6 ms·

I find it strange that the protesters target tech workers. The real class war seems NIMBY-supported landlords vs everyone else, not crappy-paid vs well-paid wo

by praptak 13y ago

I find it strange that the protesters target tech workers. The real class war seems NIMBY-supported landlords vs everyone else, not crappy-paid vs well-paid workforce. But well, I'm not even in US so what do I know.

michaelochurch 13y ago
I agree with you. The First Estate (landlords, investors and executives, paid enough to own houses) has been dicking over the Second Estate (engineers, able to live in SF but not save or buy houses) through no-poach agreements, collusive arrangements (note-sharing among VCs) blocking them from starting new businesses, and increasingly mean-spirited HR policies (stack ranking). The Third Estate (everyone else) is being evicted and abused by the rent-seeking First Estate. Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. I'm not so out-of-touch that I'd call $120,000 per year, in any city, "poor" because it's not; but neither is it "rich" and these tech workers are not responsible for this NIMBY nonsense.
- fidotron 13y ago
  A similar situation is behind the Economist existing, as about 200 years ago in the UK they had a strange setup with land owning aristocrats, free market industrialists, and proto-communist "Chartists". The aristocrats found unlikely allies in the Chartists, though it didn't help in the long run. The free market types were concerned about the Corn Laws, and formed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League , and their journal ended up becoming the Economist. The Corn Laws effectively subsidised the aristocracy, and prevented free labour movement, first by keeping cost of living too high (through cost of food) secondly by keeping people working on otherwise unviable farms to produce corn. The Chartists were so preoccupied with the idea that the industrialists wanted to drive wages down they missed the bigger picture.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods. I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate. As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.
- king_jester 13y ago
  > Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. Tech workers most certainly share some blame. When you accept work with those companies and move out to the valley, you are contributing to the culture of evictions and hyper gentrification that affect that area. You don't get to wash your hands clean.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    You seem to think they have a choice. Most tech workers don't want to live in the Bay Area. They're forced to live there because their careers require it. VC is a feudalistic, oligarchic reputation economy, concentrated in a tiny (now congested and overpriced) geographic area. Since they're not content to be passive investors (although their portfolios would perform better than they were) but want to actively manage, they only fund companies within 30 miles of them. Tech workers don't have much of a choice. If you want to have a career in this game, you have to live where the jobs are.
    - king_jester 13y ago
      While agree about VC being feudalistic and oligarchic, that doesn't mean tech workers don't have choice in where the work to some degree. There are many kinds of software development for many different companies in different locations, not to mention remote work. If you choose to pursue an opportunity in the valley, that has very real consequences and realities and that should be fully examined, and that includes knowing that you may be contributing to displacement and gentrification. EDIT: For the record, I've been a tech worker for a while and have never lived in California (except when I was a wee child).
      - michaelochurch 13y ago
        I worked for 7 years in NYC, considered the #2 tech hub. (Obviously, there's a huge gap between #1 and #2.) I'd almost certainly be an angel investor by now if I spent that time in SV. People about as talented as I am (and, some, significantly less) are now EIRs and partners at reputable VC firms, or even able to found. Place matters. I'm not poor, but I'm not where I should be, and probably not where I would be if I'd started in SF. (Why I chose NYC would take too long to explain. It's not relevant.) Once you have a national reputation and can get $250+ per hour consulting rates, you can live whereever you want. It takes a while to get there. Most people have to put in their decade in a congested, expensive, and not very pleasant region of the country before getting there (and some never do). As for remote work, it has the same issues. If you have a national reputation already, you can get away with it. Most places, remote workers don't really advance their careers and are the first ones axed.
- walshemj 13y ago
  yeh i am loking at a well paid job in london uk and I will still end up geting paid a lot less than a tube driver does and a much worse pension. Btw I am not saying that tube divers dont deserve thier sallary just pointing out how poorly techies are treated in the UK
- samstave 13y ago
  All salaries should just be spoken of with respect to their purchasing power, not qty of dollars per year. A 120k salary in sf has the same purchasing power of a 50k salary in other states (according to some studies from a few years ago, and id suspect it has gotten worse) The annual income required just to afford a monthly rent in SF is insane. Assuming that many 1bed apts are ~3,000 per month, youd need to make north of 50k just to cover the rent - let alone all other living expenses...
Shivetya 13y ago
Its a valid target for the protestors. The tech workers have sufficient funds to become part of the existing class that supports the restrictions. Since they can't do anything about those already here they merely target those who increase the problem. The downward pressure increases as more and more people with the ability to pay the high rates move in causing prices to move up. Face it, the protestors have a point. I have watched postings on this very site deride the suburb gated community members yet they turn around and defend the same if the setting is city based. Guarded/gated/etc condos/apartments are all fine, zoning rules forcing many to go to the suburbs to afford housing are fine, but damn if picking on techies living in the city who simple increase the problem is. As before, they don't want YOU or THEM as neighbors so they will invent all sorts of politically correct sounding terms to insure that outcome. There are times where it really makes sense to take zoning authority away from cities, especially when costs are demonstrably affected.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  Gated suburbs are themselves NIMBY types that seek to exclude certain classes of people through politics and restrictive land use policies. Rich tech workers are generally not like this. The secured condo building reflects the economic reality that land is expensive in San Francisco, and that housing requires security unless you like needles on the doorstep and bums pooping in your side alley. This is not hyperbole: housing in San Francisco carries a significant alley-pooping-bum risk. The only exclusion involved is a result of economic reality, and there is no way around it: someone has to be excluded from San Francisco, and you won't fix that situation by not building houses and not providing convenient transportation. That will just exclude more people. Which I think is what the protestors actually want (so long as the "right" people are excluded), but they haven't really pondered whether they are doing the right thing to achieve their distasteful ends; making them morally questionable and economically wrong. Yes, the secured condo building is a symbol of wealth and exclusivity, just like the gated community, but to declare that these two things are essentially similar is a serious misunderstanding of the situation, probably motivated by a rich-vs-poor sort of thinking.
  - king_jester 13y ago
applecore 13y ago
Inequality in the United States doesn't have to do with capital accumulation and wealth, at least not yet. It has more to do with income inequality and a larger share of total income going to the very highest earners. The key driver of this upward distribution of income has been the steep rise in executive compensation. The United States also redistributes far less through taxes than Europe. This leads to a wide gap between the very highest earners—those in the top 1.0% or even top 0.1%—and everyone else, including other high-wage earners.
- walshemj 13y ago
  But they are not going after the executives are they FWIW a bart train driver makes as much as a googler and after overtime probaly more.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - smutticus 13y ago
    I've seen the salaries of BART train drivers and I'm pretty sure you're wrong. That or Googlers don't make as much as I thought. Either way I'm not buying this statement until I see some actual numbers.
    - fennecfoxen 13y ago
      I don't have your numbers, but when you get them, remember that with government workers like BART employees, there's categorically more non-salary compensation - things like defined-benefit pension plans instead of 401(k) contributions getting deducted from your paycheck. Likewise the health-care plans. This is all on top of some of the best job security in the world, too.
      - spikels 13y ago
        As of last strike (mid-2013) the average BART worker make around $130,000 including benefits but not including overtime. Including overtime one train operator made $175,000. And both these number are likely to underestimate future pension and medical costs. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bart-workers-taking-us-for-a-ride.html?page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bar...
walshemj 13y ago
Finding a usefull scapgoat to blame is a very common tactic by the 1% look at how beneift cliamants are demonised in the UK and simarly the scare stories the tabloids run about how polish plumbers cause cancer, killed lady diana eat swans and so on.
hagbardgroup 13y ago
Nerds are trivial to beat up for their lunch money. Sad, but still true.
rwallace 13y ago
It's because mob psychology chooses targets based on visible availability. A Google employee boarding a special bus is visible - literally - in a way that his landlord is not. The reason mob psychology behaves that way in turn is because the coordination mechanisms used are very basic; thus, while individual members of the mob may be as intelligent as you or I, the mob as a collective entity necessarily behaves as though its intelligence were much more limited. What to do about it? At an individual level, if you're being targeted, say if you're on the receiving end of hostility from your neighbors, try talking to them, present yourself as a human being rather than a target. Read up on nonviolent communication. Explain what the real problem is. At a collective level, fight fire with fire. Make the correct targets more visible. Find out the names, addresses and faces of individual landowners who have been primarily responsible for the political corruption. Publish them. Make them targets. Or else get out of San Francisco. Seriously, tech workers have more intrinsic mobility than nearly anyone else does. Google could just decide to move its operations to a friendlier city tomorrow, and its net cost for doing so would be negative. If your startup has to be in San Francisco for the moment while you're raising capital, plan on getting out as soon as you have done so. But don't move to San Francisco unless you are willing to get into the political fight; as things currently stand, that's like stepping into a boxing ring and then standing there with your eyes closed. You're just setting yourself up as a target.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

by praptak 13y ago

michaelochurch 13y ago

I agree with you. The First Estate (landlords, investors and executives, paid enough to own houses) has been dicking over the Second Estate (engineers, able to live in SF but not save or buy houses) through no-poach agreements, collusive arrangements (note-sharing among VCs) blocking them from starting new businesses, and increasingly mean-spirited HR policies (stack ranking). The Third Estate (everyone else) is being evicted and abused by the rent-seeking First Estate. Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. I'm not so out-of-touch that I'd call $120,000 per year, in any city, "poor" because it's not; but neither is it "rich" and these tech workers are not responsible for this NIMBY nonsense.

fidotron 13y ago
A similar situation is behind the Economist existing, as about 200 years ago in the UK they had a strange setup with land owning aristocrats, free market industrialists, and proto-communist "Chartists". The aristocrats found unlikely allies in the Chartists, though it didn't help in the long run. The free market types were concerned about the Corn Laws, and formed the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corn_Law_League , and their journal ended up becoming the Economist. The Corn Laws effectively subsidised the aristocracy, and prevented free labour movement, first by keeping cost of living too high (through cost of food) secondly by keeping people working on otherwise unviable farms to produce corn. The Chartists were so preoccupied with the idea that the industrialists wanted to drive wages down they missed the bigger picture.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  This seems to always be the case - people turn on neighboring socioeconomic classes, not the ones at the extreme top of the pyramid. During the Jim Crow era, the worst discrimination against blacks came not from the elite (many of whom had been abolitionists during slavery and equality-minded liberals afterwards), but from poor white sharecroppers who were one degree removed from slavery themselves. Nowadays, the conservative movement within the U.S. is composed of the ultra-wealthy plus the lower-middle-class and working-class Religious Right. The targets of the LA race riots were not rich white people, but Korean shopkeepers in minority neighborhoods. I suspect it's because it's generally impossible to "skip" social classes and jump directly from the bottom to the top. Even rags-to-riches stories usually involved a period of a few decades where the person enters and assimilates into the intervening classes. Jan Koum went from immigrant to middle-class tech worker to aspiring entrepreneur to multi-billionaire. Henry Ford went from farmer to machinist to engineer to captain of industry. Andrew Carnegie went from immigrant to bobbin boy to telegraph operator to bookkeeper & investor to steel magnate. As a result, each class views the class directly above them as their impediment to upwards mobility, and they're not wrong in that belief. In times of scarcity, resentment usually flows upwards to their immediate neighbors. The more distant causes of the socioeconomic structures that hold people down are effectively invisible to the rioting classes; all they see is people who are not very different from themselves doing better than them.
king_jester 13y ago
> Somehow, the First Estate managed to convince the Third Estate that it's the Second Estate's fault, hence the bus attacks. It's not. Tech workers most certainly share some blame. When you accept work with those companies and move out to the valley, you are contributing to the culture of evictions and hyper gentrification that affect that area. You don't get to wash your hands clean.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  You seem to think they have a choice. Most tech workers don't want to live in the Bay Area. They're forced to live there because their careers require it. VC is a feudalistic, oligarchic reputation economy, concentrated in a tiny (now congested and overpriced) geographic area. Since they're not content to be passive investors (although their portfolios would perform better than they were) but want to actively manage, they only fund companies within 30 miles of them. Tech workers don't have much of a choice. If you want to have a career in this game, you have to live where the jobs are.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    While agree about VC being feudalistic and oligarchic, that doesn't mean tech workers don't have choice in where the work to some degree. There are many kinds of software development for many different companies in different locations, not to mention remote work. If you choose to pursue an opportunity in the valley, that has very real consequences and realities and that should be fully examined, and that includes knowing that you may be contributing to displacement and gentrification. EDIT: For the record, I've been a tech worker for a while and have never lived in California (except when I was a wee child).
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      I worked for 7 years in NYC, considered the #2 tech hub. (Obviously, there's a huge gap between #1 and #2.) I'd almost certainly be an angel investor by now if I spent that time in SV. People about as talented as I am (and, some, significantly less) are now EIRs and partners at reputable VC firms, or even able to found. Place matters. I'm not poor, but I'm not where I should be, and probably not where I would be if I'd started in SF. (Why I chose NYC would take too long to explain. It's not relevant.) Once you have a national reputation and can get $250+ per hour consulting rates, you can live whereever you want. It takes a while to get there. Most people have to put in their decade in a congested, expensive, and not very pleasant region of the country before getting there (and some never do). As for remote work, it has the same issues. If you have a national reputation already, you can get away with it. Most places, remote workers don't really advance their careers and are the first ones axed.
walshemj 13y ago
yeh i am loking at a well paid job in london uk and I will still end up geting paid a lot less than a tube driver does and a much worse pension. Btw I am not saying that tube divers dont deserve thier sallary just pointing out how poorly techies are treated in the UK
samstave 13y ago
All salaries should just be spoken of with respect to their purchasing power, not qty of dollars per year. A 120k salary in sf has the same purchasing power of a 50k salary in other states (according to some studies from a few years ago, and id suspect it has gotten worse) The annual income required just to afford a monthly rent in SF is insane. Assuming that many 1bed apts are ~3,000 per month, youd need to make north of 50k just to cover the rent - let alone all other living expenses...

Shivetya 13y ago

Its a valid target for the protestors. The tech workers have sufficient funds to become part of the existing class that supports the restrictions. Since they can't do anything about those already here they merely target those who increase the problem. The downward pressure increases as more and more people with the ability to pay the high rates move in causing prices to move up. Face it, the protestors have a point. I have watched postings on this very site deride the suburb gated community members yet they turn around and defend the same if the setting is city based. Guarded/gated/etc condos/apartments are all fine, zoning rules forcing many to go to the suburbs to afford housing are fine, but damn if picking on techies living in the city who simple increase the problem is. As before, they don't want YOU or THEM as neighbors so they will invent all sorts of politically correct sounding terms to insure that outcome. There are times where it really makes sense to take zoning authority away from cities, especially when costs are demonstrably affected.

cynicalkane 13y ago
Gated suburbs are themselves NIMBY types that seek to exclude certain classes of people through politics and restrictive land use policies. Rich tech workers are generally not like this. The secured condo building reflects the economic reality that land is expensive in San Francisco, and that housing requires security unless you like needles on the doorstep and bums pooping in your side alley. This is not hyperbole: housing in San Francisco carries a significant alley-pooping-bum risk. The only exclusion involved is a result of economic reality, and there is no way around it: someone has to be excluded from San Francisco, and you won't fix that situation by not building houses and not providing convenient transportation. That will just exclude more people. Which I think is what the protestors actually want (so long as the "right" people are excluded), but they haven't really pondered whether they are doing the right thing to achieve their distasteful ends; making them morally questionable and economically wrong. Yes, the secured condo building is a symbol of wealth and exclusivity, just like the gated community, but to declare that these two things are essentially similar is a serious misunderstanding of the situation, probably motivated by a rich-vs-poor sort of thinking.
- king_jester 13y ago

applecore 13y ago

Inequality in the United States doesn't have to do with capital accumulation and wealth, at least not yet. It has more to do with income inequality and a larger share of total income going to the very highest earners. The key driver of this upward distribution of income has been the steep rise in executive compensation. The United States also redistributes far less through taxes than Europe. This leads to a wide gap between the very highest earners—those in the top 1.0% or even top 0.1%—and everyone else, including other high-wage earners.

walshemj 13y ago
But they are not going after the executives are they FWIW a bart train driver makes as much as a googler and after overtime probaly more.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- smutticus 13y ago
  I've seen the salaries of BART train drivers and I'm pretty sure you're wrong. That or Googlers don't make as much as I thought. Either way I'm not buying this statement until I see some actual numbers.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    I don't have your numbers, but when you get them, remember that with government workers like BART employees, there's categorically more non-salary compensation - things like defined-benefit pension plans instead of 401(k) contributions getting deducted from your paycheck. Likewise the health-care plans. This is all on top of some of the best job security in the world, too.
    - spikels 13y ago
      As of last strike (mid-2013) the average BART worker make around $130,000 including benefits but not including overtime. Including overtime one train operator made $175,000. And both these number are likely to underestimate future pension and medical costs. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bart-workers-taking-us-for-a-ride.html?page=all http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/07/are-bar...

walshemj 13y ago

Finding a usefull scapgoat to blame is a very common tactic by the 1% look at how beneift cliamants are demonised in the UK and simarly the scare stories the tabloids run about how polish plumbers cause cancer, killed lady diana eat swans and so on.

hagbardgroup 13y ago

Nerds are trivial to beat up for their lunch money. Sad, but still true.

rwallace 13y ago

It's because mob psychology chooses targets based on visible availability. A Google employee boarding a special bus is visible - literally - in a way that his landlord is not. The reason mob psychology behaves that way in turn is because the coordination mechanisms used are very basic; thus, while individual members of the mob may be as intelligent as you or I, the mob as a collective entity necessarily behaves as though its intelligence were much more limited. What to do about it? At an individual level, if you're being targeted, say if you're on the receiving end of hostility from your neighbors, try talking to them, present yourself as a human being rather than a target. Read up on nonviolent communication. Explain what the real problem is. At a collective level, fight fire with fire. Make the correct targets more visible. Find out the names, addresses and faces of individual landowners who have been primarily responsible for the political corruption. Publish them. Make them targets. Or else get out of San Francisco. Seriously, tech workers have more intrinsic mobility than nearly anyone else does. Google could just decide to move its operations to a friendlier city tomorrow, and its net cost for doing so would be negative. If your startup has to be in San Francisco for the moment while you're raising capital, plan on getting out as soon as you have done so. But don't move to San Francisco unless you are willing to get into the political fight; as things currently stand, that's like stepping into a boxing ring and then standing there with your eyes closed. You're just setting yourself up as a target.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]