[awucs]

What people mean is usually not Silicon Valley, or the Bay Area, as a city but as a phenomenon. The technology industry is likely going to be there for a long time. There is just to much inertia, if not substance, for it to disappear overnight. But the "anomaly" of leaving so much value on the table that companies could quickly grow from nothing to world leading is likely gone. Today you are paying for every such opportunity.

For some reason people tend to think that this means that this will happen somewhere else. Like the opportunities somehow transfers somewhere else. That isn't really what happens. We might never have this sort of situation in our lifetimes, or it might show up somewhere outside of our reach. It is very likely that China has been outperforming the west in this regard over the last 10 years. They might continue to do that or not. It isn't really predictable as far as I know.

Addition: Why do people even visit a discussion forum if a simple opinion is going to offend them? The Internet is full of agreeable material you can read instead. And you can close those tabs without suppressing someone else's opinion. But I guess that is really the point of Hacker News these days.