Mores

摘要

It will come as no news to any reader, however far he or she may have been in body and/or spirit from the center of the Internet mania, that things have changed drastically in the Silicon Valley-San Francisco hot zone. For us locals, evidence of party poopout is everywhere. During commute rush hours, cars used to crawl along the area's two main highways connecting the city with the Valley. Now the drive north or south can reach a breezy 70 mph. Buildings once abuzz with on-the-verge gazillion-aires are little more than high-rent echo chambers. Once blithely overpriced and overcrowded restaurants are reduced to sending out 20%-off coupons to generate business. Highway billboards that used to hawk companies of mysterious provenance and purpose now stand blank. The epicenter of the boom seems so depopulated that one is tempted to say, "Would the last person to leave the Valley please close John Doerr?"