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Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

businessinsider.com

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Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#981

Post by bumby »

BobbyJo wrote: post #882
DSingularity wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unbecoming to point at the homeless and blame them for making our cities unattractive. These are human beings with souls and emotions. When they make us feel uncomfortable with their appearance or behavior we should remember they lead lives where they are likely suffering most of every day. We as a people have failed to create a society with space for these people to exist in peace, happiness, and good health.…

They are people, and I feel for the trouble they are in, but no amount of compassion or empathy could convince me to take a stroll through a majority of SF downtown after dark. Likewise with many of the South Bay trails and parks. I don't even go to SF downtown during the day anymore because of the number of times I've almost stepped in human feces, and the needles strewn about. 8 years of liberal politicians claimin…

>society does not exist to gift every person peace, safety, and health.

Helping to guarantee things like physical safety is one of the fundamental parts of the social contract. Laws governing those areas are covered by the Constitution (depending on how you interpret “peace”)

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#982

Post by burnthrow »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #980
burnthrow wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you'll have a much better time down there if you maintain the fantasy that you were a charming model all along and that American women are cold prudes. Wealthy geeks finding fulfillment of their "so rich that models have to fuck me" dream in the third world is a bit of a trope.

All I can say is.. YIKES Please see a therapist. whatever is going on in your headspace cannot be healthy

I'm not the one who needs to travel to Colombia to get a date.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#983

Post by BobbyJo »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #979
BobbyJo wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An opportunity is enough, I'd politely decline :)

An opportunity isn’t a choice. It’s more of a dice roll, and you don’t get to see the number.

It is by definition a chance to do something. If you don't get a choice, then you never had an opportunity.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#984

Post by BobbyJo »

romanoderoma wrote: post #978
BobbyJo wrote: post #950

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many homeless people have you met in SF? I've talked 1:1 with about 3, and in all three cases the people refused ample help due to 1) not wanting to go to rehab or 2) paranoid schizophrenia, which the city won't deal with to avoid civil rights problems. Boiling everything down to 'homelessness means society is selfish' is over simplifying an incredibly complicated problem. There are things that can be done, but i…

Homelessness as "a problem to deal with" means society is selfish, means exactly what you wrote. A society where people refuse to see it as a social issue, like sickness, and one that requires a lot of thought because you have to remove them from the eyes of people but don't want to deal with the consequences because it's actually a cleanse under a different name (decency, decorum, etc.). If SF is the least selfish o…

Are you saying things are fine the way they are and their isn't a problem? Are you saying that there is a problem and it's easy to solve? Are you saying there is a problem and it's hard to solve?

I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas, but I'm just not getting where you're going.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#985

Post by madamelic »

shuckles wrote: post #846
madamelic wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some cities also have an income tax (for example NYC). SF afaik and all of Pennsylvania does the same. NYC's rate is 3.9% I believe.

San Francisco is not allowed to have a city income tax due to state law. It wouldn’t matter much anyways: it’s a huge commuter town (daytime population is double or more the resident population), so the base to tax is relatively small. The real untapped taxable value in the city is land wealth. Until Prop 13 allows the city to tax land equitably, it will be forced to try harebrained tax schemes on employers or sales.

Good to know!

I think I mixed up discussion of a wealth tax with income tax. Or maybe that was somewhere else.

Thanks for straighting it up for me! :)

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#986

Post by romanoderoma »

BobbyJo wrote: post #984
romanoderoma wrote: post #978

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness as "a problem to deal with" means society is selfish, means exactly what you wrote. A society where people refuse to see it as a social issue, like sickness, and one that requires a lot of thought because you have to remove them from the eyes of people but don't want to deal with the consequences because it's actually a cleanse under a different name (decency, decorum, etc.). If SF is the least selfish o…

Are you saying things are fine the way they are and their isn't a problem? Are you saying that there is a problem and it's easy to solve? Are you saying there is a problem and it's hard to solve? I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas, but I'm just not getting where you're going.

Thanks for the question.

I'm saying it should be easy to solve for the richest country in the World given the sheer amount of resources it possess.

It looks impossible for the same exact country, because the society there doesn't like the solution.

Or to be more precise, they don't like being told that if other have solved it, they should just copy what the others have done.

Looks like that if you try to teach America something, the knee jerk reaction is always "X is of course underestimating something, the problem is hard, the solution can't be that easy and if X is proposing it is obviously wrong, or X would be richer then us"

Other countries have solved it, so it is solvable.

Solvable doesn't even mean it will disappear in this case, it means the situation can drammatically improve just by tuning a few knobs.

Like wearing and not wearing a mask, keeping or not keeping social distance, etc. you put all of these precautions together and you magically have much better chances of avoiding the contagion.

It is that simple.

Why it isn't in the US?

Because they don't want to solve it.

It would be as easy as reading the Wikipedia page on homelessness in Japan, for example

I'm taking Japan as an example because it was struggling with the problem, then they changed approach to it and have radically improved the condition of homeless people and reduce their number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan

> At the beginning of the 1990s, the homeless in Japan were viewed as a nuisance. The government tried to get rid of the people on streets because of "beautification programmes". Only in 1997 did Tokyo at last acknowledge the existence of homeless group representatives and start listening to their issues.

> I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas

I could write it in Italian, French, Spanish and even in bad German, but that would make it harder for people to follow.

The best I can do is my confusing English, sorry.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#987

Post by geebee »

greensquirrel wrote: post #779
habosa wrote: post #689

In the last 10-15 years San Francisco gained a ton of residents that didn't want to be there at all. They moved there because the job opportunities in tech were too hard to turn down. I had some friends like this, they just never really liked the city. Now they're all leaving because their job is not making them stay. That's fine and I'm happy they have more choices now. But there's a flip side to that. One of my lea…

> they just never really liked the city. Pretty hard to like a city where a non-trivial portion of the residents are hating on you and blaming you and others like you for many problems of their own doing. I left a year ago and I personally hope both San Francisco and all of California suffers fiscal collapse. The state grossly mistreats it's most productive citizens, when its those very citizens that fund the greates…

"Pretty hard to like a city where a non-trivial portion of the residents are hating on you and blaming you and others like you for many problems of their own doing."

Fair enough!

Though, ahem, that might describe the feeling of Californians who have moved anywhere else lately.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#988

Post by geebee »

wetpaws wrote: post #561
rpearl wrote: post #555

Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car. Really, even compared to other "walkable" cities beyond a select few, similarly expensive places. Nobody really brings up that the bay area has better LGBT and other minority protections than anywhere in the US, either. Every time someone mentions cheap midwest cities I have to pull up https://crossingenres.com/…

>Nobody really brings up that the bay area is one of few places in the US where you can live without a car I'm not sure what bay area are you talking about. The SF bay area is absolutely unmanageable without a car, unlike Portland or Seattle.

That's an interesting observation, though I think you've missed the effect of scale. Keep in mind, a one block town would be 100% accessible by a public transportation system consisting of a horse drawn carriage on permanent loop.

More of Portland is accessible by public transportation than the SF Bay Area, but then again, in absolute terms, there's notably less Portland to be accessed. I'd say that what you can access on public transportation in the SF Bay Area vastly exceeds what you can access in Portland, mainly because the SF Bay Area is far, far, bigger. There's also a lot more that you can't access in the SF Bay Area (and if you work in tech, you may be forced to access it).

One way to illustrate this would be to overlay a public transportation map on top of population density map based on census tracks. You'll see that there are far more high density census areas in SF/Oakland serviced by light rail, subway, bus systems, and so forth than in Portland, and that the areas connected offer vastly more in the realm of commerce, entertainment, arts, sports. The same will be true of Seattle was well.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#989

Post by BobbyJo »

romanoderoma wrote: post #986
BobbyJo wrote: post #984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying things are fine the way they are and their isn't a problem? Are you saying that there is a problem and it's easy to solve? Are you saying there is a problem and it's hard to solve? I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas, but I'm just not getting where you're going.

Thanks for the question. I'm saying it should be easy to solve for the richest country in the World given the sheer amount of resources it possess. It looks impossible for the same exact country, because the society there doesn't like the solution. Or to be more precise, they don't like being told that if other have solved it, they should just copy what the others have done. Looks like that if you try to teach Americ…

First, Japan's lower incidence of homeless is an anomaly mostly owing to the countries culture of extreme personal responsibility. If you've ever been to Japan you'd notice that extends to basically everything they do in public. Changing the culture of a melting pot of 300 million people is significantly harder than reading a wikipedia page. Side note (as someone whose been to Japan several times, and has several close friends who are Japanese citizens) Japan's homelessness problem is much more extreme in severity than raw number would lead you to believe. They have a smaller incidence, and the homeless themselves tend to try very hard to stay out of the way, but in the words of a Japanese friend "Japanese homeless are very very homeless". They aren't just people down on their luck, they are people with extreme mental and developmental impairments. Japan has an altogether different problem when it comes to homeless than other nations, not to mention many non-profits think the government's official numbers underreport the population of homeless by 2-3x.(TL;DR: Japan is a really awful model for any other country to follow.)

Second, the US has a lower incidence of homeless people than many countries with much more generous social programs (Canada, France, UK, New Zealand). Saying we just aren't throwing enough of our wealth at the problem is also evidently wrong. (You can look that up on Wikipedia)

Third, the homeless rate in the US has been on the decline for decades. So blowing San Francisco's problems up into some larger conversation that the US as a whole is failing is just inaccurate.

Re: Tech elites leaving San Francisco threaten Silicon Valley's supremacy

#990

Post by cultofmetatron »

burnthrow wrote: post #982
cultofmetatron wrote: post #980

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can say is.. YIKES Please see a therapist. whatever is going on in your headspace cannot be healthy

I'm not the one who needs to travel to Colombia to get a date.

well, at least not only do I get to date these beautiful women, I also don't have to talk to people like you outside of internet forums :)

That said, all the best and I hope you find some way to manage your anger. Life is way too short to live like a pressure cooker

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