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My offer letter explicitly stated that starting work (and accepting the stated pay) constituted agreeing to all the docs sent over, unless explicitly agreed upo

My offer letter explicitly stated that starting work (and accepting the stated pay) constituted agreeing to all the docs sent over, unless explicitly agreed upon otherwise. I can't wait to have enough savings to quit and move to california where the employee protections are so much higher.

jfengel 5y ago
It's interesting to hear you say that, moments after coming from a thread where people were explaining why California is so terrible. I feel like the symbol of the 2020s is Chesterton's Fence[1], people chafing against restrictions and then having to reinvent them. I'm sure that some people are indeed fleeing California, and will then immediately start reinventing it. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. The reinvention could be like a clean-sheet reimplementation that's better than maintaining a smelly old code base. But that only works if you know all of the reason those code smells are there, and don't simply re-start the same process to recreate the same bugs. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
- verall 5y ago
  Maybe we could keep the protections for labor and drop the many additional protections for landowners.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I don't know how much the issue is with the rest of Silicon Valley. There used to be a lot of undeveloped area not too far from Palo Alto. Texas may want to avoid the wrong kind of over-dense housing, since they've got plenty of land, though there are also reasons to encourage people not to commute multiple dozens of miles per day.
    - filmgirlcw 5y ago
      >I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I'm going to push back on this. Manhattan is less than half the size of San Francisco and has nearly four times the population density. The Bronx is roughly the same size and has double the population density. It isn't that San Francisco can't expand, it is that it doesn't want to.
      - Gibbon1 5y ago
        You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways[1]. Sure developers would love to build more chicken coops for tech bros. But they absolutely don't want to kick down coin to pay for the subway system needed to support that density. [1] Oh yea SF has BART which was built 50 years ago and not expanded since. And the central subway which is 1.7 miles long, not open yet after ten years of construction and 20 years after it got the green light.
        filmgirlcw 5y ago
        I agree, which is my underlying point: they don’t want to expand! The lack of public transit is a problem plenty of people have been yelling about for decades, as you mentioned. Developers, citizens, and the city council have all proven over the years they are unwilling to do what needs to be done to make expansion possible.
        wolverine876 5y ago
        The famous legend of NYC is that they had the vision to build infrastructure beyond current needs. Now, it's trendy to view any investment by democratic government as wasteful, and to reduce the taxes by which the community makes that investment to nothing. What will happen to future generations, who have us as their forbears rather than the visionary New Yorkers.
        sib 5y ago
- majormajor 5y ago
  It's perpetually curious to me when people blame CA problems on a lack of upzoning and then ... move to much less dense places with plenty of NIMBYism. Sure, you're getting away from the problem, but not because anyone there has a solution - just because they haven't been hit by the same problem to the same extent yet, because "sprawl outwards" works for a long time when you have less geographical boundaries.
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    Those people probably either (or both) of do not understand the nature of the issue(s) and/or are just as happy being somewhere where they won't be issue(s) for a long time as somewhere that's managed to prevent them in perpetuity.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Because you don't need (though it can still be good) upzoning if the population is low and housing cheap.
  - ripley12 5y ago
    That doesn’t seem odd to me. People do what’s best for them, and even if they underatand the dysfunction of North American urban planning well they’re not in a position to fix it.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > People do what’s best for them People have many motives, including themselves, their communities, their businesses, their countries, their co-workers and neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. If they only acted selfishly, there would be no community, country, business, etc.
      - ripley12 5y ago
        Perhaps “people need a place to live” would have been a better way to phrase that. Any solutions to North America’s urban planning woes will take decades, if they happen at all. I don’t fault anyone who can’t wait that long.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  What's strange to me is how people, particularly those in California, think that banning non-competes were somehow a California idea or that CA is the only state that does that. Yes banning non-competes is one of the things CA got right. People who complain are concerned about the things it got wrong. The idea that if you want non-competes then you must also accept insane regulatory burdens isn't really tenable when you look at the other states that ban non-competes and don't suffer from the same problems as California. There are low-regulation red states like Montana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota that have the same non-compete bans that CA has and many other states such as Utah and Texas place severe limits on them, whereas there are high-regulation states such as Massachusetts that allow non-competes. Please don't try to turn the non-compete issue into a california good-or-bad issue because it's just not a california thing.
  - burntsushi 5y ago
    Note that MA somewhat recently passed legislation that more tightly limits the power of non-compete agreement: https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-competition-covenants/new-massachusetts-law-limits-non-compete/ https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-...
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      I didn't know that -- it's good news. From a free market point of view, you obviously don't want to restrain trade, so that is the right-wing justification for bans. The left wing justification would be about increasing the power of labor. For both right and left leaning states, there seems to be an ongoing battle about non-compete agreements, and there is no reason for the pro-compete side to frame this as purely a left or right issue as there are allies to be had on from all sides of the political spectrum.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  California is really great in a lot of ways, but the issue that really drives people away from it is cost.

jfengel 5y ago

It's interesting to hear you say that, moments after coming from a thread where people were explaining why California is so terrible. I feel like the symbol of the 2020s is Chesterton's Fence[1], people chafing against restrictions and then having to reinvent them. I'm sure that some people are indeed fleeing California, and will then immediately start reinventing it. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. The reinvention could be like a clean-sheet reimplementation that's better than maintaining a smelly old code base. But that only works if you know all of the reason those code smells are there, and don't simply re-start the same process to recreate the same bugs. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

verall 5y ago
Maybe we could keep the protections for labor and drop the many additional protections for landowners.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I don't know how much the issue is with the rest of Silicon Valley. There used to be a lot of undeveloped area not too far from Palo Alto. Texas may want to avoid the wrong kind of over-dense housing, since they've got plenty of land, though there are also reasons to encourage people not to commute multiple dozens of miles per day.
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    >I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc. I'm going to push back on this. Manhattan is less than half the size of San Francisco and has nearly four times the population density. The Bronx is roughly the same size and has double the population density. It isn't that San Francisco can't expand, it is that it doesn't want to.
    - Gibbon1 5y ago
      You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways[1]. Sure developers would love to build more chicken coops for tech bros. But they absolutely don't want to kick down coin to pay for the subway system needed to support that density. [1] Oh yea SF has BART which was built 50 years ago and not expanded since. And the central subway which is 1.7 miles long, not open yet after ten years of construction and 20 years after it got the green light.
      - filmgirlcw 5y ago
        I agree, which is my underlying point: they don’t want to expand! The lack of public transit is a problem plenty of people have been yelling about for decades, as you mentioned. Developers, citizens, and the city council have all proven over the years they are unwilling to do what needs to be done to make expansion possible.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        The famous legend of NYC is that they had the vision to build infrastructure beyond current needs. Now, it's trendy to view any investment by democratic government as wasteful, and to reduce the taxes by which the community makes that investment to nothing. What will happen to future generations, who have us as their forbears rather than the visionary New Yorkers.
        sib 5y ago
majormajor 5y ago
It's perpetually curious to me when people blame CA problems on a lack of upzoning and then ... move to much less dense places with plenty of NIMBYism. Sure, you're getting away from the problem, but not because anyone there has a solution - just because they haven't been hit by the same problem to the same extent yet, because "sprawl outwards" works for a long time when you have less geographical boundaries.
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  Those people probably either (or both) of do not understand the nature of the issue(s) and/or are just as happy being somewhere where they won't be issue(s) for a long time as somewhere that's managed to prevent them in perpetuity.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Because you don't need (though it can still be good) upzoning if the population is low and housing cheap.
- ripley12 5y ago
  That doesn’t seem odd to me. People do what’s best for them, and even if they underatand the dysfunction of North American urban planning well they’re not in a position to fix it.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > People do what’s best for them People have many motives, including themselves, their communities, their businesses, their countries, their co-workers and neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. If they only acted selfishly, there would be no community, country, business, etc.
    - ripley12 5y ago
      Perhaps “people need a place to live” would have been a better way to phrase that. Any solutions to North America’s urban planning woes will take decades, if they happen at all. I don’t fault anyone who can’t wait that long.
rsj_hn 5y ago
What's strange to me is how people, particularly those in California, think that banning non-competes were somehow a California idea or that CA is the only state that does that. Yes banning non-competes is one of the things CA got right. People who complain are concerned about the things it got wrong. The idea that if you want non-competes then you must also accept insane regulatory burdens isn't really tenable when you look at the other states that ban non-competes and don't suffer from the same problems as California. There are low-regulation red states like Montana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota that have the same non-compete bans that CA has and many other states such as Utah and Texas place severe limits on them, whereas there are high-regulation states such as Massachusetts that allow non-competes. Please don't try to turn the non-compete issue into a california good-or-bad issue because it's just not a california thing.
- burntsushi 5y ago
  Note that MA somewhat recently passed legislation that more tightly limits the power of non-compete agreement: https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-competition-covenants/new-massachusetts-law-limits-non-compete/ https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-...
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    I didn't know that -- it's good news. From a free market point of view, you obviously don't want to restrain trade, so that is the right-wing justification for bans. The left wing justification would be about increasing the power of labor. For both right and left leaning states, there seems to be an ongoing battle about non-compete agreements, and there is no reason for the pro-compete side to frame this as purely a left or right issue as there are allies to be had on from all sides of the political spectrum.
ashtonkem 5y ago
California is really great in a lot of ways, but the issue that really drives people away from it is cost.