6 ms·

haha. San Francisco is awful. That title is misleading and uninformed. Grew up there. Got a degree in math and comp sci and returned to work. Lasted a year befo

haha. San Francisco is awful. That title is misleading and uninformed. Grew up there. Got a degree in math and comp sci and returned to work. Lasted a year before being so disgusted by the self quarantining of the rich. It’s a tech distopia. I’m not even talking about having to step over human feces 3 times per block. I’m talking about the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers and then run with the money. The damage is done and we’re just now starting to see the impact it’s had on the people that haven’t been taken along for the ride to the top. That place is a lost cause. I guess it would have been cool to be there during the Alan Kay xerox parc days. Probably intoxicatingly inspiring environment. But now... I hope it burns. I’ll show up to repair and rebuild. I do enjoy the Marin headlands though. And I suppose I’ll take a Taqueria SF burrito most days of the week. And the punk scene in Berkeley was great, and growing up skating there was awesome, but... meh the bad outweighs the good.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 8y ago
> the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.
- chrisallick 8y ago
  Seattle has the 1/3rd largest homeless population and the city wanted a $500 per employee tax from amazon. Amazon said they’d move their business and also haulted construction on new building. 40k employees, that’s 20million a year. They then lobbied and got it repealed after city lowered to $250/employee. He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently. So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    It seems perfectly legitimate for Amazon to question how much the extra $10 million would actually help. If homelessness could be solved just by throwing money at the problem, SF and its $40k per homeless person would be clean as a whistle.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    If tech is a net negative force in the city, then isn’t inducing Amazon to leave “mission accomplished”?
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    People get the Seattle tax story wrong. The money was not a problem. USD 250 is a negligible amount for an employee that earns above $100K a year. The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive. Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers). Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees. She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts. This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home". Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous. This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.
- GauntletWizard 8y ago
  I just moved back to Seattle after having been... Well, trying not to be part of the problem in SF, and I'm afraid that this is very true.
- techsupporter 8y ago
  Oh, Flying Spaghetti Monster for all his pasta goodness, I wish we could stop this trope. San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs. Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place. However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves. But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    Freedom of movement has caused quite a few issues for Seattle, with many people moving here from a variety of backgrounds. One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town. I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
- abernard1 8y ago
  I don't think these problems are related to tech. Metro areas that engage in these policies--tech or no--have had the same problems. NYC in the 70s to 80s was the same boat and had dramatic turnarounds during the Giuliani tenure. An article I read recently (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness) > According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia. That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
  - techsupporter 8y ago
    Just for context, this article was written by Christopher Rufo, a very conservative politician who ran for the Seattle City Council against Mike O'Brien (district 6, Ballard, Loyal Heights, Crown Hill) for roughly two weeks until Rufo dropped out while accusing "O'Brien activists" of "extreme harassment." Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
    - abernard1 8y ago
      Ad hominems aside, do you think spending $100K a year per homeless person--and having a dramatically increasing homeless population--is reasonable? Might there be some logic to that article?
60654 8y ago
I liked that medium post, because I'm also one of those people who said goodbye to a number of friends who had moved away - until I decided I've had it with this town, too, and it's time to move away as well. But the post throws a bunch of softballs. It mentions rising costs, hipster drinks, etc. And yes, the _relentless_ costs are a huge factor. But it's not just the costs that changed, it's the entire tenor of the place. The focus on money, valuations, investments... it's like working for Wall Street, with all the nonsense and none of the benefits of being in NYC. And a lot of people are looking at themselves and asking: is this what I want to do with my life? (Except for those who did...) But on the plus side, moving away is not such a bad thing. Unlike what the post author suggests, the transplants will not "ruin" other cities. At least not the large ones: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, NYC, there are great cities out there with a fun tech culture, much more housing (so it's cheaper), and they've been absorbing newcomers for a hundred years without any danger to their existing culture. (I'll leave Austin and Portland out of it - they might be too small to survive a mass migration of Californians. ;) )
- mcguire 8y ago
  "To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite." That may be true, but I've met too many people who sold a one-bedroom garden shed in California for $1.2B and moved to a shiney new 11,000 square foot mcmansion in Hyde Park. They're just passing the ruin along.
  - oculusthrift 8y ago
    i think you meant an M not a B
  - extra88 8y ago
    I haven’t been there in over 20 years but I thought it was the hills around Austin being ruined by McMansions built by transplanted Californians. Hyde Park was for charming bungalows that weren’t that cheap.
dtwest 8y ago
As someone from the Rust Belt, the "San Francisco is awful" mentality is puzzling to me. Awful compared to what? Seattle? Some other world class city? If it's so bad why don't you move somewhere cheap like Cleveland? Oh wait, you don't want to, because Cleveland is worse. For the record, I like Cleveland, I grew up there, real estate is affordable, it has a lake, but it is no San Francisco. That said, I'd still never call Cleveland awful, it's better than where most of the world lives. Have some perspective.
- carlivar 8y ago
  I think if you figured out a way to compare Cleveland to SF while factoring in cost of living, or just real estate, Cleveland would do pretty well in a showdown. SF is picked on because people pay such a premium to live there (including employers via the necessary high wages), and it is becoming less and less worth that premium as tech extends out of the bay area.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  Travel the world and you will see that indeed. Most large cities are pretty awesome, affordable and don’t have that much homeless people.
- space_fountain 8y ago
  I don't know. Maybe mostly because I have family I'm very much consider moving back to at least NEO after I finish working at my current job for a year and that's with knowing I'd take a pretty big pay cut. Certainly if I could make the same money anywhere I wouldn't stay in SF.
the_clarence 8y ago
I don’t get the taqueria craze. I’d rather have a flour crepe, a rice-dough bao or a naan/rothi/parhata instead of a corn taco. The inside isn’t that much tasty as well, no spices. I went to this famous taqueria and I thought it was really underwhelming.
liberte82 8y ago
Can you expand on what you mean by the "self quarantining of the rich"?
- chrisallick 8y ago
  It’s just to say that wealthy people use their money to create greater distance between themselves and people with less. Re-enforcing the “them” mentality and stigma. Rather than truly integrating into the San Francisco, they’ve planted themselves and created a moat. Google buses would be an example of how a company can add to that. They should have improved public transportation.
- barrow-rider 8y ago
  Buying a house with an HOA to keep the property values up, setting up NUMBY committees to keep new developments out, google buses as someone mentioned, corporate recruiting pipelines that pull from a handful of select schools, etc. Same general idea as the Old-Money Boston-Brahmin or NYC types, just with better marketing.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

walrus01 8y ago

> the utter lack of ethics and values of the people who have descended like rabid vultures to manipulate the tech utopian thinkers a lot of these people, having destroyed SF as a livable city, are now moving on to Seattle. Which is rapidly also turning into a city with feces laden sidewalks and a tech dystopia.

chrisallick 8y ago
Seattle has the 1/3rd largest homeless population and the city wanted a $500 per employee tax from amazon. Amazon said they’d move their business and also haulted construction on new building. 40k employees, that’s 20million a year. They then lobbied and got it repealed after city lowered to $250/employee. He than turns and donates millions/billions ONCE, but that’s specks of sand compared to what would be generated over time yearly and consistently. So... no faith in that city either and no faith in tech in general. Super sad.
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  It seems perfectly legitimate for Amazon to question how much the extra $10 million would actually help. If homelessness could be solved just by throwing money at the problem, SF and its $40k per homeless person would be clean as a whistle.
- closeparen 8y ago
  If tech is a net negative force in the city, then isn’t inducing Amazon to leave “mission accomplished”?
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  People get the Seattle tax story wrong. The money was not a problem. USD 250 is a negligible amount for an employee that earns above $100K a year. The problem is taxing job headcounts regardless the amount. That creates a horrible precedent for any company trying to do business in a city. It's basically telling business owners that the jobs they are creating are not welcomed. It's penalizing the core of what makes an economy productive. Let's put Amazon out of the picture for a minute. Since the head tax was meant to tax large employers, it's kind of hard to see in the micro context what imposing a job headcount tax actually means. So for the sake of the example let's say that the head tax applied for any business owner (not hard to imagine since implementing it for large employers create precedence for taxing small employers). Let's imagine that the business that we are talking about is Mommy's Bakery. The head tax in Seattle was the equivalent of telling mommy to pay a USD 750 ransom for her three employees or to fuck off. Mommy is already collecting and paying taxes and fees. She is employing people that are putting money back into the local economy, but the city feels that the act of job creation is adding to their problems. So they decide that they want to tax those headcounts. This is more or less the equivalent of you helping a friend or relative with some money and they coming back and telling you, "hey thanks for the hundred bucks, but because I'm gonna get wasted tonight and gonna spend it all on drinks, I'd need 6 bucks more to get back home". Yeah sure, six bucks are not too much but just asking for them after you gave them a USD 100, it's utterly ridiculous. This is how the Seattle city employers felt when the head tax was proposed. They already contribute millions of dollars to the city economy in taxes and jobs, but the city still wanted to get more to justify their gross incompetence when it comes to dealing with the homelessness crisis.
GauntletWizard 8y ago
I just moved back to Seattle after having been... Well, trying not to be part of the problem in SF, and I'm afraid that this is very true.
techsupporter 8y ago
Oh, Flying Spaghetti Monster for all his pasta goodness, I wish we could stop this trope. San Franciscans, Californians in general, and "transplants" writ large did not cause this problem. We did it to ourselves with quite a few different inputs. Ultimately what people who live here--in Seattle, I mean--is that we cannot stop new arrivals from, well, arriving. Freedom of movement is a right in the United States so they're coming, whether we like it or not. And that means we have to scoot over a bit, make a little room, and say hi to our new neighbors. That we've not done that is a huge reason why our arts, our humanities, and our not-white-collar-professional jobs are all decamping to the next cheap place. However, it's not just housing. Seattle is a city having to go it almost alone trying to fix all of the region's ills, from traffic to mental health to substance abuse to tents on WSDOT's medians. It's not something Seattle can do alone and it's not a burden Seattle taxpayers should bear all by ourselves. But it's also not the fault of the new arrival from San Francisco. She has a reasons to suspect we'd have our act together, and we've failed her just as much as we've failed the person who winds up in a tent next to the onramp to highway 520.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Freedom of movement has caused quite a few issues for Seattle, with many people moving here from a variety of backgrounds. One of my exes actually came here from Spokane, as its much easier going out here as a homeless gay 17 year old then living with his abusive brothers. Many suburbs and towns are all too happy to encourage the least well to do to head towards the nearest major town, generally involving the police corralling those less fortunate than us and giving them a ride towards said major town. I hear Tacoma is still relatively inexpensive and nice, one of my old professors moved down there and finds it rather decent. Not sure how many not-white-collar-professionals will continue to be able to afford to live in and around Seattle (outside of a handful of "Affordable" aka heavily subsidized housing complexes).
abernard1 8y ago
I don't think these problems are related to tech. Metro areas that engage in these policies--tech or no--have had the same problems. NYC in the 70s to 80s was the same boat and had dramatic turnarounds during the Giuliani tenure. An article I read recently (https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-homelessness) > According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. That statistic should shock people who think that the problem is insufficient government spending or a type of rabid, rich eating the poor Dickensian dystopia. That article also mentions "pathological altruism", which roughly translates into paying $ for guilt in a way that harms the people who are supposed to be helped. It's sad too, because most tech workers I know would not advocate behaviors/policies for themselves that they advocate for the homeless. Any tech startup that basically was content with no standards, endless spending, and no accountability in the corporate or personal sphere would be bankrupt.
- techsupporter 8y ago
  Just for context, this article was written by Christopher Rufo, a very conservative politician who ran for the Seattle City Council against Mike O'Brien (district 6, Ballard, Loyal Heights, Crown Hill) for roughly two weeks until Rufo dropped out while accusing "O'Brien activists" of "extreme harassment." Rufo's platform, just before he enter-exited the race, can best be described as "arrest them all and do it enough times that they move to Eugene." He's only one in a long line of brief candidates who want to immediately ramp up all kinds of law enforcement activity while we "consider proper funding levels" for social services, with no professed idea for what happens when the people we've arrested for vagrancy walk out of the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. The one thing he and I agree on is that the outputs for our inputs are not at all acceptable but I don't agree at all with what little he proposed to do about it.
  - abernard1 8y ago
    Ad hominems aside, do you think spending $100K a year per homeless person--and having a dramatically increasing homeless population--is reasonable? Might there be some logic to that article?

60654 8y ago

I liked that medium post, because I'm also one of those people who said goodbye to a number of friends who had moved away - until I decided I've had it with this town, too, and it's time to move away as well. But the post throws a bunch of softballs. It mentions rising costs, hipster drinks, etc. And yes, the _relentless_ costs are a huge factor. But it's not just the costs that changed, it's the entire tenor of the place. The focus on money, valuations, investments... it's like working for Wall Street, with all the nonsense and none of the benefits of being in NYC. And a lot of people are looking at themselves and asking: is this what I want to do with my life? (Except for those who did...) But on the plus side, moving away is not such a bad thing. Unlike what the post author suggests, the transplants will not "ruin" other cities. At least not the large ones: Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, NYC, there are great cities out there with a fun tech culture, much more housing (so it's cheaper), and they've been absorbing newcomers for a hundred years without any danger to their existing culture. (I'll leave Austin and Portland out of it - they might be too small to survive a mass migration of Californians. ;) )

mcguire 8y ago
"To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite." That may be true, but I've met too many people who sold a one-bedroom garden shed in California for $1.2B and moved to a shiney new 11,000 square foot mcmansion in Hyde Park. They're just passing the ruin along.
- oculusthrift 8y ago
  i think you meant an M not a B
- extra88 8y ago
  I haven’t been there in over 20 years but I thought it was the hills around Austin being ruined by McMansions built by transplanted Californians. Hyde Park was for charming bungalows that weren’t that cheap.

dtwest 8y ago

As someone from the Rust Belt, the "San Francisco is awful" mentality is puzzling to me. Awful compared to what? Seattle? Some other world class city? If it's so bad why don't you move somewhere cheap like Cleveland? Oh wait, you don't want to, because Cleveland is worse. For the record, I like Cleveland, I grew up there, real estate is affordable, it has a lake, but it is no San Francisco. That said, I'd still never call Cleveland awful, it's better than where most of the world lives. Have some perspective.

carlivar 8y ago
I think if you figured out a way to compare Cleveland to SF while factoring in cost of living, or just real estate, Cleveland would do pretty well in a showdown. SF is picked on because people pay such a premium to live there (including employers via the necessary high wages), and it is becoming less and less worth that premium as tech extends out of the bay area.
the_clarence 8y ago
Travel the world and you will see that indeed. Most large cities are pretty awesome, affordable and don’t have that much homeless people.
space_fountain 8y ago
I don't know. Maybe mostly because I have family I'm very much consider moving back to at least NEO after I finish working at my current job for a year and that's with knowing I'd take a pretty big pay cut. Certainly if I could make the same money anywhere I wouldn't stay in SF.

the_clarence 8y ago

I don’t get the taqueria craze. I’d rather have a flour crepe, a rice-dough bao or a naan/rothi/parhata instead of a corn taco. The inside isn’t that much tasty as well, no spices. I went to this famous taqueria and I thought it was really underwhelming.

liberte82 8y ago

Can you expand on what you mean by the "self quarantining of the rich"?

chrisallick 8y ago
It’s just to say that wealthy people use their money to create greater distance between themselves and people with less. Re-enforcing the “them” mentality and stigma. Rather than truly integrating into the San Francisco, they’ve planted themselves and created a moat. Google buses would be an example of how a company can add to that. They should have improved public transportation.
barrow-rider 8y ago
Buying a house with an HOA to keep the property values up, setting up NUMBY committees to keep new developments out, google buses as someone mentioned, corporate recruiting pipelines that pull from a handful of select schools, etc. Same general idea as the Old-Money Boston-Brahmin or NYC types, just with better marketing.