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Convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway? - Elon
- retox 5y agoThe homeless problem was exacerbated by twitter employees being upset about the outdoor toilets near their office.
- epistasis 5y agoThe homeless problem was exacerbated by a housing shortage, not by people thinking that there should be a better solution to people's problems than sewage in the streets. SF spends a ton of money keeping people out of homelessness through rent assistance, and this is some of the most effective public money that can be spent to help with the problem. But even more effective would be to stop the ever rising costs by allowing more people to live in the city, and allowing them to spend their own money to construct this new housing. High homelessness rates are not caused by drugs, or by mental illness. High homelessness rates are caused by artificially constrained housing and the ever increasing prices that this sort of market creates. I fear that by embracing the status quo, refusing to allow homeless shelters, refusal to allow housing for anyone, really, that there will be a growing anti-homeless backlash. Otherwise normal people are upset that there is no solution year after year to the displacement and misery. People are becoming tired of pols claiming that they care, claiming that they will do something, only to have those same pols reject the obvious solutions to reduce homelessness. I seriously fear for the increased human toll that will result from continued inaction housing.
- alkonaut 5y agoThe rules are that you can either be influential or a troll. We just don’t have any way to deal with influential trolls.
- nukemaster 5y agoTrolling can be extremely influential if the target holds some logically inconsistent view (which describes much of the urban California politics.)
- alkonaut 5y agoWhat I mean is: what keeps our world from completey collapsing is that 99% of trolls are trolls because they lack influence and take out their frustration on the internet as trolls. Whether those people have consistent views or not doesn't really matter, the trolling part is they don't allow a discussion they just lob in a grenade into the discourse and watch it burn. When someone does that with 100M twitter followers, it has consequences.
- nukemaster 5y agoMeh. People with 100M twitter followers have garbage opinions all the time. Some trolling would probably have the consequence of people learning not to believe everything they read on Twitter.
- mhoad 5y agoWhat a visionary. This whole gig is just going to be a series of random brainfarts and trolling isn’t it?
- RhodesianHunter 5y agoDon't forget stock manipulation. That's the centerpiece.
- daniel_iversen 5y agoYeah - as much as I truly love what Elon is doing for the world it's a bit hard to take him serious when he posts that kind of crap. Telling Twitter to turn HQ into a homeless shelter is not much better that saying things like "If Musk just gave every person $1000 blah blah".. those topics are worthy problems that we must solve, but the solution is not for all the tech companies to give up their office space.
- alecbz 5y agoTBH (In bad taste or not) I kinda read this exactly as poking fun at those “give every person $1000” tweets.
- deckard1 5y agoThe richest man in the world making a "joke" at the expensive of the absolute least fortunate in America is not a good look. Pretty tone deaf if you ask me.
- alecbz 5y agoI’m not saying it was in good taste but he’s not intending it to be at the expense of the homeless, it’s at the expense of the “just give everyone $1000” people (who are much more fortunate than the homeless but still less fortunate than Elon). Edit: to be explicit, the joke as I read it is that losing twitter HQ would be bad for twitter employees and also be a (borderline comically) ineffective solution to the homelessness problem.
- mmastrac 5y agoElon has a wonderful ability to make use of other people to build his own image. I was a former fanboy in the 2010s but he's so far off the deep end I won't consider touching anything he has control over. It was a disappointing turn from someone who could lead with vision to a billionaire troll that shows signs of what looks like depression to me. He's slowly sliding off the deep end.
- SwiftyBug 5y agoIn some way he reminds me of John McAffee.
- gonzo41 5y agoJohn McAffee was cooler, in the ride or die sort of way, but for taxes.
- mmastrac 5y agoEvery unstable, libertarian-leaning tech founder is really just one tax bill argument away from going McAfee.
- mhoad 5y agoMust be all the coke..
- Fatnino 5y agoI think you can often tell when musk is tweeting while high or not.
- Apocryphon 5y agoWe’re in an age that lionizes thinking different, that cherishes frank real comments that border on insanity, that embraces going viral. One person’s deep end is another’s genius. Musk is simply reinventing himself for American culture’s worship of celebrity and maverick contrarianism. In doing so he’s not only following the footsteps of polarizing figures like the previous president or Kanye West. There’s no shortage of such figures in tech, from pmarca to pg. Becoming a pontificating blowhard is practically a rite of advancement these days. The only difference is the degree of detached-from-reality contrarianism and level of politeness in tone.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoI think using unused office space is an exceptional idea. This will never happen at Twitter’s headquarters, but, Elon has a wonderful way of making everyone think about things differently. massively wealthy companies in Silicon Valley, yet a crisis of homelessness.
- misnome 5y agoHasn’t there been a whole slew of companies that attempted to do this before; realising that office space doesn’t convert very well…
- unicornmama 5y agoNo one had ever considered the juxtaposition of homelessness and wealth in San Francisco until Elon came along. The scales have fallen from our eyes. Huzzah. Excelsior!
- dazc 5y ago> No one had ever considered the juxtaposition of homelessness and wealth in San Francisco until Elon came along. Yet few of these people have ever considered doing anything about it?
- not_math 5y agoCities around the world did something similar (and didn't just trolled) during the pandemic. A lot of people had the same idea while seeing all these empty buildings. https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/07/15/downtown-hotel-turned-homeless-shelter-gets-first-residents/ https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/07/15/downtown-hotel-tu... https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-requisitions-two-hotels-to-shelter-homeless https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-requisi... https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/dartmouth-hotel-to-be-converted-into-homeless-shelter-1.5644623 https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/dartmouth-hotel-to-be-converted-... https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/10/12/toronto-has-2500-people-living-in-hotel-shelters-what-happens-when-those-leases-expire.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/10/12/toronto-has-2500...
- Overtonwindow 5y ago
- d23 5y agoIt’s becoming clear this is a man who got lucky too early and missed out on the maturing influences and experiences most people face. Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, here's more supporting evidence, I guess: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878
- throwaway894345 5y agoI think a fair number of people retain a sense of humor into adulthood but most lose the courage to be even the slightest bit subversive.
- jstepka 5y agoThis has nothing to do with homeless. Elon is saying the staff could be replaced by the homeless and it would be a better use of the office and money. This is about putting the staff on notice a house cleaning is coming.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoTwitter is permanent work from home. He's making a joke about the office being empty and the streets outside the office being filled with homeless people.
- jstepka 5y agoThis tweet where he calls out needing to fire 12 floors of staff might suggest otherwise; https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702
- natch 5y agoFinally an interesting comment, thank you. Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is, one does wonder where the staff are spending their time. Even if it’s hard to algorithmically detect a spam, it should not be so clunky to report it when the spammer repeats the same thing 20 times. It’s like they learned their work ethic at Google or something.
- aorth 5y ago> Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is I'm a nocoin/nevercoin blockchain skeptic who hates shitcoin spam too, but I wonder: does people posting tweets about "shitcoins" violate Twitter's usage policy, or just offend your sensibilities? I could see how posting the same thing twenty times might violate a policy, though not sure if it violates Twitter's. I only post about infosec and politics on Twitter and some users might not like that either!
- natch 5y ago
- enos_feedler 5y agoNot sure how I would feel as a Twitter employee right now. Especially if I didn’t like Elon.
- emerged 5y agoIf you’re a Twitter employee who doesn’t like Elon, he probably wants you to feel like quitting.
- b0sk 5y agoThat's kinda counter-productive in a world where all the techie companies are vying for top talent.
- emerged 5y agoThe big issues with tech aren’t finding enough people who can iterate a linked list efficiently. The big issues are cultural and political. You can call it a need for political equality if you want it to fit into a liberal framework.
- voidfunc 5y agoThey can quit if they don’t like him.
- nullc 5y agoAnd bonus, if they can't find new work Elon's got them covered with sweet new diggs.
- memish 5y agoOptimistic if you're one of the productive employees, particularly if you still believe in free speech.
- fortyseven 5y agoYou dropped your /s. You can use this one.
- legalcorrection 5y agoThe man is clearly making a joke at the expense of liberal Bay Area tech workers, and you all are in here clutching your pearls and psychoanalyzing him. Lmao.
- gfodor 5y agoHe’s a great troll, as demonstrated by the reactions here. Why do people get so bent out of shape about tweets? I’ll never understand it.
- emerged 5y agoThey are very fragile. I’m here to join the other grey comments in laughing at them.
- voidfunc 5y agoYea this whole thing is hilarious. A lot of folks on here without a ounce of humor in them.
- somenameforme 5y agoI think what he's doing is trying to use the internet like people interact in real life. Online we all have these overly straight forward and sterile personas, for the most part, because people get so weird and autistic about jokes or off-color references, like my last choice of adjective. It's not serious and not reflective of my views, but also has enough of a tinge of truth in it to convey some meaning - like all of the Elon's current slew of shitposts. And I think the reason "people" get bent out of shape about tweets was answered pretty aptly by this [1] post which is also why I put "people" in quotes. 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter, with a bias towards youth and liberalism. And of those 22%, 80% of all posts are generated by 10% of them with what is almost certainly a further bias. So when you think of "people" on Twitter you're talking about a biased to heavily biased sample of 2.2% of America. It's about as representative of America as Atherton is. So the reason people get bent out of shape about posts on Twitter is because Twitter is a little micro-bubble of society where the people engulfed within it likely have a very different perspective of reality than people outside of it. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517
- walkhour 5y agoThis is a joke that Elon wrote while using the bathroom this morning. There's no reason to read too much into this and convert these comments into a philosophy course.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoI hear you, but for someone who jokes around, he has a habit of making some of those jokes become a reality. If he writes it down, dare I say, we should not dismiss it as a joke.
- timnetworks 5y agoIsn't the joke that he has passive shares, but is able to push a vote through the board without involving them?
- swarnie 5y agoHe refiled as active. Taking his full 15% allowance within two years wont be an issue, i expect him to continue pushing.
- chasing 5y agoUnfortunately we're forced into this obnoxious situation where people have to spend a fair amount of time and energy parsing out these "jokes" because they're made by someone with an extreme amount of wealth and power. This, at least, is why I find him exhausting. And despite all of the chatter about his brilliance, this is not good leadership behavior.
- Anon1096 5y agoNo one is forced to analyze his tweets, it's unbelievably easy to just ignore him if you don't like Elon.
- chasing 5y agoActually, if you work in tech it's kinda tough. Especially when he buys a large stake in a company whose services you consider valuable and then starts bleating out erratic trollish(?) hot takes. I ignore him on Twitter and then they turn up here.
- jrm4 5y agoSomeone suggested to think of him as a genius 15 year old and I can't unsee it.
- Finnucane 5y agoWell, that was $3 billion well spent.
- lesgobrandon 5y ago
- vishnugupta 5y agoI can’t imagine the chaos among product org caused by Elon’s recent Tweeets. It’ll have thrown their planning completely off gear.
- CPLX 5y agoOne of the most forward-thinking prescient cultural predictions of the modern era just keeps becoming more and more true: What we have is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center. What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved. Tomorrow's Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow's Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow's Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow's Willie Horton ad will be an image macro, tomorrow's Borking a doxing, tomorrow's Moral Majority a loose coalition of DoSers and robo-petitioners and scat-GIF trolls—all of them working feverishly in service of the old idea that nothing should ever really change. https://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844 https://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-...
- mdasen 5y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878 He's also suggesting that they rename Twitter to "Titter"
- cinntaile 5y agoHe blends serious with not serious. He can test ideas and write them off as jokes if he faces a backlash. It's a somewhat interesting strategy.
- mnd999 5y agoThis is just trolling. He doesn’t have any control over twitter, he’s just a regular shareholder. Sure he could maybe try and get on the board if he wanted to but the other major shareholders would have to be pretty dumb to allow that the way he’s behaving.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vimy 5y agoHe is on the board. :p
- WillPostForFood 5y agoOn Tuesday, Twitter announced that Mr. Musk, 50, would be appointed to its 11-person board in a term that expires in 2024.* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/business/twitter-elon-musk-directors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/business/twitter-elon-mus...
- mnd999 5y agoI can’t keep up. I guess the other shareholders are pretty dumb. It's pretty clear he's motivated by some ideological crusade, rather than increasing profits.
- nullc 5y agoIt would require a careful voting power analysis, but his level of share ownership may already make him the defacto owner of twitter. Certainly he isn't that far from it already and could get there if he wanted to.
- dmamills 5y agoOne of the world's richest men using the homeless as a punchline.
- dazc 5y ago10 years ago I was homeless and broke, please don't take offence on my behalf.
- phendrenad2 5y agoYou must be fun at parties.
- yucky 5y agoThe homeless aren't the punchline. The punchline is all of the Twitter employees who lobbied for permanent work from home and thus no longer need that large empty building. I guess I'm curious to hear the downside to converting Twitter HQ to something useful like housing for the homeless. Twitter is a very progressive company, I would hope their employees would see the value in a move like this. The fact that this tweet has ruffled their feathers says a lot more about them, than Musk.
- mr_beans 5y agoHousing first has failed SF. The homeless would just trash the place. Don’t get sucked down into this mire Elon.
- photochemsyn 5y agoActually this is not a bad idea, but the required conversion might be a bit expensive. A better idea IMO would be to convert the first floor to an open-access showering / bathing / clothes washing / personal storage setup with attendants to cut down on people trying to use it as a heroin shooting gallery. Maybe put in a free veterinary clinic for those with homeless pets, hey maybe even a free medical clinic for humans too. Trying to set it up for people to sleep and live there, though, that would be a bit much.
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoWhy not have a monitored space to inject drugs right next to the OD meds and counseling services to get people off of drugs?
- photochemsyn 5y agoAnd a monitored space to drink cheap vodka too? Personally I'd say no, you have to go shoot up and guzzle cheap alcohol somewhere else. Fact is more homeless people have alcohol issues than opiate issues, anyway. A lot of the alcoholics and opiate addicts don't even want to get clean, so why bother catering to them like that? Give services to people who actually want to get off the street first, that's the better option.
- heckerhut 5y agoWe’re giving people those spaces in Europe and it’s a massive improvement for both city people and the addicted. Please open your mind.
- photochemsyn 5y agoYes, but Europe has socialized medicine for all. Here in the USA we have no such generalized resources, so triage is necessary. There's a certain fraction of the homeless population that simply needs a period of institutionalization in a managed care facility, and why should the much larger fraction of the homeless population that simply needs basic resources to get off the street be forced to mix in with the crazies shooting up in broad daylight?
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- code_runner 5y agoI can’t think of a twitter feed that deserves attention on HN less.