"Bend, Oregon, is becoming a commuter town for Silicon Valley despite the 10-hour drive."

By Yango - March 05, 2018

Yes, but it's not a drive when you've got your own plane and you're feeling so distanced from carbon-footprints that you use it to commute.

While most people jump in their cars or walk to public transportation to get to work, Darren Pleasance starts up his plane. Pleasance's family decided to make Bend, Oregon, their permanent home in 2010 even though it meant flying back and forth to the Bay Area for him. When he was tapped by Google to lead its global customer acquisitions team a couple of years later, he explained he would be out of the country most of the time....
How lucky not to be "most people."
"You're not out in Hickville," he said. "The community here is very intellectual."
How awful to be amongst hicks. Those deplorable people. But what's "very intellectual" about Bend?*
If you have to go into the main Silicon Valley, it's a "beautiful drive," said Seven Peaks Ventures general partner Matt Abrams.... "I'm an outdoor person," Abrams said. "If I wasn't in the mountains, I'd be a much angrier person....  Because it's easy to get to Bend, and there are a lot more people coming from the Bay Area and elsewhere, our job is to find out how to diversify the economy and not screw up the environment."
Notice how not screwing up the environment is about what other people do.

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* Seriously. I'd like to know. I'm always looking for a better place to live. I see Bend has Central Oregon Community College and the OSU-Cascades Campus of Oregon State University. Not that I'm enamored of the intellectualism of higher education. What does "very intellectual" even mean in the context of looking for a place to live a good life? Maybe that the people well-educated? Is it dog-whistle talk for no black people? I see "The racial makeup of the city was 91.3% White, 0.5% African American...."

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