81–90 of 252 posts
"I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes" -- Anton Troynikov I don't know who he is but I really like this quote. That's consistently my biggest surprise on the internet. The #1 question I get for my posts is "Is that sarcasm?" I never answer.
Jokes? The tweetstorm is funny because it's true.
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As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships. The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
The homeowners have much of the blame, you're right, but tech has made things worse by rapid job growth that contributed to rising rent costs.
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Sarcasm doesn't always carry clearly through text-based media. I wouldn't be so sure that the reader is always at fault.
Are you kidding?
*edit. Maybe that was sarcasm....
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Are you kidding?
I can't imagine why that would be intended to be humuoruos. The content of the post seems like a genuine attempt at trying to point out the potential flaws in purely text based communication via internet. To expand on such, text doesn't carry any of the social cues that human beings learn during their development. There's no facial expressions, tone of voice, any form of body language such as posture or hand gestures…
> the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default So true. The USA is viewed worse than China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. I also see a lot of it on HN.
I'll go ahead and say the United States is the greatest country the world has ever seen. It's not perfect, but once you live in other countries for a bit, even if you enjoy the experience, you appreciate the U.S. a lot more.
If you're the richest and most powerful nation in history, why do you have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Why do so many sick and injured Americans end up bankrupt or die prematurely? Why do parts of Michigan look post-apocalyptic? Why are many of your schools still de-facto segregated? Why is there a Wikipedia article titled "List of tent cities in the United States"?
We could understand a claim like "America is really weird - we're ridiculously wealthy, but our government is profoundly dysfunctional in ways that are hard to fix, which causes a great deal of avoidable suffering". That makes sense to us. A claim like "America is the greatest country the world has ever seen" sounds obscenely callous without some very strong caveats attached.
"- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you" This is the one that resonated with me. Obviously "the system" as a whole isn't objectively crumbling by traditional measures like GDP, but there were things that could give that feeling: Homeless sleeping in the subway and on the main streets, the smells, crime so rampant it's basically ignored (my car was broken into > 5 times), working…
As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships. The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
> the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default So true. The USA is viewed worse than China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. I also see a lot of it on HN.
It's weird how a lot of people simultaneously hold a view of the US as an uncorruptible beacon of freedom but can also name heinous things the US is doing or has done that they hate. Not paying sufficient deference to the former ideal (often, dispensing with it as perfunctory performance in the vein of a daily pledge of allegiance to a flag) often makes people think that the US is regarded as especially evil.
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> I'll go ahead and say the United States is the greatest country the world has ever seen. It's not perfect, but once you live in other countries for a bit, even if you enjoy the experience, you appreciate the U.S. a lot more. Depends on whether you have lived in an advanced Western European country. It also depends of your tolerance of rednecks, prudes, puritans, and ignorant people (which exist everywhere in the wo…
>Depends on whether you have lived in an advanced Western European country. All of which enjoy the shadow of nuclear security provided by the United States.
psst They're also quietly better at cybersecurity than the US government.
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As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships. The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
The homeowners have much of the blame, you're right, but tech has made things worse by rapid job growth that contributed to rising rent costs.
With that said, it might be worth discussing where the blame for the problem that has been made worse might lie. To aggravate an underlying problem, one has to already exist. So let's talk about that problem, and its causes, rather than casting aspersions on every group who contributed marginally after the fact - that's a very long list, and it's not even a useful list.
Then maybe, having identified the problem and the causes, we can see about solving it. So let's talk about zoning, prop 13, and the way construction permitting processes work and the political systems that support them!
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Tech is a bountiful solution, not a problem. The problem is in not properly taxing the output of the hyper rich tech industry. The taxation then goes into trivially solving the homelessness problem in SF. We're talking about 5,000 people, not 50k or 500k. It is not a problem compared to the enormity of the tech riches. SF is an extremely affluent city that refuses to act.
>The taxation then goes into trivially solving the homelessness problem in SF Homelessness is not a trivial problem that can just be solved by throwing a lot of money at it. It's certainly a start in SV though, all things considered.
Rather, tt's a trivial problem that can just be solved by throwing a lot of housing at it.
Incidentally, housing is the one thing that everywhere between Ocean Beach and Diridon are allergic to...