I think the fact that Prop J cruised to victory and Prop I went down in flames shows that the influence of the old guard is waning. There is a proliferation of groups trying to flex tech money in SF politics: Grow SF, Abundant SF, Together SF. And they are aligned with state politicians who get the goods like Weiner, Newsom, and Haney. Supervisor Peskin is termed out, again, in 2024 and Preston and his band of fake-ass socialists are going to get a serious challenger
There has literally never been a time in the history of capitalistm when capitalist wealth from any industry wasn’t being flexed in politics for the interests of the particular capitalists (and, as a natural collateral effect, the industry) involved.
after the huggingface event last night a group of us wasn't let into a bar/club because "y'all are nerds, we don't want your patronage" I don't think it's solved enough yet for their taste, what a beautifully schizoid city, never change, we should just throw money at the problem forever as a monument to hubris XD
The resentment happening from society towards us is spiraling out of control, and I say this as someone who was also at that meetup event yesterday. Pretty sad but we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people.
The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...
> we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people
It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.
Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools, and now, they're starting getting bullied for being cerebral nerds by the bars of the one city that's supposed to be theirs.
I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and democratic AI, which is basically the only protection that the non nerds of SF have against the coming AI job apocalypse.
> Why should we expect "civic attachment" when nerds are literally hardcore bullied from the beginning in our media, in our schools
You’re describing rich and powerful people. If someone with those resources can’t grow up, yes, it’s reasonable for others to dissociate from them.
What I’m describing is also uniquely San Franciscan. Tech workers in Berkeley, Oakland, Sunnyvale, Seattle, New York and overseas are civically engaged. They volunteer; join organisations, protests and campaigns; they run for office.
> the coming AI job apocalypse
It’s odd seeing AI embrace crypto’s language. Past revolutionaries for computers or nuclear power were motivated by the good they could do. They didn’t pat themselves on the back for riding a supposed pale horse. NLP has no more ability to bring an apocalypse than personal computers did, but it’s a call for regulation if this becomes mainstream.
unlike sf, tech workers in pretty much every city you listed tend to actually live in those cities. hell, half the tech workers in sf live in berkeley, oakland, sunnyvale, or other bay area communities. when i was a tech worker in sf, i wasn't civically engaged in sf because i spent that budget in berkeley, where i actually lived.
I'm a hard core computer nerd and I'm from SF, grew up here. This is not the nerd city (although we have many fine nerds here!) It's the hippie city.
Anyway, we nerds help the normals despite their bullying and lack of respect because we are human beings and humane. It's not their fault they're stupid and ignorant, after all? And do we not enjoy pleasures and rewards beyond their understanding? It's not so bad, being a nerd.
- - - -
Did you watch "Avenue 5"? That scene where the folks are trying to leave the ship and the captain and chief engineer are trying to stop them... Wooo boy that was a horrifying scene, eh? But you can't just let them leave. You still have to help them as best you can, if only so you can live with yourself, eh?
Right, and that's my point: the old timers resent the new wave. The hippies didn't give us the city, we took it from them.
The argument that sways me (as an oldtimer who misses the way it was) is that this is the way of it here: The Ohlone were savagely fucked over by the Spanish, who in turn were run out by the Americans, then the Gold Rush folk gave way eventually to the Beatniks, who then yielded to the Hippies, who have now been displaced by tech bros. Seen from that perspective, we're actually making fantastic progress, in the sense that each wave is less violent than the last, eh?
It turns out the arrogant shitting on the rest of the planet by authoritarian techies in the Bay Area has some mild consequences about a dozen orders of magnitude less than the shit it has sprayed on everyone else. If "Flyover Country" has ever been in your vocabulary for a nanosecond, you deserve all that's being heaped on you and 1,000,000x more. You can't abuse humanity, tell them it's for their own good, and then whine when there's a slight bit of blowback against your arrogance and attempt to control and micromanage everybody's lives through technology.
1. I was born in "flyover country", I know what the great plains looks like and understand their economic struggles.
2. Again, huggingface open source meetup was the OPPOSITE of authoritarian tech bros. It's literally the people trying to democratize and keep this stuff available to the masses.
This post here is the resentment I'm talking about. The reality is that the average HF event attendee has done far more to help "flyover states" than most SF tech workers. They should be treated as such, not scorned like they're part of a "techno authoritarian future". The techno authoritarians are OpenAI and their cronies.
If nuance isn't possible from non tech bros who resent tech bros, maybe there is a reason why the world is leaving them behind.
Can you please keep this sort of flamewar fodder off this site? We don't want tribes bashing each other and calling each other names here—none of it has anything to do with intellectual curiosity, which is what HN is supposed to be for.
I really wish that we could all just settle on using "whether or not someone is acting like an asshole" as our single tribal dividing line. Every other grouping scheme will lump lots of great people with lots of assholes all mixed together and then we cherry pick and make assumptions about the wider group that are generally unfair.
I skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article. The problem is not money.
> skimmed until I found the part where the author was seriously suggesting dumping money on the problem, then I closed the article
“…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents?
It all comes down to housing. If you make it affordable to build housing, you make housing affordable. If you make housing affordable, then you make services affordable.
Dunno about in SF, but I certainly realize it. And I don't care. I bought the place to live in. I don't plan to sell it for decades. I will have gotten my money's worth out of it no matter what.
Which is why I absolutely advocate locally for more housing.
Home value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there. Hell, if the value of your home goes down that could lower your property taxes!
Of course in the US, homes are first and foremost an investment, so losing resale value is one of the worst things that could happen to a homeowner, or something.
Only issues I can think of would be going underwater on a mortgage which might cause financial problems or having the price or liquidity drop when you need to sell short term.
> Home value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there.
Until you retire or for other reasons find yourself living on a fixed (and possibly diminished) income, while property taxes based on home value continue to rise.
House value means nothing. For home owners, it's a guarantee to be able to stay in place. Californian home owners are all millionaires, but will never see that wealth materialize if they or their children want to stay in the same area.
Does it have to though? Think about startup fundraising rounds. At the very beginning, the founders own 100% of a $0 company. let's say they give up 15% for $150k at a $1mm valuation. 85% of $1mm is worth more than 100% of $0. So then a series B, for another 15% but this time at $10mm valuation. They're diluted down to 70%, but it's of $10mm, which equals $7mm. What does this have to do with housing? Well as a city grows, existing housing can become more valuable, along with more housing also becoming available. So similar to cases where dilution doesn't agree over existing shareholders because they now own a smaller piece of a much larger pie, so too then owners of existing housing also appreciate, rather than depreciate in value.
Is that relevant for the amount of houses they can build?
I feel like if you were truly motivated they could have had over New York's population by now if they were to build homes and skyscrapers. It doesn't take 100 or 200 years to build a skyscraper, they could simultaneously start like 20 of them every year.
I don’t live there, but as a general rule, people overestimate the probability of “collapse“. Things can be declining for a long time without the dramatic acceleration that merits that term.
Agreed. Just look at Twitter. It's running with a skeleton crew but that's only because a system of that size does not collapse in a day. It takes years for the cracks to show and grow.
I think the specific situation with Twitter is that it takes a lot more people to create and update a system of this size than it does to merely maintain it. They simply no longer have the capacity to make a large new product at this point, but even a skeleton staff is enough to keep the existing product running.
That's why the cracks are small at first. Patches, new API connections to customers, and ambition will still cause some change, albeit small as you point out. Entropy in a living system always increases.
Twitter (the product) has changed a lot since then too. It's much more complicated and does many more things. What it was like at the beginning isn't particularly relevant anymore.
Well, this is off-topic now. Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one. It seems Twitter was simply overstaffed.
> Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one.
This can't be posted enough. Twitter currently employs 100x more developers than Mastodon. It's comically incoherent to claim that people should move from Twitter to Mastodon because Twitter obviously can't be run by half or a third of the developers that it used to have, because scale or something.
> people overestimate the probability of “collapse“
Collapse, in this article’s context, means insolvency. That doesn’t mean San Francisco disappears. But public transit may halt for a while, and the city may have control and assets forcibly removed from itself.
In reality, San Francisco is solidly investment grade [1][2]. It can borrow its way out of this hole.
New York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11.
San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore.
San Francisco is largely owned and controlled by about a half dozen extremely wealthy families, who don't just control SF...they're also "kingmakers" for the governor's office, and have been using their influence for personal gain for decades:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-san-...
Not a dime of public money should go to bailing out the Guggenhimes, Buells, Swigs, Marcuses, Fishers, Gettys, and Pritzkers.
As Biden said: oh boo hoo, capitalism working as intended.
And the 1970s financial woes aside, NYC also had a lot of petty and not so petty street crime mostly into the 80s. A lot of the area around Times Square was pretty bad, for example. [ADDED: It was really the 90s that saw the ~75% declines from peak.]
I imagine a lot of the direct comparisons break down in various ways. But, at a high level, you see similarities.
I can’t even imagine what it feels like to get downvoted for telling people about your friend’s murder. Mgarfias, I have given you my upvote as a counter. To Hacker news, you need to sort yourself the fuck out and get some empathy.
I didn't downvote (I try to never do that). But responding to a statistical observation about crime levels in NYC that were particularly bad in the 70s and 80s with a single personal ancedote about their friend's murder in 1994 just seems ... totally not relevant. People were murdered in NYC in every decade since it was founded, and will continue to be so, as they will in every other significantly sized city. Noting that a friend was killed after some specific period is content-free with respect to crime rates, even if we can all understand that it must have personally traumatic and horrifying.
Right well imagine you’ve just walked into a bar in real life and everyone is having a conversation about crime in the city and a stranger sat in the corner says that their friend was murdered in the 90s. Would you really respond with:
> Wow. They were almost the last person murdered in NYC! Stats say murder in NYC ended later that year.
Probably not unless you wanted everyone in the bar to look at you with disgust. In fact, the entire tone and topic of the conversation would probably change to accommodate this new information. If you wanted to say something, you’d probably say something along the lines of:
“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to talk about it? What happened?”
If someone is sharing something sensitive like this and you don’t think it’s relevant, just don’t say anything. Add something constructive on another comment. What have you gained from that comment other than potentially upsetting another person? I don’t think anyone is thinking “oh I’m really glad he stepped in there otherwise that one thread on the online debate would have got really off track”. And I don’t think mgarfias is going away from this thinking, “well he really opened my eyes to the fact that my anecdotal experience is not the totality of existence, my entire stance on New York City is changed now.”
Honestly dude, there are unlimited threads on every post. Every thread does not have to be a direct argument or counter argument of whatever is stated in the original content. We can just all talk and be humans going through life together.
I passed on a tech job in the Bay Area in the 90s in part because of cost of living. This was also a time when tech salaries in general were much lower than today. It would have been generally a quality of life downgrade to have moved west.
I think one reasonable solution is literally this. Would allow rebuilding whole thing from fresh, with much higher density and maybe in general as high rise buildings.
'verge of collapse' & 'brink of collapse' are some of the most frequently-slung clickbait phrases in the editor's grab-bag. Already collapsed? Not going to collapse? Neither newsworthy.
'about to collapse'? That's your stress response being triggered, to be satisfied by clicking on the headline to ascertain how to either head off the stress source or be infotained by it.
The vacancy rate is pretty similar to 20 years ago after the dot com bust. But there is a layer of crime and lawlessness this time that makes it a lot worse, and harder to recover from.
I'll tell you what - tell me what metric is in question, and what percent decrease of it over what period of time would constitute 'collapse', following which I will read the article and provide my response.
Bonus to incentivize: I'll even be providing the weird mix of native-San-Franciscan-cum-tech-person take, being born & raised in the Sunset. Therefore I promise to infuse it with a sense of entitlement & disaffection, as if it was possible to have any scope on in-migration/emigration policy across city limits.
Every city has its glory days and eventual decline. It happened to Detroit; it's happening to SF, and eventually it'll happen to other cities (I see it happening to Houston if the US truly uncouples itself from oil)
True, given the local industry. NYC has finance, marketing, fashion, etc. What would San Francisco's be? As an outsider, it feels to me like the days magical tech synergy has left, and that work in our industry is unlikely to recentralize.
Was SF ever really a tech city? I mean it can't avoid Silicon Valley's penumbra, tech events and conferences, and a few large presences like Salesforce. But SF isn't really a tech city like Manhattan is a finance city. (Indeed, SF is probably at least as much of a West Coast financial and law center as it is tech.
Outside of tech, there's UCSF, a prominent medical institution, a large part of which can only be done in person and not remotely, as well as Genentech and similar, which is in south sf and not sf proper, but where do their employees want to live? some want suburbia but some also want city living
It can certainly be a world class city, but often times the call to arms is in the response to a decline to the prosperity of the last 20 years. Odds are that the world has moved on from the conditions that brought that about, and SF has to reinvent itself (or revert to its previous identity)
Let it. The city is governed by incompetent leaders and the voters need to stop re-electing the same awful supervisors. Until that happens, I see no reason to bail them out.
I'm not convinced. There's a reason people came back faster to almost every other major city. This makes me think a lot of people were just there for the money, and once they could get the same money without the hassle of the city, they did just that.
The problem is adding more housing downtown doesn't really help the problem beyond making a shorter commute (to WFH jobs?). Especially for the people who moved out, SF's pandemic policies weren't attractive, and it's even worse in a dense neighborhood. There's still the homeless problem. There's still a lot of property crime. This week, there was a post about how hard it is for 8th graders to take Algebra.
Like the article said, I don't really want to give more money to a city that's been so mismanaged.
There are certainly reasons other than jobs why some people choose to live in a major city. But eliminate the job/commute reason and the calculus changes for a lot of people given that "live near work" is at least one of the main reasons they would choose urban living.
I've spent a lot of time traveling to SF and the broader Bay Area over the years. What I tell people is that a lot of the pros are still there but the CON list especially for living in the city proper has definitely gotten longer and redder.
It's such a beautiful piece of property too. If not for all the people. Maybe this is "success through failure" approaching. Maybe it will be quite nice in 100 years.
> …it was assumed, would never again want to work in office towers over fears of terrorism.
This feels like a ridiculous assumption. Maybe in the emotional moment, but sensible minds wouldn’t for long think that that’s it for the concept of working downtown.
"This is the city where it can take 87 permits, 1,000 days of meetings and $500,000 in fees to build residential housing projects. This is the city — the only one in the state — that allows housing permits to be appealed even after projects are entitled. This is the city where it costs an estimated $100,000 to build one tiny home for the homeless — up to 10 times more than in other Bay Area cities — and almost $1.2 million to build a single unit of affordable housing. This is the city that at one point celebrated plans to build a single public toilet for $1.7 million."
"1,000 days of meetings" sounds like the ultimate office horror movie.
Starting 1-2 months ago, many people, myself included, have started saying "SF is back" after observing the excitement surrounding, attendance at, and quantity of Generative AI events. It's too early to know how permanent this effect will be, but an article discussing SF collapse should at least mention the possibility that decline has ended and attempt to explain why event attendance won't be the first step towards recovery.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1410107988505890817
You called for violence against a public official.
Also: “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading” [1].
> Did Weiner not help pass a bill to legalize raping underage boys?
Did they? Provide a source.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After this (SFUSD's delay of algebra 1 has created a nightmare of workarounds)
https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/put-algebra-1-back-in-eight...
It's pretty clear tech isn't making the rules.
The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...
It has nothing to do with tangible harm and a lot with the attitude of techno public figures, as well as, in San Francisco, the civic detachment of its tech workers.
I don't blame them tbh. Frankly, society should be very happy uniquely for the "nerds at the HF event" since those nerds are working very hard on open source and democratic AI, which is basically the only protection that the non nerds of SF have against the coming AI job apocalypse.
You’re describing rich and powerful people. If someone with those resources can’t grow up, yes, it’s reasonable for others to dissociate from them.
What I’m describing is also uniquely San Franciscan. Tech workers in Berkeley, Oakland, Sunnyvale, Seattle, New York and overseas are civically engaged. They volunteer; join organisations, protests and campaigns; they run for office.
> the coming AI job apocalypse
It’s odd seeing AI embrace crypto’s language. Past revolutionaries for computers or nuclear power were motivated by the good they could do. They didn’t pat themselves on the back for riding a supposed pale horse. NLP has no more ability to bring an apocalypse than personal computers did, but it’s a call for regulation if this becomes mainstream.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anyway, we nerds help the normals despite their bullying and lack of respect because we are human beings and humane. It's not their fault they're stupid and ignorant, after all? And do we not enjoy pleasures and rewards beyond their understanding? It's not so bad, being a nerd.
- - - -
Did you watch "Avenue 5"? That scene where the folks are trying to leave the ship and the captain and chief engineer are trying to stop them... Wooo boy that was a horrifying scene, eh? But you can't just let them leave. You still have to help them as best you can, if only so you can live with yourself, eh?
Right, and that's my point: the old timers resent the new wave. The hippies didn't give us the city, we took it from them.
The argument that sways me (as an oldtimer who misses the way it was) is that this is the way of it here: The Ohlone were savagely fucked over by the Spanish, who in turn were run out by the Americans, then the Gold Rush folk gave way eventually to the Beatniks, who then yielded to the Hippies, who have now been displaced by tech bros. Seen from that perspective, we're actually making fantastic progress, in the sense that each wave is less violent than the last, eh?
LOL. Since when?
SF existed in the 1850's. There was no such thing as a tech bro then.
2. Again, huggingface open source meetup was the OPPOSITE of authoritarian tech bros. It's literally the people trying to democratize and keep this stuff available to the masses.
This post here is the resentment I'm talking about. The reality is that the average HF event attendee has done far more to help "flyover states" than most SF tech workers. They should be treated as such, not scorned like they're part of a "techno authoritarian future". The techno authoritarians are OpenAI and their cronies.
If nuance isn't possible from non tech bros who resent tech bros, maybe there is a reason why the world is leaving them behind.
And I am a tech bro who moved to rural and bought the farm in 2020.
I support you HF guys though. Also if you want to get into clubs in SF, at least when I use to party there extensively in the 00's you either:
A) Go to a rave style club that lets anyone in
or
B) You wear nice "preppy" clothes. With a fresh haircut.
I've been turned away from clubs for not having a button down shirt on. Dress code is a real thing.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note that they ask you not to call names or fulminate.
Also, can you please not break the site guidelines like you did e.g. at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35376440? I don't want to ban you, and these things are not ok on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
“…if you were the state of California, and you were staring down a projected $22 billion budget deficit, would you invest your scarce resources in San Francisco, which has repeatedly proven itself unfit for such investments by building a vast, inefficient bureaucracy at the expense of taxpayers and vulnerable residents?
No.”
Which is why I absolutely advocate locally for more housing.
Of course in the US, homes are first and foremost an investment, so losing resale value is one of the worst things that could happen to a homeowner, or something.
Until you retire or for other reasons find yourself living on a fixed (and possibly diminished) income, while property taxes based on home value continue to rise.
I feel like if you were truly motivated they could have had over New York's population by now if they were to build homes and skyscrapers. It doesn't take 100 or 200 years to build a skyscraper, they could simultaneously start like 20 of them every year.
This can't be posted enough. Twitter currently employs 100x more developers than Mastodon. It's comically incoherent to claim that people should move from Twitter to Mastodon because Twitter obviously can't be run by half or a third of the developers that it used to have, because scale or something.
Collapse, in this article’s context, means insolvency. That doesn’t mean San Francisco disappears. But public transit may halt for a while, and the city may have control and assets forcibly removed from itself.
In reality, San Francisco is solidly investment grade [1][2]. It can borrow its way out of this hole.
[1] https://www.fitchratings.com/entity/san-francisco-city-count...
[2] https://sf.gov/reports/march-2023/city-credit-ratings
San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...
Not a dime of public money should go to bailing out the Guggenhimes, Buells, Swigs, Marcuses, Fishers, Gettys, and Pritzkers.
As Biden said: oh boo hoo, capitalism working as intended.
I imagine a lot of the direct comparisons break down in various ways. But, at a high level, you see similarities.
> Wow. They were almost the last person murdered in NYC! Stats say murder in NYC ended later that year.
Probably not unless you wanted everyone in the bar to look at you with disgust. In fact, the entire tone and topic of the conversation would probably change to accommodate this new information. If you wanted to say something, you’d probably say something along the lines of:
“Jesus, I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to talk about it? What happened?”
If someone is sharing something sensitive like this and you don’t think it’s relevant, just don’t say anything. Add something constructive on another comment. What have you gained from that comment other than potentially upsetting another person? I don’t think anyone is thinking “oh I’m really glad he stepped in there otherwise that one thread on the online debate would have got really off track”. And I don’t think mgarfias is going away from this thinking, “well he really opened my eyes to the fact that my anecdotal experience is not the totality of existence, my entire stance on New York City is changed now.”
Honestly dude, there are unlimited threads on every post. Every thread does not have to be a direct argument or counter argument of whatever is stated in the original content. We can just all talk and be humans going through life together.
You’re reading a comment thread where no one even knows you exist and/or are reading the particular comment thread.
This is the equivalent of writing a letter to a newspaper’s editor in the old days (with less friction).
https://www.google.com/search?q=california+budget+surplus+20...
I wonder if it'll end like NYC where the state takes permanent control of various municipal services, e.g. NYC subway it's controlled by the state.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/02/budget-deficit-may...
> Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
Bonus to incentivize: I'll even be providing the weird mix of native-San-Franciscan-cum-tech-person take, being born & raised in the Sunset. Therefore I promise to infuse it with a sense of entitlement & disaffection, as if it was possible to have any scope on in-migration/emigration policy across city limits.
Nah, they'd reject him. They voted themselves into this.
The problem is adding more housing downtown doesn't really help the problem beyond making a shorter commute (to WFH jobs?). Especially for the people who moved out, SF's pandemic policies weren't attractive, and it's even worse in a dense neighborhood. There's still the homeless problem. There's still a lot of property crime. This week, there was a post about how hard it is for 8th graders to take Algebra.
Like the article said, I don't really want to give more money to a city that's been so mismanaged.
I agree, but without jobs, as a major city, SF looks pretty unattractive. It was better a decade ago, but since then, all its problems got worse.
This feels like a ridiculous assumption. Maybe in the emotional moment, but sensible minds wouldn’t for long think that that’s it for the concept of working downtown.
"1,000 days of meetings" sounds like the ultimate office horror movie.
Right now San Francisco is not "too big to fail", but rather "too bloated to save".