9 ms·

The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

101 points by coldseattle 8y ago

suprgeek 8y ago
The housing and culture aspects mentioned are the very small tip of the dark side iceberg. Some of the other aspects: 1) The weaponization of profiling and targeting capabilities 2) Complete eradication of of the cultural notion of "Privacy" :- most people coming of age today think nothing of sharing the most private info in search of a few baubles (Likes, discounts, whatnot) 3) Pervasive and inescapable monitoring in every facet of our lives In short - all of the preconditions are there for a venal system that might give rise to a (technologically)ultra-capable fascist.
- justboxing 8y ago
  > that might give rise to a (technologically)ultra-capable fascist Here in America, this facist has already arrived.
  - ythn 8y ago
    *for very loose and liberal definitions of "facism"
    - vertexFarm 8y ago
      If you reduce your definition of fascism only to actual, original Italians and Germans in the 1930s and 40s, you completely disregard lessons that we should never forget, to remain always vigilant against the causes of that era. It doesn't somehow show respect for those who fought it then to shout down anyone who thinks comparable things might come to pass in our present time. I understand you think it seems childish to accuse certain practices today of being fascist, but you must also understand that by the time it's clicking its boots and saluting a dictator in front of columns of tanks, it's a little too late to make the comparison in a useful way. Unfortunately it requires a bit of imagination to work with an uncertain future, as is always the case.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - omegaworks 8y ago
      So we can't talk on here about how we have a President now that sees fit to strip away people's citizenship? https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturalization-task-force/ https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturaliz... We can't talk about how he's rolling back promises to soldiers to score political points? https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d How his DHS is conveniently losing documentation on children they've forcibly separated from their parents? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos-family-separation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos... Why do we see ourselves as separate from this conversation? Are we not people living with this? Seeing this happen to our neighbors? The people that serve and make our food?
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        All of this stuff is important, it's just not the topic of this forum.
        omegaworks 8y ago
        It's absolutely the topic of this forum. We created the infrastructure that allowed precise micro-targeting of individuals in districts and states that enabled this person to ascend to the highest office with a 3 million vote popular margin against him. His supporters specifically targeted people who might have voted against them with completely bogus information, to deactivate them and demotivate them from participating in our system. We need to be able to talk about this; how 200 year old electoral systems fare when they're pitted against brand new forms of machine-trained targeted advertising, dark user interface design, and disenfranchisement aided by technologically-enabled over-policing.
      - 8y ago
ohthehugemanate 8y ago
Very interesting read. When we discuss inequality, I think there are a lot of assumptions made that make it hard to really judge. For example, TFA trots out the high number of people on minimum wage, and the high percentage of people below the poverty line. This is misleading, because it misses out on some key ways that "capitalism raises all boats," which are tricky to measure. Off the top of my head... The first is the commodification of goods. Fifty years ago, a washing machine, refrigerator, and color TV were high end, luxury goods, available only to the relatively wealthy. Living on minimum wage today, you likely have access to all of these things. Food, education, clothing, building materials, and luxuries are all cheaper (by hours of labor) than ever before. The second is the quality of goods. That washing machine, fridge, and color TV that your local Best Buy employee uses are all unimaginably better than their equivalents 50 years ago. It's a washing machine with multiple programmable spin cycles. The fridge has controllable temperature, no freon, uses less energy, and is quieter. The color TV is a flat screen 42" with a remote control. This is also really hard to nail down, and it is a serious limitation for inflation measures, many of which are based on a fixed basket of goods - ignoring that the quality of a "raincoat" or "dental care" changes greatly over time. The third is the invention of new goods. That person on minimum wage today also likely has Internet access, maybe even in their pocket. They have Netflix, GMaps, spreadsheets, online travel agents, and wikipedia. In concrete terms, this access to information and services is an infinite improvement over 30 years ago. Finally, these comments ignore the historical context. Yes, some 12% of Americans are below the poverty line, and that's awful. 50 years ago, it was above 20%... and in the meantime, the population exploded. According to the US Census, the number of people below the poverty line has remained flat at about 40,000 since 1959, despite the population as a whole doubling in the same time. That's an amazing feat. It's terrible to have 12% of people in poverty - but let's not forget that we're moving in the right direction. So, yes, it sucks that a lot of people are on minimum wage, and we should work to improve that. It's terrible that 12% of people in this country live in poverty. But the enormous improvement in what minimum wage MEANS in concrete terms, and the downward trend of extreme poverty, are largely due to the success of places like San Francisco. These measures are not the "dark side of capitalism" that TFA suggests.
- losteric 8y ago
  12% is 40 million people in poverty. 40,000,000. Progress is good, but it's not victory. America is far from healthy. Medical costs have skyrocketted beyond reason, housing is rising, food costs are rising, and now we're starting a trade war with the nation that supplies cheap consumer goods possible. Netflix is cheap - so what? People in poverty were not complaining about boredom.
aresant 8y ago
The principal issue, full stop, in the Bay Area and most of California is housing. There are two solutions to this: 1) Build more. But this is outrageously difficult due to a well-meaning political view of safety / fairness / etc. These restrictions employ an awful lot of bureaucrats for enforcement but add $10s of thousands in fees and delays for builders, that are IRR driven and would rather concentrate their efforts in more favorable markets (1) 2) Prop 13. For those unfamiliar this essentially locks in property taxes at the owner's basis (with a maximum 2% adjustment for inflation). Meaning if in Silicon Valley you bought a house for $250,000 in the 1990s that's now worth $2,000,000 you're paying about $3,000 a year on taxes instead of $30,000 a year in taxes your next door neighbor is paying that just bought in. Oh and if you sell your house, and then buy a new house that's less than you sold your old house for, you get to transfer the low tax basis! This was put into law due to the "sentiment that older Californians should not be priced out of their homes through high taxes" which I think is noble, but it's also not realistic or fair. In many Bay Area neighborhoods you have a bizarre composition of young families hanging by their fingernails to pay for these "entitlements" for the retirees, and then the retirees that have a gigantic financial incentive to stay put which minimizes inventory and inflates home prices. - - - - 1 - http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.aspx http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
- dev_dull 8y ago
  They can also do things like re-zoning, or ending absurd and antiquated setback rules which require me to keep 700 sqft of dead grass in front of my house instead of more home.
- bigdubs 8y ago
  Some extra color on Prop 13; a more sinister view is that it was a time bomb designed to "starve the beast" and limit tax revenues in the future.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    California doesn't seem very interested in starving the beast overall. So it seems unlikely the motivation of this prop was that.
ucaetano 8y ago
America is still paying the price of Robert Moses' folly.
guiomie 8y ago
True story: 2 mid-level engineers both working at a FANG, and we can barely afford a 3bdr/2.5bath in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara without burning thru 30-40% of our monthly income (including RSUs). Having bid on a few houses, I'm amazed by how opaque the market is here. Houses will be listed 30% less than expected selling price and when you do make an offer, the seller will come back with a higher price to all those who made an offer... I suspect some collusion on the part of the real estate agents.
- nradov 8y ago
  New homeowners anywhere in the country frequently stretch their monthly budgets to that range based on the expectation that their incomes will eventually increase while mortgage payments remain fixed. The housing market is fairly efficient and with so many participants effective collusion would be implausible. Asking prices are essentially meaningless, just the starting point in a negotiation.
  - kjeetgill 8y ago
    They point is that they're FANG employees and they probably make FAR above what most anyone else can be expected to. 30-40% of their monthly income is means that anyone outside of FANG is priced out. They feel the pressure but hey, they'll be fine. Anyone short of FANG will really feel it.
- cameronlpmoore 8y ago
  Listing a property below the expected selling price is a common strategy to induce a bidding war. If a homeowner receives 10+ offers at or above asking price then that homeowner is perfectly reasonable in coming back with an even higher price and seeing which bidder wants it the most. It's the homeowner's asset and it makes sense for that person to sell it for as much as possible - no collusion needed.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  This is how real estate works in a high demand market. Houses are intentionally listed as lower than their true market value in order to create a bidding war between possible buyers. Seattle does the same thing.
rdiddly 8y ago
"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure." No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People start or invest in businesses because they want a little bit more "inequality" in their bank account. It's not to enrich everybody equally. If you make widgets for $4.50 and sell them for $5 each to a million people, you just extracted $0.50 from a million people and made yourself $500,000. Inequality. It's weird how people have this blind spot where they fail to integrate the big bad word "inequality" they see in the headlines, with the supposedly good and morally harmless act of making oneself rich a.k.a. unequal. I guess it's a disconnect between the micro & macro scales. A rising tide of water will lift all actual boats, but a 'rising tide' of money doesn't lift all boats, unless there's some intervention in a more socialist direction, such as progressive taxation, to make the money act more like water. Water spreads out flat and covers all ground equally, that's how it manages to lift all boats.
- nradov 8y ago
  That's not how capitalism works. If you make a new widget for $4.50 and sell it for $5.00 then both the buyer and seller are enriched. You haven't impoverished anyone.
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    You're reacting to the word impoverished. You have "extracted 50 cents from them," is that better? I'll change it. Don't get distracted. Edit: Also, there's short-term and long-term enrichment. The widget I sell might be a capital good that earns an income for its buyer, or it might just as easily be something that only depreciates or even destroys other wealth. Whereas the money I've collected can reliably be made to earn an income in any number of ways, which is why I always argue that the money is usually inherently worth more, and nobody on HN seems to agree with that.
    - 8y ago
spikels 8y ago
Completely missing is any mention of the housing supply shortage. If Bay Area governments had simply gotten out of the way developers would have build more than a million new units of housing over the past 40-50 years. Real home prices would have only have increased slightly due to the increased costs of building up. Instead we got only a tiny fraction of the housing needed to meet demand and huge rent/price increases resulting the highest cost of living in the world. This is a mad-made problem.

101 points by coldseattle 8y ago

The housing and culture aspects mentioned are the very small tip of the dark side iceberg. Some of the other aspects: 1) The weaponization of profiling and targeting capabilities 2) Complete eradication of of the cultural notion of "Privacy" :- most people coming of age today think nothing of sharing the most private info in search of a few baubles (Likes, discounts, whatnot) 3) Pervasive and inescapable monitoring in every facet of our lives In short - all of the preconditions are there for a venal system that might give rise to a (technologically)ultra-capable fascist.

justboxing 8y ago
> that might give rise to a (technologically)ultra-capable fascist Here in America, this facist has already arrived.
- ythn 8y ago
  *for very loose and liberal definitions of "facism"
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    If you reduce your definition of fascism only to actual, original Italians and Germans in the 1930s and 40s, you completely disregard lessons that we should never forget, to remain always vigilant against the causes of that era. It doesn't somehow show respect for those who fought it then to shout down anyone who thinks comparable things might come to pass in our present time. I understand you think it seems childish to accuse certain practices today of being fascist, but you must also understand that by the time it's clicking its boots and saluting a dictator in front of columns of tanks, it's a little too late to make the comparison in a useful way. Unfortunately it requires a bit of imagination to work with an uncertain future, as is always the case.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - omegaworks 8y ago
    So we can't talk on here about how we have a President now that sees fit to strip away people's citizenship? https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturalization-task-force/ https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturaliz... We can't talk about how he's rolling back promises to soldiers to score political points? https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d How his DHS is conveniently losing documentation on children they've forcibly separated from their parents? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos-family-separation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos... Why do we see ourselves as separate from this conversation? Are we not people living with this? Seeing this happen to our neighbors? The people that serve and make our food?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      All of this stuff is important, it's just not the topic of this forum.
      - omegaworks 8y ago
        It's absolutely the topic of this forum. We created the infrastructure that allowed precise micro-targeting of individuals in districts and states that enabled this person to ascend to the highest office with a 3 million vote popular margin against him. His supporters specifically targeted people who might have voted against them with completely bogus information, to deactivate them and demotivate them from participating in our system. We need to be able to talk about this; how 200 year old electoral systems fare when they're pitted against brand new forms of machine-trained targeted advertising, dark user interface design, and disenfranchisement aided by technologically-enabled over-policing.
    - 8y ago

ohthehugemanate 8y ago

Very interesting read. When we discuss inequality, I think there are a lot of assumptions made that make it hard to really judge. For example, TFA trots out the high number of people on minimum wage, and the high percentage of people below the poverty line. This is misleading, because it misses out on some key ways that "capitalism raises all boats," which are tricky to measure. Off the top of my head... The first is the commodification of goods. Fifty years ago, a washing machine, refrigerator, and color TV were high end, luxury goods, available only to the relatively wealthy. Living on minimum wage today, you likely have access to all of these things. Food, education, clothing, building materials, and luxuries are all cheaper (by hours of labor) than ever before. The second is the quality of goods. That washing machine, fridge, and color TV that your local Best Buy employee uses are all unimaginably better than their equivalents 50 years ago. It's a washing machine with multiple programmable spin cycles. The fridge has controllable temperature, no freon, uses less energy, and is quieter. The color TV is a flat screen 42" with a remote control. This is also really hard to nail down, and it is a serious limitation for inflation measures, many of which are based on a fixed basket of goods - ignoring that the quality of a "raincoat" or "dental care" changes greatly over time. The third is the invention of new goods. That person on minimum wage today also likely has Internet access, maybe even in their pocket. They have Netflix, GMaps, spreadsheets, online travel agents, and wikipedia. In concrete terms, this access to information and services is an infinite improvement over 30 years ago. Finally, these comments ignore the historical context. Yes, some 12% of Americans are below the poverty line, and that's awful. 50 years ago, it was above 20%... and in the meantime, the population exploded. According to the US Census, the number of people below the poverty line has remained flat at about 40,000 since 1959, despite the population as a whole doubling in the same time. That's an amazing feat. It's terrible to have 12% of people in poverty - but let's not forget that we're moving in the right direction. So, yes, it sucks that a lot of people are on minimum wage, and we should work to improve that. It's terrible that 12% of people in this country live in poverty. But the enormous improvement in what minimum wage MEANS in concrete terms, and the downward trend of extreme poverty, are largely due to the success of places like San Francisco. These measures are not the "dark side of capitalism" that TFA suggests.

losteric 8y ago
12% is 40 million people in poverty. 40,000,000. Progress is good, but it's not victory. America is far from healthy. Medical costs have skyrocketted beyond reason, housing is rising, food costs are rising, and now we're starting a trade war with the nation that supplies cheap consumer goods possible. Netflix is cheap - so what? People in poverty were not complaining about boredom.

aresant 8y ago

The principal issue, full stop, in the Bay Area and most of California is housing. There are two solutions to this: 1) Build more. But this is outrageously difficult due to a well-meaning political view of safety / fairness / etc. These restrictions employ an awful lot of bureaucrats for enforcement but add $10s of thousands in fees and delays for builders, that are IRR driven and would rather concentrate their efforts in more favorable markets (1) 2) Prop 13. For those unfamiliar this essentially locks in property taxes at the owner's basis (with a maximum 2% adjustment for inflation). Meaning if in Silicon Valley you bought a house for $250,000 in the 1990s that's now worth $2,000,000 you're paying about $3,000 a year on taxes instead of $30,000 a year in taxes your next door neighbor is paying that just bought in. Oh and if you sell your house, and then buy a new house that's less than you sold your old house for, you get to transfer the low tax basis! This was put into law due to the "sentiment that older Californians should not be priced out of their homes through high taxes" which I think is noble, but it's also not realistic or fair. In many Bay Area neighborhoods you have a bizarre composition of young families hanging by their fingernails to pay for these "entitlements" for the retirees, and then the retirees that have a gigantic financial incentive to stay put which minimizes inventory and inflates home prices. - - - - 1 - http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/housing-costs.aspx http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

dev_dull 8y ago
They can also do things like re-zoning, or ending absurd and antiquated setback rules which require me to keep 700 sqft of dead grass in front of my house instead of more home.
bigdubs 8y ago
Some extra color on Prop 13; a more sinister view is that it was a time bomb designed to "starve the beast" and limit tax revenues in the future.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  California doesn't seem very interested in starving the beast overall. So it seems unlikely the motivation of this prop was that.

ucaetano 8y ago

America is still paying the price of Robert Moses' folly.

guiomie 8y ago

True story: 2 mid-level engineers both working at a FANG, and we can barely afford a 3bdr/2.5bath in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara without burning thru 30-40% of our monthly income (including RSUs). Having bid on a few houses, I'm amazed by how opaque the market is here. Houses will be listed 30% less than expected selling price and when you do make an offer, the seller will come back with a higher price to all those who made an offer... I suspect some collusion on the part of the real estate agents.

nradov 8y ago
New homeowners anywhere in the country frequently stretch their monthly budgets to that range based on the expectation that their incomes will eventually increase while mortgage payments remain fixed. The housing market is fairly efficient and with so many participants effective collusion would be implausible. Asking prices are essentially meaningless, just the starting point in a negotiation.
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  They point is that they're FANG employees and they probably make FAR above what most anyone else can be expected to. 30-40% of their monthly income is means that anyone outside of FANG is priced out. They feel the pressure but hey, they'll be fine. Anyone short of FANG will really feel it.
cameronlpmoore 8y ago
Listing a property below the expected selling price is a common strategy to induce a bidding war. If a homeowner receives 10+ offers at or above asking price then that homeowner is perfectly reasonable in coming back with an even higher price and seeing which bidder wants it the most. It's the homeowner's asset and it makes sense for that person to sell it for as much as possible - no collusion needed.
jorblumesea 8y ago
This is how real estate works in a high demand market. Houses are intentionally listed as lower than their true market value in order to create a bidding war between possible buyers. Seattle does the same thing.

rdiddly 8y ago

"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure." No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People start or invest in businesses because they want a little bit more "inequality" in their bank account. It's not to enrich everybody equally. If you make widgets for $4.50 and sell them for $5 each to a million people, you just extracted $0.50 from a million people and made yourself $500,000. Inequality. It's weird how people have this blind spot where they fail to integrate the big bad word "inequality" they see in the headlines, with the supposedly good and morally harmless act of making oneself rich a.k.a. unequal. I guess it's a disconnect between the micro & macro scales. A rising tide of water will lift all actual boats, but a 'rising tide' of money doesn't lift all boats, unless there's some intervention in a more socialist direction, such as progressive taxation, to make the money act more like water. Water spreads out flat and covers all ground equally, that's how it manages to lift all boats.

nradov 8y ago
That's not how capitalism works. If you make a new widget for $4.50 and sell it for $5.00 then both the buyer and seller are enriched. You haven't impoverished anyone.
- rdiddly 8y ago
  You're reacting to the word impoverished. You have "extracted 50 cents from them," is that better? I'll change it. Don't get distracted. Edit: Also, there's short-term and long-term enrichment. The widget I sell might be a capital good that earns an income for its buyer, or it might just as easily be something that only depreciates or even destroys other wealth. Whereas the money I've collected can reliably be made to earn an income in any number of ways, which is why I always argue that the money is usually inherently worth more, and nobody on HN seems to agree with that.
  - 8y ago

spikels 8y ago

Completely missing is any mention of the housing supply shortage. If Bay Area governments had simply gotten out of the way developers would have build more than a million new units of housing over the past 40-50 years. Real home prices would have only have increased slightly due to the increased costs of building up. Instead we got only a tiny fraction of the housing needed to meet demand and huge rent/price increases resulting the highest cost of living in the world. This is a mad-made problem.