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How San Francisco Hazed a Tech Bro (backchannel.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In December 2013 San Francisco's tension with its surging tech class reached a breaking point. Protesters swarmed Google buses. They stood in front of Twitter carrying a coffin labeled "Affordable Housing." Google glassholes were on the rise. In the midst of this, the CEO and founder of AngelHack posted a rant about the homeless. "In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city," Greg Gopman wrote. He thought he was becoming a thought leader. Instead, the entire city turned against him. Reviled and suddenly unemployable, Gopman spent a quixotic year spinning up businesses to solve homelessness. His journey is weirdly emblematic of today's startup-fueled San Francisco.
This is what's wrong with society - you can't point out the elephant in the room without the elephant feigning offense and everyone hating you until you buy it peanuts.
I say we shoot the elephant.
Stuff Those Matters!
I say we take off and nuke the room from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
...
walking down Market from Embarcadero to Castro brings up a few areas which indeed do look like shit, not to mention the awkward times when a delirious hobo get in a trolley. SJW are probably gonna mod me down, but that would be one more fact they conveniently ignore...
It is a tough cause for most to get behind because of the exaggerated distance the good citizen finds between his fate and the street.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Talk PC, act sociopathic.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Hmmm so 'liberals' are responsible for urban decay.. has nothing to do with conservative 'job creators' creating all those jobs in China that used to be here..
Not to mention when I think of hellholes these days it's Kansas, Mississippi.. conservative led and falling apart because surprise surprise you can't cut taxes to nothing AND afford even minimal government. Let's not even talk about how they destroy their teachers.
The situation in SF really is, pretty bad.
I'm not even sure what the solution is anymore now that I lived here for a while and see it every day first hand.
I've lived in large Australian and New Zealand cities, but the homeless epidemic here is just on a level you couldn't believe or imagine without being here and seeing it for yourself.
Prices and rents won't ever go down again imo, and the homeless refuse to leave and only increase in number every ear... shit will get to a real breaking point before long.
Not sure I want to be here when that happens.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I used to live in San Francisco, and it used to be tolerant, interesting, welcoming, and a live-and-let-live kind of place. These days, it's a dirty dump, full of intolerant people and massive social problems. Of course, the homeless and drug addicts in the street aren't the cause, they are merely the symptom of a broken political culture and corrupt political class and machinery, a toxic mix of nouveau riche techies, public sector unions, retirees, and "social justice" activists. San Francisco demographics are against it: SF has largely destroyed its middle class, leaving the city to young party goers and retirees, neither of which are the kind of people who care about the long term health of their community. Having left SF, I just hope I don't have to bail these people out with my tax dollars, because SF will get a lot worse before it gets better. So, my recommendation: don't try to fix SF, just leave it. Unless you are a 20-something who likes to party, in which case put up with the stink and dirt for a few more years and have fun before leaving.
Stop voting the loons into office?
The homeless problem is really a mental health problem. We need to open a new generation of mental hospitals to give them the treatment they need.
these high paid tech folks still want and need services. They want teachers for their kids, police and fire dept to keep them safe. Housemaids to tidy up for them after an 80 hour work week and restaurant staff to cook food for them.
What they do not want, it seems, is to pay for all that. See, it's not as easy as "Just move out of San Fransico". When your poor you live where you're born. You don't just move to where the work is, and if you try you're taking a huge risk. You have no savings because you're never paid enough for savings.
What we have is servant class asking members of the merchant class to pay for their services. I don't see a problem with that.
But hey, bashing people over the head with the "PC" moniker never gets old, right? So go ahead. I suppose it's a hell of a lot easier than facing the unpleasant consequences of a modern service economy.
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Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Kansas is doing a lot better in terms of education than, say, California. And the high cost of living in places like California means that people tend be a lot better off elsewhere. For example, Alabama, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia come out ahead of California in terms of average salary once you adjust for cost of living.
It's people like you who simply don't want to face the facts about the failure of progressive and liberal economic policies and advocate more of doing something that keeps failing in practice.
but wouldn't the solution be to just give them homes to live in? I mean, we're the wealthiest country on plant earth. This shouldn't be a problem.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The whole article reads like a package dropped from a PR firm with the sole purpose of rehabbing this guys rep.
Call me when it runs in the Sacramento Bee or any paper that actually verifies what they print.
Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
I also notice that when the conservative led state governments cut all the budgets, those cities crumble.
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Yet our middle class is vanishing. Perhaps because the well paid manufacturing jobs that were shifted out to China were replaced with part time Wal-Mart jobs and public assistance.
Kansas is doing a lot better in terms of education than, say, California. And the high cost of living in places like California means that people tend be a lot better off elsewhere. For example, Alabama, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia come out ahead of California in terms of average salary once you adjust for cost of living.
Kansas is bleeding teachers. They've had so many teachers move out of the state they can only keep schools open by hiring unlicensed teachers to fill the gaps. The Kansas Supreme Court found the state's funding of schools to be unconstitutional. If that's your metric for "pretty good", don't bother replying, you have nothing worth saying.
Conservative economic voodoo policies have created the greatest wealth disparity this country has seen in it's entire history. Welcome to the Oligarchy you conservatives sold us into, but hey as long as we have cops doing genital checks outside public restrooms it was worth it for you I guess.
Send them to the middle of nowhere 100 miles east where they won't be bothering anyone.
Send them back to Las Vegas!
For years, the Las Vegas Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, Nevada's primary state mental facility, gave discharged patients a bus ticket out of town. Poor and mentally ill, they ended up homeless in cities around the country—especially in California, where more than 500 psychiatric patients were sent over a five year period.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/10/nevada-settles-busing-homeless-lawsuit-san-francisco/
No, you fucking liar.
The liberals felt that mental institutions were cruel, and set an entire generation of lunatics loose, who promptly became homeless.
You're an ignorant piece of shit rewriting history because the truth doesn't align with your agenda.
The U.S. Supreme Court closed all the hospitals.
I could only find one Supreme Court citation. That case restricted the states from locking up a non-dangerous person for no good reason. That's not the same as the Supreme Court ruling to close down the hospitals.
O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975), was a landmark decision in mental health law. The United States Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends. Since the trial court jury found, upon ample evidence, that petitioner did so confine respondent, the Supreme Court upheld the trial court's conclusion that petitioner had violated respondent's right to liberty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Connor_v._Donaldson
If that is true, it is because progressive state governments force rural communities to subsidize cities. It is a good thing to put a stop to that.
The middle income group has shifted from about 61% in 1970 to about 50% of US households in 2015. That isn't exactly "vanishing". But what it means is that the income distribution is getting longer tailed, mostly towards higher incomes. That is, the middle class is shrinking because more people are getting wealthier. That is a good thing.
No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.
The metric you advocate, namely teacher credentials and increases in spending has nothing to do with student performance, and everything with the financial interests of powerful political groups like teachers' unions. Thanks for demonstrating how fucked up progressive priorities actually are.
Good: it means more and more people are getting richer. And economics is not a zero-sum game; the fact that more people are getting richer and inequality is increasing doesn't hurt people at the bottom of the income scale.
That "Oligarchy" is precisely what people like you are advocating, with your Keynesian stimulus programs, intrusive social justice programs, and massive support for police and teacher unions. Fiscal conservatives like myself would love to see federal spending massively cut back and control be returned to local government and the people.
Having lived in both San Francisco and now back in my hometown of Wichita, KS, I always enjoy when I can talk about both places within the same topic.
As far as urban decay, guess where you'll find it? You'll find it in urban areas 100% of the time, per the very definition of "urban decay". To claim that local phenomenon are a direct result of local political leanings is to play very fast and loose with cause and effect. I can think of ten other hypotheses off the top of my head about the cause of urban decay, many of which don't factor politics in at all, and some of which actually involve inverting the cause-and-effect relationship of your own hypothesis that liberal politics cause it (maybe urban decay causes liberal politics?). To put it generously, it's utterly obtuse to say, "urban environments often include blighted environments, urban environments often have liberal-leaning voters, thus liberal politics cause urban decay, case closed."
I should also mention that these same urban areas do not consist completely of blighted, impoverished neighborhoods. Every city has it's good parts and its bad parts. But I'm sure the devoted partisan will find some way to assign a city's bad aspects to whichever wing of politics they don't like while simultaneously claiming that the good parts are actually somehow proof of the correctness of their preferred politics.
So on to Kansas. Right now in Kansas, yes the cost of living is very low, but the lower average income from what I see does not at all work out to the advantage of most people. The only people who can really take advantage of the low cost of living are the few people here such as myself who can work remotely and thus take advantage of the sorts of incomes offered by industries which don't even tend to locate here. Here in Wichita alone, in the midst of Governor Brownback's conservative libertarian "business friendly" policies in full swing, Boeing just up and packed its bags and left the state entirely, leaving huge swaths of longtime residents suddenly jobless. Where did those jobs go? Many places, including the supposedly anti-business liberal hellhole of Seattle. So it seems your simplistic reasoning falls apart at the slightest examination.
Kansas is a fairly deep red state, and right now Governor Brownback has a lower approval rating here than President Obama. That takes a lot of fucking up to achieve. Even my grandma and my great aunt are posting to Facebook with calls for his resignation at this point, and they both tend to espouse strong conservatism both socially and economically.
You do realize that the reason for closing them in the first place was because the ACLU went to bat and won a case for a patient of one of those hospitals. This is the same case that only allows people to be hospitalized against their will if they are a threat to themselves or others. Once people could check themselves out and the courts called it unlawful detainment, there was little left to do other than stop the spending.
People act like this hasn't already been hashed out. You cannot open a mental hospital and just put people in it. You cannot declare someone mentally ill and force them to get treatment. You cannot even force people getting treatment to take their medications. People act like this never happened because they have some boogeyman to blame and think all will be magically different if we spend money again.
This is a relatively common left-wing urban myth. The ACLU is still proud of ensuring the involuntarily committed were released out of the "institutions". That was in the 60s and 70s, before Reagan was President. You can't blame him for being governor of CA, either, as the number of patients in State mental hospitals went from 37,500 to 22,000 in the years before he took office.
So go complain to the left-wing ACLU and the academic psychiatrists who influenced the courts and the bureaucracy in the 60s and 70s to get them all out of mental hospitals, rather than simply assigning blame to people you don't like something they weren't responsible for.
Next you'll be telling us about how the right-wing is governing San Francisco into the group, despite Democrat-led City, County, State and Federal administrations....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Kansas is in a state of total collapse, including their education system. The entire state is in a freefall into the shitter, and it's been entirely run by conservative Republicans.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...
https://www.salon.com/2015/06/...
http://www.politicususa.com/20...
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Thanks.
They're kind of correct. What I can suggest is that you start here and work your way out:
https://www.aclu.org/aclu-hist...
Look for unbiased sources and actual documents. The Left wanted (and keep in mind the political spectrum was a bit messier at that point with lots of Southern Democrats and Compassionate Republicans at the time) to, you know, stop fucking abusing the mentally ill. It's a just idea.
Except, the States were pretty broke. They couldn't really afford to house all of them AND give them the treatment they deserved. So, they kinda, sorta, basically let anyone go who was able to say they wanted to be free and showed they understood the concept of freedom. It really wasn't much more precise than that unless they were an obvious danger to themselves and the community and they sometimes let them go too.
This kept going until a bunch of suits throughout the 80s and even into the very early 1990s.
And yeah, you need to keep in mind that the spectrum was a bit more muddled then. When I was younger we had Democrats, elected ones, on television saying that the niggers didn't need belong in school with the whites. (I'm part black.) And, to make it more salient, the citizenry was largely cheering them on. No, it really wasn't the majority who were wanting equal rights, that's another myth. It was a very vocal minority who were tearing shit up and making the white people look bad. It should be noted that some of that minority (that was tearing things up) was also white.
I was not born a full-class citizen of your country.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well, I don't know why Brownback is liked or not liked, and fiscal conservatism isn't necessarily politically popular because it causes short term pain even if it helps long term growth. Statistically, Kansas does better in terms of educational outcomes and fiscal situation. In terms of happiness, economic growth, and per capita GDP, they also seem comparable. I suggest looking up the statistics.
Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.
California is really at a disadvantage compared to Kansas. Everyone wants to live in California due to its climate while people live in Kansas because they do. Someone in Kansas who is mentally ill and homeless is going to have a tendency to move to California, more Liberal and a better climate. Someone in California who is down and out will not move to Kansas. Kansas ends up with a more mentally stable population that is not so demanding on services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Oh, and by the way, while I'm a pretty selfish prick, I'm not so self-centered as to have picture of me in "places", and brag about it. And I don't really care about /. reader either, their demographic is not the one I'm interested in when I travel. If I want to discuss with such "nerds" (between quotes, as most are more script-kiddy millennials than hardcore nerds) from all over the world, I save the jet fuel and directly go to 4chan.
Every city has it's good parts and its bad parts.
I agree with your comments, but wanted to point out that Finnish cities don't have bad parts. I guess it may have something to do with us being socialists over here.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is just an illustration. Economic studies have shown again and again that more economic freedom and smaller government translate into increased growth and wealth.
Which studies are those then?
Just a quick grab at some examples tells me you at talking shit. Eg New York and California are wealthy and are blue, the middle of the US is poor and blue.
If you also go outside the US, we see countries like Qatar or Norway leading the GDP PPP but they are hardly 'liberal'.
And is rightfully so.
See, you can actually run a mental health program without practically jailing people as it is evident in many places in the world.
Real life is overrated.
No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.
Hello from the UK. The last Labour government tried that. Actually they were obsessed with measurable metrics and installed them everywhere with severe penalties in terms of funding for failing. Sounds good, right? No it sucked, because the simplistic metrics that you and they proposed don't actually match the real world, and of course large-scale gaming went on.
So, no, those matrics you propose suck. And here's why:
1. Test scores ignore how hard the test is. An A-level in sociology is not the same as an A-level in further maths. An A-level from the "easy" exam board (this is what happens if you apply the free market to exams) is worth more to the school (better grades) but is worth less to the person that matters (the pupil). It is in the school's financial interest to direct the pupils to stuf that is bad for the pupils in order to optimize the school's metrics. That happened a lot.
2. Even if you can do proper scores, absolute scores are not the correct thing to optimize, because externalities dominate the results, not the schools themselves. The schools can make a difference but only so far. Definding all the "bad" inner city schools as punishment and giving the money to the successful suburban schools actually makes things worse even though you're diverting money from poorly performing places to better performing ones.
So, no, the world is vastly, vastly more complex than your excessively simplistic metrics. You think you have the solution, but trust me, you do not. It's been tried before and it failed. The only thing you want to improve is "quality of education". You cannot measure that easily. Any proxy measure is subject to gaming.
So now you need to change your metrics to "test scores on good subject with sufficiently informative tests". Suddenly you've gone from something simple, easy and wrong to something much much harder to measure. And you've still not corrected for external factors.
I also think your post is deeply foolish because you're trying to distill a complex and nuanced problem into one with simplistic solutions with an emphasis on "progressives" versus "conservatives". The world is so very much more complex than that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Gopman's first post "my love affair with SF dies a little" seemed ok (although his having "no clue" about why the homeless were there does smack of techie-arrogance). It was the drunk one after that that that did for him.
In times gone by it would've just been shouting in a bar. Afterwards he could've apologised, laughed it off, and put it down to too many beers. Now - it's affected his whole life. For those living their lives online, every utterance is juggling dynamite. It seems to me that this encourages rather a strict, lockstep approach to discourse. No room to blow off a little steam, everything you ever say will be "googled" for evermore. It's a terrifying prospect, in my view.
"image", "startups", "city tax break", "hackathon host and startup incubator", "photos on Facebook of cash", "Valleywag", "Huffington Post", "the flavor of disruption", "crowdfunding", "Burning Man"
I'm afraid that if you insist on living inside your own virtual reality you're eventually going to be confronted by the fact that the rest of the world neither cares about this parallel universe whose inflation is powered almost entirely by self-aggrandisement. Nor do they believe that warehousing your homeless in instagram-friendly workfare "decadomes" is a solution to the housing problem : it's simply a product of a mind that does not understand the lives of people in the real world and believes the answer is to sweep them under an attractive carpet.
I've no idea who this guy is, nor do I particulalry care about his fate, but the unquestioning belief in the article that the narcissism of the internet should naturally just carry over into real life is breathtakingly insane.
And yes, there are parts of Europe that are pretty bad. Yes, they include people shitting on the street. Err... Quite a bit worse, depending on where are - they can get pretty bad. Try not going to a tourist trap and actually seeing what's behind the curtain. Humans are humans, all the world around. Some have better circumstances than others but, for the most part, we're largely the same.
This is very much true for the countries below the Baltic Sea. Nordic Countries (and Estonia) are the best of Europe and among the best, Sweden is the worst with its 100% immigrant housing estates (mistakes were made in the 70's and 80's by Palme...) France is probably the worst among Western European countries with its (literally) no-go zones run by immigrant gangs.
Eastern Europe has its problems, but they're quite different from the rest of Europe. There's human trafficking and organized crime, but a lot less "crazy people". If you stay out of their way, they mostly stay out of yours.
So yes, Europe has its problems too. However, the most notable difference between Europe and the US I've noticed is homelessness. While some countries in Europe have severe homelessness related problems, like France, in the US you see people living on the street across the country. And not just a few, but an insane amount of people. In the Nordic Countries and Germany, for example, you'd be generally surprised to spot a homeless person actually living on the streets (even the usual drunkards have a home provided for them by the state or city). In the US, you can't take a turn without seeing endless amounts of homeless people.
-SR
I'm not sure that has much to do with cities. Quite a few presidential candidates raise some eyebrows and I don't see Hillary being declared persona non grata.
I'm starting to think Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho would be a better alternative here.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to blame our collective bowing to our one god (the economy) far more than any political side anywhere. "Wesayso knows best" does not lead to a healthy population. Now there's a kids' show many an adult could learn from.
You shouldn't jail us for killing our parents! We're orphans!"
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Are you not paying attention?
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
By "statistically", do you mean over the course of modern history? That's ridiculous and you know it. California is an economic powerhouse. Do you mean over the course of the past five years? That's nonsense and the article cites why.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So wait, this guy flew his asshole flag high, suffered some serious consequences, yet it's other people who need a lesson in what you laughably call "real life".
So yeah fuck those liberal progrssive commienazi millenials, they should be *forced* to associate with people they don't like because real life.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The President does not control the budget, Congress does.
Yes that is how its supposed to work but King Obama decided he did not like that, and if he could not get the debt ceiling raised so that Congress could fund his insane programs where to bad for the country then. Face it Congress and the President played a game of chicken and Obama won. That isn't virtuous behavior.
Before the Constitution was enacted there was real fear from the rural public that the stronger federal government was going to be able to use its taxing and money raising capabilities to abuse them. Its one of the things that lead to actions like Shay's rebellion.
One of the compromises to make the Constitution work was to put the power of the purse in the hands of the lower house, so that the nations rural population would in face have a greater representation when it came to appropriations and taxation than the population centers. People whine about the House not representing the majority by population, its not supposed to, the system is working as expected. The power of the purse was supposed to be a major component of the checks and balances system.
Its really supposed to be the case that the House can hold a gun to the Presidents head by not making money available The President does not control the budget, Congress does. for policy initiatives, inclusive of funding the military to put down a domestic rebellion or prosecute a foreign war! What Obama did is flip the script. His behavior (and that of many presidents on both sides of the isle before him) truly is tyrannical! If you think otherwise, than I highly suspect you are making excuses because "he is your guy" or you are willfully ignorant of our history and civic system.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The GPP is correct though, metrics used by the American political left are deranged.
No idea what metrics are proposed by the so-called "left". I was however claiming that this post's GGP's metrics were also deranged, or, if not deranged then demonstrably useless.
Lets keep cutting.
That's also deranged. What is it with people proposing simplistic, one dimensional solutions to incredibly complex problems?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That's basically what we were taught. You grant courtesy to everyone automatically, but not your respect. That has to be earned. Otherwise you'd be respecting some people who don't deserve it.
Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.
Unlike Kansas, California has been running a budget surplus for 4 years straight now. It now has a healthy "rainy day" fund and its financial situation is pretty much assured for the next 10 years or so.
Oh, and even California teachers are better than no teachers in Kansas.
The way you think the debt ceiling works is completely backwards. Congress sets the amount of taxes, the amount of spending, and the debt ceiling. The President spends the money, collects the taxes, and borrows if the latter is less than the former. If the country is at the debt ceiling when it comes time to borrow, the government can either default or choose to raise it. Congress was playing chicken with arithmetic, but arithmetic doesn't flinch. Congress creates the crisis, the President just informs them when it's imminent.
You can't reduce the debt without making the deficit a surplus, and you can't make the deficit a surplus without raising taxes or cutting spending. That's just math. I get that Congress is supposed to control the budget, I'm not saying it shouldn't be that way. What I am saying is that since it is that way, blaming the President for the debt is asinine. To reduce the debt all Congress has to do is pass a surplus budget, if the President vetoes it, then we can talk about that.
You also seem to be confused about the Great Compromise... It's the Senate that protects small states from large ones, not the House. The House is proportional (as close as possible given the discrete nature of Representatives): California has ~12% of the population and ~12% (53/435) of the Representatives, Wyoming has ~0.18% of the population, and about ~0.22% (1/435) of the Representatives. In spite of California having over 6000% of the population of Wyoming, they both get 2 Senators. Who's willfully ignorant of what now?
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.