17 ms·

I another problem is this can also lead to not being involved in the local community. In San Francisco, the collective "tech industry" has long been demonized

by kelp 6y ago

I another problem is this can also lead to not being involved in the local community. In San Francisco, the collective "tech industry" has long been demonized for various things. IMO, some fair, some not. "Google Buses" taking space at MUNI stops was one for quite a while. Contributing to increasing housing costs is a long time favorite. But a lot of these come from a culture where you build your company on top of the infrastructure provided by the local community and government. Then build a very successful business on top of that, but have minimal engagement with the local government and community. So you create a perception that you're just taking, and not actually part of the local community. It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude. In contrast, Salesforce has the largest building in San Francisco named after them, and a huge urban park. I don't see them getting dragged into the anti-tech sentiment. Because I think they've effectively engaged with the local community and given back a lot. They have a culture of volunteer work, strongly encouraging employees to take time off to volunteer for local causes. They also donate to many local causes. Marc Benioff is certainly involved in politics, and advocating for specific ideas and policies. But because him and his company engage in various ways, and make substantial philanthropic contributions, they are usually respected for it.

carapace 6y ago
I grew up in SF, and I'm a tech weanie, and I gotta say: We have been terrible neighbors. We have been like the guy that bought a condo in North Beach and then sued the church for ringing their bells, but 10,000x worse. We've kind of ruined the city. As for Marc Benioff, he's the only billionaire who seems to actually, visibly give a shit. He's Jimmy James. (Even if that fwcking tower looks alternately like a phallus or a giant middle finger. Whatever, dude's cool.)
- jseliger 6y ago
  SF politicians and the voters who keep them in office have "ruined" SF in the sense of driving up housing costs by restricting supply, and failing to build adequate transportation infrastructure expeditiously: https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget or https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, to cite two examples. Any time SF wants, it can allow the supply of housing to rise to meet demand, which will drastically improve the city's culture, diversity, and affordability. SF voters don't want that, though, and they've not yet been overruled at the state level. Let's get the diagnosis right first.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Have you read this, and, if so, what do you think of it? https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... > Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse. > In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
    - creato 6y ago
      I think it would only take a few years (very few, as in low single digits) of 1.5% growth in housing supply to invalidate the extrapolations being used here.
      - carapace 6y ago
        As it stands now there's not enough construction capacity. Santa Rosa burns in a wildfire and you can't get a contractor to stucco a wall in SF that summer, eh? However, we could do it: "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" Aug., 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-complex-for-uc-berkeley-students-built-in-four-days https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl... > This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China. An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong." So yeah, if we really had the political will we could build arcologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
- Kalium 6y ago
  Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, except to criticize them as being insufficiently charitable when it happens to be noticed. I think Benioff gets a pass not because he visibly cares, but because he's got that local boy made good story. Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions. I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different. And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Will I be thanked and appreciated for my generosity and sacrifice, or just attacked for not giving more?
  - carapace 6y ago
    > Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, ... ...because their "volunteering culture" comes off as too little too late. It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row. Let me point out one aspect that seems lost on a lot of downtown techies: They see you. The bums and druggies and wastoids see the kids with wealth and success and not-fucked-up-ness of life and they resent it and them. Right or wrong, it's human nature. So yeah, Twitter was never about solving Civic Center's outdoor Bedlam, so they're never going to get credit for saving the world when they are squatting in hell clearly not saving shit. Eh? > Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Ask Rainbow Grocery. https://rainbow.coop/ https://rainbow.coop/ No one blames them for anything. > Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions. It's not impossible, but what you're talking about isn't "being a good neighbor" you're just complaining that people are blaming tech for their problems (whether it's true or not.) (And don't get me started on Zuckerberg's gross purchased virtue signalling. He paid for a hospital, put his name on it so everyone would know, and now I can't talk shit about him and the problems his massive wealth and bewheemoth company are causing, because it makes me look like an ingrate!? Bullshit. Bull. Shit.) > I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?" Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth. > The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different. Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians. This is a city of love, not self-hate. (Insert off-color joke about Castro, gay culture, learning to overcome hate and self-hate to love yourself and others freely, etc. just as a reminder that this city has been so many things to so many people in it's brief and drama-filled life.) > And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Again, no one worth respecting wants you to be miserable or to hate yourself. I don't know you or what you've personally experienced here, so I can't speak to that (I can't even figure out why most people don't like me.) If you came here since ~2001 you're already too late, the culture of welcoming was already thrashed by then. ("Dot-Com Boom", yeah?) A lot of the community has been pushed out, and most of us who remain are wary of the new wave of techie folks, or yes, outright hostile. > I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. So go somewhere else? I don't mean that in a mean or disrespectful way. I'm a proponent of the idea that just moving somewhere else can be an excellent way to solve problems. It's not a panacea, of course, but it often does the trick. Maybe you're not weird enough to hang with the old skool SF crowd. It's not a reflection on you. SF has long been the city of crazies. This whole tech-Mecca thing is hella recent. Less than a generation. The old joke: "All the crazy people in America move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to SF. (And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley.)" - - - - Benioff gets a pass because he supported Proposition C. https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless-proposition/4586423/ https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless...
- newfriend 6y ago
  Here we go with the tech guilt/savior complex. Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors. Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city.
  - carapace 6y ago
    > Here we go with the tech guilt/savior complex. The what now? > Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. Individually no, collectively yes. > People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. I would agree with that if it was possible to shit in a bathroom downtown, it's hella hard to shit downtown without $$$ in your pocket. > People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. Yes. > People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors. Drug addicts are a complex problem. I agree that we shouldn't have the open rampant drug abuse going on that we see downtown. I've seen guys shooting up in the metro staircase. It's bad. It's not "terrible neighbors" who just happen to want to smoke crack in the streets though, and it's not isolated from the economic shifts that have rocked the city since ~2001-ish. > Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city. Is that the tech guilt/savior complex again? The problem is they aren't populating an empty shell! They come as a displacing wave of invaders, made all the more insufferable because they're convinced that they're God's gift to the world at a subconscious level.
    - sammalloy 6y ago
      > They come as a displacing wave of invaders This has been happening continuously since San Francisco was first settled by Spanish explorers and soldiers in 1776, displacing the Ohlone peoples who lived there. There are SF history articles in the library that go into great detail about the shift in neighborhood demographics since the initial Gold Rush. When I first perused the source material back in the 1990s, I learned about the hidden history of San Francisco. Of particular note, was the Irish and Polish presence in the Mission in the early to mid-twentieth century, and the Scandinavian wave to Upper Market around the same time. These waves of ethnic migration to the city influenced its development, brought people with new skills and culture, and greatly contributed to the multicolored tapestry of San Francisco. Many of these groups had organized meeting places and interest groups which directly benefited their districts, and they performed charitable work to improve the city in which they lived.
- baby 6y ago
  If rent control was more of a thing, and people were more open to have more buildings, then a lot of locals and culture would have stayed. Instead, everybody's rent went up, people were forced to quit, or got offered great sums of money to sell their place. It was a forced exodus due to stupid laws, and with covid19 we're seeing another exodus of engineers. Who will remain?
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  Benioff is mensch
flyinglizard 6y ago
I doubt that anti-tech people really discern different companies. Most likely Salesforce is not consumer oriented and therefore not really a name that springs to mind when it comes to tech.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude. It isn't just that attitude that's the problem, it's the insistence by Coinbase that they're apolitical, yet the company makes significant political contributions themselves[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=coinbase https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
- bobbygoodlatte 6y ago
  Looking through these entries, I believe these are contributions made using Coinbase, not by Coinbase. I.e: political donations processed using cryptocurrency, not ones made by the company or its employees. Just speculating here based on the repeated small dollar amounts.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    I doubt it. There are a lot of $5k+ donations, and a $21k donation. The dozens of $2k and $5k donations are mostly to Brian Forde's campaign, famous for his Bitcoin connections[1]. Upon looking at the smallest donations, the majority go to Brian Forde, too. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/bitcoin-s-candidate-for-congress https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/bitcoin-s...
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      Right, so bitcoin users using a bitcoin site are making contributions to a bitcoin-friendly politician. I'm not seeing anything anomalous here.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        Do you have evidence that suggests that the FEC was deceived about the source of their financial data?
        6y ago
splaytreemap 6y ago
Salesforce doesn't get dragged into anti-tech sentiment because they build a b2b product. The Twitter activists who lead most of the anti-tech crusades don't know what CRM is or what it does because they never interact with it because they are unemployed. The people who do use Salesforce for the most part hate it. But you'll never see widespread outrage about Salesforce because the people who use it have jobs, families, and friends that prevent them from spending all day on social media.
- fake_throw_away 6y ago
  ==The Twitter activists who lead most of the anti-tech crusades don't know what CRM is or what it does because they never interact with it because they are unemployed.== The arrogance of HN is becoming pretty off-putting. Do you have any sources to back up this claim?
  - asciident 6y ago
    Maybe the quoted author was a bit flippant in their comment, but to put it another way, wouldn't you agree that if someone were to say "Salesforce is letting people spread fake news" or "Atlassian has a contract with ICE" that there would be relatively less interest and clicks on the headlines? The fact that the consumer-oriented tech companies are on peoples' minds makes a difference whether it's worth going after them.
    - fake_throw_away 6y ago
      Yes, it is harder for consumers to boycott non-consumer companies.
  - 3131s 6y ago
    HN is filled to the brim with petulant morons who really, really want to bury their heads in the sand while the rest of the world gets fucked over. Here "politics" is everything that reminds them of how terrible they are.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 6y ago
I don't see how Salesforce Park avoids getting demonized. It's a nice park, but it's literally above it all, set up in a way so that homeless people can't really do much. In San Francisco, aren't people going to object to this, eventually? Symbolism seems to be what people care about, and the symbolism of being above it all seems unavoidable.
- sershe 6y ago
  If you go to a random park in Seattle, you'll see there are two types of parks - the ones where homeless people don't do much (yet?), and the ones where nobody else can do anything whatsoever. So I think that is a plus... saying "your park sucks because people cannot camp and do drugs in it" also sounds like lunacy to most people, so it's extra nice because you cannot make it sound like it's a bad thing, like some other exclusion policies that can be twisted and made into a strawman.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    You'd think they couldn't make tech buses sound bad since they replace so many trips by car, but they managed.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what are the mechanisms they use in Seattle or SF to keep that kind of activity at bay?
    - sershe 6y ago
      I am not sure, I think none at all. The parks I am aware of that are still usable are large and/or somewhat away from points of interest like services or density (e.g. Ravenna park that is large and surrounded mostly by burbs, where you only get yelled at by crazy people in one spot).
Nasrudith 6y ago
To be frank from a North Eastern admittedly suburban perspective the "local community" manages to seem to be in the wrong here and sound very entitled. Reaching out for philanthropy is well and good and a positive thing, but the hostility and demands runs afoul of "minding your own business" essentially. It is one thing if they were say polluting or being an attractor of crime would be fair enough but complaining about high paying jobs seems downright spoiled and unpleasable. Essentially if the local government can't handle the issues with an increased tax flood the problem isn't the goose that lays the golden eggs.

by kelp 6y ago

carapace 6y ago

I grew up in SF, and I'm a tech weanie, and I gotta say: We have been terrible neighbors. We have been like the guy that bought a condo in North Beach and then sued the church for ringing their bells, but 10,000x worse. We've kind of ruined the city. As for Marc Benioff, he's the only billionaire who seems to actually, visibly give a shit. He's Jimmy James. (Even if that fwcking tower looks alternately like a phallus or a giant middle finger. Whatever, dude's cool.)

jseliger 6y ago
SF politicians and the voters who keep them in office have "ruined" SF in the sense of driving up housing costs by restricting supply, and failing to build adequate transportation infrastructure expeditiously: https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget or https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, to cite two examples. Any time SF wants, it can allow the supply of housing to rise to meet demand, which will drastically improve the city's culture, diversity, and affordability. SF voters don't want that, though, and they've not yet been overruled at the state level. Let's get the diagnosis right first.
- carapace 6y ago
  Have you read this, and, if so, what do you think of it? https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... > Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse. > In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
  - creato 6y ago
    I think it would only take a few years (very few, as in low single digits) of 1.5% growth in housing supply to invalidate the extrapolations being used here.
    - carapace 6y ago
      As it stands now there's not enough construction capacity. Santa Rosa burns in a wildfire and you can't get a contractor to stucco a wall in SF that summer, eh? However, we could do it: "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" Aug., 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-complex-for-uc-berkeley-students-built-in-four-days https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl... > This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China. An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong." So yeah, if we really had the political will we could build arcologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
Kalium 6y ago
Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, except to criticize them as being insufficiently charitable when it happens to be noticed. I think Benioff gets a pass not because he visibly cares, but because he's got that local boy made good story. Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions. I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different. And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Will I be thanked and appreciated for my generosity and sacrifice, or just attacked for not giving more?
- carapace 6y ago
  > Twitter and Zendesk and more have volunteering cultures and do their best to support the community. Nobody cares, ... ...because their "volunteering culture" comes off as too little too late. It was insane for Twitter to open their HQ in the middle of SF's skid row. Let me point out one aspect that seems lost on a lot of downtown techies: They see you. The bums and druggies and wastoids see the kids with wealth and success and not-fucked-up-ness of life and they resent it and them. Right or wrong, it's human nature. So yeah, Twitter was never about solving Civic Center's outdoor Bedlam, so they're never going to get credit for saving the world when they are squatting in hell clearly not saving shit. Eh? > Being a good neighbor in SF (or any other city in the inner Bay) is next to impossible. Ask Rainbow Grocery. https://rainbow.coop/ https://rainbow.coop/ No one blames them for anything. > Anything that happens becomes your fault no matter how unrelated you are, even if it's fully self-inflicted. Like the tower, MUNIserable buses, or the housing shortage. Or SF General's billing practices, blamed on Zuckerberg after he gave... I don't even remember how many millions. It's not impossible, but what you're talking about isn't "being a good neighbor" you're just complaining that people are blaming tech for their problems (whether it's true or not.) (And don't get me started on Zuckerberg's gross purchased virtue signalling. He paid for a hospital, put his name on it so everyone would know, and now I can't talk shit about him and the problems his massive wealth and bewheemoth company are causing, because it makes me look like an ingrate!? Bullshit. Bull. Shit.) > I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. Have you asked, "What can do to gain welcome?" Before ~2001 or so SF was one of the most welcoming places in the whole of this planet of Earth. > The best I can hope for is a grudging sufferance, so long as I hate myself enough for being the wrong kind of different. Okay if that's what you're getting from SFians you are hanging out with the WRONG SFians. This is a city of love, not self-hate. (Insert off-color joke about Castro, gay culture, learning to overcome hate and self-hate to love yourself and others freely, etc. just as a reminder that this city has been so many things to so many people in it's brief and drama-filled life.) > And why should I care about a community that refuses to grant me membership? Whose life will be improved by my misery? Again, no one worth respecting wants you to be miserable or to hate yourself. I don't know you or what you've personally experienced here, so I can't speak to that (I can't even figure out why most people don't like me.) If you came here since ~2001 you're already too late, the culture of welcoming was already thrashed by then. ("Dot-Com Boom", yeah?) A lot of the community has been pushed out, and most of us who remain are wary of the new wave of techie folks, or yes, outright hostile. > I've struggled to care about being kind to, and contributing to, a community that seems to not want me. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing I can do to gain welcome. So go somewhere else? I don't mean that in a mean or disrespectful way. I'm a proponent of the idea that just moving somewhere else can be an excellent way to solve problems. It's not a panacea, of course, but it often does the trick. Maybe you're not weird enough to hang with the old skool SF crowd. It's not a reflection on you. SF has long been the city of crazies. This whole tech-Mecca thing is hella recent. Less than a generation. The old joke: "All the crazy people in America move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to SF. (And if you're too crazy for SF you move to Berkeley.)" - - - - Benioff gets a pass because he supported Proposition C. https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless-proposition/4586423/ https://abc7news.com/marc-benioff-salesforce-prop-c-homeless...
newfriend 6y ago
Here we go with the tech guilt/savior complex. Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors. Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city.
- carapace 6y ago
  > Here we go with the tech guilt/savior complex. The what now? > Tech people in SF have not been terrible neighbors. Individually no, collectively yes. > People who shit in the street are terrible neighbors. I would agree with that if it was possible to shit in a bathroom downtown, it's hella hard to shit downtown without $$$ in your pocket. > People who steal bikes and smash car windows are terrible neighbors. Yes. > People who do drugs in the open and leave needles on the ground are terrible neighbors. Drug addicts are a complex problem. I agree that we shouldn't have the open rampant drug abuse going on that we see downtown. I've seen guys shooting up in the metro staircase. It's bad. It's not "terrible neighbors" who just happen to want to smoke crack in the streets though, and it's not isolated from the economic shifts that have rocked the city since ~2001-ish. > Techies are basically the ideal denizens of a city. Young, educated, well-paid, law-abiding people. You could hardly ask for a better group to populate a city. Is that the tech guilt/savior complex again? The problem is they aren't populating an empty shell! They come as a displacing wave of invaders, made all the more insufferable because they're convinced that they're God's gift to the world at a subconscious level.
  - sammalloy 6y ago
    > They come as a displacing wave of invaders This has been happening continuously since San Francisco was first settled by Spanish explorers and soldiers in 1776, displacing the Ohlone peoples who lived there. There are SF history articles in the library that go into great detail about the shift in neighborhood demographics since the initial Gold Rush. When I first perused the source material back in the 1990s, I learned about the hidden history of San Francisco. Of particular note, was the Irish and Polish presence in the Mission in the early to mid-twentieth century, and the Scandinavian wave to Upper Market around the same time. These waves of ethnic migration to the city influenced its development, brought people with new skills and culture, and greatly contributed to the multicolored tapestry of San Francisco. Many of these groups had organized meeting places and interest groups which directly benefited their districts, and they performed charitable work to improve the city in which they lived.
baby 6y ago
If rent control was more of a thing, and people were more open to have more buildings, then a lot of locals and culture would have stayed. Instead, everybody's rent went up, people were forced to quit, or got offered great sums of money to sell their place. It was a forced exodus due to stupid laws, and with covid19 we're seeing another exodus of engineers. Who will remain?
CyberRabbi 6y ago
Benioff is mensch

flyinglizard 6y ago

I doubt that anti-tech people really discern different companies. Most likely Salesforce is not consumer oriented and therefore not really a name that springs to mind when it comes to tech.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> It seems to me that the Coinbase case just doubles down on this attitude. It isn't just that attitude that's the problem, it's the insistence by Coinbase that they're apolitical, yet the company makes significant political contributions themselves[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=coinbase https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

bobbygoodlatte 6y ago
Looking through these entries, I believe these are contributions made using Coinbase, not by Coinbase. I.e: political donations processed using cryptocurrency, not ones made by the company or its employees. Just speculating here based on the repeated small dollar amounts.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  I doubt it. There are a lot of $5k+ donations, and a $21k donation. The dozens of $2k and $5k donations are mostly to Brian Forde's campaign, famous for his Bitcoin connections[1]. Upon looking at the smallest donations, the majority go to Brian Forde, too. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/bitcoin-s-candidate-for-congress https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/bitcoin-s...
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Right, so bitcoin users using a bitcoin site are making contributions to a bitcoin-friendly politician. I'm not seeing anything anomalous here.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Do you have evidence that suggests that the FEC was deceived about the source of their financial data?
      - 6y ago

splaytreemap 6y ago

Salesforce doesn't get dragged into anti-tech sentiment because they build a b2b product. The Twitter activists who lead most of the anti-tech crusades don't know what CRM is or what it does because they never interact with it because they are unemployed. The people who do use Salesforce for the most part hate it. But you'll never see widespread outrage about Salesforce because the people who use it have jobs, families, and friends that prevent them from spending all day on social media.

fake_throw_away 6y ago
==The Twitter activists who lead most of the anti-tech crusades don't know what CRM is or what it does because they never interact with it because they are unemployed.== The arrogance of HN is becoming pretty off-putting. Do you have any sources to back up this claim?
- asciident 6y ago
  Maybe the quoted author was a bit flippant in their comment, but to put it another way, wouldn't you agree that if someone were to say "Salesforce is letting people spread fake news" or "Atlassian has a contract with ICE" that there would be relatively less interest and clicks on the headlines? The fact that the consumer-oriented tech companies are on peoples' minds makes a difference whether it's worth going after them.
  - fake_throw_away 6y ago
    Yes, it is harder for consumers to boycott non-consumer companies.
- 3131s 6y ago
  HN is filled to the brim with petulant morons who really, really want to bury their heads in the sand while the rest of the world gets fucked over. Here "politics" is everything that reminds them of how terrible they are.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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skybrian 6y ago

I don't see how Salesforce Park avoids getting demonized. It's a nice park, but it's literally above it all, set up in a way so that homeless people can't really do much. In San Francisco, aren't people going to object to this, eventually? Symbolism seems to be what people care about, and the symbolism of being above it all seems unavoidable.

sershe 6y ago
If you go to a random park in Seattle, you'll see there are two types of parks - the ones where homeless people don't do much (yet?), and the ones where nobody else can do anything whatsoever. So I think that is a plus... saying "your park sucks because people cannot camp and do drugs in it" also sounds like lunacy to most people, so it's extra nice because you cannot make it sound like it's a bad thing, like some other exclusion policies that can be twisted and made into a strawman.
- skybrian 6y ago
  You'd think they couldn't make tech buses sound bad since they replace so many trips by car, but they managed.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are the mechanisms they use in Seattle or SF to keep that kind of activity at bay?
  - sershe 6y ago
    I am not sure, I think none at all. The parks I am aware of that are still usable are large and/or somewhat away from points of interest like services or density (e.g. Ravenna park that is large and surrounded mostly by burbs, where you only get yelled at by crazy people in one spot).

Nasrudith 6y ago

To be frank from a North Eastern admittedly suburban perspective the "local community" manages to seem to be in the wrong here and sound very entitled. Reaching out for philanthropy is well and good and a positive thing, but the hostility and demands runs afoul of "minding your own business" essentially. It is one thing if they were say polluting or being an attractor of crime would be fair enough but complaining about high paying jobs seems downright spoiled and unpleasable. Essentially if the local government can't handle the issues with an increased tax flood the problem isn't the goose that lays the golden eggs.