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California Today

California Today: Peter Thiel Is Leaving Silicon Valley. Will Others?

Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful tech entrepreneurs and investors, is the latest to proclaim the end of the valley.Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times

Good morning.

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Silicon Valley is over.

Many people have come to that conclusion over the years — some hopefully, some sadly — and they have always been wrong. San Francisco and the peninsula to the south are still the global hub of tech finance and innovation.

Peter Thiel, one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs and investors, is the latest to proclaim the end of the valley. He is giving up his San Francisco rental and moving to a house in Hollywood he bought some time ago. His personal investment firm will be making the journey as well.

In 2005, Mr. Thiel explained, he was on a panel at Stanford. The question up for discussion was: Where will we find the next Google? “It was a search problem you couldn’t solve by typing into the Google search engine,” he says. “The answer I gave was there was 50 percent chance you would find it within a five-mile radius of the room we were in.”

It turned out the next Google — at least in terms of the wealth it generated — was Facebook, in which Mr. Thiel was an investor. It was less than two miles away.

“If I had to give that talk again, I’d say there was far less than a 50 percent chance that it’s in a 50-mile radius,” he said. Perhaps the next great company would be in China, he suggested; perhaps elsewhere in the United States.

The natural concentration of the tech industry was always an odd thing.

“These technologies enabled globalization. They were about destroying the tyranny of place,” he said. “It was a bit paradoxical that the overwhelming majority of them emerged in this very small place.”

There are other reasons to leave. As the valley has gotten bigger and richer, it has, he feels, grown more close-minded.

Sam Altman of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator, is a friend of Mr. Thiel’s. He said the investor had a point. “Silicon Valley has lost some of its ability to tolerate controversial ideas that sometimes create a lot of value,” he said.

[Read more about Mr. Thiel in a rare interview with The New York Times.]

(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)

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Gov. Jerry Brown and the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, responded to comments by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions scolded California on Wednesday in an immigration speech in Sacramento, after announcing the Trump administration was suing the state over sanctuary laws. “There is no nullification, there is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land,” he said. [The New York Times]

• California leaders voiced their discontent over Mr. Sessions’s visit. Gov. Jerry Brown said the administration was “full of liars” and said the lawsuit amounted to “going to war” with California. [SF Gate]

• A legal principle on immigration that was established during the Obama administration might help the Trump administration in its lawsuit against sanctuary laws. [The New York Times]

• A new study found that San Francisco’s shoreline is slowly sinking, which could result in more flooding in the coming decades. [The New York Times]

• A court has ruled that voters whose mail-in ballots are denied because of sloppy signatures must be notified before their vote is tossed out. [The Sacramento Bee]

• The L.A. Times’s Patt Morrison sits down with Senator Dianne Feinstein. [The Los Angeles Times]

• Tom Steyer says the Democrats’ chance to flip the U.S. House of Representatives will hinge on getting California’s 10 million millennials to the ballot box. [The Sacramento Bee]

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A firefighter watching a backfire that was set to combat fires near Sonoma in September.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

• A deep-dive investigation into the Atlas Peak fire found systemic problems with California’s emergency response procedures. [KQED]

• Born amid smog and pollution, these young Angeleno women are fighting for environmental justice for future generations. [High Country News]

• Los Angeles has become an unlikely bakery and bread haven, overcoming stereotypes of carbo-phobia and anti-gluten mania. [The New York Times]

• San Francisco will take down a controversial statue that depicts a submissive Native American at the feet of a Catholic missionary. [The New York Times]

• Support is growing to designate San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood into an African American Cultural District. [SF Examiner]

• A U-Haul truck out of San Francisco can go for as high as $2,000, nearly 20 times as much as it costs to rent one going in the opposite direction. [The San Diego Union Tribune]

East Bay residents have flocked to support a gang of wild turkeys that have been menacing the John Muir Health Medical Center in Concord, expressing concern and distress over a plan to forcefully remove and euthanize the birds.

Ben Drew, a Muir Center spokesman, said the turkeys had become increasingly aggressive toward patients in the last year. The turkeys have regularly trapped people in their cars, swarmed them and pecked at their windows. The turkeys have also engaged in standoffs with patients entering the medical center.

“We have looked for more than a year to find ways to address the situation. We’ve tried turkey repellents, urine from predators of turkeys,” Mr. Drew said. He said that the medical center had worked with county animal control, California’s Fish and Wildlife Department, and the federal Department of Agriculture.

And yet, the turkeys persisted.

“The last step was looking at having the U.S.D.A. trap and remove the turkeys. That’s what we were starting to implement,” said Mr. Drew.

But a public outcry followed.

“When I learned they might be trapping them and euthanizing them, that makes me sad,” one woman, Cassie Zola, told the local NBC affiliate. “We go on our morning walks, and we see them. Our son Jaxon loves to wave at them. He actually knows how to do a turkey call.”

Mr. Drew said on Wednesday that the center had abandoned its plan and was instead working with emergency wildlife crews to relocate the birds. “We certainly heard the concerns associated with that and recognize the feelings of our neighbors,” he said.

California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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