111–120 of 249 posts
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The funny thing is that if they all did that, you wouldn't have anyone left to cook your food and clean your office. Then maybe the tech sector would realize they need to pay living wages for all the workers supporting their daily life. And a living wage in SV is much higher than the rest of the world.
Clearly not enough are leaving because otherwise the pay will naturally rise.
It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.
All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.
Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right? I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession . However, I fin…
you're not addressing the people in article at all. It literally references a single mother that works in kitchens and you're complaining about upper middle class people that sneer at Nebraska? what's wrong with you? People live where jobs are, and a lot of them have reasons to stay in the Bay. She has children and a life. She's not a fucking software engineer that can just pick and move.
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Because about 90% of people are white, in Lincoln, Nebraska. I think your evaluation is probably right, if you're white.
this is the "lynching" argument. You pay for your bigotry.
in america, if you aren't white, living in a place where it's 90% white is really, really, really unpleasant. people basically treat you like human garbage on a daily basis. this has a massive effect on your well-being and psychology, triple so if you are a child growing up in that environment.
i wish you would at least try to attempt to understand this instead of using the 'lynching' hyperbole which is obviously just you using the extreme opposite end of the experiential spectrum to invalidate the real life experiences of people who have to deal with racism constantly.
and honestly, i think by using a word like that you at least know, deep down, what the deal is.
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> There's also the issue where history has basically never been kind to groups of people who felt they could live a stable, boring existence while clinging to old ways and enjoying a high standard of living. As an interesting counter example, iirc one of the main groups of people who survived the Irish potato famine were the Celts, because they refused to give up the old ways of eating wild Clover and switch to growi…
I think you've read a myth: grass isn't particularly nutritious for humans[0] and I doubt the Celts were regularly eating clover. It's an interesting example you raise though, given the famine was caused by rich people ignoring the needs of the poor. [0] http://www.health24.com/Natural/News/Can-humans-eat-grass-20...
Why is this called a paradox? It's a greed and winner-takes-it-all culture. What are the mechanism in place which would guarantee at least a mild version of wealth redistribution?
The paradox is that Silicon Valley is one of he wealthiest parts of the country and yet >25% of the population is food insecure.
Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right? I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession . However, I fin…
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It's more than that. Money's value depends on everyone's collective attachment to it. The winners of a game remain so, only as long as a significant number of people are playing. Ditto with USD, ditto with BTC. UBI is one way to keep people playing; but I'm extremely wary of this idea. UBI without some sort of communal/anarchist/kibbutz-ian distributed structure binds society in yet another way. 'You're free as long…
I like the idea of UBI in theory, but I cannot imagine it won't have any impact on the cost of living. At the very least, it would force companies contracting minimum/low wage workers to raise wages substantially (because why work on a shitty job if I can have the same money for free ?), which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices, which in turn would make UBI money not enough to survive for most people…
> which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices,
Higher wages only result in higher prices in non-competitive industries that rely on human labour. I think what would actually happen in competitive markets is they'd be constrained in their ability to raise prices and instead shift even more rapidly toward automation and capital investment to cut wage costs.
The optimistic scenario would be lots of crappy jobs automated out of existence, and people with more free time on their hands.
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That is economically illiterate. If it got to the point where there was not enough people to fill necessary jobs around the city the wages would rise to attract more people. Right now the opposite is happening: there are too many people.
Too many people? Are you serious? San Francisco + Silicon valley has 3 million people. That's less than half of New York City. The amount of money the region makes is more than enough to support that population over that area...
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> Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Because people who are food insecure don't have savings to relocate, or the ability to take the income they have with them, generally. > I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there Lincoln has a population of 250,000; there are, per the article, 720,000 food-insecure people in Silicon Valley (and with…
> their worst experiences of in-your-face, constant racial/ethnic discrimination and tension in the US are almost always in the Midwest i'm asian american. here's what life is like somewhere other than maybe 3 or 4 cities in the US: 1. constantly explaining to people why i am not white (where i'm from, where my parents are from, why my last name is what it is [it's anglo]) 2. children are constantly getting the 'eyes…
That's not to say you can't find good places in the Midwest, you just have to shop around to find an educated cosmopolitan community. But the racism here is out of hand and I don't think white people are generally attuned to just how bad it is.