pushing anyone that has differing views from the platform is leaving it as another right wing echo chamber.
It's already far from the bastion of information flow than it used to be, but still retains some visibility because of it's history and brand name. This value is dropping fast - I'm not the person that you are asking, but I strongly suspect by the time the next election rolls around, it's simply going to be irrelevant.
The list of most retweeted tweets is telling - one from 2024, other than that, they are all from years ago,
> and it was too obvious when things were being forced into your algorithm feed
It is funny that you say that. I never received random tweets from the previous leadership while Twitter inserts Elon Musk tweets in my feed more times than the people I follow. Only right wing nuts will think Twitter is getting better.
I think if you don't see the (often overt) bias of an outlet's media that you consume, the likeliest reason is that 1) you're not aware of current social and political topics or 2) the content already aligns with your politics and/or worldview.
It sounds like Elon Musk and perceived right wing bias are what inflame you. Perhaps that's how others felt about that short period under the old management when they were also not neutrally politically aligned?
I made it very clear in my post: Twitter never forced the leadership content directly into people's feed. Musk uses Twitter as his personal social network and to advance his political agenda.
Now you by the other hand is OK with that, because you pretty much prefer every person on twitter to read and follow you political agenda. And that's why Twitter became a extreme right wing echo-chamber.
> it was too obvious when things were being forced into your algorithm feed
As someone who uses Twitter to only follow Japanese people in Japan speaking Japanese, nothing was ever forced into my feed under the old management, it was all related Japanese hobby stuff, I saw zero English and zero politics.
Now it's super obvious that every n-th algorithmic entry has to be some blue check content to push their paid engagement numbers, and it's always some US brain rot, the algorithmic feed is completely useless for discovery now.
What are you talking about? All "progressives" except for some software engineers are still there. Example (it does not get more progressive than that):
It's not an unrealistic observation given that Twitter generates over half of its income in the US and almost a third of its daily active users is American. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...). The app is quite small and geographically centralized, with about 200 million daily active users. If its popularity in the US drops off with the already strained advertiser situation twitter is probably going to be in some trouble.
I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations, all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation. With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.
IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.
SF offices are a leftover of the low interest rate cycle. It's ok when you can borrow money cheaply as a form of status symbol for your company, but it makes no sense when companies have to watch every dollar and actually turn a profit - especially with the growth of remote work.
I expect that companies will maintain bay area offices for investor relations and small teams of the absolute top talent, but do most hiring elsewhere over the years.
And I’ll just preemptively jump in and nip this in the bud before some HNer writes their anti-RTO manifesto in the replies:
Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.
Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.
There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.
Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.
And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.
I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.
I've recently gone full time remote - mainly to be closer to family - and all I can say is thank goodness I'm near the end of my career. I vastly prefer hybrid - being in the office for a couple of days at least allows for networking, face time and serendipitous opportunities. There is no way I would be where I am today if I had always been working full time remote. I simply would not have had the opportunities to cross paths with people.
> Statu quo seems to be hybrid work for many big companies.
That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.
Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.
And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.
And yet just today I read an article about how more than half of tech CEOs now are allowing workers to work fully remote if the choose, which is up from closer to 35% a year ago. It’s possible some of the RTO push was to get people to leave, or that management, underestimated how unpopular it would be with employees, or perhaps the simplest explanation: management is mostly a cargo cult just throwing spaghetti at the wall, with no real rhyme or reason behind their decision making.
The benefit of locating to e.g. SF or New York is probably mostly social, to the capitalist and ruling class.
I think you want to be close to the top of the pyramid.
A CTO I worked for at a small startup said that they "don't go far from their golf club". But since Bill Gates and Steve Jeversson turned up I guess it is about being where it happens rather than being litteraly by their golf club.
Musk seems to want the remaining Twitter employees to be in the office, and San Jose fits the lifestyle profile of those remaining much better than San Francisco does.
It is an attractive location for young people that want to live in SF instead of the boring burbs. Downtown has a ton of food options for lunch. You can walk over to a Giants game or to the waterfront. Union Square in particular has turned into something of a trash heap, but FiDi to the north and SOMA to the south are (mostly) attractive.
It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you may not need to own a car.
Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect fundraising and talent attraction.
And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).
There are a lot of very readily apparent reasons you are apparently ignoring as to why your company got a much lower rent rate than someone who signed in 2019.
Seriously - the ability for people to ignore multiple, rather large elephants in the room is hilarious.
Moving out of SF may be the correct choice, but most engineers I know who have moved out of CA to cheaper cost of living areas have regretted their decision for one reason or another. Better taxes on paper may not translate to a better talent pool.
You don't understand? Seriously? The terrible policies that are broadcasted everywhere online, through both text and video, isn't enough to understand?
I have him blocked but the CEO has 200 million followers. Even assuming 20% are real people, I'd imagine there's quite a few of those who'd love to work at his company.
I don’t know if you’ve been on X lately but even if not following him you can receive push notifications from his tweets. Tested this on multiple accounts now, he’s unavoidable unless blocked and sometimes not even then because of all the bootlicker accounts that screenshot and repost his tweets. Frankly it’s made the platform unusable to me, almost nothing he posts is interesting or worth reading.
So my understanding is Elon reduced the algorithm's bubble effect - causing people to be exposed to contrarian content, content a person doesn't agree with, so that it would be witnessed by more people.
Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?
If you are a content creator on Twitch or YouTube you pretty are being held hostage on Twitter due to critical mass. Migrating would require a mass protest of large content creators to choose a new platform and move over all at once.
A lot of scientists and journalists have not moved to other platforms. I tried to use instagram instead but the algorithmic injection of content and a terrible UI make it unusable for me.
I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.
I stopped using X because it was literally impossible to not see his posts.
/shrug
My partner has the same. …but, to be fair, who knows what different variants of the platform are given to different people in different regions at different times.
Should a person with the most followers in the world have more people seeing, to then be able to know what they are sharing or saying, to then have more eyeballs to scrutinize them?
Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them, and responding to them?
I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing other articles about him that are most likely propaganda nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin with.
But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.
Not following is for content you don't mind seeing, muting is for annoying friends you can't be screenshotted blocking, and blocking is for content you don't care.
So after naughty ol' Mr Car took over Twitter, but before I stopped using the site (this would probably have been around Oct 22), I started, after never having followed or interacted with him, getting multiple inane tweets from Musk in my feed every day, along with constant suggestions to follow him. So I blocked him (I think he was one of three people in 15 years on the site who I felt the need to block). I assume this is fairly common for Twitter users; can't imagine it's gotten _better_ since.
I mean, they did ask why block him. That's why; the site will bombard you with his stuff until you do, so if you don't like his particular brand of weird loser, well, what you gonna do?
I know one Twitter guy who was a big Elon fan and loved the energy, right up until he got arbitrarily cut in one of the previous rounds of don't-call-them-layoffs.
Many people dislike their boss. I severely dislike Elon, but if they do move to the South Bay where I live and I happen to be out of a job, I'd entertain an offer from X.
Folks with H1B visas have an undue burden on any attempt to move jobs. Also interviewing is hell for many tech folks who are extremely introverted (myself included in that last part.)
Very true although anyone on a H1B may have to file a bunch of paperwork since their job location changed. Although I suppose the paperwork is going to be more something that twitter's attorneys need to do.
Doubtful narrative. In a time when occupancy is going up you would not want to kick our your anchor. Having a large company like X can help boost the rest of the area.
Throw in any other factor and it fits. Another tenant already lined up, musk wanting to significantly reduce the space he was leasing (plausible, no?) or what have you. A slow commercial market might be the only reason it took as long as it did.
The timeline is just crazy, but from a financial stance it makes sense to leave the more expensive location, if you already have the space else where (ignoring that they didn't pay their rent in San Francisco anyway).
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
> making fall promises that never come to fruition
That's definitely not consistent; the SpaceX stuff may be always behind his schedule, but it does actually deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g. hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).
SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla.
Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
> SpaceX seems mostly operated by Gwynn, and the electric cars existed before Musk ever bought into Tesla
Neither of which matters; the SpaceX promises are still Musk's, and the pre-Musk Tesla was losing money on each sale (all <= 147 of them).
> Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Agreed.
To me, colonising Mars has a huge romantic appeal… but there's no way I'd want to be in a disconnected space habitat with an (orbital position dependent) 6-30 month return-to-Earth delay, if he's in charge of it.
> those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist
Well, except the $30K Model 3, and the $35K CyberTruck (Musk can promise all he likes that it's coming next year, but I see it coming at all as a snowball's chance in hell).
They've already cut about 80% of their workforce since Elon took over, I'm not sure how much more attrition they can take. Sure the site still mostly works in the technical sense, but the way it works now has led to a significant decline in revenue and active users.
> They should know better and the best have already left or been culled.
We should care, even if it's just a little. Some of them may not be able to leave for various reasons: health, family, immigration status, who knows.
Maybe if more of us showed a bit more empathy towards each other online, the Internet wouldn't be such a sociopathic cesspool. These are real people you're talking about, not inanimate objects.
Of course, I agree with you at the individual level.
However, at the macro level, I'm more than happy to see jobs destroyed at insert sh1tty company for the good of both individuals, and the good of the nation/world. Short term pain, long term gain. And don't tell me the workers X/twitter can't get re-hired or land on their feet elsewhere ... so actually, I'm not that sympathetic. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
And that sociopathic cesspool you're speaking of? ... yes, that's right, you could be talking about X/twitter.
So, I appreciate your words of empathy, they're much needed in these times. But I'll be the asshole who dismisses them on this occassion.
Most of the workers stuck at X are on H1B visas or similar, which require them to keep their job or immediately find new employment at a company that will sponsor them.
Interesting question. Should have joined the Rebel Alliance, or at least actively worked to sabotage the Death Star. A little mis-solder here, a little wire pull there, and ...
They've cut out things like viewing who liked a tweet etc (for cost savings I suspect) so the site is probably dirt cheap. Can't imagine ads don't pay for the cost of running servers at this point, and a headcount reduction might bring it to profitability.
The ads may pay for the servers and reduced headcount[1], but there is no way that they pay for servicing the $10B of high-interest debt that the company was saddled with.
[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.
Yes, the debt weighs heavily around their neck. If it eventually ends up in bankruptcy, will Elon Musk lose control of his beloved x.com domain name for the second time?
I would imagine that it was set up so that it is rented from Musk (instead of owning* outright), but it's Musk so who knows.
* I know it's still not owned owned but there is still a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.
That's not how a bankruptcy works. In a bankruptcy, the company is owned by the creditors and gets resolved by them. Usually a business will attempt to avoid bankruptcy by filing Chapter 11[1] or similar so they get to propose a plan for restructuring that will pay back the creditors over time, but their actions as debtor in posession are scrutinized by the US trustee to ensure they meet a fiduciary obligation to the debtors, and the debtors can file a court case to appeal both the chap 11 and can try to get the debtor kicked out and a trustee appointed if they aren't acting in their interests.
> American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition
Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.
If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.
But market rates are well known and well published. CCC class loans were 10% in April 2022 when these deals were likely. So 10% to 15% covers the possible range of loans if you know much about the market.
The higher end of 15% would be possible if the loans were finalized closer to May or June.
There is a big difference from Feb 2022 vs April 2022 though. But we know the rough timeline of Twitters acquisition as well as the rough timeline of when deals were signed. So I'm reasonably confident in an April 2022 deal.
Looks like when he took down the financing, rates would have been in the 12% range. Possible some/all of the debt has been rolled over since then, possibly at higher rates.
I will wager a box of donuts the like-hiding was due to some combination of politics and Musk’s embarrassment for being called out every time he liked some cringe porn-adjacent tweet.
The issue is the $13 Billion loans and estimated $1.3 Billion/year interest payments.
I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.
I actually don't think the removal of like views has anything to do with revenue.
I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.
I don't know if you are serious but because of LLMs trained on our work basically every tech company is scrambling for ways to get rid of programmers. Just yesterday I commented in a thread here where someone said 80% of their work is LLMable "bullshit" (somehow that guy, like many, didn't connect it to headcount or likelihood of keeping own job...)
Even if it wasn't for LLMs, it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API.
I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.
People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
Lawyers or real engineers can only push a button and still have secure jobs because they have licenses/certifications/boards and liabilities with consequences. There is no such thing in programming. (Even though our mistakes can and do also lead to real people dying)
> it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API
That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.
> automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)
"Work" isn't Boolean — the self drive AI does exist, just not well enough to do everything and even the "F" (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)
The same quality may be worse or better in specific roles, but AI isn't stationary.
> It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed — but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to make workers redundant.
Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer protection.
Dunno much about the Amish. Communism was (in practice a power grab, but in theory) very much in favor of automation. Hyping LLM training without licensing original works and calling for banning copyright and patents is what reminds me of communism a lot these days. I saw someone call it "IP communism". Let's see how well it works for innovation;)
I am not against automation too. We all used autocomplete. But it is amusing to see people sawing off the branch on which they sit, encouraging each other to do so and spitting on people who point it out.
I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
> Certifications are consumer protection.
If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture. In the end it is protection for every side.
I've only seen half the stuff you're calling "IP communism", but many are inspired by the "fully automated luxury gay space communism" meme, so sure :)
> I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
I've met both, and yup; though the communists seemed more sociable, neither could really understand that the other existed except as caricature.
> If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture.
I was unsure if I should have written "also" in that sentence; but I didn't write "just" ;)
FWIW, I'm fairly sure the communists I know have a blind spot for all the failures of communist governments and not just the USSR's failures, they put Marx on a pedestal and insist the evidence to the contrary doesn't count somehow.
As I see equivalent blind spots in anarchocapitalism (any example of bad outcomes is dismissed as "not real free market"), that's why I don't think either communism or anarchocapitalism works.
To me "revenue and MAUs have declined significantly" sounds like a reason they would want to reduce employee numbers, rather than a reason they wouldn't.
At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.
Terminating employees without cause (i.e. due to employee’s poor performance) entitles the employer to unemployment benefits, causing the state to increase the business’s unemployment insurance premiums.
If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.
There’s how much the company can take, and how much Elon thinks the company can take. He subscribes to the ubermensch view, where him and maybe two other superior specimens of manhood could single handedly run the entire company.
I thought the company would collapse after firing 80% of staff, and for a long time I kept arguing that Twitter was still in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the edge of the cliff but didn't fall yet" phase where they were running on pure momentum. I must admit, as time goes by, it's harder and harder to argue that. I just can't believe that 80% of the company was really just not needed. Every company I've ever worked at was lean to the point where they almost couldn't get anything done due to lack of people. I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.
The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).
As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).
My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.
When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.
They just announced an anti-trust lawsuit regarding what they say is a coordinated effort to remove advertisers from the site. Not advocating one way or the other as to the merits of the claim but an interesting development regarding the revenue drop you mentioned.
Companies have to be sensitive to the overton window of their customers. You make a mistake - it can be expensive. Let's ignore X/Twitter for a second - look at what happened to one of ABInBev's brands, Bud Light. They stepped outside that window and got smacked down pretty quickly.
I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do.
I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant.
The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
This lawsuit is ridiculous. If Twitter can sue companies for not advertising, can Tesla sue people for buying vehicles not made by Tesla? Can Google sue companies for advertising on Bing? Can Rivian sue Tesla buyers for not buying Rivians?
The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
Musk took a bunch of outside money during the buyout so they're still reporting results to e.g. Fidelity and other debtholders. Hence why we broadly know that investors have lost >70% of their money: https://x.com/danprimack/status/1774456271871033823
Don't forget that 2022 was still a good time for tech with people recovering from COVID lockdowns. It's not really much of a surprise that they're back to pre-COVID income.
Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups like Media Matters and others attempting to scare advertisers away.
Those numbers don't mean anything. Revenue does not equal profit.
Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.
Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
> now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits
> Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Notably, the company does not release audited financials anymore. If the company were able to go from breakeven to netting 80% margins, great. But nobody should believe such a turnaround without evidence.
Separately, if the company were netting $320mm annually (using your hypothetical), AND we assign the P/E of best-in-class Meta (which is growing, not shrinking), the company would be worth $8B[1]. Under these generous assumptions, Musk has presided over a $36B (82%) destruction of value in under 2 years.
1 - That's not accounting for the outstanding debt used to finance the deal. Including that makes the value of the enterprise negative.
People always find a way to justify their existence. In sufficiently large companies you can find people whose job is to satisfy policies invented by other people in other departments. In one sense, they were all "needed" because of the domino effects of some policy created long ago.
But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
I think Twitter is down 60% in advertisers and 30% in users? Elon personality is part of it, but losing so many people handling community, clients, institutions… I am sure the company has lost most of its institutional knowledge.
a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with increased demands in the space.
b) take on more and more existential risks
For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the product for as long as it lives. Informally known as enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than market capture.
You can last a while though, especially because there aren't many changes so there's also less operational risk.
Depends on your standards I guess. You could cut it down to one person and have a website running. As it stands if you look at most people's profiles when logged out you see tweets starting a couple years ago other than the pinned tweet. I haven't used it much since a bit before Elon took over but generally as I understand it's more buggy and spammy than before. If that's good enough, I guess you could say it's still trucking.
Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.
Not able to comment on the technical side, but for sure a lot people who got sacked were on moderation. Some countries like mine eventually lost all moderators specifically working for that country. And it does show in the amount of spam an unchecked racism etc, which is a big reason why many advertisers left.
From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.
> I can't imagine a company that could lose 80% of their people and keep on trucking.
Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.
How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.
By "maintenance mode" you mean shipping more features per year than the pre-Elon Twitter? Remember, the pre-Elon Twitter was completely stagnant and seemingly unable to ship even the most desired features.
Musk has openly said many times he wants X to be an "everything app" and sees huge growth in its future. What makes you think he ever intended to put it in "maintenance mode"?
80% was needed to grow the business. If Twitter chooses not to grow them it doesn't need those people. It only needs enough to keep the lights on.
If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing any more though so it's probably quite safe.
The linked article doesn’t seem to say anything about growth in revenue numbers - but it does say overall revenue has dropped 50% since Musks takeover. The quarterly chart doesn’t look great either.
Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.
This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.
Don't forget the peak happened during COVID- where it is at now isn't really much different than where it was before, if the numbers are accurate anyway.
The brand was never not tainted. Twitter has long been known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.
> Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU
Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism. Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff that you'll already find better coverage of on X.
> This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.
Look at the revenues per quarter. It was growing in 2023, but declined in the first quarter of 2024, but I wouldn't say you can make conclusions for 2024 from one quarter.
No one is comparing year over year, there's been barely a year since the acquisition. I said the "arrow" over the latest few quarters was generally UP, in response to a mistaken argument that Twitter/X has collapsed. I am not trying to say Elon is great or something like that, I am making an observation of what the charts say, that's all. I don't know if the charts are 100% accurate, but I have no reason to doubt either... Why anything that may be positive about X is so controversial, even something as uncontroversial as the direction of an arrow on a damn graph? People seem to lose all rationality over this guy, what the hell is going on?! Do you actually have figures showing completely different results?? IF no, why all of a sudden people are so completely skeptical of it?! Sounds like discussions about climate change: someone shows a chart with temperatures way up, all of a sudden everyone is an expert and points out it was higher 60 million years ago or whatever, or the data cannot be fully trusted because they learned in high school that these are just estimates or other crap on the same vein. It's embarrassing for the human race.
The point has nothing to do with Elon. It's just the correct way to analyze revenue graphs due to seasonality. Whether or not X is "collapsing" isn't obvious from the graphs either, and I made no such claim. We'd need to know other things that aren't public, and it's probably too early to tell anyway. But it's incorrect to say that revenue is growing. It's down quarterly YoY, which is the only real meaningful way to look at it.
Further, everything after Musk bought it is just a guess. Without public audited numbers, who knows what is going on. If I had to bet, I would guess the numbers are even lower than estimated - if things were hunky dory, I doubt they would be suing their customers (advertisers).
Let's assume we can trust these numbers. The user count is not material for a site that has already scaled and monetized, so focus on the actual money changing hands.
That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture how much worse off the company is today than before the acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023 looks more like $2B in topline.
Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.
Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding debt, you will end up with a negative number.
If you're suing your customers? With frivolous lawsuits? You are admitting that your business is in collapse.
There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety so that people could post whatever they want under the guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want to run ads next to objectionable content.
Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved here.
At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter management wants to create a space where people can post ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter management are directly in conflict with the goals of big advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation to unfold.
“ If you're a Twitter diehard who's not willing to swap to X, it might be finally time to ditch X for Mastadon or Threads. On your way out, don't forget to delete your X account.”
journalists are so biased against X
You're getting downvoted because you're just regurgitating the Elon Musk fanboy "journalists hate X because they're threatened by it!" and "journalists are biased and not trustworthy!" party line nonsense like a complete weirdo.
4Chan was run by like one guy using the change he found in the cushions of his couch.
Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.
I much prefer the Twitter of today. Since I'm a grown adult, I can handle some mean words being seen by my eyes, and just ignoring what I don't like. It's nice seeing a balance of both sides of an argument now, rather than only seeing the left biased information.
"You and everyone like you should be rounded up and executed" is a just a mean message, but it's also dangerous. People will believe that stuff, and then try to do it. This isn't a theoretical danger, it has happened time and time again throughout history. These sorts of seductive messages that target out-groups and provide a sense of community have lead to real life horrors.
X has also gotten very bad about amplifying misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics. Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community notes. The comment section was full of great replacement theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and making it sound like there was a consensus. People see stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some point.
Is "left biased information" a euphemism for anything that doesn't include Nazi propaganda or hate speech? Because those are pretty much the things that were (loosely, not fully) banned prior to Elon's takeover.
I was a big Reddit user back in 2015/16 and also spent a lot of time in the NPR comments. Watching the insanity around the 2016 election in real time was an interesting experience. The mass suppression on Reddit and NPR shutting their comment section down was enough to form my opinion on this whole thing.
That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.
Active users on the site is setting records pretty regularly, according to Linda. Usability and performance of the site is far higher than before in my experience as well. Revenue is down only due to an illegal cartel boycott, which X has recently filed a lawsuit to resolve.
This is just another of Musk's "free speech for me, but not for you" lawsuits that never go anywhere and are designed to waste your money with lawyers.
I've only seen the words "illegal cartel boycott" being used (verbatim, as it were) by Musk, as well as the Twitter account of something called Rumble who are apparently joining Musk in trying to sue the advertisers who left the platform in response to it becoming too volatile to associate their brands with.
Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?
Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?
This take, which is taken straight from Elon, is plainly hilarious.
They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but when advertisers exercise their free speech and go advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.
Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be censorship". But then with the legal and publicly available information posted by ElonJet, that was different and everybody who ever mentioned it was banned.
>Government using force, whitewashed with a thin veneer of an NGO to cartelize advertisers and censor twitter is not “free speech”.
This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but doesn't really justify the thought that association between any group of private entities could be compelled.
> You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
I think this may have been in reference to another commenter.
> You support censorship.
I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying to find technical workarounds to online censorship in dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these days is closer to the censorship seen in those places than it was before Musk took over.
I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't get started on here.
> This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete conversations where people who aren't constructively participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me if this thread got removed, for example.
I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since those aren't really substantial enough to even talk about.
I don't know what the established criteria are for 'reasonable commuting distance' in the SF Bay area, but seems like a big forced transfer like this might need a WARN act notice, which is going to get the company in the news for layoffs. And probably in the news for not providing the notice in a timely fashion, too.
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in SF have particular interests and desired amenities that make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.
From what I could tell, the 'standard' for reasonable commute measures from the employee's home, not from the original location to the other. But the federal WARN info says 'reasonable' varies by locale, and didn't offer any specifics.
Moving the office is probably neutral or better for people on the Penisula. And may be neutral for parts of the East Bay. Depends on where exactly in San Jose the new office is too.
Also, I was surprised by how light traffic was when I drove from Mountain View to SF last October during what I was expecting to be the morning rush hour. I don't recall what the reverse direction looked like, though.
But my point was kind of to raise the likelyhood that this action was taken without regard for how it looks, and without regard for required notifications.
It's an exciting move by X! They seem to adapt to the changing work environment. I wonder how this relocation will impact their company culture and operations in the long run.
That depends on how many X employees actually live in SF and how many commute each day back and forth from the same South Bay. When I worked in SF, I regularly shared a train with the latter crowd, and there are a lot of them. I'm not saying they all work for X, but I suspect for a lot of people there the move would actually be an improvement.
You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
You don't say that 2020-2022 proves that remote work definitely is ok for a lot of people and they want it to stay that way. And recently there have been multiple reports showing that more flexible working options help lowering attribution. Well, what a surprise. /s It is clear that CEOs force people back to office mostly to cut headcounts.
Why assume everyone is living in SF? I can’t imagine Elon actually asking his employees and taking there opinions into account, but my experience is that people are commuting in every direction in the Bay Area. This will be closer for some people without a doubt.
Does any employer factor this in? That's the employee's time/expense, not the company's. After all, SF is one of the cities with the worst traffic (to say nothing of the cost of living)
That's not free speech, that's just might makes right principle which don't need a fancy name.
Free speech, at least on the Internet, means say what don't get the majority nod and enjoy getting harassed to literal suicide, death, mental health consequences, or all of above. Right makes might, not the normal way around.
IOW, free speech do come with consequences, and it's super-proportional on the Internet.
There's free speech and there's amplification of speech. When Musk talks about "free speech" being denied what he's really complaining about is his views aren't being amplified. Obviously he can create a webpage somewhere and write whatever he wants on it (free speech), but that wouldn't be amplified so that's not what he wants. This is presumably also the reason he set fire to so much money buying Twitter.
You might be right when it comes to employees, but definitely not when it comes to users.
There's a lot of people using X, and the vast, vast majority of them don't care much for Musk or actively dislike him.
THe problem with X is that it is (and always was) sort of an echo chamber, there's no average X user, everybody sees very different content based on what they follow. The average HNer probably won't notice the huge swathes of people who are on there just for sports content or their favorite celebrity. Those people usually don't care much for Musk, except when he appears in some funny meme.
Musk pumps himself to the top though; I neither follow or click on his messages, but they still plop in my notifications. Further yes, for some reason people still use it so I have to as well or I sell nothing. However, if it would collapse or have Not Musk, it might be better. We will see eventually.
I'm only on Twitter for Sport, but deranged political content tends to infect even that more regularly, so i finally bite the bullet and gave my data to Zuck through Instagram where I don't have to read conspiracy on athletes I actually like.
when you stop dwelling on the random hot yoga posts while scrolling, after an ad scroll by, they will pump it up to other engagement content to feed the pavlovian cycle.
My consumption isn't high enough, I often look up at the interesting sport stories of the week, maybe a dozen post every day during the Olympics, but I used to use Twitter once a month to follow the NBA stories (hopefully it will work on Instagram, else I will end up subscribing to a real sport news media).
Echo chamber might not be the right word, but most people are/were on Twitter for a relatively narrow usecase. You joined Twitter for Fortnite content, or for web development, or for local stuff. It's why these groups were described as "media twitter" or "Black twitter" or 'NBA twitter"
It’s not like this anymore I think. I destroyed my Twitter account way before the acquisition by Musk.
But I recently created a disposable account because it happens that my regional train lines have hired good community managers and so I know I can reach them. Otherwise I just never use it.
Since I subscribed to basically nothing, I’ve got the full algorithm version. It’s frankly horrible. I’m submerged by far right content and civilization wars.
It’s perfect for my social media addiction because it make me want to leave as soon as I finished what I had to do but it really feels like an unsafe place for anyone who somehow still have some mental health left.
I imagine that people with more suscriptions are seeing less of this shit but I wouldn’t be so sure and also, I personally wouldn’t tolerate to use a platform with such dysfunctional moderation.
Used to always be an echo chamber, that’s true. Yet the amount of alt-right, post-facts, no-vax, conspiracy theory shit I’m served on X despite me not following any of that has increased dramatically to the point of making X a cesspool of toxic content.
Most of that is spewed or retweeted by Musk himself
Im there for finance news and compiler tech. It’s the only platform where I don’t feel like I am force fed Hollywood drama. You just have to follow people you respect instead of people you find amusing.
Twitter has always skewed older, in terms of not having kids on it, but it's still mostly people in their 20s and 30s. And there's far less 50+ yr olds in 2024 than FB according to statista:
Twitters largest demo is 25-34yr olds = 36%, 18-24 = 34.2%. While 50+ yr = 7%
16-28 is the gold of demographics. all those numbers skew A LOT to the lower end of the age range to pretend they have that demographic when in reality they do not.
It is the same thing. Not political, but as far as I know the previous guy didn't whine as much about free speech while not being free speech as the current guy.
Also free speech in law just means you can’t be prosecuted to say stupid things. It doesn’t mean that anyone owes you the canal to say your stupid things.
The previous twitter had (somehow) moderation. You would think what you want about it but you were free to use your free speech right elsewhere.
The difference is that Musk says that it gives you this canal but he lies because he is still moderating the network, except the moderation now favors far right content.
That’s not more free speech than before, that’s just a pro-fascist moderation.
Free speech is both an ideal, and something which is guaranteed by law (in some countries anyways). As a matter of law, you're correct. If you aren't prosecuted for your speech, then the law of free speech wasn't violated. But extralegal actions can still be (and often are) contrary to the ideal of free speech and are criticized on that basis. It is common, but erroneous, to conflate these two senses of "free speech".
It's weird to see people making spiteful comments about working for Musk.
I never see spiteful comments about people who work for British American Tobacco, BP or the Sacklers and these companies have, in my opinion, done far more damage to people, families and society in general.
If I can try to explain it - it is overcorrection from times when Tesla and SpaceX were cool with appealing mission places to work on. Bcs of that they could get away with smaller salaries too (although Tesla meteoric rise in value compensate it if you got options as I understand it).
Which "wrong think" specifically got people banned? Because the vast majority of conservatives on the platform did not get banned, so I'm left wondering which exact people banned for what exact reasons you're thinking of. Trump was removed after the Jan 6 assault on the capital for provoking that violence and repeatedly lying to his followers about the election, which, weirdly, is quite different than for being a conservative.
Getting banned for wrongthink on the old Twitter was a rite of passage, almost every content creator I follow (mostly gaming youtubers, nothing spicy or even controversial) got banned at least once.
What you quoted here and the article you linked are extremely different things. The article states "referring to a transgender individual by their biological sex and opining that “women aren’t men.”". You may not agree with that decision, but I hope you can understand that difference.
I might've linked a different story than the one I thought of — was a result of a quick google search, sorry.
The tweet I've seen wasn't directed at anyone, just a sentence to the effect of "Women are different from men". By a feminist, so likely not a conservative.
Harassing a trans person is terrible behavior, sure. Like with any other person. (I.e. that's not a wrongthink issue.)
From where I'm standing, it looks like when Dorsey was CEO, leftist accounts got more leniency and were more likely to not be banned after being reported for offenses—be them legitimate or not; this was the opposite for accounts on the other end of the spectrum. When Musk took over, this phenomenon was completely and totally inverted. IMO.
The difference is that Twitter didn’t ban conservatives for their political views but for violating their terms of service. In Trump’s case that was continued calls for violence and election interference, more than a hypothetical concern after his followers made an unprecedented violent attack on the U.S. electoral process. As you can easily verify, most conservatives were never banned: the people who were banned made repeated, deliberate violations of the legal agreement that they accepted.
And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology? Do we then finally concede that Twitter did, in fact, target or disproportionately affect non-left-wing users? Is our next point of discussion about whether we can allow such a huge societal discussion/debate tool to be aligned with a pre-defined set of principles that 50% of people don't agree with? Or rather, on a set of principles that we can't find more than 50% consensus on?
Either way, this is just like normal government laws. One of the big criticisms that Libertarians have over laws is that they're not universally enforced, so they end up being selectively enforced, which just means that "those with power" wield the laws against those they don't like. Same goes here with platforms like Twitter. The rules are vague, opaque, and their enforcement is seemingly random and at the whims of some faceless entity behind their enforcement process. If we all knew these supposed "terms of service" and they did, in fact, have very clear rules and guidelines then there would be absolutely no room for conservatives or anyone else to cry about being targeted.
But even if, as you argue, calling for violence against people is part of right wing ideology or culture, it still seems reasonable to prohibit that. We do have to draw a line somewhere even against things that may be ingrained in a particular culture and which may have a disproportionate effect on that culture.
But we should examine these choices in a principled way. Still, prohibiting calls for violence doesn’t seem like a gray area…
I will not use calls for violence as an example for this argument I'm making. I specifically left it vague so we could all apply our own minds on it.
But if i had to pick one it would be the Trans issue. Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates on this topic meant the platforms usually sided with the trans or left-wing party.
As for calls of violence: there are many examples where anti-white and anti-right calls for violence and extermination go unpunished and swept under the rug to be memory holed. Let's start by making this a bad thing across the board.
The entire doc has an "aura" of being fair, and "protecting" the weak. But it ends up stifling debate and genuine discussion because report-brigades and coordinated attacks by left-wing institutions and left-wing activists (with way too much time on their hands because they are full-time activists) end up targeting right-wing individuals for benign and not-harassing behaviour. I've seen my fair share of anti-white and anti-republican hateful comments and calls for violence, that I don't know why you even need to see examples. Look for them everywhere, even on HN.
Look, this is a very diffuse topic. You're not going to get a clear example and we don't know what was happening behind the scenes at Twitter. But it's very telling that most tech companies are predominantly left-wing donors and have left-wing ideologies. Even if they act to be as impartial as they can, their bias will show because they have anti-republican discriminatory hiring practices.
So, to be clear, you’re saying that conservatism is synonymous with directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”? I couldn’t agree with such a broad claim about millions of people.
"Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates" was my example, and that doc absolutely targets it even though arguably misgendering and having blunt debates on the trans issue is not "directly attacking “other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” according to your accusation.
Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules. Or that, in an argument about illegal immigration, a conservative forbidden from "asserting that members of a protected category are more likely to take part in dangerous or illegal activities" will find it impossible to convey their belief that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crime.
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.
> Surely you can agree that, if the rule is no "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals", a conservative who is arguing that personal pronouns are silly is either compelled to bow to their opposition or violate the rules.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is make direct targeted attacks against a specific person. You can say this is a dumb policy, you can rant about the concept in general, all you can’t do is say “@alice you’re really named Bob”.
Similarly, you can rant about immigrants and they wouldn’t do a thing as long as you could resist specifically targeting people.
Again, my point isn’t that Twitter was perfect or that they had solved every issue for balancing freedom of speech in an open forum but simply that rules against targeted attacks are not anti-conservative unless you have a very negative view of conservatism. It’s popular to try to score in-group points by whining about censorship but there’s a reason why nobody has been able to provide examples of actual conservative ideas being censored, because they know as soon as they do it’ll turn out to be something else which most people consider reasonable or, like the NYPost ban for hacked materials, a decision affecting one account which was reversed.
The rules are designed as such so that "well meaning" and well-thinking individuals such as yourself can provide an aura of protection over their actions, and "technically" be right. But in practice, the debate is definitely stifled in one direction.
Just look at the list of "notable Twitter bans", and you'll see a pattern. Among the clear "incitement of violence" and bot-accounts, there is a huge pattern of "we got banned and we don't know why, but we're vocal about X,Y,Z". One has to read between the lines. I'd be all for your argument and with you if we could have a clean-room look at the Twitter data to confirm, but we don't have that. Where is the twitter ban dataset that we can all have a look at?
Unfortunately, your beliefs align with that of the oppressor's side, so you don't see these and it'll be uncomfortable for you to go out on a limb. You think the system is "working as expected" and "they're only banning you if you target specific people".
> And if those "Terms of Service" heavily aligns with left-wing ideology?
First, they don’t - if they had, you would be able to provide an example rather than confabulating about imaginary scenarios.
Second, private companies are generally not obligated to provide you services on your own terms. If a bar kicks you out from screaming threats at other patrons, your rights are not being violated - go find a place which welcomes you.
Third, it’s not 50%, although I can understand why you’d make that up, but a fraction of a percent. Almost all conservatives were not banned because they didn’t repeatedly violate the terms of service. The ones who were kicked out were given warnings, chose to ignore them, and had the promised consequences.
Look, we all know you’re making that up but if we take you at face value, you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act. Nobody got blocked for advocating for smaller government, business-friendly policies, or talking about their religious or family values – it was threats of violence, slurs, targeted harassment, election misinformation, etc. None of the conservatives I know would claim those as defining their beliefs, and they’d be rather insulted to have you define them that way.
> you just defined conservatism as the beliefs bad enough to get Twitter’s famously hands-off moderators to act.
This sort of disingenuous reply really isn’t helpful. The GP was clearly accusing Twitter of enforcing their TOS for righty accounts, while not enforcing their TOS when lefty accounts would do similar things.
I don’t think they are correct, but your rhetoric is just going to alienate people and makes your argument look weaker.
Can you provide any examples? The poster rather has been rather conspicuously unable to do so, which is hard to reconcile with the broad policy they’re claiming, especially when there are counter examples of accounts which were not blocked because Twitter gave more leeway to political accounts.
The reason is simple: the things which got those accounts closed weren’t traditional conservative positions, and there were plenty of lefty/hard to classify accounts which were also suspended or banned for similar reasons but nobody is sticking up for their behavior and claiming it represents their larger political group.
Dude, you realize we can see the timestamps of your messages? You’re replying to a message left 4 hours ago claiming that something you wrote 2 hours later somehow contradicts it.
Now, as to that specific claim since you actually provided details we can see that it doesn’t support the claim. It’s a single account, not the imagined campaign account conservatives, and Twitter changed their policy around hacked materials specifically to allow what the NYPost did:
Again, nobody is saying that Twitter was perfect but there just isn’t evidence supporting the belief that they ran a discrimination campaign against conservatives. Even the much ballyhooed “Twitter Files” fizzled because it made it clear that they bent over backwards accommodating political figures.
Yeah, I think the current phrase for this is "delulu".
I give you an example but apparently its not the example you wanted. You expect me to list every right wing account that got pulled? The Babylon Bee got banned as well if that helps you get a grip on reality.
The twitter files never fizzled out, except in the NYT. This is just your unfounded assertion. They were literally a smoking gun.
Twitter took 14 days to change their policy re the Hunter Laptop to slow roll the story breaking fully before the presidential election.
Surely you can provide specific details of this alleged censorship? It was heavily covered here but even pretty conservative people didn’t see it living up to the PR claims.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was all anyone was talking about for days. They blocked non-consensual nudity but that’s consistent with long-running policy and had no impact on the political aspects any more than we needed to see Trump and Daniels in action to discuss whether payoffs were appropriate.
They did not ban Trump for "continued calls for violence and election interference".
Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1]
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
And
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Of course, in the blog post, Twitter claims to have "assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy"
If those two tweets are glorification of violence, then your post is calling for genocide.
Again, if those were all he’d posted and his followers hadn’t just responded to his past calls with a violent assault on the election process, he’d never have gotten banned. As you can see by reading the page you linked, this decision was made with that context in mind after years of crossing the boundaries, and they did not want their corporate resources potentially being used for additional political violence.
The problem is their claim was those two tweets were violent. If they just said they banned him for behavior outside of Twitter they wouldn't be lying. Instead they claimed two tweets that have literally nothing to do with violence are violent.
Text-based hivemind social media like Twitter auto-excludes likes of Trump and Musk. They don't generate text in the Internet sub-language. Twitter users judge, cancel and ignore liberals and conservatives equally hard, I think largely by presentation.
My brother's weird friend, who I don't associate with much, says Twitter is still great for porn. If/when they pull a Tumblr will be the start of their irrelevancy,
It's great for people to advertise porn and sexual services. It's not very great at monetising them. Most of it is just teasers for OnlyFans et al and more personal services.
I'm not a fan, I don't follow him, I just have my timeline on "Following" and almost never see any Elon content unless I look for it. I follow a small carefully curated list of people and still get value from the site.
More like the easy commute you had in San Francisco on muni (the bus and subway network of San Francisco) becomes an annoying hour and a half-long commute on bart (The regional train system) with 2-3 transfers
Until Boring Company sets up multiple pickup points with Loop and Hyperloop tunnels; then will arguably be a max 20-30 minute ride.
The dynamics of travel will dramatically change multiple industries, save for if the status quo establishment and industrial complexes through regulatory capture prevent the rapid expansion of the paradigm shift in transport that Boring Company is rapidly developing; the technology of which Elon needs for his Mars colony, and so it'll happen and be developed as far as is determined to be necessary to maximize its utility and safety.
I haven't looked into it recently, however their Las Vegas network is going and expanding; 40 million people per year travel to Vegas, a great testbed and for exposure.
I like how the Vegas Loop tunnels are almost the same diameter as the London Underground deep lines. Glasgow subway is even smaller. Which means the tunnels are big enough to run metro and carry lots of people.
It would be better to use larger tunnel, buy normal sized trains, and keep tall people from hitting their heads. It would also make sense to use one of the automated systems instead of trying to build pod system.
It is also curious that Musk always want to do his way. Cause there is company that makes automated pods used at Heathrow. They should work for the current service and wouldn't be Tesla 3 with driver.
"if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
The criticisms of TBC fall into three camps: (1) this is terrifyingly unsafe, if a vehicle catches fire in those tunnels the occupants can't even open the doors and no vehicle behind them has a way to safely evacuate either; (2) they are still really expensive, like all other tunnels; (3) this compared poorly with all other modes of transport on every measure.
Thanks for replying with some depth-specific concerns.
Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?
All-or-nothing thinking without critically thinking or brainstorming through how adaptations for adoption could be made isn't helpful.
Re: Safety
Perhaps battery tech that eventually is safer than currently driving a vehicle, perhaps even safer then with the casualties from airplane crashes, or other solutions like before entering the tunnels everyone is provided emergency kit/safety-oxygen masks/goggles, etc; and maybe necessary for doors that have an emergency "blowout" handle to pull and have doors pop off their hinges? I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Also, in the Hyperloop almost vacuum state that's planned, fire will be less of a problem - and perhaps a safety system could be implemented, especially if everyone is temporarily given an oxygen mask-goggles for each longer ride or all rides, that at certain points a fire extinguishing-suppression system could be implemented where non-oxygen gases are flooded into the tunnel between the point a fire is detected?
Arguably so long as cost of implementation is less than or the same cost than current existing infrastructure costs, where the time savings are arguably up to invaluable - but a cost per ride for each person using the system will be determinable, then it can be a great alternative especially with the positives of how it allows transport regardless of winter weather conditions, etc.
> Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?
So, in this scenario, you could only do that if each major long-haul route had a tunnel. And you made the tunnel wider, as the current tunnels — where the only cost-saving TBC has demonstrated of any kind so far is by limiting the size — aren't big enough to fit an American standard intermodal container, and only just fit the ISO containers (with so little margin you have to care about the turning circle even if you could fit the carrier into the circular gap around the boxy cross-section). And that's without also considering that current trucks definitely don't fit no matter which size standard is considered, so either you'd need the tunnels even wider or you'd need something custom-designed to fit.
High axle weights cause more damage to the surface, which is really bad for a tunnel where you can't just go around a pot-hole, so you want something hard-wearing, something like steel. Even if you use maglev, looking at current maglev research trains, you've got a speed-up zone where you still have contact.
But you don't need to cover the whole surface in steel, because unlike a road where the vehicles might move sideways, this is so tight that there's only one place for the wheels to even be. And if you do that, you could get rid of the batteries entirely by hooking these steel wheel-paths to the mains.
But then you can save money on the vacuum systems, because if you put all the ISO containers in a row: as each container will be in the slip-steam of the one ahead of it, a chain of 10 will have the same impact as a 10x reduction in air resistance.
Oh look, it's now either a railway or a subway depending on if you bother with the "underground" part.
> I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
The pictures I've seen show negligible clearance between the bottom of the car doors and the curve of the wall. Also, I talked to a civil engineer.
But if you're talking about an evacuated tunnel, then leaving is lethal even if it's physically possible.
> We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Hyperloop in particular (as in, not just the tunnel) is about the speed, so it only makes sense to wait 30 minutes for security etc. if you can go sufficiently faster than a car would have. But is this a point-to-point system in a network that connects everywhere to everywhere else, like a road, or a hub-to-hub system? If it's the former, then those 30 minutes could've taken you 15 miles at residential speeds or 35 miles at motorway speeds (in the UK, I don't know US norms) — a delay like that means there's no point even trying to make it like the road network, so QED it will be hub-to-hub; but if it's hub-to-hub, you now also need to factor in the time it takes to get from wherever you are to your closest starting hub, and in reverse at the far end the time between your ultimate destination and its nearest finishing hub in addition to factoring in the delay for security.
But hub-to-hub can't replace all semi-trucks off the road — at least around here, they go to each supermarket, and I've got something like 8 supermarkets with articulated lorry loading bays within a 15 minute walk from my apartment.
Given the big-rigs aren't going away without an absurd degree of extra infrastructure build-out (never mind tunnelling, that kind of density is more like "raise city by 10 meters and rebrand old roads as 'hyperloop'"), if you're going to have a setup with hubs that far apart, why not just use a plane (for long distances, with securit...
Loop and Hyperloop are two completely different things. Loop is Tesla cars in a tunnel, and Hyperloop is theoretically capsules in evacuated tube. The former is not very good way to get around city, and the later is a not very good to get between cities.
... Wait, is it actually _that_ low? That's, like, a high-frequency conventional bus route (ie not BRT). Like, what on earth was the point? Either use buses for same capacity, or build a real rail line for ten times the capacity. The highest capacity metro systems can do something like 40k/hour each direction (though one of those would clearly be overkill in this case, and something far more modest could be used).
I wouldn't bring up the Las Vegas network if you're trying to advocate for the boring company, it's quite possibly the worst system of transportation that's ever been created. A farce in every aspect, benefiting no one.
This is not the sort of thing you should measure on an individual user experience basis. Try running the numbers for the system, it would essentially get beaten by a medium-sized bus in capacity and times, at a fraction of the cost.
Not to mention the large delta between what was promised versus what was delivered. There's probably a good case for fraud, if it were not for the fact that the purchasers want to save face they could probably sue.
Might as well argue he’s going to give all his employees time machines to go buy $AAPL in the 90s as part of their comp plan. Would also get downvoted.
"Extreme sycophancy without much critical thought."
A claim you make with no supportive arguments.
My comment is packed with critical thought. Maybe you're just lacking understanding to unpack it? Or are you too arrogant to not think that you know all?
And then ridiculous ad hominem that you think was clever enough to actually waste time to type out; what work do you have that you hate that you're procrastinating from working on?
I'm really curious if you know what sycophancy means, and if so, how exactly my comment is benefitting me? I think it's more likely you're jealous of Elon's success, have past trauma from personal work experiences you're projecting onto him, and taking it out on anyone who notes his successes and extrapolates to estimate where his projects will lead to.
Because theres a snowball's chance in hell that will ever happen. Just build normal trains and expand the public transportation like every developed country on Earth.
This is a very anti-Musk thread and generally anti-Musk crowd. Pro-Musk comments should be expected to be downvoted, unfortunately. It's days like these one has to be brave and burn some magical internet karma points in order to present an opposing view and to call out the one-sided discussions.
I don't think the comment is being voted because it's "pro-Musk", but because no one believes they're going to do any of that. I even thought it was a joke, until they asked why they were being downvoted.
The true is, there's a huge gap between what was promised early on and what they seem to be able to do. After a certain point people start calling it "bs" and have no patience for those repeating the initial claims.
If it's not I encourage you to go look at the stellar success of the boring company in places like Las Vegas and reconsider your assessment of the future.
Transit in the Bay Area has very fragmented governance: 27 different transit agencies for 7.6m people in 9 counties with little coordination and no regional vision. By most measures, the Bay Area has the most fragmented public transit network in the country. See Seamless Bay Area if you want to make your voice heard for fixing this: https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/
(Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the freeway where possible).
BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in construction).
It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too: as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic and enormous construction disruption from underground multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.
You can get to San Jose on BART now but have to go all the way under and around the bay instead of directly south, so it’s not really worth it to go from SF to SJ using anything other than Caltrain.
You can take Caltrain to San Jose. I did this commute for several years when I lived in SF and worked in SJ. With electrification coming top Caltrain this fall, it should be faster than the current diesel trains. Depending on where Twitter's offices are in Palo Alto and San Jose, it probably won't be that bad.
BART runs with 20 minute headways on longer routes (and as little as 4 minutes through San Francisco). The six CalTrain "baby bullet" express trains run hourly at best, with long service lapses mid-day and in the late evenings. Locals run more often (about every 10--20 minutes during peak commute hours) but add a half-hour to the just over one-hour express schedule.
(Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly during rush hour.)
BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose) departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):
Are they upgrading the tracks as well? Diesel trains can run at 80mph no problem, which is about the maximum any standard US railroad supports. If the track is built to high speed standards you could go faster.
Melbourne, Australia has been running a project since 2015 – scheduled to continue until at least 2030 – to remove at-grade intersections (or "level crossings" as we call them) on suburban rail lines. They've already removed 83, and by 2030 plan to have removed 110. I'm not sure of the total cost, but I'd say in the ballpark of US$5-10 billion. The removal is done by a combination of elevating the rail line, trenching the rail line, and leaving the rail line at the same level but building road bridges over it – adopting whichever solution is most feasible and cost-effective for any given at-grade intersection. The project is run and paid for by the state government, with the federal government contributing some of the funding.
Australia's State of Victoria: population close to 7 million, economy almost US$300 billion (Gross State Product), annual state government budget around US$70 billion. California: population close to 40 million, economy almost US$4 trillion (GSP), annual state government budget of almost US$300 billion. If Victoria can afford it, California can too.
I commuted for several years to Palo Alto from SF. If you manage to get on a "baby bullet" it was a 37 minute ride, but you also have to get to/from a Caltrain station on each end. In PA, I was lucky that the office was a few minute walk, but in SF it was a taxi or bus ride (this was pre-Uber etc).
As an X employee, if you had optimized your commute around the mid-market area, you could be living less than 45 minutes away on a single mode of public transit, but it could double or triple to commute to the new X offices. Any time you have a transfer with the commuter systems in the Bay Area, it's going to be a clusterfuck from time to time.
.. and being "close" to the occasional death: The inter-city CalTrain (the outside of the train) is used frequently by those amongst us who pursue suicide, and aside from that dropping a mini-nuke on society / friends + family, another side-effect is 2-3 hours of delay on CalTrain. Overall, a traumatic and unhealthy commute.
Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I did that, for that reason in particular.
If they relocate engineers to Palo Alto, that's halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. And a lot of engineers (not necessarily at X but in general in Silicon Valley) live in the suburbs between SF and SJ already. It might be mildly less convenient for some, but also mildly more convenient for many.
The Bay area is fairly constrained in terms of transportation. Commuting in a car is not possible (unless you enjoy deadlock traffic + paying for parking). Public transportation exists but only works on specific segments.
I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr commute.
People actually live everywhere in the Bay Area, and do every commute, and there is extensive mediocre transit in the South Bay. Commuting Santa Cruz into town, Livermore into town, every single suburb has people going to San Francisco, or to another suburb, or San Jose, or Oakland. In heavy traffic they are much longer than 1 hr apart, and the fastest train is 1hr 10min iirc.
I'm imagining hordes of 20-something engineers living in the Mission with a 15 minute flat bicycle commute to the X office now having to grapple with getting to San Jose. Probably pretty rough news for a decent amount of people.
San Jose is bigger than SF, and tech people tend to age out of the city and move south into the peninsula- so probably a good portion of the employees are getting an improved or neutral commute.
I wonder why the author omitted Musk's stated motive for the move. Wouldn't that be of interest to the reader? Like, why do this? I also notice your explanation has been censored.
According to my friend, Tesla engineering didn't move to Texas, and he doesn't want to give up the California weather, so unlikely to make the move. If you have a routine, and enjoy year-long pretty nice weather, California will just have a natural advantage.
Aside from how you define “pleasant” there is a considerable vibe difference, SF feels more cosmopolitan and SJ more metropolitan. No judgement either way, pros and cons to both.
After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.
There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.
If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.
From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.
I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.
China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).
The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)
San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.
The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.
The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.
yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.
Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
Zoned for single-family housing or 1-2 story apartments mostly. There may be sidewalks (stroads) but almost everyone drives due to pedestrian accessibility issues.
I don't have time to watch your youtube, however it's not really a myth, just no longer true. There was definitely a long period of time when it was kind of true. I say kind of because it's specifically a diocesan cathedral.
While it's hard to make definitive statements about when a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other towns in that diocese were administered by that cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The important part was that these particular towns with cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status. Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted those towns (and they also all happened to have cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at least, there was a strong precedent that city status and being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact people were told that cities were cities because of this, even though technically towns became cities only by Royal decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal decree, but historically both were done at the same time.
This understanding was only really challenged in the early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals became new dioceses and their local governments assumed they were now cities and renamed themselves as such. Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the cities), at which point there was an act of parliament specifically to confer city status on these new large towns that were already calling themselves cities, again reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.
The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of being a city, but were told they were too small to justify it and rightly complained that other cities were even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to towns because they had always been called cities as long as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the basis of its important, and was recognised, at which point the link between city and cathedral was broken down. After that, a few more large towns also successfully petitioned for city status based on size or historical importance.
It can be said that the link between city status and cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for city status along with justifications. This was re-granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and lost its city status), and at the same time city boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan areas that would previously have been considered towns or villages in their own right.
So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now, but about hundreds of years this was actually the case. Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns. So, it's also not a myth.
> the video I've posted goes into great detail, but you'd know that if you had watched it.
Firstly, I'm sure you could have worked out that "your youtube" was shorthand for "the youtube video that you linked to". Had you even mentioned that it was a Map Men video, I might even have decided to watch it even though I was short on time at the time, but as it was, I just had 5-10 minutes spare before I had something else I needed to do so I didn't even click on it. But even if I had clicked on it, I wouldn't have had time to watch it at the time.
Anyway, I finally found the time to watch it (somehow I missed it even though I've been subscribed to the channel a long time), and it basically agrees with all the points I made, but in a much more interesting way and with additional information. I'm not sure that the tone "you'd know that if you had watched it" was really required, given that nothing that I'd written was contradicted by it, and I didn't really learn anything significant from it that I would have added to my post.
So really, the only thing you're arguing about is the definition of myth. And to me something that used to be true but now isn't doesn't qualify it as a myth [1] [2]. I said exactly that in my post. You'll notice if you re-watched the video you posted, that they also don't ever call it a myth, they say that it is wrong, and later clarify that it used to be true: "So why then do so many people think it's about cathedrals? Because it used to be."
> It is a myth that the former definition of what counts as a "city" still applies to this day, yes.
So no, it's still not a myth, it's just incorrect.
[1] For example "carrots make you see better in the dark" is a myth because it is wildly held, is wrong and has never been correct. Likewise, "the moon is made of cheese". However, "Trump is the president of the USA" is not a myth - it was once correct, but now isn't as he's now just "a president of the USA". Someone in 1920 who'd missed the recent news and said "Women are not allowed to vote in the UK" wouldn't have been repeating a myth, just saying something that was factually incorrect.
[2] I checked a number of dictionaries to make sure before writing this, and while most support a meaning like "a widely held but false belief or idea" when you delve into that in more detail, most dictionaries seem to have the view that a myth has no actual basis in fact, so something having previously been true and now no longer true doesn't seem to fall into the myth category.
I disagree. There are cities that are dense and cities that are spread out much more. See LA vs London, both count as cities, even though they are extremely different layout-wise.
The drug use and homelessness are still pretty visible in downtown San Jose, or were when I lived there 2 years ago. Your personal tolerance level for it may be different from mine - I just treat it as a reality of city life, but my sister complained about it any time she visited because it made her feel actively unsafe.
It was a bit of an imitation of NYC at the peak of the pre-COVID boom, but I travel to both regularly, NYC has 100x more energy than SF. SF is akin to cities like Austin or Denver, we’re talking a city with only an 800k population.
> They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true. [0]
In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
He said they want to move all the HQs to Texas, which implies they could still have offices in California just maybe smaller. This may be part of the plan.
They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely the other big reason.
There is a mile of difference between "person in the Army" and "West Point graduate." Also I want to clarify that the Master's Degree isn't like an online grift, it's really Stanford's graduate program (see link).
granted on the West Point part, but it was not very many years ago that Stanford did not even assign grades to class credits.. the vast majority of undergraduates were simply uniformly without flaw?
It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
> I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.
Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.
I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.
Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.
Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.
SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.
> These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.
But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].
This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.
But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..
I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.
People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Note: “not that dangerous” means you will be confined in extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely. situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd will leave physically unscathed
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one statistic. The point here is not simply that the office is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.
Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
> You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program
This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make anything safer.
Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.
Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss
>Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target
Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.
Here's more stats for perspective:
- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.
- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.
> You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>". Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are suicides both in cities and out of cities.
To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.
They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.
Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.
It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.
Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.
Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.
The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
---
There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.
These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.
Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation.
(Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)
>Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions
Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s
Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.
To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.
To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.
This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.
If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.
Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject and the commentaries audience really overlap.
I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't exactly articulate why I think that.
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another makes about as much sense statistically as being scared because there was a car accident outside the office. Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than violent criminals.
Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a place like that. It is weird to read people trying to downplay it as if it is nothing.
I don't think SF is an example of the place where the link between paying a lot of taxes and get the environment around improved is as obvious as you seem to imply.
Note though the reduction didn't come from anything getting in fact more efficient, but from "two companies donated materials and installation" - probably to quell the bad press. And it looks like $1.7m is still going to get spent, just maybe on two toilets instead of one.
The donated services and material was worth $425,000 [1]. The project costs came down on their own, meaning they never needed to be that high. It was an overestimate. If there wasn’t bad publicity then who knows if grift would have allowed it to stay too high or not, we’ll never know.
Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?
Go ahead and complete the thought in the context of the comment I was replying to and review if your "dunk" is conflicting with the point I'm making...
Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.
My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.
Just another anecdote but I concur with you--10 years of commuting experience in the Bay Area tells me that the most likely bodily harm I will experience is behind the wheel on the freeway, not from homeless / mentally-ill people wandering the streets. I have been involved in two car accidents on 580 (not at fault) but zero bodily harm on BART.
Why would an individual living and working around some area care about the crime per population?
I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.
I couldn't care less about the crime per population.
This doesnt make sense. You care about "per population" because you are 1 out of the population. You don't care about per square mile because you are not measured in square miles, you are measured in people (1).
Higher rate per person means it is literally more likely to happen to you.
High rate per area but low rate per person means I guess that you're more likely to be a witness.
Low rate per area but high rate per person means you're likely to be a victim.
I am not only concerned about being a victim though. I don't want to be anywhere near it. I think I should be allowed to have that kind of a desire and preference.
I also think that whether or not you end up being a victim has a lot more to do than simply crimes per person.
I don't think whether you end up a victim is evenly distributed to every single person.
I think that the way you live and act and guard against things can affect your personal chances differently and that physical proximity can end up playing a role.
If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a shooting happening under your very office window is extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also. Criminals want the same advantages too.
You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.
I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day. Your country controls speech through force. Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country.
Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.
Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.
Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?
We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1) individual piece of small rubbish on the street.
Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month holding timer resets.
People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.
As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.
Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt extremely safe.
Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.
SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.
I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to me.
People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.
That's the worst possible interpretation of what that comment said.
- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.
- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.
So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.
The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.
Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.
Because as the Zendesk example that started this pointed out, an entire building (probably multiple!) of people were affected by this incident. There was 1 victim. It's going to seem insignificant on a per capita basis. There's thousands of people impacted by it, and possible dozens in the immediate vicinity who could be suffering from ongoing trauma having witnessed it.
I don't think you're reading those numbers correctly. The highest crime per capita is in Alberque, New Mexico, the 32nd largest city in the US, and that list is literally the crime rates of the 100 most populated cities, not the 100 cities in the US with the most crime.
Which small cities, in your opinion, are more dangerous than, say, Albuquerque? How many chances, say, a high-tech professional has to regularly find oneself in such a city because his company offices are located there and they have no choice but to go there regularly?
Crime is not random lottery. It is concentrated and specific to certain places and circumstances. Thus, pretending that it is a stochastic process that is well characterized by per capita number over the whole city, and that if more people move into a bedroom community 20 miles from you, you automatically become safer because per capita numbers decreased - is innumerate at best. If you are present where the crime is concentrated, you risk is high, regardless of how many people live 20 miles from you but still in the same administrative unit. This should be obvious but some people still insist on focusing exclusively on large-area per-capita numbers.
It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery, to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime level, the difference between the official picture and the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government whose interests are detached from the interests of the citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.
There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply don't do anything with reports and the problem solves itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's little point to reporting less serious crime once it's established that no action is taken. To that end, crime statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.
Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.
Accidental victims are already included in the "per capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone, that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.
So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.
If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.
"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."
I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.
The correct claim is not that per capita does not matter but that it alone does not provide you with adequate picture. Imagine a street where 100 people live, and there's a shoot-out there every day. Now imagine a mayor made an order, and another 100 people are forced to move and live on the same street now, and there's still a shoot-out there every day. Can you honestly say the quality of life on that street improved 2x, even though you still have the daily shootings as before, but it's now twice as crowded? I think something is missing in this picture if you make such a conclusion. Of course, per capita numbers show some part of the picture, but you need to see the other parts too.
What you could say, assuming the number of shooting victims per day remained constant, was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting. If you moved enough people onto that street, again assuming a no change in the number of victims, the likely-hood of any individual being shot could be forced into a statistically insignificant number.
The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
> was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting.
If shootings were randomly distributed by a mechanical process with uniform distribution among everybody who has the address registered on this street, it would be true. But that's not how shootings work. You confuse a simplifying assumption - that is made for the purposes of modeling, because it's impossible to model the life of every person - with actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is if there's a shootout every day on the street, and you live on that street, and you are a sane person, you would be afraid to go on that street, because the next person shot could be you. And that's the rational behavior, while "I don't care for the shots I hear, these numbers on screen say it's ok" is wildly irrational.
> If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
Again, no, because shootings aren't a random lottery allocated uniformly by independent metric, like an address. It's connected to your behavior, so if you go to the street where shootings happen, you risk being shot. And how many people are registered on the same street has very little to do with that.
> it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
And again, it would be, if we were dealing with uniform random distribution. That's not what actually happens - if 100 people live in a safe neighborhood and I have to walk the street where druggies hash out their quarrels - the averages are not going to help me. Remember, Bill Gates walks into a bar... how richer have you just become by sitting in that bar?
1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.
2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.
>
Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime
Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.
No it does not literally say that. It would if the crime were be allocated by a random uniform lottery to every person living in the city. That's not how the crime works.
That's a really surprising example. Paris has nearly identical crime level to San Francisco.
From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).
Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.
I think OP was referring to shootings. In France, as in most of Europe, it's not trivial to get access to guns. So the risk of getting shot in Paris is small, but of course you still might get stabbed.
I was talking only about shootings. But if we are comparing anecdotes regarding your example I happened to also live in one of these unsafe suburbs, and visiting LA, SF or Chicago and getting in the wrong neighborhood seemed order of magnitude less safe. Gangs are not armed, you don’t hear gunshots at night or people screaming in the city center, and you don’t encounter aggressive drug addicts. All of this never happened to me in decades in Paris but did in one trip to the these US cities.
I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these things "happen everywhere" is asinine.
San Francisco has nearly 8 times higher population density than Auckland.
Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more often here, but violence is far lower than you would think from the media and online anecdotes.
When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a scare.
Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue.
> https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.
A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.
> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.
I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships.
I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit.
After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise.
> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
I think the point here is we are comparing Menlo Park best case scenario to the Mission worst case scenario.
If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike the whole way which would be around 20 min.
If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min walk. But you could bike there in about 15.
I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min, which I often did, and didn’t bother with buses.
> This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked
in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
You don’t really need an e-bike to go from the Mission to SoMa as it is pretty flat. I don’t think it will take you much longer on a regular bike. But your statistic that you showed is a bit flawed as it includes people that commute from outside and into SF, hardly any of whom does so on bikes, so this methodology will always show bias against walking or rolling (I don’t know a better methodology, it is just something to keep in mind).
Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.
If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
> And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable estimate for the commute the vast majority will experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.
I know from experience that walking would take much longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.
The problem with bikes is, in sf if a driver kills you, as long as they don't flee the scene, they'll be let off with a talking to or maybe a ticket. I don't know a single former coworker who regularly bikes who hasn't been at minimum doored.
45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about right if you use bart; see my timeline above.
A typical worker will probably work closer to Market and they may even live in the Lower Mission where the buses are a bit faster and land further south. So I think 45 min from Mission to SoMa is closer to the worst case commute rather then the typical commute between Mission and SoMa. 30-40 min is probably your average transit rider, and 20-30 min for the lucky ones.
Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?
> I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?
Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.
In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.
That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.
Rainy "season" in SF? That's January, and the past few years even January had been pretty dry.
That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.
> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts...
Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and the city center.
For starters, tents shouldn't be allowed in the downtown area, which is the heart of business, shopping and tourism in San Francisco. It is one of the most expensive areas to live, so just like most residents cannot afford to live there, it is only fair that homeless people don't live there as well.
Remove them. It is an abuse of the commons that creates a vicious cycle that will only exacerbate the problem. And for your next question, San Fran already spends $141k per year per homeless person. That’s 7x LA. It isn’t working because of the lack of accountability and oversight in the use of those funds and San Fran’s lax (even favorable treatment) of public drug use, public camping, and general lawlessness. Send them to a shelter, treatment, or jail. “Harm reduction” doesn’t work. Full stop.
Freakonomics have done some interesting coverage of the opioid epidemic and how spending more money on it doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. Having listened to what different people say about it, I'm not so sure that "harm reduction doesn't work" is something I can agree with. Addiction and homelessness just aren't trivial problems to solve. Sending people to jail sure doesn't help anything, does it?
That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.
> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities
When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.
Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules.
1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand dollars. The median household income in SF is 119 thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests resources are not being allocated well.
If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now afford.
Money is not the issue with homelessness, and until people get that out of their heads the problem will not be solved.
If the problem were literally that "these people want houses and just can't afford them," I think that'd work. But that's not the issue in San Francisco.
I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing housing - especially the billionaires.
The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no effect, apparently.
That probably works when people have no money and no place to go.
I used to live near Portland OR, and in that case many or most choose to be there, they wanted drugs and ANY house they lived in would soon be trashed.
I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem are going to face significant challenges from existing beneficiaries.
> the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people.
That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place.
So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.
It doesn’t matter how nice the community is, nor that the people would own their space, nor anything else about your plan.
As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of people who work “for” the homeless really enjoy living in SF. Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is the reason they will call you names.
Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of course they will fight you.
But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't the rest of the people living and voting in the city outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?
In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than there is for the whole population to fight back to eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing" groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially compassionate way.
[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.
Sounds like the sympathies of the majority of the voters play a significant role, and not only the "advocates", as the other commenter suggested. Or at least as I understood it.
The people of SF think that solving the problem as you have described, relocating the street junkies into cheap homes in the outskirts, is "literally fascism" because "how dare you tell these people they're not allowed to camp and shoot up heroin anywhere they like?"
I recall seeing some stories years ago was that one issue with Twitter (and most Bay area tech companies at the time) was that due to the presence of an on campus cafeteria, surrounding areas never got much benefit from Twitter's presence.
That is, workers would show up to the building, and then essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses) until the day was over and they went home.
Yes, that's how politicians and activists are shifting blame from their lack of interest in solving the issue to sacrificial goats.
The streets are full of homeless and drugged out people? That's not the reason restaurants are failing, it's the tech bro's cafeteria!
The house prices are sky high? It's not single house zoning and politicians blocking any house building, it's the rich tech bros gentrifying your neighborhood!
It allows them because of a court case that said they can't take them down unless they can provide shelter, and they've refused to build enough shelter space.
The supreme court invalidated that decision, and so now they are allowed to tear the tent cities down again without having to actually find people shelter space. I imagine a lot of these encampments are going to be torn down (which will just cause them to relocate until they end up at a place where no one cares).
San Francisco was ignoring this problem for at least 10 years before that judgement happened.
Not to mention the issue there wasn't exactly that the city was trying to do something but the fact that they were fining them and plaintiffs claimed the fines were so large that they were "cruel and unusual punishment" which is non-constitutional.
So no, it's 100% political and bureaucratic apathy over many years, not one court case.
I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.
> But you don't think that will change with the executive order from newson to remove homeless camps?
I don't remember there being homeless camps on Market but maybe I missed them. I saw them in other places around SF though. So unless there's more to it I don't expect just cleaning up the homeless camps to be enough to fix SF.
> Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?
How much talent does x/twitter require? Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft have 20-30-50-100 different products each, some of those products with 50-100 teams for different parts of the product. X seems like it has 1 product with 4-ish features. Posts, Ads, Video, Direct Messages. Is there more?
Yet another petty tyrant rants. In this time of cult of personality how is that newsworthy or unexpected? But this is "fortune.com", a corporate rag, so perhaps it is interesting to them.
There is a thesis in your question. I'm not a terminated Twitter employee. I follow him on X and see exactly what he writes, the amount of disinformation he retweets, his manipulation tactics and what he does. That's enough for me to be "anti-Elon." It wasn't always like this—a few years ago, I was pro-Elon.
You could start by looking at stock price. TSLA is flat since 2020, and their only release in a long time is the Cybertruck which is frankly terrible. They've also lost a huge amount of marketshare. Oh, and Musk's outspoken political opinions are toxic to most EV buyers and have massively turned off a large part of the fanbase that originally propelled him to success.
Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down 80% since he acquired it, and is now making only around 10% of the money required to even service the debt from acquisition). Basically every company he's involved with is doing terribly, except for SpaceX, which fortunately has Gwynne Shotwell at the helm. But even SpaceX isn't doing so well with their latest rocket, Starship; the upper stage is simply way too big and heavy for most uses, and will require up to 15 (!!) additional refueling in-orbit refueling launches to fully refuel a single Starship for missions beyond LEO, like the upcoming lunar missions. This is a huge liability that casts doubt on the overall architecture. Contrast with the Saturn V, a smaller rocket that could nevertheless do an entire self-contained lunar mission with a single launch.
I was a huge Elon fan for many years, but everything he's been doing recently has been a swing and a miss.
They released a refreshed Model X and Model S in 2021, a refreshed Model 3 in 2023, and the Cybertruck in 2023/2024. FSD 12 was also released in 2024. Most of the world does not care about Elon Musk's political opinions, and the fact that some people do is a testament to how unhinged everyone is in 2024. The Cybertruck is terrible based on what? It's an incredible piece of technology, and everyone who owns one loves it.
Twitter is a dumpster fire—fine. I couldn't care less about Twitter, but at least it's not heavily moderated like its competitors. If you don't like Twitter, don't use it. SpaceX is very successful by every metric, even without Starship.
Nobody cares about minor model refreshes or yet another iteration of a driver assist technology. Tesla's only real release in many years is Cybertruck. They were supposed to have the Roadster out by now too, but that's years late.
But if Tesla is really doing so well as you claim, why has their net profit significantly decreased two quarters in a row now? Why is their stock back at levels from 4 years ago? Why has it underperformed the S&P by 17 percentage points sinc ethen? https://apnews.com/article/tesla-earnings-second-quarter-sal...
The semi is such a failure that I completely forgot about it. As far as I can tell, it's shipped around 150 units in total. It's basically a complete non-factor for a company with a valuation of $600B.
I've never been a fan of Musk fwiw so I remember when the default attitude was to worship him. Why do so few people remember that? It was just as glaring as the hate now.
People seemed to have turned against him far before he started expressing controversial views. I think the original hate for him was a reaction to people who liked him as well as just generally an anti-capitalist sentiment.
Consider the lifestyle, world view and personality type of people who have a lot of time to get into culture war arguments on the internet and there you have your answer.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 420 ms ] threadpushing anyone that has differing views from the platform is leaving it as another right wing echo chamber.
It's already far from the bastion of information flow than it used to be, but still retains some visibility because of it's history and brand name. This value is dropping fast - I'm not the person that you are asking, but I strongly suspect by the time the next election rolls around, it's simply going to be irrelevant.
The list of most retweeted tweets is telling - one from 2024, other than that, they are all from years ago,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-retweeted_tweets
It is funny that you say that. I never received random tweets from the previous leadership while Twitter inserts Elon Musk tweets in my feed more times than the people I follow. Only right wing nuts will think Twitter is getting better.
It sounds like Elon Musk and perceived right wing bias are what inflame you. Perhaps that's how others felt about that short period under the old management when they were also not neutrally politically aligned?
Now you by the other hand is OK with that, because you pretty much prefer every person on twitter to read and follow you political agenda. And that's why Twitter became a extreme right wing echo-chamber.
As someone who uses Twitter to only follow Japanese people in Japan speaking Japanese, nothing was ever forced into my feed under the old management, it was all related Japanese hobby stuff, I saw zero English and zero politics.
Now it's super obvious that every n-th algorithmic entry has to be some blue check content to push their paid engagement numbers, and it's always some US brain rot, the algorithmic feed is completely useless for discovery now.
https://x.com/RobinDiAngelo/status/1814664120307704118
No one who depends on popularity for their income leaves.
I’m not sure how true that is, but it’s certainly possible and he’s definitely acting like it.
IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.
https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/city/
Not sure it was worth it in the long run, but there was a lot of benefits that normal companies didn't receive.
I expect that companies will maintain bay area offices for investor relations and small teams of the absolute top talent, but do most hiring elsewhere over the years.
Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?
Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.
Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.
There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.
Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.
And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.
I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.
That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.
Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.
And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.
I think you want to be close to the top of the pyramid.
A CTO I worked for at a small startup said that they "don't go far from their golf club". But since Bill Gates and Steve Jeversson turned up I guess it is about being where it happens rather than being litteraly by their golf club.
It is easily accessible for anyone on BART or Muni lines so you may not need to own a car.
Outside of that, it's still a flex to have a downtown SF office. This isn't just for warm feelings, it can affect fundraising and talent attraction.
And currently, office prices are super low in SF. My company is paying about 1/5th of the price (literally) for the top floor of a building compared to a company that rents the floor below them (which signed a 5 year lease in 2019).
I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.
Didn't people vote for this?
You can just say that you never leave well-to-do regions of the US in less words.
reading xitter today is worse than daytime television.
contributing to it's content pool is just counter intuitive.
Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?
People aren't getting educational and uplifting material shoved into their feeds.
I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.
/shrug
My partner has the same. …but, to be fair, who knows what different variants of the platform are given to different people in different regions at different times.
Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them, and responding to them?
I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing other articles about him that are most likely propaganda nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin with.
But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAY83HIL-Jg
Or maybe I'm just thoroughly unlikable.
The building manager stopped any and all proceedings against X for the two months of alleged unpaid rent.
Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.
Not a certainty, but a real possibility.
Does it still apply if the company offers relocation benefits and a reasonable time for (say) school transfers?
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
Build cult, treat like cult members.
I think people just generally don’t like being constantly fooled.
That's definitely not consistent; the SpaceX stuff may be always behind his schedule, but it does actually deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g. hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).
Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Neither of which matters; the SpaceX promises are still Musk's, and the pre-Musk Tesla was losing money on each sale (all <= 147 of them).
> Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Agreed.
To me, colonising Mars has a huge romantic appeal… but there's no way I'd want to be in a disconnected space habitat with an (orbital position dependent) 6-30 month return-to-Earth delay, if he's in charge of it.
Well, except the $30K Model 3, and the $35K CyberTruck (Musk can promise all he likes that it's coming next year, but I see it coming at all as a snowball's chance in hell).
> They should know better and the best have already left or been culled.
We should care, even if it's just a little. Some of them may not be able to leave for various reasons: health, family, immigration status, who knows.
Maybe if more of us showed a bit more empathy towards each other online, the Internet wouldn't be such a sociopathic cesspool. These are real people you're talking about, not inanimate objects.
However, at the macro level, I'm more than happy to see jobs destroyed at insert sh1tty company for the good of both individuals, and the good of the nation/world. Short term pain, long term gain. And don't tell me the workers X/twitter can't get re-hired or land on their feet elsewhere ... so actually, I'm not that sympathetic. Sometimes you have to take a stand.
And that sociopathic cesspool you're speaking of? ... yes, that's right, you could be talking about X/twitter.
So, I appreciate your words of empathy, they're much needed in these times. But I'll be the asshole who dismisses them on this occassion.
[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.
* I know it's still not owned owned but there is still a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.
https://twitter.com/Garossino/status/1817220477427093963
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...
Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.
If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.
source?
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/elon-musk-has-a-huge-tw... and
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...
If you don't like my choice of sources, any popular search engine will help you surface additional sources.
Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%, leaves 100million to 150million / month on debt alone.
But market rates are well known and well published. CCC class loans were 10% in April 2022 when these deals were likely. So 10% to 15% covers the possible range of loans if you know much about the market.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
The higher end of 15% would be possible if the loans were finalized closer to May or June.
There is a big difference from Feb 2022 vs April 2022 though. But we know the rough timeline of Twitters acquisition as well as the rough timeline of when deals were signed. So I'm reasonably confident in an April 2022 deal.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
Looks like when he took down the financing, rates would have been in the 12% range. Possible some/all of the debt has been rolled over since then, possibly at higher rates.
I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.
Instead, Elon continues to make decisions like closing Twitters headquarters.
I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.
Sometimes i find interesting twitter accounts or posts through likes, and that's now gone.
I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.
People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
> it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API
That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.
> automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)
Mobile, even smaller.
> It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs
I was talking to a taxi driver pre-pandemic (from his passenger seat) who was enthusiastic about FSD even though it would end his career.
And if FSD AI don't perform some of their training by trying to predict what all the other cars will do, they're missing out on a huge opportunity.
More broadly, I think this pattern applies to all labour: surveillance is easy, humanoid robots exist.
> this pattern applies to all labour
Yup, that was the point of the taxi analogy.
It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
"Work" isn't Boolean — the self drive AI does exist, just not well enough to do everything and even the "F" (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)
The same quality may be worse or better in specific roles, but AI isn't stationary.
> It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed — but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to make workers redundant.
Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer protection.
I am not against automation too. We all used autocomplete. But it is amusing to see people sawing off the branch on which they sit, encouraging each other to do so and spitting on people who point it out.
I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
> Certifications are consumer protection.
If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture. In the end it is protection for every side.
> I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
I've met both, and yup; though the communists seemed more sociable, neither could really understand that the other existed except as caricature.
> If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture.
I was unsure if I should have written "also" in that sentence; but I didn't write "just" ;)
Thanks, TIL!
Communists may be sociable but being a Russian I don't have a good impression from the ideology.
FWIW, I'm fairly sure the communists I know have a blind spot for all the failures of communist governments and not just the USSR's failures, they put Marx on a pedestal and insist the evidence to the contrary doesn't count somehow.
As I see equivalent blind spots in anarchocapitalism (any example of bad outcomes is dismissed as "not real free market"), that's why I don't think either communism or anarchocapitalism works.
At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.
If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.
That's a pretty dramatic collapse.
The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).
As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).
My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.
When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.
https://x.com/lindayaX/status/1820838625245880634
I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do.
I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant.
The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups like Media Matters and others attempting to scare advertisers away.
Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.
Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Assuming all $114M is profit, Elon dropped what, $43B on this?
Which ever way you look at it, it looks pretty bad.
> Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Notably, the company does not release audited financials anymore. If the company were able to go from breakeven to netting 80% margins, great. But nobody should believe such a turnaround without evidence.
Separately, if the company were netting $320mm annually (using your hypothetical), AND we assign the P/E of best-in-class Meta (which is growing, not shrinking), the company would be worth $8B[1]. Under these generous assumptions, Musk has presided over a $36B (82%) destruction of value in under 2 years.
1 - That's not accounting for the outstanding debt used to finance the deal. Including that makes the value of the enterprise negative.
But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
Well, they just outsourced everything to cheap devs in India and things kept rolling. No new features and some new bugs, but most things work.
Turns out you don't really need that much to keep lights on.
a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with increased demands in the space. b) take on more and more existential risks
For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the product for as long as it lives. Informally known as enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than market capture.
You can last a while though, especially because there aren't many changes so there's also less operational risk.
Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.
From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.
Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.
How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.
If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing any more though so it's probably quite safe.
Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.
This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.
Check the actual graphs! It went down by 50% briefly, but then increased again. It's still lower than before, but not by that much.
The brand was never not tainted. Twitter has long been known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.
Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism. Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff that you'll already find better coverage of on X.
> This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.
So... you mean the bot detection is now more broken?
That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture how much worse off the company is today than before the acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023 looks more like $2B in topline.
Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.
Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding debt, you will end up with a negative number.
Yes, this business is currently in "collapse."
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...
There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety so that people could post whatever they want under the guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want to run ads next to objectionable content.
Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved here.
At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter management wants to create a space where people can post ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter management are directly in conflict with the goals of big advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation to unfold.
They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac app so... no
Edit:
This, I guess: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/x-kills-its-mac-app-ac...
the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and ideological
Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.
X has also gotten very bad about amplifying misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics. Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community notes. The comment section was full of great replacement theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and making it sound like there was a consensus. People see stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some point.
That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.
I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...
[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-sha...
I'm not sure what you're talking about, can you fill me in a little bit?
Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.
He is suing a literal cartel after their crime was exposed in congress.
Yeah, congress "exposed" it, when it's right on their website (https://wfanet.org/leadership/garm/about-garm)
This is just another of Musk's "free speech for me, but not for you" lawsuits that never go anywhere and are designed to waste your money with lawyers.
Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?
Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?
You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
You support censorship.
This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
There’s nothing more hypocritical than leftists pretending to care about human rights.
I’m not going to indulge pretending otherwise.
You cannot lie your way into moral superiority.
They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but when advertisers exercise their free speech and go advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.
Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be censorship". But then with the legal and publicly available information posted by ElonJet, that was different and everybody who ever mentioned it was banned.
This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but doesn't really justify the thought that association between any group of private entities could be compelled.
> You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
I think this may have been in reference to another commenter.
> You support censorship.
I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying to find technical workarounds to online censorship in dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these days is closer to the censorship seen in those places than it was before Musk took over.
I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't get started on here.
> This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete conversations where people who aren't constructively participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me if this thread got removed, for example.
I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since those aren't really substantial enough to even talk about.
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in SF have particular interests and desired amenities that make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.
Moving the office is probably neutral or better for people on the Penisula. And may be neutral for parts of the East Bay. Depends on where exactly in San Jose the new office is too.
Also, I was surprised by how light traffic was when I drove from Mountain View to SF last October during what I was expecting to be the morning rush hour. I don't recall what the reverse direction looked like, though.
But my point was kind of to raise the likelyhood that this action was taken without regard for how it looks, and without regard for required notifications.
You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
Effective remote work is as much, if not more, a social and collaboration problem, as it is a technological problem.
It’s just that the consequences you face are reverse proportional to your wealth.
Free speech, at least on the Internet, means say what don't get the majority nod and enjoy getting harassed to literal suicide, death, mental health consequences, or all of above. Right makes might, not the normal way around.
IOW, free speech do come with consequences, and it's super-proportional on the Internet.
There's a lot of people using X, and the vast, vast majority of them don't care much for Musk or actively dislike him.
THe problem with X is that it is (and always was) sort of an echo chamber, there's no average X user, everybody sees very different content based on what they follow. The average HNer probably won't notice the huge swathes of people who are on there just for sports content or their favorite celebrity. Those people usually don't care much for Musk, except when he appears in some funny meme.
when you stop dwelling on the random hot yoga posts while scrolling, after an ad scroll by, they will pump it up to other engagement content to feed the pavlovian cycle.
But I recently created a disposable account because it happens that my regional train lines have hired good community managers and so I know I can reach them. Otherwise I just never use it.
Since I subscribed to basically nothing, I’ve got the full algorithm version. It’s frankly horrible. I’m submerged by far right content and civilization wars.
It’s perfect for my social media addiction because it make me want to leave as soon as I finished what I had to do but it really feels like an unsafe place for anyone who somehow still have some mental health left.
I imagine that people with more suscriptions are seeing less of this shit but I wouldn’t be so sure and also, I personally wouldn’t tolerate to use a platform with such dysfunctional moderation.
i guess it's the new Facebook, social network for old people who will not open a different app ever, for some small groups?
Twitters largest demo is 25-34yr olds = 36%, 18-24 = 34.2%. While 50+ yr = 7%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283119/age-distribution-...
Facebooks largest demo is 25-34yr olds = 24% followed by 35-44 = 19%. While 50+ yr = 24%
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/1ehq5ig/why_are_99...
The previous twitter had (somehow) moderation. You would think what you want about it but you were free to use your free speech right elsewhere.
The difference is that Musk says that it gives you this canal but he lies because he is still moderating the network, except the moderation now favors far right content.
That’s not more free speech than before, that’s just a pro-fascist moderation.
I never see spiteful comments about people who work for British American Tobacco, BP or the Sacklers and these companies have, in my opinion, done far more damage to people, families and society in general.
Which "wrong think" specifically got people banned? Because the vast majority of conservatives on the platform did not get banned, so I'm left wondering which exact people banned for what exact reasons you're thinking of. Trump was removed after the Jan 6 assault on the capital for provoking that violence and repeatedly lying to his followers about the election, which, weirdly, is quite different than for being a conservative.
See e.g. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-sues-twitter-...
Getting banned for wrongthink on the old Twitter was a rite of passage, almost every content creator I follow (mostly gaming youtubers, nothing spicy or even controversial) got banned at least once.
The tweet I've seen wasn't directed at anyone, just a sentence to the effect of "Women are different from men". By a feminist, so likely not a conservative.
Harassing a trans person is terrible behavior, sure. Like with any other person. (I.e. that's not a wrongthink issue.)
Either way, this is just like normal government laws. One of the big criticisms that Libertarians have over laws is that they're not universally enforced, so they end up being selectively enforced, which just means that "those with power" wield the laws against those they don't like. Same goes here with platforms like Twitter. The rules are vague, opaque, and their enforcement is seemingly random and at the whims of some faceless entity behind their enforcement process. If we all knew these supposed "terms of service" and they did, in fact, have very clear rules and guidelines then there would be absolutely no room for conservatives or anyone else to cry about being targeted.
But we should examine these choices in a principled way. Still, prohibiting calls for violence doesn’t seem like a gray area…
But if i had to pick one it would be the Trans issue. Misgendering and having some rather "blunt" debates on this topic meant the platforms usually sided with the trans or left-wing party.
As for calls of violence: there are many examples where anti-white and anti-right calls for violence and extermination go unpunished and swept under the rug to be memory holed. Let's start by making this a bad thing across the board.
Do you have an examples?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230407140923/https:/help.twitt...
The entire doc has an "aura" of being fair, and "protecting" the weak. But it ends up stifling debate and genuine discussion because report-brigades and coordinated attacks by left-wing institutions and left-wing activists (with way too much time on their hands because they are full-time activists) end up targeting right-wing individuals for benign and not-harassing behaviour. I've seen my fair share of anti-white and anti-republican hateful comments and calls for violence, that I don't know why you even need to see examples. Look for them everywhere, even on HN.
Look, this is a very diffuse topic. You're not going to get a clear example and we don't know what was happening behind the scenes at Twitter. But it's very telling that most tech companies are predominantly left-wing donors and have left-wing ideologies. Even if they act to be as impartial as they can, their bias will show because they have anti-republican discriminatory hiring practices.
I don't personally agree with either position, but those rules clearly give conservatives an explicit disadvantage.
And the implicit advantage was more clear- I don't have a twitter account, but whenever I followed a link there, there were piles of recommended tweets about how white people are all racist, or complaining about toxic masculinity / mansplaining / manspreading, or how christians are evil and hate women, or how much boomers suck- all of this clearly in violation of the rules, none of it censored. Well, maybe some of it was censored, I wouldn't know. But they certainly left quite a lot untouched.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is make direct targeted attacks against a specific person. You can say this is a dumb policy, you can rant about the concept in general, all you can’t do is say “@alice you’re really named Bob”.
Similarly, you can rant about immigrants and they wouldn’t do a thing as long as you could resist specifically targeting people.
Again, my point isn’t that Twitter was perfect or that they had solved every issue for balancing freedom of speech in an open forum but simply that rules against targeted attacks are not anti-conservative unless you have a very negative view of conservatism. It’s popular to try to score in-group points by whining about censorship but there’s a reason why nobody has been able to provide examples of actual conservative ideas being censored, because they know as soon as they do it’ll turn out to be something else which most people consider reasonable or, like the NYPost ban for hacked materials, a decision affecting one account which was reversed.
Just look at the list of "notable Twitter bans", and you'll see a pattern. Among the clear "incitement of violence" and bot-accounts, there is a huge pattern of "we got banned and we don't know why, but we're vocal about X,Y,Z". One has to read between the lines. I'd be all for your argument and with you if we could have a clean-room look at the Twitter data to confirm, but we don't have that. Where is the twitter ban dataset that we can all have a look at?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
Unfortunately, your beliefs align with that of the oppressor's side, so you don't see these and it'll be uncomfortable for you to go out on a limb. You think the system is "working as expected" and "they're only banning you if you target specific people".
First, they don’t - if they had, you would be able to provide an example rather than confabulating about imaginary scenarios.
Second, private companies are generally not obligated to provide you services on your own terms. If a bar kicks you out from screaming threats at other patrons, your rights are not being violated - go find a place which welcomes you.
Third, it’s not 50%, although I can understand why you’d make that up, but a fraction of a percent. Almost all conservatives were not banned because they didn’t repeatedly violate the terms of service. The ones who were kicked out were given warnings, chose to ignore them, and had the promised consequences.
This sort of disingenuous reply really isn’t helpful. The GP was clearly accusing Twitter of enforcing their TOS for righty accounts, while not enforcing their TOS when lefty accounts would do similar things.
I don’t think they are correct, but your rhetoric is just going to alienate people and makes your argument look weaker.
The reason is simple: the things which got those accounts closed weren’t traditional conservative positions, and there were plenty of lefty/hard to classify accounts which were also suspended or banned for similar reasons but nobody is sticking up for their behavior and claiming it represents their larger political group.
Now, as to that specific claim since you actually provided details we can see that it doesn’t support the claim. It’s a single account, not the imagined campaign account conservatives, and Twitter changed their policy around hacked materials specifically to allow what the NYPost did:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542801/twitter-lifts-n...
Again, nobody is saying that Twitter was perfect but there just isn’t evidence supporting the belief that they ran a discrimination campaign against conservatives. Even the much ballyhooed “Twitter Files” fizzled because it made it clear that they bent over backwards accommodating political figures.
I give you an example but apparently its not the example you wanted. You expect me to list every right wing account that got pulled? The Babylon Bee got banned as well if that helps you get a grip on reality.
The twitter files never fizzled out, except in the NYT. This is just your unfounded assertion. They were literally a smoking gun.
Twitter took 14 days to change their policy re the Hunter Laptop to slow roll the story breaking fully before the presidential election.
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Conservative: LOL no... not those views
Me: So... deregulation?
Conservative: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Conservative: Oh, you know the ones
Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1]
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
And
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Of course, in the blog post, Twitter claims to have "assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy"
If those two tweets are glorification of violence, then your post is calling for genocide.
[1] https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
I wouldn't really go on Twitter for that.
Where do folks actually live in those areas? Is it that a 30min drive north to San Fran becomes a 30min drive south to San Jose?
The dynamics of travel will dramatically change multiple industries, save for if the status quo establishment and industrial complexes through regulatory capture prevent the rapid expansion of the paradigm shift in transport that Boring Company is rapidly developing; the technology of which Elon needs for his Mars colony, and so it'll happen and be developed as far as is determined to be necessary to maximize its utility and safety.
It would be better to use larger tunnel, buy normal sized trains, and keep tall people from hitting their heads. It would also make sense to use one of the automated systems instead of trying to build pod system.
It is also curious that Musk always want to do his way. Cause there is company that makes automated pods used at Heathrow. They should work for the current service and wouldn't be Tesla 3 with driver.
The criticisms of TBC fall into three camps: (1) this is terrifyingly unsafe, if a vehicle catches fire in those tunnels the occupants can't even open the doors and no vehicle behind them has a way to safely evacuate either; (2) they are still really expensive, like all other tunnels; (3) this compared poorly with all other modes of transport on every measure.
Okay, so perhaps the worst case scenario is only goods are shipped in the tunnels - taking all semi-trucks off the roads for at least the major long-haul routes?
All-or-nothing thinking without critically thinking or brainstorming through how adaptations for adoption could be made isn't helpful.
Re: Safety
Perhaps battery tech that eventually is safer than currently driving a vehicle, perhaps even safer then with the casualties from airplane crashes, or other solutions like before entering the tunnels everyone is provided emergency kit/safety-oxygen masks/goggles, etc; and maybe necessary for doors that have an emergency "blowout" handle to pull and have doors pop off their hinges? I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Also, in the Hyperloop almost vacuum state that's planned, fire will be less of a problem - and perhaps a safety system could be implemented, especially if everyone is temporarily given an oxygen mask-goggles for each longer ride or all rides, that at certain points a fire extinguishing-suppression system could be implemented where non-oxygen gases are flooded into the tunnel between the point a fire is detected?
Arguably so long as cost of implementation is less than or the same cost than current existing infrastructure costs, where the time savings are arguably up to invaluable - but a cost per ride for each person using the system will be determinable, then it can be a great alternative especially with the positives of how it allows transport regardless of winter weather conditions, etc.
So, in this scenario, you could only do that if each major long-haul route had a tunnel. And you made the tunnel wider, as the current tunnels — where the only cost-saving TBC has demonstrated of any kind so far is by limiting the size — aren't big enough to fit an American standard intermodal container, and only just fit the ISO containers (with so little margin you have to care about the turning circle even if you could fit the carrier into the circular gap around the boxy cross-section). And that's without also considering that current trucks definitely don't fit no matter which size standard is considered, so either you'd need the tunnels even wider or you'd need something custom-designed to fit.
High axle weights cause more damage to the surface, which is really bad for a tunnel where you can't just go around a pot-hole, so you want something hard-wearing, something like steel. Even if you use maglev, looking at current maglev research trains, you've got a speed-up zone where you still have contact.
But you don't need to cover the whole surface in steel, because unlike a road where the vehicles might move sideways, this is so tight that there's only one place for the wheels to even be. And if you do that, you could get rid of the batteries entirely by hooking these steel wheel-paths to the mains.
But then you can save money on the vacuum systems, because if you put all the ISO containers in a row: as each container will be in the slip-steam of the one ahead of it, a chain of 10 will have the same impact as a 10x reduction in air resistance.
Oh look, it's now either a railway or a subway depending on if you bother with the "underground" part.
> I'm not sure you're correct about being unable to open and get out of a vehicle in such the tunnels.
The pictures I've seen show negligible clearance between the bottom of the car doors and the curve of the wall. Also, I talked to a civil engineer.
But if you're talking about an evacuated tunnel, then leaving is lethal even if it's physically possible.
> We go through security checks, etc, at airports to save time - what level of "inconvenience" are people willing to implement or follow if a ~5 hour drive can turn into say a ~30 minute ride in a Hyperloop?
Hyperloop in particular (as in, not just the tunnel) is about the speed, so it only makes sense to wait 30 minutes for security etc. if you can go sufficiently faster than a car would have. But is this a point-to-point system in a network that connects everywhere to everywhere else, like a road, or a hub-to-hub system? If it's the former, then those 30 minutes could've taken you 15 miles at residential speeds or 35 miles at motorway speeds (in the UK, I don't know US norms) — a delay like that means there's no point even trying to make it like the road network, so QED it will be hub-to-hub; but if it's hub-to-hub, you now also need to factor in the time it takes to get from wherever you are to your closest starting hub, and in reverse at the far end the time between your ultimate destination and its nearest finishing hub in addition to factoring in the delay for security.
But hub-to-hub can't replace all semi-trucks off the road — at least around here, they go to each supermarket, and I've got something like 8 supermarkets with articulated lorry loading bays within a 15 minute walk from my apartment.
Given the big-rigs aren't going away without an absurd degree of extra infrastructure build-out (never mind tunnelling, that kind of density is more like "raise city by 10 meters and rebrand old roads as 'hyperloop'"), if you're going to have a setup with hubs that far apart, why not just use a plane (for long distances, with securit...
Not to mention the large delta between what was promised versus what was delivered. There's probably a good case for fraud, if it were not for the fact that the purchasers want to save face they could probably sue.
However, transit advocates need to realize that the experience of individual users _does_ matter.
Might as well argue he’s going to give all his employees time machines to go buy $AAPL in the 90s as part of their comp plan. Would also get downvoted.
A claim you make with no supportive arguments.
My comment is packed with critical thought. Maybe you're just lacking understanding to unpack it? Or are you too arrogant to not think that you know all?
And then ridiculous ad hominem that you think was clever enough to actually waste time to type out; what work do you have that you hate that you're procrastinating from working on?
I'm really curious if you know what sycophancy means, and if so, how exactly my comment is benefitting me? I think it's more likely you're jealous of Elon's success, have past trauma from personal work experiences you're projecting onto him, and taking it out on anyone who notes his successes and extrapolates to estimate where his projects will lead to.
I don't think you know what ad hominem nor sycophancy mean.
Have a good week!
The true is, there's a huge gap between what was promised early on and what they seem to be able to do. After a certain point people start calling it "bs" and have no patience for those repeating the initial claims.
If it's not I encourage you to go look at the stellar success of the boring company in places like Las Vegas and reconsider your assessment of the future.
For a map and list of the organizational insanity, see https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/transitagencieslist (2019).
(Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the freeway where possible).
BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in construction).
It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too: as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic and enormous construction disruption from underground multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.
At least, Caltrain electrification is finally promised, fall 2024: https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-be... (more reliable (=> fewer breakdowns and delays), less noise, cleaner air quality)
(Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly during rush hour.)
CalTrain: <https://www.caltrain.com/media/22502/download>
BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose) departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):
<https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/January%201...>
Melbourne, Australia has been running a project since 2015 – scheduled to continue until at least 2030 – to remove at-grade intersections (or "level crossings" as we call them) on suburban rail lines. They've already removed 83, and by 2030 plan to have removed 110. I'm not sure of the total cost, but I'd say in the ballpark of US$5-10 billion. The removal is done by a combination of elevating the rail line, trenching the rail line, and leaving the rail line at the same level but building road bridges over it – adopting whichever solution is most feasible and cost-effective for any given at-grade intersection. The project is run and paid for by the state government, with the federal government contributing some of the funding.
Australia's State of Victoria: population close to 7 million, economy almost US$300 billion (Gross State Product), annual state government budget around US$70 billion. California: population close to 40 million, economy almost US$4 trillion (GSP), annual state government budget of almost US$300 billion. If Victoria can afford it, California can too.
As an X employee, if you had optimized your commute around the mid-market area, you could be living less than 45 minutes away on a single mode of public transit, but it could double or triple to commute to the new X offices. Any time you have a transfer with the commuter systems in the Bay Area, it's going to be a clusterfuck from time to time.
Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I did that, for that reason in particular.
I would guess a large portion of the individuals in the SF office would live within SF/East bay and have a fairly reasonable commute going to the SF office. I am not sure how far Bart goes south now but typically you would take Caltrain so thats a 45min ride from SF to Palo Alto. Then tack on however long it takes you to get to Caltrain. Easily a 1hr commute.
Caltrain's main issue is that trains run every hour. (with 1 super slow train in the middle). Miss a train, and you're screwed.
‘SHUT IT OFF!!’ Disruptive new ‘X’ logo removed in San Francisco:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/31/twitter...
>Construction crews dismantled the giant, blinking ‘X’ logo after 24 complaints were logged with the city
San Jose is much more permissive than San Francisco when it comes to shitty public art:
San Jose’s Quetzalcoatl: The story behind much-ridiculed poop statue:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/san-joses-quetzalcoat...
If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...
From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.
I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.
But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.
Non-major cities do, but not “small rural villages”.
The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)
San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)
Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.
China: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...>
US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...>
Anquing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anqing>
Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.
A town of 100k in Europe will feel livelier than a metro area of 3 million in the US.
I assume the drug use/homeless issues are less prevalent in San Jose, at least it was that way 10 yrs ago.
Isn't this oxymoron? Isn't city the `urbia`?
Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.
Think “city, but instead of walking, you drive”.
https://youtu.be/Whqs8v1svyo
While it's hard to make definitive statements about when a lot of cities originally became cities, it was first formalised in the 16th century, and at that time all the cities were cathedral towns (or more accurately, they were diocesan cathedrals meaning that churches in other towns in that diocese were administered by that cathedral), and significantly in many cases these cities were smaller than other towns in the diocese. The important part was that these particular towns with cathedrals that had always been called cities for as long as anyone remembered were recognised as cities by the Crown, and other towns were not allowed that status. Later on, Henry VIII created new dioceses and granted those towns (and they also all happened to have cathedrals) city status as well. So, at that time at least, there was a strong precedent that city status and being a diocesan cathedral town were linked, and in fact people were told that cities were cities because of this, even though technically towns became cities only by Royal decree and dioceses were only created by separate Royal decree, but historically both were done at the same time.
This understanding was only really challenged in the early 19th century, when some more towns with cathedrals became new dioceses and their local governments assumed they were now cities and renamed themselves as such. Clearly, the Crown wasn't too worried about this as it took nearly two decades for this to be noticed (and only happened in the context of a Royal visit to one of the cities), at which point there was an act of parliament specifically to confer city status on these new large towns that were already calling themselves cities, again reinforcing the people's understanding that towns with diocesan cathedrals should be called cities.
The interesting stuff happened at the end of the 19th century, when some of the other new diocesan towns that were quite small decided the also wanted the prestige of being a city, but were told they were too small to justify it and rightly complained that other cities were even smaller, but they weren't going to be downgraded to towns because they had always been called cities as long as anyone knew. And then Birmingham, the third largest town/city in the country petitioned to be a city on the basis of its important, and was recognised, at which point the link between city and cathedral was broken down. After that, a few more large towns also successfully petitioned for city status based on size or historical importance.
It can be said that the link between city status and cathedrals was firmly broken in 1974, when all existing cities lost their city status, and towns had to apply for city status along with justifications. This was re-granted to all the existing cities (actually, I've got a vague recollection that at least one didn't bother and lost its city status), and at the same time city boundaries were redefined to include the metropolitan areas that would previously have been considered towns or villages in their own right.
So, in one sense the assertion that towns with cathedrals are cities isn't quite true, and is definitely wrong now, but about hundreds of years this was actually the case. Arguably, correlation doesn't imply causation, but the Crown seemingly made an effort for a long time to ensure that the correlation held to ensure the set of cities was exactly identical to the set of diocesan cathedral towns. So, it's also not a myth.
And the video I've posted goes into great detail, but you'd know that if you had watched it. It's not "my youtube", it's by Jay Foreman.
Firstly, I'm sure you could have worked out that "your youtube" was shorthand for "the youtube video that you linked to". Had you even mentioned that it was a Map Men video, I might even have decided to watch it even though I was short on time at the time, but as it was, I just had 5-10 minutes spare before I had something else I needed to do so I didn't even click on it. But even if I had clicked on it, I wouldn't have had time to watch it at the time.
Anyway, I finally found the time to watch it (somehow I missed it even though I've been subscribed to the channel a long time), and it basically agrees with all the points I made, but in a much more interesting way and with additional information. I'm not sure that the tone "you'd know that if you had watched it" was really required, given that nothing that I'd written was contradicted by it, and I didn't really learn anything significant from it that I would have added to my post.
So really, the only thing you're arguing about is the definition of myth. And to me something that used to be true but now isn't doesn't qualify it as a myth [1] [2]. I said exactly that in my post. You'll notice if you re-watched the video you posted, that they also don't ever call it a myth, they say that it is wrong, and later clarify that it used to be true: "So why then do so many people think it's about cathedrals? Because it used to be."
> It is a myth that the former definition of what counts as a "city" still applies to this day, yes.
So no, it's still not a myth, it's just incorrect.
[1] For example "carrots make you see better in the dark" is a myth because it is wildly held, is wrong and has never been correct. Likewise, "the moon is made of cheese". However, "Trump is the president of the USA" is not a myth - it was once correct, but now isn't as he's now just "a president of the USA". Someone in 1920 who'd missed the recent news and said "Women are not allowed to vote in the UK" wouldn't have been repeating a myth, just saying something that was factually incorrect.
[2] I checked a number of dictionaries to make sure before writing this, and while most support a meaning like "a widely held but false belief or idea" when you delve into that in more detail, most dictionaries seem to have the view that a myth has no actual basis in fact, so something having previously been true and now no longer true doesn't seem to fall into the myth category.
San Jose: your average American city, in terms of looks, but considerably more upscale.
San Francisco: an NYC-style "world-class city." It's trying for that title in terms of tempo, density, architecture.
Doesn't always succeed of course, but the cities are fundamentally going after different goals.
> They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm going to do everything in my power to make that come true. [0]
In SJ, you usually have a car door separating the homeless from you. Seems like SJ is more car-oriented in design; driving in SF is really awful and if I lived there I'd avoid it
If I had to summarize: SJ -> boring, lots of jobs with great variety, easier to avoid riffraff; SF -> cooler (in character and temperature), grittier, more loud politically
Personally, if I could get a cushy corporate job in SF I'd just live there. But it seems like that's becoming harder
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California#History
They are also opening a new Palo Alto office for xAI where they could move a lot of engineering talent as well. Which is likely the other big reason.
https://knight-hennessy.stanford.edu/
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.
I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
Obviously others will have different experiences than me.
Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.
It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.
I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.
From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.
I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.
Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.
I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.
Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.
And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.
The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.
But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].
Quite unique, indeed.
In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.
That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.
Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr
People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.
On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.
Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.
You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.
To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.
Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program
Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.
I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.
Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]
[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.
Here's more stats for perspective:
- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.
- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).
You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.
[1] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Visi...
Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.
They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.
Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.
It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.
Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.
Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.
The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.
Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.
I totally agree with you. Suicide by firearm is not gun violence.
What I see is people seeing statistics that say counting suicide in firearm deaths is inappropriate. This is why the CDC has to call it out separately, to avoid the furore. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...).
The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.
What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.
*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.
Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.
[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]
---
There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.
These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.
Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)
"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)
Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s
Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.
To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.
To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.
This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.
If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.
Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.
Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.
Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?
Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/noe-valley-s-pricey-p...
Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.
I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.
I couldn't care less about the crime per population.
If the crime is higher per person, but the crimes are several miles away then why would that be a problem for me?
Compared to lower crimes per person, but the crimes are happening on my street.
If the crimes are happening closer to me I'm more likely to be affected by it in some way.
Higher rate per person means it is literally more likely to happen to you.
High rate per area but low rate per person means I guess that you're more likely to be a witness. Low rate per area but high rate per person means you're likely to be a victim.
I also think that whether or not you end up being a victim has a lot more to do than simply crimes per person.
I don't think whether you end up a victim is evenly distributed to every single person.
I think that the way you live and act and guard against things can affect your personal chances differently and that physical proximity can end up playing a role.
And yet Musk proves you wrong: https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin
https://freespeechunion.org/young-afd-politician-convicted-f...
Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.
Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?
This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.
People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.
As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.
Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.
SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.
People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.
- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.
- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.
So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.
The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.
Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.
So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.
If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.
Not where it is lowest per square mile.
"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."
I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.
The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
If shootings were randomly distributed by a mechanical process with uniform distribution among everybody who has the address registered on this street, it would be true. But that's not how shootings work. You confuse a simplifying assumption - that is made for the purposes of modeling, because it's impossible to model the life of every person - with actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is if there's a shootout every day on the street, and you live on that street, and you are a sane person, you would be afraid to go on that street, because the next person shot could be you. And that's the rational behavior, while "I don't care for the shots I hear, these numbers on screen say it's ok" is wildly irrational.
> If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.
Again, no, because shootings aren't a random lottery allocated uniformly by independent metric, like an address. It's connected to your behavior, so if you go to the street where shootings happen, you risk being shot. And how many people are registered on the same street has very little to do with that.
> it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"
And again, it would be, if we were dealing with uniform random distribution. That's not what actually happens - if 100 people live in a safe neighborhood and I have to walk the street where druggies hash out their quarrels - the averages are not going to help me. Remember, Bill Gates walks into a bar... how richer have you just become by sitting in that bar?
1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.
2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.
Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.
Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:
1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas City
If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it’s still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you’re getting your info.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their crime.
Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.
This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely safer than being in a small town.
From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).
Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.
Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.
Here's one summary of it as of last year:
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/
Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
>> $10 million a year in lost revenue
That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-publ...
I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood.
The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.
I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar...
Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.
This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.
This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.
Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.
The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike the whole way which would be around 20 min.
If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min walk. But you could bike there in about 15.
I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min, which I often did, and didn’t bother with buses.
The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].
There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-r09.ht....
[2] https://www.sfmta.com/blog/biking-numbers-san-franciscos-201...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1405949/electric-bicycle....
Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.
If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.
https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-mode-choice
My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable estimate for the commute the vast majority will experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.
I know from experience that walking would take much longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.
45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about right if you use bart; see my timeline above.
My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.
If you take bart to Montgomery, it's an 0.8 mile walk to South Park. Calling that a bit under 20 minutes seems fair.
So a 10 minute walk to bart, a 5 minute wait, 7 minutes on bart, 3 minutes to exit the station, and 20 minutes to South Park is your 45-ish minutes.
Source: I used to do this commute. Getting around internally in sf is absolutely terrible the second you're not super close to the transit line.
Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?
> I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?
Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.
In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.
That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.
That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.
I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?
Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
Overpaid Executive Tax (OE)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi...
Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR)
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...
That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.
When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.
Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?
There's no money in that though, and there's lots of money in keeping Americans divided.
1: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/
https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...
[1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...
[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran...
That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.
1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/californias-...
That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place.
So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.
It doesn’t matter how nice the community is, nor that the people would own their space, nor anything else about your plan.
As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of people who work “for” the homeless really enjoy living in SF. Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is the reason they will call you names.
Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of course they will fight you.
[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.
That is, workers would show up to the building, and then essentially never leave (and spend money at nearby businesses) until the day was over and they went home.
The streets are full of homeless and drugged out people? That's not the reason restaurants are failing, it's the tech bro's cafeteria!
The house prices are sky high? It's not single house zoning and politicians blocking any house building, it's the rich tech bros gentrifying your neighborhood!
The supreme court invalidated that decision, and so now they are allowed to tear the tent cities down again without having to actually find people shelter space. I imagine a lot of these encampments are going to be torn down (which will just cause them to relocate until they end up at a place where no one cares).
Not to mention the issue there wasn't exactly that the city was trying to do something but the fact that they were fining them and plaintiffs claimed the fines were so large that they were "cruel and unusual punishment" which is non-constitutional.
So no, it's 100% political and bureaucratic apathy over many years, not one court case.
I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.
This is 2 blocks away
https://www.ktvu.com/news/report-workers-at-sf-federal-build...
This is 2 blocks away
https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/15/sideshow-crash-market-stre...
This is 1 block away
https://sfstandard.com/2023/04/10/downtown-san-francisco-who...
I hope SF can fix itself but it's arguably on the government to make the city safe and clean. I wouldn't be begrudge any company leaving it currently. I'm not that's not the only reason they're leaving and if they wanted to say in SF there are probably some other locations, maybe Mission Bay, they could have picked. But, SF is ridiculously expensive and downtown still seems like it's got further to fall. There will need to be huge changes in zoning and lots of investment for it to recover.
Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?
That's why I'm puzzled
I don't remember there being homeless camps on Market but maybe I missed them. I saw them in other places around SF though. So unless there's more to it I don't expect just cleaning up the homeless camps to be enough to fix SF.
> Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?
How much talent does x/twitter require? Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft have 20-30-50-100 different products each, some of those products with 50-100 teams for different parts of the product. X seems like it has 1 product with 4-ish features. Posts, Ads, Video, Direct Messages. Is there more?
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down 80% since he acquired it, and is now making only around 10% of the money required to even service the debt from acquisition). Basically every company he's involved with is doing terribly, except for SpaceX, which fortunately has Gwynne Shotwell at the helm. But even SpaceX isn't doing so well with their latest rocket, Starship; the upper stage is simply way too big and heavy for most uses, and will require up to 15 (!!) additional refueling in-orbit refueling launches to fully refuel a single Starship for missions beyond LEO, like the upcoming lunar missions. This is a huge liability that casts doubt on the overall architecture. Contrast with the Saturn V, a smaller rocket that could nevertheless do an entire self-contained lunar mission with a single launch.
I was a huge Elon fan for many years, but everything he's been doing recently has been a swing and a miss.
They released a refreshed Model X and Model S in 2021, a refreshed Model 3 in 2023, and the Cybertruck in 2023/2024. FSD 12 was also released in 2024. Most of the world does not care about Elon Musk's political opinions, and the fact that some people do is a testament to how unhinged everyone is in 2024. The Cybertruck is terrible based on what? It's an incredible piece of technology, and everyone who owns one loves it.
Twitter is a dumpster fire—fine. I couldn't care less about Twitter, but at least it's not heavily moderated like its competitors. If you don't like Twitter, don't use it. SpaceX is very successful by every metric, even without Starship.
But if Tesla is really doing so well as you claim, why has their net profit significantly decreased two quarters in a row now? Why is their stock back at levels from 4 years ago? Why has it underperformed the S&P by 17 percentage points sinc ethen? https://apnews.com/article/tesla-earnings-second-quarter-sal...
I've never been a fan of Musk fwiw so I remember when the default attitude was to worship him. Why do so few people remember that? It was just as glaring as the hate now.