yourself with false analogies (caste system, hukou issues). Utah being majority white _is_ the issue for the author. His implied solution is to dramatically change the demographics of the state and disrupt a successful, safe, high-trust society.
Unfortunately, there's also bad pollution. The valley makes SLC prone to pollution and especially inversion layers in the winter and ozone in summer. You'd expect mountain air and you get that sometimes, but other times it's as bad as or worse than major cities elsewhere.
One of the downsides of being a red state is less will to address environmental concerns like this. It's been slowly getting better due to car emissions standards (which Utah has no active involvement in), but there's still a lot of pollution sources that need addressing. There's an active refinery in town, at least one big mine across the valley, tons of trucks and trains passing through the region, and the airport is being expanded.
Given the air is also extremely dry in the winter, I can't see myself moving there, despite it hitting a lot of my criteria for places to live. Were they to get their environmental house in order I'd say it's one of the best places to live. I hope someday SLC realizes its just not geographically destined to be an industrial hub, and makes responsible choices to shift away from that.
http://www.stateoftheair.org/city-rankings/states/utah/salt-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quality_in_Utah
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2020/01/28/salt-lake...