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Rattling off excuses for why "that will never work" and not even attempting will not solve anything either. Funny how design is all about problem solving until

Rattling off excuses for why "that will never work" and not even attempting will not solve anything either. Funny how design is all about problem solving until it forces people out of their comfort zone and challenges them to meet people who are not like them.

woah 13y ago
Sorry, right out of high school, I spent 3 years digging ditches, pouring concrete, and putting up drywall before getting into tech. For me at least, this has nothing to do with "meeting people who are not like me". I have found the tech community to be very diverse and much more tolerant than my colleagues in the construction industry.
- thwest 13y ago
  Is this a claim that your colleagues in construction are the same housing activists your OP is demonizing?
dvanduzer 13y ago
Indeed. Like the original author points out, NYC techies aren't the villain, Wall Street is! And SF techies aren't the villain, real estate developers are!
- glenra 13y ago
  Housing is expensive in SF because it's in short supply. You know who helps alleviate that short supply? Real estate developers! Seems to me the villain here is anybody who votes for more rent control and tighter restrictions on new development.
  - dvanduzer 13y ago
    Anil Dash said that everyone should do more, and the only reason NYC tech workers don't get as much flack as SFbay tech workers is because Wall Street is right next door to look so much worse. Essentially: the upper middle class doesn't understand why the lower middle class is angry at them for catering to every whim of billionaires? "Don't be mad at us, be mad at our boss. No wait, don't be mad at our boss, blame our boss's landlord." I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?
    - glenra 13y ago
      > I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy? No, I really did mean it's the voters. In the case of SF (and Berkeley, and NYC), the problem is democracy. Voters are economically ignorant and tend to vote for laws which screw up the housing market, then they gripe about it having been screwed up. I'm not sure how to fix this, but more democracy certainly isn't the solution. The problem is that good government is in the economic sense a public good, so it gets undersupplied. People vote from their gut and do so to broadcast their affiliations - to show that they care - not so much to solve real problems in ways that might plausibly work. I have occasionally thought about other systems that might work better. The fundamental problem is that we pass laws that sound like they might help solve a problem but we never actually go back to check if they did solve the problem, so over time the legal code becomes an impenetrable thicket of things people have tried that didn't work, but which inadvertently created a new constituency that doesn't want to get rid of them. I'd like to see us treat new laws the way we treat new drugs: Specify in advance what specific problem each law is trying to solve and how we'll know if the solution is helping - what metric will be measured. Then try the law out in some small region, see if it substantially helps, and only expand it further if it turns out it does. First, do no harm.
prostoalex 13y ago
The true solution is to build more housing. However, no sane person who's dealt with San Francisco's red tape would suggest it.

woah 13y ago

Sorry, right out of high school, I spent 3 years digging ditches, pouring concrete, and putting up drywall before getting into tech. For me at least, this has nothing to do with "meeting people who are not like me". I have found the tech community to be very diverse and much more tolerant than my colleagues in the construction industry.

thwest 13y ago
Is this a claim that your colleagues in construction are the same housing activists your OP is demonizing?

dvanduzer 13y ago

Indeed. Like the original author points out, NYC techies aren't the villain, Wall Street is! And SF techies aren't the villain, real estate developers are!

glenra 13y ago
Housing is expensive in SF because it's in short supply. You know who helps alleviate that short supply? Real estate developers! Seems to me the villain here is anybody who votes for more rent control and tighter restrictions on new development.
- dvanduzer 13y ago
  Anil Dash said that everyone should do more, and the only reason NYC tech workers don't get as much flack as SFbay tech workers is because Wall Street is right next door to look so much worse. Essentially: the upper middle class doesn't understand why the lower middle class is angry at them for catering to every whim of billionaires? "Don't be mad at us, be mad at our boss. No wait, don't be mad at our boss, blame our boss's landlord." I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?
  - glenra 13y ago
    > I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy? No, I really did mean it's the voters. In the case of SF (and Berkeley, and NYC), the problem is democracy. Voters are economically ignorant and tend to vote for laws which screw up the housing market, then they gripe about it having been screwed up. I'm not sure how to fix this, but more democracy certainly isn't the solution. The problem is that good government is in the economic sense a public good, so it gets undersupplied. People vote from their gut and do so to broadcast their affiliations - to show that they care - not so much to solve real problems in ways that might plausibly work. I have occasionally thought about other systems that might work better. The fundamental problem is that we pass laws that sound like they might help solve a problem but we never actually go back to check if they did solve the problem, so over time the legal code becomes an impenetrable thicket of things people have tried that didn't work, but which inadvertently created a new constituency that doesn't want to get rid of them. I'd like to see us treat new laws the way we treat new drugs: Specify in advance what specific problem each law is trying to solve and how we'll know if the solution is helping - what metric will be measured. Then try the law out in some small region, see if it substantially helps, and only expand it further if it turns out it does. First, do no harm.

prostoalex 13y ago

The true solution is to build more housing. However, no sane person who's dealt with San Francisco's red tape would suggest it.