ThanksLiving

Ol' Si survived another holiday.  For you outside the US, that would be the feast of Thanksgiving. Actually, for this grizzled old veteran of Silicon Valley, it is the only US holiday that I actually enjoy. Around my family, significant other, and good friends.  Lots of good food, decent TraderJoe's bargain wines, and a no -guilt run at the dessert line. There is none of the religious garbage or phony nationalism that surrounds most holiday here. Christmas is a consumer spending orgy, Easter has no meaning to most of us, other than the snow has melted.  I appreciate Veterans Day. But, it is not holiday, it is a memorial. Thanksgiving is a holiday.

Celebrating freedom, celebrating life. Living in The Valley, you need to stop and remember where you are and what you are doing every day. While we think we are marketing IP, developing codecs,  or spec' ing out switching power supplies, we are actually creating world peace.

The seeming mundane tasks done in Silicon Valley mean that Vietnam can employ millions of MOOC -educated young people in software testing,  Eastern Europe can keep it's brilliant, but unemployed physics PhDs creating/preventing computer viruses, and India has a place for IIT grads that doesn't involve pushcarts.  Total social meltdown in failed Socialist societies has been averted, because people are writing apps, bidding for work on Freelancer.com, or getting into US grad schools.  Consider the world if we could have vectored all the smart people in Germany to jobs after WWI.

OK, OK, I know-- we are are under the gun now. Code drop is late, quota is too high, vendors are not paying in even 90 days.  We all have underfunded 401Ks, overfunded teenagers, and leaky roofs.  But, we are free and everyone around me seems to be eating well. World is a bit unstable, not in places we need to care about anymore.

Ayn Rand may have a correct view of the future in her book 'Atlas Shrugged', but no one I know has moved to the hills in Colorado yet and the trains still run on time.  I see very few John Galt bumper stickers, so things appear somewhat stable.  Speeches from Washington, DC are ominous and following the script, but the storm seems some time away.

Finish your turkey, top off the Scotch sniffer and toast Thanksgiving. A holiday that still means something.