How much business was lost through the two summers of rotating brown-outs? Datacenter outages? Maybe Enron didn't impact America, but thanks to America's pro-business, anti-consumer laws, Enron really hurt California.
Poor people are forced to spend more on everything. Finance is a great example. In the USA, banks find poor people unprofitable. To remedy this, they created two institutions:
* ChexSystems, a credit reporting service for bank accounts
* Payday loans, a predatory lending system which takes 4-8% of a person's paycheck to cash it instantly instead of waiting a couple of days.
ChexSystems is designed to identify poor people and ban them from the banking system so that they have to give their round of flesh to shylocks in order to buy food and pay rent. This is one of the more egregious attacks on the poor in the USA, but there are tens of thousands of them to be honest.
In the 1990s we thought Pearl Jam was being silly for trying to bring up an anti-trust lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and the nation had lost it's will after Microsoft's joke of a settlement. In retrospect, that was a real loss. Ticketmaster and Livenation abuse their monopolies to the harm of consumers globally.
I guess the right way to do this is to setup something to 'auto-install updates' which prompts a call to the contractor to fix the corrupted excel file.
Where did I say I hate it? I actually quite like it, so no need to cry. But, despite of how much I like and enjoy the city, I would never live here if I didn't have a high paying tech job that can cover my living expenses and allow me to save a lot in the process, it would be what I personally consider massively irresponsible.
I come from a small and beautiful European country where my monthly SF rent could easily pay 12 months of rent of an apartment close to the beach and I would get free health care on top of that, so if tech jobs in SF were to dry up, guess where I'd be headed :-)
The happiest man I know is more intelligent than anybody on HN, a wild violinist you'll see playing wild roma, turkish, and arabic standing on top of newspaper boxes in north beach and the mission, when he's not traveling abroad. A genius with perfect pitch who memorizes books and speaks 10 languages.
He decided in University he would be happier without anything, and has been homeless since he was 16. He makes about $40 per day busking, and gives half of it to people less fortunate than himself. say hi to him if you see him.
If you leave those few neighborhoods that techies never leave? The Sunsets, West Portal, Portala, Hayes Valley, the Outer Richmond, Noe, Glen Park, the Excelsior, the Outer Mission, Bayview / Hunter's point? The areas where brogrammers don't venture are filled with screaming children, obnoxiously so.
I don't know if this has ever been hypothesized, but HIV infection rates, and AIDS mortality among IV drug users in the 90's before the advent of medications?
That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen anyone on HN say, and I've seen people defending rapists.
I lived in San Francisco for 20 years and never, ever saw that. I'm not some boring techie who never leaves SOMA or the Mission, I've walked every street in san francisco (according to my Garmin), I've had a drink in every bar, I've made music in almost every park.
I have lived in Toronto most of my life, and I’ve seen plenty of people with dogs in strollers. But before we climb up on stage like a smug comic and bond with the audience by ridiculing people we don’t understand, let’s ask ourselves this:
What do we do if our canine companion has mobility issues? How do we take them shopping with us so that they aren’t left at home, lonely? How do we take them to the park so they can lay down under a tree with us while we read a book?
Many people choose very small dogs. I don’t know if it’s fashion, or if it’s the best choice for living in a very small apartment/condo, but perhaps very small dogs aren’t able to keep up for long outings, and a stroller lets them accompany their human.
I stop far short of ridiculing things without looking past my biases and knee-jerk impulse to criticize things I don’t understand.
> So, are you telling me that 50% of all strollers in Toronto have dogs in them? You would be lying as much as the op.
I'll tell you something else in response:
Starting a response by suggesting that someone is acting in bad faith is not a productive way to engage people in discussion.
You may misunderstand something about the subject. You may misunderstand the person's comment. The comment may have several interpretations, and you may have picked one that differs from the person's intent. The other person may misunderstand something.
There are lots of reasons you may feel a comment misrepresents your perception of reality, and going right into the sewer to suggest malicious deception is a terrible way to participate in a social group.
People come to San Francisco, and just lie about what they see. They don't really observe anything, they just repeat the myths and paranoid lies that they read on reddit and HN!
The city that I know, have supported, run companies, run punk venues, run hacker houses, and taught children to program does not bear any resemblance to the views of recent techie imports.
It exists if you want to find it. Hint: It doesn't exist inside of a startup's office space. I've been to 60 countries, and there's nowhere in the world that has SF's diversity of music, art, food, cultures, peoples, points of view, businesses, and climates. The underground warehouse scene is still alive and well, as is the underground/aboveground bdsm/sex scene, the world music scene, hip-hop, bluegrass, techno (ugh).
If you know who to talk to, you can go to an illegal, underground restaurant where guest chefs like Michael Minna cook. The are no less than 5 hacker warehouses focused solely on robotics development. Two of the old goth warehouses are still available. Sure, and there are bars/night clubs, hundreds of music venues. The closeness to natural beauty combined with all of this is almost unfair. 45% of the city is public parkland.
That's just San Francisco, not mentioning the rest of the bay area. If you can't find a niche in the bay, you would be happier living somewhere that you can find a niche. Why be unhappy just for money?
Nowhere in the world is even close. Maybe Berlin, but I'm not a big fan of Germany.
Considering how expensive underground warehouses are getting (to the point where only techies can afford those warehouse loft apartments, even the illegal ones), I find it hard to believe that the culture is thriving. Just look at what happened to Burning Man for an example. Now the art projects aren't built in SF by attendees and driven over they are purchased and imported.
The culture still thrives, but not how it was, for sure. The older guard of the tech community keeps it alive, but for the most part, the brogrammer wave we got hit with in 2007, when everybody "did social", definitely sucked the life out of the area.
One side effect is that you are a lot less likely to find out. Spaces I used to attend which were generally "if you can find it, you can come" now have guest lists and sometimes vouch lists with the intent of keeping the bros out.
Hey, despite your virulent reaction to my comment - which I think was exaggerate - I would like to hear more about this.
To give you context: I live in SF since 2012, and I try to bring my own experience and observations, rather than "stuff I read on Reddit". But of course I'm not perfect, and I am certainly biased in some ways.
You sound like someone who knows much more than me. Share it with us. That's what HN is for. Not for flame wars.
Hey, off-topic question. My father built the fare collection system for the Montreal metro in the early '80s. Do you still have the awful system they built that gave you two paper tickets (one for proof, one for transfer)?
The fair collection has been revamped. It could be better, but I've also seen worse.
Single Ticket Fares
Single tickets are printed on a piece of thick cardstock. They are both used for a proof and transfer. Validation is electronic by inserting it into a machine on a bus or at a terminal of up to 2 hours. The machine prints the times it was used on the ticket.
Multiday tickets are printed on some thin plastic-like paper with an NFC chip inside. They are tapped on terminals and in busses and get no physical markings of when they were used, but are validated 100% digitally with some central system. They are also good for the same type of transfer.
Monthly/Yearly passes are a thick plastic credit-card-like card. They have an NFC chip and work similarly to the multiday tickets.
