[jacques_chester]

When all you have is a slightly upgraded monkey brain, everything looks like a status play.

Edit: Apparently humour needs to come with captions now.

This is a play on the "hammer/nail" truism, observing that folk love to frame things as X vs Y zero-sum games. Possibly because of the human fondness for associating the status value of markers (places, brands) with the status value of our own selves. Thus arguments over NYC vs SF or iOS vs Android or Facebook vs Google or Node.js vs Go are not really about X vs Y at all. They are about establishing status in a troupe of great apes.

Indeed, this edited text is about status.

[carriemelissa]

Ha, I thought it was kind of funny and I wrote the darn thing.

For the record, I did hear someone refer to it as "the ongoing New York/SF debate". This isn't something I just invented. I had personally never thought there was any comparison to be made until I heard that people out there make it all the time.

[jacques_chester]

I only knew it was "a thing" from HN, actually. I recently took a holiday to visit both NYC and the Bay Area and I liked both of them a lot.