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This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back

by mbesto 11y ago

This is why the free market is so great. 1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. 2. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave. 3. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning. 4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out. I too think it's weird here, but since I do enjoy my life in the Bay area enough, I'm happy to wait for the market to correct to normalcy. The people who are here just to chase the "me too's" will soon be forgotten. EDIT: I should probably clarify my overall sentiment. People who come to SF and complain that this situation is less than ideal have the freedom to simply choose not to play. The cost of living is driven by the simple laws of supply and demand. Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths.

josh2600 11y ago
Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI. Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. I think automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For some people, that's any task which must be performed twice and then you write a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...
- grandalf 11y ago
  Excellent points. In most startups it doesn't take much technology to prove (or disprove) the business model idea. For the few startups that do experience significant growth, it's much easier to find talent (engineering and otherwise).
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  >Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week. Found out that the project was going to be axed if we didn't deliver very soon.
  - ionforce 11y ago
    How does a guy like that become senior? As a senior one should know that there is a pragmatic balance lost in trying to aim for perfection.
    - IndianAstronaut 11y ago
      He has his strengths. He produces exceptional quality code (albeit a bit on the spaghetti side) and is good at finding problems in code. He is also 63 and has decades of experience.
      - restalis 11y ago
        It's a challenge for me to imagine "exceptional quality code" with "albeit a bit on the spaghetti side". Can you elaborate?
        IndianAstronaut 11y ago
        It covers a lot of corner cases, it is fast, it is robust, and produces good quality data. Only thing is it is hard to navigate.
        superplussed 11y ago
        These developer descriptions sound like they are coming from the "Silicon Valley" tv show.
- warrenmar 11y ago
  StitchFix started as an Excel sheet. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2rjqt2/stitch_fix_is_a_3_year_old_startup_now_valued_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2rjqt2/stitch_fix...
  - JackFr 11y ago
    The Book-of-the-Month club operated for 75 years before they had even a website.
- nawitus 11y ago
  >I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people. Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.
  - azinman2 11y ago
    If they were trivial then they'd have been eaten up by competitor now.
    - mantas 11y ago
      They're technically trivial. But execution ain't.
      - azinman2 11y ago
        Just because they're not google search doesn't mean their technically trivial either. Have you worked on either product or do you just assume?
  - JackFr 11y ago
    Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.
    - pc86 11y ago
      Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between the app being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.
- AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
  An excellent point. In fact, it is stated often that ZeroCater - a YC graduate - began as an Excel spreadsheet. (http://thehustle.co/stories/zerocater/ http://thehustle.co/stories/zerocater/)
- Animats 11y ago
  "Soylent" is a good example. They regularly post about their elaborate IT infrastructure. Based on their sales volume, they do about two transactions a minute. One shared server could handle their transaction load. They could get a low-end hosting account from Hostgator, use one of the six shopping cart programs Hostgator supports, and lay off most of their computer staff. (Soylent doesn't even make the stuff. That's outsourced to Jasper Products in Joplin, MO.[1]) [1] http://www.jasperproducts.com http://www.jasperproducts.com
sholanozie 11y ago
Sorry, but this is a totally heartless comment. By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications. Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.
- stvswn 11y ago
  Wait, what are the problems? "Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers. Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it. So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion? And, then, what changes are you proposing?
  - acchow 11y ago
    Can whoever downvoted this explain why they did so?
    - stvswn 11y ago
      Thanks, it's interesting that I simply asked "what are the problems?" and that offended people so much that they downvoted -- but then I got three different answers. One person says "collective values, worship of the free market." Another person says "there are poor people in Chicago." Finally there's a third person who says "people can't afford to live in their neighborhoods because cost of living got too expensive." So they haven't agreed on the problem, but they agree on the enemy - it's the spoiled engineers and their high salaries.
      - sholanozie 11y ago
        "They"? The people who responded to you aren't part of some larger conspiracy to oppose you, or even advocating on behalf of the same people or ideas. The fact that I'm commenting here doesn't even mean that I agree with the article. Could it be possible that there are several problems at play here, at once? You can't look at situations as if they are black or white, or "us vs. them".
munificent 11y ago
> This is why the free market is so great. I feel like I should just make this my email/social media signature since I say it so often: A perfect requires these things: - Perfect market information - No participant with market power to set prices - Non intervention by governments - No barriers to entry or exit - Equal access to factors of production - Profit maximization - No externalities The less you have those, the less efficient your market is. "Free markets" aren't these magical things that arise on their own in nature. They are carefully crafted and maintained artificial environments and most are far from efficient. Market forces are not a silver bullet that will solve all problems if we just sit around and wait long enough for the invisible hand to do everything.
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  The reason free markets are great isn't their speed (though they are often faster than your average politician); it's the self-regulating nature of it. You don't have to tell people to stop buying overly-expensive food, nor do you have to tell the food stores to cut their prices. Over time, they each realize that the higher price isn't working; the customer buys elsewhere (either across the street or aceoss the state), and the grocery store lowers its prices until people decide that it's worth it again. Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets.
  - acchow 11y ago
    > Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets. And yet even telecoms have invested huge swaths of capital to get us to 3G then LTE.
    - bpchaps 11y ago
jobu 11y ago
> Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. That's a rather nonchalant way of saying something that will likely be a very sharp, painful transition. And when a boom-town the size of San Francisco implodes it can have a huge impact on the entire country.
Rusky 11y ago
I don't see any reason to assume the free market will solve those problems- the local markets are doing just fine with the rich (spoiled?) part of the population, and have little to no incentive to change; dumb startups are doing just fine as VC fodder; bad engineers are doing fantastic at making CRUD apps for startups that don't need anything fancier.
devsquid 11y ago
The free market is great if you're wealthy... yes
sampo 11y ago
> This is why the free market is so great. I don't disagree with the points you made. But there is nothing free market about the housing market in San Francisco.
- restalis 11y ago
  "But there is nothing free market about the housing market in San Francisco." How so? There is a supply (although limited), and there is a demand. The landlords are interested to maximize their profits, but can not ask more than the market can bear.
  - sampo 11y ago
    There would be high demand for buying land to build new homes on. Or buying land with old low-rise buildings, and replacing the buildings with higher and/or more efficient design, to provide more homes on the same piece of land. But even if the owner would like to sell the land, and buyer would like to pay a lot of money, this is usually not allowed, for political reasons. If let to operate more freely, free market economy would be efficient in increasing the density of homes in high-demand areas. This is very much not happening in San Francisco. If people are willing to pay Manhattan-prices (and even more), the free market response would be to build at Manhattan-density.
popmystack 11y ago
What an extreme simplification and absurd push-under-the-rug statements. I'm glad we could stand by free-market narratives while we waste untold amounts of capital on nothing.
whybroke 11y ago
This is the archetype of magical thinking. You could just as well have said god will do those things with the amount of support you offered. But it seems there is such an unquestioning faith in "the invisible hand" that the mere suggestion that misrembered high school economics may be an oversimplification, let alone in error, is viewed as unspeakable blasphemy. Particularly ludicrous is: >4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out. But I'd ask the prophet of the invisible hand these questions: Isn't the current state necessarily exactly correct given the panglossian invisble hand? How is it other's using the same hand waving also claim the bay area economy is a permanent feature? Heretics I presume? If the invisible hand is going to correct the situation, when will it happen? Next week? A hundred years? Or "soon, my son, soon"
- popmystack 11y ago
  There is absolutely no reason for this post to be down voted. I am not sure why people are okay with "it will fix itself" -- it is an absurd position.
FussyZeus 11y ago
I agree with everything you said but this: > then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning. Made me lol. As if any Government has ever changed it's offerings based on the market. They'll just keep paying public workers absurd wages to continue to suck because status quo is way more important than customer satisfaction when it comes to public entities.
- babygoat 11y ago
  Ever? Your bias is showing. http://www.twincities.com/2015/12/31/mark-dayton-wants-100-million-for-rural-minnesota-web-access/ http://www.twincities.com/2015/12/31/mark-dayton-wants-100-m...
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    How does a politician wanting money to start a service defeat my point in any way? He's not fighting a status quo, he's adding a new service which is extremely sexy for a politician to do, especially in the leadup to an election. Not to mention he isn't actually doing anything yet, he's demanding funding to do something, which is also way easier to do then actually doing it. A Government entity has no competition, or if they do (like the USPS for example) they can rely on subsidies from the Government and run at a total loss if they need to. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, but if you have a worker who knows their performance is tied to their ability to deliver a product and another worker who knows they're pay is coming whether the customers are happy or not, one of those is going to be motivated to make sure customers are happy and the other one is not, and they will act accordingly.
deathcakes 11y ago
1) Sure, eventually. 2) Sure, eventually. 3) Sure because you are so averse to being taxed that you will deliberately destroy your own potential to get to work rather than acknowledge the idea that this could be a shared problem solveable by shared funds. 4) Sure, eventually. So your argument is that this is really bad at the moment, but over an unspecified amount of time, 'the market' will sort it out. No worries. No need to think about things. No need to consider things. Just the market. Isn't the market great.
- restalis 11y ago
  I think he was putting it more as a natural state of things. It's not "really bad", it's how things are ought to be. Yes, think about things, consider things for your life, plan out, et cetera. He does that and he is content (although I'm not sure how much he's actually considering in his daily thought sessions, as I've encountered more ignorant content people than thoughtful content ones).
cylinder 11y ago
Free market? Last I heard the money supply was decided by a few people in New York.
ktRolster 11y ago
"When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning." The opposite, I think. I recently started taking public transportation MORE often, because traffic on the freeways has gotten so bad.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Ok, as a perennial voice for free markets I agree with your observations, but not your point. Having lived through it I see the damage it is doing to individuals who will take years to recover. Too many engineers today, perhaps like sports players, take a big salary, project it across 30 years and then say "Wow I've got millions headed my way, do I really need to bag my lunch?" I've watched as they became both broke and depressed as the wave that was supporting those salaries and the technology that was supporting their employment have broken (as they always do) and they are suddenly "too old and too out of date." Like the guy who was making $200K/year as a SOAP architect for some package that managed really expensive enterprise server and storage gear. When the wave passed and people moved to cheap white box servers in abundance using things like Docker or Chef to run and manage them, this guy walked into a world at 45 years of age with zero applicable experience to your distributed server cluster based company. And he is slowly burning what savings he had because the only entry level programmer job he could get is paying him $85K and his take home pay doesn't completely cover his burn rate (he optimistically expects to be promoted to a high paying job as soon as they see what he can do.) If you are living the high life as an in demand engineer please don't be that guy. Start planning to provide funds for your kids education, or if you're not having kids ever then a fund to pay someone else's kids to take care of you when you're too old to work. Cut out recurring expenses in your life where ever you can and put excess money into savings or investment vehicles so that it can start working for you by earning more money. Understand that life is change until you die. Anticipate change to avoid having change drive your decisions.
- pc86 11y ago
  I agree with everything you said but I think you're underestimating the importance of fighting lifestyle inflation at all costs. It's incredibly hard to justify a six-figure burn rate under any circumstances, even in San Francisco. If you've got a job making multiples of the median household income in the US, it's incredibly irresponsible to live in a manner that wouldn't support a pretty major pay cut at any point.
  - Retric 11y ago
    IMO, housing is a partial exception. You can easily opt out of 25$ for lunch and 6$ coffee seeming normal, but wasting hours a day driving is soul crushing. That said, making 150k and having roommates is completely reasonable.
gone35 11y ago
This is why the free market is so great. Intractability issues of Nash equilibria aside, if that's your take on an article ostensibly about sustained market disequilibria, then I don't think you fully understand what a 'free market' is supposed to entail.
wahsd 11y ago
If only that were the case. Especially in the internet age, one would expect that you could work in some far off place where you can get a mansion on a huge piece of land and have a drive jusr for the amount you pay in rent in SF, yet for some reason (it's free money bubble, stupid) people, i.e., kids that drank the Tech Crunch Kool-Aid, all cram into tiny little apartments to do useless shit. Ultimately the missing element from the market is rational actors.
- gclaramunt 11y ago
  > Ultimately the missing element from the market is rational actors. Love the quote :)
mempko 11y ago
Your examples are why the market is seriously flawed here. Why does it take so long for the market to correct and why does the market allow such huge variance from normal? I think the answer is obvious, people get acclimated to their environment very quickly and lose the ability to see systemic problems. Therefore it seems the market will tend towards local minimum. Similar to how evolution works. It doesn't handle gross changes without a lot of pain.
pc86 11y ago
Disclaimer: I don't live in SF and never would > When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning. I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply raise taxes to cover the shortfall and let the public transit die.
- restalis 11y ago
  "I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply [...] let the public transit die." That kind of happened in other parts of the world (in the former socialist block). You know what happened afterwards? The significant demand for mass transportation encouraged private parties to step in. They weren't as good or as convenient compared to the former government-subsidized public one, but they solved the problem for a while.
bduerst 11y ago
What about the people who have already lived there, who aren't on engineering salaries and work service positions? I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.
- yarou 11y ago
  Of course, but their skin tone is a few shades darker, so nobody talks or cares about them. People would rather argue in ivory towers about abstract problems that don't exist in the real world (sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc), rather than work on unpleasant and unsexy problems that can easily be solved.
  - the_af 11y ago
    > sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc What's abstract or unreal about them? What's "Internet" feminism, for that matter? I'd say sexism in videogames is real... and the level of aggression in online discussions about that topic is almost asphyxiating, enough that I consider it a serious problem. Would you similarly argue that it's "unreal" to argue about sexism (or racism, or whatever -ism) in movies? It's a shame you said this, because I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.
    - yarou 11y ago
      I'm on a completely different planet than you, and lately I've realized I'm completely different from the vast majority of commenters here. I could explain it to you, but it would be an experience akin to a blind man seeing for the first time. Experience is the mother of all teachers, and while I wouldn't wish my path on anybody else, it certainly has given me clarity on certain topics of discourse. "Sexism in video games" is an abstract problem because it's basically mental masturbation. Suppose you are right, and there is a problem. What is the net benefit to society? Some privileged child somewhere will feel good about themselves for a brief moment, until they find another abstract issue that ultimately is meaningless. There are much more pressing problems in our world today, that are ugly, unsightly, and less "rewarding" in the short term dopamine releasing sense. Like income inequality, the increasing erosion of civil liberities, and single moms. An Ask HN with thousands of replies so you we can collectively pat ourselves on the back doesn't count as solving anything. If anything, it just shows how far we've fallen.
AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
Considering how very non-free-market principles led to the regulation and law that made startup speculation such a hot, bubbly market, I am led to strongly question your underlying premise. You are speaking of a free market that is highly theoretical, because there is no such "free market" in today's economy, no matter where you live. However, free market theory suggests that a situation such as SF is not possible under a free market. San Francisco has a great deal of political might, which explains a lot of the founding contexts allowing it to survive in the way it does. Add the fact that employees cannot be held to an non-compete agreement, and you have a bunch of engineers stepping over one another to chase the next six month gig as the number of ridiculous startup options balloons to a totally unsustainable size.
tostitos1979 11y ago
Your comment is valid if we lived in a totally free market. We do not. 1) Want to build a skyscrapper? Having the same housing density as Tokyo or Manhattan? No .. sorry .. think of the traffic or view or ... whatever. 2) The place you live in has become very valuable. Pay the appropriate property tax. Umm .. no .. sorry. We don't want to make live unaffordable for seniors or umm whatever. The reality is just wealth distribution. Away from people who are young and new to the area and towards those who were here before.
- nwah1 11y ago
  Exactly! Although, it isn't just that assessments need to rise in tandem with values, which Prop 13 prevents, but the rates on land ought to rise dramatically which Prop 13 also prevents. And taxes ought to be eliminated for improvements. Considering people seem to have planned their lives around the implicit expectation of the current tax structure, it isn't ridiculous for seniors on "fixed incomes" to be nervous. But let's remember that seniors are the wealthiest age demographic, and those among them who are actually financially needy can be easily cared for while still not stifling all the hopes of young entrepreneurs.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. What do free markets and San Francisco NIMBYism have to do with each-other?
hawleyal 11y ago
Don't get offended. People are free to speak with their mouths.
sandworm101 11y ago
>> Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths. Careful. Money=speech is a touchy subject. It implies that those with less money are somehow less important. That may be true from a libertarian absolute free market standpoint, but cities are not liberated markets. They are nests of overlapping interests and entrenched power brokers. Not everyone is free to move at the drop of a hat, nor should we expect them to bounce around chasing their market niche. We should respect that people want to live in community year after year without being forced out, or in, due to market fluctuations. There is value in establishing roots in a community beyond the financial.
Kinnard 11y ago
I don't know if SF public transportation is awful . . . try living in Detroit.
harmonicon 11y ago
Your points are great and all, but what about the local folks that the engineers displaced? The people who has lived in SF for decades, contributed to its wonderful culture but failed to catch on to the tech boom. After being pushed out by the high living cost you cannot just expect they will seamlessly move right back when the prices/market calibrates to normal.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
Such a simple answer for a problem that is vastly more complex. Here's 2 simple ideas for you: 1. Some people can have more freedom than other people. 2. In a free market, rich people have more freedom than everyone else. A free market is not truly free. Although this concept is frighteningly obvious it is incredibly hard to articulate. You are essentially telling people to get the fuck out of San Francisco because they're not rich enough.

by mbesto 11y ago

josh2600 11y ago

Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI. Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. I think automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For some people, that's any task which must be performed twice and then you write a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...

grandalf 11y ago
Excellent points. In most startups it doesn't take much technology to prove (or disprove) the business model idea. For the few startups that do experience significant growth, it's much easier to find talent (engineering and otherwise).
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
>Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. This is why a product I was working on almost got killed. The senior engineer working on it wanted perfection before delivery. The project was already one year overdue. He suddenly came in one day and rushed me to finish up something and he wrapped up a couple things and we launched at the end of the week. Found out that the project was going to be axed if we didn't deliver very soon.
- ionforce 11y ago
  How does a guy like that become senior? As a senior one should know that there is a pragmatic balance lost in trying to aim for perfection.
  - IndianAstronaut 11y ago
    He has his strengths. He produces exceptional quality code (albeit a bit on the spaghetti side) and is good at finding problems in code. He is also 63 and has decades of experience.
    - restalis 11y ago
      It's a challenge for me to imagine "exceptional quality code" with "albeit a bit on the spaghetti side". Can you elaborate?
      - IndianAstronaut 11y ago
        It covers a lot of corner cases, it is fast, it is robust, and produces good quality data. Only thing is it is hard to navigate.
        superplussed 11y ago
        These developer descriptions sound like they are coming from the "Silicon Valley" tv show.
warrenmar 11y ago
StitchFix started as an Excel sheet. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2rjqt2/stitch_fix_is_a_3_year_old_startup_now_valued_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2rjqt2/stitch_fix...
- JackFr 11y ago
  The Book-of-the-Month club operated for 75 years before they had even a website.
nawitus 11y ago
>I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow. I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people. Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.
- azinman2 11y ago
  If they were trivial then they'd have been eaten up by competitor now.
  - mantas 11y ago
    They're technically trivial. But execution ain't.
    - azinman2 11y ago
      Just because they're not google search doesn't mean their technically trivial either. Have you worked on either product or do you just assume?
- JackFr 11y ago
  Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.
  - pc86 11y ago
    Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between the app being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.
AndrewUnmuted 11y ago
An excellent point. In fact, it is stated often that ZeroCater - a YC graduate - began as an Excel spreadsheet. (http://thehustle.co/stories/zerocater/ http://thehustle.co/stories/zerocater/)
Animats 11y ago
"Soylent" is a good example. They regularly post about their elaborate IT infrastructure. Based on their sales volume, they do about two transactions a minute. One shared server could handle their transaction load. They could get a low-end hosting account from Hostgator, use one of the six shopping cart programs Hostgator supports, and lay off most of their computer staff. (Soylent doesn't even make the stuff. That's outsourced to Jasper Products in Joplin, MO.[1]) [1] http://www.jasperproducts.com http://www.jasperproducts.com

sholanozie 11y ago

Sorry, but this is a totally heartless comment. By saying things like "Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave" you're completely overlooking the human costs and implications. Things don't just change overnight. It's an slow, painful, eventual decline. Things shouldn't need to be pushed to a breaking point for us to make necessary changes to alleviate these problems.

stvswn 11y ago
Wait, what are the problems? "Everyone rides an Uber" is great for the Uber drivers. "People spend too much on organic produce" is great for the farmers. "Even bad engineers are in high demand" is great for the mediocre engineers. Housing is a problem, but this post didn't mention it. So before we start making changes, what are the problems in your opinion? And, then, what changes are you proposing?
- acchow 11y ago
  Can whoever downvoted this explain why they did so?
  - stvswn 11y ago
    Thanks, it's interesting that I simply asked "what are the problems?" and that offended people so much that they downvoted -- but then I got three different answers. One person says "collective values, worship of the free market." Another person says "there are poor people in Chicago." Finally there's a third person who says "people can't afford to live in their neighborhoods because cost of living got too expensive." So they haven't agreed on the problem, but they agree on the enemy - it's the spoiled engineers and their high salaries.
    - sholanozie 11y ago
      "They"? The people who responded to you aren't part of some larger conspiracy to oppose you, or even advocating on behalf of the same people or ideas. The fact that I'm commenting here doesn't even mean that I agree with the article. Could it be possible that there are several problems at play here, at once? You can't look at situations as if they are black or white, or "us vs. them".

munificent 11y ago

> This is why the free market is so great. I feel like I should just make this my email/social media signature since I say it so often: A perfect requires these things: - Perfect market information - No participant with market power to set prices - Non intervention by governments - No barriers to entry or exit - Equal access to factors of production - Profit maximization - No externalities The less you have those, the less efficient your market is. "Free markets" aren't these magical things that arise on their own in nature. They are carefully crafted and maintained artificial environments and most are far from efficient. Market forces are not a silver bullet that will solve all problems if we just sit around and wait long enough for the invisible hand to do everything.

dawnbreez 11y ago
The reason free markets are great isn't their speed (though they are often faster than your average politician); it's the self-regulating nature of it. You don't have to tell people to stop buying overly-expensive food, nor do you have to tell the food stores to cut their prices. Over time, they each realize that the higher price isn't working; the customer buys elsewhere (either across the street or aceoss the state), and the grocery store lowers its prices until people decide that it's worth it again. Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets.
- acchow 11y ago
  > Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets. And yet even telecoms have invested huge swaths of capital to get us to 3G then LTE.
  - bpchaps 11y ago

jobu 11y ago

> Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. That's a rather nonchalant way of saying something that will likely be a very sharp, painful transition. And when a boom-town the size of San Francisco implodes it can have a huge impact on the entire country.

Rusky 11y ago

I don't see any reason to assume the free market will solve those problems- the local markets are doing just fine with the rich (spoiled?) part of the population, and have little to no incentive to change; dumb startups are doing just fine as VC fodder; bad engineers are doing fantastic at making CRUD apps for startups that don't need anything fancier.

devsquid 11y ago

The free market is great if you're wealthy... yes

sampo 11y ago

> This is why the free market is so great. I don't disagree with the points you made. But there is nothing free market about the housing market in San Francisco.

restalis 11y ago
"But there is nothing free market about the housing market in San Francisco." How so? There is a supply (although limited), and there is a demand. The landlords are interested to maximize their profits, but can not ask more than the market can bear.
- sampo 11y ago
  There would be high demand for buying land to build new homes on. Or buying land with old low-rise buildings, and replacing the buildings with higher and/or more efficient design, to provide more homes on the same piece of land. But even if the owner would like to sell the land, and buyer would like to pay a lot of money, this is usually not allowed, for political reasons. If let to operate more freely, free market economy would be efficient in increasing the density of homes in high-demand areas. This is very much not happening in San Francisco. If people are willing to pay Manhattan-prices (and even more), the free market response would be to build at Manhattan-density.

popmystack 11y ago

What an extreme simplification and absurd push-under-the-rug statements. I'm glad we could stand by free-market narratives while we waste untold amounts of capital on nothing.

whybroke 11y ago

This is the archetype of magical thinking. You could just as well have said god will do those things with the amount of support you offered. But it seems there is such an unquestioning faith in "the invisible hand" that the mere suggestion that misrembered high school economics may be an oversimplification, let alone in error, is viewed as unspeakable blasphemy. Particularly ludicrous is: >4. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out. But I'd ask the prophet of the invisible hand these questions: Isn't the current state necessarily exactly correct given the panglossian invisble hand? How is it other's using the same hand waving also claim the bay area economy is a permanent feature? Heretics I presume? If the invisible hand is going to correct the situation, when will it happen? Next week? A hundred years? Or "soon, my son, soon"

popmystack 11y ago
There is absolutely no reason for this post to be down voted. I am not sure why people are okay with "it will fix itself" -- it is an absurd position.

FussyZeus 11y ago

I agree with everything you said but this: > then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning. Made me lol. As if any Government has ever changed it's offerings based on the market. They'll just keep paying public workers absurd wages to continue to suck because status quo is way more important than customer satisfaction when it comes to public entities.

babygoat 11y ago
Ever? Your bias is showing. http://www.twincities.com/2015/12/31/mark-dayton-wants-100-million-for-rural-minnesota-web-access/ http://www.twincities.com/2015/12/31/mark-dayton-wants-100-m...
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  How does a politician wanting money to start a service defeat my point in any way? He's not fighting a status quo, he's adding a new service which is extremely sexy for a politician to do, especially in the leadup to an election. Not to mention he isn't actually doing anything yet, he's demanding funding to do something, which is also way easier to do then actually doing it. A Government entity has no competition, or if they do (like the USPS for example) they can rely on subsidies from the Government and run at a total loss if they need to. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, but if you have a worker who knows their performance is tied to their ability to deliver a product and another worker who knows they're pay is coming whether the customers are happy or not, one of those is going to be motivated to make sure customers are happy and the other one is not, and they will act accordingly.

deathcakes 11y ago

1) Sure, eventually. 2) Sure, eventually. 3) Sure because you are so averse to being taxed that you will deliberately destroy your own potential to get to work rather than acknowledge the idea that this could be a shared problem solveable by shared funds. 4) Sure, eventually. So your argument is that this is really bad at the moment, but over an unspecified amount of time, 'the market' will sort it out. No worries. No need to think about things. No need to consider things. Just the market. Isn't the market great.

restalis 11y ago
I think he was putting it more as a natural state of things. It's not "really bad", it's how things are ought to be. Yes, think about things, consider things for your life, plan out, et cetera. He does that and he is content (although I'm not sure how much he's actually considering in his daily thought sessions, as I've encountered more ignorant content people than thoughtful content ones).

cylinder 11y ago

Free market? Last I heard the money supply was decided by a few people in New York.

ktRolster 11y ago

"When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning." The opposite, I think. I recently started taking public transportation MORE often, because traffic on the freeways has gotten so bad.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Ok, as a perennial voice for free markets I agree with your observations, but not your point. Having lived through it I see the damage it is doing to individuals who will take years to recover. Too many engineers today, perhaps like sports players, take a big salary, project it across 30 years and then say "Wow I've got millions headed my way, do I really need to bag my lunch?" I've watched as they became both broke and depressed as the wave that was supporting those salaries and the technology that was supporting their employment have broken (as they always do) and they are suddenly "too old and too out of date." Like the guy who was making $200K/year as a SOAP architect for some package that managed really expensive enterprise server and storage gear. When the wave passed and people moved to cheap white box servers in abundance using things like Docker or Chef to run and manage them, this guy walked into a world at 45 years of age with zero applicable experience to your distributed server cluster based company. And he is slowly burning what savings he had because the only entry level programmer job he could get is paying him $85K and his take home pay doesn't completely cover his burn rate (he optimistically expects to be promoted to a high paying job as soon as they see what he can do.) If you are living the high life as an in demand engineer please don't be that guy. Start planning to provide funds for your kids education, or if you're not having kids ever then a fund to pay someone else's kids to take care of you when you're too old to work. Cut out recurring expenses in your life where ever you can and put excess money into savings or investment vehicles so that it can start working for you by earning more money. Understand that life is change until you die. Anticipate change to avoid having change drive your decisions.

pc86 11y ago
I agree with everything you said but I think you're underestimating the importance of fighting lifestyle inflation at all costs. It's incredibly hard to justify a six-figure burn rate under any circumstances, even in San Francisco. If you've got a job making multiples of the median household income in the US, it's incredibly irresponsible to live in a manner that wouldn't support a pretty major pay cut at any point.
- Retric 11y ago
  IMO, housing is a partial exception. You can easily opt out of 25$ for lunch and 6$ coffee seeming normal, but wasting hours a day driving is soul crushing. That said, making 150k and having roommates is completely reasonable.

gone35 11y ago

This is why the free market is so great. Intractability issues of Nash equilibria aside, if that's your take on an article ostensibly about sustained market disequilibria, then I don't think you fully understand what a 'free market' is supposed to entail.

wahsd 11y ago

If only that were the case. Especially in the internet age, one would expect that you could work in some far off place where you can get a mansion on a huge piece of land and have a drive jusr for the amount you pay in rent in SF, yet for some reason (it's free money bubble, stupid) people, i.e., kids that drank the Tech Crunch Kool-Aid, all cram into tiny little apartments to do useless shit. Ultimately the missing element from the market is rational actors.

gclaramunt 11y ago
> Ultimately the missing element from the market is rational actors. Love the quote :)

mempko 11y ago

Your examples are why the market is seriously flawed here. Why does it take so long for the market to correct and why does the market allow such huge variance from normal? I think the answer is obvious, people get acclimated to their environment very quickly and lose the ability to see systemic problems. Therefore it seems the market will tend towards local minimum. Similar to how evolution works. It doesn't handle gross changes without a lot of pain.

pc86 11y ago

Disclaimer: I don't live in SF and never would > When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning. I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply raise taxes to cover the shortfall and let the public transit die.

restalis 11y ago
"I think what is much more likely is that the government will simply [...] let the public transit die." That kind of happened in other parts of the world (in the former socialist block). You know what happened afterwards? The significant demand for mass transportation encouraged private parties to step in. They weren't as good or as convenient compared to the former government-subsidized public one, but they solved the problem for a while.

bduerst 11y ago

What about the people who have already lived there, who aren't on engineering salaries and work service positions? I think it's fun to be flippant, but there still certain demographics that are being displaced and negatively impacted by the bubble.

yarou 11y ago
Of course, but their skin tone is a few shades darker, so nobody talks or cares about them. People would rather argue in ivory towers about abstract problems that don't exist in the real world (sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc), rather than work on unpleasant and unsexy problems that can easily be solved.
- the_af 11y ago
  > sexism in video games, Internet feminism, etc What's abstract or unreal about them? What's "Internet" feminism, for that matter? I'd say sexism in videogames is real... and the level of aggression in online discussions about that topic is almost asphyxiating, enough that I consider it a serious problem. Would you similarly argue that it's "unreal" to argue about sexism (or racism, or whatever -ism) in movies? It's a shame you said this, because I'm in agreement with the rest of your post.
  - yarou 11y ago
    I'm on a completely different planet than you, and lately I've realized I'm completely different from the vast majority of commenters here. I could explain it to you, but it would be an experience akin to a blind man seeing for the first time. Experience is the mother of all teachers, and while I wouldn't wish my path on anybody else, it certainly has given me clarity on certain topics of discourse. "Sexism in video games" is an abstract problem because it's basically mental masturbation. Suppose you are right, and there is a problem. What is the net benefit to society? Some privileged child somewhere will feel good about themselves for a brief moment, until they find another abstract issue that ultimately is meaningless. There are much more pressing problems in our world today, that are ugly, unsightly, and less "rewarding" in the short term dopamine releasing sense. Like income inequality, the increasing erosion of civil liberities, and single moms. An Ask HN with thousands of replies so you we can collectively pat ourselves on the back doesn't count as solving anything. If anything, it just shows how far we've fallen.

AndrewUnmuted 11y ago

Considering how very non-free-market principles led to the regulation and law that made startup speculation such a hot, bubbly market, I am led to strongly question your underlying premise. You are speaking of a free market that is highly theoretical, because there is no such "free market" in today's economy, no matter where you live. However, free market theory suggests that a situation such as SF is not possible under a free market. San Francisco has a great deal of political might, which explains a lot of the founding contexts allowing it to survive in the way it does. Add the fact that employees cannot be held to an non-compete agreement, and you have a bunch of engineers stepping over one another to chase the next six month gig as the number of ridiculous startup options balloons to a totally unsustainable size.

tostitos1979 11y ago

Your comment is valid if we lived in a totally free market. We do not. 1) Want to build a skyscrapper? Having the same housing density as Tokyo or Manhattan? No .. sorry .. think of the traffic or view or ... whatever. 2) The place you live in has become very valuable. Pay the appropriate property tax. Umm .. no .. sorry. We don't want to make live unaffordable for seniors or umm whatever. The reality is just wealth distribution. Away from people who are young and new to the area and towards those who were here before.

nwah1 11y ago
Exactly! Although, it isn't just that assessments need to rise in tandem with values, which Prop 13 prevents, but the rates on land ought to rise dramatically which Prop 13 also prevents. And taxes ought to be eliminated for improvements. Considering people seem to have planned their lives around the implicit expectation of the current tax structure, it isn't ridiculous for seniors on "fixed incomes" to be nervous. But let's remember that seniors are the wealthiest age demographic, and those among them who are actually financially needy can be easily cared for while still not stifling all the hopes of young entrepreneurs.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>1. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms. What do free markets and San Francisco NIMBYism have to do with each-other?

hawleyal 11y ago

Don't get offended. People are free to speak with their mouths.

sandworm101 11y ago

>> Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths. Careful. Money=speech is a touchy subject. It implies that those with less money are somehow less important. That may be true from a libertarian absolute free market standpoint, but cities are not liberated markets. They are nests of overlapping interests and entrenched power brokers. Not everyone is free to move at the drop of a hat, nor should we expect them to bounce around chasing their market niche. We should respect that people want to live in community year after year without being forced out, or in, due to market fluctuations. There is value in establishing roots in a community beyond the financial.

Kinnard 11y ago

I don't know if SF public transportation is awful . . . try living in Detroit.

harmonicon 11y ago

Your points are great and all, but what about the local folks that the engineers displaced? The people who has lived in SF for decades, contributed to its wonderful culture but failed to catch on to the tech boom. After being pushed out by the high living cost you cannot just expect they will seamlessly move right back when the prices/market calibrates to normal.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

Such a simple answer for a problem that is vastly more complex. Here's 2 simple ideas for you: 1. Some people can have more freedom than other people. 2. In a free market, rich people have more freedom than everyone else. A free market is not truly free. Although this concept is frighteningly obvious it is incredibly hard to articulate. You are essentially telling people to get the fuck out of San Francisco because they're not rich enough.