The great writer Wallace Stegner, who once lived in rural Redmond, wrote about settlers in the American West. He said they came in two types, the boomers and the stickers. Boomers came for the boom and then moved on, while stickers came with the intent to dig in and stay.

That came to mind reading this Seattle Times story about a survey of newcomers and old-timers in King County. Of newcomers, nearly half (48 percent) think they'll be out of here in five years or less. These are not stickers. For them, Seattle isn’t an end-point, rather a steppingstone to somewhere else.

That makes some sense when you think about tech workers who might want to add Amazon to their resume before moving on to the next job or startup. Plus, much of that workforce is global. It is also in the nature of the tech biz to be self-focused—even Bill Gates, a local, was slow to take local politics and charity seriously, and he came from a family steeped in civic engagement.

Another interesting stat: In this survey, only half as many newcomers as long-timers read local newspapers in print or online. That’s partly a change in habits I’m sure—lots of people get their news from Reddit or Twitter links and don’t think of their media consumption in terms of “newspapers.”