As if this blog hasn't taken a gloomy enough turn, here's more from what is apparently a fairly in-depth piece from AP on the sad state of the Silicon Valley.

This does not bode well for the future. Perhaps the only hope for the area is an infusion of new defense/Homeland Security-related technology spending. And of course, fighting Silicon Valley for that business is the area which used to dominate defense production: the Greater Los Angeles area. (sorry about the brain-sucking registration required for that link)

I've seen this kind of slump before. Right after the Berlin Wall fell and defense spending plummeted, a lot of high-paid, well trained people got shown the door at all the major defense contractors. I had a friend go for several years without work because there were no jobs available for someone with his background.

I suppose that the defense spending run-up during the Reagan era could be considered another economic bubble, and the collapse of that bubble after the end of the Cold War was as inevitable as the collapse of the Dot Com bubble. The bursting of the defense bubble is something the Los Angeles economy has never quite recovered from. That's not a good sign for our friends up North.