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Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#231

Post by 205guy »

dalke wrote: post #173
205guy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if you have a neighborhood full of nice row houses (almost historic by American standards), friendly local businesses, etc., then the "politics of zoning" by the local residents has tended to the status quo, which they seem to like. In that case, where would you be able to increase construction? People want to live in those nice neighborhoods, not some new high rise in a "redeveloped" area. So the newcomers wi…

I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story…

dalke: please Note that I mostly agree with the arguments in your other posts, but here you're disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. Fine, let's consider 5-story zoning (I do love Haussmannian Paris after all). Nobody adds 2 stories to an existing wooden 3-story building, it is just not going to happen. Also, co-ops would be cool, but how would that happen in a block of individually owned houses? Especially in a city where subdividing (TICs) is common, you won't spontaneously get collectivization. The only way you can redevelop and densify a desirable low density neighborhood is with an emperor, a grand architect, and an even richer buyer. And even though google employees are rich enough, I don't see an architect around, let alone an emperor.

I'll tell you how the city will densify: very slowly. The 5-story apartment blocks in mission Bay will gentrify in 20-30 years, and by then decay and/or earthquake will take care of the nice neighborhoods we have now.

I'll end with another question: what is so wrong (I know it's unamerican, but I mean logically and morally wrong) with telling rich employees of faraway companies that others are currently living in and enjoying the neighborhoods that they covet, so they shouldn't move there (by upbidding rents and sales) even if their company provides them the transportation (and saying the company is wrong--or misguided if facesaving is required--for doing so)?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#232

Post by cafard »

michaelt wrote: post #168
badman_ting wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how that line of thinking should boil down to "capitalism, or at least the way we are practicing it, misallocates resources", but the thought-buck always stops with the smart people. There's no "well, I the incentives must say these people should work on sexting apps, and they are acting rationally, I wonder why the incentives are that way?", it's just "Ugh! You're smart! Stop it with the sexting and start…

People who believe incentives are destiny tend not to take jobs writing for the New York Times. It's not like journalists enjoy high pay or great job security. Maybe the author of this piece believes "I don't do X for the money, I do X to make the world a better place / for the love of X". Many people in the arts, education, charities, research etc act as if they believe this. Perhaps it's never occurred to the autho…

The author does not have a job writing for the NY Times. He is a graduate student at Columbia University, with an internship scheduled for this summer with Uber.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#233

Post by JoeAltmaier »

alanlewis wrote: post #230
nostrademons wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW on #3, Google has been pushing for rezoning the North Bayshore area (the area by its campus, north of 101 around Shoreline) for mixed-use ground-level retail + high-rise apartments since I got here in 2009. This plan would create about 1100 housing units within walking distance of campus, taking that many cars (or more, including spouses) off of 101, off of Shoreline, and probably out of SF or Mountain View wher…

Lemme guess: google employee? Part of what the city council has been blocking is (according to the linked Verge article) stopping Google from doing an environmental report necessary to develop land adjacent to one of their campuses. Why? Because, surprise!, the council members noticed that the environment reports paid for by large companies always happen to come back with a result favorable to the company who paid fo…

In fact, by law, if you pay for the report, it has to come back as favorable to you as possible. Its something to do with 'agency' and fiduciary responsibility.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#234

Post by dalke »

205guy wrote: post #231
dalke wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen that the frequent opposition to zoning changes protests the replacement of single-family or row houses with "high rises", as you did. Why did you chose to use an extreme as contrast? That's not the only alternative. What about if they are replaced with a low-rise, or a mid-rise? These offer higher density than row houses but without the same visual impact as a high rise. Some in Manhattan love their 5-story…

dalke: please Note that I mostly agree with the arguments in your other posts, but here you're disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. Fine, let's consider 5-story zoning (I do love Haussmannian Paris after all). Nobody adds 2 stories to an existing wooden 3-story building, it is just not going to happen. Also, co-ops would be cool, but how would that happen in a block of individually owned houses? Especially in a c…

My goal elsewhere was to argue that there are valid reasons for why someone can conclude that a private shuttle service isn't useful. My goal here was to complain about the use of "high-rise" as the the exemplar of any sort of higher density housing. The poster asked many questions, and in for a penny, in for a point, I offered some ideas, not really meant as a disagreement for the sake of disagreement.

What you see reveals more a lack in my understanding. No, I have no idea how a co-op system would happen. I also have no idea how it happened in the places where it did happen. Researching now, I found http://www.academia.edu/3393216/Gentrification_-_gentle_or_t... which talks about city efforts to promote a co-op housing system. While it worked, it also encouraged the city's efforts to bring in an "economically sustainable population", which excludes the politically and economically less powerful who were able to afford the area before. BTW, there doesn't appear to be a grand architect for this system.

Perhaps you're right, and Haussmann's authoritarian style, or great destruction, are the only ways to get major changes to a city's infrastructure. Certainly though there is much I don't like about the efforts of the American Haussmann, Robert Moses. But many cities have transformed over time, and not all used this imperious style.

Urban evolution is a topic I know little about, but also one where there are many strong feelings and few certainties. I know some of my own feelings: 1) commuting is a waste of human time, 2) the price of petroleum does not reflect its true cost, 3) company subsidies for things like commuting, meals, laundry services, etc. should be counted as personal income, rather than a business expense (at time I think that personal frequent flier miles for business travel should be the same), 4) car travel is dangerous and should not be promoted over other means, and 5) I prefer the "cuddly" Nordic model of capitalism over the "cut-throat" free market capitalism (and think that the Nordic countries have been moving too much in recent years towards equating everything in market terms).

With those in mind, what's "wrong" is a confluence of several factors. The transportation subsidizes should be included as part of the overall employee salary (SF's payroll tax on companies helps unbalance this a bit more), the Bay Area has no well integrated large scale mass transit system (thus Google et al. have a disproportionate influence on precisely which regions will be impacted by their specific choice of transportation routes), and 3) housing is too closely coupled to free market rates, so short term economic booms may break up community and emotional ties that take decades to establish (replacing it certainly with a different set of community and emotional ties, but see "cuddly").

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#235

Post by pabb »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #215
Jaiguss wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc. Ther…

Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them . Substanceless apps are not only objectively…

Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread.

You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.

It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?

That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#236

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pabb wrote: post #235
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them . Substanceless apps are not only objectively…

Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread. You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is…

>So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems?

I can think of a couple reasons:

1) Because hardware/microarchitecture companies do devote effort to architecture and compilers.

2) Because low-level software/OS companies do devote effort to networking, compilers, and operating systems.

3) Because network effects mean that only a very few mutually incompatible languages and OS's can survive on the open market, with a larger but still fairly small variety surviving on open-source volunteer efforts.

>Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing.

Oh really? Aren't there some computational problems we could work on that have cancer-cure-level impacts?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

#237

Post by leoc »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #216
leoc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It all smells like protester-chic, finding something semiplausible to complain about then faking a protest. They're the torchbearers for the lawlessness and thuggery of the late-'60s "student revolutions" etc.

If you'd like to see some actual thuggery and lawlessness, I invite you to take a flight to Beirut or Istanbul and cross the border into Syria. Until then, please stop overblowing protests over real issues.

This doesn't stand up at all. So if I see someone staggering about the street drunk, urinating on lampposts and punching passing strangers on a whim, I can't properly describe them as a lawless thug, because they're not as bad as Bashar Assad or Atilla the Hun? If anything the adjectives 'lawless' and 'thuggish' are too weak to use to describe Assad's misbehaviour, not too strong to apply to lesser criminals. Secondly, even assuming for the sake of argument that Google's right to hire buses is a real issue, having a real issue to protest isn't (in itself) nearly sufficient to justify the illegal, hostile and aggressively unpleasant, financially harmful and, apparently, deceitful nature of the protests.
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