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Zucktown, USA

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Re: Zucktown, USA

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

TrickyRick wrote: post #45
humanrebar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get fired you also get evicted. If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.

If I'm a healthy individual then the risk that I need my healthcare insurance are low (But it has a big impact on my economy if I do need it). However the risk that I need some form of housing is 100% and the impact of not having it is huge which to me makes it a bigger risk. However YMMV depending on your situation.

Circumstances change quickly.

I'm married, things happened, and we ended up having a baby. Due to various circumstances beyond our control. That cost $100k.

As a healthy guy in my 20's, I suffered an injury through no fault of my own that led to me needing a serious back surgery. Net cost -> $250k.

Rolling the dice on something that fundamentally life altering, and expecting society to pick up the tab for the consequences of your risk management is bullshit. It is a good illustration of why you can't treat healthcare as a market driven thing unless you're willing to drop the moral obligation to preserve human life (and expect the providers to "absorb" it).

Re: Zucktown, USA

#92

Post by Chardok »

princekolt wrote: post #70

HN is criticizing the article wording but completely ignoring its point. This article coupled with the other one on the dystopian reality of San Francisco[1] have me feeling completely disgusted at the current state of the tech industry. Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly h…

"This time around, though, that community will be bridled with union–busting and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate."

This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin.

Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#93

Post by Bartweiss »

cupscale wrote: post #72
michaelt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price, [...] they also oppose any construction of high density accommodation My theory is there are three parties in this discussion. Renter Roy can't afford a house, and thinks tech companies' money is bidding up prices. Homeowner Harold has lived and worked in this neighbourhood for 40 years and doesn't want its character to change and his house's value to fall. Techie…

Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't. Sure, you can get to an armistice with Harold and Tammy: Housing costs are high but your salary is such that even spending 66% of your pay on housing leaves you with an ample amount of money. But I wouldn't call that agreement anything other than begrudging.

> Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't.

This seems like the essential problem. Harold isn't actually a buyer in the housing market; he locked in a fixed-rate mortgage 20 years ago. If he's planning on retiring somewhere outside the city, or to a managed community, he might never be on the buyer's side of the market again.

But he's definitely a seller - that house will presumably be sold or passed on to his kids. Property taxes are a pain, but they're a manageable one for a house bought as an investment. Harold is actively opposed to Roy and Tammy; if their rent doubled that would be a good outcome for him.

We keep treating this like all the residents of the city are a group, but that's not true. Renters own zero units of housing, homeowners own one unit, landlords own multiple. It's not at all guaranteed that homeowners align with renters more than with landlords.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#94

Post by jsjohnst »

humanrebar wrote: post #33
avar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is a badly written opinion piece that meanders through various topics, but your critique of it is beating a strawman. It's not making the "you can't win" argument that tech companies should be critiqued whether or not they build housing. Rather, it's that they're supposedly constructing "company towns" in the sense that the housing stock they build won't be for sale, and presumably only rented to employee…

> If you get fired you also get evicted. If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.

> If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare

Not in the US, at least not for 18 months anyway. It’s called COBRA and is available to anyone with work provided insurance.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#95

Post by Apocryphon »

rtpg wrote: post #22
rdtsc wrote: post #19

And you'd go to Zuckshop and buy Zuckbread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store It would be creepy having to live in a employers' housing unit. But if it is subsidized enough many would jump on it. The interview process at many of these company is already geared to bring in college graduates. So a dorm of sort would make sense. Then they could outfit them work spaces so you could live there and maybe work rem…

Japan has a lot of this, but it's usually a building in the middle of a city so you're not like... completely surrounded. But your neighbors are probably from the same company.

And isn't Japanese corporate culture, for all of its repressive and overworked ways, at least compensating its workers with guaranteed lifetime employment, pensions, etc.? Whereas in the U.S. You may be fired at any time.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#96

Post by Apocryphon »

humanrebar wrote: post #38
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #30

It's exactly these biggest companies that should take moral responsibility and relocate / redistribute their work to various cities on the one hand, and if they want to go through with the idea of company towns, campuses etc, they need to move way out of the SF area - there's huge wads of unused space in the US, they could found their own city if need be. Probably not something very attractive to their employees, but…

> Probably not something very attractive to their employees... I keep hearing this meme and I'm skeptical. Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?

Seriously? You're saying it's easy to afford to live in the Bay Area? That anyone can move to there?

Re: Zucktown, USA

#97

Post by jschwartzi »

jsjohnst wrote: post #94
humanrebar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get fired you also get evicted. If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.

> If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare Not in the US, at least not for 18 months anyway. It’s called COBRA and is available to anyone with work provided insurance.

Anyone with work provided insurance who can also afford the group rate the company pays.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#98

Post by Bartweiss »

jonbarker wrote: post #86
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making money is not evil. Wall street makes money, pharma makes money, lawyers make money, insurance makes money, automobiles, consumer goods, real estate - all huge industries. Now that tech is being used on a massive scale of course the tech companies are making money. So what? It doesn't make sense to equate rich with evil - either for companies or for people. SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) ha…

Making money is not evil, but social class increases likelihood of utilitarianism. Being a tech elite in the valley arguably makes one more likely to be more of a utilitarian. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich... . Large scale usage does not increase likelihood of profit, either. There aren't any hard disk drive billionaires, for example. Also they aren't in the same town; those who are try…

This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously "utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes utilitarianism?"

Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.

I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people".

(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.

- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.

- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.

- PNAS is a bad sign.

- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work.

- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.

- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad.

My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)

Re: Zucktown, USA

#99

Post by countryslicker »

mc32 wrote: post #6
apsec112 wrote: post #2

This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices", dressed up in some purple prose. And they're also to blame for high rents. But if they build apartments to help ease the housing shortage, that's a "company town" and we can't have that either. And Amazon is a "commandeering leech" which "suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep", but when Google offers Mountain…

These people only know how to tear things down. I don't like FB or even Mark personally. But this is ridiculous and would not unfairly be characterized as sour grapes or simply not wanting progress at all to spite some good careers. Society never moves at the pace of life. It always lags --even in command economies like China's or to a degree S Korea and Singapore. Adjustment takes time. At the same time as you point…

Why don't FB/Google/Apple/etc expand to Auburn, CA? Or Lincoln, CA? or Lincoln, NE?

I really don't think that putting the next 5000 employees next to the last 10000 employees improves productivity. Spread out. Spread the wealth and the pain. Make yourself less vulnerable to a single point of failure.

Re: Zucktown, USA

#100

Post by nerfhammer »

eru wrote: post #39
nerfhammer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions seem to have more tractability where you expect to have the same employer for life.

It's a bit hard to talk about unions in general. Eg the Americans have these unions for people working in the entertainment industry (eg actors guild or so?), and those people usually work on a project basis, don't they? On a historical note, I am currently reading A Generation of Materialism. The book has some very interesting bits about the early history of unions in Europe.

Of course. If I think of cases where people might expect to have the same employer for life I think you'll be more likely to find unionization there. Not that it cannot happen outside of that condition.
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