Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 161 posts

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#61

Post by bdcravens »

marcellus23 wrote: post #27
bdcravens wrote: post #18

Every city has its glory days and eventual decline. It happened to Detroit; it's happening to SF, and eventually it'll happen to other cities (I see it happening to Houston if the US truly uncouples itself from oil)

Cities can come back after the decline, too. Look at NYC.

True, given the local industry. NYC has finance, marketing, fashion, etc. What would San Francisco's be? As an outsider, it feels to me like the days magical tech synergy has left, and that work in our industry is unlikely to recentralize.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#62

Post by Der_Einzige »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56
Der_Einzige wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resentment happening from society towards us is spiraling out of control, and I say this as someone who was also at that meetup event yesterday. Pretty sad but we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people. The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...

> we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.

Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs.

I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and democratic AI, which is basically the only protection that the non nerds of SF have against the coming AI job apocalypse.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#63

Post by dehrmann »

ghaff wrote: post #58
dehrmann wrote: post #44

I'm not convinced. There's a reason people came back faster to almost every other major city. This makes me think a lot of people were just there for the money, and once they could get the same money without the hassle of the city, they did just that. The problem is adding more housing downtown doesn't really help the problem beyond making a shorter commute (to WFH jobs?). Especially for the people who moved out, SF'…

There are certainly reasons other than jobs why some people choose to live in a major city. But eliminate the job/commute reason and the calculus changes for a lot of people given that "live near work" is at least one of the main reasons they would choose urban living.

> There are certainly reasons other than jobs why some people choose to live in a major city

I agree, but without jobs, as a major city, SF looks pretty unattractive. It was better a decade ago, but since then, all its problems got worse.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#64

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #62
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.

Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs. I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and de…

> Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools

You’re describing rich and powerful people. If someone with those resources can’t grow up, yes, it’s reasonable for others to dissociate from them.

What I’m describing is also uniquely San Franciscan. Tech workers in Berkeley, Oakland, Sunnyvale, Seattle, New York and overseas are civically engaged. They volunteer; join organisations, protests and campaigns; they run for office.

> the coming AI job apocalypse

It’s odd seeing AI embrace crypto’s language. Past revolutionaries for computers or nuclear power were motivated by the good they could do. They didn’t pat themselves on the back for riding a supposed pale horse. NLP has no more ability to bring an apocalypse than personal computers did, but it’s a call for regulation if this becomes mainstream.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#65

Post by tracerbulletx »

thot_experiment wrote: post #16
floren wrote: post #2

Hey, congratulations SF. You spent over a decade whining about tech-bros and Google buses. Guess those problems are solved now!

after the huggingface event last night a group of us wasn't let into a bar/club because "y'all are nerds, we don't want your patronage" I don't think it's solved enough yet for their taste, what a beautifully schizoid city, never change, we should just throw money at the problem forever as a monument to hubris XD

I really wish that we could all just settle on using "whether or not someone is acting like an asshole" as our single tribal dividing line. Every other grouping scheme will lump lots of great people with lots of assholes all mixed together and then we cherry pick and make assumptions about the wider group that are generally unfair.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#66

Post by cubefox »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #17
orzig wrote: post #5

I don’t live there, but as a general rule, people overestimate the probability of “collapse“. Things can be declining for a long time without the dramatic acceleration that merits that term.

Agreed. Just look at Twitter. It's running with a skeleton crew but that's only because a system of that size does not collapse in a day. It takes years for the cracks to show and grow.

Well, this is off-topic now. Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one. It seems Twitter was simply overstaffed.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#67

Post by mgarfias »

ghaff wrote: post #37
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8

New York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11. San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...

And the 1970s financial woes aside, NYC also had a lot of petty and not so petty street crime mostly into the 80s. A lot of the area around Times Square was pretty bad, for example. [ADDED: It was really the 90s that saw the ~75% declines from peak.] I imagine a lot of the direct comparisons break down in various ways. But, at a high level, you see similarities.

Not just “into the 80s”. A friend of mine was murdered there in 94.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#68

Post by chrisweekly »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8

New York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11. San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...

Detroit's decline seems like a closer analogy to me.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#69

Post by ujhy4gt3fred »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64
Der_Einzige wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs. I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and de…

> Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools You’re describing rich and powerful people. If someone with those resources can’t grow up, yes, it’s reasonable for others to dissociate from them. What I’m describing is also uniquely San Franciscan. Tech workers in Berkeley, Oakland, Sunnyvale, Seattle, New York and overseas are civica…

unlike sf, tech workers in pretty much every city you listed tend to actually live in those cities. hell, half the tech workers in sf live in berkeley, oakland, sunnyvale, or other bay area communities. when i was a tech worker in sf, i wasn't civically engaged in sf because i spent that budget in berkeley, where i actually lived.
Post reply on HN