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"San Francisco is filthy and has a homeless problem it refuses to take care of and does its best to either ignore or address indirectly. It is full of tech elit

"San Francisco is filthy and has a homeless problem it refuses to take care of and does its best to either ignore or address indirectly. It is full of tech elite who are completely disconnected from the world around them. ... I live in San Francisco." I thought this was a little hilarious. For so many people who live in the Bay Area, a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is. I too thought it was terrible, so I made the irrational decision to no longer live there. Everything else in the piece was pretty solid, as usual. I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I don't just mean sites that require a login or paywalled sites like NYTimes, and I don't mean sites where some functionality is crippled. I mean sites like Washington Post, which (apparently intermittently) fail to render any content at all. For those of us that are actively taking some steps to protect our privacy, the web is gradually becoming outright hostile.

beachstartup 11y ago
> a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is you forgot the kicker - while claiming to be superior to west LA, manhattan, chicago, etc, etc, etc.
scott_karana 11y ago
Admittedly, idlewords is a self-employed immigrant(?) sole-proprietor running a self-sufficient small business with open financial books and an equally open business model. Far from the regular demographic starting or running our current decade's "unicorn" startups with million dollar Series B and burnrates larger than some small countries. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a good portion of his time or money went towards improving the state of affairs in SF. ;-)
smacktoward 11y ago
Complaining about something doesn't mean that you're not disconnected from it, at least in the sense of feeling like you have any personal responsibility about it or agency to change it. People complain about the weather too.
JeremyNT 11y ago
> I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I have at various times tried to use the web this way by default, and it's frustrating to no end. The comments from the talk about the browser being the user agent really hit home for me. The browser is all we have to fight this, and it still (mostly) does what we tell it to. There are ways to deal with cookies other than outright blocking which allow you to bypass such defective-by-design sites (e.g. "private browsing" and add-ons like self-destructing cookies). The biggest concern I have, though, is how much computing I do on my Android telephone now. I have Firefox and uMatrix even there, sure, but it's an entire product designed to collect my data.

beachstartup 11y ago

> a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is you forgot the kicker - while claiming to be superior to west LA, manhattan, chicago, etc, etc, etc.

scott_karana 11y ago

Admittedly, idlewords is a self-employed immigrant(?) sole-proprietor running a self-sufficient small business with open financial books and an equally open business model. Far from the regular demographic starting or running our current decade's "unicorn" startups with million dollar Series B and burnrates larger than some small countries. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a good portion of his time or money went towards improving the state of affairs in SF. ;-)

smacktoward 11y ago

Complaining about something doesn't mean that you're not disconnected from it, at least in the sense of feeling like you have any personal responsibility about it or agency to change it. People complain about the weather too.

JeremyNT 11y ago

> I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I have at various times tried to use the web this way by default, and it's frustrating to no end. The comments from the talk about the browser being the user agent really hit home for me. The browser is all we have to fight this, and it still (mostly) does what we tell it to. There are ways to deal with cookies other than outright blocking which allow you to bypass such defective-by-design sites (e.g. "private browsing" and add-ons like self-destructing cookies). The biggest concern I have, though, is how much computing I do on my Android telephone now. I have Firefox and uMatrix even there, sure, but it's an entire product designed to collect my data.