The bubble! The tech bubble! The Silicon Valley bubble! There's so much bubble talk that we expect some pundits to start traveling like Glinda the Good Witch (UberBubble rides, coming soon to a smartphone near you!).

The bubble makes for good headlines, as Scott Kupor noted in an article he wrote for Fortune about bubble talk, but with big deal VCs like Marc Andreessen saying that people who believe in a bubble "don't know what they're talking about" in a January Wall Street Journal interview, maybe all that is just hype.

Or maybe not, as just nine months later, Andreessen went on a tweeted bubble bender, saying that the end is, basically, near. Some people take nine months to make a baby, but Andreessen used that time to either lose the ability to know what he's talking about, or to see the writing on the wall.

And over the weekend, the New York Times joined Andreessen's doomsday cult, with an editorial headlined "Will Boom Lead to Bust in Silicon Valley?"

According to the Times, the current bubble (if that is what it is! Who knows, everyone might be rich forever!) differs from the last bust because companies like Twitter and Facebook are more "mature" than early 2000s bubble whipping boys Pets.com and Webvan. Stock market valuations are higher, too.

The reason to be worried, per the Times? It's the spending, stupid. "Many privately held tech companies have such easy access to venture capital that they are spending lavishly and burning through cash without a clear plan for turning a profit." Oh, you mean like Lyft's new, mustachioed three-floor HQ, Heroku's (which, had you even heard of Heroku before that Chron article?) "wellness guru," and LinkedIn's lease of an entire office tower in San Francisco (though LinkedIn, at least, might have found a way to make money, albeit a totally sketchball one).

A bursting bubble could be even worse for those of us in the Bay Area than the last one was (though if you were here for the last one that might be tough to imagine), the Times says.

Much more of the current tech boom is concentrated in Silicon Valley than it was in the late 1990s. About half of the $22.7 billion that venture capital firms invested in start-ups in the first six months of this year went to businesses located there. By contrast, Silicon Valley’s share of venture capital investments was less than 35 percent during the late 1990s.

Sadly, the Times' editorial board doesn't offer any advice on how to avoid a downturn, except, perhaps, to make more money. After all, they say, "the valuations of companies can outstrip their ability to make money for only so long."

Good luck, everyone!

Now that San Francisco is officially the most elite city in America, shouldn't we have a public transportation system that works? Or does our dysfunctional transit system point to an elitism at work as income disparity rises here? These are the questions being asked by a New York Times opinion piece penned by Seattle-based columnist Tom Egan.

Egan visited San Francisco and experienced what many Bay Area commuters have experienced over the years, a rush-hour meltdown that took down an entire transportation line. In his case, it was a power glitch on CalTrain that put the entire service out of commission and stranded him down on the Peninsula, but he uses it as an example of how San Francisco, as a city, isn't serving its middle- and working-class citizens very well. He cites the figure of $50 million as what Muni costs the city in lost productivity due to its slowness (the slowest system in the country, he notes, at an average of 8 miles per hour), and its frequent breakdowns.

In New York, at least, rich and poor are more likely to rub elbows, and even make eye contact while getting around. The commute is a daily reminder to the very wealthy that not everybody can afford those new condos overlooking Central Park, just listed at $53 million.

[In San Francisco], transportation segregation is on the rise because you can’t rely on the public system. And when you put the working poor and middle class out of sight, you put them out of mind. The sleek fleet of Google-bound buses and black über-taxis is a market response to a costly, unreliable, unpleasant transit system.

Yep. He's right on about that, and the whole reason for the corporate shuttle buses is that BART doesn't serve Silicon Valley much at all, and it's not that easy to access BART from most of the city's neighborhoods either without hopping a slow-ass Muni bus.

So, we've been shamed in the NYT again, everyone. And Egan adds more fuel to the fire in re: losing the cool kids and the middle class. "A city without its nurses, its teachers, its artists, its waiters, its bus drivers, its cops, its musicians and writers and grandmothers as residents is a monoculture," he writes. "As sterile as a forest of a single commercial tree species."

[NYT]

Have you been to the racetrack lately? Probably not, and if you're not tuned in to the Bay Area's horseracing culture, you may never have heard of Russell Baze. But an excellent New York Times multimedia profile of the jockey with the winningest track record gives an inside look at Baze, "down-on-its-luck" Golden Gate Fields, and the state of racing today.

The story, punctuated with video interludes that give a glimpse into Baze's world, details the career of a jockey who's been a near-sure bet at Golden Gate Fields for over 20 years. The article's author and narrator, Barry Bearak, notes that our track is the "minor leagues" of racing. "San Francisco, for all its other charms, is a horse racing also-ran." And yet Baze, a career racer who's part of three generations of West Coast horsemen, prefers to stay here in relative obscurity. Is he the best jockey out there? It's hard to tell.

"Because Baze has primarily worked in the Bay Area, some horseplayers put a mental asterisk beside his name, likening his record for wins to a baseball home run king given credit for round-trippers in Class AAA. That is a reasonable observation, as Baze would acknowledge. 'I’m not the greatest jockey, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that,” he said.'"

The piece details the insider's world of Golden Gate Fields, from Baze's agent Ray Harris to his appalling number of racing injuries to his straight-edge, weight-conscious lifestyle. The profile gives focus not only to Baze's character, but also to the depressing realities of the track "Where the Bay Comes to Play." From its midcentury heyday, the track is now little more than a betting parlor on weekdays, when only the serious gamblers turn out.

"Baze finds the under-populated grandstands a little depressing. Horse racing used to suffer from a reputation for seediness, he said. But these days, apathy seems to be the problem. The sport is no match for baseball, football and the rest. 'It ought to at least get in front of golf,' Baze said."

Despite the sorry state of attendance, the track is still "a lovely spot, facing the tree-laced hills of Berkeley and Albany, the two cities it straddles. The view is even better over its shoulder, the Golden Gate Bridge itself." A weekend crowd of 5,000 is now considered a good turnout, "and when that many are present, Golden Gate Fields still seems a heart-stirring place."

The track is the only racing venue left since San Mateo's Bay Meadows was demolished, and despite its somewhat seedy feel, it's still great for a fun day out with the horses. So let the Times piece serve as your official reminder that the track's Dollar Days are still among the best deals in town for cheap beer, hot dogs, and entertainment, not to mention a chance to see a world-class jockey at work.

[NYT]