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

latimes.com

431–440 of 488 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterargument to the claim that Europe is less violent than the United States, especially over a historical period going back to the 18th century: Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process than the total number of murders in the United States for the entire 20th century.

There is a case to be made that war is just legalised murder, but nevertheless in these comparisons the context does not normally include war . And would you really want to? The US is far from innocent with its use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing Japan (Truman: "there were more people killed by fire-bombs in Tokyo than dropping the atomic bombs"), Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on. Note that I'm not sayin…

I wasn't even including war!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

> Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Notice the use of the word "murdered" in the second sentence of the article, as well as throughout the rest.

The context was violence, not criminality. But even if it were criminality, the Holocaust is widely considered a crime against humanity.

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

#432
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On an absolute basis, SF has horrifically restricted housing policy that makes it incredibly difficult to build new, denser housing. However, compared to the broader bay area, SF has incredibly progressive housing policy. It is ridiculous to compare downtown Houston, which is surrounded on all sides by a zillion square miles of suburbs (under city control!), to SF, which is surrounded by a limited number of more expe…

I'm not even comparing that. I have been to SF all the time. SF--just SF--is not as dense as downtown Houston, where housing is affordable.

According to Google, downtown Houston is 1.84 square miles. Houston is 669 square miles. So downtown Houston represents about 0.3% of Houston. The reason it is affordable in downtown Houston is because the other 99.7% of Houston exists, and if it weren't affordable in downtown people would just live elsewhere.

You don't have the same choices in and around SF, therefore there is a lot of demand on much smaller amounts of land, therefore it's a lot more expensive!

It's the same reason rent is really expensive in NYC, even though they are way more dense than SF. Lots of demand, not many alternatives.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves? This isn't a recent change, they were always instructed to call the police instead of interfering. And if crime isn't being prosecuted then why would police waste limited resources on catching thieves just to see them out on the street with no consequence? You are looking at this backwards. It's all directly because of policy changes, because t…

> Do you seriously think retailers had their employees confronting thieves? Well, since I've known people who worked as loss prevention managers and who did it, and since the news article on the issue posted elsewhere in the thread specifically identified that retailers have changed policies in ways which reduce that, yes, I am reasonably think that they were doing so before and are doing so less now. > And if crime…

So why would retailers change their behavior then? Again you're looking at this backwards. The law changed, so the prosecution changed, so the arrests changed, so the police response changed, and so the retailers (and general public) changed the way they report and deal with crimes.

Why are you placing blame at everything downstream instead of what actually triggered the changes?

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drew an equivalence to highlight that the problems related to the record 100 year cold weather crossed regulatory boundaries, which was the topic of discussion. In Louisiana 2 million people lost power (42% of the state population), 800k had to boil water (17%), and 5 people died (1 of every 940k). In Texas 4.5 million people lost power (17% of the state population), 12 million had water problems (43%), and 40 deat…

The power producers that did winterize couldn't run their plants for lack of gas due to wellheads and pipelines freezing [0] (Texas Railroad Commission jurisdiction) and an emergency order directing gas away from power plants (TRC again) [1] [0] https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/blackout-crisis-texans-ele... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/12640ebb-5c20-4d00-aec0-9c8810541...

Gotcha. Thanks for the links!

I'm just finished reading about the people in Texas who got $10k bills. I'm wondering if these people, residential customers, knew the rate limits were increased for those 32 hours? It's not fair if they don't have a mechanism to monitor or limit the rate they're willing to pay. I wouldn't call that a complete failure of their system, but it needs to be made right. A 10k surprise bill sucks. They pushed the risk to these people, and the regulators there knew it. I don't know where the money is going. I'd try to negotiate it down. I also think it should be easier to declare bankruptcy. People are more important than companies. I'm hoping they get bailed out at some point, they are as deserving as anyone else. I'd be outraged if people don't get the tools to monitor and limit their usage rates.

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial sector is probably a larger driver of income inequality than tech. Do you kick out NYC too?

A corollary to my thesis is that local inequality is what drives resentment among the middle class. Finance is peculiarly concentrated in NYC. It’s not like JP Morgan has an office in Portland where it hires investment bankers who drive up housing prices.

So Malaysia booting out Singapore or West Bengal booting out East Bengal...wasn't discriminatory?

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

#436

I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality. The usual retort to this is “what will you do without California’s economic engine?” And that’s a fair point—America without California will be less wealthy. But that will be fine; and in…

>I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality. I agree about one thing. California actively drives economic inequality. Here's my theory about the entire economy of the US transforming since 2000. Thanks to globalization manufacturin…

Why not have Congress pass an amendment striking down Prop 13 or the Supreme Court rule against it?

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

#437
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand." No they don't. Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build. The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there. Vancouver 'built b…

>Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build. It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in. >The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale i…

"It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in"

This makes no sense.

? People who live in SF (or any community) are already housed in SF. 'Everyone' already has a place to live.

Unless by 'everyone' you mean 'everyone who wants to live there', which is absurd, because if cost were not part of the equation probably 50x the number of people in SF would not mind being there.

That's why we have suppl and demand.

"why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? "

This is really baffling. You do realize that if SF when from 600K people to 5M people (vertical, like HK or Vancouver) that it would be a completely different kind of city, and wouldn't resemble the current SF in any way?

Nobody has a right to live anywhere.

Every community has a right to influence the future of their own community.

If SF residents want to 'go vertical' that's fine, if they don't that's fine as well.

"Pretty much everyone I have heard talk about Vancouer is that Vancouver failed to build enough housing."

'Hearsay' (i.e. some random people said some stuff about an issue) does not help your argument.

The facts are 1) Vancouver built out massively. You can see the city skyline has been totally transformed and 2) it's still completely unnafordable.

Why is it unnafordable? Because of demand from foreign places and ultra low interest rates. Local salaries are not enough to supply that kind of demand. A lot of people moving in from foreign places (or just buying). For a variety of reasons.

As a 'global safe zone' the demand is massive, far more so than the locals can endure.

In this specific case, the problem is not 'build more' - the problem is 'don't allow foreign ownership', 'get interest rates under control' and 'reduce migration to normal levels' (Canada always has higher than normal migration, that's fine, but the amounts set lately are massive and most migrants prefer cities, putting additional pressures).

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

#438
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be an awful lot of overlap between the positions they are looking for in San Francisco: Salesforce: https://salesforce.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Sit... Autodesk: https://autodesk.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/Ext/2/refreshFacet/31... VMWare (which owns Spring): https://careers.vmware.com/main/jobs?page=1&country=USA&stat... LendingClub: https://lendingclub.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/0/refresh..…

You're absolutely right! The companies I mentioned do hire many people with similar skills. Do you think it's possible that this might not be quite the same as being in the same market and thus being a direct commercial competitor for a company's offerings? Otherwise every company is in the Human Resources and Accounting industries. Perhaps the companies in question are not in commercial competition with one another,…

Detroit's problem was not that the companies there were direct competitors, it was that all of them were producing automobiles. When American automobile production moved elsewhere and took a large number of well-paying jobs with it, the bottom fell out of the city's economy.

What do you expect to happen to San Francisco if it loses its "tech mecca" status? Will the financial sector or the tourism sector supply enough high-paying jobs to make up the difference, or will the money drying up cascade down through the service industries?

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

#439
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…

My knowledge of SF zoning and housing problems is quite limited, but how in your opinion building new residential property will help the problem of homelessness and drug abusing? For homeless and drug abusers to be able to afford housing, prices must fall by a couple of orders of magnitude.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a case to be made that war is just legalised murder, but nevertheless in these comparisons the context does not normally include war . And would you really want to? The US is far from innocent with its use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing Japan (Truman: "there were more people killed by fire-bombs in Tokyo than dropping the atomic bombs"), Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on. Note that I'm not sayin…

I wasn't even including war! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust > Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. Notice the use of the word "murdered" in the second sentence of the article, as well as throughout the rest. The context was violence, not criminality. But even…

> I wasn't even including war!

Maybe you never intended to, but your comment reads:

> Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process

Reference to Nazi Germany does not, as you say, necessarily equate to war. However "a single named process" would to most readers be treated as narrowing it down to "a single named process" - World War Two.

The most obvious simple reading of your comment would give the clear impression you meant the war. If that wasn't the intention, if the named process was the wider genocide, or simply the Third Reich, then fair enough. But I'm sure you can understand any misreading.

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