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03 Jul 2009 01:35 pm

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

I’ve been missing your Tales from your Recession posts with all your recent coverage on the Iranian elections.

Close to where I work in Silicon Valley, over 400,000 square feet of premium office space lies empty which was previously occupied by Netscape. The buildings and landscaping are well maintained, but I wonder when that immense emptiness will ever be occupied. Silicon Valley prides itself on its creative destruction, but with so much space built during the boom years, there are a lot of areas here that look like the zombie apocalypse.

Another writes:

We moved yesterday.  One of the movers was a 58 year-old guy, obviously college-educated and white-collar.  He told me he lost his job at a bank.  Now he's not even a regular employee with the moving company; he's a day laborer who picks up work for several moving companies whenever he can. He was in excellent shape for a guy almost sixty, but I could tell that some of the lifting was really hard on him.  Man. Almost sixty, and he's carrying king-sized beds up and down flights of stairs to get enough money to eat. Obviously, I tipped the hell out of him and the other guys.

(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty.)

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