[HN Gopher] Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will r...
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to
South Bay
Author : crhulls
Score : 591 points
Date : 2024-08-06 03:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sfstandard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfstandard.com)
| tomohelix wrote:
| I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain
| to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location
| in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations,
| all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation.
| With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot
| as well.
|
| IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out
| of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is
| looking for.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Twitter received a sweetheart deal from the city to move there
|
| https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/city/
|
| Not sure it was worth it in the long run, but there was a lot
| of benefits that normal companies didn't receive.
| glimshe wrote:
| SF offices are a leftover of the low interest rate cycle. It's
| ok when you can borrow money cheaply as a form of status symbol
| for your company, but it makes no sense when companies have to
| watch every dollar and actually turn a profit - especially with
| the growth of remote work.
|
| I expect that companies will maintain bay area offices for
| investor relations and small teams of the absolute top talent,
| but do most hiring elsewhere over the years.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is
| moot as well._
|
| Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Not only Elon Musk. Lots of companies are backtracking on
| full remote work. Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many
| big companies.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| And I'll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud
| before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the
| replies:
|
| Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest
| in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game
| when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their
| leases expire.
|
| Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by
| incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats,
| either.
|
| There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that
| legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of
| eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to
| trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy
| about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree
| with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it's wrong.
| But the reality is that they believe it.
|
| Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of
| staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I'm not
| talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as
| techies often put it. I'm talking about ICs. I'm talking
| about developers.
|
| And there are certainly, certainly people that just don't
| feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.
|
| I'd love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve
| into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about
| commercial real estate and dumb management.
| EricE wrote:
| I've recently gone full time remote - mainly to be closer
| to family - and all I can say is thank goodness I'm near
| the end of my career. I vastly prefer hybrid - being in
| the office for a couple of days at least allows for
| networking, face time and serendipitous opportunities.
| There is no way I would be where I am today if I had
| always been working full time remote. I simply would not
| have had the opportunities to cross paths with people.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.
|
| That's the status quo until they rescind that as well. The
| companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending
| it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up
| in 2024.
|
| Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote
| work requires good communication hygiene in the company,
| hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct
| back-channels, now you can degrade systematic
| communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO
| on those grounds.
|
| And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a
| perk of upper management, "as it should be".
| bart_spoon wrote:
| And yet just today I read an article about how more than
| half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully
| remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year
| ago. It's possible some of the RTO push was to get people
| to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular
| it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest
| explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just
| throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or
| reason behind their decision making.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The benefit of locating to e.g. SF or New York is probably
| mostly social, to the capitalist and ruling class.
|
| I think you want to be close to the top of the pyramid.
|
| A CTO I worked for at a small startup said that they "don't go
| far from their golf club". But since Bill Gates and Steve
| Jeversson turned up I guess it is about being where it happens
| rather than being litteraly by their golf club.
| cdchn wrote:
| Musk seems to want the remaining Twitter employees to be in the
| office, and San Jose fits the lifestyle profile of those
| remaining much better than San Francisco does.
| lubujackson wrote:
| It is an attractive location for young people that want to live
| in SF instead of the boring burbs. Downtown has a ton of food
| options for lunch. You can walk over to a Giants game or to the
| waterfront. Union Square in particular has turned into
| something of a trash heap, but FiDi to the north and SOMA to
| the south are (mostly) attractive.
|
| It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you
| may not need to own a car.
|
| Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF
| office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect
| fundraising and talent attraction.
|
| And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is
| paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor
| of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below
| them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).
| EricE wrote:
| There are a lot of very readily apparent reasons you are
| apparently ignoring as to why your company got a much lower
| rent rate than someone who signed in 2019. Seriously - the
| ability for people to ignore multiple, rather large elephants
| in the room is hilarious.
| some-guy wrote:
| Moving out of SF may be the correct choice, but most engineers
| I know who have moved out of CA to cheaper cost of living areas
| have regretted their decision for one reason or another. Better
| taxes on paper may not translate to a better talent pool.
| fooker wrote:
| Good riddance. That part of San Francisco has been worse than the
| risky areas of most third world cities for the last 3-4 years.
|
| I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate
| so fast.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to
| deteriorate so fast.
|
| Didn't people vote for this?
| mplewis wrote:
| Sort of. San Francisco residents voted to recall the one
| mayor whose policies were having a positive impact on the
| city.
| cdchn wrote:
| Hmm Twitter wasn't able to single handedly rejuvenate the
| Tenderloin when they moved to 10th & Market like they were
| crowing about?
| rabuse wrote:
| You don't understand? Seriously? The terrible policies that are
| broadcasted everywhere online, through both text and video,
| isn't enough to understand?
| fabian2k wrote:
| Doing this on a few weeks notice seems rather insane to me.
| Unless you have very good remote work options this is very
| disruptive for employees.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I cannot understand why anyone would work there, especially in
| office. but each their own.
| DevX101 wrote:
| I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers.
| Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite
| a few of those who'd love to work at his company.
| loceng wrote:
| Why do you have him blocked, and just not following him?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I don't know if you've been on X lately but even if not
| following him you can receive push notifications from his
| tweets. Tested this on multiple accounts now, he's
| unavoidable unless blocked and sometimes not even then
| because of all the bootlicker accounts that screenshot
| and repost his tweets. Frankly it's made the platform
| unusable to me, almost nothing he posts is interesting or
| worth reading.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Why be on X in the first place? I lost all reason to be
| there about around the time of the rename.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| exactly!
|
| reading xitter today is worse than daytime television.
|
| contributing to it's content pool is just counter
| intuitive.
| loceng wrote:
| So my understanding is Elon reduced the algorithm's
| bubble effect - causing people to be exposed to
| contrarian content, content a person doesn't agree with,
| so that it would be witnessed by more people.
|
| Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in
| bubbles?
| lupire wrote:
| Do you think it's a problem that people are inundated
| with rage bait and scams? That's it's own "bubble".
|
| People aren't getting educational and uplifting material
| shoved into their feeds.
| Washuu wrote:
| If you are a content creator on Twitch or YouTube you
| pretty are being held hostage on Twitter due to critical
| mass. Migrating would require a mass protest of large
| content creators to choose a new platform and move over
| all at once.
| exe34 wrote:
| It's his personal blog, and he allows the plebs to post
| comments.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| A lot of scientists and journalists have not moved to
| other platforms. I tried to use instagram instead but the
| algorithmic injection of content and a terrible UI make
| it unusable for me.
|
| I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed
| to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content
| and almost no noise.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Even Musk has recommended doing this.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Yeah Instagram's algorithm is garbage. I get repetitive
| generic content no matter what. It doesn't seem
| responsive at all.
| rendall wrote:
| I just have Musk muted and I never, ever see his posts
| nor retweets.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| I stopped using X because it was literally impossible to
| not see his posts.
|
| /shrug
|
| My partner has the same. ...but, to be fair, who knows
| what different variants of the platform are given to
| different people in different regions at different times.
| loceng wrote:
| Should a person with the most followers in the world have
| more people seeing, to then be able to know what they are
| sharing or saying, to then have more eyeballs to
| scrutinize them?
|
| Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them,
| and responding to them?
|
| I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing
| other articles about him that are most likely propaganda
| nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence
| partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin
| with.
|
| But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.
| bigallen wrote:
| Dissenting opinions are Not Tolerated
| numpad0 wrote:
| Not following is for content you don't mind seeing,
| muting is for annoying friends you can't be screenshotted
| blocking, and blocking is for content you don't care.
| rsynnott wrote:
| So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before
| I stopped using the site (this would probably have been
| around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or
| interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from
| Musk in my feed every day, along with constant
| suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he
| was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I
| felt the need to block). I assume this is fairly common
| for Twitter users; can't imagine it's gotten _better_
| since.
| rob74 wrote:
| The question is, how many of these "candidates" still love
| him while/after working at one of his companies?
| zwily wrote:
| Elon has an estimated 110,000+ employees across all his
| companies. Maybe you can find one and ask?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I know one Twitter guy who was a big Elon fan and loved
| the energy, right up until he got arbitrarily cut in one
| of the previous rounds of don't-call-them-layoffs.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I doubt many of them would be honest with you out of fear
| of legal consequences: https://www.forbes.com/sites/james
| farrell/2024/03/21/elon-mu...
| rabuse wrote:
| Yet, they still choose to work under him. I go by actions
| of people to get their real beliefs.
| educasean wrote:
| Many people dislike their boss. I severely dislike Elon,
| but if they do move to the South Bay where I live and I
| happen to be out of a job, I'd entertain an offer from X.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Because San Jose is the home of Bad Boy Bail Bonds!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAY83HIL-Jg
| greenthrow wrote:
| Folks with H1B visas have an undue burden on any attempt to
| move jobs. Also interviewing is hell for many tech folks who
| are extremely introverted (myself included in that last part.)
| macintux wrote:
| Just _getting_ an interview isn 't easy for most in this
| economy.
|
| Or maybe I'm just thoroughly unlikable.
| scheme271 wrote:
| Very true although anyone on a H1B may have to file a bunch
| of paperwork since their job location changed. Although I
| suppose the paperwork is going to be more something that
| twitter's attorneys need to do.
| rty32 wrote:
| H1B is nothing compared to those who need to file a new
| PERM due to work location change. Going to be rough.
| jagermo wrote:
| probably got kicked out since Elon did not want to pay rent.
| Maybe the locks got changed.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Why would X have gotten kicked out for unpaid rent?
|
| The building manager stopped any and all proceedings against
| X for the two months of alleged unpaid rent.
| vundercind wrote:
| Just because you caught up with back payments doesn't mean
| the landlord wants you around anymore.
|
| Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of
| lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.
| infecto wrote:
| Doubtful narrative. In a time when occupancy is going up
| you would not want to kick our your anchor. Having a
| large company like X can help boost the rest of the area.
| vundercind wrote:
| Throw in any other factor and it fits. Another tenant
| already lined up, musk wanting to significantly reduce
| the space he was leasing (plausible, no?) or what have
| you. A slow commercial market might be the only reason it
| took as long as it did.
|
| Not a certainty, but a real possibility.
| davedx wrote:
| Because commercial real estate is just booming right now,
| right? People are fighting for that office space!
| wesleywt wrote:
| Because Twitter doesn't pay rent. IDK?
| chuckadams wrote:
| Given the surrounding conditions of lower Market, the
| landlord would probably need to pay someone to occupy the
| building if X didn't.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Shifting offices is also a way to get rid of staff without
| having to fire or lay them off.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Didn't he already fire most of the staff there? Who's left to
| fire?
| lupire wrote:
| Incorrect. Shifting office is a layoff (constructive
| dismissal).
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| First time I've heard the term, thanks.
|
| Does it still apply if the company offers relocation
| benefits and a reasonable time for (say) school transfers?
| resource_waste wrote:
| Maybe the building lease was up?
| mrweasel wrote:
| The timeline is just crazy, but from a financial stance it
| makes sense to leave the more expensive location, if you
| already have the space else where (ignoring that they didn't
| pay their rent in San Francisco anyway).
|
| I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter,
| sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see
| people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a
| year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Nah, this is VERY common for YC startups (which is the size of
| X I guess now)
| TheAdamist wrote:
| Thats generally the point with sudden disruptive moves - high
| attrition. Reduce the headcount without having to be in the
| news for layoffs.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Or the company is just led by a highly erratic narcissist
| with a track record (across several companies) of not
| treating his employees well.
|
| Build cult, treat like cult members.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I dunno. He seems somewhat consistent. I think people just
| generally don't like the things he's consistent about.
| ulfw wrote:
| He is a consistent liar making fall promises that never
| come to fruition.
|
| I think people just generally don't like being constantly
| fooled.
| ben_w wrote:
| > making fall promises that never come to fruition
|
| That's definitely _not_ consistent; the SpaceX stuff may
| be always behind _his_ schedule, but it does actually
| deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of
| the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells
| don 't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are
| really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g.
| hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).
| llamaimperative wrote:
| SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric
| cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla.
|
| Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have
| achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall
| from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e.
| self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more
| disappointing.
| ben_w wrote:
| > SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric
| cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla
|
| Neither of which matters; the SpaceX promises are still
| Musk's, and the pre-Musk Tesla was losing money on each
| sale (all <= 147 of them).
|
| > Makes the fall from grace, especially in such
| foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all
| the more disappointing.
|
| Agreed.
|
| To me, colonising Mars has a huge romantic appeal... but
| there's no way I'd want to be in a disconnected space
| habitat with an (orbital position dependent) 6-30 month
| return-to-Earth delay, if he's in charge of it.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do
| actually exist
|
| Well, except the $30K Model 3, and the $35K CyberTruck
| (Musk can promise all he likes that it's coming next
| year, but I see it coming at all as a snowball's chance
| in hell).
| jsheard wrote:
| They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon
| took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can
| take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical
| sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant
| decline in revenue and active users.
| nuz wrote:
| They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc
| (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt
| cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running
| servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might
| bring it to profitability.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1],
| but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B
| of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with.
|
| [1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad
| revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the
| acquisition it might not be so obvious.
| jrpelkonen wrote:
| Yes, the debt weighs heavily around their neck. If it
| eventually ends up in bankruptcy, will Elon Musk lose
| control of his beloved x.com domain name for the second
| time?
| rahkiin wrote:
| He'll probably sell x.com to himself just before that
| happens
| zinekeller wrote:
| I would imagine that it was set up so that it is rented
| from Musk (instead of owning* outright), but it's Musk so
| who knows.
|
| * I know it's still not _owned_ owned but there is still
| a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com
| (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner
| (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.
| chuckadams wrote:
| He'll probably name his next kid X. His history at PayPal
| shows how obsessed he is with that letter.
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| He calls his first kid with Grimes X
| ninininino wrote:
| Already happened
|
| https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1817220477427093963
| queuebert wrote:
| Maybe they could declare bankruptcy and sell for pennies
| on the dollar to a mysterious new holding company: Ksum
| Nole, LLC.
| seanhunter wrote:
| That's not how a bankruptcy works. In a bankruptcy, the
| company is owned by the creditors and gets resolved by
| them. Usually a business will attempt to avoid bankruptcy
| by filing Chapter 11[1] or similar so they get to propose
| a plan for restructuring that will pay back the creditors
| over time, but their actions as debtor in posession are
| scrutinized by the US trustee to ensure they meet a
| fiduciary obligation to the debtors, and the debtors can
| file a court case to appeal both the chap 11 and can try
| to get the debtor kicked out and a trustee appointed if
| they aren't acting in their interests.
|
| [1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-
| forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...
| bn-l wrote:
| Nah uh. Mr Ksum would find a way.
| queuebert wrote:
| Yes, I know. It was a joke.
| runako wrote:
| > American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter
| since the acquisition
|
| Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the
| likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase
| substantially since the financing was initially booked in
| mid 2022.
|
| If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do
| not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is
| probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to
| breakeven.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo
|
| source?
| runako wrote:
| Many sources for this, including:
|
| https://www.thestreet.com/technology/elon-musk-has-a-
| huge-tw... and
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-
| twit...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitte
| r-s...
|
| If you don't like my choice of sources, any popular
| search engine will help you surface additional sources.
| dragontamer wrote:
| $13 Billion leveraged buyout means that Twitter took on
| $13 Billion in loans for the privilege of being bought
| out by Elon.
|
| Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%, leaves
| 100million to 150million / month on debt alone.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%
|
| Do you have a source on this? I couldn't find anything.
| dragontamer wrote:
| On Twitters specific loan terms? No.
|
| But market rates are well known and well published. CCC
| class loans were 10% in April 2022 when these deals were
| likely. So 10% to 15% covers the possible range of loans
| if you know much about the market.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
|
| The higher end of 15% would be possible if the loans were
| finalized closer to May or June.
|
| There is a big difference from Feb 2022 vs April 2022
| though. But we know the rough timeline of Twitters
| acquisition as well as the rough timeline of when deals
| were signed. So I'm reasonably confident in an April 2022
| deal.
| runako wrote:
| Lower tiers of non-investment-grade corporate bonds
| currently yielding ~14%:
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
|
| Looks like when he took down the financing, rates would
| have been in the 12% range. Possible some/all of the debt
| has been rolled over since then, possibly at higher
| rates.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to
| some combination of politics and Musk's embarrassment for
| being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-
| adjacent tweet.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3
| Billion/year interest payments.
|
| I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still
| a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot
| merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at
| least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Elon can either directly pay the loans himself, or lend
| money to Twitter/X.
| dragontamer wrote:
| He could, but hasn't done so yet.
|
| Instead, Elon continues to make decisions like closing
| Twitters headquarters.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I actually don't think the removal of like views has
| anything to do with revenue.
|
| I think they actually did this so users are free to like
| whatever they want without having to worry about getting
| vilified for liking something that is not supported by
| the majority. For example liking something political or
| anti whatever.
| chii wrote:
| which i think is a good thing - but i wish there's a
| toggle to allow the user to choose.
|
| Sometimes i find interesting twitter accounts or posts
| through likes, and that's now gone.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I don't know if you are serious but because of LLMs trained
| on our work basically every tech company is scrambling for
| ways to get rid of programmers. Just yesterday I commented
| in a thread here where someone said 80% of their work is
| LLMable "bullshit" (somehow that guy, like many, didn't
| connect it to headcount or likelihood of keeping own
| job...)
| ben_w wrote:
| Even if it wasn't for LLMs, it feels like a long time
| since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or
| Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it
| to a pre-existing API.
|
| I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how
| rote their work is.
|
| People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel
| like these tasks should've been automated away a decade
| ago, without LLMs.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Lawyers or real engineers can only push a button and
| still have secure jobs because they have
| licenses/certifications/boards and liabilities with
| consequences. There is no such thing in programming.
| (Even though our mistakes can and do also lead to real
| people dying)
|
| > it feels like a long time since I did more than convert
| someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document)
| into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API
|
| That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of
| all programming in question.
|
| > automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
|
| I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally
| what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi
| drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate
| themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars
| actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov
| regulation _and_ taxi drivers all cheer for this because
| each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only
| for someone else not themselves:)
| ben_w wrote:
| > That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of
| all programming in question.
|
| Mobile, even smaller.
|
| > It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs
| to automate themselves out of jobs
|
| I was talking to a taxi driver pre-pandemic (from his
| passenger seat) who was enthusiastic about FSD even
| though it would end his career.
|
| And if FSD AI _don 't_ perform some of their training by
| trying to predict what all the other cars will do,
| they're missing out on a huge opportunity.
|
| More broadly, I think this pattern applies to all labour:
| surveillance is easy, humanoid robots exist.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| FSD is moot because it didn't work in the end.
|
| > this pattern applies to all labour
|
| Yup, that was the point of the taxi analogy.
|
| It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist...
| accountability and keeping society from unraveling
| ben_w wrote:
| > FSD is moot because it didn't work in the end.
|
| "Work" isn't Boolean -- the self drive AI does exist,
| just not well enough to do everything and even the "F"
| (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)
|
| The same quality may be worse or better in specific
| roles, but AI isn't stationary.
|
| > It is why unions/gov protections/certifications
| exist... accountability and keeping society from
| unraveling
|
| No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed
| -- but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the
| automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to
| make workers redundant.
|
| Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe
| conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer
| protection.
| michaelt wrote:
| To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds
| like a reason they _would_ want to reduce employee numbers,
| rather than a reason they _wouldn 't_.
|
| At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to
| pay wages.
| brookst wrote:
| Layoffs are expensive compared to making people miserable
| so they quit.
| runako wrote:
| Only if you pay severance/etc., which X doesn't.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Terminating employees without cause (i.e. due to
| employee's poor performance) entitles the employer to
| unemployment benefits, causing the state to increase the
| business's unemployment insurance premiums.
|
| If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming
| into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment
| benefits, and hence the business's unemployment insurance
| premiums are unaffected.
| runako wrote:
| Increased UI premiums on the remaining employees are not
| likely to approach the cost of "normal" severance for
| 80%+ of the original staff.
| brookst wrote:
| There's how much the company can take, and how much Elon
| thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the
| ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior
| specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire
| company.
| tiahura wrote:
| Did you think it would collapse when he canned the 80%
| runako wrote:
| Revenue is down by a larger percentage than the
| headcount, right? I think that counts as "collapse" by
| any reasonable definition.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I thought the company would collapse after firing 80% of
| staff, and for a long time I kept arguing that Twitter
| was still in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of the
| cliff but didn't fall yet" phase where they were running
| on pure momentum. I must admit, as time goes by, it's
| harder and harder to argue that. I just can't believe
| that 80% of the company was really just _not needed_.
| Every company I 've ever worked at was lean to the point
| where they almost couldn't get anything done due to lack
| of people. I can't imagine a company that could lose 80%
| of their people and keep on trucking.
| ghshephard wrote:
| Twitter's US revenue has dropped -83% from $661M in Q2 of
| 2022 to $114M in Q2 of 2024 according to:
| https://twitter.com/RealNeilC/status/1817562915634819464
|
| That's a pretty dramatic collapse.
|
| The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99%
| uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions
| - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton
| crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra
| Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an
| outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord,
| Platform Messaging APIs).
|
| As time goes on though, and you go through incident
| review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and
| 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on
| more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much
| reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation
| schedules pretty nice).
|
| My sense (from both interviewing and working with them)
| is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from
| Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of
| exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they
| were people on the periphery associated with making
| Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just
| maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra
| people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week
| without it becoming all encompassing.
|
| When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly
| place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue
| crashed.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| They just announced an anti-trust lawsuit regarding what
| they say is a coordinated effort to remove advertisers
| from the site. Not advocating one way or the other as to
| the merits of the claim but an interesting development
| regarding the revenue drop you mentioned.
|
| https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1820838625245880634
| ghshephard wrote:
| Companies have to be sensitive to the overton window of
| their customers. You make a mistake - it can be
| expensive. Let's ignore X/Twitter for a second - look at
| what happened to one of ABInBev's brands, Bud Light. They
| stepped outside that window and got smacked down pretty
| quickly.
|
| I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate
| to his _customers_ who they should do business with. I
| can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when
| interacting, particularly with (for the most part)
| completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies.
| But I 'm looking forward to digging into the theory of
| law which suggests that _vendors_ can regulate who /what
| type of business their _customers_ do.
|
| I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like
| there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and,
| companies are really, really profit seeking - if there
| was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by
| advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue,
| and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1
| CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance.
| Their political views would be irrelevant.
|
| The problem is - when all these trust and safety and
| advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to
| reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something
| horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So
| they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
| runako wrote:
| This lawsuit is ridiculous. If Twitter can sue companies
| for not advertising, can Tesla sue people for buying
| vehicles not made by Tesla? Can Google sue companies for
| advertising on Bing? Can Rivian sue Tesla buyers for not
| buying Rivians?
|
| The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of
| advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Where would they get revenue numbers on a private
| company?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Musk took a bunch of outside money during the buyout so
| they're still reporting results to e.g. Fidelity and
| other debtholders. Hence why we broadly know that
| investors have lost >70% of their money:
| https://x.com/danprimack/status/1774456271871033823
| zdragnar wrote:
| Don't forget that 2022 was still a good time for tech
| with people recovering from COVID lockdowns. It's not
| really much of a surprise that they're back to pre-COVID
| income.
|
| Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling
| mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups
| like Media Matters and others attempting to scare
| advertisers away.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| Those numbers don't mean anything. Revenue does not equal
| profit.
|
| Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the
| revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made
| $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M
| a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a
| dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.
|
| Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
| Aperocky wrote:
| So what's the profit?
|
| Assuming all $114M is profit, Elon dropped what, $43B on
| this?
|
| Which ever way you look at it, it looks pretty bad.
| runako wrote:
| > now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits
|
| > Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon
| Companies.
|
| Notably, the company does not release audited financials
| anymore. If the company were able to go from breakeven to
| netting 80% margins, great. But nobody should believe
| such a turnaround without evidence.
|
| Separately, if the company were netting $320mm annually
| (using your hypothetical), AND we assign the P/E of best-
| in-class Meta (which is growing, not shrinking), the
| company would be worth $8B[1]. Under these generous
| assumptions, Musk has presided over a $36B (82%)
| destruction of value in under 2 years.
|
| 1 - That's not accounting for the outstanding debt used
| to finance the deal. Including that makes the value of
| the enterprise negative.
| recursive wrote:
| People always find a way to justify their existence. In
| sufficiently large companies you can find people whose
| job is to satisfy policies invented by other people in
| other departments. In one sense, they were all "needed"
| because of the domino effects of some policy created long
| ago.
|
| But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it
| might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
| padthai wrote:
| I think Twitter is down 60% in advertisers and 30% in
| users? Elon personality is part of it, but losing so many
| people handling community, clients, institutions... I am
| sure the company has lost most of its institutional
| knowledge.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| They have recently reported an all time high usage
| record, that unsurprisingly happened after the
| assassination attempt on Trump.
| irksomehails wrote:
| I wonder if that record takes bots into account because
| the site is now teeming with bots, even more so than
| before.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I thought the same when they fired a bunch of people at
| my old employer (and 98% of the developers left).
|
| Well, they just outsourced everything to cheap devs in
| India and things kept rolling. No new features and some
| new bugs, but most things work.
|
| Turns out you don't really need that much to keep lights
| on.
| Lutger wrote:
| That is true. But you'll:
|
| a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with
| increased demands in the space. b) take on more and more
| existential risks
|
| For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to
| do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business
| lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut
| costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the
| product for as long as it lives. Informally known as
| enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than
| market capture.
|
| You can last a while though, especially because there
| aren't many changes so there's also less operational
| risk.
| lokar wrote:
| This is the Broadcom business model
| orblivion wrote:
| Depends on your standards I guess. You could cut it down
| to one person and have _a_ website running. As it stands
| if you look at most people 's profiles when logged out
| you see tweets starting a couple years ago other than the
| pinned tweet. I haven't used it much since a bit before
| Elon took over but generally as I understand it's more
| buggy and spammy than before. If that's good enough, I
| guess you could say it's still trucking.
|
| Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet.
| I figured Elon would slash things that people thought
| were important but actually weren't, and make it more
| efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site
| is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective
| that's not important, which is a shame for us.
| ljsprague wrote:
| Definitely more spammy but I have not found it to be more
| buggy.
| Lutger wrote:
| Not able to comment on the technical side, but for sure a
| lot people who got sacked were on moderation. Some
| countries like mine eventually lost all moderators
| specifically working for that country. And it does show
| in the amount of spam an unchecked racism etc, which is a
| big reason why many advertisers left.
|
| From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did
| collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it
| when running social media.
| valval wrote:
| Moderation is just another word for cencorship
| muddi900 wrote:
| Not all censorship is bad. For example, I doubt you would
| like to be exposed to CSAM or ISIS videos when scrolling
| Twitter.
| psd1 wrote:
| Bollocks. The word "censorship" has connotations of
| "suppressing truth". There's no uptick of truth. It's not
| censorship to flush a turd.
| dang wrote:
| They're paired like this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their
| people and keep on trucking.
|
| Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run
| a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what
| Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce
| is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance
| mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.
|
| How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the
| lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly
| wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy
| lifters.
| durandal1 wrote:
| By "maintenance mode" you mean shipping more features per
| year than the pre-Elon Twitter? Remember, the pre-Elon
| Twitter was completely stagnant and seemingly unable to
| ship even the most desired features.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Musk has openly said many times he wants X to be an
| "everything app" and sees huge growth in its future. What
| makes you think he ever intended to put it in
| "maintenance mode"?
| onion2k wrote:
| 80% was needed to grow the business. If Twitter chooses
| not to grow them it doesn't need those people. It only
| needs enough to keep the lights on.
|
| If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction
| it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to
| react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing
| any more though so it's probably quite safe.
| brabel wrote:
| Not really, revenue seems to have fallen but not so much
| and it's growing again according to this:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
| 2014 1.4 2015 2.2 2016 2.5 2017
| 2.4 2018 3 2019 3.4 2020 3.7
| 2021 5 2022 4.4 2023 3.4
|
| Number of users is actually larger than ever now:
| 2015 304 2016 313 2017 310 2018
| 298 2019 312 2020 347 2021 362
| 2022 401 2023 421
|
| I think everyone can agree this looks nothing like
| "collapse".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is there a reason to assume this website has access to
| audited figures from a private business like Twitter?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| The linked article doesn't seem to say anything about
| growth in revenue numbers - but it does say overall
| revenue has dropped 50% since Musks takeover. The
| quarterly chart doesn't look great either.
|
| Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was
| allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the
| size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter,
| but the door has been opened and that seems like an
| unforced error.
|
| This election season looks poised to further drive long
| term disengagement as the platform is going to be very
| toxic and very unmoderated.
|
| Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down
| 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I
| suspect, like other private equity investments, this will
| not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his
| personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to
| unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE
| playbook.
| brabel wrote:
| > if revenues are down 50%
|
| Check the actual graphs! It went down by 50% briefly, but
| then increased again. It's still lower than before, but
| not by that much.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Don't forget the peak happened during COVID- where it is
| at now isn't really much different than where it was
| before, if the numbers are accurate anyway.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Further, the brand has been tainted
|
| The brand was never _not_ tainted. Twitter has long been
| known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively
| contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It
| would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it
| the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.
| skissane wrote:
| > Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around
| 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU
|
| Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism.
| Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on
| X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at
| Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just
| people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed
| takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff
| that you'll already find better coverage of on X.
|
| > This election season looks poised to further drive long
| term disengagement as the platform is going to be very
| toxic and very unmoderated.
|
| I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff
| posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you
| follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Where is this site getting revenue numbers for 2023 &
| 2024? The company is no longer public and doesn't issue
| public earnings reports AFAIK.
| vecter wrote:
| Isn't revenue declining according to that data?
| brabel wrote:
| Look at the revenues per quarter. It was growing in 2023,
| but declined in the first quarter of 2024, but I wouldn't
| say you can make conclusions for 2024 from one quarter.
| vecter wrote:
| That's the wrong way to read revenue graphs. You need to
| compare quarterly year over year. From that perspective,
| it's down across the board.
| brabel wrote:
| No one is comparing year over year, there's been barely a
| year since the acquisition. I said the "arrow" over the
| latest few quarters was generally UP, in response to a
| mistaken argument that Twitter/X has collapsed. I am not
| trying to say Elon is great or something like that, I am
| making an observation of what the charts say, that's all.
| I don't know if the charts are 100% accurate, but I have
| no reason to doubt either... Why anything that may be
| positive about X is so controversial, even something as
| uncontroversial as the direction of an arrow on a damn
| graph? People seem to lose all rationality over this guy,
| what the hell is going on?! Do you actually have figures
| showing completely different results?? IF no, why all of
| a sudden people are so completely skeptical of it?!
| Sounds like discussions about climate change: someone
| shows a chart with temperatures way up, all of a sudden
| everyone is an expert and points out it was higher 60
| million years ago or whatever, or the data cannot be
| fully trusted because they learned in high school that
| these are just estimates or other crap on the same vein.
| It's embarrassing for the human race.
| vecter wrote:
| The point has nothing to do with Elon. It's just the
| correct way to analyze revenue graphs due to seasonality.
| Whether or not X is "collapsing" isn't obvious from the
| graphs either, and I made no such claim. We'd need to
| know other things that aren't public, and it's probably
| too early to tell anyway. But it's incorrect to say that
| revenue is growing. It's down quarterly YoY, which is the
| only real meaningful way to look at it.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Further, everything after Musk bought it is just a guess.
| Without public audited numbers, who knows what is going
| on. If I had to bet, I would guess the numbers are even
| lower than estimated - if things were hunky dory, I doubt
| they would be suing their customers (advertisers).
| slashdave wrote:
| > Number of users is actually larger than ever now
|
| So... you mean the bot detection is now more broken?
| runako wrote:
| Let's assume we can trust these numbers. The user count
| is not material for a site that has already scaled and
| monetized, so focus on the actual money changing hands.
|
| That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture
| how much worse off the company is today than before the
| acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue
| and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly
| had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the
| year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023
| looks more like $2B in topline.
|
| Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more
| capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.
|
| Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the
| company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding
| debt, you will end up with a negative number.
|
| Yes, this business is currently in "collapse."
| brightball wrote:
| Well, based on today's activity there is apparently some
| conspiracy involved.
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=
| alZ...
| runako wrote:
| If you're suing your customers? With frivolous lawsuits?
| You are admitting that your business is in collapse.
|
| There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety
| so that people could post whatever they want under the
| guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to
| advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want
| to run ads next to objectionable content.
|
| Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to
| big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability
| to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now
| CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run
| next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop
| spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved
| here.
|
| At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter
| management wants to create a space where people can post
| ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if
| they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for
| restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this
| practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter
| management are directly in conflict with the goals of big
| advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation
| to unfold.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| "where him and maybe two other superior specimens of
| manhood could single handedly run the entire company" -
| while driving their manly cyber trucks.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Correction: "While their manly cybertrucks drive them"
| nicce wrote:
| If they happen to work...
| dbbk wrote:
| > Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense
|
| They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac
| app so... no
| ben_w wrote:
| Oh? I missed that news.
|
| Edit:
|
| This, I guess: https://www.msn.com/en-
| us/money/other/x-kills-its-mac-app-ac...
| justinhj wrote:
| " If you're a Twitter diehard who's not willing to swap
| to X, it might be finally time to ditch X for Mastadon or
| Threads. On your way out, don't forget to delete your X
| account." journalists are so biased against X
| justinhj wrote:
| ofc a "journalist" just outright tells people to delete
| their X accounts and I get a downvote
|
| the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and
| ideological
| amiantos wrote:
| You're getting downvoted because you're just
| regurgitating the Elon Musk fanboy "journalists hate X
| because they're threatened by it!" and "journalists are
| biased and not trustworthy!" party line nonsense like a
| complete weirdo.
| dbbk wrote:
| Yep happened to me. 16 year old account. Oh well, Threads
| it is.
| jandrese wrote:
| 4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in
| the cushions of his couch.
|
| Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part.
| Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part.
| You have to do the latter if you want to keep the
| advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more
| for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being
| able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real
| boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great
| time.
| rabuse wrote:
| I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown
| adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my
| eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice
| seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather
| than only seeing the left biased information.
| jandrese wrote:
| "You and everyone like you should be rounded up and
| executed" is a just a mean message, but it's also
| dangerous. People will believe that stuff, and then try
| to do it. This isn't a theoretical danger, it has
| happened time and time again throughout history. These
| sorts of seductive messages that target out-groups and
| provide a sense of community have lead to real life
| horrors.
|
| X has also gotten very bad about amplifying
| misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics.
| Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old
| paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of
| 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community
| notes. The comment section was full of great replacement
| theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and
| making it sound like there was a consensus. People see
| stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I
| wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some
| point.
| reverius42 wrote:
| Is "left biased information" a euphemism for anything
| that doesn't include Nazi propaganda or hate speech?
| Because those are pretty much the things that were
| (loosely, not fully) banned prior to Elon's takeover.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No. Left biased information is what was on twitter
| before. Not everything you disagree with can be classed
| as nazi.
| Shocka1 wrote:
| I was a big Reddit user back in 2015/16 and also spent a
| lot of time in the NPR comments. Watching the insanity
| around the 2016 election in real time was an interesting
| experience. The mass suppression on Reddit and NPR
| shutting their comment section down was enough to form my
| opinion on this whole thing.
|
| That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It
| still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels
| very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For
| every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of
| crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > but the way it works now has led to a significant decline
| in revenue and active users
|
| I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this
| year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...
|
| [1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-
| twitter-sha...
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| Given the replies to every popular tweet, I don't really
| believe those are actual people.
| cyphertruck wrote:
| Active users on the site is setting records pretty
| regularly, according to Linda. Usability and performance of
| the site is far higher than before in my experience as
| well. Revenue is down only due to an illegal cartel
| boycott, which X has recently filed a lawsuit to resolve.
| latentcall wrote:
| "illegal cartel boycott"
|
| I'm not sure what you're talking about, can you fill me
| in a little bit?
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/6/24214536/x-elon-musk-
| antit...
|
| Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.
| cyphertruck wrote:
| Except he is not suing advertisers. The Verge is fake
| news.
|
| He is suing a literal cartel after their crime was
| exposed in congress.
| cyphertruck wrote:
| From the CEO:
| https://x.com/lindayax/status/1820838625245880634
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Elon?
| verandaguy wrote:
| I've only seen the words "illegal cartel boycott" being
| used (verbatim, as it were) by Musk, as well as the
| Twitter account of something called Rumble who are
| apparently joining Musk in trying to sue the advertisers
| who left the platform in response to it becoming too
| volatile to associate their brands with.
|
| Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?
|
| Would it not be an expression of free speech and
| advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity,
| seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech
| absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst,
| wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market
| acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its
| previous consumers?
| cyphertruck wrote:
| Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of
| an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not
| "free speech".
|
| You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you
| straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
|
| You support censorship.
|
| This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative
| positions.
|
| There's nothing more hypocritical than leftists
| pretending to care about human rights.
|
| I'm not going to indulge pretending otherwise.
|
| You cannot lie your way into moral superiority.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| This take, which is taken straight from Elon, is plainly
| hilarious.
|
| They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but
| when advertisers exercise their free speech and go
| advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.
|
| Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't
| moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if
| it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be
| censorship". But then with the legal and publicly
| available information posted by ElonJet, that was
| _different_ and everybody who ever mentioned it was
| banned.
| verandaguy wrote:
| >Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer
| of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is
| not "free speech".
|
| This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but
| doesn't really justify the thought that association
| between any group of private entities could be compelled.
|
| > You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you
| straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
|
| I think this may have been in reference to another
| commenter.
|
| > You support censorship.
|
| I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying
| to find technical workarounds to online censorship in
| dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these
| days is closer to the censorship seen in those places
| than it was before Musk took over.
|
| I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as
| censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't
| get started on here.
|
| > This site literally bans anyone who defends
| conservative positions.
|
| Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been
| any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete
| conversations where people who aren't constructively
| participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me
| if this thread got removed, for example.
|
| I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since
| those aren't really substantial enough to even talk
| about.
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't know what the established criteria are for
| 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems
| like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act
| notice, which is going to get the company in the news for
| layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the
| notice in a timely fashion, too.
|
| This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how
| it looks.
| jorts wrote:
| SF to San Jose would be a horrible commute via car, which
| not everyone has.
| nomdep wrote:
| Because they are paying SF rents? If they moved to San
| Jose wouldn't they solve two problems at the same time?
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| If you enjoy being bored to death, perhaps.
|
| Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in
| SF have particular interests and desired amenities that
| make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively
| neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You should check what rent in San Jose is.
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| Not to bad via 280
| toast0 wrote:
| From what I could tell, the 'standard' for reasonable
| commute measures from the employee's home, not from the
| original location to the other. But the federal WARN info
| says 'reasonable' varies by locale, and didn't offer any
| specifics.
|
| Moving the office is probably neutral or better for
| people on the Penisula. And may be neutral for parts of
| the East Bay. Depends on where exactly in San Jose the
| new office is too.
|
| Also, I was surprised by how light traffic was when I
| drove from Mountain View to SF last October during what I
| was expecting to be the morning rush hour. I don't recall
| what the reverse direction looked like, though.
|
| But my point was kind of to raise the likelyhood that
| this action was taken without regard for how it looks,
| and without regard for required notifications.
| wesleywt wrote:
| Since Musk took over Twitter one word we could use to describe
| the process is "disruptive to employees"
| smsm42 wrote:
| That depends on how many X employees actually live in SF and
| how many commute each day back and forth from the same South
| Bay. When I worked in SF, I regularly shared a train with the
| latter crowd, and there are a lot of them. I'm not saying they
| all work for X, but I suspect for a lot of people there the
| move would actually be an improvement.
| pound wrote:
| Sacramento data center shutdown happened without even a few
| weeks notice (just suddenly, on Christmas eve Saturday)
| slashdave wrote:
| Disruptive for employees? Have you been reading about the
| recent history of this company?
| pie420 wrote:
| "very good remote work options"
|
| You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows
| machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work.
| And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more
| productive
| rty32 wrote:
| You don't say that 2020-2022 proves that remote work
| definitely is ok for a lot of people and they want it to stay
| that way. And recently there have been multiple reports
| showing that more flexible working options help lowering
| attribution. Well, what a surprise. /s It is clear that CEOs
| force people back to office mostly to cut headcounts.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > that's literally all you need for remote work.
|
| Effective remote work is as much, if not more, a social and
| collaboration problem, as it is a technological problem.
| blueboo wrote:
| Consider the savings to add 15hr/wk of commute time to the onsite
| workforce. Yikes
| uxp100 wrote:
| Why assume everyone is living in SF? I can't imagine Elon
| actually asking his employees and taking there opinions into
| account, but my experience is that people are commuting in
| every direction in the Bay Area. This will be closer for some
| people without a doubt.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Does any employer factor this in? That's the employee's
| time/expense, not the company's. After all, SF is one of the
| cities with the worst traffic (to say nothing of the cost of
| living)
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Yes, I've been at two companies that changed office locations
| and both took into consideration the effect of a commute
| change on employees.
| zknill wrote:
| I don't know US commutes, or US geography too well. But it seems
| these two locations are about 45mins-1hr drive from each other.
|
| Where do folks actually live in those areas? Is it that a 30min
| drive north to San Fran becomes a 30min drive south to San Jose?
| htrp wrote:
| More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni
| (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an
| annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional
| train system) with 2-3 transfers
| loceng wrote:
| Until Boring Company sets up multiple pickup points with Loop
| and Hyperloop tunnels; then will arguably be a max 20-30
| minute ride.
|
| The dynamics of travel will dramatically change multiple
| industries, save for if the status quo establishment and
| industrial complexes through regulatory capture prevent the
| rapid expansion of the paradigm shift in transport that
| Boring Company is rapidly developing; the technology of which
| Elon needs for his Mars colony, and so it'll happen and be
| developed as far as is determined to be necessary to maximize
| its utility and safety.
| ebabani wrote:
| How big is their network so far?
| loceng wrote:
| I haven't looked into it recently, however their Las
| Vegas network is going and expanding; 40 million people
| per year travel to Vegas, a great testbed and for
| exposure.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Why is the number of people in LA relevant when the
| ridership peak is 1,355 an hour.
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... Wait, is it actually _that_ low? That's, like, a
| high-frequency conventional bus route (ie not BRT). Like,
| what on earth was the point? Either use buses for same
| capacity, or build a real rail line for ten times the
| capacity. The highest capacity metro systems can do
| something like 40k/hour each direction (though one of
| those would clearly be overkill in this case, and
| something far more modest could be used).
| occz wrote:
| I wouldn't bring up the Las Vegas network if you're
| trying to advocate for the boring company, it's quite
| possibly the worst system of transportation that's ever
| been created. A farce in every aspect, benefiting no one.
| jen20 wrote:
| I used the underground Tesla thing to get between the
| halls of the convention center during NAB - it was pretty
| reasonable, but not really scalable...
| occz wrote:
| This is not the sort of thing you should measure on an
| individual user experience basis. Try running the numbers
| for the system, it would essentially get beaten by a
| medium-sized bus in capacity and times, at a fraction of
| the cost.
|
| Not to mention the large delta between what was promised
| versus what was delivered. There's probably a good case
| for fraud, if it were not for the fact that the
| purchasers want to save face they could probably sue.
| jen20 wrote:
| ... that is what I said. Good experience, not scalable.
|
| However, transit advocates need to realize that the
| experience of individual users _does_ matter.
| vundercind wrote:
| Is that the one that's just teslas driving in a pretty
| normal tunnel at fairly unimpressive speeds & throughput?
| vel0city wrote:
| Teslas which still don't have reliable enough FSD to
| drive on a one-way only track so they need human drivers
| to drive 1-3 people at a time.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They have 2 or 3 tunnels of which at most 2 are actively
| in use.
| askl wrote:
| 0
| wodenokoto wrote:
| By that time current senior staff is retired
| loceng wrote:
| Hey dang, what exactly in my comment above warrants -5 (or
| more) downvotes?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought.
|
| Might as well argue he's going to give all his employees
| time machines to go buy $AAPL in the 90s as part of their
| comp plan. Would also get downvoted.
| loceng wrote:
| "Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought."
|
| A claim you make with no supportive arguments.
|
| My comment is packed with critical thought. Maybe you're
| just lacking understanding to unpack it? Or are you too
| arrogant to not think that you know all?
|
| And then ridiculous ad hominem that you think was clever
| enough to actually waste time to type out; what work do
| you have that you hate that you're procrastinating from
| working on?
|
| I'm really curious if you know what sycophancy means, and
| if so, how exactly my comment is benefitting me? I think
| it's more likely you're jealous of Elon's success, have
| past trauma from personal work experiences you're
| projecting onto him, and taking it out on anyone who
| notes his successes and extrapolates to estimate where
| his projects will lead to.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| wat.
|
| I don't think you know what ad hominem nor sycophancy
| mean.
|
| Have a good week!
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| You're telling people to commute with a thing that
| doesn't and very unlikely ever will exist?
| loceng wrote:
| https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop - doesn't exist?
| sammex wrote:
| Because theres a snowball's chance in hell that will ever
| happen. Just build normal trains and expand the public
| transportation like every developed country on Earth.
| zo1 wrote:
| This is a very anti-Musk thread and generally anti-Musk
| crowd. Pro-Musk comments should be expected to be
| downvoted, unfortunately. It's days like these one has to
| be brave and burn some magical internet karma points in
| order to present an opposing view and to call out the
| one-sided discussions.
| luuurker wrote:
| I don't think the comment is being voted because it's
| "pro-Musk", but because no one believes they're going to
| do any of that. I even thought it was a joke, until they
| asked why they were being downvoted.
|
| The true is, there's a huge gap between what was promised
| early on and what they seem to be able to do. After a
| certain point people start calling it "bs" and have no
| patience for those repeating the initial claims.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Is this comment satire? It's really hard to tell.
|
| If it's not I encourage you to go look at the stellar
| success of the boring company in places like Las Vegas and
| reconsider your assessment of the future.
| BadHumans wrote:
| This will never happen and the Hyperloop was a lie. Your
| comment reads like Elon propaganda.
| chuckadams wrote:
| You need CalTrain to get to San Jose. BART should have gone
| all the way around the bay by now but CalTrain defends its
| turf like a honey badger.
| smcin wrote:
| Transit in the Bay Area has very fragmented governance: 27
| different transit agencies for 7.6m people in 9 counties
| with little coordination and no regional vision. By most
| measures, the Bay Area has the most fragmented public
| transit network in the country. See Seamless Bay Area if
| you want to make your voice heard for fixing this:
| https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/
|
| For a map and list of the organizational insanity, see
| https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/transitagencieslist
| (2019).
|
| (Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all
| this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the
| freeway where possible).
|
| BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended
| to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still
| debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in
| construction).
|
| It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there
| are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too:
| as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail
| project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no
| midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain
| View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic
| and enormous construction disruption from underground
| multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.
|
| At least, Caltrain electrification is finally promised,
| fall 2024:
| https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-
| be... (more reliable (=> fewer breakdowns and delays), less
| noise, cleaner air quality)
| orblivion wrote:
| They still haven't finished that leg? I was there 7 years
| ago and the plan was advertised on the maps.
| sentientslug wrote:
| You can get to San Jose on BART now but have to go all
| the way under and around the bay instead of directly
| south, so it's not really worth it to go from SF to SJ
| using anything other than Caltrain.
| whyenot wrote:
| You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for
| several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With
| electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be
| faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where
| Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably
| won't be that bad.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| BART runs with 20 minute headways on longer routes (and as
| little as 4 minutes through San Francisco). The six
| CalTrain "baby bullet" express trains run hourly _at best_
| , with long service lapses mid-day and in the late
| evenings. Locals run more often (about every 10--20 minutes
| during peak commute hours) but add a half-hour to the just
| over one-hour express schedule.
|
| (Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly
| during rush hour.)
|
| CalTrain: <https://www.caltrain.com/media/22502/download>
|
| BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose)
| departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm
| (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):
|
| <https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/January%2
| 01...>
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Are they upgrading the tracks as well? Diesel trains can
| run at 80mph no problem, which is about the maximum any
| standard US railroad supports. If the track is built to
| high speed standards you could go faster.
| jen20 wrote:
| The track has a lot of at-grade intersections with roads
| running through the mid-peninsula - it seems unlikely
| they'll be running trains at 80mph.
| skissane wrote:
| At-grade intersections can be removed.
|
| Melbourne, Australia has been running a project since
| 2015 - scheduled to continue until at least 2030 - to
| remove at-grade intersections (or "level crossings" as we
| call them) on suburban rail lines. They've already
| removed 83, and by 2030 plan to have removed 110. I'm not
| sure of the total cost, but I'd say in the ballpark of
| US$5-10 billion. The removal is done by a combination of
| elevating the rail line, trenching the rail line, and
| leaving the rail line at the same level but building road
| bridges over it - adopting whichever solution is most
| feasible and cost-effective for any given at-grade
| intersection. The project is run and paid for by the
| state government, with the federal government
| contributing some of the funding.
|
| Australia's State of Victoria: population close to 7
| million, economy almost US$300 billion (Gross State
| Product), annual state government budget around US$70
| billion. California: population close to 40 million,
| economy almost US$4 trillion (GSP), annual state
| government budget of almost US$300 billion. If Victoria
| can afford it, California can too.
| morepork wrote:
| The plan is to run the high speed rail along the same
| tracks at reduced speed, so if that doesn't get cancelled
| they'll eventually remove all those
| s1mon wrote:
| I commuted for several years to Palo Alto from SF. If you
| manage to get on a "baby bullet" it was a 37 minute ride,
| but you also have to get to/from a Caltrain station on each
| end. In PA, I was lucky that the office was a few minute
| walk, but in SF it was a taxi or bus ride (this was pre-
| Uber etc).
|
| As an X employee, if you had optimized your commute around
| the mid-market area, you could be living less than 45
| minutes away on a single mode of public transit, but it
| could double or triple to commute to the new X offices. Any
| time you have a transfer with the commuter systems in the
| Bay Area, it's going to be a clusterfuck from time to time.
| ncr100 wrote:
| .. and being "close" to the occasional death: The inter-city
| CalTrain (the outside of the train) is used frequently by
| those amongst us who pursue suicide, and aside from that
| dropping a mini-nuke on society / friends + family, another
| side-effect is 2-3 hours of delay on CalTrain. Overall, a
| traumatic and unhealthy commute.
|
| Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I
| did that, for that reason in particular.
| northerdome wrote:
| If they relocate engineers to Palo Alto, that's halfway between
| San Francisco and San Jose. And a lot of engineers (not
| necessarily at X but in general in Silicon Valley) live in the
| suburbs between SF and SJ already. It might be mildly less
| convenient for some, but also mildly more convenient for many.
| htrp wrote:
| Twitter sold a lot of people on living in SF proper as
| opposed to Palo Alto, if memory serves they were one of the
| first big shops to set up on Market
| RALaBarge wrote:
| Yeah, unless you live in Oakland, this probably will be
| irrelevant to everyone who lives north of Palo Alto.
| infecto wrote:
| The Bay area is fairly constrained in terms of transportation.
| Commuting in a car is not possible (unless you enjoy deadlock
| traffic + paying for parking). Public transportation exists but
| only works on specific segments.
|
| I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF
| office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly
| reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how
| far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain
| so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on
| however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr
| commute.
| htrp wrote:
| oh god i forgot Caltrain exists
| uxp100 wrote:
| Commuting in a car is not possible because most people do it,
| I suppose.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
| uxp100 wrote:
| People actually live everywhere in the Bay Area, and do every
| commute, and there is extensive mediocre transit in the South
| Bay. Commuting Santa Cruz into town, Livermore into town, every
| single suburb has people going to San Francisco, or to another
| suburb, or San Jose, or Oakland. In heavy traffic they are much
| longer than 1 hr apart, and the fastest train is 1hr 10min
| iirc.
| thr0w wrote:
| I'm imagining hordes of 20-something engineers living in the
| Mission with a 15 minute flat bicycle commute to the X office
| now having to grapple with getting to San Jose. Probably pretty
| rough news for a decent amount of people.
| pie420 wrote:
| they will just work remote
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Are they permitted to?
| metadat wrote:
| No, not anymore post-Elon.
| rty32 wrote:
| Wrong thread, this is Elon's company we are talking about
| morepork wrote:
| You mean they won't switch to a 3-4 hour, mostly flat, 50
| mile bike ride?
| klooney wrote:
| San Jose is bigger than SF, and tech people tend to age out of
| the city and move south into the peninsula- so probably a good
| portion of the employees are getting an improved or neutral
| commute.
| screye wrote:
| I commute to Palo Alto from SF. It takes ~90 minutes. 1 hour on
| the CalTrain + 15*2 minutes of last mile transport.
|
| Caltrain's main issue is that trains run every hour. (with 1
| super slow train in the middle). Miss a train, and you're
| screwed.
| xyst wrote:
| I'm surprised they haven't fully jump shipped to a lower COL
| state.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Musk already moved Tesla, and is in the process of moving
| SpaceX, to Texas. It's surprising X isn't following suit.
| kredd wrote:
| According to my friend, Tesla engineering didn't move to
| Texas, and he doesn't want to give up the California weather,
| so unlikely to make the move. If you have a routine, and
| enjoy year-long pretty nice weather, California will just
| have a natural advantage.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Many companies have offices in several places. Several big
| tech companies, like Meta, Apple, etc, have offices in
| Austin, for example.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Did San Jose agree to let them use their incredibly obnoxious
| blinking X logo eyesore?
|
| 'SHUT IT OFF!!' Disruptive new 'X' logo removed in San Francisco:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/31/twitter...
|
| >Construction crews dismantled the giant, blinking 'X' logo after
| 24 complaints were logged with the city
|
| San Jose is much more permissive than San Francisco when it comes
| to shitty public art:
|
| San Jose's Quetzalcoatl: The story behind much-ridiculed poop
| statue:
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/san-joses-quetzalcoat...
| chuckadams wrote:
| The new HQ should have a giant neon poo emoji for a sign.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Made out of real poo!
| EricE wrote:
| Thats why they are leaving SF
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Elon Musk runs around San Francisco late
| at night shitting on sidewalks himself, just so he has
| something to complain about.
| ionwake wrote:
| As a UK chap, can someone give me their opinion on if San Jose is
| a more pleasant place to live than San Fran these days?
| dboreham wrote:
| Really depends what you are looking for. And are you asking
| about the two cities themselves, or south bay vs north bay?
| hellisothers wrote:
| Aside from how you define "pleasant" there is a considerable
| vibe difference, SF feels more cosmopolitan and SJ more
| metropolitan. No judgement either way, pros and cons to both.
| ulfw wrote:
| Both are quite boring mid-size cities that are heavily
| overpriced for what they offer. SF is more exciting/prettier
| yet less safe than SJ.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| The 17th largest city in the US is mid-sized?
| jeffbee wrote:
| San Jose has this problem where instead of acting like a
| top 20 city they act like Lubbock.
| presentation wrote:
| From my perspective living in Asia I'd place it on par with
| a small rural village
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company
| opening a network of village banks. The villages had a
| population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.
| lucianbr wrote:
| There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the
| entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero
| population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.
|
| If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely
| made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages,
| plus some smaller stuff.
| brabel wrote:
| Well, there are more than 100 cities in China with over 1
| million people:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_
| pop...
|
| From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is
| definitely midsized if you compare with China.
|
| I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million
| people is a midsized city there (I don't live there
| anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas?
| Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and
| everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
|
| But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million
| people city is a village :D.
| janalsncm wrote:
| This is a very funny comment. Small rural villages in
| China do not have 61 story buildings.
|
| Non-major cities do, but not "small rural villages".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population.
| (113 to be precise).
|
| The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a
| population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just
| under 210k.)
|
| San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in
| China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd
| tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing,
| is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi
| Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
|
| Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never
| have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11
| million, more than _any_ US city, and ranks 9th overall
| in population within China.
|
| China: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_C
| hina_by_pop...>
|
| US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_
| cities_b...>
|
| Anquing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anqing>
| kentlyons wrote:
| The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good
| fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The
| downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a
| city is rather small.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk
| that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated
| enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails
| my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the
| geometric complexity of their boundary.
| pie420 wrote:
| yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the
| sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation
| valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.
|
| Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east
| quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that
| as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
| ulfw wrote:
| It's not even a million population. Certainly would never
| call San Jose or San Francisco a metropolis.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| San Jose is very much a suburbia-type city, very spread out,
| downtown is rather small and you need a car 90% of the time,
| whereas SF is much denser.
|
| I assume the drug use/homeless issues are less prevalent in San
| Jose, at least it was that way 10 yrs ago.
| timeon wrote:
| > suburbia-type city
|
| Isn't this oxymoron? Isn't city the `urbia`?
| curiousthought wrote:
| Not all urbia's are equally urbie.
|
| Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair
| to say that some cities are more spread out and low
| density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No. Many, perhaps most US major cities have suburban type
| zoning all over the place.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Zoned for single-family housing or 1-2 story apartments
| mostly. There may be sidewalks (stroads) but almost
| everyone drives due to pedestrian accessibility issues.
|
| Think "city, but instead of walking, you drive".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| No, cities are not only the super dense large cities.
| Smaller cities exist too, and are comparable to the suburbs
| of large cities in their feel.
| fragmede wrote:
| No, those are called towns, because they're not actually
| cities if they don't have the density to support city-
| grade amenities.
| jen20 wrote:
| Given that the OP was from the UK, a "city" is a town
| with a cathedral. Nothing more, nothing less.
| Biganon wrote:
| That's a myth.
|
| https://youtu.be/Whqs8v1svyo
| ralferoo wrote:
| I don't have time to watch your youtube, however it's not
| really a myth, just no longer true. There was definitely
| a long period of time when it was kind of true. I say
| kind of because it's specifically a diocesan cathedral.
|
| While it's hard to make definitive statements about when
| a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first
| formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the
| cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they
| were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other
| towns in that diocese were administered by that
| cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities
| were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The
| important part was that these particular towns with
| cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long
| as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the
| Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status.
| Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted
| those towns (and they also all happened to have
| cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at
| least, there was a strong precedent that city status and
| being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact
| people were told that cities were cities because of this,
| even though technically towns became cities only by Royal
| decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal
| decree, but historically both were done at the same time.
|
| This understanding was only really challenged in the
| early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals
| became new dioceses and their local governments assumed
| they were now cities and renamed themselves as such.
| Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it
| took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only
| happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the
| cities), at which point there was an act of parliament
| specifically to confer city status on these new large
| towns that were already calling themselves cities, again
| reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with
| diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.
|
| The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th
| century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that
| were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of
| being a city, but were told they were too small to
| justify it and rightly complained that other cities were
| even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to
| towns because they had always been called cities as long
| as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest
| town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the
| basis of its important, and was recognised, at which
| point the link between city and cathedral was broken
| down. After that, a few more large towns also
| successfully petitioned for city status based on size or
| historical importance.
|
| It can be said that the link between city status and
| cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing
| cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for
| city status along with justifications. This was re-
| granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a
| vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and
| lost its city status), and at the same time city
| boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan
| areas that would previously have been considered towns or
| villages in their own right.
|
| So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals
| are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now,
| but about hundreds of years this was actually the case.
| Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the
| Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure
| that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was
| exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns.
| So, it's also not a myth.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The drug use and homelessness are still pretty visible in
| downtown San Jose, or were when I lived there 2 years ago.
| Your personal tolerance level for it may be different from
| mine - I just treat it as a reality of city life, but my
| sister complained about it any time she visited because it
| made her feel actively unsafe.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| If you hate everything people generally like about European
| cities, you might like San Jose.
| mplewis wrote:
| My advice: Never move to San Jose.
| labrador wrote:
| I like it here. I've lived many different places in America.
| San Jose has the best weather or most suitable for me anyway
| julianeon wrote:
| They are very different propositions.
|
| San Jose: your average American city, in terms of looks, but
| considerably more upscale.
|
| San Francisco: an NYC-style "world-class city." It's trying for
| that title in terms of tempo, density, architecture.
|
| Doesn't always succeed of course, but the cities are
| fundamentally going after different goals.
| jen20 wrote:
| San Jose is just expensive, not upscale.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It was a bit of an imitation of NYC at the peak of the pre-
| COVID boom, but I travel to both regularly, NYC has 100x more
| energy than SF. SF is akin to cities like Austin or Denver,
| we're talking a city with only an 800k population.
| matrix87 wrote:
| Relevant quote:
|
| > They say San Jose is going to become another Los Angeles.
| Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that
| come true. [0]
|
| In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from
| you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in
| SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
|
| If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great
| variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character
| and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
|
| Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just
| live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#History
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| boring, bad public transport
| JS-Sound wrote:
| Probably to do with less rent, less feces, less mentally instable
| people, less drugs, and also Elmo's weird thought chains.
| christkv wrote:
| They say moving to existing office spaces so just saving money i
| guess. Lease probably due and not wanting to renew it?
| francisofascii wrote:
| So he's not moving X to Texas? Or is this just the preliminary
| move?
| dmix wrote:
| He said they want to move all the HQs to Texas, which implies
| they could still have offices in California just maybe smaller.
| This may be part of the plan.
|
| They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they
| could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely
| the other big reason.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| If he does, he should announce it doing a cover of "All My X's
| Live in Texas".
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| I thought this wording was funny: "the famous Twitter sign ...
| [was] summarily removed" - extra-judicial signage removal! Musk
| is out of control.
| bcx wrote:
| It's been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did
| sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross
| receipts taxes.
|
| I'd imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
|
| I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for
| companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g.
| zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near
| the tenderloin.
|
| As for commutes, I'd be pretty curious to know how many folks who
| work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day,
| especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I
| can't imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course
| I've never worked for musk or his managers -- but I'd assume that
| if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in
| the office).
|
| Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks
| 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get
| to an office in South Park.
|
| I'd be curious to know:
|
| - how folks who work at X think about this move?
|
| - how much remote work will be allowed?
|
| - tax savings.
|
| - lease savings.
|
| I'd bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the
| reason.
| anotherhue wrote:
| during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack
| message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away
| from the windows, as there was shooting outside.
|
| About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to
| worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug
| dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
|
| I never understood why the company would put its employees in
| danger until the parent comment.
| dmix wrote:
| [flagged]
| ahuth wrote:
| SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of
| working in the financial district I never saw something
| like this.
|
| Obviously others will have different experiences than me.
|
| Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city.
| San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole
| people or the news make it out to be.
| ianhawes wrote:
| Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and
| the media have described it as in my own experiences.
|
| It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad
| parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good
| parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have
| evidently merged.
|
| I do not understand why people who live in SF have to
| effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the
| breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of
| the culture of their city.
| ahuth wrote:
| As I said, everyone's experience has been different.
| Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't
| been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
| VancouverMan wrote:
| > I do not understand why people who live in SF have to
| effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the
| breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of
| the culture of their city.
|
| That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even
| to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in
| "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto,
| and Ottawa, for example.
|
| From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the
| "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is
| that certain specific groups of people are declared to be
| "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on
| a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no
| matter how awful they behave in public.
|
| I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that
| these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're
| ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the
| "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves
| don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the
| stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used
| needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus
| shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public
| transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from
| passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to
| rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
|
| Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that
| this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally
| wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to
| themselves, then the rest of their belief system will
| inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't
| built on reality.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which
| strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You
| cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while
| simultaneously being against punishing anti social
| behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn't
| feel safe to riders they will use personal transport
| instead. But the notion that some people may hold some
| responsibility for where they may be in life by their own
| decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held
| accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day
| light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives
| have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to
| someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if
| there were simply a boring Conservative alternative
| elections would have been blowouts against them.
| archagon wrote:
| Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine
| dehumanization of these individuals. I've actually seen
| people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts
| on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and
| throw away the key, I'm sure they'd do it in a heartbeat.
| anon291 wrote:
| I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see
| these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial
| portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland
| for example, simply are not very good at observation, and
| will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and
| never notice. I've had to point out to my very
| progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug
| deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly
| just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very
| common among a certain subset of residents, especially in
| cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they
| do.
|
| I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational
| awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if
| people were aware at all.
| channel_t wrote:
| Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of
| it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't
| really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway.
| A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general
| anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city.
| Everything going on in Portland today are the same things
| that have been going on in the city for decades, it's
| just become much more visceral and in your face over time
| as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder
| now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more
| competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns
| are a different story, however. I think everyone of all
| stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I
| don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but
| I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more
| introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you
| think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals
| happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to
| your personal safety than crossing a busy street.
| anon291 wrote:
| Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think
| it's safe to say I don't find these situations
| necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist,
| which many of my neighbors are not.
|
| Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people
| were simply aware of their surroundings.
| presentation wrote:
| For what it's worth homeless people were having sex on
| the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door
| by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was
| stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as
| my office within half a year of me being there. I also
| got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to
| fight them regularly.
| fosk wrote:
| SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really
| appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities.
| You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are
| not in other places despite the fact that there are "good
| and bad" parts of town everywhere else.
|
| Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often
| finding "bad" in "good" parts of town, with unpredictable
| drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the
| unpredictability of the bad experiences.
|
| Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a
| "good" part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a
| stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is
| no amount of "bad" in other cities that results in
| hammering and smashing the back window of a car -
| assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn -
| for nothing. It's unwarranted violence, it wasn't even a
| robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world,
| including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt
| unsafe in San Francisco.
|
| And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of
| mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an
| individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money,
| for example.
|
| The whole town is a social experiment where we put
| families and working individuals into a drug den and see
| what happens.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| These anecdotes aren't unique to a city like SF though. I
| can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense
| suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims
| that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than
| anywhere else of that size/density.
| fosk wrote:
| > These anecdotes aren't unique to a city like SF though.
|
| But they are, because this is city that has established a
| record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without
| setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how
| that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and
| arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds
| [1][2].
|
| Quite unique, indeed.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than
| the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are
| not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy
| of their solution is.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| But what if you run out of air superiority and money to
| bribe those paying for this special party. And to have
| this is constant free adverisement for the right
| wingnuts..
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've
| had the exact opposite experience.
|
| In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked
| twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and
| around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and
| just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in
| my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now
| when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking
| whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to
| me.
|
| That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of
| us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
| dijit wrote:
| Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there
| was a young black woman who was being detained for
| assaulting an asian lady.
|
| Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the
| officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She
| was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously
| large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed
| incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to
| the Moscone Centrr
| consteval wrote:
| Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not
| that dangerous.
|
| People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is
| almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very
| dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to
| gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see
| that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount
| of deaths is lower.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Note: "not that dangerous" means you will be confined in
| extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely.
| situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd
| will leave physically unscathed
|
| Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
| ghodith wrote:
| That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one
| statistic. The point here is not simply that the office
| is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.
| anon291 wrote:
| Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting
| danger. What really matters is average proximity to
| shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to
| the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the
| shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously,
| this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived
| danger.
|
| Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people
| and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the
| likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was
| near any of those shooting is very low.
|
| On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a
| 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000
| heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
|
| Cities need to be safer than other places in order to
| feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities
| will always have this reputation.
| consteval wrote:
| Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between
| perception and reality. The reputation cities have is
| based on their perception and not necessarily reality.
|
| You can only make some place so safe in a country like
| the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally
| gun violence will always be a problem for us.
|
| To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more
| public services available. They have shelters, food
| banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as
| compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can
| do.
| anon291 wrote:
| > You can only make some place so safe in a country like
| the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally
| gun violence will always be a problem for us.
|
| Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide
| rate is on par with places without guns at all.
| Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely
| correlated with amount of quality of life policing.
| Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the
| safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of
| guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works.
| Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly
| dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even
| mention the environmental ones) is more effective than
| any welfare program
| consteval wrote:
| This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of
| tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make
| anything safer.
|
| Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much
| higher than any developed country (and even a few
| undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
|
| I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of
| increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't
| include... making it harder to obtain a firearm.
| Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only
| allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those
| policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law
| enforcement, somehow.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >What really matters is average proximity to shootings
|
| Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from
| strangers [1]
|
| [1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-
| the-u.s.-...
| anon291 wrote:
| Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a
| random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However,
| again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less
| dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for
| the simple reason that the bullet can miss
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| >Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a
| random by stander are unlikely to be the target
|
| Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere
| because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and
| is in fact rather safe despite your _feelings_.
|
| Here's more stats for perspective:
|
| - There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI
| source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random
| killings.
|
| - There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all
| of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
|
| You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be
| randomly murdered in SF.
|
| [1] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/07/Visi...
| chengiz wrote:
| I think you must live in a city. Literally everyone in
| your 1000 people rural area would be affected by 10
| shootings.
| anon291 wrote:
| No area in the United states has crime rates as high as
| in my hypothetical, but many rural areas of the South
| have homicide rates on par with a city.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun
| violence in rural America.
|
| Isn't the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because
| if that's the case than your statement is disingenuous,
| you're not less safe in rural America if you're worried
| about being shot on the way to the office.
| John23832 wrote:
| If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of
| gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast
| majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>".
| Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are
| suicides both in cities and out of cities.
| 15155 wrote:
| Fascinating how suicides are creatively included in "gun
| violence."
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Like how suicide by opiates is included in "overdoses"?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides
| being considered a firearm death. They are.
|
| They may not be "gun violence" against another, but
| they're still a firearm death.
|
| Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a
| paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit
| suicide rather than for recreational use is still
| considered an overdose death.
|
| It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an
| overdose death.
|
| Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a
| special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is
| somehow not a death by firearm.
| 15155 wrote:
| "Pout?"
|
| Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not
| "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to
| be for this strawman to work.
|
| The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths
| together and then attempt to legislate based on these
| inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
|
| Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my
| Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Show me where suicide by firearm is described as "gun
| violence" rather than "death by firearm".
|
| I totally agree with you. Suicide by firearm is not gun
| violence.
|
| What I see is people seeing statistics that say counting
| suicide in firearm deaths is inappropriate. This is why
| the CDC has to call it out separately, to avoid the
| furore. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...).
|
| The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it
| very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that
| the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your
| own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because
| both are effective at enabling suicide, but have
| legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
| consteval wrote:
| There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind
| suicide isn't always clear-cut.
|
| What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the
| safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also
| suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
| 15155 wrote:
| Here's what Black's Law Dictionary has to say:
|
| *violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force,
| usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or
| fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d
| 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of
| force; that force which is employed against common right,
| against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-
| Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401,
| 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure,
| damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
|
| Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical
| contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted
| with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and
| veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating
| Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
|
| [Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
|
| ---
|
| There's a stark difference between randomly being killed
| by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the
| Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own
| life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an
| exercise in bad faith.
|
| These conversations are typically held under the frame
| that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a
| Constitutionally-enumerated right.
|
| Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" -
| not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or
| to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly,
| vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-
| euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
|
| "Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of
| sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural
| area? (Is it _that_ boring?)
| petsfed wrote:
| > _Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the
| most pro-euthanasia /doctor-assisted-suicide positions_
|
| Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in
| my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-
| assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into
| my head./s
|
| Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on
| their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a
| reach to think that if fewer people had access to another
| method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people
| would kill themselves.
|
| To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for
| self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if
| you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides
| in with opposition to suicide as an option for the
| terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation,
| I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith
| _either_.
|
| To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides
| are frequently the result of long-simmering depression,
| punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help.
| One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is
| suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent
| them from doing something rash, but also because
| companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation
| in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of
| self-evident that people who are physically alone more
| often would commit suicide more often.
| consteval wrote:
| > consciously choosing
|
| This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that
| many people can play a role in suicide.
|
| If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their
| life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and
| you're partially responsible. People don't take their
| life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's
| incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to
| gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's
| a gun present.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience
| the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject
| and the commentaries audience really overlap.
| pc86 wrote:
| I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun
| violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide
| isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns
| generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be
| disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't
| exactly articulate why I think that.
|
| Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're
| going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more
| gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner
| city Chicago.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Danger stress is an AOE (area of effect). A single
| shooting in a city mentally harms/affects 100x more
| people than in the burbs.
| ben_w wrote:
| An Onion headline comes to mind.
|
| Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right
| decision by staying away from the US despite the
| significant wage disparity.
| ninininino wrote:
| Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another
| makes about as much sense statistically as being scared
| because there was a car accident outside the office.
| Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than
| violent criminals.
| flippinfloppin wrote:
| Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that
| this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a
| place like that. It is weird to read people trying to
| downplay it as if it is nothing.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I never understood why the company would put its employees
| in danger...
|
| Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week
| when they could continue working from home?
| caycep wrote:
| vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes
| to improve the environment around its chosen home"?
| dgfitz wrote:
| Yeah, because that works...
| smsm42 wrote:
| I don't think SF is an example of the place where the
| link between paying a lot of taxes and get the
| environment around improved is as obvious as you seem to
| imply.
| golergka wrote:
| Like paying $2m for a public bathroom?
| azinman2 wrote:
| *300k in reality:
| https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-
| fran...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| the most dangerous thing the average N American does every
| day is drive...
| WheatMillington wrote:
| This is peak HN - "stop putting me in danger be making me
| leave my house"
| sangnoir wrote:
| Go ahead and complete the thought in the context of the
| comment I was replying to and review if your "dunk" is
| conflicting with the point I'm making...
|
| Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger
| (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will
| sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax
| break, they will force you to come to the office because
| the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in
| seats and the employees will be _forced_ to take on the
| non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic
| accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent
| refunds during lockdowns because of this.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Imagine they had to work on a field or something,
| aqme28 wrote:
| My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan
| there was a significant shooting. These things happen
| everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced
| that a more suburban location that forces people to drive
| would actually be any safer.
| lokar wrote:
| You really need to normalize crime rates by population
| (including commuters) and avoid focusing on anecdotes
| aqme28 wrote:
| No, my point was that you would also want to factor in
| injury rates from commuting, which tend to dwarf crime
| rates.
| some-guy wrote:
| Just another anecdote but I concur with you--10 years of
| commuting experience in the Bay Area tells me that the
| most likely bodily harm I will experience is behind the
| wheel on the freeway, not from homeless / mentally-ill
| people wandering the streets. I have been involved in two
| car accidents on 580 (not at fault) but zero bodily harm
| on BART.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Why would an individual living and working around some
| area care about the crime per population?
|
| I would personally care way more about the crime density
| like per mile or something because that is what would
| actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would
| happen in close proximity to me that could put me in
| potential danger.
|
| I couldn't care less about the crime per population.
| aqme28 wrote:
| This doesnt make sense. You care about "per population"
| because you are 1 out of the population. You don't care
| about per square mile because you are not measured in
| square miles, you are measured in people (1).
| SirMaster wrote:
| Why should crime proximity to my location be completely
| ignored?
|
| If the crime is higher per person, but the crimes are
| several miles away then why would that be a problem for
| me?
|
| Compared to lower crimes per person, but the crimes are
| happening on my street.
|
| If the crimes are happening closer to me I'm more likely
| to be affected by it in some way.
| smsm42 wrote:
| If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime
| problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not
| everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a
| shooting happening under your very office window is
| extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its
| advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also.
| Criminals want the same advantages too.
| aqme28 wrote:
| You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I
| live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun
| crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.
| willmadden wrote:
| Don't your police regularly jail people for non-violent
| speech? I don't see Musk moving to Germany.
| TurboTveit wrote:
| If by non-violent speech you mean roman salutes or nazi
| quotes, yes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is more or less enough to in public say why you don't
| support Likud nowadays to be arrested in Germany.
| jeromegv wrote:
| They jail people for antisemitic and nazi speech, if for
| you this is "non-violent", I have a history lesson on
| 1939-1945 to show you.
| willmadden wrote:
| I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by
| the police for giving a seminar about censorship the
| other day. Your country controls speech through force.
| Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move
| anything to your country.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your
| country
|
| And yet Musk proves you wrong:
| https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin
| willmadden wrote:
| Tesla does not operate a social media platform.
| thomasz wrote:
| You certainly did not see an activist hauled off by the
| police for giving a seminar about censorship the other
| day.
| lukan wrote:
| So ... can you link that outrageous video, that we can
| judge whether it really was the way you said it was?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Cities tend to have a lower per-capita crime rate, it's
| just dense and visible.
|
| This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.
| willmadden wrote:
| No, it's not just suburban paranoia. Travel to Tokyo or
| Singapore and then to S.F.
| FredPret wrote:
| We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously
| safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime
| at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1)
| individual piece of small rubbish on the street.
| sneak wrote:
| Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion
| of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened
| and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they
| are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours
| and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month
| holding timer resets.
|
| People there have been held for months in solitary
| confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN)
| awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.
|
| As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the
| police on you and accuses you of something. You're
| looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police
| will of course believe natives over tourists.
| rangestransform wrote:
| well that just shows that to japanese people, even
| kangaroo courts are better than crime
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt
| extremely safe.
|
| Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain
| about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech
| workers feel uncomfortable in SF.
|
| SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass
| homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove
| the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will
| never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining
| about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you
| demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you
| pushed the existing population out.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to measure crime in terms of
| crimes per area, rather than crimes per capita,
| especially when comparing suburban to urban.
| etchalon wrote:
| I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in
| is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not
| how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to
| me.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| You really don't see how that's reasonable?
|
| People want to feel safe. Having high crime _nearby_
| makes people feel unsafe, even if it 's just drug dealers
| and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care
| about you.
| etchalon wrote:
| By that logic, it would be reasonable for the government
| to outlaw the reporting of crime, as people would "feel"
| safer.
| FredPret wrote:
| That's the worst possible interpretation of what that
| comment said.
|
| - If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it
| gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the
| crossfire.
|
| - On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from
| me, I'm safe.
|
| So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second
| situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask
| the effects of the first and make the second look worse.
|
| The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when
| judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area
| stats when judging your likelihood of being _near_ a
| crime.
|
| Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on
| them for it is bizarre.
| etchalon wrote:
| Minimizing both is fine. But not minimizing the one that
| actually measures how likely you are to be a victim of a
| crime is ... weird.
| glenngillen wrote:
| Because as the Zendesk example that started this pointed
| out, an entire building (probably multiple!) of people
| were affected by this incident. There was 1 victim. It's
| going to seem insignificant on a per capita basis.
| There's thousands of people impacted by it, and possible
| dozens in the immediate vicinity who could be suffering
| from ongoing trauma having witnessed it.
| spiderice wrote:
| Regardless, the whole premise that started this argument
| is wrong. There is higher crime per capita in large
| cities.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cit
| ies...
| etchalon wrote:
| I don't think you're reading those numbers correctly. The
| highest crime per capita is in Alberque, New Mexico, the
| 32nd largest city in the US, and that list is literally
| the crime rates of the 100 most populated cities, not the
| 100 cities in the US with the most crime.
| spiderice wrote:
| Ridiculous take. And not only because people obviously
| wouldn't feel safer if reporting crimes was illegal.
| smsm42 wrote:
| It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide
| crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage
| reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery,
| to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime
| level, the difference between the official picture and
| the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense
| usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow
| it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government
| whose interests are detached from the interests of the
| citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply
| don't do anything with reports and the problem solves
| itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's
| little point to reporting less serious crime once it's
| established that no action is taken. To that end, crime
| statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental
| victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.
|
| Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some
| logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime
| (especially one where someone is shot) while
| theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being
| a target of a crime.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Accidental victims are already included in the "per
| capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone,
| that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.
|
| So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all
| that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a
| dense city, that's _already accounting_ for accidents
| like stray bullets too.
|
| If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want
| to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.
|
| _Not_ where it is lowest per square mile.
| etchalon wrote:
| "There's only 1 crime per square mile!"
|
| "...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."
|
| I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!"
| parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of
| the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps
| disagreeing with what they think reality is.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The correct claim is not that per capita does not matter
| but that it alone does not provide you with adequate
| picture. Imagine a street where 100 people live, and
| there's a shoot-out there every day. Now imagine a mayor
| made an order, and another 100 people are forced to move
| and live on the same street now, and there's still a
| shoot-out there every day. Can you honestly say the
| quality of life on that street improved 2x, even though
| you still have the daily shootings as before, but it's
| now twice as crowded? I think something is missing in
| this picture if you make such a conclusion. Of course,
| per capita numbers show some part of the picture, but you
| need to see the other parts too.
| etchalon wrote:
| What you could say, assuming the number of shooting
| victims per day remained constant, was that people on
| that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a
| shooting. If you moved enough people onto that street,
| again assuming a no change in the number of victims, the
| likely-hood of any individual being shot could be forced
| into a statistically insignificant number.
|
| The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-
| crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1
| person every day is killed, and half the people leave,
| you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area
| declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
|
| While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-
| good proxy for the thing we worry about - "how likely is
| crime in this area to affect me?"
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Show me where I said it doesn't matter.
| scarmig wrote:
| What doesn't go into statistics is
|
| 1) the negative externalities of being near crime.
| Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that
| you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you
| every year. There's another area, with an identical crime
| rate but a much more sparsely populated population such
| that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of
| you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.
|
| 2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the
| externalities and risk of being an accidental victim).
| There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or
| even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being
| absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be
| more additional accidental murders.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > Crime per area makes it more likely you are an
| accidental victim of a crime
|
| Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has
| nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim
| of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how
| likely you are to be a victim of a crime.
| watwut wrote:
| No, crimes per capita express how likely you are to be
| that accidental victim.
| spiderice wrote:
| According to who? Do you have a source?
|
| Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:
|
| 1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas
| City
|
| If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it's
| still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you're
| getting your info.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States
| _cities...
| warkdarrior wrote:
| That list is of the 100 most populous cities in US, so by
| definition it does not include mid/small cities, towns,
| and villages.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_citie
| s_b...
|
| Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their
| crime.
|
| Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.
|
| This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often
| called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely
| safer than being in a small town.
| 91bananas wrote:
| St. Louis is sketchy AF but it's hardly a large city,
| relative to actual large cities.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Not "everywhere", as an European that grew up in a big city
| (Paris) that's unthinkable.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| That's a really surprising example. Paris has nearly
| identical crime level to San Francisco.
|
| From personal experience, I did not feel particularly
| safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).
|
| Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs
| that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there.
| One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation,
| but it's very small and easy to avoid.
| misja111 wrote:
| I think OP was referring to shootings. In France, as in
| most of Europe, it's not trivial to get access to guns.
| So the risk of getting shot in Paris is small, but of
| course you still might get stabbed.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I was talking only about shootings. But if we are
| comparing anecdotes regarding your example I happened to
| also live in one of these unsafe suburbs, and visiting
| LA, SF or Chicago and getting in the wrong neighborhood
| seemed order of magnitude less safe. Gangs are not armed,
| you don't hear gunshots at night or people screaming in
| the city center, and you don't encounter aggressive drug
| addicts. All of this never happened to me in decades in
| Paris but did in one trip to the these US cities.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never
| witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings
| have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these
| things "happen everywhere" is asinine.
| etchalon wrote:
| It's just a very American-centric sentiment, because here
| in the states, that's true.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| San Francisco has nearly 8 times higher population
| density than Auckland.
|
| Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy
| (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system,
| attractive social services (compared to the rest of the
| US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
| amrocha wrote:
| We both know it's none of those things, it's access to
| guns
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Non-gun crime is a bigger concern in SF than gun-related
| violence.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never
| witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more
| often here, but violence is far lower than you would
| think from the media and online anecdotes.
| StressedDev wrote:
| This is not typical in the US. I have never heard or seen a
| gun shot fired while someone committed a crime.
| confidantlake wrote:
| You are much more likely to die in a commute on your way to
| work than you are from some drug dealer.
| dehrmann wrote:
| When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something
| similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later
| that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on
| their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a
| scare.
| jacooper wrote:
| This sounds so ridiculous from an outsider perspective, it's
| absolutely crazy! Oh nvm, it's just a _drug dealer shooting
| another drug dealer_
| DrBazza wrote:
| Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and
| the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets
| we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same
| with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.
|
| Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences
| here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same
| about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
| drewda wrote:
| That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created _for_
| Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-
| get-pa...
|
| Here's one summary of it as of last year:
|
| > The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed
| Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by
| exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its
| sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize
| mid-Market -- and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria
| didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local
| businesses -- and it just ended up costing the city about $10
| million a year in lost revenue. >
| https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
|
| When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also
| did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects:
| https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/
| aqme28 wrote:
| I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on
| incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my
| understanding that these are rarely worth it.
|
| Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject
| focusing on Louisiana
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big
| business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what
| incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it
| worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
| golergka wrote:
| > $10 million a year in lost revenue
|
| This assumes that the company would be based on the city
| regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news
| articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
| liquidgecka wrote:
| I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a
| real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office
| in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax
| and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I
| suspect they would have left SF completely.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and
| people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and
| cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF,
| people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech
| companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and
| bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the
| homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless
| in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as
| an alternative.
|
| >> $10 million a year in lost revenue
|
| That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Wow. I had to fact-check this. Wow.
|
| https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-
| spending-11-billion-...
|
| > San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville,
| Florida. Yet San Francisco's homelessness budget--$1.1
| billion in fiscal year 2021-22--is nearly 80 percent of
| Jacksonville's entire city budget.
| macinjosh wrote:
| I can't find it because X search sucks, but Musk has stated
| before he despises the concept of remote work.
| daghamm wrote:
| "I've never worked for musk or his managers -- but I'd assume
| that if folks are high output he would not care how often they
| were in the office"
|
| I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the
| mood.
|
| The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in
| the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at
| one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point
| just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not
| difficult to find someone who _has_ worked for him and can
| tell you what that experience was like.
| mrastro wrote:
| Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that
| have their residency tied to their employment status with a
| particular company. It's transferable to a different
| company but requires getting an offer to another company
| large enough to do H1B sponsorships.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on
| an H1B rose since Elon took over.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to
| be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly
| crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are
| sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working
| extremely long hours on cool shit.
|
| After two internships at Tesla i understood why people
| joined cults.
| lmm wrote:
| Any US company could randomly fire you for no reason and
| many US companies do.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Didn't Elon also give a politically motivated reason for moving
| his HQs out of California? [1]
|
| [1]
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I could imagine him having a variety of reasons, but in
| certain situations pretending it's only one of them, to apply
| pressure.
|
| I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm
| just drawing on my understanding of people.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| He'd been threatening it since at least the Covid/Alameda
| County spat. It's transparently just him trying to save 13.3%
| on capital gains taxes
| SeenNotHeard wrote:
| It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's
| offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for
| schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of
| California's demise.
|
| https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-
| headquar...
|
| Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South
| Bay Area. Go figure.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our
| folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park
| to get to an office in South Park.
|
| This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16
| minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at
| 313 Brandan next to South Park.
|
| This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of
| course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the
| infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer.
| I'm not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my
| expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More
| people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use
| of the city infrastructure overall.
|
| Separately as a business owner, I'm not sure there is a
| generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax
| avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and
| smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of
| 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things
| more efficiently, and they're going to all live together, and
| maybe that's the value that locality in San Francisco provides:
| an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves
| 100% to everything can enjoy.
| runarberg wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not buying it either, I did a quick google map
| survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40
| minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on
| where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around
| 20 minutes.
|
| Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo
| Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some
| commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk
| after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
|
| The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you
| could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used
| rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe
| half the way to South Park).
| saagarjha wrote:
| If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo
| Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch
| the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
| runarberg wrote:
| I think the point here is we are comparing Menlo Park
| best case scenario to the Mission worst case scenario.
|
| If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart
| or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In
| total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike
| the whole way which would be around 20 min.
|
| If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can
| take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min
| walk. But you could bike there in about 15.
|
| I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min,
| which I often did, and didn't bother with buses.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me
| 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike
|
| The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of
| workers in SF biked in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2].
| Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in
| 2022 [3].
|
| There is value in considering how a company's location
| impacts the vast majority of its employees.
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-r09
| .ht....
|
| [2] https://www.sfmta.com/blog/biking-numbers-san-
| franciscos-201...
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1405949/electric-
| bicycle....
| runarberg wrote:
| You don't really need an e-bike to go from the Mission to
| SoMa as it is pretty flat. I don't think it will take you
| much longer on a regular bike. But your statistic that you
| showed is a bit flawed as it includes people that commute
| from outside and into SF, hardly any of whom does so on
| bikes, so this methodology will always show bias against
| walking or rolling (I don't know a better methodology, it
| is just something to keep in mind).
|
| Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in
| SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about
| the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either
| walk, bike or take transit.
|
| If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives
| in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn't be surprised
| if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes
| transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I
| very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each
| day in each direction.
|
| https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-mode-
| choice
| bhelkey wrote:
| > And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min
| commuting each day in each direction.
|
| My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable
| estimate for the commute the vast majority will
| experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more
| reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the
| grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.
|
| I know from experience that walking would take much
| longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.
| x0x0 wrote:
| The problem with bikes is, in sf if a driver kills you,
| as long as they don't flee the scene, they'll be let off
| with a talking to or maybe a ticket. I don't know a
| single former coworker who regularly bikes who hasn't
| been at minimum doored.
|
| 45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about
| right if you use bart; see my timeline above.
| runarberg wrote:
| A typical worker will probably work closer to Market and
| they may even live in the Lower Mission where the buses
| are a bit faster and land further south. So I think 45
| min from Mission to SoMa is closer to the worst case
| commute rather then the typical commute between Mission
| and SoMa. 30-40 min is probably your average transit
| rider, and 20-30 min for the lucky ones.
| bcx wrote:
| Employee in question took Muni + Walked. I biked and did a
| baby bullet from Menlo Park.
|
| My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while
| ago.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's not unreasonable. Biking in SF is a death wish.
|
| If you take bart to Montgomery, it's an 0.8 mile walk to
| South Park. Calling that a bit under 20 minutes seems fair.
|
| So a 10 minute walk to bart, a 5 minute wait, 7 minutes on
| bart, 3 minutes to exit the station, and 20 minutes to
| South Park is your 45-ish minutes.
|
| Source: I used to do this commute. Getting around
| internally in sf is absolutely terrible the second you're
| not super close to the transit line.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Employee in question took Muni + Walked.
|
| Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni
| anywhere is kind of foolish?
|
| > I'd bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of
| the reason.
|
| You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same
| personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community.
| Neither of us have really been affected by the business
| tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and
| Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing /
| amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from
| anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings
| mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving
| everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our
| schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi
| schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few
| places, making everywhere else worse until those schools
| close and then, where do those kids go?
|
| Many issues, no leadership, just _leavership_ : solving
| your problems by changing the community you live in, not by
| changing your community. This is fine, we have little
| choice.
|
| In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be
| able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white
| collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people
| they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out
| how to tell them without hurting their feelings or
| violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of
| commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self
| expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of
| your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments
| like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit
| hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet
| personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as
| yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.
|
| That said, most tech workers should be working remotely.
| But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we
| shall see how that all plays out.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > infrastructure improvements
|
| Do you mean biking infrastructure? Also, what do you do
| during the rainy season?
| thwarted wrote:
| Rainy "season" in SF? That's January, and the past few
| years even January had been pretty dry.
|
| That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being
| dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since
| 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently
| back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as
| SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single
| week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does
| wonders for washing away just about everything, including
| all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise)
| excrement.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| SF is rainy for Dec/Jan/Feb according to Wiki climate
| data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate
| hintymad wrote:
| > back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional
| payroll tax and gross receipts taxes
|
| I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes?
| Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the
| city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate
| each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they
| improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they
| resolve the housing crisis?
|
| Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't
| know what representation I got in the city.
| snotrockets wrote:
| People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not
| everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want
| (wanted?) to attract those people.
|
| Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only,
| it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one,
| because some people (like myself) wouldn't commute to Palo
| Alto.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I
| think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently,
| something about payment processing and gross receipts...
|
| Overpaid Executive Tax (OE)
|
| https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi...
|
| Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR)
|
| https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...
| standardUser wrote:
| Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy
| that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby
| (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San
| Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just
| that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and
| around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and
| the city center.
| davedx wrote:
| What do you think the city should do with the tent communities?
| standardUser wrote:
| Designate areas outside of the densest neighborhoods for tent
| communities to exist and clear out areas that have the
| highest public utilization.
| notfried wrote:
| For starters, tents shouldn't be allowed in the downtown
| area, which is the heart of business, shopping and tourism in
| San Francisco. It is one of the most expensive areas to live,
| so just like most residents cannot afford to live there, it
| is only fair that homeless people don't live there as well.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Remove them. It is an abuse of the commons that creates a
| vicious cycle that will only exacerbate the problem. And for
| your next question, San Fran already spends $141k per year
| per homeless person. That's 7x LA. It isn't working because
| of the lack of accountability and oversight in the use of
| those funds and San Fran's lax (even favorable treatment) of
| public drug use, public camping, and general lawlessness.
| Send them to a shelter, treatment, or jail. "Harm reduction"
| doesn't work. Full stop.
| davedx wrote:
| Freakonomics have done some interesting coverage of the
| opioid epidemic and how spending more money on it doesn't
| necessarily lead to better outcomes. Having listened to
| what different people say about it, I'm not so sure that
| "harm reduction doesn't work" is something I can agree
| with. Addiction and homelessness just aren't trivial
| problems to solve. Sending people to jail sure doesn't help
| anything, does it?
|
| That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking
| for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a
| few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street
| that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever
| SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.
| urda wrote:
| Remove them, many are causing ADA violations. You don't get
| to break the law because you feel like it.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities_
|
| When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really
| weird that such a rich place would have so many people living
| in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents
| in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or
| something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never
| made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to
| give these people _something_ so they don 't have to live in
| tents.
|
| Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about
| 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in
| the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To
| avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these
| people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a
| place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd
| imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a
| blink of an eye, no?
| squigz wrote:
| > So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's
| situation in a blink of an eye, no?
|
| There's no money in that though, and there's lots of money in
| keeping Americans divided.
| milkshakes wrote:
| I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government
| alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve
| the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending.
| Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as
| there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play
| by the rules.
|
| 1: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/
| maxerickson wrote:
| Seems you need to evaluate the effectiveness of that
| spending to conclude that it can't be a resource allocation
| issue.
| adolph wrote:
| Maybe a problem could be on the allocation side rather
| than the resource side.
| sfmz wrote:
| They cleaned it up for President Xi's visit.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-
| encam...
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| 1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand
| dollars. The median household income in SF is 119
| thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them
| a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of
| spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests
| resources are not being allocated well.
|
| [1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-
| populat...
|
| [2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-
| san-fran...
| EricE wrote:
| If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a
| month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now
| afford. Money is not the issue with homelessness, and
| until people get that out of their heads the problem will
| not be solved.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > spends almost a billion a year
|
| That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren't enough
| beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on
| the street.
| moduspol wrote:
| If the problem were literally that "these people want houses
| and just can't afford them," I think that'd work. But that's
| not the issue in San Francisco.
| atmavatar wrote:
| I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing
| homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing
| housing - _especially_ the billionaires.
| KingMob wrote:
| The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness
| solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental
| health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no
| effect, apparently.
| kardianos wrote:
| That probably works when people have no money and no place to
| go. I used to live near Portland OR, and in that case many or
| most choose to be there, they wanted drugs and ANY house they
| lived in would soon be trashed.
| analyst74 wrote:
| I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of
| budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with
| homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem
| are going to face significant challenges from existing
| beneficiaries.
| fosk wrote:
| The so called "homeless industrial complex" [1].
|
| 1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-
| jolt/californias-...
| labcomputer wrote:
| > the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what
| they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts,
| build small houses and relocate these people.
|
| That will never work in SF because it involves moving the
| homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to
| a singular place.
|
| So the homeless "advocates" will accuse you of being a Nazi
| who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.
|
| It doesn't matter how nice the community is, nor that the
| people would own their space, nor anything else about your
| plan.
|
| As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of
| people who work "for" the homeless really enjoy living in SF.
| Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is
| the reason they will call you names.
|
| Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless
| advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of
| course they will fight you.
| lucianbr wrote:
| But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't
| the rest of the people living and voting in the city
| outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?
| telotortium wrote:
| In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a
| small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy
| that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than
| there is for the whole population to fight back to
| eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the
| population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least
| progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing"
| groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they
| happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots
| of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially
| compassionate way.
|
| [1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to
| professional political lobbyists.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Sounds like the sympathies of the majority of the voters
| play a significant role, and not only the "advocates", as
| the other commenter suggested. Or at least as I
| understood it.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The people of SF think that solving the problem as you have
| described, relocating the street junkies into cheap homes in
| the outskirts, is _" literally fascism"_ because _" how dare
| you tell these people they're not allowed to camp and shoot
| up heroin anywhere they like?"_
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I recall seeing some stories years ago was that one issue with
| Twitter (and most Bay area tech companies at the time) was that
| due to the presence of an on campus cafeteria, surrounding
| areas never got much benefit from Twitter's presence.
|
| That is, workers would show up to the building, and then
| essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses)
| until the day was over and they went home.
| kjksf wrote:
| Yes, that's how politicians and activists are shifting blame
| from their lack of interest in solving the issue to
| sacrificial goats.
|
| The streets are full of homeless and drugged out people?
| That's not the reason restaurants are failing, it's the tech
| bro's cafeteria!
|
| The house prices are sky high? It's not single house zoning
| and politicians blocking any house building, it's the rich
| tech bros gentrifying your neighborhood!
| tedivm wrote:
| It allows them because of a court case that said they can't
| take them down unless they can provide shelter, and they've
| refused to build enough shelter space.
|
| The supreme court invalidated that decision, and so now they
| are allowed to tear the tent cities down again without having
| to actually find people shelter space. I imagine a lot of these
| encampments are going to be torn down (which will just cause
| them to relocate until they end up at a place where no one
| cares).
| brookst wrote:
| Mostly agree, but there are few places no one cares. The
| pattern is generally that they just get chased around from
| one place to another, forever.
| kjksf wrote:
| San Francisco was ignoring this problem for at least 10 years
| before that judgement happened.
|
| Not to mention the issue there wasn't exactly that the city
| was trying to do something but the fact that they were fining
| them and plaintiffs claimed the fines were so large that they
| were "cruel and unusual punishment" which is non-
| constitutional.
|
| So no, it's 100% political and bureaucratic apathy over many
| years, not one court case.
| keepamovin wrote:
| IMO, San Jose has been nicer than downtown San Francisco for
| about 10 years.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Which would be relevant if Twitter HQ was in downtown SF.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Ha! :) smh. Nah, it's relevant. What, you don't think it's in
| Downtown? Embarcadero's the only downtown for you?
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| I'm puzzled by this move. The more and more I read about a
| business being political the less I want to support it.
|
| I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years
| daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.
| nox101 wrote:
| I don't know about the move to San Jose specifically but
| 9th-10th and Market in SF is arguably not a nice place
| currently.
|
| This is 2 blocks away
|
| https://www.ktvu.com/news/report-workers-at-sf-federal-build...
|
| This is 2 blocks away
|
| https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/15/sideshow-crash-market-stre...
|
| This is 1 block away
|
| https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/10/downtown-san-francisco-who...
|
| I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to
| make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any
| company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only
| reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there
| are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they
| could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and
| downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will
| need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it
| to recover.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| But you don't think that will change with the executive order
| from newson to remove homeless camps?
|
| Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just
| magically move?
|
| That's why I'm puzzled
| talkingtab wrote:
| Yet another petty tyrant rants. In this time of cult of
| personality how is that newsworthy or unexpected? But this is
| "fortune.com", a corporate rag, so perhaps it is interesting to
| them.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Way easier to recruit/attract talent in South bay. More
| senior/staff level engineers. SF talent pool trends more junior,
| more single, less experience, etc.
| anon291 wrote:
| Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes
| have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher
| quality and much more balanced.
| timeon wrote:
| Nor really. It used to work for all people with browser now it
| is only for logged-in.
| brabel wrote:
| That was already the case before Musk bought it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire
| Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also
| possible to go to someone's account page and see their
| posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away
| shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little
| longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't
| even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you
| to log in.
| brabel wrote:
| I clearly remember it wasn't, they would pop up with a
| login page as soon as you scrolled down.
| throw-away_42 wrote:
| Maybe for you, but not for most of the rest of the
| universe.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-
| access-re...
| 998244353 wrote:
| I remember it being the case before too. It wasn't
| unconditional like it is now. For example, I distinctly
| remember being able to scroll through someone's profile
| in a normal browser window without being logged in, but
| in an incognito window, I was immediately told to log in
| or create an account.
|
| They may have had other heuristics too that led to
| inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be
| so surprising if some people report that that happened
| even though it didn't happen to others.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There was a feature flag for this that rolled out in 2021
| or so.
| diffxx wrote:
| Yes, but you could bypass the login page.
| ailun wrote:
| No, it wasn't.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Wrong. I don't understand why people attempt to make
| corrections like this.
|
| Anyone could browse Twitter anonymously, since the
| beginning.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| There was briefly a log-in nag popup that would appear on
| scroll.
|
| That disappeared and Musk got lots of praise for it,
| probably entirely unwarrented but it was basically the
| only thing that improved post-Musk. Then it came back
| with a vengeance.
| brabel wrote:
| Mate, you're wrong, as many others have said.
|
| Here's proof right here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769715
|
| Funny that people also found ways to criticize Musk back
| then for doing that :D.
|
| Do you understand now why we make corrections to patently
| wrong statements like yours?
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| No, it was much more possible to consume without being
| logged in than it is now, though sometimes tricks like
| closing a login popup were needed.
| recursive wrote:
| That must have been a very long time ago.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| ~October 27, 2022. So yeah, about 2 years ago.
| recursive wrote:
| I have to admit, I have a loose understanding of what's
| going on with twitter or even how to use it. But my
| personal Mandela effect is that it didn't work right if
| you weren't logged in for a lot longer than that.
|
| I'm probably mis-remembering.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| You used to be able to look at people's profiles, tweets
| and entire threads without being signed in. If you go to
| my profile today signed out you see tweets from before
| 2022. If you click on a tweet signed out, you only see
| that single tweet without context. Some of those changes
| are only a few months back.
| pcwalton wrote:
| It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly
| worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a
| position on the value of any of the other changes to the
| product.)
| wonderwonder wrote:
| It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least
| dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post
| though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely
| unrelated in the comments
| smsm42 wrote:
| I'm mostly reading political tweets, and for the last year
| or so I have never noticed that - the comments can be of
| very varying quality, as always on an unmoderated forum,
| but I don't remember too much offtopic. Maybe it depends on
| who do you follow and who the bots are targeting - except
| Musk, my follows are usually not celebrities, so maybe bots
| don't bother targeting them.
| fwip wrote:
| I don't recall ever seeing porn spam in my ~8 years of
| using the site pre-Musk. Probably a few incidents here and
| there, but nothing notable enough that I remember it
| happening.
|
| If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more
| than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for
| something.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| No, they haven't. I have at least one porn bot start
| following me every day. In any thread, a porn post can just
| randomly appear. TBH, the _rate_ at which it 's getting
| worse is increasing.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| The reply section of posts with any reach has become unusable
| on purpose, and they're making it even worse. Great!
| jerojero wrote:
| Every day I get 5-10 new followers bot followers. I haven't
| gotten a real follower in months, I don't use the account that
| much.
|
| Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content
| (and particularly Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do
| show them.
|
| Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly
| refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the
| site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been.
| Not by a mile.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Community notes predate Musk. They're a lot more common now,
| but they're needed more than ever too. Meanwhile spam is
| everywhere (except in the "probable spam" section) and all ads
| are scams.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Community notes by themselves do not do much if the network
| administration has severe bias vs one side of political
| spectrum.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Readers added context they thought people might like to know:
|
| Twitter misinformation about a tragedy started far-right riots
| in the UK the other day.
|
| And Musk commented approvingly that civil war was inevitable.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| I see much more right wing content boosted by the algorithm
| now, and the paid checkmarks ensures every tweet's replies have
| low quality and bot replies filtered to the top.
|
| The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post
| anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly
| people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot
| account followers.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I think it's because Twitter doesn't bury and ban moderate
| and conservative opinions now. It feels like there's more
| balance today. I'd say in my experience I've seen more of the
| far left voices I follow move away from the platform
| (although many moved back) and they're not as powerful not
| that the Twitter team isn't backing them exclusivly.
| dom96 wrote:
| Community notes sometimes provide useful context I'll grant you
| that... but often they are just a popularity contest to see
| which side can upvote which community note.
| typon wrote:
| * No ability to browse the site without logging in
|
| * Hundreds of spam account followers
|
| * Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real
| content
|
| * Random bugs with video content constantly
|
| * Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making
| conversations effectively pay to win.
|
| * Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any
| popular tweet
|
| Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the
| internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist.
| This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by
| Jack.
| slashdave wrote:
| Balanced? Only if you like mob rule. Which maybe is the point.
| Cody-99 wrote:
| What are you talking about? Open any twitter link and there is
| a pretty good chance it just doesn't work lol. And even if it
| does work hopefully it isn't a thread because you won't see any
| of the parent comments or replies.
| randerson wrote:
| Clever! Give a thousand+ high earners a reason to buy a car.
| Install Superchargers in all the best parking spots to reserve
| them for Teslas. Most X employees are loyal to Musk, so that is
| probably $50M in additional revenue for TSLA, and he gets people
| to show up early if they want to charge at work. /s
| dang wrote:
| All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk
| comments to HN threads? They're tedious and have nasty effects.
|
| I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's
| why HN's guidelines say " _Comments should get more thoughtful
| and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
| carabiner wrote:
| Fun fact: There are 3 "south bays" in California.
|
| 1. SF Bay Area
|
| 2. Los Angeles Beach Cities
|
| 3. Orange County
| jiveturkey wrote:
| 4. Eureka
| ljsprague wrote:
| 5. San Diego
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Bay_(San_Diego_County)
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I thought X/Twitter had stopped paying rent in SF.. so maybe this
| is related to that?
| robxorb wrote:
| Why is the title of the HN post changed to read "Twitter", when
| the linked article title states correctly "X", and is otherwise
| identical?
| dang wrote:
| I did that because I don't know anyone who doesn't still call
| it Twitter.
| awb wrote:
| X (formerly Twitter) is how I've seen it cited elsewhere.
| dang wrote:
| That's the safest, but it runs up against HN's 80 char
| limit on titles and also feels clumsy and formalistic.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| It's pretty common in my circles to call it X now. Things
| change, most people adapt.
| robxorb wrote:
| Well, when I got up this morning I didn't think I'd be doing
| this today:
|
| > please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait; don't editorialize.
| dang wrote:
| Both names are linkbait. I think 'Twitter' is less
| misleading than 'X', so it wins the guideline on points.
|
| Not saying it's a strong case, just that it tilts that way.
| Others would call it differently and that's always the case
| with a close call.
|
| Just because you buy something doesn't mean you get to
| change popular usage by decree. There's a whiff of
| corporatism about that which sticks in my craw.
|
| (I am not, god help us, making any implicit point about the
| muskwars.)
| samatman wrote:
| Ideally you'd do the same for Facebook. That other thing
| they call themselves is immensely insulting to a good
| word, and stolen valor to boot.
|
| No, Zucc, you're not cyberpunk. And your overgrown
| jumped-up Ivy league hot-or-not definitely ain't.
| dang wrote:
| Well now that you mention it, the Twitter -> X, Facebook
| -> Meta, and Google -> Alphabet transitions are all kind
| of similar aren't they. I never noticed that before!
| nox101 wrote:
| There's a difference
|
| Meta owns Facebook so you can still talk about Facebook
| separate from Meta. Meta also owns Oculus
|
| Alphabet owns Google so you can still talk about Google
| separate from Alphabet. Alphabet also owns Waymo.
|
| X "is" Twitter. They aren't two separate things (a parent
| company and one of their subsidiaries) like the other two
| examples.
| dang wrote:
| Those are distinctions without a difference in popular
| usage. Alphabet may own Waymo but in most people's minds
| (or at least in my mind) it's all one thing and the name
| of that one thing is Google. Similarly for FB and
| Twitter. You can change a name on paper but that doesn't
| determine how people talk.
|
| There's another interesting aspect: the original names
| Google/Facebook/Twitter are so much more expressive than
| Alphabet/Meta/X. The latter feel like constructs of some
| imperious baron on his march up the abstraction ladder,
| leaving the rest of us cold.
|
| But I'm ranting now, sorry!
| autoexecbat wrote:
| It ultimately doesn't matter what a company wants to call
| themselves if the vast public just uses the old name
| 015a wrote:
| I mean, it does matter, and also HackerNews is the only
| bubble I interact with regularly that still holds on to the
| Twitter name like gollum and the one ring.
|
| My understanding is that HN has rules against
| editorialization of headlines. This absolutely qualifies. The
| company is called X, the article calls it X. You don't have
| to like it, you don't have to use that name when you speak
| about the company, but editorializing the headline to name
| the company whatever the submitter wants is inappropriate.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| I have never heard anyone in real life call it X.
|
| I do agree that the headline shouldn't be editorialized,
| though. "X (formerly Twitter)" at most.
| dang wrote:
| I think there's a lot of variance between the different
| groups people here are part of and the different
| conventions they follow. That's broadly the case with HN
| actually.
| metabagel wrote:
| "X" feels (to me) much more ambiguous than "Twitter".
|
| If you say "Twitter", people know what you're talking
| about. If you say "X", are you talking about "X" marks the
| spot? Rated "X"? "X" the former project name for Paypal?
| "X" as in an unknown quantity? "X" is used in a lot of
| different contexts. I think if you want to use the name
| "X", then you should probably say "The company, X,".
|
| Twitter is a verb, but when you use it as a noun, the
| listener instantly knows that you are talking about the
| company "Twitter". Plus, it's the name we are all familiar
| with.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in
| office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both
| ways to work was not acceptable.
|
| Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
|
| I don't buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1
| is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| I've had several meetings, either in Twitter office or around
| it, and the street scene is very bad in that part of SF. If the
| claim is that this is a motivation for the move, it certainly
| passes the sniff test for me.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| So you've been able to gauge life and the street scene in SF
| based on several meetings? That's super interesting. I would
| argue the Embarcadero is fairly nice and I live here, but
| what do I know.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I visited Fisherman's Wharf last year after dark and it was
| pretty poorly lit and not that clean. Maybe for a company
| where employees are expected be "extremely hardcore" (i.e.
| long hours) that is a consideration.
|
| (Although if you're truly hardcore you don't care what the
| street looks like, you sleep under your desk.)
| er4hn wrote:
| This is disingenuous. Twitter is located in Civic Center,
| which is a different neighborhood. From the ferry building
| at the Embarcadero to Twitter HQ is about 1.8 miles away,
| or 3 BART stops.
|
| Given the density of SF and how quickly spaces can change
| you cannot realistically compare the two.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Only visited for a few days for a conference, but I think
| if you live there you may have become desensitized to the
| situation. It's really really not normal to have all the
| stores boarded up and security guards at the entrance. It's
| really not normal to be outnumbered by fent addicts nodding
| off on the street. The worst vibes of any city i've ever
| been to in my life (Including many people would describe as
| shitholes). This is so messed up to everyone who hasn't
| been beaten into acceptance of it
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't know what you know, but one thing you apparently
| don't know is that Twitter HQ is nowhere near the
| Embarcadero.
| renewiltord wrote:
| My wife and I have lived in SF for over a decade and I go
| to the Fitness SF next door to this building at least twice
| a week these days. We can all play this game where we try
| to pretend that this area is really nice to people not from
| here.
|
| But what that guy said was " _the street scene is very bad
| in that part of SF._ " and he's dead right.
|
| I love this city, but misleading people on the Internet is
| not right. Tell them the truth. I've lived here as long as
| I have because I think the benefits outweigh the pains. But
| not because there are no pains.
| lucidone wrote:
| I am nobody important living in rural middle of nowhere,
| but visited SF twice for work, and it was the most horrific
| city I have ever been to. I am a big man and didn't feel
| very safe.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The last time I visited SF for a conference, I witnessed
| first-hand more crime in two weeks than I have in my
| entire life before or since, and this was all during
| broad daylight.
| arethuza wrote:
| About 20 years ago I was visiting SF for work and, in a
| moment of weakness, let someone else book me a hotel -
| they booked me into a rather rough hotel on Geary. When I
| got into a taxi at the airport the driver said "Do you
| really want to go there?".
| smsm42 wrote:
| SF has had some cleaner parts - including north parts of
| Embarcadero, Presidio, etc. but the center and Market St.
| areas can be pretty scary to a person who's not used to it.
| As a large ugly dude, I didn't really feel _that_
| threatened there, even if a bit uneasy, but I can only
| imagine how, for example, a woman would feel navigating it,
| especially at later hours...
| sneak wrote:
| Statistically speaking, women are almost never physically
| attacked by strangers, it is almost always someone they
| know.
|
| Men are attacked by strangers at a much much higher rate
| than women are.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| I would also say woman fear strangers much more than
| somebody they know.
|
| Maybe what's the reason they can avoid getting physically
| attacked by strangers better than men.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is to be honest, are you
| saying women are safe in that area at that time of night
| because of global statistics?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "I didn't feel that threatened, but I can only imagine
| how X group would feel" doesn't make much sense if X
| group is actually at a lower risk.
|
| I don't know if they're right at all, but the point seems
| pretty clear. And they're not saying anyone is safe.
| janalsncm wrote:
| That's fair, I never visited the office. But if that was the
| only issue maybe they'd consider a different part of SF,
| which would be easier for current employees.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| ... a literal sniff test? from what I hear (not having been
| there in more than a few years), it's become quite a problem.
| Diederich wrote:
| I rode by their office in SF daily in 2015-2018 and even back
| then it was pretty rough. I've heard things have gotten only
| more difficult since.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I interviewed there around then, I remeber getting off at
| civic center bart station on my way in wondering to my self
| if I really want to do this commute everyday and what kind
| if effect it would have on me. Then I got the offer and was
| like, I'll figure it out hah. Sketchy mornings watching all
| the drug dealing happening hoping I wouldn't accidently
| look at the wrong person the wrong way or something.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Isn't van ness station closer to Twitter?
| SllX wrote:
| If he was going via BART, Van Ness doesn't have a BART
| station. If he was going via MUNI, technically yes but
| not by a lot.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Oh wow, my bad. I thought there was a BART station down
| there. (I used to be a regular muni rider, not a regular
| bart rider).
| SllX wrote:
| It is an easy mistake to make because Van Ness is a
| strange station to have been built. It's past the point
| where the BART tracks turn towards Mission and is close
| enough to Civic Center to seem redundant; but I guess a
| ton of civic buildings are directly on Van Ness and it is
| a major North-South transit corridor.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| The Van Ness station is not particularly pleasant either.
| Come out of the subway and see this:
| https://x.com/sfdsrvsbttr/status/1809986173844279305?s=46
| tayo42 wrote:
| Maybe, I used to live closer to a Bart station and it was
| faster so I always took that down town if I could.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I used live in the Tenderloin and work in the Twitter
| building. My walk to work required me to be mindful of both
| stationary and recently minted poop in transit. This was in
| 2019.
| roberto2016 wrote:
| I used to live in the Tenderloin in late 90's early 00's.
| Nice affordable studio on Turk. There was always a diverse
| party going on during the day on the streets. Definitely
| had an old fashion skid-row vibe. Market street wasn't too
| bad then. Ah the memories.
| snotrockets wrote:
| That was also true in mission bay, is true in Lakeshore,
| and I assume other neighborhoods too.
|
| It shouldn't be like that, but those are the priorities we
| (as society and electorate) decided on.
| highcountess wrote:
| That is a quite ironic statement considering that Twitter
| has been an integral part of modern social engineering to
| reprogram people into accepting and tolerating the
| intolerable and unacceptable.
|
| So here we are, at a point where people not only self-
| censor, they will even get violently aggressive or simply
| will suppress speech or even the ability to read or hear
| what someone has said if it diverges from the cult rules
| that have been imposed on our whole civilization.
| darby_nine wrote:
| I'd far prefer to live in the tenderloin than south bay.
| People make it out to be far scarier than it is.
| drawnwren wrote:
| I'd be willing to be good money you couldn't take the bus
| out of the old X headquarters at 11pm for a month straight
| and not get robbed at least once. I got robbed twice in the
| 3 months I worked in the TL.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Look I understand what you're saying, but it really
| doesn't take much survival skills to walk around at 2am
| without getting robbed. Living around people who haven't
| sold their soul is well worth the cost. I love the
| neighborhood and will forever defend it.
| drawnwren wrote:
| You know an area is fucked when people start trying to
| blame the victims for the crime.
| qingcharles wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/getting-mugged-just-say-no
| darby_nine wrote:
| I'm not blaming them for the crime, just their lack of
| understanding how the world works. If you want to
| understand poverty in america the only place to look is
| capital and americans' commitment to individual material
| comfort over all other values.
| yurwrng wrote:
| Both Australia and Singapore are very individualistic,
| capitalistic and materialistic, and yet you don't get
| robbed constantly.
| rangestransform wrote:
| > the only place to look is capital and americans'
| commitment to individual material comfort over all other
| values
|
| the only place to look is the disgust with which
| americans view enforcement of public order
| delfinom wrote:
| Not to mention talk about "survival skills" as if that
| should be normal in a highly wealthy western country in a
| highly wealthy city. That's shit you talk about in
| developing countries.
| naveen99 wrote:
| old people love talking about shit. Younger people are
| more into survival.
| toast0 wrote:
| Survival skills are nice to have. But it's even nicer to
| live and work in a location where robbery isn't something
| that someone might reasonably experience twice in 3
| months.
|
| Of course, I left a job when my lunch got stolen twice in
| 3 months; well 3 times, but one time I brought leftover
| pizza in a pizza box, that's understandable. Taking
| leftovers in plastic is just rude... especially when my
| shift started at 4pm and everyone else was working normal
| hours, other than the overnight person whose shift
| started when mine left.
|
| If I had been robbed because of the location of my job,
| I'd probably show up one more time, to return my stuff
| (assuming it wasn't stolen when I was robbed).
| darby_nine wrote:
| I've been robbed before, too. I prefer that to the
| sterile antisocialness of the wealthy.
| spunker540 wrote:
| others may value personal safety (of themselves or their
| family) higher than you do. Twitter may not be optimizing
| for folks like yourself (you may be in the minority).
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Incredible mental gymnastics.
| lupusreal wrote:
| _" Survival skill"_ is a matter of looking like a scary
| scumbag who's more trouble than he's worth to fuck with.
| I'm good at it, I size up the real scumbags like they're
| meat I'm going to chew up and spit out and I have the
| physical build to back it up. They cross the street to
| avoid me. But many people will just never have this
| "skill".
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Why do the citizens of SF like living in such squalor?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The obvious answer is they don't, and it is a tough problem
| to fix
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| The way I see it, the main way in which the citizens of
| SF can fix it is by voting for something different, but
| they don't. So it certainly does seem like they find the
| status quo preferable to alternatives.
| pokot0 wrote:
| Before you jump to that conclusion you have to be sure
| that: - such politician exist (politician is not where we
| humans shine) - you believe the ones who claim they will
| fix it - the one that you believe can fix it don't come
| with values that you cannot accept (extreme example:
| "I'll kill all homeless people. vote me!"
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Given there are/were cities that are not in such decline
| and such a state, including SF itself, it definitely
| seems like there are politicians that can fix it.
|
| The values conflict may be relevant. If, for example, you
| think it's critical to allow and facilitate your fellow
| man to become total enslavement to drugs that destroy
| their lives and health and eventually kill them, then I
| can get that you won't want to do anything to stop it,
| even if you have to live in squalor for that to be the
| case.
| naasking wrote:
| Not really. People have just deluded themselves into
| thinking that the current situation is somehow more
| humane than mandatory rehab and institutionalization.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Homeless industrial complex. First you cause the crisis
| then you profit off of the solutions that claim to fix it
| (but never fix it).
|
| https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=san+francisco+homeles
| s...
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| But the citizens of SF can just stop electing local
| governments that fund this, yet they don't. I can
| certainly see how they contributed to causing the crisis
| (i.e. by electing people who caused it), but I don't see
| how they profit from it, unless the people in SF likes
| such conditions, which seems pretty weird, at least to
| me.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >the people in SF likes such conditions
|
| The people in SF like their million dollar shoeboxes to
| appreciate in value, with zero regard for the
| externalities that scheme creates[1].
|
| 1. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/articles/...
| omegaworks wrote:
| Blame the homeless and people trying to help them, take
| the blame off the real problem: few available homes with
| high prices[1].
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10574586
| /#:~:te....
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I mean reason #1 is probably that they are getting evicted
| right? Didn't elon stop paying rent?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Paying rent is a woke mind virus, so Elon would never go for
| that. Fight the oppression!
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Like just buy twitter, then you won't have to pay rent. -
| Elon probably
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Santa Clara-San Jose area is relatively still damn expensive.
| (Ask me how I know.)
|
| Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to
| treat their employees like children and waste my time and money
| on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, this has been tested every which way by now, the entire
| point of in-person work is to monitor employees. My manager
| told me outright that the only reason I can stay remote is,
| unlike most of the team, I didn't seem to "disappear" during
| 2020.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Musk runs Twitter like a dictator.
|
| The first and only reason is whatever Musk felt like.
|
| Twitter was imperically a terrible financial decision.
|
| It seems like a bold statement to say the #1 is de facto money.
|
| I suspect non-money issues are much higher on the list.
|
| If anyone on the planet doesn't need more money, it's Musk.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| TBF, Elon has been running his other companies like he is
| running Twitter. Also, isn't it his prerogative to run his
| companies however he pleases as he is the CEO? If the
| shareholders are not happy with it, they can push him out.
| poisonarena wrote:
| reading this as a mariner who works 2-4 months straight, on a
| ship, in deep sea, 12 hour work day, and no days off (working
| saturday and sunday).. lol you dont know how bad it really is..
| zappb wrote:
| Sounds like a prison work camp!
| deathanatos wrote:
| I'm going to assume your work requires your physical presence
| on that ship, in the deep sea, though. My work, however, does
| not. Further, employers are, on the whole, cheap, and want to
| pack workers into as small a footprint as possible.
| (Literally, 4' or less.) I can build a better work
| environment at home, for under $1k.
|
| "My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me
| to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for
| myself, where there is a possibility of better work
| conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs.
| another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions
| of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't
| like.
|
| (And, I would also still default to advocating for sane
| worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some
| compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort
| of sense in your industry.)
| morgansmolder wrote:
| "You kids think you're being exploited? Haha that's nothing,
| I've been exploited 10x harder!"
| oblio wrote:
| Let's not crab bucket each other. You deserve good working
| conditions and making life suck for everyone else, too, won't
| make your life truly better.
| rty32 wrote:
| "you should feel good about that because my life has been
| much worse"
| lmm wrote:
| Talent pool is downstream of the "flamebait reasons" though.
| Maybe they're not moving out of SF directly because of the high
| crime etc., they're moving out of SF because they can't attract
| talent in SF... but that may well be at least partly because of
| the high crime etc..
| not_alexb wrote:
| I've lived in high crime areas, and SF doesn't have the kind
| of high crime that would actually deter me. The monotony of a
| homogeneous population is enough to keep me away from the Bay
| for as long as I can; and I know plenty of other talented
| people that feel the same
| astrange wrote:
| The Bay doesn't have a homogenous population, you just
| don't know any locals.
| not_alexb wrote:
| I've lived all along the West Coast from Tijuana to
| Seattle. There is no place along this coast which I would
| call homogeneous except the Bay. I would challenge your
| locals statement, but at this point, I've wasted too much
| time on No True Scotsman fallacies for this lifetime.
|
| Either way, my community was one of the last diverse
| communities to get priced out of the Bay (around the
| early 2010s). Yet, you can find my community in any other
| populated place along the west coast. The bay definitely
| has a diversity issue when it comes to interesting
| people.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Have you been to Twitter's SF site? It is a weird place,
| between super sketchy and plainly empty, what is missing is the
| peace of mind, definitely a valid reason to leave. It has all
| the downsides from being in the downtown, while none of the
| perks remain in today's SF.
|
| Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I
| don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other
| companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is
| it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took
| over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think it's inaccurate to say that they don't need talent to
| keep the lights on at Twitter. Maybe not a lot of new
| architectural development is happening, but you definitely
| need a lot of ops people that know what they're doing to keep
| the lights on there.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Elon had outsourced majority of Ops work, there are about
| 20% of employees left in the Bay last I checked from news.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| If you use Twitter you would know it has been far from the
| same.
| barkerja wrote:
| It appears they're trying to change the platform to be more
| of a media and payments platform. That requires talent.
| debacle wrote:
| Does Elon still dislike/disallow remote work? Seems like that
| would be a competitive disadvantage.
| bboygravity wrote:
| But then, like with all of Elon's companies, the question is:
| who's the (serious) competition?
|
| Rethorical question... There is none.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| There are plenty of people who have no problem working from the
| office 5 days a week, and even some who prefer it. On HN some
| people are vocal about insisting on remote work, but outside
| the bubble here people aren't so adamant. Your average person
| would prefer remote, but isn't going to refuse a job offer
| based only on that one factor.
| meowtimemania wrote:
| It's also becoming increasingly difficult to get a remote job
| with a bay area salary.
| rvz wrote:
| I have to say, the anti-elon meltdown vs the elon simps is quite
| entertaining to watch and it goes both ways.
|
| Why are you getting so upset, angry, emotional and screaming over
| someone that doesn't care about you?
|
| Very unhealthy folks. but regardless, until the next time you
| will talk about Twitter / X again.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I'm pretty surprised that they elected to stay in CA at all.
| Would have expected him to move the company to Austin.
| hintymad wrote:
| There is a famous paper about the location of company
| headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of
| company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm
| actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to
| do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the
| employees start to have families, they most likely move to the
| south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine
| that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an
| hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a
| city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least
| increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample
| parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start
| jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal
| with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who
| prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a
| company will have access to more talent by moving its
| headquarters to the south of SF.
| beacon294 wrote:
| What did you mean by "move to south bay for good for worse"? I
| just couldn't parse your meaning.
| hintymad wrote:
| My bad. I meant "for good or for worse". That is, I was
| trying to be neutral to the merit of moving from SF to the
| south.
| mkaic wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've generally heard this phrased as "for
| _better_ or for worse " :)
| hintymad wrote:
| Oh yeah! Thanks!
| asveikau wrote:
| They seem unaware that a lot of SF based people go to the
| east bay.
|
| But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either.
| Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight"
| kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for
| families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
|
| Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF
| specifically is the expense.
| jacobolus wrote:
| SF is a great place for kids of all ages. But housing is
| indeed very expensive, as is childcare. Families in rent-
| controlled apartments who want more space without
| significantly higher expense don't have a lot of options;
| several such families we know ended up moving out of the
| city (sometimes to elsewhere in Northern CA but often
| across the country to be closer to family). I don't know
| anyone who moved because they thought their kids were
| having a bad time in the city.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Yes, but surely those people are not moving to the South
| Bay (which is just as expensive).
| nimbius wrote:
| i concur. I think a lot of this is just sound business acumen.
|
| Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes
| like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco
| had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and
| accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the
| physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea
| im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
|
| San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global
| pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also
| made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to
| entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or
| general congestion for even a minute.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Musk Twitter stopped paying office rent a long time ago. I
| can only assume they finally couldn't keep doing that without
| getting evicted.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Musk has been following his hero Trump in not paying those
| he owes money to. So now X stands for shmuck.
| groby_b wrote:
| fwiw, hiring senior talent in SF works just fine. If you pay
| at the right pricing tier. SF is a decent city. It could
| definitely do better, it has issues, but if we all could stop
| pretending it's a post apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
|
| Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major
| cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But
| I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that
| reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and
| your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little
| differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger
| companies)
|
| What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly
| high , and then you combine that with half the twitter
| offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office
| space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again
| cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that
| Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk
| of savings.
| nostrademons wrote:
| South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually _more_ expensive
| than SF, though you do get a bit more for your money.
| Compensation is often marginally higher as well, though
| most companies with offices in both have them in the same
| salary band.
| hintymad wrote:
| For senior engineers, I'd say opportunities weigh more
| than the difference in salary or even in overall package,
| unless the package correlates with the opportunities. I
| may complain about commute, but I'd still be happy to
| join an exciting startup in the city.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more
| expensive than SF
|
| Per square foot/meter? I find this hard to believe.
| rconti wrote:
| I mean, obviously it depends on what city you choose, but
| given that the article is specifically about X moving to
| Palo Alto....
|
| San Francisco is $957/sqft median listing price [1]
|
| Palo Alto is $1800/sqft median listing price. [2]
|
| Hell, I live in Redwood City and the median is $996/sqft.
|
| 1. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-
| Franci...
|
| 2. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-
| search/Palo-Alto_...
| nostrademons wrote:
| San Jose is a bit less, about $700/sf:
|
| https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-
| Jose_C...
|
| The Santana Row neighborhood ("Winchester Orchards") is
| pretty comparable, at $910/sf though. I was actually
| thinking of Mountain View & Sunnyvale, which are
| considered decent places to live in the South Bay but
| aren't quite as elite as Palo Alto. They are both about
| $1.2K/sf:
|
| https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-
| search/Mountain-V...
|
| https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-
| search/Sunnyvale_...
| perks_12 wrote:
| > but if we all could stop pretending it's a post
| apocalyptic hellscape, that'd be nice.
|
| I'm very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I've
| seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being
| littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called
| bopping. Isn't this real, or is it far less common than
| those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this
| from people in SF.
| _acco wrote:
| There are a few very bad neighborhoods and the videos you
| are seeing accurately depict them. Most unfortunately,
| those bad parts are mixed into downtown where most
| offices are.
|
| As a resident, it's extremely disheartening and must be
| fixed. The Tenderloin has been bad for years, but
| fentanyl has taken it to the next level.
|
| However, most neighborhoods are different. Most are free
| from encampments and open-air drug use. Many residents
| just avoid downtown and some aren't wise to how bad it
| really is.
|
| Hence why the city is still so expensive.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Just in response to your second point, I do think that's
| specific to you and your circles. I know multiple retired or
| semi-retired people who have moved towards the center of a
| city. Without work to keep them occupied, they want the hustle
| and bustle, which means something to do. And driving has become
| more of a hassle and a barrier to the kinds of lives they want
| to live. These are east coast or midwest cities, so maybe there
| is something about SF that's different, but that's my
| experience.
| danielhep wrote:
| Also, a lot of older people don't want big houses, and having
| easy access to amenities and socialization is more important
| than having extra empty bedrooms.
| hintymad wrote:
| Very true. At least to me, a modest condo will be more than
| enough, as I've learned long before that tidiness brings
| more pleasure than large space.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I will get downvoted for this comment: Size of living
| area does seem to be highly influenced by gender. I hear
| many more men say they would be happy living in a smaller
| place. I never once heard that from a woman under 50.
| (After the kids are gone, they may wish to downsize.)
| antisthenes wrote:
| Men are just content to have less, usually.
|
| Also, are these single men with hobbies that don't take
| up a lot of space like gardening or woodworking?
| Elinvynia wrote:
| Let me be the first one then - I am fully content on
| living in a 40-60m2 space with my partner and two cats.
| Considering we never lived in anything bigger this size
| is perfect for us, easy to clean and still enough space
| to live.
| gkoberger wrote:
| You're talking about different age groups. You mention
| retired people (who are likely empty nesters), but the age
| group OP is talking about are middle-aged CEOs with young
| kids or teenagers.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Cities' attractiveness feels u-shaped
|
| Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to
| bars/restaurants/clubs
|
| Middle aged folks hate it because they're so busy - they
| can't take advantage, and other people get in their way
|
| (some) Older folks like it again bc they have the time to go
| to restaurants/theater
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Exactly this. I grew up on a farm, was a student in the
| city, started a family in the countryside and I want to
| retire in a city, as long as it's close to my children.
| tomcam wrote:
| Did you... did you, ah, raise spiders on the family farm?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Is that a Thing? I'm so behind /s
| tomcam wrote:
| Well, check out their username
| AlbertCory wrote:
| oops. right.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| I've polled my friends about this, and our group is a
| about 50/50. Some of us when looking at comments never
| read the usernames, we just completely skip over it. And
| some alway do - the next is right there of course you'd
| read it!
|
| It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any
| obvious correlation between other traits in my informal
| survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set
| of personality traits that correlates with reading vs
| ignoring user names.
| TylerE wrote:
| I don't skip commentor names _intentionally_ , but HN
| makes it really easy with the stupid (not sorry) light
| grey on slightly darker grey text. Contrast is an
| accessibility issue, and HN sucks at it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Middle ages folks hate it because they are most likely to
| have kids and cities (in the US) tend to be kid hostile.
| What I'm calling city below is probably better described as
| downtown - most cities extend out farther and have areas
| that are nothing like what follows - but are also nothing
| like what you described as what people move to the city
| for.
|
| Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often
| lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too
| small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will
| yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the
| other ways kids play.
|
| Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age
| folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and
| hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an
| minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars
| might allow kids to eat there).
|
| Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but
| they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows
| are not what kids would be interested in, and because they
| will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will
| be - not kid friendly shows).
|
| Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks
| for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and
| will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they
| define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
|
| Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when
| it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a
| lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a
| babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or
| 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more.
| You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and
| other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city
| apartment.
|
| Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've
| concluded that this because of the other factors above -
| few families live there and so not enough people care to
| make them good. It does however stop many families that
| might want to try living in the city.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Cities are far more kid-friendly than suburbs, especially
| for kids from age ~9-18. Everything is walkable or can be
| reached by transit, many more amenities and activities
| are accessible, kids are dramatically less dependent on
| parents or other caretakers to constantly chaperone them,
| and there are a wider variety of other kids around with
| many niche interests.
|
| Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be
| bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider
| the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the
| parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful
| while suburbs are often boring and repressive.
| hintymad wrote:
| > For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful and
| suburbs are often a kind of prison
|
| I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are
| wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me
| and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't
| care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and
| exciting.
|
| I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My
| kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when they
| spend days and nights there.
|
| It's not that parents falsely think that cities are bad
| for kids (it may be a factor for some people, of course),
| but that parents themselves do not want to live in a busy
| city. For instance, I have zero interest in bars or
| clubs. In fact, they are way noisy for my social needs.
| Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods
| and shaded trails. And I want to have access to those
| large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools
| and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms,
| instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because
| I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point). Or
| take Asian supermarket for another example. There are
| really not that many choices in SF or NYC. Even for the
| available ones, let's say H Mart in NYC, I really don't
| like the cramped space. I want to have those spacious
| walkways and shelving and big food court and etc.
| dayvid wrote:
| Suburbs can be prisons if there's not enough people your
| age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had friends
| I'd walk to after school. Makes it more fun than having
| to organize car dates until someone gets a car. But
| nowadays kids are so supervised I don't know if they hang
| outside anymore
| hintymad wrote:
| > Suburbs can be prisons if there's not enough people
| your age around you. I lived in semi-suburbs and had
| friends I'd walk to after school. Makes it more fun than
| having to organize car dates until someone gets a car.
| But nowadays kids are so supervised I don't know if they
| hang outside anymore
|
| Totally. There seem fewer kids in the neighborhood than
| before too. Play-date is such a suburb concept for the US
| kids. As a kid, I used to hang out with neighbor kids,
| sometimes more than a dozen, every day. Not any more for
| my kids in the suburb. To that end, I admire my Indian
| friends. Even during the most panicking days of Covid,
| they would organize weekly meetups of multiple families,
| so kids got to play together.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are less kids outside, but that is just because
| families are so much smaller on average and there are
| less kids.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| That seems like both a generational and cultural thing,
| vs a urban/sub-urban consideration. Prior generations in
| the US had kids just hangout with whomever in the
| neighborhood be it urban or sub-urban too. Playdates are
| probably just as common in urban areas now, the cultural
| change wasn't specific to the built-environment.
| mapt wrote:
| > And I want to have access to those large club houses
| that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries
| and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those
| smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy
| enough, but that's also my point).
|
| Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country
| clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal
| organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social
| life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third
| places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints
| about suburbia.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country
| clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal
| organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social
| life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third
| places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints
| about suburbia.
|
| I think they literally mean "Club house" -- the shared
| services center for the housing development. High-rises
| often have them, large developments have them.
|
| In NYC, our high-rise had a reading room, yoga room, gym,
| entertainment center, as well as a paved playing area for
| building residents inside building premises. People met
| each other regularly at these places and socialized. This
| is very common (minus the paved playing area, which is
| rare.)
|
| In the burbs we also have most of these, and also tennis
| courts and a pool.
|
| Many of these served as a "Third Place" for residents,
| especially once you have kids because it isnt as easy to
| hang out elsewhere. Unlike previous centuries, I'm
| constantly on my phone or on call explicitly or
| implicitly, at least in my profession, so social clubs
| seem unrealistic, though I know the wealthy folks go
| there regularly.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This is either something in a luxury apartment building
| or an amenity you pay for via an HOA in a condo.
| zybftjmvs wrote:
| And what is your point?
| vel0city wrote:
| Even cheap/mid tier apartment complexes around me have a
| clubhouse with a pool, a small gym, maybe a billiard
| table and what not. It is not very expensive to do when
| land is cheap.
|
| My last apartment wasn't super high-end and it even had a
| golf simulator in it along with a billiard room kind of a
| theater room with a giant TV and some big couches.
| hughesjj wrote:
| > I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though.
|
| Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have
| transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends
| until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's
| miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's
| just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There
| was one historical park that's still nice but its also a
| mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent
| sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk
| walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed
| limit and curves.
|
| I suppose it heavily depends on the suburb.
| hughesjj wrote:
| > Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods
| and shaded trails.
|
| Most places that have woods at all also have this.
|
| Golden gate park+presidio in SF,
| discovery+arboretum+Seward+ a bunch more in seattle,
| central park in NYC, fairmont park in Philly are all
| places I've loved walking/biking around (and to).
| deadmutex wrote:
| Please also consider that suburbs are often much cheaper
| to rent a 1800 sqft of living space (say a decent 3 BR 2
| Bath) vs the city.
| jacobolus wrote:
| That's true. Housing is expensive because the city is
| great and people want to live here, but the direct
| results of expensive housing are harmful to the society
| (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic
| activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.).
|
| It would be a significant benefit to the people of SF if
| the western half of the city were significantly upzoned
| with a lot of new housing construction here and
| throughout the Bay Area, and ideally rent and house
| prices cut by something like half (gradually rather than
| in a market crash), so that more of the people necessary
| to run the city could afford to live here.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Housing is expensive because the city is great and
| people want to live here,
|
| If by "great" you mean "where the jobs are" then I agree.
|
| That has been the primary driving force behind
| urbanization since at least the industrial era.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The jobs are in the city because the people are there,
| and the people are there because the jobs and other
| people are there. Empirically, both residents and
| employers prefer to relocate to the city.
|
| The city is convenient and fun: it provides easier
| transportation, more amenities, more other people to
| engage with, more companies of all types to do business
| with, etc.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| You ignore the fact that many European cities are much
| smaller than the North American mega city landscape and
| still have lots of jobs in those cities. But it's also
| easier to have safer yet walkable and publicly
| transportabel neighborhoods in a city of 150k or 300k
| than 3 or 10 million.
| hughesjj wrote:
| There's plenty of American cities from 50k-300k, that's
| not a uniquely European thing.
|
| None of the jobs where I grew up were in the city
| (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, largest employers were all
| suburban campuses save for the electric company and some
| colleges. Even the hospitals were off the highway.).
|
| All the fun stuff was in the city though, so that's where
| we'd go once you got a friend of driving age.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If you run a business selling a niche amenity, you need
| to do so in a city because in the country you won't have
| enough customers nearby.
|
| End result: cities have more fine-grained amenities.
| People who want more amenities live in cities.
| theamk wrote:
| There are? I see the opposite trend (at least in US East
| Coast) - cities only have generic amenities, while all
| the unusual stuff is in the suburbs, where the the land
| is cheap.
|
| For example, let's take a relatively common hobby of
| sewing. The two stores in downtown closed tens of years
| ago, and the only ones left are in the suburbs,
| unreachable without the car.
|
| I think at this stage, the only advantage of city is
| bars, restaurants, and expensive clothing/jewelry. If you
| like something else, you are better off in suburbs with a
| car.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> (and high rent is a kind of giant tax on all economic
| activity, raising prices in shops, restaurants, etc.)_
|
| I've long pointed out to conversation mates IRL that for
| a technological civilization like ours, shelter costs are
| a straight deadweight, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cost
| upon the innovation throughput that is the civilization's
| lifeblood. In the U.S., healthcare pricing policies are
| as well, but that's a different conversation. Both are
| stranded capital that need unlocking towards increasing
| the technological development pace.
|
| But most people with mortgages are trapped like a
| monkey's fist around a fruit in a jar, by the siren song
| of house appreciation.
|
| I'd rather have fusion, life extension, solar system
| colonization, mind uploads and AGI sooner than be "rich"
| in real estate.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| The purpose of capitalism is not technological
| advancement, innovation, or efficient deployment of
| resources. The purpose of capitalism is that rich people
| get paid for being rich.
|
| If you believe otherwise, you will learn the hard way
| when you seek your reforms and find that none of the
| people spouting the high-minded capitalist rhetoric
| support the actions that would bring it closer to
| reality. In short, the monkey's hand isn't trapped. The
| monkey is masturbating into the jar. It knows exactly
| what it is doing and you will not be thanked for
| interrupting.
| jandrese wrote:
| This assumes that the parents consider the city safe
| enough for the kids to wander around unsupervised. The
| perceptions may be bullshit, but people still act on
| them. Statistically speaking the schools in the city are
| going to score lower on pretty much every test than the
| suburban ones, sometimes by large margins.
| jacobolus wrote:
| By far the biggest danger for children wandering around
| (in rural area, suburb, or city) is big cars moving
| quickly. But none of the suburbanites worried about
| cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around
| their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour.
| (Or more realistically, plenty do worry, and keep the
| kids indoors or drive them everywhere instead of letting
| them wander around independently.)
|
| > _Statistically speaking the schools in the city are
| going to score lower_
|
| This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children
| in the class than it does to do with school or teacher
| quality per se.
|
| But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class
| parents are also inordinately worried that their children
| might spend too much time near poorer children who get
| worse test scores because their families have fewer
| resources and they were not as academically prepared.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem
| to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their
| residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour.
|
| The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or
| separated from the road by trees. That's the difference.
| You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens
| directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are
| sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-
| hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
|
| But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for
| pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do
| well to introduce traffic calming, improve
| pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in
| all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of
| about 20 miles/hour.
|
| It would also make streets much safer to reduce the
| proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks.
| Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit
| government policy goal.
| jandrese wrote:
| Those are all great ideas, but to the average voter you
| might as well be saying we should outlaw apple pie.
| Political will behind reforms like this is very hard to
| find and always in danger of being voted out by angry
| drivers.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians
| are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit
| pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable
| streets.
|
| Can you cite this?
| Arelius wrote:
| I think it's a pity you're getting downvoted, I think
| it's a very valid opinion and one that I think is getting
| underrepresented in this thread.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| That's it I'm moving back to the city.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often
| lack kid basics like swings and sand.
|
| Leaving NYC my son was disappointed in almost any park
| we'd go to. Most smaller cities and towns have a few
| decent playgrounds but in the city we had 3-4 in walking
| distance that were amazing and another 10 within a single
| subway stop.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Where in NYC?
| nkozyra wrote:
| Greenpoint/Williamsburg
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| San Francisco has really really good playgrounds, it's
| quite crazy.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often
| lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too
| small for a ball game. Often the people who are there
| will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and
| the other ways kids play.
|
| This doesn't describe Seattle or any other city I've
| lived in. We literally have 3 huge ball fields within
| walking distance of my town home, all full up on weekends
| and even most weekday nights with soccer, baseball,
| etc...
| jorvi wrote:
| > what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
|
| Right, sprinting back-and forth, ear-piercing screams at
| the top of their lungs, kicking chairs - all things we
| should just accept at a restaurant, for the sake of the
| parents. What terrible people we are for wanting a decent
| dining experience.
| throwaway19423 wrote:
| You were a helpless, innocent kid once too :)
| kelnos wrote:
| When I was a kid, going to a restaurant was a treat and a
| privilege. If my sister or I misbehaved, we were taken
| out to the car, and might not get to go to a restaurant
| again for a while.
|
| I see kids in restaurants these days and mostly find
| their behavior appalling. And it's sad the best-behaved
| kids are only quiet because they have an iPad in front of
| them. (No headphones, of course, so that's another
| annoyance the rest of us have to put up with.)
| jorvi wrote:
| Its just common courtesy.
|
| Same as minimizing the amount of flights you have with a
| baby.
|
| People with a baby that take multiple flying trips a year
| are rude, bordering on douchey.
|
| Just because you want an experience doesn't mean you get
| to ruin it for hundreds of others. Who not to mention
| paid for it. Height of egocentrism.
| astura wrote:
| When I was a kid the only restaurant I was allowed to go
| to was Friendly's, and only on my/my siblings birthdays.
| It was a HUGE treat and I knew to be on my very best
| behavior because if there was any acting up, even a
| little, I wouldn't be allowed out to eat out ever again.
|
| Nowadays kids aren't expected to behave in a restaurant,
| so they don't. It's about expectations.
| rangestransform wrote:
| my parents did not bring a 3 year old crying baby into an
| airport lounge
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _" Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty
| looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids
| and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what
| they define as misbehaving is normal for kids."_
|
| Any child older than a toddler should be able to sit
| quietly and respectfully eat a meal. If they can't,
| that's bad parenting.
| danenania wrote:
| Sitting still for long periods is naturally difficult for
| little kids. Of course they shouldn't be allowed to go
| nuts, but a kid who just sits quietly for long periods
| with no signs of antsiness might be having their spirit
| crushed by authoritarian parents (or might just be
| unusually calm). Good parenting is a give and take.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The restaurant isn't going to complain about the kids
| chatting or pushing peas around on their plate. If the
| wait staff are willing to risk the ire of pissed off
| parents to say something, the kids must be going nuts.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's very variable. There's also a lot of inertia once
| people are established in the suburbs/exurbs. I know some
| examples but I don't actually know a ton of cases of people
| moving into the city upon retirement.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| For another couple data points - my middle aged friends
| with kids who moved to my city did so for much of the same
| reason as you suggest the younger and older folks do.
| There's just more services for their kids: clubs, day care,
| pediatrics, playgrounds, sports teams, museums, etc. I have
| a few middle aged friends who moved away from my city, but
| they moved to bigger cities (Chicago, NYC) for work.
| silisili wrote:
| Don't forget access to doctors and hospitals. I browse
| city-data at times out of boredom, and it's a major concern
| for retired people considering relocating anywhere.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| In fact I know a retired guy who moved to Maui, and then
| moved back. The principal reason was the saying they
| have, "If you have a pain, get on a plane."
|
| You _might_ get served in Honolulu. Quite often you 're
| flying to the mainland, though.
|
| That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at
| all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could
| want.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| For people aging and not in the best of health, declining
| vision/response times makes driving riskier, and there is
| often a preference for homes without stairs as well,
| which might very well be a condo with an elevator. Then
| there's also common area maintenance in condos vs. the
| manual labor of lawn care, pool care, etc.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I lived in Maui for a year and it was always in the back
| of my mind that my link to civilization was basically one
| road. And my apartment was just north of Lahaina.
|
| That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just
| say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or
| a balcony staring out into the ocean.
|
| The doctors couldn't really do anything other than
| misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late.
|
| I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical
| issue.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I told this guy I had rotator cuff surgery. One week wait
| for an MRI, and three for the surgery.
|
| He said the MRI would have been a 4-week wait in Hawaii.
|
| But it's a choice, for sure. There are lots of medical
| time wasters that are not life-threatening.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It almost makes retiring to Southeast Asia reasonable.
| Yes, you don't get Medicare, but then paying out of
| pocket reasonable prices for medical services means you
| aren't eating for anything either, plus you get the beach
| and affordable everything else living. As long as you
| don't get cancer.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > you aren't eating for anything either
|
| ?? might be a typo but I don't know for what
| gmadsen wrote:
| Palo Alto is suburbs. It is also home to the best medical
| care in the world...
| nradov wrote:
| Better than Rochester, MN?
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I don't know, the residential neighborhoods of SF are the
| perfect place to raise a family if you make tech money:
| dense enough that there is a ton of stuff to do and your
| kid knows other kid nearby, low density enough that you get
| 1500-2500sqft to yourself.
| trgn wrote:
| turn of the century suburbs truly are goldilocks
| neighborhoods.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| genuinely curious which century you mean?
| cheschire wrote:
| This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever
| considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back
| to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siecle" which is
| well understood by educated English speakers and yet
| always refers to the end of the 19th century without
| additional qualifications.
| moate wrote:
| Define "educated" and cite the survey showing how well
| understood it is among "English speakers" (British
| English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English
| Speakers? Non-native/ESL?)
|
| I use "fortnightly" to mean "in 2 weeks" because bi-
| weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular
| I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with
| me reads that and is thinking "the fuck does he talk like
| a Victorian English Dandy for?"
| November_Echo wrote:
| > the French term "fin-de-siecle" which is well
| understood by educated English speakers
|
| This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am
| an educated English speaker, who has many educated
| English speaking friends and family, I have never heard
| this phrase.
| tempfile wrote:
| I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I
| coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3
| days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siecle"
| - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the
| left wing at that time.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Turn of the millennium?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard
| these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons.
| They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes.
| Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these
| neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or
| other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop.
| The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets,
| plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The
| houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled
| craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike
| the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war
| suburbs.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but
| don't let selection bias ruin reality.
|
| Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled
| craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned
| protections against tenements.
| chefandy wrote:
| Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe
| 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the
| three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And
| it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3:
| from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is
| packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube
| electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places
| I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out
| of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is
| jam packed with buildings from that era.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _were the cheapest quality_
|
| In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick
| building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of
| the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But
| nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality"
| than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building
| code.
|
| (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
| trgn wrote:
| but all those buildings are up to code now too right? And
| the fact that people keep them occupied for so long and
| renovate speaks to their intrinsic quality I'd think.
|
| but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today,
| quality is all because there is caulk (greatest
| invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint.
| Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural
| materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a
| house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries,
| regardless of when it was built.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Selection bias, houses from <1920 that weren't nice have
| been torn down. "Only the good ones survived".
| trgn wrote:
| Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the
| Full House house basically.
| hintymad wrote:
| Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to
| make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a
| small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then
| endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of
| the US ugly, especially when compared to the European
| cities.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space
| to build postwar sprawl was limited.
| kolbusa wrote:
| I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF
| is not like that. The city feels so much more livable
| almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts,
| but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get
| really depressed.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Respectfully, you're almost certainly going to the wrong
| parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now
| reside inside SF.
|
| Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For
| similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you're
| going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you're
| not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of
| SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each
| residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique
| commercial street full of shops and restaurants,
| surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up
| the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality
| is inversely correlated with office space.
|
| Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of
| hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas.
| You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of
| streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which
| Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education
| industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| could you expand on what you mean by "the education
| industry"?
|
| I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally
| think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared
| to tech money :)
| michaelt wrote:
| I've never been to Boston, but Wikipedia tells me they
| have several universities - Harvard and MIT, which I've
| heard of, and also Boston University, Boston College,
| University of Massachusetts Boston, Bentley University,
| Brandeis University, Tufts University, Northeastern
| University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and a load
| of others.
|
| In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a
| decent part of the local economy.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the
| planet.
|
| Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend
| things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in
| that area there is a transient student population of
| 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher
| education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20
| miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?)
| universities, making education one of its six or seven
| tent-pole industries.
| ghaff wrote:
| To be pedantic, MIT and most of Harvard is Cambridge--
| across the river from the city of Boston. But, yes, the
| Boston area has a very university-influenced vibe much of
| it urban with some exceptions like BC and Wellesley.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| There are something like 30 universities in the Boston
| metro, including some extremely press and wealthy ones.
| Universities like Harvard and MIT have sprawling research
| industrial complex's beyond teaching students. And many
| thousands of employees, many of whom are high paid
| professionals.
|
| All that to say nothing of the students. The population
| of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M
| people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro.
| These are obviously not all local students, but students
| from all over the world who have come to Boston for
| education.
|
| I didn't mean directly that the schools had money, but
| that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the
| universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students
| tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained
| neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the
| hills limit how far you'd walk.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Some of them are even within the borders of cities! See,
| for example, much of Queens, NY. Forest Hills is
| especially pretty. If you're not a New York, go back and
| watch the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and marvel (ha)
| over the difference between where Aunt May lives and
| where Peter works.
| dnissley wrote:
| They still exist, but they are generally absurdly
| expensive because lots of people want to live there and
| they aren't particularly dense (although denser than
| plenty of other areas)
| galdosdi wrote:
| Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should
| make more.
|
| Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going
| quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which
| allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-
| own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough
| density to get economies of scale and insanely great
| walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public
| schools were good.
|
| Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about
| public school quality there, and it's probably hard to
| afford these days -- but balanced by access to the
| Manhattan job market)
|
| Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive
| metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust
| zoning and incentives to flood the zone with
| transportation and housing (which help substitute for and
| encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck
| choosing between affordable housing and access to
| education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby
| creates more than the sum of their parts because workers
| are often more productive in industry clusters.
| lazide wrote:
| SF schools and traffic are _terrible_ with kids. Suburbs
| are generally much mellower.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean this depends on what specifically you're
| optimizing for.
|
| A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get
| anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and
| sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of
| taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
| lazide wrote:
| Have you not heard of school buses or soccer moms?
|
| Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two
| different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are
| working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and
| hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal
| with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers
| and/or private schools.
|
| The public school system in SF is also notoriously
| terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as
| 'equity' changes results in bussing kids all over town so
| there are no 'good'/'bad' schools due to demographics. So
| siblings will often end up in schools on different sides
| of town, or kids in a school very far from where they
| live.
|
| The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things
| are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get 'bad'
| things like a school where all the neighbors kids also
| go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they
| can buy into a 'good school district'. Among other
| things.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Yeah, I'm saying that parents can choose to live in
| cities to avoid being just a soccer parent forever.
|
| School bus routes have been decimated in much of the
| country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake
| up times for children. And a school bus doesn't take you
| to any place outside of school and the home.
|
| Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit
| pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a
| museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant,
| or any number of things without having to involve parents
| for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.
| lazide wrote:
| I'm glad that all parents in suburbs are clearly wrong?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| who said they're clearly wrong? i'm just saying that kids
| can be in cities.
| lazide wrote:
| I never said they couldn't?
| jwiz wrote:
| SFUSD only busses kids with special needs. Everybody else
| has to get to school on their own.
|
| Siblings get preference for the same school, so it's
| pretty unlikely they'd be on different sides of town.
|
| SFUSD has tons of problems but you are not accurate in
| your description of what they are.
|
| The real problem is that the kids of parents who can't
| drive them to school end up having to go to a local
| school anyway, so the egalitarian idea of having kids go
| to any school did not actually work out as a positive for
| anybody but kids who were already privileged enough to
| have someone drive them to school.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Kids still get driven to school in cities.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They don't _have_ to though, which is nice. And not all
| children do.
| bushbaba wrote:
| SFUSD lotto system, and the schools being far away
| enough. Yeah, everyone I know in sf drives their kids to
| school
| throwaway19423 wrote:
| I've heard about the lotto system but assumed the school
| district would be obligated to bus kids (i.e. not force
| them to use public transit alone). The parents have
| issues with the school bus??
| greenavocado wrote:
| Why don't the kids take the school bus
| ehvatum wrote:
| Some kind of lotto system
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I made choices to live near a K-8 and high school, so
| hopefully my kid is walking from K to 12.
| foobarchu wrote:
| Kids still get driven to school in my neighborhood that
| wont let you enroll if you're more than a mile or so away
| (officially it's a walking school). Yet every day the
| street it's on becomes packed with cars trying to pick
| their child up instead of just letting them walk home.
| Mehvix wrote:
| no, as a kid I was able to go _anywhere_ I desired with a
| bike or skateboard; I had few boring summer days.
|
| this is much safer/practical in suburban environments. do
| you really believe public transport, in SF, is as safe
| for a kid?
|
| e: md fix
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Kids are, quite frankly, much smarter and more capable
| than modern helicopter parents give them credit for.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| BART is, quite frankly, much grimmer and less safe than
| you seem to give it credit for.
| beaglesss wrote:
| That doesn't matter anymore because although kids are
| probably as smart as they've ever been, everyone has a
| cellphone in their pocket and will rat the family out to
| CPS if the child exhibits independence.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Just don't drive.
| dunham wrote:
| We bailed for seattle because we could get a bigger house
| and have a better school situation. We did enjoy living
| on the border between the mission and noe valley before
| that though.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm reading this from Ballard and I think we do alright
| on school quality and house size, although my east side
| colleagues think the deal is better in more suburban
| Kirkland or Bellevue.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Ballard hardly has houses left, it's a condo jungle now.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Townhome jungle. We still have lots of single family
| homes, especially north of 65th.
| dnissley wrote:
| Without the townhomes it would be even more unaffordable.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Seattle is an interesting area, so many different
| pockets. I moved to Seattle in 2016 from Southern
| California, could never shake the depression. Moved to
| Cupertino in Jan and am as happy as a (very busy) clam.
| throwaway19423 wrote:
| I visited Seattle the city proper recently, and also felt
| depressed. Not sure why I got that vibe. On paper Seattle
| is great, and no-doubt, the Pacific north west has good
| nature and tech-industry. It felt odd why Seattle felt
| "different".
| harshaw wrote:
| The weather? it's well documented. SAAD.
| sph wrote:
| Seasonal Affective Disorder, i.e. lack of sun? Not sure
| what the other A stands for.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| The Seattle Freeze seems like one of those broad
| stereotypes, but I experienced it as very real. People
| are not unfriendly, but they are unsocial. I felt
| lonelier than any other place I've lived. There are of
| course many other factors, but I'm not the only one,
| which is validating.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Except schools, crime, and kids able to get into trouble.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| > if you make tech money
|
| It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and
| diversity of geography and people has only really managed
| to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful
| of "I don't always use my car" neighborhoods, which are
| always the most expensive places to live. So many cities
| outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the
| budget.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| So many cities outside the US manage to have this as the
| only redeeming quality. It's nice to not have to walk -
| it's not so great to have to walk because you can't
| afford a car and public transit does not cut it for
| everyone even in the best rated cities of the world. And
| it's not really interesting to have a dense train network
| if you can't afford the train ticket; then you're just
| angry your tax money is spent on it instead of you.
|
| I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming
| it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made
| a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at
| least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on
| cities with significant tech/business scene.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to
| drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk.
| People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all
| that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and
| bigger SUVs.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs
|
| No, I don't. Thank you.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Soccer moms disagree with you. In my area they actually
| removed bike lanes to make way for more traffic.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Where I live in London there are football (soccer)
| pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which
| kids tend to use. Most people have such a park in a 5-10
| minute walk from their home. No need to drive for such
| short distances. It's better for kids to walk around and
| experience their neighbourhood, use the time walking to
| chat with their friends, etc.
| vel0city wrote:
| Where I live in Texas there are football (soccer) pitches
| in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend
| to use. Also often baseball fields and sometimes tennis
| courts as well. Most people here have such a park in a
| 10-minute walk from their home.
| sensanaty wrote:
| The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take
| public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going,
| from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction
| every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10,
| sometimes at night too.
|
| I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of
| the US
| refurb wrote:
| _The percentage of commutes by car in Northern and
| Southern European cities ranges from 50% to 75%_
|
| I'm not sure where Americans get the idea Europeans don't
| commute by car.
| sensanaty wrote:
| We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.
|
| And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office
| (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by
| car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages
| where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10
| minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a _lot_ depending
| on the country you 're looking at, and if we're talking
| about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm
| willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that
| the vast majority of kids take public transport or their
| bikes.
|
| I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the
| Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from
| their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my
| friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I
| chauffeur them around?"
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| "The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school
| ( _college_ in french), there was a long line of cars in
| front of the school entrance from parents dropping off
| their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take
| the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.
|
| Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-
| residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty
| minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by
| car.
|
| That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are
| like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me,
| they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and
| places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there,
| because you had a hard time getting _anywhere_ without a
| car. Less hard than the US, but still.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go
| to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at
| night too._
|
| This sounds terrible. I would much prefer driving 10
| minutes to my suburban sports complex.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Statistically Europeans have longer commutes than
| Americans because they rely on public transport more
| while Americans drive and driving is almost always faster
| than surface public transport since not all Europeans
| have an underground in their city so public transport is
| often a slow an infrequent bus in tier 2 cities.
| ackfoobar wrote:
| The more people drive, the worse the traffic. And if
| public transport has to be stuck in traffic, then driving
| is always faster.
|
| Now this setting sounds familiar...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
| vel0city wrote:
| > I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day
|
| And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of
| commute to go to swim practice, _every day_??) over
| having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend
| maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?
| gilbetron wrote:
| > Americans want to walk
|
| They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one
| or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we
| know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city.
| They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way
| they are because a great majority of Americans want them
| that way.
|
| It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at.
| Americans that want to walk are a small minority.
| beaglesss wrote:
| Children don't have the patience of parents. They melt
| down waiting for a bus/transit in snow or summer broiling
| heat and it becomes a nightmare. I didn't have a car most
| the time until I had a kid and found quality of life went
| way up with a car.
| badpun wrote:
| I was born in a walkable in Europe. School was 5 minutes
| (by walk) from home. High school was 10-15 minutes by
| bus, plus 10 minutes walking to the bus stops. The bus
| service was very frequent, there was no endless waiting
| on bus stops in snow or heat. If Communist Poland could
| pull it of, so could the richest country in the world.
| beaglesss wrote:
| Getting to school works but that's because everyone on
| the bus is going the same place.
|
| A child can walk to say a cornerstore in the US many
| places no problem but the parents will be placed under
| arrest for negligence. Most any other place they'd like
| to go is most practical with public transit involving a
| long wait or driving by what appears to the child as a
| private car chartered at his convenience.
| vel0city wrote:
| Yeah, for a while I used to get around by bicycle a lot
| (faster and way cheaper than paying for parking on
| campus), lots of people thought it was very weird to do
| so. I'd show up at the usual bar scenes with my bicycle
| after taking the light rail down and most of my friends
| wouldn't begin to understand how I got there.
|
| I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into
| the city and take the bus to the city parks around me
| with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing
| so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.
|
| I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even
| know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue
| how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it
| out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving
| further and further out into the burbs, into developments
| that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one
| neighborhood.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money
| and diversity of geography and people has only really
| managed to produce a single walkable city_
|
| Have you considered, then, that many people do not
| actually want this?
|
| > _So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a
| fraction of the budget._
|
| Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to
| spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't
| America be like this?"
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Have you considered, then, that many people do not
| actually want this?
|
| If so, the European city planning wouldn't be popular
| within the US, but it's the opposite. The few European
| style cities are incredibly attractive to live in.
|
| > Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to
| spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't
| America be like this?"
|
| Right.. and? They're not representative? Or it's
| unrealistic? That's a perfectly reasonable question to
| ask for those that do get the opportunity to see
| functional dense urban areas in other places, especially
| as they don't require anywhere near SV salaries yet are
| still lively and safe.
|
| I don't think the US will drop car centrism, partly
| because of the perpetual lower class social issues that
| make it dangerous to share public space with strangers,
| but you can get pretty far if you mix in high volume
| public transit like in NYC (or even SF BART for a smaller
| example), which greatly reduces the dead spaces that
| prevent walkability.
| rangestransform wrote:
| > because of the perpetual lower class social issues that
| make it dangerous to share public space with strangers
|
| I never quite figured out why the US is so allergic to
| enforcing the public order laws already on the books with
| any degree of vigour
| alright2565 wrote:
| > that many people do not actually want this?
|
| The concept of supply & demand shows people obviously do
| want this, given that the cost of living in that walkable
| city and in walkable places is so high.
|
| The real reason? Americans become infatuated with the
| latest technological marvel too easily. For a while, this
| was the car. And unfortunately, rolling back all these
| car subsidies takes a while and is heavily fought against
| because people hate the feeling of having something taken
| from them.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Idk about your second point, it's only because I live in
| the city that I have time to enjoy it, after work and kids
| commuting to and from the city is too much of a time sink
| and there's fuck all to do everywhere else in the bay.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm young, like cities, but dislike SF.
|
| The main reasons are
|
| - crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk
| around safely at night
|
| - lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either
| convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF
| has neither)
|
| - rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for
| projects
|
| - not clean
|
| - Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino
| and Fremont
|
| I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and
| Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about
| cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food
| (by my standards) everywhere.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| In SF, the northeast quadrant has most of the good public
| transit. Does that not fit your needs? And, I disagree
| that Taipei and Chengdu are significantly cleaner than SF
| -- about the same level of grime in my experience.
| hylaride wrote:
| There's different meanings to "cleanliness". A bit of
| grime is fine. Drug paraphernalia, human feces, and tons
| of homelessness is another matter.
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah exactly.
|
| Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to
| pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was
| refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I
| was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it
| in.
|
| I have _never_ been refused restroom access (and there
| was almost always a public one within 100m at all times)
| in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is
| basically Asia), people are usually nice here about
| letting you use restrooms.
| dheera wrote:
| No. The public transit there hardly goes anywhere in
| reasonable time. It takes a good 40 minutes just to get
| across it. Many times I've walked faster to my
| destination than the public transit estimates. The Muni
| trolleys get stuck at intersections and red lights and
| don't move faster than cars. The BART only goes down 1
| smelly street. I'd spend 2 hours round trip (1 hour each
| way) just to buy a vegetable from the nearest Ranch 99.
| That's not city life.
|
| Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars
| on the surface. They actually save time from driving.
| stanleykm wrote:
| im probably an outlier but i love being able to walk to
| work as a middle aged city dweller.
| pmontra wrote:
| In my experience everybody grown up outside a big city and
| especially in the countryside, look at big cities and say
| "no no, it's a mess, I'll never live there." That's
| independent from the age. Of course they go there for
| concerts, theaters, museums, maybe hospitals. People grown
| up in a big city tend to have the opposite reaction,
| ranging from "it's like being dead" to "there is nothing to
| do", which of course is false: there are different kind of
| activities. People that like sports usually will feel
| better outside a city.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| That's so true.
| galdosdi wrote:
| You know what sucks? A ton of families-with-kids would love
| to stay in the city, if only the schools-- especially high
| schools-- were on par with what can be found for similar
| price in the suburbs. There is no physical reason it should
| be like this; in fact, just the opposite. Cities may have
| the density to support more bars, but they also have the
| density to support more varied after school kids'
| activities and cultural attractions, etc (and the ability
| to let middle and high school aged kids walk themselves to
| school and other places rather than becoming a chauffeur)
|
| But the failing schools push many parents out against their
| own and their own childrens' preferences.
|
| This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's
| really not that different to how a lot of third world
| cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by
| having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled
| black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and
| there's no real net savings for society, it's just money
| left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason
| cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are
| inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where
| you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.
| hintymad wrote:
| > I know multiple retired or semi-retired people who have
| moved towards the center of a city
|
| Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself
| living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get
| to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the
| challenges of raising kids.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| cities cost more for smaller spaces. when you've got a
| family you need that space, but for two empty-nesters, a
| city location is smaller, easier to manage, and closer to
| things. elevators and small apartments on a single floor
| might even be preferable -- no stairs for bad knees.
|
| also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction
| time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might
| even keep grandpa healthier, longer.
|
| and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to
| (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local
| hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad
| the ambulance can get them there ASAP.
|
| and then you have more food options, more entertainment,
| etc.
| lumost wrote:
| anecdotally, city life becomes a net drain when one doesn't
| have time for themselves. In my mid-thirties now, and keeping
| up with family/travel/hobbies is more than I can handle on
| most days. I've gone to a great number of restaurants in the
| past and ... getting more sleep seems like a better bet for
| the day then going to another restaurant.
|
| I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at
| home and have reached retirement.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I do think that's specific to you and your circles. I know
| multiple retired or semi-retired people...
|
| Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be
| specific to you and your circles.
|
| In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally
| that some older people move to live near where they
| themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of
| change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need
| actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale
| trends.
| gumby wrote:
| Back in the early 90s my wife and I moved to SF because it had
| a thriving art and music scene and more interesting culture
| than the 'burbs of palo alto. But as you say, the long commute
| to SV was a killer and we moved back down. Back then SF was a
| bedroom community for SV with no tech sector. Businesses up
| there were banking (Wells Fargo, BofA, Crocker etc), retail,
| the local stock exchange, and a bunch of manufacturing.
|
| Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other
| art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like
| the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these
| days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| they went to Santa Cruz, man.
|
| Go Slugs!
| gumby wrote:
| The Taiwan of the countercultural Bay Area.
| fantasybuilder wrote:
| Depends on one's interests. It sounds like my preferences
| would be more in alignment with yours - music and art - and
| yes, SF is almost completely lacking that today. But if one
| were an active part of the LGBT community - SF is a buzzing
| option. They have various festivals and events almost daily.
|
| Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either.
| Definitely more independent music events in run down houses,
| but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable
| value.
| CalChris wrote:
| I lived in San Francisco in the very late 70s through to the
| 00s. My first apartment share was $50/mo. The late 70s had
| the dying embers of the Beat Generation and San Francisco was
| a sleepy town. San Francisco was great in the 80s with a ton
| of theater, music, dance, art, everything. It was good in the
| 90s although the late 90s dotcom boom pushed/priced artists
| out. The 00s became pretty boring and compressed. I moved to
| Oakland.
|
| I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great
| bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
| slyall wrote:
| I've seen similar complaints from cities in rich countries
| around the globe
|
| Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in
| the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do
| art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it
| is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.
|
| If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting
| yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of
| spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.
| hughesjj wrote:
| 20s really is the perfect time to live downtown.
| qingcharles wrote:
| What are your thoughts on Oakland now?
| CalChris wrote:
| Oakland is more affordable for artists now than San
| Francisco but not even close to what San Francisco was in
| the 80s. But it's a very different time. I find myself
| occasionally trying to relive that and having to remind
| myself it's gone.
|
| Oakland has crime now but 80s San Francisco had the drug
| wars with actual machine gun battles between the now gone
| high rise projects on Army (now Caesar Chavez).
| a-dub wrote:
| it's true, the techies of the '90s and '00s who lived in sf
| embraced the culture (and suffered the commute). what
| happened in the '10s kinda steamrolled it.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| That seems reasonable - even if companies aren't _moving_ based
| on where their employees are, employees are taking into account
| where the company is when they decide which jobs to take, and
| are probably more likely to leave a job if they find their
| commute too long.
| CaliforniaKarl wrote:
| The mentioned South Bay locations are xAI's Palo Alto office,
| and an office in Santana Row. Both locations likely have
| connections to Caltrain.
|
| I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in
| the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in
| the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that
| runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes,
| depending on where exactly you get off.
|
| Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa
| Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is
| ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a
| half- or one-mile walk.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The Santana Row office is miserable to get to via Caltrain.
| You're going to want to bike or scooter and even then it's a
| trip on Stevens Creek/San Carlos, which is exceptionally busy
| at all times of day due to the two malls next to it and also
| it drops bike lanes for some portion of the road.
| shortn wrote:
| Santana Row will start charging for parking.
| https://www.ktvu.com/news/santana-row-is-charging-parking
| saagarjha wrote:
| I feel like this was the case already? Maybe not for 2
| hours but I do distinctly remember that when I popped
| into the Twitter offices for a bit I was able to park
| there for a few hours but after that it would charge me
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| and let's not forget the increase in crime that SF has
| experienced. Even department/CVS/etc stores have had to close
| due to the increase in crime.
|
| Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south
| bay is ideal but it's better than SF.
| weitendorf wrote:
| > If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually
| curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with
| the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the
| employees start to have families, they most likely move to the
| south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time
| imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for
| more than an hour every day.
|
| IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional.
| One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is
| that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a
| startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where
| the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to
| set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge
| consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a
| reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or
| in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
|
| > If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the
| city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to
| more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I
| don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the
| demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels,
| pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
| saagarjha wrote:
| Google has offices in San Francisco but it also has offices
| in South San Francisco, San Bruno, Redwood City, Palo Alto,
| Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. And probably some
| other cities I forgot. The "reason" Google has an office
| anywhere has to do more with "why not" rather than anything
| else.
| zamfi wrote:
| Acquisitions.
| weitendorf wrote:
| Not the case with the main Google SF office (except now
| some buildings are indeed the results of acquisitions)
| but definitely for San Bruno and varied for the other
| ones.
| biztos wrote:
| I had the impression the Google SF office was for
| capturing that talent that would not be bothered to
| commute south; but that for most people there it was a
| career dead end, if you weren't in Mountain View you
| weren't in the game.
|
| At least that's what the people I know who worked there
| told me, I don't have any real inside knowledge and the
| stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
| zamfi wrote:
| Yeah, like almost every other central-city engineering
| office of that era, SF was initially a sales office that
| SF-resident ICs would sometimes work from on
| Fridays...and then more often, and then eventually teams
| wanted to move there, and then...and then...
| weitendorf wrote:
| That's not really how the SF presence developed
| historically but I admire your confidence
| saagarjha wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to me?
| metadat wrote:
| I wish I understood what you're getting at, because Google
| does not consider it's employees at all at this point, it's
| late stage capitalism sweetie. Is there a point, can you
| clarify?
| piuantiderp wrote:
| Sweetie, it's not that hard, google considered them
| _before_.
|
| P.S. Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism
| metadat wrote:
| > Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism
|
| How so? Will you please indulge me you explain this a
| little?
|
| Genuinely curious.
| jjav wrote:
| Not relevant to any current actions by Twitter, but an
| interesting historical perspective is that it was very rare for
| a tech company to be in San Francisco.
|
| Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper
| (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the
| boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
|
| When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how
| _weird_ it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it
| was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and
| then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
| quesera wrote:
| This is not correct at all.
|
| When Twitter was launched, SF was _overflowing_ with startups
| on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF
| startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
|
| The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's
| location was that they were way down in South Park instead of
| more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin
| building in 2012.
| jjav wrote:
| > SF was overflowing with startups on every corner.
|
| Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in
| SF in the early 2000s?
|
| I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more
| difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt,
| which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:
|
| In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were
| predominantly located in the southern part of the San
| Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto,
| Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not
| as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.
|
| While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without
| specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively
| small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were
| headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The
| tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow
| significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and
| beyond.
| quesera wrote:
| So many startups in SF. Most dead now of course. The
| first round of post-money hiring at Twitter took a few of
| my coworkers.
|
| There were launch parties in SF every week in the late
| 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated
| to not conflict. It was a _very_ active scene. The first
| wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few
| very slow years after that, but things were picking up
| again around the time of Twitter 's 2006 launch (and
| 2007-2008 scaling).
|
| We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley
| back then, so that might be throwing off the search
| results. The relabelling came later, when the never-
| formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to
| include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom
| communities between the city and the Valley proper).
|
| (Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet
| and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of
| the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of
| Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely
| expected location)
| a-dub wrote:
| historically there was a lot of media and some internet in
| sf. more interesting hardware type tech companies generally
| clustered in the south bay with some exceptions (oqo, sega).
|
| twitter was notable because they put a big campus in
| midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia
| that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to
| mind but there were countless others)
|
| sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun
| or apple either.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| There's no housing south of SF. That's why the Menlo/PA/SC
| crowd originally invaded SF. It was cheap and hip.
| dickfickling wrote:
| off topic: do you have a name or a link for the paper
| referenced? My company just moved to a new office that's
| "coincidentally" closer to the CEO's house, and I'd love to
| send it to him.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| This is why return to office is such a joke. It's really
| "return to the office near where the CEO lives or lived at one
| time"
|
| Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that's where Apple
| Park would be
|
| So dumb
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that's where Apple
| Park would be
|
| A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of
| trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to
| _Bentonville, AR_. I can see why someone would move to NYC or
| SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for
| career development, but you have to be pretty committed to
| Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with
| workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to
| Bentonville.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Walmart has always been headquartered in Bentonville, AR so
| that's a huge difference from the other examples here.
| People in well paying jobs move all the time though so it's
| not the commitment or strategic retention plan you seem to
| imply unless you think everyone in NY or CA is so
| pretentious that they couldn't believe that Walmart
| employees are worth poaching despite their IT and analytics
| department being bigger bigger than most tech companies.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess not everyone working at Walmart headquarters are
| in well paying jobs though.
|
| Relocating wasn't such a big deal when most family models
| were single income and women were basically all slaves
| and would follow their husband without having any say on
| the matter. These day, any relocation involve a
| discussion between 2 parties on the merit of relocating
| and possibility of career development for both. It is
| much more difficult.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that's where
| Apple Park would be_
|
| What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple
| was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in
| California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed
| is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so
| will their CEO.
|
| You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will
| uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
| occamsrazorwit wrote:
| While this is true, it's also funny to note that Apple was
| only founded in South Bay because Jobs and Wozniak wanted
| to be close to their families. There was already talent in
| the region, but the origin of that talent started the same
| way. Shockley (of Shockley Semiconductor and traitorous
| eight fame) moved the company from LA to South Bay to take
| care of his mother [1]. Silicon Valley is only Silicon
| Valley because of "I want to be with my parents" decisions.
|
| [1]
| https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-
| by...
| ojbyrne wrote:
| They are moving to San Jose, which is a city. It may not be as
| cosmopolitan as SF (certainly not as compact) but the
| differences have narrowed some in the last decade or so. Not to
| mention that it has a larger population than SF.
| closeparen wrote:
| The typical commuter suburbs for SF companies are in the East
| Bay, in my experience. South Bay is a lot more expensive.
| Onavo wrote:
| > _As the employees start to have families, they most likely
| move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a
| hard time imagine that they 'd enjoy commuting via BART or
| Caltrain for more than an hour every day._
|
| The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter
| can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too
| young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For
| companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left
| and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company
| headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist
| employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot
| to a privately held conservative operating model).
| patrick451 wrote:
| These companies have never encouraged employees to speak up.
| James Damore thought that was the culture, and he got fired.
| pyeri wrote:
| Here in India, it's a wide mystery why most startups prefer to
| headquarter in Bangalore. It made sense two decades ago but
| today there are several other Indian cities like Vizag, Nasik,
| Noida, Gurugram, Chandigarh, etc. which are more equipped, have
| better infrastructure and even lower cost of living. Still most
| folks prefer Bangalore just because it has been like that since
| ages and popularly called the "IT Hub". But logically, it
| doesn't make any sense at all!
| devTen85 wrote:
| It's a chicken & Egg problem. I run a startup in Pune, and we
| just don't get good developers here. We are open to remote,
| and most of the good candidates are in Bangalore.
| elbear wrote:
| What's the explanation? Better schools in Bangalore or
| something else?
| devsda wrote:
| Access to better schools is a factor in selecting a
| locality within the city but I don't think it has been a
| deciding factor in deciding the city itself.
|
| Many cities including tier-2 cities have a variation of
| one of those "international" schools that parents seek
| and there's no significant difference in the quality of
| education between them.
|
| Apart from the usual cycle of available talent + job
| opportunities, Bangalore has better weather and location
| wise it can attract talent from 4 states(these 4 states
| are major contributors to IT workforce compared to other
| states) while not being too far from place of origin.
| lennxa wrote:
| better schools is not a factor at all. right out of
| college, or a little later most of the high quality
| engineers move to Bangalore because that's where the jobs
| already are. once people settle down a bit, they tend to
| be averse to move on average. it's network effect and
| sheer inertia. no one really wants it this way.
| Animats wrote:
| > There is a famous paper about the location of company
| headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of
| company CEOs.
|
| Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory
| in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near
| Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago.
| He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and
| marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
|
| It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out.
| Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The move to Chicago was made by Condit. Ostensibly it was
| just a cover to stay far away from the wife while he kept his
| mistress shacked up at the HQ.
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, right. That was around the time of the strange merger
| with McDonnell Douglas. Somehow, the finance people from
| McDonnell Douglas ended up in charge. That didn't go well.
| fabrikam wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, Boeing moved its headquarters in
| 2001, a mere two decades before he became CEO, and the nearly
| half dozen that preceded him.
| n_ary wrote:
| Your ideal suburb describes most of the Europe(excluding few
| cities).
| catskul2 wrote:
| I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here.
| I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect
| headquarter location selection.
| philsnow wrote:
| > Twitter -- which at the time was threatening to move to
| Brisbane
|
| _Wow_ , that does not seem like it would jive with the local
| character for Brisbane, from what little I know of it.
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| Brisbane, California not Australia.
| paulsutter wrote:
| The issue is the San Francisco gross receipts tax, which becomes
| problematic for any payments company because it applies to the
| payments volume
|
| Twitter is planning to become a payments platform
| BluSyn wrote:
| Correct. Surprised more people aren't aware of this. Twitter
| literally can't launch it payments service while still having
| SF as HQ.
| cbsmith wrote:
| There might also be a thing about being millions behind on
| rent...
| dehrmann wrote:
| Since a gross receipts tax hits anything other than small,
| local stores inconsistently, I'm not sure what behavior it's
| trying to drive. It also taxes revenue rather than income, so
| yes, it makes anything ulta-low margin like a payments platform
| DOA.
| acchow wrote:
| It seems the objective is to disincentive companies that have
| business outside the city borders.
| newsclues wrote:
| This is the result of prop c 2018?
| rapatel0 wrote:
| I lived for about 12 months in telegraph hill (got lucky with a
| solid apartment). I had my wife and 1 year old son.
|
| Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there
| was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left
| outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My
| neighbor's car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for
| a joyride and left in a random part of the city.
|
| On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of
| scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).
|
| Bottomline, when you have a family you don't have the luxury of
| tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved
| out.
|
| Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of
| California, and the technical community. Nothing like it
| elsewhere.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| While SF is a nice place to visit, but the sheer numbers of
| unreasonable, lemming-like people who will spend and do
| anything to cling to live there as some sort of Promised
| Land(tm) make it a hellish place to try to live a sustainable
| life for almost everyone who isn't already a multimillionaire.
| Keeping a car parked in SF to as far south as San Mateo on the
| street is a recipe for catalytic converter theft.
|
| Visit the de Young museum's observation tower. It has a
| spectacular vantage point. The other things California have
| are: less annoying creepy crawlies, more variety of scenery and
| microclimates, weather, food, and relatively cheaper property
| taxes.
| not_alexb wrote:
| California is massive though, and I would argue there is
| nothing in the rest of California that resembles the Bay even
| a little bit. Redding is nothing like the Bay; Joshua Tree is
| nothing like the Bay; Orange County is nothing like the Bay;
| Big Bear is nothing like the Bay. None of those regions are
| anything like the other, too. Hell, the difference inside 10
| miles of Los Angeles is enormous. Compare Venice Beach to
| East LA for example.
| choppaface wrote:
| Telegraph Hill is one of the most touristy parts of the city,
| hence lots of crime (especially at night). It might be pretty
| but you just chose poorly / naively if safety was a priority.
|
| Raising a kid in SF is definitely tough, but places in the
| Sunset have yards, and there are some top-notch schools e.g.
| Lowell High School, UHS, Lick, etc.
|
| A lot of tech people come from out of town and don't take any
| time to adjust to the fact that SF has very distinct
| neighborhoods. Many will just draw high salaries and gravitate
| towards whatever is popular / flashy without considering the
| consequences.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Correct me if i'm wrong but that's haight ashbury right? The
| famous magnet for druggies and general sh*theads? Why is this
| being help up as an example of a safe place?
| heylook wrote:
| I think you either replied to the wrong comment or are
| maybe confused. Telegraph Hill is quite far from Haight
| Ashbury (as much as anything can be far apart in a 7x7 mile
| city).
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| You are right I got confused, but Telegraph Hill still
| was known for beatniks etc. And today it's close to the
| embarcadero which is ... well bad.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| Actually due to a confluence of events the place we chose was
| the best deal we found. The decision was based on cost (not
| trendiness)
|
| Regarding schools, school catchment is based on an esoteric
| lottery system loosely related to the area you place you
| live. If you have money, there are ways to game the system
| but otherwise it's a low probability roll of the dice that
| you get a good school. Also, I didn't have money
|
| Also, Day cares generally have a waitlist that starts before
| children are born.
|
| It's interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I
| am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit
| their priors.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > It's interesting you feel you can judge the type of
| person I am almost no information. The internet makes
| everyone overfit their priors.
|
| This is pretty common on HN when lifestyle is the debate.
| mempko wrote:
| Crime is a function of inequality.
| jdp23 wrote:
| Agreed. Although based on the downvotes HN doesn't see it
| that way, who could have predicted?
| heylook wrote:
| > Crime is a function of inequality
|
| I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime
| is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X,
| Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than
| good to the discourse."
| robertoandred wrote:
| Don't blame crime on the poor.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047
| 2....
|
| There is compelling evidence crime is correlated with
| inequality.
| fastball wrote:
| https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
| mempko wrote:
| Ok, but not all correlations are spurious. What makes
| that research spurious?
| undersuit wrote:
| In an unequal society the crime could just be in the areas
| of high poverty because the government chooses to avoid
| improving those areas. Off the top of my head that's just
| one way to interpret "Crime is a _function_ of inequality.
| "
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Wet streets cause rain.
| FredPret wrote:
| This is a blanket statement and is lazy in the same way as
| "all government is bad" or "all business owners are bad".
|
| Of course a small portion of all crimes is committed due to
| poverty. But it's super easy to come up with counter-
| examples.
|
| Mass murderers are committing crime because they're evil /
| crazy, not poor. There have been lots of rich mass murderers.
|
| Ponzi schemers do it because they're greedy. Just think
| Bernie Madoff - already super rich, then decided to steal
| some more.
|
| Gangs do it because for them it's a business. Again, the gang
| bosses are already rich but they keep going.
|
| Not one single rape has ever been about inequality.
|
| And so on. In the past, inequality was much worse and more
| entrenched than it is today, and yet crime during certain
| historical periods were much lower. Here's an example from
| the UK: https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/resea
| rch/oly...
| mempko wrote:
| I didn't make my comment in a vacuum. Look at the context.
| Notice we aren't talking about rape, or financial ponzi
| schemes. Context clues people, context clues.
| shadowtree wrote:
| No, it's a function of low IQ and low impulse control.
| mempko wrote:
| IQ is a bullshit measure.
| gcau wrote:
| What do you think is a better measure of intelligence?
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| Well, Dubai, Kuwait, Singapore and a bunch of other places
| clearly demonstrate that you can have high inequality and
| close to zero street crime.
| nilsherzig wrote:
| Might be a lot easier to reduce street crime if you don't
| care about sentencing innocent people or human rights in
| general
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Did you ever try the peninsula, like Palo Alto? Crazy expensive
| if you want a free standing house but condos and townhouses
| aren't too bad (relatively) and always felt safe when I was
| there.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| I wasn't making very much actually and we were a single
| income household. We wanted to look into buying a house but
| it was north of 850k for a closet sized space. Rent+food
| basically ate up all my income.
|
| Moving to Palo Alto was definitively not in the cards
| neilv wrote:
| Question from someone who doesn't know the SF neighborhoods...
|
| Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live
| comfortably _walking_ car-free in contemporary SF, long-term?
| If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
|
| Reason I'm asking: the East Coast city where I currently live
| isn't great for software startups, and, on top of some crazy
| downsides of this city, there's a possibly emerging new
| downside: panhandler demographics shifting more towards angry
| 20yo men who use borderline mugging approaches, very brazenly.
|
| Ideal for me in tech work is what I'll call "mostly-WFH-in-
| town", where people get most of the WFH flexibility goodness,
| but can also easily meet up for in-person high-bandwidth
| focused collaboration, personalizing, working on hardware, etc.
| So I'd probably want a concentration of potential colleagues
| who also like mostly-WFH-in-town. So I'm wondering whether SF
| is that place.
|
| Zillow searches for modern apartments in parts of SF proper
| look more attractive, for the same money, as places in my city.
|
| But I don't know the SF neighborhoods, and I don't know how
| representative are the SF stories about stepping over needles
| on the sidewalk all the time, finding poo on your doorstep
| every morning, frequent casual break-ins, etc.
|
| Socioeconomic diversity, social justice, and safety nets are
| great, and preferred. Excessive poo, and other hazards, aren't.
|
| When you walk most places, the sidewalk environment matters
| even more than if you're usually insulated in either a building
| or a car.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| > Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live
| comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term?
| If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
|
| I used this when doing analysis. It's pretty good.
| https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp
|
| From a pure cost, POV you burn most of your money on rent and
| food. When we had visitors, I had to plan out my budget to
| cover meals for everyone. I remember paying >$80 for a decent
| bagels+coffee breakfast for me, my wife and her parents.
|
| In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then
| you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when
| traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all
| the time.
|
| Otherwise is it's a wonderful place. If I was a single guy,
| I'd love the vibe, the people, and the opportunity. If your
| in a WFH situation then I'd suggest just trying it out for 6
| to 12 months. The experience will be great either way.
|
| Other place id recommend is the Folsom near Sacremento. It's
| ~1 hour to lake tahoe and lots of nature to enjoy there. Very
| suburban WFH tolerant with roughly 50% of the rental cost
| neilv wrote:
| Thank you for the info.
|
| > _In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel
| then you 're fine. I had the same alertness that I have
| when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high
| alert all the time._
|
| Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy
| (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy
| pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without
| trying, and can avoid or handle them)?
|
| Or more like someone who has that basic street savvy, but
| who is also feeling like they found themselves in a rougher
| neighborhood at the moment (e.g., getting closer to
| military head on a swivel mode, and looking to not spend
| more time there than necessary)?
| hylaride wrote:
| Don't live in SF, but was a frequent visitor. During the
| day you'll be fine if you don't look like a dumb tourist
| and mind your own business. Some of SF's main cultural
| attractions are in "rough" neighbourhoods like Chinatown.
| As night falls and the street life thins out, you
| probably don't want to wander the areas like the
| tenderloin or most dark red places on this map:
| https://gisgeography.com/san-francisco-crime-map/ but
| even the vast majority of the crime there is petty.
| You're still unlikely to be a victim of violent crime,
| but the chances are higher that you'll be assaulted by
| somebody desperate for a fix.
|
| The actual violent crime rates in SF are still below the
| national average, but the drug issues are just very, very
| visible.
| pfisherman wrote:
| I don't know where the original poster is from, but I am
| kind of scratching my head at their comment. There is
| basically nowhere in SF I would have the slightest bit of
| fear walking around with the exceptions of bayview /
| hunters point or sunnydale.
| wnolens wrote:
| > You need to be on high alert all the time. Otherwise is
| it's a wonderful place
|
| That must do a number on your nervous system long term. I
| live in NYC where I'm on high alert in specific areas at
| specific times that amount to maybe 30% of my time outside
| home and office. Otherwise I'm earbuds in enjoying
| something, or staring into the middle distance processing
| something on my mind. Both feel essential to my mental
| health.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Holy shit i feel bad for SF folks. It's crazy how you've
| normalized:
|
| >In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel
| then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when
| traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert
| all the time.
|
| do you not realize this is really bad and not some reality
| of the world? Just the terrible city you live in?
| cbabraham wrote:
| I've lived car free in SF for 12 years it's very walkable!
| Just start out in the mission for max socializing and transit
| access and then you can live somewhere else when you've
| gotten to know the city.
|
| You can take bike share and the bus everywhere, housing is
| expensive but less so than nyc!
| hemloc_io wrote:
| > Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live
| comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term?
| If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
|
| yes-ish
|
| In SF generally the areas are the most car dependent and the
| hilliest are also the quietest and have the least amount of
| bullshit.
|
| SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern apartments, is
| going to have some of the worst problems. You get what you
| pay for in the city. Every part of the city is going to have
| some kind of street problem, but some, like Bernal for
| example, have them very rarely. It entirely is neighborhood
| dependent and there's tradeoffs.
|
| Maybe you get a quiet apartment, but it's at the top of a
| hill. Do you want to walk up that every day?
|
| The easiest way to tell is just to show up and walk around
| the whole city, it's only 7x7 so you can literally spend a
| weekend walking around and see all of it and make your own
| conclusions. Certain places change completely within a few
| blocks.
|
| e.g. you can go from the Tenderloin which is easily one of
| the worst parts of the city to the yuppie paradise of Hayes
| Valley in like three or four blocks.
|
| Edit: in terms of cost? prob 2-4k in monthlies for a good
| studio/one bed.
|
| The rest is up to your budgeting, eating out and anything in
| the service economy is very expensive compared to the rest of
| the country. Including places like NYC.
|
| Very few affordable places survive here, regardless of their
| quality.
|
| I'd say you could tack on like another 1-2k a month as a
| single person and be pretty happy with the amount of things
| you're doing, plus some grocery cost depending on how much
| you cook for yourself.
| stanleykm wrote:
| > SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern
| apartments, is going to have some of the worst problems
|
| I dont think thats true once you get east of 4th and for
| sure 3rd street.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| 8th and Mission is a lot different than 4th and Mission
| that's for sure.
|
| I actually work up near that area and would still say
| you'll have interesting characters, but not something
| like 8th and Mission where I feel terrible for everyone
| who runs a business around there.
|
| Most new apartment buildings I saw for my move a few
| years ago were concentrated around the civic center +
| market area.
|
| Regardless of what people say here, walking around is the
| most effective way of ensuring that you're comfortable
| with where you are planning on being.
| gumby wrote:
| I have always had mixed feelings about silicon valley expanding
| into San Francisco -- I felt there was a strong negative impact,
| though to some degree SF acted as a honey pot for those just
| interested in money.
|
| I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of
| the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a
| one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really
| burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for
| some reason.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| My understanding is that that part of Market street never quite
| recovered from BART construction few decades back. That building
| was abandoned and was beautifully restored for Twitter HQ. I
| vividly remember it opening and then the neighborhood improving
| gradually. Sad for SF - the final blow to one of the few once
| optimistic and truly SF-based utopian social media companies...
| collinmanderson wrote:
| I recently learned about Elon showing up to a Sacramento
| datacenter on Dec 22 2022 and personally moving server racks out
| of the datacenter, when his employees said it would take 6
| months.
|
| "Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his 'maniacal sense of
| urgency' at X, formerly Twitter"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470110
| stevetron wrote:
| I'm probably not a favorite amog the moderators here. I don't
| mean to sound snarky, but if Twitters moves out of San Francisco,
| will the no-nudity ordinance in San Francisco get repealed? I had
| understood it was the influx of the tech companies that caused
| the fiasco thet resulted in it being passed in the first place.
| sub7 wrote:
| I saw a guy get shot on Mission and 6th after picking a fight
| with the car in front of him at the light. Lucky for him, there
| was an ambulance already on the block loading up a tweaked out
| junkie.
| thih9 wrote:
| Is the constant stream of flamebait (this action and other recent
| changes) helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?
|
| To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and
| unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target
| audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in
| 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps
| had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the
| company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].
|
| I'm puzzled.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Statis...
| jcfrei wrote:
| To me it's still useful but I exclusively read it through
| lists. That way it's always chronological and only consists of
| tweets from selected accounts and retweets from other (usually
| interesting) people.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Is the constant stream of flamebait helpful for twitter, or
| part of some larger strategy?
|
| I don't think much thought was put into it, but I do think
| there will be a gradual numbing effect among the comments as
| people get bored of the criticism. Maybe _very_ gradual though.
|
| Edit: It just occurred to me that you might be referring to
| user posts on the platform being flamebait; my answer assumed
| that the _action_ (moving the HQ) was perhaps flamebait, along
| with other recent changes.
| thih9 wrote:
| To clarify, yes, by flamebait I meant the latter (this action
| and other recent changes). Added that to the original comment
| now.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Musk's tweets and the unimpeded use of the platform for
| misinformation and coordinated violence give me the impression
| that he cares less about turning it into a profitable
| enterprise and more about its use as a tool to push his agenda
| and affect the cultural and political changes he desires.
| ashleyn wrote:
| There is plenty of evidence for this. E.g. banning the word
| "cis" as hate speech
| macrael wrote:
| No! It's just bad management. There is not some secret 4D chess
| to discover here. A paranoid billionaire with a ketamine
| problem is running Twitter into the ground. I think Howard
| Hughes is becoming a more and more accurate model with time.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| Are these numbers that important when you're privately owned
| and slashing costs? I guess the motivators are different to a
| VC backed or publicly traded company.
| ein0p wrote:
| Might as well just skip all the intermediate steps and move the
| office to Austin. Twitter will fit right in.
| freshfunk wrote:
| For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of
| a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in
| mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What
| people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses
| for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly
| tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they
| pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.
| WatchDog wrote:
| SF public funds are horribly miss-managed.
|
| Hopefully events like this contribute to speeding up the reform
| that the city needs.
|
| Unfortunately the necessary austerity is going to cause more
| near-term pain, but hopefully results in some longer term
| prosperity for the city.
| snapcaster wrote:
| It doesn't matter, SF residents are so delusional and
| stockholmed i think they'll put up with literally anything.
| Even in this thread you have them acting like their city isn't
| a horrifying disaster to anyone not desensitized to it
| kshri24 wrote:
| Twitter? Isn't it X now?
| spullara wrote:
| Don't you think the gross receipts tax that forced every other
| payments firm out of SF is also forcing X out because they are
| launching payments?
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1813967418383126840
| darby_nine wrote:
| I don't think Twitter realizes how much the quality of employees
| will crater when they trash the brand and the workplace
| snotrockets wrote:
| You erroneously inserted the word "will" into the above
| comment.
| matrix87 wrote:
| the brand is already trashed, at this point the workplace
| doesn't really matter. only thing that will save it now is if
| elon sells it
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Musk might be coaching all his moves on twitter in political
| terms but to me the from the looks of it twitter was extremely
| bloated and wasting money. And Musk is doing his best to get out
| ahead on the money he spend to buy it. And as far as I can tell
| he will get out ahead. If Trump wins the presidency again I think
| he might get out ahead huge
| caseyf7 wrote:
| When did Palo Alto become South Bay? South Bay was always much
| further south.
| etse wrote:
| Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County whereas Menlo Park and East
| Palo Alto are in San Mateo. That might be how.
| mlindner wrote:
| I mean it makes lots of sense. I'm in South Bay and the amount of
| vacant corporate buildings around here is ridiculous. The
| property prices have to be falling through the floor. Lots of
| companies substantially downsized their footprint during covid as
| they're now either partially or completely work from home places
| now, meaning they need a lot fewer seats in the office.
| pixxel wrote:
| > All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk
| comments to HN threads?
|
| Perhaps change the inflammatory title? "kills" to "moves"
|
| FFS.
| hit8run wrote:
| I like that. San Francisco is a dirty city with bazillions of
| homeless people and woke activists living in their bubble. It's
| insane what happened to this once beautiful place.
| zuckerma wrote:
| It's about time.
| patrick451 wrote:
| The original headline says "X ...". Why was it edited to say
| twitter, which is not the companies name?
| defrost wrote:
| Somebody solved for X I guess .. it's unknown otherwise.
| zendaven wrote:
| "Musk took to the social media platform to announce that X would
| relocate to Austin, Texas, due to his fury over a California
| transgender protection law." What happened with going to Texas?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| July 16: _" Elon Musk announced that ... Twitter is moving to
| Austin Texas"_
|
| ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=twitter+relocating+to+austin
|
| August 7: Twitter moving to LA.
|
| What made LA more appealing than Texas?
| _acco wrote:
| I live a few blocks from TwitterHQ.
|
| Mid-market is in terrible condition, worst I've seen it.
|
| I'd feel super bad asking employees to navigate those streets
| while commuting in.
|
| Not discussed enough about RTO is what a mess downtown is. And an
| emptier downtown is a seedier downtown, feeding the cycle.
| jounker wrote:
| I wonder if Twitter is about to be evicted for non-payment of
| rent.
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