Well this won't stand court challenges hopefully. It's dreadful that they ever passed this law. It's demeaning to women and simply will make people think that any woman on a board of directors is there for the sake of being the token woman to fulfill the requirements of the law.
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
Even if they argue a loophole "directors aren't employees thus aren't subject to discrimination law" then that will simply result in companies outside California (and considering most corporations are registered as Delaware C-Corporation, that's most of them) openly legally discriminating in selection of board members.
I have lived in California for about 30 years. Yesterday I took my kids to the Barnes and Nobles in San Luis Obispo. The kids section is next to the bathrooms. Inside the bathroom a homeless guy was smoking meth and another was using the sink and paper towels to give himself a bath. On the ride home I noticed that there was literally no less than one homeless guy per block on both sides of the road.
It has not always been like this and it's getting worse.
This is on top of all the other issues California has. Ridiculous housing prices, horrible schools and a wildly business unfriendly environment, etc.
My point is: The governor was working on mandating public companies have female board members instead of the laundry list of catastrophes that are destroying this state. Think about who you vote for this upcoming election in CA.
California has about 25% of the nation's homeless population. It's quite bad and there are complex reasons for it.
One contributing factor is the lovely California weather that makes it much less of a hardship to "sleep rough" than it is in most parts of the continental US.
i cab imagine there are much more lovely weather than in SF, yet it’s the city with the largest number of homeless i’ve ever seen ( and i live in europe).
Really? Our entire continent, and only one city has truly good weather, which is the city just you happen to live in? That sounds like old fashioned vanity.
The San Francisco Bay Area has more than 100 cities. I don't live there. I have never lived in San Francisco and I moved away from the Bay Area many years ago.
I can't think of any other state that has weather that's as conducive to living outside as CA. Most of the the southwestern states (NM, AZ, West TX) are blistering hot in the summer, and the warm southeastern states get hot and muggy with a crap-ton of rain. No place is as good as CA.
Not remotely true. California has a unique combination in some parts of the state of mild temperatures combined with low precipitation. Other places with mild temperatures tend to be much, much wetter. Other places with dry weather tend to have more extreme temperatures.
Off the top of my head:
The joke is that San Diego is "72 degrees and sunny" year round. San Diego gets about 10 inches of rain annually. Fresno gets 11 inches. SFBA gets around 20. Average for the nation is 44 inches annually iirc.
If you go someplace dry that's more inland, it's typically blazing hot in summer at a minimum and deserts can have temperature swings between day and night of 30 degrees or more.
I agree the weather's awesome in CA, but it's also pretty fine in AZ, NM, TX, MS, AL, LA, GA and FL. Is there evidence of mass migrations of homeless people to CA from the rest of the U.S.?
Why wouldn't the housing affordability problem in CA be directly contributing to homelessness there?
I have seen articles indicating some states have been known to stick people on a bus and ship them to California.
I run several homeless sites and routinely read r/homeless. A common question is "Where can I go with better weather than where I am currently?"
I spent several years homeless. I was evicted from my apartment in Georgia and walked and accepted rides to cross the country to get back to California. So I basically camped my way across the country.
I'm quite confident I know whereof I speak on this specific detail.
Though just to be clear, I am not suggesting we ship all our homeless there, though it absolutely is true that some portion of the homeless population in California traveled there from elsewhere in some fashion.
The weather in TX is better described as miserably hot in the summer. We don't have the stabilizing influence of an ocean right next door (the Gulf doesn't really help except right at the coast).
Given how many dysfunctional policies in California are a result of the proposition system I think the people of California only have themselves to blame not the Governor.
For example? Truly, I'm curious as to what the dysfunctional policies you're referring to? Absolutely agree the homelessness and housing are ridiculous. That said, California is something like the 5th largest economy in the world, produces a huge chunk of USAs food, has some of the greatest universities in the world and is home to some of the largest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity (not sure how I feel about that one). Not to say there aren't huge issues but it's not exactly a hellscape here.
I'm not the guy you replied to, but the poster child for this has got to be Prop 13[1] which limits the maximum property taxes on property can increase at 1% of the full cash value as last assessed. Nominally, it prevents old/poor people from being priced out of their homes.
The owner of a home not reassessed since the 50s now worth millions today may be paying a few hundred a year in real estate tax. Corporations have found a variety of loopholes for themselves here, the simplest involve shell corporations[2] and have allowed large and extremely valuable properties to change hands without reassessment robbing the state in billions in revenue.
Even reversal of the policy just for commercial property would produce a massive windfall of much needed capital for the state, to the tune of roughly 8.2-10.2 billion dollars per year[3].
It's honestly one of the worst longstanding pieces of legislation I've ever encountered and one of the big reasons for the massive distortion in the CA housing market.
Hermitian already mentioned the worst offender.I've lived in New York, Atlanta, Miami and San Francisco. San Francisco is probably the worst place I've ever lived.
> California is something like the 5th largest economy in the world...
California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations [0]
If its business environment is so wildly unfriendly shouldn't that have solved the housing prices issue as all the jobs and therefore the desire to relocate should have long since faded?
I don't agree with the law and yet I don't think any of the problems you listed have simple solutions. For example all the ways imaginable to address ridiculous housing prices would seem to negatively effect those who presently own houses who have basically all the wealth. How do you propose to fix THAT.
Few things lag, these things have a long cycle. I come a state in India which used to be richest 60 years ago then we voted in the communists. Now we rank in the bottom five, after all parties trying to out left each other.
I've always considered myself a liberal, but I've become so frustrated by what seems to be passing for "liberal solutions" in the past few years.
For example, I believe having more women on boards is a desirable, admirable goal, but this mandate has to be about the dumbest way to accomplish it. It's similar to what I feel about the housing crises in big cities. I'm very much in favor of increasing affordable housing, but things like rent control (coupled with relatively small numbers of government funded affordable housing units) are so probably counter-productive it's laughable.
First of all, it does not work. We had it in Prague like a decade ago. I've seen contracts including extra cost of renting keys for as much as the regulated price. Also I guess it could decrease pressure to developers to build new houses since the prices are artificially low.
Rent control disincentivizes construction of new housing, by adding a major regulatory risk to investment in new housing units. First, imagine that you are the owner of a rental building, and the rent control law passes, in let's say SF. You own the building, and as the landlord, you're obligated to pay for things like repairs and general property management. That takes labor. The price of labor (i.e. wages) tends to increase more or less in step with property values. So, now your costs are increasing, but it's illegal for you to raise your rents. The investment you made, with the presumption that you would be able to charge a market rate for rents is now fucked.
Now, consider that you are a prospective property developer. Someone thinking about building a new rental building. You're thinking about investing millions of dollars of your own money to do this. But you look at what happened to the last guy, who got fucked by this rent control law, and you think "maybe i'll build elsewhere, or just stick my money in an index fund instead".
The California model of rent control limits the amount you can raise rent on a tenant, and the reasons you can evict someone. Surprisingly, you can often transfer a lease to a family member, leading to situations where someone is living in a rented house originally rented to their grandparent.
It also leads to situations where an empty nester has spare bedrooms but cannot afford to move into a smaller rental unit, effectively taking bedrooms off the market and making prices higher for everyone. Presumably AirBNB relieves some of this pressure, though I seem to recall some landlords running sting operations in order to evict long term tenants and reset the market rate.
Over the past 30 years of SF rent control, this dynamic has created a group of people for whom in-fill redevelopment would be disastrous: they'd lose their rent control, and definitely can't live here anymore. Much of SF is pretty low density, and housing supply would come from building up. Doesn't need to be a 60 tower millenium tower deal. But you'll need to tear up some buildings to make it happen, and the cheapest properties are the ones under rent control. So anyone campaigning on a 'build baby build' platform is more or less running a platform of evicting the poor and/or elderly.
At it's core, rent control is treating the symptom of high prices rather than the disease of tight supply.
It impedes market forces that normally act to add more housing. In the case of SF, fortunately, we don’t apply rent control to new construction. But you can’t build new, bigger buildings if you can’t remove your tenants from the existing one. You also can’t afford to, since you’re not earning rent proportional to the actual economic value of your land.
It reduces market forces that encourage optimal use of scarce resource. My neighbor in SF lives alone in his 3 bedroom apartment that he’s rented since 1990. If he paid market rate, all 3 bedrooms would be filled, 2 more people would be housed, and the overall housing demand would be proportionally cheaper.
It massively restricts mobility of tenants. Once you’re in on a “good deal” you can’t move. And reduced turnover creates all kinds of inefficiencies: people live farther from their jobs, don’t upgrade into nicer units over time (and thus free the cheaper/older units for those who are starting out).
It creates massive cost inequality for tenants and massive income inequality for landlords. As a tenant, one neighbor might be paying 50% or 100% or even 300% more than others with the same or similar unit, regardless of whether they can better afford it.
A property might generate 1/3rd the income of the building next door simply because the owner has tenants that have lived there for 25 years. Meanwhile costs of gardening, roofing, carpentry, plumbing and other labor have increased and thus one building is in disrepair. The building can’t be sold without the tenants, so the building is worth much less than the neighbors is due to random chance.
It places odd restrictions on lease terms, so that many go vacant unecessarily.
Because of rent control, if I own a unit built before 1979 I literally can’t make a contract with a tenant to lease to them for a year or two. Any term lengths I put on a lease are meaningless, and the tenant has nearly unlimited rights to live in my house for as long as they want.
If I have plans to use a unit for something else, upgrade it, etc I will likely leave it unoccupied.
That's my initial gut reaction as well. But I see it may work out this way:
You need to accept a woman onto the board. Accepting just a woman is not a good way to go. So you start changing the environment to have more women get to the top.
Being in the board of directors of a public company requires a certain attitude toward life and a willingness to accept certain trade-offs. I don't see why having a vagina between your legs should give you any preferential treatment by law.
Taking your statement as a legitimate point, I think the issue isn't that having a vagina means you should be treated differently (side point: not all women have vaginas; don't down vote me). In tech we like to think that everything is a meritocracy but we see countless examples where company culture has made it difficult to exist as a woman. Think of the numerous complaints from women working at Uber circa 2016-2017. Or the thousands of high profile #MeToo allegations. Men being in the dominant and default in tech means it's easier to get away with crap like that. Ensuring that women are adequately represented means that type of stuff is harder to get away with. If more equal representation makes workplaces less toxic, then it's worth it for that alone.
All those despicable events are to be opposed and condemned. I'm favorable to chem. castration at the first definitive sentence of sexual assault.
But here we are talking about something different. In order to justify this law, you would have to prove that the amount of women in boards of directors is so low mainly because of sexism by men.
On that point I'm willing to concede that that is part of the problem in certain cases, but I'm not at all willing to accept that that is the only reason or even the predominant one. It would take a statistical analysis with numbers suggesting a causal connection to convince me.
ok, so we will waste money on A: token female board members or B: a female board member who is under qualified because the company couldn’t find a better qualified woman to fill the role; when that male candidate had to be passed up because of his gender.
I was against this for a long time going against meritocracy, fairness and makeing a company weaker.
Now I think this is a good idea to kickstart more women into top management, as one reason people want to make a career and see it achievable are role models, which there currently aren't too many.
This should be limited to a kickstart period, say 5y.
I got down voted into oblivion on the previous dupe of this post for saying pretty much the same thing with regard to a sunset clause. I think it is a very reasonable idea.
The argument that this goes against meritocracy only makes sense if you inherently think men are better at the role. If you think men and women are likely to be equally as good, it makes more sense that men are currently in the privileged position of getting a role that could be filled by a more qualified woman.
As an aside, on the dupe, there are 40 posts or so arguing against this move. Literally every positive post was downvoted, none with a single argument in response. There are clearly a few toxic down voters on HN, particularly when it comes to issues of male privilege.
59 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadEEOC: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
Even if they argue a loophole "directors aren't employees thus aren't subject to discrimination law" then that will simply result in companies outside California (and considering most corporations are registered as Delaware C-Corporation, that's most of them) openly legally discriminating in selection of board members.
The bill passed the House and Senate, and was signed by the Governor. His signing was purely symbolic and is aware of the serious legal concerns.
So although a court challenge would put it on shaky ground, it actually might be politically tenuous to pursue the case at all!
And plus, the Equal Rights Amendment will nix it anyway (but too bad the 50 year red supreme court will nix that)
It has not always been like this and it's getting worse.
This is on top of all the other issues California has. Ridiculous housing prices, horrible schools and a wildly business unfriendly environment, etc.
My point is: The governor was working on mandating public companies have female board members instead of the laundry list of catastrophes that are destroying this state. Think about who you vote for this upcoming election in CA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One contributing factor is the lovely California weather that makes it much less of a hardship to "sleep rough" than it is in most parts of the continental US.
As I said, there are many factors, weather being just one.
While the initial claim was slightly overstated in claiming uniqueness, the SFBA is pretty special in that regard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18110598
No, it's not. A significant fraction of California outside of the Bay Area, and some of Oregon and, IIRC, Washington also does.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_climate
What do you mean by this? Because I live in Europe too and it's rare to see a homeless person, even in the bigger cities.
Off the top of my head:
The joke is that San Diego is "72 degrees and sunny" year round. San Diego gets about 10 inches of rain annually. Fresno gets 11 inches. SFBA gets around 20. Average for the nation is 44 inches annually iirc.
If you go someplace dry that's more inland, it's typically blazing hot in summer at a minimum and deserts can have temperature swings between day and night of 30 degrees or more.
Why wouldn't the housing affordability problem in CA be directly contributing to homelessness there?
I run several homeless sites and routinely read r/homeless. A common question is "Where can I go with better weather than where I am currently?"
I spent several years homeless. I was evicted from my apartment in Georgia and walked and accepted rides to cross the country to get back to California. So I basically camped my way across the country.
I'm quite confident I know whereof I speak on this specific detail.
Though just to be clear, I am not suggesting we ship all our homeless there, though it absolutely is true that some portion of the homeless population in California traveled there from elsewhere in some fashion.
The owner of a home not reassessed since the 50s now worth millions today may be paying a few hundred a year in real estate tax. Corporations have found a variety of loopholes for themselves here, the simplest involve shell corporations[2] and have allowed large and extremely valuable properties to change hands without reassessment robbing the state in billions in revenue.
Even reversal of the policy just for commercial property would produce a massive windfall of much needed capital for the state, to the tune of roughly 8.2-10.2 billion dollars per year[3].
It's honestly one of the worst longstanding pieces of legislation I've ever encountered and one of the big reasons for the massive distortion in the CA housing market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
[2] https://financialtransparency.org/how-shell-corporations-und...
[3] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/550356b8e4b02e0b159ae...
California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations [0]
[0] https://github.com/RhysU/states/blob/master/README.md
I don't agree with the law and yet I don't think any of the problems you listed have simple solutions. For example all the ways imaginable to address ridiculous housing prices would seem to negatively effect those who presently own houses who have basically all the wealth. How do you propose to fix THAT.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18109162
Edit: fix spelling
For example, I believe having more women on boards is a desirable, admirable goal, but this mandate has to be about the dumbest way to accomplish it. It's similar to what I feel about the housing crises in big cities. I'm very much in favor of increasing affordable housing, but things like rent control (coupled with relatively small numbers of government funded affordable housing units) are so probably counter-productive it's laughable.
Now, consider that you are a prospective property developer. Someone thinking about building a new rental building. You're thinking about investing millions of dollars of your own money to do this. But you look at what happened to the last guy, who got fucked by this rent control law, and you think "maybe i'll build elsewhere, or just stick my money in an index fund instead".
It also leads to situations where an empty nester has spare bedrooms but cannot afford to move into a smaller rental unit, effectively taking bedrooms off the market and making prices higher for everyone. Presumably AirBNB relieves some of this pressure, though I seem to recall some landlords running sting operations in order to evict long term tenants and reset the market rate.
Over the past 30 years of SF rent control, this dynamic has created a group of people for whom in-fill redevelopment would be disastrous: they'd lose their rent control, and definitely can't live here anymore. Much of SF is pretty low density, and housing supply would come from building up. Doesn't need to be a 60 tower millenium tower deal. But you'll need to tear up some buildings to make it happen, and the cheapest properties are the ones under rent control. So anyone campaigning on a 'build baby build' platform is more or less running a platform of evicting the poor and/or elderly.
At it's core, rent control is treating the symptom of high prices rather than the disease of tight supply.
You can't and that's how it's counterproductive.
It reduces market forces that encourage optimal use of scarce resource. My neighbor in SF lives alone in his 3 bedroom apartment that he’s rented since 1990. If he paid market rate, all 3 bedrooms would be filled, 2 more people would be housed, and the overall housing demand would be proportionally cheaper.
It massively restricts mobility of tenants. Once you’re in on a “good deal” you can’t move. And reduced turnover creates all kinds of inefficiencies: people live farther from their jobs, don’t upgrade into nicer units over time (and thus free the cheaper/older units for those who are starting out).
It creates massive cost inequality for tenants and massive income inequality for landlords. As a tenant, one neighbor might be paying 50% or 100% or even 300% more than others with the same or similar unit, regardless of whether they can better afford it.
A property might generate 1/3rd the income of the building next door simply because the owner has tenants that have lived there for 25 years. Meanwhile costs of gardening, roofing, carpentry, plumbing and other labor have increased and thus one building is in disrepair. The building can’t be sold without the tenants, so the building is worth much less than the neighbors is due to random chance.
It places odd restrictions on lease terms, so that many go vacant unecessarily. Because of rent control, if I own a unit built before 1979 I literally can’t make a contract with a tenant to lease to them for a year or two. Any term lengths I put on a lease are meaningless, and the tenant has nearly unlimited rights to live in my house for as long as they want.
If I have plans to use a unit for something else, upgrade it, etc I will likely leave it unoccupied.
You need to accept a woman onto the board. Accepting just a woman is not a good way to go. So you start changing the environment to have more women get to the top.
I'm not saying this definitely will work though
Hmm.
Now I think this is a good idea to kickstart more women into top management, as one reason people want to make a career and see it achievable are role models, which there currently aren't too many.
This should be limited to a kickstart period, say 5y.
The argument that this goes against meritocracy only makes sense if you inherently think men are better at the role. If you think men and women are likely to be equally as good, it makes more sense that men are currently in the privileged position of getting a role that could be filled by a more qualified woman.
As an aside, on the dupe, there are 40 posts or so arguing against this move. Literally every positive post was downvoted, none with a single argument in response. There are clearly a few toxic down voters on HN, particularly when it comes to issues of male privilege.