[mbell]

Here is my problem with Boston:

If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?".

To me the Boston business ethos is anti-youth and of an 'old guard' mentality. Your either young, stupid and in college or your in 'business clothes' going to do 'real work' (aka climbing a corporate ladder).

There are definitely some very good groups and things going on for the younger builder crowd but its a long ways from overriding the general stigma that exists in the city. Creating a place where creative young people want to live and have fun would require a number of changes in general city culture to really have an impact.

All that said, I hate how early Boston shuts down, not just the bars but this city as a whole seems to be built around a early to rise, early to sleep mentality.

[54mf]

(I used to live in Allston, currently living in the "greater Boston area".)

"If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?"."

This is purely personal experience, but every single one of my friends when I was living in Allston was, at least, getting money from their parents monthly, and none had any kind of full-time work to speak of. FWIW.

[mbell]

> This is purely personal experience, but every single one of my friends when I was living in Allston was, at least, getting money from their parents monthly, and none had any kind of full-time work to speak of. FWIW.

I'm not saying its a bad assumption to make, and that is the difficult part of the problem to solve. Given the college population of Boston its a completely reasonable assumption to make that a casually dressed 20-25 year old is in college. On the same note in SV its statistically reasonable to assume a casually dressed 20-25 year old is doing something interesting. None the less, that assumption creates an additional barrier to communication in Boston. First you've got to get past the initial visual presumption to get the conversation started, and then often spend some time vetting that your not a member of the presumed 'college kid' crowd. As a result there is a much larger barrier to getting down to the interesting parts of a conversation in Boston that I don't feel exists nearly as much in SV.

Part of it is just that SV has an advantage in that the young people that go there have already demonstrated some level of drive by simply being there.

[ZenPsycho]

Your inability to write in proper english is not helping your argument.