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Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

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Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#21

Post by iantimothy »

justinchen wrote: post #14
wyclif wrote: post #13

SF streets are pretty disgusting. It's true that there's fecal matter everywhere you find homeless people, which is nearly everywhere in SF. It is not at all uncommon to find a big brownie right in the middle of the sidewalk. The streets and sidewalks in my tiny, obscure East coast village, OTOH, are as clean as they are in Singapore. I don't quite understand why SF doesn't do something about this, as it's a health h…

They don't want their taxes raised to pay for the clean up :)

To be fair, Singapore doesn't really have high taxes to deal with the cleanups. Our main strategy is to import a lot of low cost labor to do these sort of work.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#22

Post by psadauskas »

I agree and disagree with him on Boulder (where I live now). I've visited SF and the valley many times, and moved to Boulder from the midwest 4 years ago.

A couple of his cons are way out of left field though:

The weather: Its never been 10 below in the 4 years I've been here, and only been below zero or single digits at night. Only about one or two days in each of the winter months is it cold, and there's as many winter days with highs in the 60s as there are days below freezing. It's very rarely cold more than a couple days in a row, unlike the midwest winters I'm used to where it won't get above 40 for a month. It'll snow 20" here, and be completely melted 3 days later. But I guess compared to SF and Seattle, he hasn't experienced enough really cold weather to know that what Boulder has isn't cold.

Real estate prices/rent is about the same as downtown of any major city not in California. Denver is about 30 minutes up the road, and condos are about the same price. As for getting to Denver, its easy enough, there's an express bus.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#23

Post by rdouble »

Whenever someone talks about how dirty SF is, you know they confined themselves to SOMA, TL, the Mission and maybe North Beach. The rest of the city is about as clean as any big city in the US. There's nothing particularly dirty about the Sunset, Richmond, Pac Heights, Cole Valley, Parnassus, Diamond Heights, West Portal, Forrest Hill, Russian Hill, Glen Park, or the other neighborhoods that make up most of San Francisco.

In contrast, I now live in NYC and while there are no distinct "human poo" neighborhoods as there are in SF, the entire city is covered with a layer of grime and garbage from Manhattan all the way out to the furthest stops in Brooklyn and Queens. This was simply not the case where I lived in SF, on top of 17th street.

The same applies to the weather. Anyone who thinks SF has great weather has never spent much time west of Twin Peaks. It is foggy and cold most of the time.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#24

Post by jfb »

rdouble wrote: post #23

Whenever someone talks about how dirty SF is, you know they confined themselves to SOMA, TL, the Mission and maybe North Beach. The rest of the city is about as clean as any big city in the US. There's nothing particularly dirty about the Sunset, Richmond, Pac Heights, Cole Valley, Parnassus, Diamond Heights, West Portal, Forrest Hill, Russian Hill, Glen Park, or the other neighborhoods that make up most of San Franc…

Both of these things are true. I work in SOMA and live in Glen Park and the city's dysfunction seems to be strongly correlated to the nice weather.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#26

Post by jfb »

iamclovin wrote: post #7

Great point about SF being an echo-chamber. I live in Singapore and the burgeoning startup scene here has started to feel like an echo-chamber too.

San Francisco is an echo chamber in many ways. There are days when it feels less like a city where shit gets done and more like Disneyland for rich white people. That said, it's a pretty great place to live.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#28

Post by look_lookatme »

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #20

Pittsburgh is beautiful. It has a decent startup scene and lots of tech talent (pitt, cmu). Rent is extremely cheap here, so you can't get more ramen profetable than here. We also have our own startup incubator, alphalab. Seriously. Pgh has all the qualities needed to become the next major startup community.

My friends that have gone to CMU all say the same.

What are the ideal neighborhoods for someone coming from SF or NYC? I'm thinking with bars and restaurants and a general nightlife-ish, walkable vibe.

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#29

Post by geuis »

For folks that are outside of SF or didn't vote, we had a measure up for vote to prevent sitting or lying on public sidewalks. This is principally targeting the homeless problem.

Luckily, it passed!

Go to this link and go all the way to the bottom. Its item L. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/03/...

Edit Additionally, it looks like Ron Conway was a big contributor to this. http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/San_Francisco_Sit-Lie_...

Re: Joe Stump: Your city sucks (And so does mine)

#30

Post by benatkin »

I live in Boulder. These two things really hit me:

> I really yearned for hardcore technology while I was in Boulder. A lot of the technology scene was very much focused on creating consumer applications. I’m a big infrastructure, big data, big scale kind of guy and often felt out of place in that scene.

I concur, except for the part about feeling out of place. I'd rather feel out of place more often so I can get more exposure to "big data, big scale".

> I didn’t like Boulder at all due to the cold climate and small size of the city.

I've heard this before, but hearing it from Joe Stump (the sentiment, not the reasons given which I'm well aware of) feels different. Not sure how I'll feel when it sinks in.

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