311–320 of 325 posts
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Shhh. Don’t wake the two elephants in the room from India and China. They represent the primary cause for real estate inflation in the Bay Area.
Would you please stop posting flamebait here? We've asked you more than once already. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I also said, that SF isn't the entire Bay Area. If you gave weightings to crime categories (we all do this internally), property crime would probably be the lowest weighted next to white collar crime. Violent crime would get exponentially higher weightings. It's one thing to have $200 worth of stuff stolen in a car break-in. It's another to be violently mugged for $200 in cash on your person. I've lived in bad areas…
It is not a zero sum situation - you don't get high violent crime due to low property crime and vice versa. It's entirely possible to live in an area with low property and low violent crime. Besides, doing a quick search shows [e.g. 1] that the NYC has both violent and property crimes rates much lower than SF, this could explain why people are not saying it's a hell hole. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unit…
Also, I'm talking about the entire Bay Area and you keep zeroing in on SF.
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It is not a zero sum situation - you don't get high violent crime due to low property crime and vice versa. It's entirely possible to live in an area with low property and low violent crime. Besides, doing a quick search shows [e.g. 1] that the NYC has both violent and property crimes rates much lower than SF, this could explain why people are not saying it's a hell hole. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unit…
Those stats are based on city and not MSA. If it were MSA, the Bay Area would be equivalent to New York. The city of New York includes all boroughs, not just Manhattan. If you compared Manhattan to SF, I bet they would be similar. Also, I'm talking about the entire Bay Area and you keep zeroing in on SF.
Also, seeing that the Bay Area includes Oakland and Palo Alto, I don't think comparing the entire Bay Area to NYC will give you results you have imagined.
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Because of the highest property tax in the nation. This is a feature, not a bug. It’s very difficult for the wealthy to hide their property. There are also a number of ways to reduce the tax rate on one’s primary residence. Combined effect of this is surprisingly progressive, closer to a wealth tax. Another effect high property taxes, is that most existing homeowners feel some pain when real estate prices soar and th…
Don't forget the joy of parcel taxes, city and county sale taxes, and other ways of bleeding you out to make up for the people who aren't paying their fair share because of Prop 13; which you still have to pay even if prop 13 doesn't help you because you were born in the wrong decade.
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As I pointed out, if they violate the charter, which explicitly says that shareholder returns is the purpose of the corporation, then they are liable to be sued by either shareholders or state’s attorneys. That charter is a legally binding obligation. The requirement to disburse profits, have shareholders approve executive pay, etc which is also in the charter also becomes a legal obligation. It’s not a question of p…
Corporate charters don't generally include clauses requiring that profits be maximized, profits be disbursed, and executive pay be approved by shareholders. Rather they tend to include maximally expansive language such as "all business activities legal in the state of XXX". It's a placeholder, delegating responsibility to the directors to the greatest extent permitted by law. This is the standard, for good reason. Ar…
This is false.
Corporate law requires that Board members faithfully represent the interest of stakeholders, and the corporate bylaws define who those stakeholders are. Generally they will he creditors, holders of preferred shares followed by holders of common shares. By defining the stakeholders, the corporate charter is defining who owns what and whose interest the board must represent. This is where all the activists who insist that corporations have stakeholders like "the environment" hit a road block -- they aren't going to get shareholder approval to list the environment as a stakeholder.
Corporate bylaws, which must be voted on and approved by shareholders, do spell out voting rights for shareholders, approval of executive pay, approval of debt issuance. This is very common.
People misunderstand how heavily regulated corporations are, because it is a funny ownership structure, where the owners -- the shareholders -- are distributed and don't actually run the company. This creates all sorts of principle agent problems and thus corporate law grants shareholders many rights and imposes many obligations on corporations. Shareholders can audit the books. Shareholders can sue. All the ways that the business does anything from make a decision to issue debt must be spelled out in bylaws that shareholders must approve. Corporations must have a board. The board must be elected by the shareholders. The board has to act in their interest. The board gets to appoint the CEO, etc.
State law also defines the liability shield, that as long as board members are acting faithfully in the interests of shareholders, they can't be sued, but as soon as they are not they can be.
Things like corporate donations are generally justified as helping the bottom line by improving the brand. But you do need to show how they are helping shareholders, otherwise it would be a breach of fiduciary duty and the liability shield would be lost at which point shareholders could sue.
But even apart from this, when the shareholders turn against you they can sell, and if someone buys a majority of the shares the company becomes theirs, they own it, they can take it private, they can throw out management, etc. This ensures that the board be focused on keeping shareholders happy above all other concerns.
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Yeah. The longer you live in SF and the Bay Area, the more apparent it becomes how much it skates on tech, history, and intrinsic advantages like the weather and beautiful geography. SF in particular has such incredible resources that it should be the most advanced city in the world.
But the people in San Francisco have got what they wanted. Maybe in 20 years SF will be able to change but right now the majority of people are actually in favor of the way the city is being run: to stay stuck in time as long as possible
The long time residents of SF don't believe in _change_, and that isn't going to change.
It is just happenstance that the initial San Jose tech explosion happened near SF. ...but maybe other parts of the country are better suited to it going forward...
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Aren’t taxes highly regressive in Texas with sky high property taxes which exempt rich people ?
I would say overall California’s high income and sales taxes and low property taxes are far, far more regressive, see this at the extreme: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-proper...
California’s income taxes are super progressive. They’re only high for high earners.
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It is not a canard. The purpose of a corporation is going to be specified in the corporate charter, and while some corporations are non-profits or have explicit charitable requirements, most have a charter that focuses on maximizing shareholder earnings. Almost no company has a charter that focuses on maximizing taxes paid. That charter is a binding contract that governs the behavior of the officers of the company an…
You're changing the subject to substantially narrower claims, none of which I disagree with. The claim wasn't that corporations aren't free to explicitly optimize for goals other than or contrary to shareholder value (this seems trivially true AFAIK). It was that corporations are forced by law to take specific steps like "doing everything they can to optimize tax avoidance", and are legally prohibited from leaving an…
Thus shareholders can agree to bring in other stakeholders. They can agree that a certain business should maximize its taxes. They can agree to turn the company into a non-profit. But they have to be the ones to agree to do it, and it needs to be spelled out in the various bylaws that define who the stakeholders are that the Board members must faithfully represent.
It is not up to management. It is not up to employees. Only the shareholders decide this. The broader claims come from the assumption that shareholders generally support their own economic interests exclusively. My own observation of the world is that this is the case. Even if a shareholder cares about the poor, they would rather have the maximum return from their assets and then donate some money to the poor themselves, rather than asking their investments to donate to the poor and lower their return.
So the technicalities are that yes, shareholders can give up these claims if they want to. Admitting this is not, IMO, backing off from my broader claim, but recognizing that shareholder supremacy also empowers shareholders to direct a corporation to include other factors than profits.
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Don't forget the joy of parcel taxes, city and county sale taxes, and other ways of bleeding you out to make up for the people who aren't paying their fair share because of Prop 13; which you still have to pay even if prop 13 doesn't help you because you were born in the wrong decade.
Pricing people out of their own homes they used to be able to afford is "fair"?
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Pricing people out of their own homes they used to be able to afford is "fair"?
I'm struggling to see how someone who got $1MM+ in free equity would be priced out of a home they could previously afford; or how the current system that prices people who grew up here out of the entire area is somehow more fair.