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Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF
marks writes "Wired is carrying a story about some folks in San Francisco that are going around and putting up anti-dot-com stickers such as 'blowthedotoutyourass.com' and 'ButIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com.' They even have a website (blowthedotoutyourass.com) where other people can download and print their slogans and paste them other places. Its funny, in that sick, twisted, 'If I hear one more website commercial I'm gonna kill someone' way."
I just moved to SF from Silicon Valley. I like it, but it's pretty amazing how full of hate this town is. People who work at internet companies are regularly refered to as "dot com slime" in mainstream media. The alternative media, which is big here, is much worse. The level of complaining at anything and everything is stunning, especially anything originating from outside of city limits, which is seen as one large uniform unsophisticated redneck barbary by many here.
A lot has sure changed since SF was the City of Love, and welcomed change!
(I'll post anonymously for once, since I don't want to get in trouble over this.)
I'd bet against it. If many of the people leave they tend to drive down the prices of housing etc. Good? Maybe but then you have people who can't pay thier mortgages dumping the buildings back onto the banks that lent them the money? Still not a problem. Those banks end up holding a bunch of property they either hold onto or dump onto the market further driving down the value of everything else. Still don't care? Those banks now have smaller capital bases. Maybe they are close to legal limits and the government decides to close them down. Maybe they don't get that bad but they are still hurting for capital. Still don't care? Those hurting banks start to really tighten who then lend money to. Want to start a company,buy a house or even get a loan for school? Don't be surprised how tough it gets. Still not worried? Watch good companies with nothing to do with things start having trouble getting normal fiancing. Things like lines for credit. They start having to close because they can't get the money most companies need to go from shipping a product [issuing an invoice] to actually getting paid. More people get laid off. More mortgages get called. It keeps spiralling. You think it can't happen? Well think Tokyo. Property bubbles almost always end nasty. The people who get hurt often have nothing in common with the people who drove up the prices. On the issue of all those improvements that have been put in [fiber,buildings etc] they don't go anywhere but an empty building is an empty building. Doesn't matter if it's guilded in gold or in rat droppings. By the time they do get filled they will be outdated and need to be brought up to the new standards. Whatever they are at the time. I'm not saying it will happen but if it does happen it won't be pretty. NB I haven't even mentioned what will happen to all those people who thought they had retired on stock options when those options go to money heaven.
Is that the whole thing strikes me as hollow geek chic. I can just picture it. Late at night on a dark corner in San Francisco: "See! We have a sense of humor about ourselves.. The dot com ads are *soooo* rude!! oops, hang on, gotta take this cell phone call.. " "Sorry I'm late, I had to synchronize my pilot and avantgo before leaving just in case I suddenly had the urge to go see a movie or rudely read news bits in the middle of our conversation." "See! I'm part of The City. I'm fighting the man. Dot commer slime are ruining the city!! Wait, they're ticketing my illegally parked Z! Be right back." "Okay, I'm here, let's do it!! Sorry I'm late, I printed the sickers on the color laser at work but couldn't find a space big enough to part my 'Runner. I squeezed it into one of the 'compact' spaces down the block. Whoops, another cell call, hang on." There's a long list of things that are rude, socially irresponsible and obnoxious about the tech culture around here (and most places) that have very little to do with the advertisements. For any sensible person, the ads aren't even in the top 10. Given the atmosphere in SF, by the end of the month, it'll be Geek Cool to bash dot-coms in an attempt by the (largely unaccepted and seriously bashed in the free press) geek contingent to be perceived as cool and accepted. Christ, it's highschool all over again and the geeks still haven't gotten over it. They're still being made fun of and they're still responding by trying to sound cool by bashing themselves. -RSR
Yes, it has. There are some important issues you're not getting.
This isn't about how people spend their money. The problem is that long-time residents, including many who made SF a desirable place to live in the first place, are being kicked out onto the street. It's not just artists; ethinic diversity is being lost too.
Please remember that the dot-com explosion in SF arose from the multimedia industry in SOMA in the mid-90's, which was started by artists in the early 90's because they could get cheap warehouse space there. And the artists are here because of the tolerant and multicultural environment that SF used to have.
It's not as simple as "people not wanting change", no matter what Mayor Brown says. Let's say I corner the market on food and means of its production, and then refuse to give you any. I bet you'd complain about that "change" too. The housing crisis is not about aesthetics, it's about desperate situations and even SURVIVAL for some people.
Please don't pretend class differences and struggle don't exist. Yuppies and high-tech people (and I'm one) are in much greater positions of power than most working class people, and most white people (and I'm one) are in greater positions of power than non-white people. This is why your comparisons to racial segregationists are invalid. When the non-powerful try to defend what little they have against the powerful, to avoid becoming homeless, it's hardly the same as white people trying to keep black people out of the neighborhood. In Detroit and Chicago, the sheriff didn't come to the door with a gun to physically remove white people from their homes. In SF, he does.
You clearly haven't been in SF very long, or thought very deeply about social issues. Most yuppies don't, because they don't have to. You can maintain your illusion, as long as you have money.
I'm not dismissing your ideas out of hand. I'm dismissing them because I've heard them a hundred times before and they still don't stand up to scrutiny by anyone who's familiar with the issues.
I grew up in Sunnyvale, and now that I'm in my twenties I'll probably never be able to afford housing in my home town.
I think the whiners up north should try coming down here for a while and realize they aren't the only ones being forced out by slicon implants.
But when is their IPO?
94 was the year I got on the internet. Coincidence? I think not.
//Caine - caine@evilconspirations'r'us.com
I was going to reply to the parent article, but you pretty much covered all the bases. I second your opinion.
-Stu
SOMETHING to angst about, perpetually. I read the statments made by the guy behind this, and honstly, I think there's more truth and heart in the "Andre The Giant Has A Posse" stickers. By the way, generation X is mid 30's by now, proudly I am not, I've stopped bitching about mass media, and I'm getting on with my life.
-- The unsig...
When these people are able to come back with some reasoned position instead of a bunch of vulgar slogans which they use to vandalize public porperty, they can come talk to me.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Are you honestly going to try to say that the
modern grown internet is more usable and nice
than the old internet? Sheesh!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
just a sidenote, but wasn't the mission yuppie eradication project a hoax put out by the sfbg to expose the ignorance and consistent failure to check facts of other local media? btw: agree about the polarization of this town and the threat to it's heritage. every time some little one off business closes down, we get another baby gap or a freakin jamba juice.
mudweasel "and i wudda gotten away with it too if it hadn'ta been for you meddling kids."
I assume you mean Vancouver BC, which is a cool place.
;)
Yeah, a friend's going to school there (and I passed thru while on a cross-country vacation about 16 years ago.. Vancouver, Seattle, Spokane, Portland, then east thru Idaho, Montana, etc.. Very cool to have teachers for parents, as they have 2 months to burn on a trip like that) and he loves it.. Very free up there, though the gas is real expensive
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
In the Star Trek universe, hasn't money been obsoleted on Earth, and can't people teleport to work? At which point all those San Francisco dotcoms become meaningless or don't need to locate anywhere in particular or both and all of a sudden there's a lot of available real estate there. : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
And you haven't unleashed your trained attack lawyers yet?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
How would you have felt if someone had "thrown" an old Ferrari or D-type Jag on the fire?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I thought it was supposed to be an ironic play off the fact that some of us are not all that bright.
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
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Almost as silly as dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.
Did anyone notice the Giant Has a Posse "Obey" poster in the upper left of one of the street shots? San Francisco, where the subversive postmodern billboards have to fight one another for space.
ObSpellCheck: It should be "MoreNippleWaxThanAnyone.com."
Yes, I should make it more clear that I'm of mixed views about Rent Control. On one hand, I understand the problems that led to Rent Control, and I'm glad that I live in a rent controlled apartment.
On the other hand, it does create a situation where some people are paying far below "market" rents, while others who have just moved in are actually paying far above the market rents. The difference between the below-market rent (that artists etc can afford) and the above-market rent (that computer professionals can afford) is so great that eventually the Landlord figures out some way to evict the tenents -- even if they could afford the 'average' rent somewhere in the middle. This is radically changing the population of the city.
It's the law of unintended consequences, I guess. And there isn't a really good way to fix the problem. (God help us if they repeal rent control at this point.)
BTW, Rent Control in SF applies to any building built before 1979 with two units or more. That's probably ~80% of the rental housing stock. As for Marin County, it's an upper class enclave and there's almost no rental housing there, except way up in Novato. I have a few blue collar cousins that grew up in Marin and were basically forced over to the East Bay because of the lack of even moderately affordable housing.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually, i submitted it like two days ago. What probably happened is that it was put into the queue to wait for a slow news period (like a sunday morning).
-mark
-mark
If your computer says LINUX, run...computers can't talk! [unless you have text-speech software]
whois blowthedotoutyourass.com@whois.register.com
shows that the domain is registered to somebody in Chicago, and there even is a web server at www.blowthedotoutyourass.com.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Oops, it was already in the header. Sorry, 'bout that.
;-))
There goes karma
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog
What gives you the right to tell these people how to spend their money? The money you spend on your education could feed plenty of destitute 3rd worlders. Just shut up.
Blar.
I found an article in Salon that might be interesting to reproachful SFO implants.
When 9/10 of these companies go under, two things will happen.
9/10 already go under. In fact if 1 in 10 businesses that you invest in make it, you've got a pretty nice profit. Consider that dotcoms that score big, will give you 100/1 profits. And it's not like the businesses that fail leave the city in ruin. It happens every day, yet the unemployeement rate stays at an all time low. I don't see any kind of crash you are refering to anytime soon.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Unamerican Activities, is a good start. they have all sorts of thought invoking stickers....
UA is remotely related to The-Revolution in that remote viewing kind of way.
i will have to try to add T-R and UA meme to the DC LUG's Protest of DMCA just because DC needs laugh, here and there...
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I assume you mean they're burning someone else's cross, other than their own?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
My favorite is the one for Obsession
Prion
Become a FIST.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Fists_of_Righteous_
Well, where would you all the awful more-affluent people to live? It shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve...it's not like they're human beings who have every right to try to rent a place to live. And the people who own houses and rent them out don't have right to try to actually charge as much rent as someone is willing to pay them.
Attempts to fight off normal market interactions through rent controls or overt violence and intimidation (yeah, sure, such a movement would really stop at scratching up some SUVs if it got any momentum) only serve to disadvantage a community at a later time, as demand fades, property values plummet, and insurance rates rise in response to a poor rent market and perception of high criminality.
And, yes, this sort of xenophobic response is exactly like the reactions minorities get when they move into white neighborhoods. The hostility is always framed in a claim of the need for economic self-defense, and many people come to believe their rationalizations for it, but the hostility always originally comes from the strangeness of the newcomers. Mix in the envy of artistic types who currently aren't faring well in the marketplace for techies whose skills are in great demand, and there you go. Instant grass-roots outrage.
As for "Anti-dot-com"...Were there people who had such a reaction when businesses started including phone numbers in their ads?
Avoid the valley crush - get an overpaid dotcom job in Austin instead :-)
Oh, Oh, Oh, please say the B.F. Day kids freaked the fuck out too?
They built the (a Adobe building?) Adobe building _right next_ to my ol' elementary school! Grr!
Methinx I haven't been there since....
Latez,
--"LEVIATHAN"
I disagree - there is an excellent reason for people to pursue this kind of anti-advertising campaign. Half of these STUPID web-blender.com sites are put up because people want them, or they hear about it, and think it's a good idea, for some god-forsaken reason. If they can show Joe Average Consumer how absurd most of these websites are, by giving examples of just slightly more absurd sites, they might cut down on the willingness of the consumer to put up with that kind of crap.
Andrew
Well, I think the ads are really funny, but they are being posted all over the streets for everyone to see. The only problem I have with it is kids can read those ads too. I don't think I would want my friends little sister saying "What does BlowItOutYourAss.com mean?" or "Why did they say FuckYou...com?". I have no problems with obsenities around adults, but these sticker people need to think that they are posting in a public street where little kids can read this stuff too.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
No doubt brought to you by the same sad, jealous losers that brought you the "yuppie eradication project". If me and my money force people like that down onto the peninsula, well, err... hooray.
Sorry, but I do not grasp the idea of this campaign at all. What is all this about? As far as I understand it, it is about some guys who start their anti-dot-com campaign against .com ads. Right? But what are .com ads, and why are they bad?
Alexander Skwar -- Homepage: http://www.digitalprojects.com | http://www.iso-top.de iso-top.de - Die
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Now, I've never been there, but, can someone tell me:
Why the hell is everyone moving to San Francisco?
In the "new" economy, where location is pretty irrelevent as long as you've got a lot of bandwidth, why are people cramming into little penninsulas on the West Coast? I'm sure there's more land north and south of there . . .
Yeah, there are companies in Silcon Valley (is this the same as San Francisco? I dunno.) But there is no reason why you can't start a company in, say, the middle of nowhere (like where I live). Or, god forbid, in another country.
As for the ads, I think they're funny and point out some serious troubles with the new types of non-profit buisiness (as opposed to non-profit orginizations). I don't need my toothpaste delivered for damn sure, because UPS would likely break it.
later
Dan
dude, would it be quite as ironically funny if it were a .org?
.org advertizements all the time and it makes me sick. All the kkk.org advertisments and the naacp.org and the slashdot.org, man, or the HOTSEX.org those commercials are really getting on my nerves.
blowthedotoutyourass.com -- all the companies
blowthedotoutyourass.org -- all the organizations
Yeah, I see
.com? Never heard of it.
Dan
I hope you can see how different the situation in San Francisco is from that of old white suburbanites who don't want black folk reducing property values.
These are the kinds of views that perpetuate racism. People aren't denying subway access to their neighborhoods because there might be (god forbid!) black people on them! They're doing it because there might be crooks/thieves/bums/homeless/rapists and all other undesirables coming into their communities. It has nothing to do with race. The fact that most, not all (you yourself said there were lots of gays who were "since most of the homosexuals were yuppie white people with good income" - who's race profiling now?) of the people living in the center of the doughnut are black.
I am a white man born in New England. I have some relatives (also white) that I wouldn't want wandering around my neighborhood. I would put a gate up in my community and fight public transportation to prevent it. It's not a racist issue, it's an attempt to protect your investment (your house and belongings), your piece of mind and your family.
Now, as for the _cause_ of most of the poor inner city people being black, that I can't say isn't racism, but the other issues are not racists issues.
Tom
P.S. I'm already in a startup ;-)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
It's still just petty bitterness. Life goes in cycles. San Francisco wasn't going to last as it has. It has a nice bay, nice weather (to me) and a close proximity to Napa and Sonoma Valley's, never mind Skiing in Tahoe, etc. It was bound to occurr, it's just happening faster than normal. To quote Denis Leary: "Life sucks. Get a fucking helmet".
Tom
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Maybe someday people will also understand that there are other TLDs. I mean, it's embarrasing to hear someone go, "I know dot-com, it's an internet address."
.ca -- that's just namespace polution.
And the companies that have no A records for the top level of the site are very annoying. somesite.com -- "Host valid, no address found" whereas www.somesite.com works. Amateurs!
I especially hate companies that have canada.com instead of
---
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If that's all they had done, it would not even warrant a footnote. But then came the war.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
My interpretation of the saying is look in yourself before judging others.
_______________
Spare me a moment to think on this, I'm sure to strike an answer shortly if my mind doesn't do a 7-10 split trying.
I'm sure there's a bowl quip somewhere, but I left my grits at home.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
"this may be the beginning of the end for the dotcom fad."
.cc now ;^)
Of course. They're all going to move to
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
TekPolitik said: The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value
A lot of the money in NASDAQ is coming from businesses and wealthy people right now: the individual 'small investor' has been on the short end of the economy for the last ten years, and so growth in investable capital has been concentrated in the hands of those who already had quite a bit of it. Also, most small investors are buying mutual funds instead of buying shares directly, which will help shield them from the effects of a crash (more on this later). The crash in the dot-com economy will resemble the savings & loan crash more than the Great Depression: big investors will be exposed to more risk than small ones, and so there will be some sort of bailout or safety net arranged so that companies don't suffer too much. Remember you read it here first!
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism.
Actually, the last global revolution was the end of most organized colonialism at the end of World War I. The industrial revolution only affected Northern Europe, a comparatively small part of the world (but one we Americans learned a disproportionately great amount about in school). The end of colonialism created more upheaval because it affected much more land and many more people, who went from being subjects to nominally self-governing and had to abruptly create their own institutions to replace the recently departed colonial powers. The industrial revolution ushered in the idea of capitalism, but it was a long time before most of the world saw the large-scale kind of capitalism you're referring to.
The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
Why should a stock market crash, particularly one localized to a very small sector of the economy, lead to a capitalism-replacing revolution? It's not going to lead to hundreds of thousands of people suddenly losing their life savings--this isn't the same economy we had in the 1920's. Let me explain. The dot-com economy has a high value on paper, as you've pointed out, but you're also aware they have very small revenues and profits: that means that they play a very small part in the economic life of the world as a whole. If they all disappeared tomorrow a lot of paper value would go with them, but not very many actual employees or revenues would be affected.
You said if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation. This is exactly what the Federal Reserve Board has been carefully preventing for the past 10 years. We have a lot of paper millionaires, but their millions are still worth something BECAUSE inflation has been artificially held down. By the same token, you don't have to be a millionaire just to put food on the table. As long as people still have jobs, loss of their stock market portfolios won't necessarily sink them.
And just how much do small investors stand to lose? Most of them (me included) are not buying stocks directly any more--we're buying mutual funds, which means paying other folks to watch the markets full time and to get our investments out of falling stocks before they drop too far. And most of the funds out there are not the "Massive Brokerage Co. Ludicrous Growth Fund" type, they're more conservative and so will jump to the safer blue chip stocks at the first sign of trouble. We saw this just last week, in fact: the first few dot-coms began plummeting, and the Dow went up. So the Ludicrous Growth fund might crash, but thanks to SEC rules anyone who invested in it pretty much knew what they were risking. This is a big contrast to the 1920's, when blue chips themselves were massively overvalued (providing no safe haven when the speculative stocks began to fall), small investors had much less information and market power than the market makers, and a sudden loss of stock market value was combined with high inflation. If the Great Depression didn't lead to a populist/socialist government in the US, any lesser stock market crash isn't going to either.
Jenny
What is the point of this argument? Perhaps they are also protesting plice killing & public transportation & such. These people are not luddites, they are web "programmers" just like you. Just because we have some new fucking technology doesn't mean its going to help "the people". & these people are quite clearly NOT against the technology, they are upset with the CRAP that you see living in the Bay Area. I understand it isn't is bad in the rest of the country; or at least in mid. America. Out here, in the Bay Area, the web site billboards/tv ads etc are DISGUSTING. The CRAP that is being done just because its related to the web is OBSCENE. They are wasting good money. Anyway, I am all for this. There has been a culture of resistance to advertising building for a while, and its about fucking time somebody did something to fuck up those web companies.
This is disturbing, I clicked the link and got taken to an error page from a web hosting service that the site was no longer available. Perhaps they felt the message was a little too subversive?
Somedays it's just not worth chewing through the restraints...
It might make an interesting study to see how many Wired News articles actually are original in comparison to those which are "me too" follow-ons to the reporting of others.
Then again, it might not.
The economic realities of it are very relevant. But from reading the article, that's not what these people are all excited about. They seem to just be annoyed by the advertisements to the point where they felt necessary to make fun of it. I really don't think they're making any sort of political or economic statement.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You mean at Fiesta Lanes? Too bad that place is going. I never went there much. But it was an...err..interesting place. Sawmill Lanes was like heaven when I went there.
It really is sad that the place is going, they're going to put some shops there. They'll probably poop out and be deserted and then people will wish they had a bowling alley there. Bah!
Welcome to Slashdot. Please do not feed the trolls.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I would say that the current situation regarding the so called "dot com" companies is very relevent.
It seems that every day a new company floats on the stock market, and is instantly worth milions of $'s. The companies do not actually make a profit. Where is all this money coming from? Why are people so eager to chuck money at such small companies (reletivly speaking).
If it continues, we're looking at a world wide economic time-bomb. Long standing Blue Chip companies are being replaced on the FTSE 100 by these dot com companies. It's a very shaky situation, and when the bubble bursts we could all be in a lot of trouble.
Personally i have given it 6 months before the stock markets crash because of these dot com's. I'm watching the Nasdeq very carefully.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Not really. They claim to be an anti-corporate-website group, not against the web in general.
BoneShintai
If you want to have a look, there is a statistics page. It consistently shows 0's for each day, then over 50,000 for today! I wonder why...
who wants anti-dot.com ?
philippe, StopLifePatents.org
And what if joe does remember? Will he even realise this is a protest? He tries that link, gets an "server not found" error, and give it up as another dead web site. killthedot.com anyone? This seems to be the common thread to all these, not all of them have his real URL (and as someone else posted, why does he have a website if he is so adamant?).
If this guy was serious, would he protest anonymously? Like someone else posted, "write a book." Vandals are vandals. Sure corporate litter is bad enough, but whats this about "get drunk and liquored up"? If that isn't encouraging trouble, I dont know what is: "hey bob, why dont we get drunk, stick derogatory posters up all over town, and throw eggs at .comers. If we get caught, its only a fine and maybe a night in jail. Doesnt this sound like fun?"
I dont want my kids on the streets with this guy, or even seeing posters like this all over the place. There is enough profanity floating around elsewhere, he doesnt need to add to it.
What about this about "can any sew... build a table out of wood" crap? Granted he lives in sf, but I can do this, and if I can, anyone should be able to. If you arent sure, do a search for "instructions building tables woodcraft" or something. Guess what? It's online! All because someone decided it would be a good idea to put that information out there, and maybe pay for it or made his living from ad revenue.
Besides, if I thought I could made 15 million dollars, this wouldnt stop me. I'd have my .com ads out there so fast he wouldnt know what hit him.
and NO he isnt invited to my .com party.
.sigs are dumb!
a couple of days ago...i saw a segment on 4 that was about the insane cost of housing in the Denver/Metro area. A house that cost $200,000 ten years ago is now worth approx. $400,000.
Talk about equity!
From what i've been seeing in my apartment hunting around the downtown area...things are getting quite expensive. I may have to look for something in Aurora. BTW - if you know of any action in the $500 range that's as good as you appear to have...drop me a line @ fluxrad@coolmail.net
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Just wait - the bottom is going to fall out of the .com industry pretty soon as it's becoming inundated with all kinds of .commie crap. Most companies haven't really made a dime as their too new. I expect that within a couple of year we're going to see people out on the streets with scraps of bread and cheese in their beards holding up signs that read: "Will administer systems for food."
I think i might be one of 'em. Oh well. I'm prepared to move to SF when this all blows over...the housing cost isn't a problem. I live in Denver and we've got people out here with signs that read: "Will give left testicle for rent under $1000 a month"
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Anyway, if the only gimmick these people have is shouting out obsceneties, then they are already too late. Everyone around us does it, I don't know about you, I am very tired of this.
One more thing, I know how to carve wood and work with metal, and even fix my car and my house and I have been with computers for the past 12 years now.
Cheers
You can't handle the truth.
It would have made more sense for them to use a .org domain instead.
Anyone got a viable business plan involving recycled domestic animal waste?
TomV
Can we get rid of the term e-Business too? Having to hear that a hundred times a day makes me want to die.
While these people have a good point (.com ads are bloody annoying), I think that .com ads are showing how much more the world is trusting the Internet, and that ain't a bad thing._ __
_________________________________________
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I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
These guys may hate dot coms, but they do seem to be pretty good at web design. Ooops... Wait a minute... The links to the PDFs are dead... hmmmmm. Oh well, maybe they should put up an ad banner or something for the slashdotting they are about to receive!
but it would have been less funny.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Exactly! E-this and E-that. Do these companies have ANY idea what e-Commerce is? Hell, does the public? You could create a startup that sells absolutely nothing, put a bunch of words together and you'd be able to get VC capital up the wazoo. Just call yourself something like e-Business Commerce Solutions Inc.
:)
IMNSHO the term ecommerce is annoying and overused. Does it mean business2business? business2consumer? consumer2consumer? banking? retail? asset systems? auctions? Well, all of the above I guess.
It's comparable to someone starting a company and advertising on company: We make stuff. Or even better: We make electronic frobs. What the hell? I'm sorry to go off on a rant, but the overcommercialization of the Internet sickens me, but I'm sure as hell not quitting my job and forfeiting my stock. I love my BMWs
Justin
anything counter culture is good
lose != loose
In the Star Trek universe, hasn't money been obsoleted on Earth, and can't people teleport to work? At which point all those San Francisco dotcoms become meaningless or don't need to locate anywhere in particular or both and all of a sudden there's a lot of available real estate there. : )
;-)
Yeah but that took some time to happen!   We gotta start building Star Fleet Academy by the bay and the UFP Headquarters in Paris now!   Then we'll discuss obsoleting the money (once we build the Daystrom institute so that we can work on transporters and replicators before WW III so that Zephrem Cochran can invent his warp drive and do a flight in April 2061 to catch the attention of the Vulcans)!   Hell... we got alot of work to do and those damn dot coms are in the way!
I guess I should post this at (Score:0 Offtopic)
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
SEI = Software Engineering Institute CMM = Capability Maturity Model. Actually, I *do* try to distribute/share knowledge I have, and give pointers to sites/books to those that I work with and for, but I often find that those I work for are eager to dismiss *any* kind of rigorous software practice (at their eventual peril) as merely "academic". For a good (current)read, I suggest After the Goldrush, by Steve McConnell. He builds a very good case, IMHO, for having certification in the Software Engineering field - Texas and Canada already have such programs. I've actually considering moving to Texas so I could complete said program...I would like to see awareness and professionalism (and I don't mean wearing a tie) given a boost in this industry.
I'd like to point you to Steve McConnell's book, After the Goldrush, if you truly believe what you wrote.
Do you really think NASA does not write software?
There are others who can do a far better job at it than myself...I have not been in an organization that uses it yet.
For a good argument about WHY it should be used, check out After the Goldrush by Steve McConnell. Also I think Fred Brooks mentions it in the anniversary edition of Mythical Man-Month. Probably ACM has a few articles on it, too....Here's SEI's home page
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/
And Steve McConnell's companion page to the book:
http://www.construx.com/stevemcc/
Ed Yourdon's site:
http://www.yourdon.com
Regarding the "maturing" of the field, that goes for all of the Software Engineering, period. There are far, far, far too many people calling themselves Software Engineers who do not even have a Comp. Sci. degree (closest thing most schools offer right now) and not nearly enough people paying attention to SEI/CMM - same mistakes keep happening over, and over, and over, and over....people think it's all new, but nothing is rarely completely new, it's just old ideas rehashed. I find it very frustrating when potential employers focus more on languages and tools and buzzwords and years/months using them (example Java, CORBA, UML, EJB, RMI, COM/DCOM, C/C++) rather than trying to measure a person's critical thinking skills...I happen to have experience with some of the above tools/languages, but I don't think it's the whole of my worth as an employee - and the ideas in the above tools/languages are hardly new - yes, Java contains a whole bunch of good ideas and is very logically put together from the ground up - but it contains nothing that has not been done before. Don't believe me? Here's an example: http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/ This industry (in general) has a hard time getting perspective on things.
this may be the beginning of the end for the dotcom fad.
Just what do these people think they can accomplish with their juvenile acts of vandalism?
They are amusing themselves and others at the expense of people like you who are getting all worked up over this. You're reaction shows that they hit a sore spot.
First, distributing handbills and posting fliers has a long history as an effective means of protest. Those the protest is targeted against, of course, call it "vandallism", thereby trying to equate it with carving your name in the park bench. When something strikes close to home your first reaction is to belittle it, trying to make yourself feel superior to those responsible.
there has to be a more productive method of protest than plastering avery labels all over the place
Such as??? For very little $ and effort they have reached a national audience. This is a very effective guerilla tactic.
It also is no different then the thousands of .com stickers distributed by bay-area companies at this year's SXSW conference in Austin. You want to talk about vandalism? Come look at all the marketing crap illegally stuck on everything in a 10-block area of my town last week. At least the protesters have some kind of intent more noble than capturing market share to boost the price of their IPO.
Even a vague expression of angst utilizing humor is a valid form of art (as defined by most since about 1900). True art confronts, questions, & provokes, just like these stickers. If you find the actions of these people upsetting, perhaps you should ask YOURSELF why that is. Don't give me that "vandalism" crap as an excuse. There's much worse and more blatant acts of vandalism all over the world, and I don't hear you railing against that.
4:35PM CST. /.ed.
Looks like it was pulled, NOT
Interesting. Who pulled it & why?
But the public needs Rutabegas.com! Where else can they go to get rutabegas airlifted to them no matter where they are in the world!
And more importantly, once Rutabegas.com makes our IPO, we can get some cash and buy a company that actually does something useful.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
(although I personally think it was ESCHELON related... Deffinitly looks like a govt conspiracy) :)
"I do not go believe comes out therefrom that I will concentrate on always more special zones."
--Linus To
You are SO right. We recently went through a HUGE period of expansion in Amherst, NY (a suburb of Buffalo, NY). Population tripled. The local IDA & Republican Town Board were handing out tax breaks left and right. Now the growth has stopped. Development has taken a dive. Property values have plummeted, some houses losing 20-50% of their value in just 3-4 years. And our schools? Now we're the fourth largest schoold district in NYS (Except for City School Districts). The school budget topped $100 million 3 years ago. People are pissed now that we have:
It just hasn't been good... and now the towns farther out into the rural areas are goign through what we went through... hopefully they'll be able to avoid the problems we saw.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
damn...I hope this gentrification thingy hasn't gotten us into a revolutionary frenzy.
I doubt these people truly despise dot.com's, otherwise why would they have their own web site? Seems like a marketing ploy than another else. With all that's happened online, it might be original a ploy, but definitely not surprising.
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
well ya know... since there were so many OTHER posts saying "i smoke pot!"
Hahahaha silly slashdot, moderation is for kids!
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Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
I hate you.
Am I now? And who may I ask might you be-- hiding behind anonymity like the pansy you are! And for what reason am I a "fucking idiot" as you so colloquially put it?
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Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
I hate you.
time to face the facts. every media industry that has boomed thus far has only boomed because of advertising. without advertising things don't get noticed, or they loose all financial backing. before advertising came in the web was still crawling around in diapers but since avertising has came in the internet has boomed reaching more people then it could ever have on it's own. oh and btw anyone ever think about the fact that the com in XXXXXX.com means commerce?
-Borgdude
How do you enforce a law making it illegal to commit suicide?
Your right.HAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!
About time someone did something about those annoying .com ads. I live in `Frisco, and have still not seen these, but I think I will go try and find whomever is sending these out! I love it!
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Funny thing about all of this is that I own the domains you-suck.com, you-suck.net and you-suck.org and someone in New York has been selling white T-Shirts with you-suck.com tastefully printed in sharp black letters.
SomeoneSucks.com!
A message from our sponsor
So I got a couple million in VC and like your business model. Ya wanna dance now?
rx_chutzpah, the Doc.
are you really that lame? then again, you probably are, never mind.
Does anyone have a copy of the pdf file to mirror?
I was at work contemplating shit and out of the blue I said "I hate yuppies." And this dude I work with is like "huh?" So I say, "You know why windows crashes so much?" And he said he didn't think it did.
.com BS makes us all look like GD yuppies. It's good to see some techies revolt against the .coms.
.org. What a grand transition from several years ago when I went to .com's exclusively and .org was alien. I bet most people don't even know .org exists.
.com's can make their founders millionaires without having any revenue or profit just by going public is making the computer world looked at badly. Why, just the other day on linux.com I saw a post saying that Linux companies could make paper millionaires by having an IPO without having profit, or even revenue, and that we were seeing it right and left. But the only Linux companies that had gone public as of that post were VA and Red Hat, which had revenue and I believe were both turning profit. Bottom line, people see it happening in .com-land, it's ridiculous, they assume it's what goes on in all of the tech world. So you whip out your pilot, they assume you bought it by not turning any profit or revenue having an IPO. Even tho' you bought it by working hard making the things that make their world run.
Well, I'm a big tech and computer person, and you're right. All this
BTW I noticed the other day that all the sites I was visiting were
The fact that hundreds of
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"A...a piece of sushi named Matt just said hello to me..."
"And a ball of lint with feet is okay in your world? Just deal with it, pal."
-User Friendly
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Didn't this already happen? Too many people on the get-rich-quick, something for nothing bandwagon in the 20s, a depression...
It was said around then that if Roosevelt couldn't handle the problem he would be the last President of the United States.
He may have overstepped his authority as president in de-capitalizing the situation, but the nation was shifting and if he hadn't we would've seen, as you said, a revolution with guns.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
It isn't to sound cool. It's bashing them because we have a legitimate point. Once a certain amount of people are in it just because it's chic, the original starters of the "bashing dot-com" movement will be past it, the real geeks, they will have moved on.
I'm a geek, but I don't have a cell phone, or a palm. I don't interrupt conversations for crap like that. I know plenty of yuppy business-persons who do tho'.
It'd be interesting to see the "long list of things that are rude, socially irresponsible and obnoxious about the tech culture" and see how many of them really apply to where you're applying them. You are missing the point of dot-com bashing while at the same time proving it.
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"Internet users seem to think adding ':)' on to anything will make it funny." -Yeah, but the original idea was to put it on something already funny. Before the influx of the AOLer contingent.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
My favorite part:
"Shiny, 24-year-old people who were all very hip and cool [were] going into this thing. We just couldn't believe that this is what it had come down to -- that this was a cool thing in the Mission -- to go to these kind of dot-com opening parties and stuff. So we came back and threw some eggs at them."
Face it, we're the next generation of yuppie scum. Even if you're not rolling in pre-IPO stock, you're exposed to such backlash, by merely whipping out your Pilot, or saying you do 'computer stuff'. Sometimes it's a groan & rolling of eyes, or you get passed off to the other geek in the room, or better yet, they glare & report that 'I hate computers'. And really, I can't blame them. We're pummelled with it, especially in the Bay Area... it's not so much the 'net & computers, but the inane corporate.com culture that's in our face, 24-7. It was all fun & games until the barrage of ads began.
I was in San Fransisco today and one of the MUNI stations is a huge Microsoft advertisement. However, as the main add comes into site on the way down the escalator, you see: "MICRO$OFT". Someone's added some strategic white tape in just the right places. Caused quite a double-take.
--
see shy jo
They are amusing themselves and others at the expense of people like you who are getting all worked up over this. You're reaction shows that they hit a sore spot.
Sounds like they've already solved this problem in South Africa..
Your Working Boy,
Absolutely. I've never understood the "Look I'm a vandal so I'm a cool insightful rebel" attitude. There is a lot of hype about the net, granted, but why not write a book about it? Stoll's "Silicon Snake Oil" was not bad, but it really was written too early to focus on the current situation.
They call the company "Sun" because the people who work for it don't see it often.
Remember, just because the pot calls the kettle black, doesn't mean the kettle isn't black.
Actually, if you look at the dates, you'll notice that this is the Wired effect, not the Slashdot effect.
--
Dan
that an anti-website group has their own website?
Wouldn't Tuttle have been a better choice? Or was that Buttle...?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
I had commercials on television and radio generally but the dot com commercials I hate even more. I know how these guys feel. Some of the most annoying commercials are dot coms second only to the Warehouse music commercials with the people singing out of tune. South side California probably isn't as bad but we've still got our load of dot com billboards. I'm making a blowitoutyourass.com t-shirt as I type. You're going to moderate this down.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Has anyone considered the possibilty that this is just another stupid ad campaign? I'll admit that this is a low-probability scenario, but bear with me. With a few bucks worth of stickers, these guys have gotten people all over the net talking about their website (which appears to have been taken down at the moment). If they put up a new, commercial website tomorrow, with all the buzz going around the net, a lot of people would see it. For all we know, it could be some RealNames-type company trying to publicize a new, proprietary addressing scheme.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
The machines were originally built as networked boxen that lived on the network and could be produced for much less than the "mainframes" or whatever of the time. Ironic that many SUN workstations are now being replaced by Linux and (sadly) NT workstations because they are cheaper..
"...Is this world not a call I can screen out" --
Just HairyDrunkenLactatingSpottedMonkies.com should be worth $300M alone!
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
A lot more people take notice of an advert than read a book. Plus when something is done as succintly as "Idon'tneedmytoothpastedelivered.com" it's a bit boring to stretch it out into a 300page book.
Although by the looks of things Andre the Giant still has a posse.
A lot of the pictures on their site showed their posters were stuck on top existing advertisements, which themselves were stuck on public and private property. So they're actually bringing attention to corporate-sponsored acts of vandalism, and keeping the cost of the removing their own ads to a minimum.
But then again, they also stuck them on steet signs and legitimate ads.
I imagine it has more to do with the person placing the posters than the organization itself. Do you think Nissan, Nintendo, and HBO condone vandalism?
In Seattle ("The San Francisco of the Northwest") the latest grafitti craze (no, not Grafitti (tm)) is "NoMorePrisons.net" spray-painted on sidewalks. To me this is the perfect undeniable proof that grafitti can be a positive act. I saw the grafitti, I bought the book, and though I just read it yesterday I literally think it's changed my life.
I don't know how annoying the SF labels are. I do know that spray paint on sidewalk will wear off in a few months, and that it has a hell of a lot less negative impact on my quality of life than a lot of billboards (or worse, TV screens in airports). I'd much rather give the right to spam my environment over to those who care (yes, that includes sidewalk evangelists) rather than those who just have more money than I do.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
I'm sorry -- trying to draw a distinction between hating someone because you don't like where he puts his money and hating someone because you don't like where he puts his penis is puerile it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is sophistry.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
This reminds me of something here in Fremont (A district in Seattle.) A couple years ago, Adobe built a nice shiny new building here which blocks the view of the water. A while ago, Someone went around and stuck stickers all over the area that say "Fuck Adobe". The best part is the irony. They used a distinctive Adobe font for the stickers.
--GnrcMan--
I'd definitely consider the Pacific NW (Vancouver, WA, OR, been to all and enjoyed them a lot)
I'm in Seattle. I assume you mean Vancouver BC, which is a cool place. There's a town in WA, right across the border from Portland, called Vancouver. It's kind of a shithole.
I would recommend against Seattle. It gets on your nerves and wears you down. Traffic sucks. Costs are outrageous due to the abundance of dot coms and MS millionaires. People here are so apathetic it isn't even funny. And everyone drives an SUV and bitches about how much gas costs. I'm only here because my girlfriend is finishing up her Classics degree at UW.
Portland, OR on the other hand, is a wonderful city. I'd move there in a second. If you are going to move to the Pacific Northwest, that is the place to be. Just watch out for a scary man named Lon Mabon.
--GnrcMan--
Easy: they get a lot of people's attention very quickly, just like e-marketers do. And that, of course, is the whole point here -- they're trying to make a point to a lot of people very quickly. Looks to me like it's working.
Writing a book about it is in this case pretty much pointless -- anyone that picks up the book is probably a sympathizer in the first place. Making a web site will only draw so many hits unless it becomes a meme (which has actually begun to happen in this case, just as it did with Mahir et al). Taking to the streets with posters is just... so... non-digital, I can't really take that seriously for this effort.
No, I think Mr Lowry is on the right track here -- these pseudo-ads are great, and I hope to see them pop up all over the place. San Francisco, Boston, London, everywhere. We're in the midst of a gold rush with a dirty little secret: there ain't no gold to be found! It's time that news became a bit more well known, even if it does kick your startup in the belly. Sorry guys, them's the breaks -- the party needs to end & we need to clean up the mess we've made.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I think you're ignoring a lot of (not so recent) history and geography ...
Internet companies didn't make it practially illegal to build new housing in SF. SF politicians did.
More like it has something to do with the fact that almost every square inch of SF has been developed for decades now - even out in the far avenues there are row after row of 2 story houses - if you want to build new housing you have to knock down housing that already has people living in it - that becomes a political problem
You could argue that the political corruption scandals that resulted in San Mateo county being broken off from SF county at the turn of the century were "of it's own making" - but no one involved is still alive to my knowledge
Internet companies didn't refuse to do anything about traffic or parking, and then complained about the resulting mayhem. SF politicians did.
Of maybe it has something to do with much of SF being built up before cars were in common uses - all those victorians with 4-6 apartments in them don't have garages for a reason - people didn't have cars when they were built - and there was good public transport - now each of those people living in those apartments want their own SUV and street parking is a nightmare. This is nothing new - I had the same problem when I lived in the Haight 15 years ago - in the end we ditched our car and used the buses - we usually got where we wanted faster anyway.
Internet companies didn't impose a state of war between renters and landlords through rent control. SF politicians did.
This has been going on for a couple of generations SF has a really big problem with spiralling rents for people on fixed incomes - the politicians are after all just representiung the voters. Rent control has been viciously fought over every 3-4 years for as long as I can remember
However, SF politicians didn't invent blaming all their problems on the nasty subhuman outsiders. That one is universal.
Actually SF politicos seem divided on this one - in fact it's a historical divide - between the ones who represent and suck up to downtown big-business and the more populist ones who try and represent the voters. Besides after a few years the 'outsiders' become locals and start griping about the latest batch of immigrants
It's like a drunk making fun of Budweiser while finishing off the last drop in his 40oz bud.
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This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'.
Jealousy of Seattle ? The NW Slackers got to have their revolution, and now SF wants its own.
-- Reclaim The TrustfundsI don't agree that ending the transient state will be a good thing.
A crunch is a crunch. People get hurt. Small investors will take a very big hit on the collapse of the ecomm boom. Let's face it, we like to think of VCs as those lovely rich people who keep us in big lunches and new G4s, while we bleed them dry, but where did their money come from ? A lot of the fund money floating around now is either Joe Sixpack's own little day-trading adventure, or it's Doreen Bluerinse's life-savings in a Fund that was late into .com and still can't tell the difference between Amazon and Lastminute, or Cisco and Iridium.
What happened in '29 ? Banks got burned, and when a bank gets burned, it takes it out on its smaller creditors. Rockefeller didn't find a bank trying to repossess his mansion, but a lot of poor Okie farmers did.
This is fairly amusing, but don't you all think there are significantly more important issues that need attention. Sure, a lot of the people who read/post/submit to /. care about those things, and that's great, but this anti-dot-com thing, with all its bumper stickers and whatnot is going to get way more public attention than any of the stuff that really matters. Sure, anti-IP patent bumperstickers aren't going to be as interesting, and probalby are not the best idea, but it's far more relevant.
I guess this is just showing me that all the discussion and arguments and thoughts that take place on /. are hampered by the fact that /. is one of the few places they can take place. So how can we spread the word about more prevelant issues than the dot-com sillyness to the mostly ignorant public? The deCSS t-shirts would seem to be a start, except I doubt they make much sense to most people, and line upon line of seemingly random characters isn't all that appealling.
The anti-dot-com fanfare is ok, but it's only really going against something that's not all that important, and will die out soon enough anyways. I'm not sure how serious the people running it actually are, but if they really want to change the future of the internet, they should focus on something relevant.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Why is it that internet startups (any high tech startup FTM) feel the need to be located in the Bay area, NYC, Boston, SoCal or Seattle given the physical locationlessness (new word) of the internet?
I understand that it provides a method for new companies to recruit talent from other local companies without requireing the employee to move but it would seem to me that a company could either startup or move to somewhere like Ann Arbor, Madison, Boulder or Austin, still offer the same stupidly overvalued salaries and allow the employees to live like kings in some pretty cool cities. Why does this not happen very much? Are the VC's trying to drive up the values of their real estate investments?
Any other reasons for this?
no sig.
At first I thought that these flyers may have been the result of regular people who had become tired of E-this and E-that everywhere and .com's everywhere you look especially in San Francisco. But after rereading the article I begin to suspect that this campaign may be the product of embittered tech folk who are in the land of IPO plenty and yet feel they are going hungry (by Silicon Valley standards). I also suspect they are either owners of a failed startup, wannabe CEOs who didn't obtain venture capital, and recently fired valleyites.
The domain names picked although funny are also very revealing about them e.g. ShredsOfSomeonesSoulForAuction.com, FuckYouAndTheStartupYouRodeInOn.com. After all in Silicon valley everyone feels they should be a millionairre and since does not hold true it seems the losers (again by Silicon valley standards) have decided that if they can't have it no one else will. I wonder how native SFer's feel about these ads and all the wealth being thrown around by snot-nosed geeks with more money than they know what to do with.
PS: I submitted this last night and it got declined. Go figure.
You miss the point...it isn't about how some snot nosed programmers and geeks are lavishly spending their money . This is about people and organizations who have lived in San Francisco for years and perhaps even generations that are being forced out of their homes simply because they are not as well to do as the snot nosed geeks who showed up in the city less than five years ago. I'll give you 2 true life examples that show exactly how different the San Francisco situation is from the racist scenario you liken it to.
- Recently in the city of Atlanta (which has the second largest gay population in the U.S.) members of the gay community decided to start moving into low cost inner city housing which until then had predominantly occupied by blacks. This had the effect of driving up property values since most of the homosexuals were yuppie white people with good income. Very soon some of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, some of which had lived there for decades, started a campaign against the newcomers because they were forcing them out of their homes. Of course, the media picked this up and it became a blacks vs. gays issue as opposed to an issue with economic undertones. This is similar to what's happening to native SFer's and the geek newcomers.
- Atlanta is described as "The white donut". This is because the city is predominantly black but completely surrounded on all sides by predominantly white suburbs consisting primarily of gated communities. Since most of the suburbanites work in the city, there is a considerable amount of rush hour traffic on a daily basis. Yet efforts to extend subway service into the suburbs have been consistently blocked by the suburbanites because they don't want to give easy access to the city people (blacks) to their neighborhoods so they don't reduce their property values, rob & steal, bring the inner city bums with them, etc. This is an example of racial seclusionary behavior
I hope you can see how different the situation in San Francisco is from that of old white suburbanites who don't want black folk reducing property values. Personally it is my opinion that San Francisco is probably the most tolerant city in the country especially when juxtaposed with southern cities.PS: Full disclosure. I am a black, snot nosed punk programmer who hopes to launch a startup.
I have to agree with this group of individuals after living first in Palo Alto and then in San Jose. The point is that all these high paying dot coms in the area have driven prices sky high. I was appalled to find out that at $50,000 per year I was considered poverty level... and it was tough, it never seemed like my wife and I could make ends meet. Finally I told IBM and the whole silicon valley area good-bye and moved back to Utah. So you can imagine what it is like for the "regular" people like gas station attendants, school teachers, etc... Both parents work and yet they still struggle to even pay their rent or mortgage. The whole silicon valley area is divided into two distinct groups, the rich dot- commers and the poor regular folk.
It is no wonder there is such a backlash against them. In fact, when I was there this whole thing was already gaining steam with some groups in San Francisco openly vandalizing rich dot-commers cars and property, in hopes to drive them out. I don't condone such actions but it goes to show just how desparate the situation is for many people.
I think the solution to this problem is already taking form as many dotcoms are actually locating in other places that have a lower cost of living and thereby alleviating the already exploding situation in Silicon Valley.
Just my two cents.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Let me put it clearly for you: NASDAQ is the biggest, baddest pyramid scheme on the planet.
The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value.
Part of the problem here is that you have everybody eying the wealth that appears to be getting created from thin air on NASDAQ, and thinking "I'd like some of that."
There is, however, a fundamental principle of economics. That is, if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation.
While we're not quite at that point, we are getting a ludicrous number of people being ludicrously wealthy, and that is simply unsustainable. The system is headed for a major breaking point.
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism. The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
andicantwaittillitsover.com
And to drive this point home, I just ran out to the store to pick up a few items and happened to glance at the 3/27 issue of Time magazine.   Guess what's on the front cover?   Stephen King, his face and upper torso as a picture on a computer monitor, with his hand reaching out of it to a keyboard directly in front.
Front cover title of this journalistic brilliance?   "'icandoit.com' and you can too".
I live in Philly - whoever has those "anti-dot com" materials that the article mentioned were going to be handed out here on the east coast - PLEASE GET THEM HERE FAST!!!!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
San Francisco is the hideous mega-capital of obnoxious real-world advertising. We have flatbed trucks with billboards mounted in the back, whose sole purpose is to drive around town showing a giant ad for some lame web "business".
We've got those and the barges in Philly too.   First time I saw one of those flatbed truck signs was a couple of years ago.   I thought it was just one company's unique way of advertising.   Then I kept seeing them and seeing them and cursed having to drive behind one too!   Please don't forget the small planes dragging a banner through the sky with some "dot com" on it and I've even seen some sky-writers spell out "dot com" companies as an ad! (true).
Alot of this sort of thing started when alot of cities started banning billboards in residential neighborhoods, so the advertisers "took their show on the road" so to speak.
One thing that's interesting is the massive increase in radio advertising for these "dot coms".   Probably 3/4 of the ads I hear on all-news stations are either for "computerjobs.com" or some other "tech-relatedindustry.com".
And I know that tech and businesses on the internet have brought an amazing amount of jobs and wealth but I'd like to see the field mature a bit, without all the hype.   Okay, it's here, so lets move on.   JMHO.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
andicantwaittillitsover.com
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)
;-)
;-)
And I was gonna point out NASA's Beowulf cluster but then you'd say... ohhhhh...   fsck it!  
Actually want to make a point that hasn't been touched here yet and that is this:   Remember learning in U.S. History about what happened, oh...   around 1849 in San Fran?   A little thing called the "gold rush"?   Looks like we're seeing a repeat in history here some 150 years later...
And for those who are new to that area and/or are considering the latest dot com gold rush, remember that the last sortof big earthquake occurred when? In 1989?   And they're looonnngggg overdue.   I remember watching the World Series when Candlestick Park (OOPPPSSS!!!   WRONG NAME!   Ahem.   "3COM Park", I believe it was later called) was literally being shaken apart.   If you like San Andreas fault living, be my guest.   Zico and me will stick with the Linux-caused hurricaines and blizzards and tornadoes on the east coast!
And by the way, regarding the real estate there?   ALL that stuff has to go - the Presidio included.   I mean come on.   How the hell can they start building Star Fleet Academy with those damn dot coms in the way, huh?   Let's start moving to the REAL technology!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
There's no way in hell Microsoft is behind this. Many of the slogans are far too...um..colorful, for any big family-friendly company like Microsoft to be involved with them.
yeah but there's a difference that the .marketing dweebs aren't just moving in, they're displacing those who were here by driving rents through the roof, doubling in the past two years and san francisco wasn't cheap to begin with. Every week it seems theres another story about some little non-profit going under or moving out of the city (if they can) as they can't afford their rent doubling. This week it's cartoon art museum (which was I think the only museum dedicated to cartooning) next week it's be somebody else.
Here is a nice story from sf on the dot.whatevers impact in SOMA.
While people may regard SF as a home for hippies, flakes and freaks, it wasn't always this way. This radical transformation in the 50's was as hard fought as the hippie/dotcom struggle is today.
Those fighting progress in SF now are cut from the same cloth as those at the heart of the tumult forty years ago.
Couple that with the rather annoying fact that a lot of these pointless (and hopeless) businesses are making money for their employees anyway, and you have a pretty silly situation. It's good to see someone publicly decrying this absurdity.
-jwb
You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.
The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.
There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this sometime.)
People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'
Some details to be aware of are that there is no commercial rent control, which has a whole slew of corallary effects on market motivation.
That said, your point about the exploding cost of housing in other (non rent-controlled!) parts of the Bay Area is quite accurate, and I'd forgotten it. One little irony is that Marin County, once the most beautiful expensive counties in the Bay Area, has become remained a lot more affordable (especially for renters) and largely avoided the crunch of the rest of the Bay Area. It's not cheap, by any means, but their decision to NOT invest in a lot of transportation infrastructure, and to keep many of their interior roads one-lane and to completely control growth (it's virtually impossible to build on green land in most of the county) has made the portions of it that are far from the freeway an unattractive option to commuters, and kept housing prices stable.
score: revolution 1, .com 0
This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'. Please. Maybe these people can grow up actually do something that will help their community. I'm glad that they are trying to voice their opinion, I just feel that without a constructive aspect, their campaign is pure egotism.
Anyway, I was much more subversive than this when I was in high school. Maybe I'm just jealous because nothing I did was published on a web site.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I live in SF, and have to admit that I'd like to see the Beauty Bar burned to the ground when the revolution comes as much as the next guy. But, in general, San Franciscians are actually a pretty small minded lot, and only see the 'big picture' in a ten block radius from where they live.
A couple things are happening here:
1) Land values are skyrocketing around the whole bay. There simply isn't enough land to go around, and poor people and industrial usage are feeling it. Unlike in the 1980s boom, San Francisco hasn't been excepted this time, and rents here are actually similar or lower to Cupertino or anywhere else. The perception is that SF is being 'invaded' by computer jocks that want to enjoy the lifestyle while destroying it. The reality is that many people are being pushed here by the more intolerable situation in SV.
2) Rent Control is having the reverse effect of increasing evictions, rather than decreasing them. Quite a few people have been holed up for years in a victorian flat paying $800/month, split 4 or 5 ways. Obviously, if the landlord can slap on a coat of paint and get $3000 for the same flat, he'll find a way. And since he doesn't want to get into a situation where he's below market again, he might jack that $3000 up to $3500. This sort of thing totally distorts the economics in a city where most people rent.
But anyways, you're right. The days of San Francisco being a real artistic center are probably over. Most of that community is either trust funded or entrenched and over 35 years old. The fear is that we'll end up like a big version of Carmel-by-the-Sea or Sausilito, and the art will be pastel pictures of balloons and seagulls floating over the golden gate.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
http://www.blowthedoto utyourass.com/stats/www2000/stats.html
or
Maybe we need this dotshit
I hate to sound like a gun manufacturer or a child pr0nographer, but it seems like the eToothpaste eDelivery eServices and the trade-stocks-at-3-AM and dancingsquidtitties.com wouldn't be there if people didn't want them. Their movement into the web is more or less the inevitable result of the common folk moving into the web.
So, while I understand the frustration of one of the most empowering communication and information-transforming tools ever created being used to sell crap even more useless than the crap we sold last week, it may be a great opportunity for those with brains. The eOverload lowers the noise-to-signal ratio, but it doesn't drive good information out. If little Johnny's dad gets a shiny new computer and a DSL line so that he can buy underwear at the speed of light using the Business Model of the Future, that doesn't stop Johnny from visiting GNU or Bartleby or the DXM FAQ. I'm talking about guerilla education here. Let's let the dots put a computer in every nook and cranny, build powerful internet backbones and make everyone need high-speed reliable access as one of life's basic requirements.
That's when we move in...
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block. Destroying folk's property (i.e. slashing tires or burning crosses or what have you) doesn't sound tollerant-- although both certainly express resentment (and how!)
Also, I didn't want to sound like I didn't understand the hostility. I totally understand why any set community dislikes an interlopper-- people don't like change. That's fine. But it's interesting (which isn't to say significant) that the same excuses ("they're screwing up our community's values, messing with our property values, edging us out, taking our rightful places from us") are trotted out by old white suburbanites and younger, hipper artsy San Franciscans.
Just food for thought. Don't dismiss this out of hand, please.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
OK, you won't usually hear completely crazy ideas coming from me. But this is different. Those SF people were the usual anti-freedom antitech luddites, but this is an excuse to promote my agenda:
End all TLDs!!!!
This sounds funny and/or sarcastic; I fully expect this time to be moderated into the floor. But ever since Ralph Nader's group started advocating whole new TLDs just for their pet causes, it has occurred to me that the whole notion of .org .net .whatever is silly.
It made sense in the old days, when you needed to know at a glance if you could access a site for regulatory reasons (ie certain mil domains accessing com domains, etc). But what purpose do they serve now?
More web addresses? It doesn't address the limited number of *.*.*.* addresses (there are other solutions for that). Most companies reserve all possible TLDs which could violate their trademarks-- add more TLDs and you won't even see more lawsuits-- the same squatters and the same trademark holders, just more names to fight over.
It hardly serves as an organizing principle. Is an American private school a .com, .edu, or .city.state.us? The latter is ruling of self-appointed Masters of American Domains at USC. They want coke to be coke.atlanta.us. Why? Really, I can't tell. I don't need to look at a web address to tell if I am at a gov't, private or network provider's homepage.
What we need aren't more top-level domains, but less. We have to drop this .com hack and type http://slashdot. Current dot-whatevers can keep their distinctions, but let's let EVERYTHING be a TLD.
End the TLD Tyranny. In your heart, you know I'm right.
If they have some kind of point to make, other than whining, there has to be a more productive method of protest than plastering avery labels all over the place.
read the comments in the html
(Whoa, I'm replying to a JDax post! ;-) )
Everybody gets sick of stuff they hear all the time, whether it's Brittney Spears or "Cha-ching!" However, you don't very often see people going around vandalizing property over it. The reaction that this article (and many others that you can find at the SF Weekly or SF Gate) is talking about is a different phenomenon.
Namely, it's all about jealousy and class warfare and the incredibly immature (although we've probably all done it at some point) "I got here first, so I'm better" attitude.
Jealousy and class warfare? This shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone anywhere, but San Francisco (no, I refuse to call it "The City") is particularly notorious for it. The bonus is that it takes no thought whatsoever to join this movement -- just go after anything that looks like a yuppie status symbol: in order, the pager, the cell phone, the SUV, and San Francisco real estate.
An aside: I never really understood why yuppie youth thought they were cool because they carried a pager on their belt. To me, it's saying, "Yeah, I lack so much independence that I have to be at the beck and call of other people 24 hours a day." But I digress.
As for the third attitude I mentioned, it's hardly unique to San Francisco, but they seem to do it better than just about anyone save possibly New York City dwellers. Recently, a decent number of gay folks thought it would be fun to start vandalizing people's cars, because too many straight people were moving into their neighborhoods. (How's that for discriminatory irony!) You see it among the Slackers of NYC, too, because the mayor actually had to gall to make run down areas like Times Square safe for families to visit at night. Gasp! This definitely isn't limited to real estate, either, if you've ever heard anyone whine "Man, BandX and TVshowX were so cool, but now they suck because a lot of people like them. Mainstream bastards!"
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that we're one of the groups that has moved into a place that was vacated by an organization mentioned elsewhere in this thread at Slashdot because they could no longer afford the rent. It still wouldn't change my opinion on this, though, as I've never been harrassed over it, nor has any of my property been vandalized.
I will say, however, that the San Francisco land grab is pretty ironic. Technology, and more specifically, the Internet, are supposed to increase our abilities to work together remotely, yet we're all fighting to squeeze into San Francisco, and paying through the nose for the honor.
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?
As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )
Oh, crap; does any of this make sense?
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I'm sick of this internet BS too...everyone is E-this/E-that. I just want to read a book or something. Even my boss at work seems to be into this whole internet thing...he's always asking me, "Did you restart those webservers?" or "Hey..is that E4500 back up and working yet"/"Damnit, why has our bandwidth dropped?"
Personally, i don't know what he's talking about. I just took this job as a...i think they call me a SysAd or something...because they have a foosball table. Besides - no one has told me why they call the company i work for "Sun" anyway. I mean...it's really not that well lit around here anyways.
-FluX
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.
Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.
I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.