Live data from Hacker News

Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

latimes.com

151–160 of 488 posts

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media. I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so…

> The mayor of Miami literally bought a billboard right now begging people to go to his city.

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I moved to central FL a couple years ago and I tend to browse jobs from time to time just to see whats around me, so while I don't live in Miami, specifically, I have looked around. Looking at Florida is weird, compared to some other places I've been, the market in FL seems rather disappointing, in both the quality and variety of tech jobs in the state. I feel like career wise, it'd be better off to go back to GA or NC. Culturally Miami seems past it's prime as well. You never really here much about or here about people talking wanting to move there like you do most of the other cosmopolitan US cities or even cities in the Midwest and South. I'll give south FL one thing though, the area sparked a great underground rap scene in the 2010s.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#152
There are more people leaving California each year than being born in it. The study in the article focuses on movement between 2019-20. I’m not sure if they’re addressing the question the right way, as 2020 was a pretty unusual year and this has been going on for quite some time.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#153
post #6

I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism…

People of San Francisco passed a law t̶o̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶$̶1̶0̶0̶0̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶p̶s̶.̶ They also expect safe neighborhoods. You can't have both. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040812 Liberal policies such as this does not solve the actual problem. Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps st…

The misinformation about Prop. 47 is stunning to me. It did not change anything relating to violent crime, nor did it make petty theft legal. Petty theft is still punishable by jail time. Robbery is still a felony.

What it actually did is raise the line between misdemeanor and felony theft from $450 to $950.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I coul…

"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".

IIRC East Asians don’t count toward diversity number.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#155
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities are the root cause, imo. As a society we need to spread out towards the countryside more.

Cities are more efficient and sustainable. Most importantly, cities bring people together to enable cooperation, therefore acting as a multiplier on what is produced and generally making humanity better off. What’s needed are better run cities.

>enable cooperation

If this were the natural state of large cities, it wouldn't require government regulation (better run cities) to accomplish.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually want SF city to meet its fate and be an example for other cities what not to do.

I think that plan will backfire. Look at Detroit. Secondly, everyone will draw different conclusions when looking at the same data.

As a Detroiter I'm curios to hear why you think Detroit went the way it did.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media. I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so…

> and the problems are massively overblown For all the places I have worked in and visited through my life, including poor countries in Africa, Europe, Russia, and places as extreme as Afghanistan, the only place I have ever seen someone openly defecate in the street is San Francisco. And I've seen it many times in San Francisco. It's not overblown. Your reference points have been distorted. It's not normal. People d…

...This actually happens in the downtown of literally every major metro in the US because the US is terrible at dealing with the underlying issues that lead to this sort of thing as a whole.

Just because you haven't exposed yourself to it nor seen about it in disgusting sensationalist shitshow that is media in the US doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly never said that homelessness is “just life.” I’m just realistic. San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent, and it’s our responsibility as San Franciscans to help alleviate it as much as possible. None of this has to do with my original point about San Francisco’s recent changes, which I have personally experienced as having a much higher density of artists.

> San Francisco will probably always have this problem to some extent But why? Other cities don't. For example Liechtenstein has literally no homeless people in the entire country. They had to close their last homeless shelter... because it was empty. Many other global cities have single-digit homeless per 100k population. Why does San Francisco have literally ten thousand homeless people and why are the numbers stil…

As a country we've decided that the suitable response to children regularly being mass murdered in schools is to train children to expect being mass murdered in school. A similar abandonment on the subject of homeless is hardly surprising.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I coul…

I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".

No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism.

By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism.

The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity).

But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak.

People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous.

It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest.

I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year.

The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'.

Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'.

Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#160
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People of San Francisco passed a law t̶o̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶b̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶$̶1̶0̶0̶0̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶p̶s̶.̶ They also expect safe neighborhoods. You can't have both. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040812 Liberal policies such as this does not solve the actual problem. Instead of providing food and shelter to the poor, perhaps st…

> People of San Francisco passed a law to allow any robbery under $1000 That’s just not true at all, come on, you’re intentionally spreading misinformation. It raised the limit to $950 for the felony threshold for simple theft. Robbery is still a felony. “Prop 47 doesn’t cover robberies, theft by the use of force or fear. It doesn’t cover burglaries,” Gascón said. “If you break into a structure with the intent to com…

That's a very high limit for simple theft, so now simple theft is what occurs the most. Why would anyone commit felonies or robberies when they can just walk in and take below that limit without any enforcement or consequence?

Making crime easier to commit doesn't reduce crime.

Post reply on HN