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

sfchronicle.com

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I assume that you're comfortable being equated with whatever your parents did during their younger years? Look, radical leftist politics in SF (or anywhere else) would be about: 1. corporate taxation 2. minimum wage at $21/hr or above 3. limiting investment in residential real estate 4. major investment in public transit 5. limiting the use of private motor vehicle transportation 6. reducing the role of national/…

Those were all hallmark left wing policies up to maybe the early 2000s but nowadays the policy programme is different. When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax? It's like something from another time, these days it's all about other policies like racial/sexual divisions, control over media and education, "reparations" and so on.

> When was the last time you heard leftists talk about tax?

I don't live in SF, or the Bay Area or CA, so maybe the leftists you're referring to are people I don't hear much at all. But the leftists I do hear (e.g. Jacobin magazine) talk about taxes all the time. I heard Sanders talk about taxes while Schultz was in front of Congress last week.

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

#152

"This is the city where it can take 87 permits, 1,000 days of meetings and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. This is the city — the only one in the state — that allows housing permits to be appealed even after projects are entitled. This is the city where it costs an estimated $100,000 to build one tiny home for the homeless — up to 10 times more than in other Bay Area cities — and almost $1.2 m…

The author follows up with measures the mayor is taking to fight this.

Which is worthless unless the measures go though, there are no "points for trying at this scale"

Right now San Francisco is not "too big to fail", but rather "too bloated to save".

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are one and the same. Chesa Boudine was largely responsible, and ran on the platform, of essentially not enforcing laws on drugs and theft. His parents spent decades in prison for murder as a result of their radical leftists activism with the Weather Underground. SF is basically the poster child for putting radical leftists in charge.

Can I assume that you're comfortable being equated with whatever your parents did during their younger years? Look, radical leftist politics in SF (or anywhere else) would be about: 1. corporate taxation 2. minimum wage at $21/hr or above 3. limiting investment in residential real estate 4. major investment in public transit 5. limiting the use of private motor vehicle transportation 6. reducing the role of national/…

I’m confused—you’re claiming the above are radical leftist policies? They seem like (mostly bad) moderate left policies to me.

Here are things I think are radical, and my gauge for that is asking if it could reasonably appear on a BLM demands list. Pushes to defund police, stop enforcing laws (or as Chesa did, enforce weakened versions for fear it would result in “dangerous” deportations) or direct repeat criminals to programs that allow them to avoid jail/records, giving homeless cash and a place to do drugs “safely”. Not to mention the new ask for $5M per black resident for reparations, with some claiming it doesn’t go near far enough.

The idea that these problems are a result of high cost of living and NIMBYism are absurd. When progressive policies fail, the left still find ways to blame it on “the rich”. Marxism 101.

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

#154

Just spent a few days there and man, talk about living off past beauty. It sure is one of the most beautiful urban environments in the world: the geography, the variety of the architecture, but fuck me, so expensive and just weirdly hostile rules. And I live in London so no stranger to shit costing a lot. Was there with my wife and child and tried to go to a cool wine bar at like 5pm, told we weren’t allowed in due t…

>Was there with my wife and child and tried to go to a cool wine bar at like 5pm It's everywhere in California: minors (under 21 y.o.) are not allowed into bars except on legitimate business (e.g. making a delivery) at any time.

The US is stupid about things like this. When I was a kid, my family used to go to bars and the VFW club in rural Minnesota, so we could meet up with our relatives. These were equivalent to community social centers. No harm was done to our little minds.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Was there with my wife and child and tried to go to a cool wine bar at like 5pm It's everywhere in California: minors (under 21 y.o.) are not allowed into bars except on legitimate business (e.g. making a delivery) at any time.

The US is stupid about things like this. When I was a kid, my family used to go to bars and the VFW club in rural Minnesota, so we could meet up with our relatives. These were equivalent to community social centers. No harm was done to our little minds.

It's not a US law, it's a California law.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I'm not sure I understand what this is but please don't do it here.

Also, can you please not break the site guidelines like you did e.g. at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35376440? I don't want to ban you, and these things are not ok on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#157

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…

Please don't do regional flamewar on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#158

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...

It turns out the arrogant shitting on the rest of the planet by authoritarian techies in the Bay Area has some mild consequences about a dozen orders of magnitude less than the shit it has sprayed on everyone else. If "Flyover Country" has ever been in your vocabulary for a nanosecond, you deserve all that's being heaped on you and 1,000,000x more. You can't abuse humanity, tell them it's for their own good, and then…

Can you please keep this sort of flamewar fodder off this site? We don't want tribes bashing each other and calling each other names here—none of it has anything to do with intellectual curiosity, which is what HN is supposed to be for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note that they ask you not to call names or fulminate.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the specific situation with Twitter is that it takes a lot more people to create and update a system of this size than it does to merely maintain it. They simply no longer have the capacity to make a large new product at this point, but even a skeleton staff is enough to keep the existing product running.

Twitter was created originally by a much smaller team than even the one that Musk still has today.

Twitter (the product) has changed a lot since then too. It's much more complicated and does many more things. What it was like at the beginning isn't particularly relevant anymore.

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

#160

"This is the city where it can take 87 permits, 1,000 days of meetings and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. This is the city — the only one in the state — that allows housing permits to be appealed even after projects are entitled. This is the city where it costs an estimated $100,000 to build one tiny home for the homeless — up to 10 times more than in other Bay Area cities — and almost $1.2 m…

The author follows up with measures the mayor is taking to fight this.

It's the city's own policy. How could the mayor 'fight' it?
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