- Anyone who sounds like a wrecker must be reeducated. (q.e.d. https://twitter.com/DanielDoWrite/status/1015263695558135808 )
The fuck???
Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
191–200 of 252 posts
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could talk about the real underlying cause of the one issue you are referencing (cost of housing) - vastly more people moving to the Bay Area than there are houses available. Since it doesn't matter how fast we can actually build homes as we will never catch up to the current demand, we should implement a new resident tax. Let's say everyone who has not been a Bay Area resident for at least 10 years contributes…
I understand why you feel that way. People are moving here so fast ! They're changing everything, and there's no way we could ever keep up with how large the hordes of new migrants are. However, I think it might actually be possible to build homes rapidly enough to meet demand. We should at least try, and if we fail we'll have a lot of new housing. That's a nice prize no matter the outcome. What's convenient about th…
My original post was sensationalist and a 'new resident tax' is ridiculous - and no, I'm not scared of the migrant hordes ;) But I do get a bit frustrated with the morally superior stance that many housing advocates take (not saying this is you). Many folks seem to believe that by repealing prop 13 and removing all barriers to development, we will magically be able to build the millions of housing units necessary to meet the current demand. There is a small but vocal minority who also feel if you have a difference of opinion on how to address housing in the Bay Area then you are a morally reprehensible "rent-seeker" who doesn't care about homelessness or diversity.
This is a multi-faceted problem and must be addressed hand in hand with transportation. What if we could house everyone but nobody could get anywhere? Higher density housing along transit lines, better public transportation, etc. are all things we should be working to improve. But we also need to consider the demand side of the equation. Is there a way to even out the demand. What if we build a ton of new high-density housing and the economy takes a major downturn or the tech industry gets distributed to other locales? Will we be left with a bunch of empty buildings that will be a drag on our regional economy and downtown areas for decades?
I feel the biggest immediate relief to the demand issue is legislating tax breaks for companies who allow some large percentage of their workforce to work full-time remote. This would immediately allow people to live in lower cost areas but still take advantage of the dynamic Bay Area tech economy. This is the quickest way to release a little pressure on both housing and transportation while working on the longer term solutions.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#193> - living five adults to a two room apartment > - 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet > - the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work > - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless So true it hurts. > - mandatory workplace political education Is it really a thing?
> - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless
Not quite sure what that is a dig at. Unless you are dealing in fresh produce or something, everything can be considered fake and worthless...
As for the political education thing: I don't think they would be overt (or perhaps even conscious) but they do have various team building exercises, no?
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the argument is that the USA is a democracy (at least more so than the others), and therefore it's fair to criticise the USA as a whole (i.e. the citizens of the USA) for the failures of the US Government. A friend of mine made the same comment recently in regards to condemning human rights abuses in Israel. You can condemn until your face is blue the human rights violations in Iran, but there's not a lot the…
Iranians can revolt, most huge social changes requires revolt. Government is a result of the people, if the majority were not ok with it I think it would not last long. To me this implies on some level that the people of the country like their government.
Except not that long ago the Iranians DID revolt, following a sham election where the reformists/progressives should have won. They got into the streets. And then they got shot.
You seem to be living in a phantasy world where subjects of a dictature are just "asking for it", and a 50%-or-more majority should magically change everything. That's not how power works. Money and bullets, you see, matter more than ballots.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not objectively good to have more highly-paid people, those benefits they bring all carry significant downsides to any regular people in the area. Yes, rich people will spend more. But this is bad for all the regular people, who can't spend that much, and will be outbid on housing+rent, schooling, childcare, entertainment, etc. Yes, rich people will pay more in taxes, but this is generally bad for all the regula…
How had growth ever been possible in the era before the last 20 years or so?
I'm no economist. But I think it has something to do with how we used to grow in ways that didn't monopolize people's needs. (better equipment, better networks, new consumer products, holiday travel, toys, fashion, etc). But now our growth is mostly in ways that do monopolize people's needs (healthcare, housing, childcare, education, transportation).
If you evaluate the last 30 years using, for example, TV's or telephones as a benchmark, it looks like we've been amazing at everything, and capitalism is awesome. But if you evaluate the last 30 years using, for example, housing or healthcare as a benchmark, we look like a country that's on the brink of total collapse
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Part of being a free country, is the freedom to abstain completely. The freedom to walk away. Television sets or movie theatres, for instance, can never get too corrupt, or too expensive, because you can always just walk away. There's a limit to how exploitative a transaction can get on many products, because eventually people can just throw up their hands and say "fuck it, I'm out, I'm done with this whole mess".
But you can't walk away from healthcare. You can't opt-out of the housing market. As we transition to exploiting needs instead of wants, people can't opt out, so the potential for exploitation in those particular fields is almost limitless -- limited only by total income.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right. Homeless is not an easy problem that can be solved with big dollops of cold, hard, cash. 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...
Homelessness is not a trivial problem, full stop. There is no way around this. It can be lessened with extra housing for those who are only homeless because of cost of living, but that doesn't get to the root causes of what causes people to lack funds for housing and such.
It comes down to equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity. Homelessness can be solved with the former, it’s just that everyone else will suffer as well.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also depends of your tolerance of rednecks, prudes, puritans, and ignorant people (which exist everywhere in the world, but have particularly large concentrations there). FYI, using "redneck" as a pejorative, as in this context, can be interpreted as pretty offensive, and maybe this is unintentional. I for one consider it offensive.
The term derives from someone who works in the sun. It's unambiguously elitist. I don't think you need to hedge here, it's quite clear. I also enjoy the pejorative aimed at a sectarian group immediately followed by decrying "ignorant people".
>According to Chapman and Kipfer in their "Dictionary of American Slang", By 1975 the term had expanded in meaning beyond the poor Southerner to refer to "a bigoted and conventional person, a loutish ultra-conservative."[20]
If the OP was using it in this way, I don't see the issue. If he/she was using it to just describe laboring, rural whites, I agree; it's offensive and inappropriate. Given the context of the statement, I assumed the former.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck
On the topic, Randy Newman's song "Rednecks" is a scathing critique of Northerners and their "hidden" racism and hypocrisy on the subject.
>Yes he's free to be put in a cage In Harlem in New York City And he's free to be put in a cage On the South Side of Chicago And the West Side And he's free to be put in a cage In Hough in Cleveland And he's free to be put in a cage In East St. Louis And he's free to be put in a cage In Fillmore in San Francisco And he's free to be put in a cage In Roxbury in Boston They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around . . . (apologies for the formatting)
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
The US of late has caused more shit than anything. The Syrian war is a direct consequence of going into Iraq for no reason.
Let’s go back a bit. The US intervened in Afghanistan against the Soviets decades ago, training what would become Al Qaeda, which would later attack the US. In response the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq (again) destabilizing the region and leading to the birth of ISIS, the “Arab Spring” and the Syrian civil war.
It’s just waves of blowback from bad decisions without any concept that the groundwork for more blowback is being laid.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one thing that you didn’t get in the Soviet Union was everyday crime, well, what we understand as crime. Sure they could and did send people off to the camps for weird [political and crimes against the state] offenses, but property crimes and such were close to non existent.
Sure, you could in Soviet Union meet some nice guys under the bridge or in the park selling you a brick for 50 rubles when you salary was like 160 rubles a month. I heard of nobody refusing to buy it. Is it a crime? Drinking in a bar in foreign city with some stranger would end with clonidine poisoning. Stealing from workplace was that common, that it wasn’t defined as crime anymore. People were so poor in general, t…
> Sure, you could in Soviet Union meet some nice guys under the bridge or in the park selling you a brick for 50 rubles when you salary was like 160 rubles a month.
That sounds utterly horrifying. It’s amazing how people were able to survive in those conditions.
Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
This claim sticks in the throat of a lot of Europeans, because of the visible level of inequality in the US. We see many of your citizens suffering in ways that simply wouldn't happen in our countries; we struggle to find a charitable way of reconciling that with the claim that America is the best country. If you're the richest and most powerful nation in history, why do you have the highest incarceration rate in the…
Even when Europeans critique the United States, they're critiquing the US from the US liberal perspective. > Why do so many sick and injured Americans end up bankrupt or die prematurely? Because we don't have a national healthcare system. Why? Because people vote against it. The party in charge of the entire country would cut the government by half if it had the power to do so, and they keep getting elected because a…
> Because we don't have a national healthcare system. Why? Because people vote against it.
Most Americans have supported some form of public healthcare for most (but not all) years for about two decades (scroll to end of article for stat): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/23/public-suppo...
So in fact you want the same thing as Europeans, you just don't live up to your own standards.
As for your comment on "favelas after a nuke" in Europe, I'll just remind you you're not on Reddit, you're supposed to come up with real arguments.