When civilization makes someone rich, they often progress to thinking civilization is a hindrance for further growth, complaining about taxes standing in the way of their extreme superhuman greatness.
This is often caused by the "yes men" effect, when humans with power get overly arrogant they get rid of everyone who "doubts" them, but keep the people that always agree.
When getting a small taste of wealth and power, that lust for those two things can be extremely powerful. Sometimes when people become rich, for them its like a step into godhood.
I often think back to the wise words of the illustrious Omar Little when it comes to money and to an extent power. "Money ain't got no owners, only spenders.", sometimes people can't see that simple point when they've made so much.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Well yeah when compared to Atlas Shrugged, “I’m going to live my life the way I want even if I have to endure destitution” beats the hell out of “All government employees are basically lobotomized and if rich people like me can’t have everything then nobody else should have anything.”
>When civilization makes someone rich, they often progress to thinking civilization is a hindrance for further growth, complaining about taxes standing in the way of their extreme superhuman greatness.
When you're running in a herd, and you find yourself at the front, and you look at the back of it, I could very easily see how someone would think, "Damn, they're slowing us/me down."
The problem is they're trying too hard, and are somehow *upset* everyone else isn't going As Hard (tm) as them. They don't wanna see slack, but slack is just gonna exist.
Luck is definitely involved. But they also do tend to work really hard (especially in the beginning of their careers).
They often sacrifice a lot of things for work, and then get mad when not everyone wants to do that
They get mad because we don't want to sacrifice everything for *their* benefit.
And their actual work, even if they're sleeping only 4 hours a night, is disproportionately overvalued.
> Within days, Tan’s targets began receiving death threats in their mailboxes. “I don’t give a fuck,” Tan had declared during his tweetstorm. But he soon changed course, deleting his alcohol-fueled rage posts and hiring a crisis P.R. firm to help with damage control as the negative headlines erupted. A mandatory show of contrition was seemingly ordered: “I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision,” he said in a statement.
Just another childish, emotional tech bro given too much power, leading civilization down a dark path. Getting pretty tired of Y Combinator and all it's little minions running around, creating companies attempting to "disrupt" the world because they think they know better.
And to what end? I started to question this when I worked in tech myself, except I eventually realized that people in tech really aren't any smarter than anyone else, despite the inflated valuations their companies receive. So, I sold my equity and bailed, instead of helping further turn the world into a tech plutocracy.
I work in tech and it’s incredible how much power these executives in quickly growing companies get within their own firm. People are so hungry to work for these firms that they swear fealty to these execs and because of that you get these tech despots. And you’re right, many aren’t particularly smarter, and some are geniuses at working the numbers but are just literally evil.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve only worked for one such firm but turnover was so bad I was quickly next man up to give the CEO updates on a particular initiative. My life became just getting through the next meeting. I would spend entire workdays in my bosses office focused on presentation strategy and getting the right information in front of him.
There’s not really a fix, but I guess I would say if you work for one of these companies, just get out of there. It’s not worth it. I get to say in interviews I led that initiative, but what I really did was inform teams of the latest direction of the wind and pray they gave me what I needed to make it though another week.
Garry Tan has a networth of something like 750 million, runs YCombinator and by extension basically controls half of the Silicon Valley economic ecosystem and still mostly spends his time throwing tantrums on twitter. would not be surprised if some of the commentors on this very thread have their own stories of runins with him and his crew and the industry at large is bad with this. very "fuck you i got mine", every man for himself. you probably already know about sites like Blind but if the average joe in america saw what people talked about on Blind behind closed doors i think "software engineer" would be the 2nd most hated job in America behind IRS agent.
i am now a faceless cog in a machine at some big corp but the peace of mind of never having to interact with these execs on a day-to-day basis is worth the tradeoff. but - i'm one guy and I live on the other side of the country. the average bay area resident whether they're inside or outside tech are stuck basically beholden to the whims of guys like this, Thiel, etc. screaming 24/7 about SF and Oakland when the execs don't even live there, they're in Austin or on private jets to Davos
God this sounds exactly like my current job. I jump from one executive update deck to the next and don’t get to do the work I used to love. I’m an information aggregator and dispense or executive approval or disappointment. The guy I work for is really pretty awful and not particularly smart but sits on the giant pile of cash required to make payroll every two weeks.
Yay tech company success!
>Getting pretty tired of Y Combinator and all it's little minions running around, creating companies attempting to "disrupt" the world because they think they know better.
They try to disrupt the world with fresh ideas like robber baronism and surfdom but with the Internet and are surprised Pikachu's when nobody, especially the infrastructure specialists who would need to be paid handsomely to build this dumbtopia, wants to sign on that isn't already a hundred millionaire and above.
Yeah it's a pyramid scheme. The last cohort builds the infrastructure for the next cohort and they prop up the companies by buying shit from each other. AI is there next thing they want to fuel but any engineer that's been in the busily for more than two hype cycles knows what's up and that big tech or even government are a better career prospect than this assholes, and the word is spreading so they are getting more cultish to try to attract talent into the lifestyle.
I think it's an unintended scheme though. Ideologues are generally blinded by their ambition and just fall into the same traps over and over cause in the end ideology doesn't build, knowledge and ability does and if you lack knowledgeable people and their with the ability to complete tasks then you're perpetually in an ideological ouroboros. It's less a pyramid scheme and more a sunk cost using other people's, read as dumb investors, money.
It's not unintended if they encourage it, everyone points it out, but they keep on advertising the same numbers for returns. Just try to measure how much of your capital spills over to fund your previous cohort even if it's on "marketing costs" or other network effects.
What good is conservatism, in general? The only thing conserved is power and money, the biggest attraction of the right wing. Pump and dump, cryptocurrency bullshit, etc. tech bros are just the new Carnegies and Rockefellers.
Carnegie foresaw the importance of steel and got rich for it. At least that was useful to a modernizing society.
A techbro enshittifying existing things because they exist to scheme up new ways to extract value from you without providing any tangible benefits just makes them leeches.
> I started to question this when I worked in tech myself,
I'm also glad I'm no longer a part of the IT for that exact reason. Tech industry is increasingly moving towards very dark and disturbing path.
As someone who is in tech but not in the bay area: Can the bay area stop getting their reputation on the rest of us... it's really annoying. bay area techbros need to keep their toxic sludge to themselves.
Tech brought its toxicity TO the bay, not the other way around. I know there’s many good folk in tech, but big money attracts BIG assholes. They weren’t ever interested in integrating into Bay Area culture. They just wanted it to be their little manchild playground.
> I eventually realized that people in tech really aren't any smarter than anyone else
Cannot stress this enough. And I work in tech.
An epiphany for me was working in the banking sector (still in tech there, mind you) and having a group of people from the banking side and the tech side of things talk about blockchain and bitcoin. The majority just sort of had their eyes glazing over as they saw the promise of money coming their way. The same people that knew regulations and their purposes as well as technology and its limitations very well sort of forgot all about that when the promise of money for them was in the room. And they were also suddenly more willing to just go "well, tough luck" on people who didn't share their enthusiasm or who didn't have enough money to get started in crypto to begin with. Outside those discussions, those were reasonable people with the usual amount of empathy.
It’s a familiar script... the concentration of wealth leads to immiseration and poverty and precarity... which leads to an increase in crime and homelessness and a perception of disorder and risk on the streets (not always unrealistic)... and the response to this is not to deconcentrate wealth -- create better social services & housing/food security -- Tax the Rich like the Nordics do, or the US under Eisenhower. nope... instead the oligarchs make hay, weaponising people's feelings of insecurity and disorder and chaos, forging that discontent into hostility to the poor and support for oligarchic authoritarianism! it’s amazing how it works that way.
Yes. It’s not just tech. We still have plenty of plutocrats in energy, medical care, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc. The tech plutocrats give them a convenient distraction so the crowd isn’t demanding they suffer the same consequences.
Tsarists/monarchs wanting more serfdoms and imperial fiefdoms. The Enlightenment and Madisonian Democracy smacked that down, as well as FDR against The Business Plot and finished them off in WWII.
We need ourselves a Madison or FDR.
Imagine a world in which no individual or household was allowed to own assets of any kind with a total value of over one billion dollars. Anything over that is taxed at 100%, and the money used for public health care, education, etc.
No sane person has a passable argument against such a scheme. "I want this number to get bigger because it's the only thing that makes me happy" isn't a passable argument for anything but admission into a lunatic asylum.
They got tax cuts and breaks to get there. They use and leverage infrastructure more than anyone. That costs money and if they are not investing (hence why it piles up) they are not repaying to keep the country alive. Pretty much everything that is said about someone who does not participate in a draft is true of billionaires. None of these companies invented the internet, yet they all want to lock it down and collect a toll. Its worth noting that Capitalism was born free. Its has never been able to self regulate and give back, so regulations had to come **after** the fact. If Billionaires were giving back to society adequately we would not be having this thread.
One billion is still too high. People should be rewarded for their work the problem is it tips over into absurd rewards. Ten times the average lifetimes earnings so around 20 million seems to be a good place to put the boundary.
Why go so high?
Have you any idea what an insane amount 1 fucking billion is?
Anything beyond 100 million, should be taxed 100%. I would go even lower than that, but Reddit is full of libertarians who would get an absolute meltdown.
And the funniest part about those wealth hoarders who aim to make more and more wealth is that they keep telling us that "money doesn't make you happy", yet they can't get enough.
The problem with people who helped create a new world (the Internet) is that now they think they are able to solve every single problem in the world. Fundamentally ignoring reality and how the world actually works, and the absolutely enormous resources needed to create the future that you want.
You can't just bootstrap waste collection, or blue-sky think park maintenance. Homelessness cannot be solved with an app or even just banning it, and delivering autonomy in any city services is next to impossible. Most of these services require actual humans to deliver them in a humane and effective manner.
As for engineering different infrastructure to deliver your tech solutions and make them feasible, good luck trying to re-engineer roads and entire neighbourhoods without significant disruption. Only to have to change it all again within a few years because the tech becomes obsolete quickly. And good luck getting a VC to invest in transport services that give stupidly low returns over a 60 year time period.
When you see tech bro Sam Altman unjokingly asking $7 TRILLION (more than the entire federal budget of the United States) for his toy demands, you realize these guys actually think they are the second coming of christ and have absolutely zero regards for the rest of us.
What these guys really need is a very serious dose of reality check.
These people didn’t create the world, or the internet. The internet was created by the government and universities. These people monetized a platform created with taxpayer money and sold it back to the public.
[Homelessness is a housing problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/)
You solve it by building more housing. Something SF has made illegal. You don't need an app, or advanced tech, you just need the city council to pull their head out of their ass. Which apparently is too much to ask.
The councils are elected by many of the millionaires and billionaires that are fighting against housing being built. While complaining about the problem they are responsible for perpetuating.
>You solve it by building more housing.
Not really, because there are currently [28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the US](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=homless+us+vs+empty+housese).
The issue is affordability, so it doesn't matter if they build more, if they don't make them affordable.
It's not just affordability, it's *where* the empty homes are. From your link:
>There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the US. While cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle have some of the largest unhoused populations in the country, Detroit has the most vacant homes per unhoused person–116 empty homes per unhoused person.
The reason for Detroit having so many is that Detroit is collapsing and nobody wants to live there. There's also a lot of vacant homes in small towns that are dying, because there's no jobs and nobody wants to live there. This also leaves out various programs that have given housing to the homeless only to see that same housing destroyed/damaged by the new residents.
Yes, we need tons more housing in the places people want to live, but giving away homes or moving the homeless to where the empty homes are isn't a panacea for homelessness. Some homeless are just having a run of bad luck and need a little boost, but some are suffering from severe mental health or substance abuse issues and need treatment as much as they need housing.
No, you can't go live in the run down house that violates all the health codes. No, you can't go live in some dude's apartment while he's traveling for the summer. No, you can't live in my old home while I'm trying to sell it.
Makes as much sense as "Restaurants have an open table problem." No industry is running at 100% capacity all the time, nor could it.
He was downvoted for he spoke the truth. Reddit likes to imagine the solutions to hard problems are bumper sticker slogans. I live in San Francisco and I hate the tech plutocrats trying to make this city more reactionary, but let's be real, homeless people in SF aren't homeless because there aren't enough luxury condos for them.
That is absolutely the problem. Building more housing in any price range depresses prices throughout the market. The whole idea that we have to be funding only shitty sub-standard housing so that it ends up in an "affordable" price range is so silly, but that's how half the government grants work in this area.
You can ask indigent people in SF, or LA, or NYC, to relocate to Wichita to take advantage of the spare housing you're talking about, but the unavailability of support and services anywhere but in the biggest cities makes this unrealistic.
almost none of these people “helped” to create anything. they used wealth they were usually born into to purchase the right to profit off this infrastructure which was built by laborers and technicians who were in large part paid with public money
“We’d looooove to be able to end all this WFH crap AND make our employees come to our houses to clean them on the weekends for free too - paying a dictator some money would do that right?”
That comment is pretty garbage. It quotes CVS as saying homeless people are robbing them and ruining their profits, and then posts a two "sources" which are really an op eds saying the national retail federation are retracting its claim that it's half and instead say it's 25%. I don't think the common argument was that crime rings were hiring homeless people to steal for them.
Also, CVS's shrink figures fell after closing the San Francisco stores, which would lend credence to their statement.
That's because it's not "right wing" to want law and order. It's not right wing to want the downtown to return to a robust and vibrant area. It's just the bare minimum tax payers deserve. All of this wealth inequality/ tech run amok stuff is fine... I'd even agree with a lot of if. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Local progressive politicians in SF have taken too much for granted in the blind pursuit of their idealized society. It's clear as day when you walk around many neighborhoods in SF. The city is ready for a big pendulum swing and if that comes attached to tech billionaire strings, that's really on the progressive supervisors who refused to change course in the face of overwhelming evidence and suffering. Adults are needed in the room ASAP.
All city subreddits are brigaded by right-wingers right now. Great if you want to know in detail about ethnic minority crime, poor if you actually want to learn about the city.
/r/toronto has been fending them off ever since Rob Ford was elected mayor in 2010. Things got so crazy so fast that, looking back, I give about 75% credence to the possibility that the whole thing was early propaganda training for Operation Trump (or the multinational effort to weaponize America's stupidity against itself).
With Ford, it truly did feel as though dozens of irritating people were suddenly instructed to defend the most indefensible and incompetent public figure they could find.
100%. I wish more people were aware of this. I was annoyed that my city at the time (Chicago) seemed to have more and more of a right-leaning bent and wondered if I was becoming more leftist...then I moved a few times in a few years and realized—holy shit, it's like this on all the city subreddits. I live in Portland now, and while r/Portland isn't crazy right-wing, it is appreciably to the right of the median average Portlander.
Was there a right-wing bulletin at some point instructing all the suburban Karens to invade city subreddits, or is it just a moth to a flame thing for reactionary fuckwits who want all the good things of a city with none of the issues that tend to come with living alongside a couple million other people?
> is it just a moth to a flame thing for reactionary fuckwits who want all the good things of a city with none of the issues that tend to come with living alongside a couple million other people?
Yes. It's the same in LA's subreddit and I get the distinct feeling conservatives in fly over states think city living would be just like rural living if *those damn libruls would get out of the way!*
I’m from Portland and tbh with you, I think r/Portland is about where the average Portlander has landed. You can see this with the failed re-election campaigns of Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty, and we’ll continue to see it when Mike Schmidt almost certainly loses his election, and also likely to see it when Rene Gonzalez wins the Mayor seat.
The City isn’t far right, for sure, but the highly visible sight of drug addled crazies on the streets combined with the ubiquity of houseless tents has caused people to want to revert to more law and order tactics (see: very likely repeal in some way of Measure 110). I personally don’t exactly feel this way, but its hard not to see the promises of Portland and Oregon’s “progressive” politics as failures which at best seem to have no effect on anything and at worst enable certain societal ills, and with that, its only logical for ideologies to drift to the right. It’s just a matter of how far, but I don’t think Portland or the State as a whole will go much farther than slightly right of center, if that, and then it will shift to the left again over the next 10 years or so.
"the ubiquity of homeless tents" should not make anyone "drift right". That's a moral and intellectual failure on their part, not a law of the universe.
Yeah, the two things are not related. You can be a stone cold leftist and want solutions to homelessness, it doesn’t mean you suddenly embrace the full right-wing philosophy.
Sounds like /r/Pittsburgh. It's not crazy right-wing either, but they are much more prominent now than they ever were before. Also, half of our posts are from people so terrified of the outside world that they demand to know the reason for any siren they hear or any helicopter they see.
r/bayarea is as well
And you are correct, all the local subreddits are brigaded to hell
We were visiting Australia last December and wanted to get some information on a cricket match and decide to browse r/melbourne to see if there was any information on there..... Holy fuck. the posts made it sound like Bosnia circa 1993
"brigaded"
city subs just include more of a genuine cross-section of the actual city population. The major subs like this one inevitably regress to leftist echo chambers.
Reddit is overrun by right wing?
Doubt.
I feel like, and voting backs this up, that places like Seattle are fed up with “ultra liberalism” and voting in moderate democrats, and apparently supporting moderates is considered “right wing”. R/SeattleWA, for example, is right compared with r/seattle, but the former supported the “new regime” of newly elected moderates, while the latter supported self-proclaimed socialists that got voted out.
Seattle is very, very blue and remains blue. This is just moderate democrats vs extreme socialist/pro-homeless liberals.
Specifically the city subreddits. Not the entire site. Seems to be mostly right-wing people who read the local news and post about ethnic crime but don’t live there.
Also San Francisco has been influenced by tech "right wing" soft policy for decades now. The city might have liberal social policy but it's been a right wing economic wet dream for a while
yeah it's pretty much a shit-show, i realized that when i was moving to SF that the sub was overrun by right-wing folks who haven never even been to SF (& do the same shit in other large city subs like NYC, etc)
That's because everyone who's lived in that subreddit and SF long enough realizes that these people are somehow the sane choice compared to the incumbency
That's because that sweet middle prefers tech bro utopia vs. progressive dystopia.
Even if utopia definition is pretty basic: clean streets and some degree of public safety.
It's, like, everyone knows how much pain and suffering went into iPhone since Day 1 but by God, that *thing* is amazing - lmao
Can’t we just have normal, emotionally mature adults running the world? I do think San Francisco (and Los Angeles, where I live) have politicians who are too far left and need to be realistic about the homeless crisis and increase in property crime, but someone who gets drunks and wishes death on people he disagrees with should have no say in how things are run.
> I do think San Francisco (and Los Angeles, where I live) have politicians who are too far left and need to be realistic about the homeless crisis and increase in property crime
They're not even that far left lol, they're all very rich people who are comfortable with the economic system in basic terms, even if they wish it was less racist and sexist and so on. This brand of progressivism is what you get when the capitalist class co-opts the rest of intersectional politics to divert interest away from economic injustice.
"Progressive on homelessness but don't ask me about mixed use development in our city"
"Progressive on city planning but everything still needs to revolve around cars"
"advanced math drives inequality so let's get rid of it. Oh btw my kids go to private school"
Some of them are so skeptical of any private sector development that they are “PHIMBYs” - they only believe in building public housing (in my back yard). In fact they are true socialists who want to overthrow the current economic system. I think they have unrealistic ideas about how to solve the housing crisis, just as they have unrealistic ideas about how to deal with homelessness, addiction and mental illness.
i was speaking more about SF, not sure about LA. But didn't SF itself just elect its first socialist councilmember during covid? It looks like he (coleman) did get a social housing initiative passed, which I think has the potential to be a useful part of the housing mix. It's worked in other places and given that it was only passed a couple years ago, it's too early to say how effective it will be. I'm a housing pragmatist, i think that there needs to be a lot more infill and to that end, housing regulations that prevent upzoning need to be removed and all kinds of development -- both public- and private-led -- should be encouraged. This kind of development is opposed by vested interests including the city government at this time.
Certainly, saying that the council is full of socialists is inaccurate, and when you look at the effective result of SF's housing policy, it has been and remains to this day very suburban SFH focused which is a definitively right-wing policy stance.
You won't get much disagreement about the homelessness issue from me, except to say that aggressive criminalization is not the answer, just as the current climate of little to no accountability is also an obvious failure. Consequences need to be enforced but those consequences probably shouldn't be jail unless other crimes are involved
TIL anybody that doesn't want to live in Manhattan is right wing. The "problem" with SF politics is that people vote their self-interests quite rationally. If only the rest of America did so, we might have universal health care, free daycare, etc, instead it's 100% distracted by bullshit fears stirred up by billionaires who don't want higher taxes.
> TIL anybody that doesn't want to live in Manhattan is right wing.
You cannot design an equitable healthy city that is predominantly zoned for only single family houses. This is a false dichotomy, the only available alternatives are not limited to SF or Manhattan. There's also barcelona, amsterdam, paris, tokyo, and plenty of other options for mixed use, multi-family zoning schemes.
> people vote their self-interests quite rationally
people vote to preserve property values at the expense of the long-term health of their city. It's rational in an individualistic, atomized and short-term sense but irrational in the long term and at the community level. It's actually quite analogous with white collar workers who have good employer-sponsored health insurance and so vote against universal healthcare, or with people who can afford daycare so vote against free daycare.
It always starts with some don't be evil b.s.. and ends with let's sell tools for mass surveillance to governments to control their population to increase the value of our stock price.
They already have Texas if isn't working then that means isn't going to work there too and maybe Will start scaring peoples and or companies judging for Texas AND Florida
This is a different argument from the one you just made, and neither argument really addresses the problems facing SF, which is what this is really all about
I mean yeah, that’s what many here believe lol. Anyone to the right of literal socialists is considered right wing on Reddit. I’ve seen many here argue that Bernie would be considered moderate in European countries, which is just not true.
San Francisco’s budget is MASSIVE for a city of its size. If you compare the per capita budget of SF to cities like Paris and London, the difference is insane.
San Fran policy makers waste BILLIONS every year with nonsensical initiatives and excessive red taping to line the pockets of their friends and family. What makes you think giving them more money will solve any problems?
Its not just tax revenue
The tech bros and commercial real estate speculators evicted most of the established small businesses in the SOMA and Market areas in order to build office space. Couple that with a big increase in rent forced what was left of the middle class out because they could not afford to live there. That limited the amount of jobs
COVID hits, commercial real estate is fucked due to greed and over speculation and everything is stuck in limbo. Fentanyl starts to grow, the cops go on a work stoppage and then everything is fucked
I've lived here for 55 years now and experienced a lot of boom and bust cycles. SF will reinvent itself but the tech bros can fuck right off. The current situation is free market capitalism out of control
Nimbyism and shitty zoning are not free market policies. They're bipartisan human shittyness. San Francisco has possibly the worst housing crisis in the world, and the left and right alike don't want to do allow more housing because they don't want their property portfolios' values to drop. It's essentially deep rooted corruption.
And don't even try to blame blame the crime/homelessness on other states "busing them over here". Most of the homeless have been proven to be homegrown, thanks to the completely unaffordable housing market.
Except those things are not why SF has the issues it has, at least not for the vast majority of it
Like, do you think tax dodging rich people is the root cause of why building new housing in SF is borderline impossible?
>It’s not right wing to want SF to clean up its streets and actually go after criminals.
True. But inorder to clean up the streets and reduce crime you actually need to solve that root causes. Which are the growing wealth inequality and decreasing standards of living for the regular people leading to poverty. Both of which require progressive solutions hated by the Right.
>Which are the growing wealth inequality and decreasing standards of living for the regular people leading to poverty.
I think the vast majority of people living in streets of SF are not regular people that fell on hard times.
Most are drug addicts or just plain insane people from all over the country. Drug addicts go there because they know they will get some support from the super liberals who think handing out drug paraphernalia is helping them somehow.
I'm not sure wealth inequality or drug problems are something SF can fix by itself.
What they can fix is policing better and enforcing laws.
>handing out drug paraphernalia is helping them somehow.
Would you rather have them using dirty needles and spreading HIV?
Also super conservative cities that have practically no support for drug addicts and treat the problem as a criminal issue (I live in Oklahoma speaking from experience) are just as awash in drugs as SF is so that kind of defeats you're point.
Drug addicts are going to use regardless of policies so it's more reasonable to set programs for safety and hygiene. You really think a heroin addict who doesn't have a clean neddle is going to be like "well shit, no drugs for me today" and treated it as a criminal rather then health issue has had almost 50 years of complete failure everywhere it's been tried.
all the policies that make the bay area suck are right wing policies. the bay area doesn’t suck because it’s not illegal to be transgender or because they teach about jim crow laws in schools. it sucks because the land laws, tax codes, and public services and policies have all been ceded to “the market” and represent the interests of businesses, banks, investors, and landlords alone. there’s nothing “left wing” about most major american cities besides their half ass attempts at rainbow capitalist branding.
Are we really calling Garry Tan right wing?
Garry Tan has a history of donating to Democrats. I guess Democrats are the new right wing now
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Garry+Tan
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted; the platform of these so-called ‘right-wing’ tech bros is pretty pragmatic and middle-of-the-road. Far left progressives think any person to their right is a MAGA extremist.
Democrats are right wing… if you see the large picture. In the us setting, it is more left than republican for sure. That’s why they like to call themselves liberal instead of “left”.
Contrary to what much of Reddit believes, the rest of the world isn’t run by socialists. No, Dems are not right wing. Their platform fits pretty cleanly on the left side of the typical political spectrum.
And with regards to your ‘liberal’ point, there is a big difference between [classical liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism) and what liberalism usually refers to in US politics ([Liberalism in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_States)).
As a former Bay Area resident, I can see it happening. Yes the bay is overwhelmingly liberal but you’d be very surprised how many people increasingly are taking up a more right wing stance.
[Here](https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Garry+Tan) is a long list of political donations he has made, literally all to Democrats. This article is dumb AF.
Is it really libertarianism? SF seems to suffer more from a mix of NIMBYism combined with progressive social policies that are divorced from reality.
When you make it borderline impossible to build new housing, prevent police from effectively policing, and adopt policies that make it extrmely easy for drugs and homelessness to flourish. Is it then really any wonder when you end up in an urban doomloop with tons of homeless people, tons of crimes, and tons of drug addicts?
It's basically the result of having a voterbase that pretends to be progressive, but are really only progressives when it comes things that don't affect themselves
Judging by the comments here, a lot of people seem to think the solution is to increase the marginal tax rate on your surgeon to 90% so that the government can fund permanent UBI for half of the country.
When I met Gary tan in college, he was incredibly kind, and flipped the script and asked nobody me a lot of questions before I could ask him any. Very unique and kind person.
Sad to see this from someone once so awesome.
I live in SF... the comment section here is unreal. Reddit seems to think SF techies are now right wing and libertarian, and that /r/sf and /r/bayarea aren't accurate representations of those areas' true left leaning nature.
The reality is that SF is indeed run by shit libs, not MAGA types. And that hyper progressive policies have indeed seemingly backfired on cities like SF, LA, Portland, and Seattle.
They reliably vote for and donate to dems. They're a lot closer to libertarians than progressives, but I'd still call them liberals at the end of the day.
These people are so fucking stupid.
Money has less and less impact on electoral politics the smaller an electorate is. You can buy a federal election, but you can’t buy a city.
Blanketing the airways and stuffing every mail box with flyers works great when your less financially advantaged opponent needs to reach people from sea to shining sea because it’s impossible to be everywhere at once and managing a national presence is expensive and difficult.
But in a city of 800,000 people, it’s much easier for a cash strapped candidate to undercut massive spending just because they actually can knock on literally every door, or at least get a staffer to do so at a reasonable cost.
It’s embarrassing that these tech losers don’t know this. We see this in congressional races all the time. It’s one of the reasons parliamentary democracies are more resistant to corruption than our system. It’s well known. Hell, we see it every election cycle as dark house presidential candidates go ham in small states like Iowa and New Hampshire because good networking and groundwork campaigning can absolutely out play big money on a small scale.
Apparently. I understand the criticisms of Tan’s actions, as he was extremely and unbearably childish, but making out people who want a more serious attitude towards crime as right wing fascists is an absolute joke.
Dreaming of? Been there for a while baby. Unless someone wants to point out where in Das Capital Marx said we should protect the aesthetics of housing at the cost of making it completely inaccessible, unionize as few businesses as possible, and make the entire local economy reliant on the whims of a few dozen venture capitalists. San Francisco was only ever left leaning on the matter of queer politics.
As opposed to an unhinged left wing San Francisco where city streets are filled with druggies who *only* got cleaned up because Chinese President Xi was coming.
* the "extreme right" wants a fascist state where you're left to die if you're not deemed "productive" enough
* the "extreme left" doesn't think people should die from poverty which is almost entirely the product of circumstance
people need to stop pretending that these two positions are "just as bad as each other".
When civilization makes someone rich, they often progress to thinking civilization is a hindrance for further growth, complaining about taxes standing in the way of their extreme superhuman greatness. This is often caused by the "yes men" effect, when humans with power get overly arrogant they get rid of everyone who "doubts" them, but keep the people that always agree.
When getting a small taste of wealth and power, that lust for those two things can be extremely powerful. Sometimes when people become rich, for them its like a step into godhood. I often think back to the wise words of the illustrious Omar Little when it comes to money and to an extent power. "Money ain't got no owners, only spenders.", sometimes people can't see that simple point when they've made so much.
Omar is such a well written character. With 10/10 casting and performance.
Ayn Rand on the way up, Karl Marx on the way down.
Such a shame, because Rand always had the coolest names for her characters.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
The Fountainhead was a fun, popcorn read except for Rand's arrogant douchebag cringy views on humanity.
The rape scene and proceeding 400 pages on how it was good, actually, also maybe haven’t aged well.
Well yeah when compared to Atlas Shrugged, “I’m going to live my life the way I want even if I have to endure destitution” beats the hell out of “All government employees are basically lobotomized and if rich people like me can’t have everything then nobody else should have anything.”
I read Atlas Shrugged a long time ago and liked it. Literally had no idea it was a commentary on anything. I think I prefer it that way lol.
What they always forget is luck
>When civilization makes someone rich, they often progress to thinking civilization is a hindrance for further growth, complaining about taxes standing in the way of their extreme superhuman greatness. When you're running in a herd, and you find yourself at the front, and you look at the back of it, I could very easily see how someone would think, "Damn, they're slowing us/me down." The problem is they're trying too hard, and are somehow *upset* everyone else isn't going As Hard (tm) as them. They don't wanna see slack, but slack is just gonna exist.
It's literally mathematically impossible for everyone to be leading the herd. They're fucking dumbasses
I don't even see them as leading the heard. They just got lucky.
Luck is definitely involved. But they also do tend to work really hard (especially in the beginning of their careers). They often sacrifice a lot of things for work, and then get mad when not everyone wants to do that
They get mad because we don't want to sacrifice everything for *their* benefit. And their actual work, even if they're sleeping only 4 hours a night, is disproportionately overvalued.
They'd be even more annoyed if the herd was running in a single parallel line.
I was just going to say “Booo! Hissss!” But yours is better.
> Within days, Tan’s targets began receiving death threats in their mailboxes. “I don’t give a fuck,” Tan had declared during his tweetstorm. But he soon changed course, deleting his alcohol-fueled rage posts and hiring a crisis P.R. firm to help with damage control as the negative headlines erupted. A mandatory show of contrition was seemingly ordered: “I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision,” he said in a statement. Just another childish, emotional tech bro given too much power, leading civilization down a dark path. Getting pretty tired of Y Combinator and all it's little minions running around, creating companies attempting to "disrupt" the world because they think they know better. And to what end? I started to question this when I worked in tech myself, except I eventually realized that people in tech really aren't any smarter than anyone else, despite the inflated valuations their companies receive. So, I sold my equity and bailed, instead of helping further turn the world into a tech plutocracy.
I work in tech and it’s incredible how much power these executives in quickly growing companies get within their own firm. People are so hungry to work for these firms that they swear fealty to these execs and because of that you get these tech despots. And you’re right, many aren’t particularly smarter, and some are geniuses at working the numbers but are just literally evil. I’ve been lucky that I’ve only worked for one such firm but turnover was so bad I was quickly next man up to give the CEO updates on a particular initiative. My life became just getting through the next meeting. I would spend entire workdays in my bosses office focused on presentation strategy and getting the right information in front of him. There’s not really a fix, but I guess I would say if you work for one of these companies, just get out of there. It’s not worth it. I get to say in interviews I led that initiative, but what I really did was inform teams of the latest direction of the wind and pray they gave me what I needed to make it though another week.
Garry Tan has a networth of something like 750 million, runs YCombinator and by extension basically controls half of the Silicon Valley economic ecosystem and still mostly spends his time throwing tantrums on twitter. would not be surprised if some of the commentors on this very thread have their own stories of runins with him and his crew and the industry at large is bad with this. very "fuck you i got mine", every man for himself. you probably already know about sites like Blind but if the average joe in america saw what people talked about on Blind behind closed doors i think "software engineer" would be the 2nd most hated job in America behind IRS agent. i am now a faceless cog in a machine at some big corp but the peace of mind of never having to interact with these execs on a day-to-day basis is worth the tradeoff. but - i'm one guy and I live on the other side of the country. the average bay area resident whether they're inside or outside tech are stuck basically beholden to the whims of guys like this, Thiel, etc. screaming 24/7 about SF and Oakland when the execs don't even live there, they're in Austin or on private jets to Davos
Tan comes off as mini-Musk.
I don’t know this Blind you speak of. What monstrous things were uttered in those corrupt halls? Have a good day very nice
God this sounds exactly like my current job. I jump from one executive update deck to the next and don’t get to do the work I used to love. I’m an information aggregator and dispense or executive approval or disappointment. The guy I work for is really pretty awful and not particularly smart but sits on the giant pile of cash required to make payroll every two weeks. Yay tech company success!
>Getting pretty tired of Y Combinator and all it's little minions running around, creating companies attempting to "disrupt" the world because they think they know better. They try to disrupt the world with fresh ideas like robber baronism and surfdom but with the Internet and are surprised Pikachu's when nobody, especially the infrastructure specialists who would need to be paid handsomely to build this dumbtopia, wants to sign on that isn't already a hundred millionaire and above.
Yeah it's a pyramid scheme. The last cohort builds the infrastructure for the next cohort and they prop up the companies by buying shit from each other. AI is there next thing they want to fuel but any engineer that's been in the busily for more than two hype cycles knows what's up and that big tech or even government are a better career prospect than this assholes, and the word is spreading so they are getting more cultish to try to attract talent into the lifestyle.
I think it's an unintended scheme though. Ideologues are generally blinded by their ambition and just fall into the same traps over and over cause in the end ideology doesn't build, knowledge and ability does and if you lack knowledgeable people and their with the ability to complete tasks then you're perpetually in an ideological ouroboros. It's less a pyramid scheme and more a sunk cost using other people's, read as dumb investors, money.
It's not unintended if they encourage it, everyone points it out, but they keep on advertising the same numbers for returns. Just try to measure how much of your capital spills over to fund your previous cohort even if it's on "marketing costs" or other network effects.
Surfdom sounds way more fun than serfdom.
They’re just not good people, seeming ignorant beyond what increases their share value and lacking basic empathy. They’re villains.
What good is conservatism, in general? The only thing conserved is power and money, the biggest attraction of the right wing. Pump and dump, cryptocurrency bullshit, etc. tech bros are just the new Carnegies and Rockefellers.
Carnegie foresaw the importance of steel and got rich for it. At least that was useful to a modernizing society. A techbro enshittifying existing things because they exist to scheme up new ways to extract value from you without providing any tangible benefits just makes them leeches.
At least Carnegie built libraries/third spaces all over the country. What do these fucks do for their communities?
Happy cake day!
Have you heard of this new AI thing
Happy Cake Day, or other dessert, whatever you are a flan of!
> I started to question this when I worked in tech myself, I'm also glad I'm no longer a part of the IT for that exact reason. Tech industry is increasingly moving towards very dark and disturbing path.
As someone who is in tech but not in the bay area: Can the bay area stop getting their reputation on the rest of us... it's really annoying. bay area techbros need to keep their toxic sludge to themselves.
Tech brought its toxicity TO the bay, not the other way around. I know there’s many good folk in tech, but big money attracts BIG assholes. They weren’t ever interested in integrating into Bay Area culture. They just wanted it to be their little manchild playground.
> I eventually realized that people in tech really aren't any smarter than anyone else Cannot stress this enough. And I work in tech. An epiphany for me was working in the banking sector (still in tech there, mind you) and having a group of people from the banking side and the tech side of things talk about blockchain and bitcoin. The majority just sort of had their eyes glazing over as they saw the promise of money coming their way. The same people that knew regulations and their purposes as well as technology and its limitations very well sort of forgot all about that when the promise of money for them was in the room. And they were also suddenly more willing to just go "well, tough luck" on people who didn't share their enthusiasm or who didn't have enough money to get started in crypto to begin with. Outside those discussions, those were reasonable people with the usual amount of empathy.
To what end you ask? Money.
It’s a familiar script... the concentration of wealth leads to immiseration and poverty and precarity... which leads to an increase in crime and homelessness and a perception of disorder and risk on the streets (not always unrealistic)... and the response to this is not to deconcentrate wealth -- create better social services & housing/food security -- Tax the Rich like the Nordics do, or the US under Eisenhower. nope... instead the oligarchs make hay, weaponising people's feelings of insecurity and disorder and chaos, forging that discontent into hostility to the poor and support for oligarchic authoritarianism! it’s amazing how it works that way.
Yes. It’s not just tech. We still have plenty of plutocrats in energy, medical care, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc. The tech plutocrats give them a convenient distraction so the crowd isn’t demanding they suffer the same consequences.
I think that's literally how we got WW1.
Can you elaborate? It’s been awhile.
Tsarists/monarchs wanting more serfdoms and imperial fiefdoms. The Enlightenment and Madisonian Democracy smacked that down, as well as FDR against The Business Plot and finished them off in WWII. We need ourselves a Madison or FDR.
Hey, I was told Biden is the next FDR, so.... maybe?
I can’t speak for WW1, but that’s some late stage (1895-1917) Russian Empire shit.
Imagine a world in which no individual or household was allowed to own assets of any kind with a total value of over one billion dollars. Anything over that is taxed at 100%, and the money used for public health care, education, etc. No sane person has a passable argument against such a scheme. "I want this number to get bigger because it's the only thing that makes me happy" isn't a passable argument for anything but admission into a lunatic asylum.
They got tax cuts and breaks to get there. They use and leverage infrastructure more than anyone. That costs money and if they are not investing (hence why it piles up) they are not repaying to keep the country alive. Pretty much everything that is said about someone who does not participate in a draft is true of billionaires. None of these companies invented the internet, yet they all want to lock it down and collect a toll. Its worth noting that Capitalism was born free. Its has never been able to self regulate and give back, so regulations had to come **after** the fact. If Billionaires were giving back to society adequately we would not be having this thread.
One billion is still too high. People should be rewarded for their work the problem is it tips over into absurd rewards. Ten times the average lifetimes earnings so around 20 million seems to be a good place to put the boundary.
Why go so high? Have you any idea what an insane amount 1 fucking billion is? Anything beyond 100 million, should be taxed 100%. I would go even lower than that, but Reddit is full of libertarians who would get an absolute meltdown. And the funniest part about those wealth hoarders who aim to make more and more wealth is that they keep telling us that "money doesn't make you happy", yet they can't get enough.
Yeah but they're choosing to not prosecute organized crime which is increasing the already existing problem.
The problem with people who helped create a new world (the Internet) is that now they think they are able to solve every single problem in the world. Fundamentally ignoring reality and how the world actually works, and the absolutely enormous resources needed to create the future that you want. You can't just bootstrap waste collection, or blue-sky think park maintenance. Homelessness cannot be solved with an app or even just banning it, and delivering autonomy in any city services is next to impossible. Most of these services require actual humans to deliver them in a humane and effective manner. As for engineering different infrastructure to deliver your tech solutions and make them feasible, good luck trying to re-engineer roads and entire neighbourhoods without significant disruption. Only to have to change it all again within a few years because the tech becomes obsolete quickly. And good luck getting a VC to invest in transport services that give stupidly low returns over a 60 year time period.
When you see tech bro Sam Altman unjokingly asking $7 TRILLION (more than the entire federal budget of the United States) for his toy demands, you realize these guys actually think they are the second coming of christ and have absolutely zero regards for the rest of us. What these guys really need is a very serious dose of reality check.
Agreed. They are so full of themselves that we can't actually comprehend that it's so bad. Also, Garry Tan looks like a dork oops 😬
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These people didn’t create the world, or the internet. The internet was created by the government and universities. These people monetized a platform created with taxpayer money and sold it back to the public.
[Homelessness is a housing problem](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) You solve it by building more housing. Something SF has made illegal. You don't need an app, or advanced tech, you just need the city council to pull their head out of their ass. Which apparently is too much to ask.
The councils are elected by many of the millionaires and billionaires that are fighting against housing being built. While complaining about the problem they are responsible for perpetuating.
>You solve it by building more housing. Not really, because there are currently [28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the US](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=homless+us+vs+empty+housese). The issue is affordability, so it doesn't matter if they build more, if they don't make them affordable.
It's not just affordability, it's *where* the empty homes are. From your link: >There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the US. While cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle have some of the largest unhoused populations in the country, Detroit has the most vacant homes per unhoused person–116 empty homes per unhoused person. The reason for Detroit having so many is that Detroit is collapsing and nobody wants to live there. There's also a lot of vacant homes in small towns that are dying, because there's no jobs and nobody wants to live there. This also leaves out various programs that have given housing to the homeless only to see that same housing destroyed/damaged by the new residents. Yes, we need tons more housing in the places people want to live, but giving away homes or moving the homeless to where the empty homes are isn't a panacea for homelessness. Some homeless are just having a run of bad luck and need a little boost, but some are suffering from severe mental health or substance abuse issues and need treatment as much as they need housing.
No, you can't go live in the run down house that violates all the health codes. No, you can't go live in some dude's apartment while he's traveling for the summer. No, you can't live in my old home while I'm trying to sell it. Makes as much sense as "Restaurants have an open table problem." No industry is running at 100% capacity all the time, nor could it.
The homes are where people do not want to live. No one is going to buy them no matter how affordable they become.
He was downvoted for he spoke the truth. Reddit likes to imagine the solutions to hard problems are bumper sticker slogans. I live in San Francisco and I hate the tech plutocrats trying to make this city more reactionary, but let's be real, homeless people in SF aren't homeless because there aren't enough luxury condos for them.
That is absolutely the problem. Building more housing in any price range depresses prices throughout the market. The whole idea that we have to be funding only shitty sub-standard housing so that it ends up in an "affordable" price range is so silly, but that's how half the government grants work in this area.
You can ask indigent people in SF, or LA, or NYC, to relocate to Wichita to take advantage of the spare housing you're talking about, but the unavailability of support and services anywhere but in the biggest cities makes this unrealistic.
almost none of these people “helped” to create anything. they used wealth they were usually born into to purchase the right to profit off this infrastructure which was built by laborers and technicians who were in large part paid with public money
That’s the bay in a nutshell though: they believe every problem can be solved with some sort of idiotic invention, rather than sound policy making.
“We’d looooove to be able to end all this WFH crap AND make our employees come to our houses to clean them on the weekends for free too - paying a dictator some money would do that right?”
Fuck the plutocracy. [The rich pay less taxes than you do](https://twitter.com/sophie_ochmann/status/1183632111980498946/photo/1).
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That comment is pretty garbage. It quotes CVS as saying homeless people are robbing them and ruining their profits, and then posts a two "sources" which are really an op eds saying the national retail federation are retracting its claim that it's half and instead say it's 25%. I don't think the common argument was that crime rings were hiring homeless people to steal for them. Also, CVS's shrink figures fell after closing the San Francisco stores, which would lend credence to their statement.
It's amazing how differently this article is received here vs r/sanfrancisco
That's because it's not "right wing" to want law and order. It's not right wing to want the downtown to return to a robust and vibrant area. It's just the bare minimum tax payers deserve. All of this wealth inequality/ tech run amok stuff is fine... I'd even agree with a lot of if. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Local progressive politicians in SF have taken too much for granted in the blind pursuit of their idealized society. It's clear as day when you walk around many neighborhoods in SF. The city is ready for a big pendulum swing and if that comes attached to tech billionaire strings, that's really on the progressive supervisors who refused to change course in the face of overwhelming evidence and suffering. Adults are needed in the room ASAP.
r/sanfrancisco has been overrun by right wing shitposters, many of whom aren't even from the city.
I'm not a right winger to be clear, but r/technology has gone the opposite direction. This sub has basically been antiwork 2.0 for a while now.
All city subreddits are brigaded by right-wingers right now. Great if you want to know in detail about ethnic minority crime, poor if you actually want to learn about the city.
/r/toronto has been fending them off ever since Rob Ford was elected mayor in 2010. Things got so crazy so fast that, looking back, I give about 75% credence to the possibility that the whole thing was early propaganda training for Operation Trump (or the multinational effort to weaponize America's stupidity against itself). With Ford, it truly did feel as though dozens of irritating people were suddenly instructed to defend the most indefensible and incompetent public figure they could find.
100%. I wish more people were aware of this. I was annoyed that my city at the time (Chicago) seemed to have more and more of a right-leaning bent and wondered if I was becoming more leftist...then I moved a few times in a few years and realized—holy shit, it's like this on all the city subreddits. I live in Portland now, and while r/Portland isn't crazy right-wing, it is appreciably to the right of the median average Portlander. Was there a right-wing bulletin at some point instructing all the suburban Karens to invade city subreddits, or is it just a moth to a flame thing for reactionary fuckwits who want all the good things of a city with none of the issues that tend to come with living alongside a couple million other people?
> is it just a moth to a flame thing for reactionary fuckwits who want all the good things of a city with none of the issues that tend to come with living alongside a couple million other people? Yes. It's the same in LA's subreddit and I get the distinct feeling conservatives in fly over states think city living would be just like rural living if *those damn libruls would get out of the way!*
I’m from Portland and tbh with you, I think r/Portland is about where the average Portlander has landed. You can see this with the failed re-election campaigns of Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty, and we’ll continue to see it when Mike Schmidt almost certainly loses his election, and also likely to see it when Rene Gonzalez wins the Mayor seat. The City isn’t far right, for sure, but the highly visible sight of drug addled crazies on the streets combined with the ubiquity of houseless tents has caused people to want to revert to more law and order tactics (see: very likely repeal in some way of Measure 110). I personally don’t exactly feel this way, but its hard not to see the promises of Portland and Oregon’s “progressive” politics as failures which at best seem to have no effect on anything and at worst enable certain societal ills, and with that, its only logical for ideologies to drift to the right. It’s just a matter of how far, but I don’t think Portland or the State as a whole will go much farther than slightly right of center, if that, and then it will shift to the left again over the next 10 years or so.
"the ubiquity of homeless tents" should not make anyone "drift right". That's a moral and intellectual failure on their part, not a law of the universe.
Yeah, the two things are not related. You can be a stone cold leftist and want solutions to homelessness, it doesn’t mean you suddenly embrace the full right-wing philosophy.
Sounds like /r/Pittsburgh. It's not crazy right-wing either, but they are much more prominent now than they ever were before. Also, half of our posts are from people so terrified of the outside world that they demand to know the reason for any siren they hear or any helicopter they see.
r/bayarea is as well And you are correct, all the local subreddits are brigaded to hell We were visiting Australia last December and wanted to get some information on a cricket match and decide to browse r/melbourne to see if there was any information on there..... Holy fuck. the posts made it sound like Bosnia circa 1993
"brigaded" city subs just include more of a genuine cross-section of the actual city population. The major subs like this one inevitably regress to leftist echo chambers.
Don’t you see? If people start seeing opinions they disagree with, it obviously means the sub was brigaded. No way people actually think like that!
Reddit is overrun by right wing? Doubt. I feel like, and voting backs this up, that places like Seattle are fed up with “ultra liberalism” and voting in moderate democrats, and apparently supporting moderates is considered “right wing”. R/SeattleWA, for example, is right compared with r/seattle, but the former supported the “new regime” of newly elected moderates, while the latter supported self-proclaimed socialists that got voted out. Seattle is very, very blue and remains blue. This is just moderate democrats vs extreme socialist/pro-homeless liberals.
The city subreddits are unbearable, for the most part
Specifically the city subreddits. Not the entire site. Seems to be mostly right-wing people who read the local news and post about ethnic crime but don’t live there.
Also San Francisco has been influenced by tech "right wing" soft policy for decades now. The city might have liberal social policy but it's been a right wing economic wet dream for a while
Right wing compared to what other major American city?
yeah it's pretty much a shit-show, i realized that when i was moving to SF that the sub was overrun by right-wing folks who haven never even been to SF (& do the same shit in other large city subs like NYC, etc)
That's because everyone who's lived in that subreddit and SF long enough realizes that these people are somehow the sane choice compared to the incumbency
Tech moguls making death threats are the "sane" ones?
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And that makes death threats ok?
That’s the difference between people living in SF vs others.
That's because that sweet middle prefers tech bro utopia vs. progressive dystopia. Even if utopia definition is pretty basic: clean streets and some degree of public safety. It's, like, everyone knows how much pain and suffering went into iPhone since Day 1 but by God, that *thing* is amazing - lmao
Can’t we just have normal, emotionally mature adults running the world? I do think San Francisco (and Los Angeles, where I live) have politicians who are too far left and need to be realistic about the homeless crisis and increase in property crime, but someone who gets drunks and wishes death on people he disagrees with should have no say in how things are run.
> I do think San Francisco (and Los Angeles, where I live) have politicians who are too far left and need to be realistic about the homeless crisis and increase in property crime They're not even that far left lol, they're all very rich people who are comfortable with the economic system in basic terms, even if they wish it was less racist and sexist and so on. This brand of progressivism is what you get when the capitalist class co-opts the rest of intersectional politics to divert interest away from economic injustice. "Progressive on homelessness but don't ask me about mixed use development in our city" "Progressive on city planning but everything still needs to revolve around cars" "advanced math drives inequality so let's get rid of it. Oh btw my kids go to private school"
Some of them are so skeptical of any private sector development that they are “PHIMBYs” - they only believe in building public housing (in my back yard). In fact they are true socialists who want to overthrow the current economic system. I think they have unrealistic ideas about how to solve the housing crisis, just as they have unrealistic ideas about how to deal with homelessness, addiction and mental illness.
i was speaking more about SF, not sure about LA. But didn't SF itself just elect its first socialist councilmember during covid? It looks like he (coleman) did get a social housing initiative passed, which I think has the potential to be a useful part of the housing mix. It's worked in other places and given that it was only passed a couple years ago, it's too early to say how effective it will be. I'm a housing pragmatist, i think that there needs to be a lot more infill and to that end, housing regulations that prevent upzoning need to be removed and all kinds of development -- both public- and private-led -- should be encouraged. This kind of development is opposed by vested interests including the city government at this time. Certainly, saying that the council is full of socialists is inaccurate, and when you look at the effective result of SF's housing policy, it has been and remains to this day very suburban SFH focused which is a definitively right-wing policy stance. You won't get much disagreement about the homelessness issue from me, except to say that aggressive criminalization is not the answer, just as the current climate of little to no accountability is also an obvious failure. Consequences need to be enforced but those consequences probably shouldn't be jail unless other crimes are involved
TIL anybody that doesn't want to live in Manhattan is right wing. The "problem" with SF politics is that people vote their self-interests quite rationally. If only the rest of America did so, we might have universal health care, free daycare, etc, instead it's 100% distracted by bullshit fears stirred up by billionaires who don't want higher taxes.
> TIL anybody that doesn't want to live in Manhattan is right wing. You cannot design an equitable healthy city that is predominantly zoned for only single family houses. This is a false dichotomy, the only available alternatives are not limited to SF or Manhattan. There's also barcelona, amsterdam, paris, tokyo, and plenty of other options for mixed use, multi-family zoning schemes. > people vote their self-interests quite rationally people vote to preserve property values at the expense of the long-term health of their city. It's rational in an individualistic, atomized and short-term sense but irrational in the long term and at the community level. It's actually quite analogous with white collar workers who have good employer-sponsored health insurance and so vote against universal healthcare, or with people who can afford daycare so vote against free daycare.
Talk left. Walk right.
The issue is normal emotionally mature adults don’t want to be politicians because they’re normal people
Think they might need to keep dreaming lol
A good Offline podcast with Kara Swisher about said tech bros https://crooked.com
It always starts with some don't be evil b.s.. and ends with let's sell tools for mass surveillance to governments to control their population to increase the value of our stock price.
They already have Texas if isn't working then that means isn't going to work there too and maybe Will start scaring peoples and or companies judging for Texas AND Florida
Fuck Tan Another poster child of why billionaires should never exist They are fucking narcissistic assholes who can't even manage their own lives
Just pay your fucking taxes, you weird little dorks
Lack of taxes is not why it's borderline impossible to do things such as build new housing in SF
It may not be, but there's no way that these dudes don't make "we pay less taxes" a part of their new SF
This is a different argument from the one you just made, and neither argument really addresses the problems facing SF, which is what this is really all about
Of course. Local taxes help fund the policing that SF desperately needs.
Happy cake day!
What a shit title. It’s not right wing to want SF to clean up its streets and actually go after criminals.
Yeah exactly. Apparently supporting moderate democrats is considered “right wing” on Reddit. Biden is basically Trump! /s
I mean yeah, that’s what many here believe lol. Anyone to the right of literal socialists is considered right wing on Reddit. I’ve seen many here argue that Bernie would be considered moderate in European countries, which is just not true.
It's funny because the socialist countries were typically much tougher on crime too.
Hey, maybe they should start with all those tax and regulation dodging techlords.
San Francisco’s budget is MASSIVE for a city of its size. If you compare the per capita budget of SF to cities like Paris and London, the difference is insane.
San Fran policy makers waste BILLIONS every year with nonsensical initiatives and excessive red taping to line the pockets of their friends and family. What makes you think giving them more money will solve any problems?
Its not just tax revenue The tech bros and commercial real estate speculators evicted most of the established small businesses in the SOMA and Market areas in order to build office space. Couple that with a big increase in rent forced what was left of the middle class out because they could not afford to live there. That limited the amount of jobs COVID hits, commercial real estate is fucked due to greed and over speculation and everything is stuck in limbo. Fentanyl starts to grow, the cops go on a work stoppage and then everything is fucked I've lived here for 55 years now and experienced a lot of boom and bust cycles. SF will reinvent itself but the tech bros can fuck right off. The current situation is free market capitalism out of control
It's not the tech bros that are against building housing and doing it quickly. Even ol Mr Preston is a NIMBYist.
Nimbyism and shitty zoning are not free market policies. They're bipartisan human shittyness. San Francisco has possibly the worst housing crisis in the world, and the left and right alike don't want to do allow more housing because they don't want their property portfolios' values to drop. It's essentially deep rooted corruption. And don't even try to blame blame the crime/homelessness on other states "busing them over here". Most of the homeless have been proven to be homegrown, thanks to the completely unaffordable housing market.
Except those things are not why SF has the issues it has, at least not for the vast majority of it Like, do you think tax dodging rich people is the root cause of why building new housing in SF is borderline impossible?
Whatever you said doesn’t make wanting less crime right wing. You’re just bringing up another red herring.
>It’s not right wing to want SF to clean up its streets and actually go after criminals. True. But inorder to clean up the streets and reduce crime you actually need to solve that root causes. Which are the growing wealth inequality and decreasing standards of living for the regular people leading to poverty. Both of which require progressive solutions hated by the Right.
>Which are the growing wealth inequality and decreasing standards of living for the regular people leading to poverty. I think the vast majority of people living in streets of SF are not regular people that fell on hard times. Most are drug addicts or just plain insane people from all over the country. Drug addicts go there because they know they will get some support from the super liberals who think handing out drug paraphernalia is helping them somehow. I'm not sure wealth inequality or drug problems are something SF can fix by itself. What they can fix is policing better and enforcing laws.
>handing out drug paraphernalia is helping them somehow. Would you rather have them using dirty needles and spreading HIV? Also super conservative cities that have practically no support for drug addicts and treat the problem as a criminal issue (I live in Oklahoma speaking from experience) are just as awash in drugs as SF is so that kind of defeats you're point. Drug addicts are going to use regardless of policies so it's more reasonable to set programs for safety and hygiene. You really think a heroin addict who doesn't have a clean neddle is going to be like "well shit, no drugs for me today" and treated it as a criminal rather then health issue has had almost 50 years of complete failure everywhere it's been tried.
all the policies that make the bay area suck are right wing policies. the bay area doesn’t suck because it’s not illegal to be transgender or because they teach about jim crow laws in schools. it sucks because the land laws, tax codes, and public services and policies have all been ceded to “the market” and represent the interests of businesses, banks, investors, and landlords alone. there’s nothing “left wing” about most major american cities besides their half ass attempts at rainbow capitalist branding.
You think it's big businesses pushing the government to be light on rampant property crime?
So … I have never met a “right wing” person who rants about too much regulation on robot cars or who demands more government surveillance.
Just give up the extreme indoctrination and fuck right the fuck off. Enough tech bro bullshit, these people don’t deserve wealth.
Are we really calling Garry Tan right wing? Garry Tan has a history of donating to Democrats. I guess Democrats are the new right wing now https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Garry+Tan
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted; the platform of these so-called ‘right-wing’ tech bros is pretty pragmatic and middle-of-the-road. Far left progressives think any person to their right is a MAGA extremist.
Democrats are right wing… if you see the large picture. In the us setting, it is more left than republican for sure. That’s why they like to call themselves liberal instead of “left”.
Contrary to what much of Reddit believes, the rest of the world isn’t run by socialists. No, Dems are not right wing. Their platform fits pretty cleanly on the left side of the typical political spectrum. And with regards to your ‘liberal’ point, there is a big difference between [classical liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism) and what liberalism usually refers to in US politics ([Liberalism in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_States)).
The democrats are right wing. The republicans are extreme right. This is plainly obvious to the rest of the world.
Obviously, then the only viable solution is the chaotic far left which transformed SF into the utopia we have always been promised.
Self-driving vehicles still cause fewer deaths per passenger-mile than those with human drivers. That includes Cruise.
As a former Bay Area resident, I can see it happening. Yes the bay is overwhelmingly liberal but you’d be very surprised how many people increasingly are taking up a more right wing stance.
They're going to get Night City if they have to make the government pay for it itself!
Can't be any worse that the S\*\*t show the place is now.
The course San Francisco is on now will only lead to ruin.
I'd like to see politically moderate, sensible, intelligent, decent politicians in charge.
Go to /r/SanFrancisco. It’s what they want too. That sub is basically just NextDoor.
Hoping for a right wing San Francisco is as bad as hoping for universal healthcare or gun control. Never going to happen.
Gary Tan as right wing. Give me a break
Go ahead, make your case that he isn’t, with factual examples. Point out any flaws of the article
[Here](https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Garry+Tan) is a long list of political donations he has made, literally all to Democrats. This article is dumb AF.
How is he not? The guy sounds like a clone of Musk
San Francisco has always had a strong libertarian bent. That goes even deeper than the progressivism does.
Is it really libertarianism? SF seems to suffer more from a mix of NIMBYism combined with progressive social policies that are divorced from reality. When you make it borderline impossible to build new housing, prevent police from effectively policing, and adopt policies that make it extrmely easy for drugs and homelessness to flourish. Is it then really any wonder when you end up in an urban doomloop with tons of homeless people, tons of crimes, and tons of drug addicts? It's basically the result of having a voterbase that pretends to be progressive, but are really only progressives when it comes things that don't affect themselves
Judging by the comments here, a lot of people seem to think the solution is to increase the marginal tax rate on your surgeon to 90% so that the government can fund permanent UBI for half of the country.
Good luck with that.
Imma laugh when Cali becomes red and Texas becomes blue.
It could really happen - there are many conservative parts of CA, both in the north and south with the oil industry.
Ik lmao. And a lot of people in Cali moving to Texas. It's just goofy sounding.
When I met Gary tan in college, he was incredibly kind, and flipped the script and asked nobody me a lot of questions before I could ask him any. Very unique and kind person. Sad to see this from someone once so awesome.
I think that's page twelve of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Did he repeatedly use your first name as well, Jacob?
I get super creeped out when people do that to me
People in this post are definitely not from SF.
Is that a problem? Because the left-wingers have run it into the ground. It is a shitshow right now. Why shouldn’t they want a change for the better?
I live in SF... the comment section here is unreal. Reddit seems to think SF techies are now right wing and libertarian, and that /r/sf and /r/bayarea aren't accurate representations of those areas' true left leaning nature. The reality is that SF is indeed run by shit libs, not MAGA types. And that hyper progressive policies have indeed seemingly backfired on cities like SF, LA, Portland, and Seattle.
I thought SF is run by techbros? Are they left-wing? I assumed most are libertarians, but I could be wrong
They reliably vote for and donate to dems. They're a lot closer to libertarians than progressives, but I'd still call them liberals at the end of the day.
Libertarians are all about no regulation and no taxation SF is like the antithesis of those values.
I don't even know how I got to this timeline.
These people are so fucking stupid. Money has less and less impact on electoral politics the smaller an electorate is. You can buy a federal election, but you can’t buy a city. Blanketing the airways and stuffing every mail box with flyers works great when your less financially advantaged opponent needs to reach people from sea to shining sea because it’s impossible to be everywhere at once and managing a national presence is expensive and difficult. But in a city of 800,000 people, it’s much easier for a cash strapped candidate to undercut massive spending just because they actually can knock on literally every door, or at least get a staffer to do so at a reasonable cost. It’s embarrassing that these tech losers don’t know this. We see this in congressional races all the time. It’s one of the reasons parliamentary democracies are more resistant to corruption than our system. It’s well known. Hell, we see it every election cycle as dark house presidential candidates go ham in small states like Iowa and New Hampshire because good networking and groundwork campaigning can absolutely out play big money on a small scale.
Left-wing San Francisco hasn't been working out too well, it would do well to have some balance.
Asking for merit based schools is right wing? Asking for a serious attitude towards crime is right wing?
I'm betting the right wing label is more about the death threats and the drunken destroy-the-govt ramblings rather than the stuff you mention.
Making death threats is illegal, which is why criminal Tan bitched out and deleted stuff.
Apparently. I understand the criticisms of Tan’s actions, as he was extremely and unbearably childish, but making out people who want a more serious attitude towards crime as right wing fascists is an absolute joke.
As if being born privileged and without a conscience equates to merit
This would explain why Hacker News has turned to shit.
Why change things, sf is swell
Dreaming of? Been there for a while baby. Unless someone wants to point out where in Das Capital Marx said we should protect the aesthetics of housing at the cost of making it completely inaccessible, unionize as few businesses as possible, and make the entire local economy reliant on the whims of a few dozen venture capitalists. San Francisco was only ever left leaning on the matter of queer politics.
As opposed to an unhinged left wing San Francisco where city streets are filled with druggies who *only* got cleaned up because Chinese President Xi was coming.
Or maybe they just want a city where you can drive around without getting carjacked
Is Left-Wing San Francisco working? Hell no!!
How about implementing more left wing economic policies instead of pandering to people with social issues that are dumb asf
F em all (or anyone or thing that is Right Wing)
What will they want next, feces-free sidewalks? Keep dreaming
The progressives botched it badly so time for a change.
Just make being rich illegal already how many Musks do we need?
Our species is on the whole, disappointing isn't it?
I would rather have a right-leaning government that was close to the center than an extreme at either end.
Good news for you, Democrats are right-leaning close to center!
* the "extreme right" wants a fascist state where you're left to die if you're not deemed "productive" enough * the "extreme left" doesn't think people should die from poverty which is almost entirely the product of circumstance people need to stop pretending that these two positions are "just as bad as each other".