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

San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

californiapolicycenter.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 129 posts

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#91

Post by CogitoCogito »

rayiner wrote: post #66
monero-xmr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t understand. The incentives are all wrong. There is absolutely zero benefit for a bureaucracy to make itself more efficient and require less money each year. No one is incentivized to ensure money is being spent well. The biggest incentive for a lifelong bureaucrat is to increase budget and headcount - the more money and headcount you have, the more important you are. There is never a time when you aren’t re…

The US seems especially bad, though. Do other countries do things differently in terms of incentives?

What exactly do you mean by "the US seems especially bad"? Bad compared to what? US government efficiency vs foreign governments' efficiency? US government efficiency vs private sector efficiency? After clarifying what you mean by "bad", _is_ the US especially bad in actuality? Are you basing this perception on any systematic analysis?

I don't mean this to be argumentative or something, I'm just trying to understand what you're basing your thinking on.

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#92

Post by adammarples »

fmajid wrote: post #88
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of states give prisoners open bus tickets on release if they have no one coming to pick them up. They are not technically sending them to LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle, but where else are they going to go? Living outside in LA is much better than doing the same in Houston. But this is another point of the problem: anyone who solves the problem well is bound to just attract more of the problem. People are not imm…

SF does not solve the homeless problem, but there is good money to be made in the welfare-industrial complex pretending to help. Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place. Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched…

The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#93

Post by kortilla »

pstuart wrote: post #78
proc0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it beyond liberal? I would almost say it's so left it's not even liberal anymore, but that's a different matter. i think for sure it is a factor because the people who make decisions in the city, who are elected to manage the city, are probably not afraid of losing their jobs or the consequences of the decisions they make. There is so little pushback they can just run experiment after experiment with zero reper…

Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right. So if you want to say: is San Francisco tolerant of the LGBQT+ community? Absolutely, with flying rainbow flag colors. But that's the key driver in the culture wars, and it has nothing to do with the business of running a government (other than minimizing government persecution of that community. All of these issues could and should be dissecte…

> Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right.

This is incorrect. It may have widened in both directions, but it absolutely did not shift to the right.

Transgender support from mainstream corporations (Target, Budweiser, etc) would have been completely unthinkable 10 years ago.

That’s just one example of many. What has happened is that the Overton window is broken because people don’t even engage with “the other side” anymore. So we just end up with both sides discussing things with impunity that were previously off-topic and still are for the other side.

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#94

Post by amanaplanacanal »

kortilla wrote: post #93
pstuart wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right. So if you want to say: is San Francisco tolerant of the LGBQT+ community? Absolutely, with flying rainbow flag colors. But that's the key driver in the culture wars, and it has nothing to do with the business of running a government (other than minimizing government persecution of that community. All of these issues could and should be dissecte…

> Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right. This is incorrect. It may have widened in both directions, but it absolutely did not shift to the right. Transgender support from mainstream corporations (Target, Budweiser, etc) would have been completely unthinkable 10 years ago. That’s just one example of many. What has happened is that the Overton window is broken because people don’t eve…

I think this is a perfect example of why the left-right axis doesn't capture the issues here. Support for gay or trans rights seems to have little or nothing to do with the problems described.

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#96

Post by onos »

RC_ITR wrote: post #77
onos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old navy is not closing, then?

Having an old navy in a tourist corridor that does a very bad job of serving local residents is your metric of whether a place is a healthy city or not? I’m sure all those AI specialists will flee now that they can’t get fast fashion jorts on market street. It’s amazing to me that on a forum of supposed hackers, legacy businesses failing is some sort of harbinger of doom. E-commerce won in SF. This forum should be th…

I’ll take that as a yes.

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#97

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fmajid wrote: post #88
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of states give prisoners open bus tickets on release if they have no one coming to pick them up. They are not technically sending them to LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle, but where else are they going to go? Living outside in LA is much better than doing the same in Houston. But this is another point of the problem: anyone who solves the problem well is bound to just attract more of the problem. People are not imm…

SF does not solve the homeless problem, but there is good money to be made in the welfare-industrial complex pretending to help. Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place. Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched…

Salt Lake City is actually pretty liberal, not just by Utah standards.

And the “SLC solved homelessness” was a last decade story that has already unraveled due to sustained and increased funding not being applied (again national problem, local solutions can’t do much).

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#98

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sokoloff wrote: post #89
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to do tax returns in China. But you have to fill out a form with some numbers from your pay check stubs as HR tells you. It’s absolutely bizarre, it doesn’t change what taxes you pay at all, but you are in trouble if you don’t file the form (which is in Chinese anyways and I’ve never read through).

Wouldn’t it seem weird if the official government form wasn’t in the official government language?

Oh no arguments about that, it was a disclaimer that I had no idea what this form really was for. It was called a “self reporting tax form” but was pretty systematic in how it was filled out. Our HR just gave us a PowerPoint on what numbers to put where.

So it could have been a language gap thing that the useless paperwork was actual useful for some reason that I would only know if I could read Chinese.

Re: San Francisco’s Financial Crisis

#99

Post by joefitzgerald »

monero-xmr wrote: post #26
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #21

I think they surely can get rid of a lot of city personal. I've moved to a different state and just being in contact with government officials to get things done is just... easier. Something not right? Let's fix it. Let's do this first and then that. General California feeling: you're missing form 5858b. Can't help you. Come back later. Next available appointment: 3 months. Half of their jobs could be filled by using…

You don’t understand. The incentives are all wrong. There is absolutely zero benefit for a bureaucracy to make itself more efficient and require less money each year. No one is incentivized to ensure money is being spent well. The biggest incentive for a lifelong bureaucrat is to increase budget and headcount - the more money and headcount you have, the more important you are. There is never a time when you aren’t re…

I use my adaptation of Hanlon’s razor frequently:

> Never mistake for stupidity that which is explained by incentive structure.

Seems to fit here also!

Post reply on HN