Why are you getting so upset, angry, emotional and screaming over someone that doesn't care about you?
Very unhealthy folks. but regardless, until the next time you will talk about Twitter / X again.
I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.
You can just say that you never leave well-to-do regions of the US in less words.
Didn't people vote for this?
* Hundreds of spam account followers
* Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real content
* Random bugs with video content constantly
* Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making conversations effectively pay to win.
* Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any popular tweet
Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist. This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by Jack.
Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content (and particularly Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do show them.
Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been. Not by a mile.
The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot account followers.
Twitter misinformation about a tragedy started far-right riots in the UK the other day.
And Musk commented approvingly that civil war was inevitable.
If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.
I'm probably mis-remembering.
Anyone could browse Twitter anonymously, since the beginning.
That disappeared and Musk got lots of praise for it, probably entirely unwarrented but it was basically the only thing that improved post-Musk. Then it came back with a vengeance.
Here's proof right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769715
Funny that people also found ways to criticize Musk back then for doing that :D.
Do you understand now why we make corrections to patently wrong statements like yours?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...
They may have had other heuristics too that led to inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be so surprising if some people report that that happened even though it didn't happen to others.
Selective memory perhaps?
Wow, that does not seem like it would jive with the local character for Brisbane, from what little I know of it.
Rethorical question... There is none.
I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for some reason.
"Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at X, formerly Twitter"
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv...
‘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...
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=twitter+relocating+to+austin
August 7: Twitter moving to LA.
What made LA more appealing than Texas?
Perhaps change the inflammatory title? “kills” to “moves”
FFS.
My understanding is that HN has rules against editorialization of headlines. This absolutely qualifies. The company is called X, the article calls it X. You don't have to like it, you don't have to use that name when you speak about the company, but editorializing the headline to name the company whatever the submitter wants is inappropriate.
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't Elon massively anti-remote?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
If you say "Twitter", people know what you're talking about. If you say "X", are you talking about "X" marks the spot? Rated "X"? "X" the former project name for Paypal? "X" as in an unknown quantity? "X" is used in a lot of different contexts. I think if you want to use the name "X", then you should probably say "The company, X,".
Twitter is a verb, but when you use it as a noun, the listener instantly knows that you are talking about the company "Twitter". Plus, it's the name we are all familiar with.
I do agree that the headline shouldn’t be editorialized, though. “X (formerly Twitter)” at most.
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.
1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/californias-...
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”.
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.
[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.
[1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...
[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...
That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.
Not saying it's a strong case, just that it tilts that way. Others would call it differently and that's always the case with a close call.
Just because you buy something doesn't mean you get to change popular usage by decree. There's a whiff of corporatism about that which sticks in my craw.
(I am not, god help us, making any implicit point about the muskwars.)
No, Zucc, you're not cyberpunk. And your overgrown jumped-up Ivy league hot-or-not definitely ain't.
Meta owns Facebook so you can still talk about Facebook separate from Meta. Meta also owns Oculus
Alphabet owns Google so you can still talk about Google separate from Alphabet. Alphabet also owns Waymo.
X "is" Twitter. They aren't two separate things (a parent company and one of their subsidiaries) like the other two examples.
There's another interesting aspect: the original names Google/Facebook/Twitter are so much more expressive than Alphabet/Meta/X. The latter feel like constructs of some imperious baron on his march up the abstraction ladder, leaving the rest of us cold.
But I'm ranting now, sorry!
I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
Young adults love it bc they have the time to go to bars/restaurants/clubs
Middle aged folks hate it because they're so busy - they can't take advantage, and other people get in their way
(some) Older folks like it again bc they have the time to go to restaurants/theater
I'm sure that this will flip when I no longer have kids at home and have reached retirement.
Is it because their kids have grown up? I can imagine myself living in a city like Paris or NY if I don't have kids. I get to enjoy a bustling city without needing to dealing with the challenges of raising kids.
Just a note that this reversal could just as easily be specific to you and your circles.
In this thread all we have is two people who find anecdotally that some older people move to live near where they themselves live. Given how many people make some kind of change in retirement that's hardly surprising. We'd need actual data to come to any conclusion about large-scale trends.
Nowadays there's a bland sameness -- barely any music or other art much less much craziness. You can't imagine anything like the psychedelic scene appearing in SF much less Palo Alto these days, and most of what's left is in Oakland. Sigh.
I would say that San Francisco is quite nice now, great bones, although too expensive for interesting people to live.
Oakland music scene isn't particularly inspiring either. Definitely more independent music events in run down houses, but quality and inventiveness is too often of questionable value.
Go Slugs!
Boeing. That's what killed Boeing - moving HQ from the factory in Renton, WA to Chicago. Boeing has no plants anywhere near Chicago. But Dave Calhoun, the previous CEO lived in Chicago. He previously was the head of Nielsen, the TV ratings and marketing company, which has been in Chicago for a century.
It took far too long, but Calhoun is finally being eased out. Not fired outright, which would have been appropriate.
IME this is definitely true and it's often very intentional. One of the major reasons SF stole the startup scene from SV is that younger startup employees wanted to live in SF. As a startup founder you are very strongly incentivized to go where the talent is (or wants to be). When I was considering where to set up my startup a few months ago this was a huge consideration. Not quite at the level of HQ, but there's a reason Google has offices in both SF and South Bay as well, or in both SLU/SLU-area Seattle + across Lake Washington.
> If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF. I don't think it's about more vs less as much as matching the demographics of your typical employee. Eg experience levels, pay, work culture, personality, mix of job roles
I don't know where xAI's Palo Alto office is, but transit in the corporate Palo Alto office are generally good. If xAI is in the Stanford Research Park, you'll be taking a shuttle that runs only during commute times, and takes 15-30 minutes, depending on where exactly you get off.
Santana Row is more confusing. You'll travel either to Santa Clara or San Jose and take a bus. From Santa Clara, the bus is ~15 minutes. From San Jose, the bus is faster, but you've got a half- or one-mile walk.
Twit-er...X, isnt raking in cash like it used to. Musks changes like reinstating hate speech accounts and the blue check fiasco had a direct negative effect on advertising revenue and accelerated already downward subscriber trends. Leaning out the physical side of the already agile digital side was a good idea im not sure twitters old guard would have considered.
San Francisco has seen a talent exodus after the global pandemic. no senior SRE with 20 years of experience --whos also made to show up to the office five days a week-- is going to entertain San Francisco's traffic, crime, homelessness, or general congestion for even a minute.
Yes, you pay an SF premium. You pay a premium for most major cities, and the worse housing is, the higher the premium. But I'd bet moving to the South Bay isn't happening for that reason. SF pricing has a halo effect on the South Bay, and your savings will be minimal, if any. (I see little differences in South Bay and SF salaries, for larger companies)
What I'd wager precipitated the move is SF rents are stupidly high , and then you combine that with half the twitter offices being empty. If you believe loopt, San Jose office space is ~ half the cost of SF. Half the space, at half again cost - their real estate bill shrinks by 75%. And given that Twitters bill is likely ~$40M-50M/month, that's a good chunk of savings.
The 25-35 crowd are probably the worst employees that Twitter can ask for; too experienced to "keep their head down" and too young to suffer from ageism and be tied down with families. For companies like Google and Twitter that traditionally lean left and encourage employees to speak up, moving the company headquarters is probably the easiest way to filter out activist employees (since these days the company is making a hard pivot to a privately held conservative operating model).
Suburbs on average have less crime. i wouldn't say that south bay is ideal but it's better than SF.
But it's not inevitable that families move to suburbs either. Commenter is partly perpetuating a 1960s era "white flight" kind of stereotype, where cities are said to be terrible for families. I happen to have two kids in SF.
Additionally, a lot of what drives people out of SF specifically is the expense.
Just saying, maybe south bay isn't SF, but it ain't idyllic peaceful suburbs either
Like if Tim Cook decided to move to Alabama that’s where Apple Park would be
So dumb
A current example of this is Walmart which is in the midst of trying to force a huge number of employees to relocate to Bentonville, AR. I can see why someone would move to NYC or SF for a job, since there are plenty of other options for career development, but you have to be pretty committed to Walmart for life (undoubtedly their intention along with workforce reduction) to decide to move your entire family to Bentonville.
What a dumb take. Tim Cook lives in California because Apple was founded there over 40 years ago. And Apple will stay in California because most of the talent Apple needs to succeed is already there. And since Apple will stay in California so will their CEO.
You must be on some really good shrooms to think Apple will uproot itself just to move to wherever Tim Cook would move.
Approximately all tech companies were in Silicon Valley proper (thus named) which is about (depending on who was drawing the boundaries) about 30-60 minutes south of San Francisco.
When Twitter opened in San Francisco I distinctly remember how weird it was to see a tech company up in SF. Then found it was due to tax breaks SF was creating for these companies and then lots more tech companies started showing up in SF.
When Twitter was launched, SF was overflowing with startups on every corner. In fact it was the second wave of SF startups, being a handful of years after the dot com crash.
The only thing even slightly surprising about Twitter's location was that they were way down in South Park instead of more solidly in South of Market. They moved to the Tenderloin building in 2012.
twitter was notable because they put a big campus in midmarket... but there was plenty of internet and multimedia that preceded them. (organic, macromedia, razorfish come to mind but there were countless others)
sure, no sun or apple, but let's be clear, twitter was no sun or apple either.
Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.
I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.
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.
Twitter is planning to become a payments platform
Hopefully events like this contribute to speeding up the reform that the city needs.
Unfortunately the necessary austerity is going to cause more near-term pain, but hopefully results in some longer term prosperity for the city.
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?
To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].
I'm puzzled.
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Statis...
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.
Mid-market is in terrible condition, worst I’ve seen it.
I’d feel super bad asking employees to navigate those streets while commuting in.
Not discussed enough about RTO is what a mess downtown is. And an emptier downtown is a seedier downtown, feeding the cycle.
1. SF Bay Area
2. Los Angeles Beach Cities
3. Orange County
Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My neighbor’s car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for a joyride and left in a random part of the city.
On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).
Bottomline, when you have a family you don’t have the luxury of tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved out.
Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of California, and the technical community. Nothing like it elsewhere.
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
Talent pool isn't a real issue for Twitter now, under Elon, I don't think they truly prioritize Twitter over any of his other companies, the mission is to keep Twitter's lights on, that is it, the website/app had basically stayed the same after he took over, what talents do they really need, I don't buy it.
Anywhere with an RTO mandate is a hard pass. If they want to treat their employees like children and waste my time and money on pointless commuting to feel in-control, then count me out.
"My [unrelated] job is worse" is not a logical reason for me to abstain from advocating for better work conditions for myself, where there is a possibility of better work conditions. I can dislike things about one tech job vs. another tech job while still appreciating that the conditions of either job probably far exceed that of a career I wouldn't like.
(And, I would also still default to advocating for sane worker's rights in your industry too, unless there is some compelling reason that working >8h/d, 7d/wk makes some sort of sense in your industry.)
The first and only reason is whatever Musk felt like.
Twitter was imperically a terrible financial decision.
It seems like a bold statement to say the #1 is de facto money.
I suspect non-money issues are much higher on the list.
If anyone on the planet doesn't need more money, it's Musk.
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/
>> $10 million a year in lost revenue
That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
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.
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.
Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?
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.
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 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.
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.
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....
My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.
> infrastructure improvements
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).
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
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.
I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
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...
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Build cult, treat like cult members.
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.
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.
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.
Living in SF and working in South Bay sucked for me, when I did that, for that reason in particular.
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 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.
I don't think much thought was put into it, but I do think there will be a gradual numbing effect among the comments as people get bored of the criticism. Maybe very gradual though.
Edit: It just occurred to me that you might be referring to user posts on the platform being flamebait; my answer assumed that the action (moving the HQ) was perhaps flamebait, along with other recent changes.
I guess it always has been and it affects any media platform. Then again it’s easier to switch to a different radio station, or buy a different newspaper. In the context of a social media platform you are leaving your network.
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`?
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
Can a single, childless tech startup-type person live comfortably walking car-free in contemporary SF, long-term? If so, how much does that cost, and in what neighborhoods?
Reason I'm asking: the East Coast city where I currently live isn't great for software startups, and, on top of some crazy downsides of this city, there's a possibly emerging new downside: panhandler demographics shifting more towards angry 20yo men who use borderline mugging approaches, very brazenly.
Ideal for me in tech work is what I'll call "mostly-WFH-in-town", where people get most of the WFH flexibility goodness, but can also easily meet up for in-person high-bandwidth focused collaboration, personalizing, working on hardware, etc. So I'd probably want a concentration of potential colleagues who also like mostly-WFH-in-town. So I'm wondering whether SF is that place.
Zillow searches for modern apartments in parts of SF proper look more attractive, for the same money, as places in my city.
But I don't know the SF neighborhoods, and I don't know how representative are the SF stories about stepping over needles on the sidewalk all the time, finding poo on your doorstep every morning, frequent casual break-ins, etc.
Socioeconomic diversity, social justice, and safety nets are great, and preferred. Excessive poo, and other hazards, aren't.
When you walk most places, the sidewalk environment matters even more than if you're usually insulated in either a building or a car.
I used this when doing analysis. It's pretty good. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp
From a pure cost, POV you burn most of your money on rent and food. When we had visitors, I had to plan out my budget to cover meals for everyone. I remember paying >$80 for a decent bagels+coffee breakfast for me, my wife and her parents.
In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Otherwise is it's a wonderful place. If I was a single guy, I'd love the vibe, the people, and the opportunity. If your in a WFH situation then I'd suggest just trying it out for 6 to 12 months. The experience will be great either way.
Other place id recommend is the Folsom near Sacremento. It's ~1 hour to lake tahoe and lots of nature to enjoy there. Very suburban WFH tolerant with roughly 50% of the rental cost
You can take bike share and the bus everywhere, housing is expensive but less so than nyc!
I think a 1 bedroom apartment rent would be around $3500 now (and all of the buildings here are fairly new)
yes-ish
In SF generally the areas are the most car dependent and the hilliest are also the quietest and have the least amount of bullshit.
SOMA, where you see a majority of those modern apartments, is going to have some of the worst problems. You get what you pay for in the city. Every part of the city is going to have some kind of street problem, but some, like Bernal for example, have them very rarely. It entirely is neighborhood dependent and there's tradeoffs.
Maybe you get a quiet apartment, but it's at the top of a hill. Do you want to walk up that every day?
The easiest way to tell is just to show up and walk around the whole city, it's only 7x7 so you can literally spend a weekend walking around and see all of it and make your own conclusions. Certain places change completely within a few blocks.
e.g. you can go from the Tenderloin which is easily one of the worst parts of the city to the yuppie paradise of Hayes Valley in like three or four blocks.
Edit: in terms of cost? prob 2-4k in monthlies for a good studio/one bed.
The rest is up to your budgeting, eating out and anything in the service economy is very expensive compared to the rest of the country. Including places like NYC.
Very few affordable places survive here, regardless of their quality.
I'd say you could tack on like another 1-2k a month as a single person and be pretty happy with the amount of things you're doing, plus some grocery cost depending on how much you cook for yourself.
Visit the de Young museum's observation tower. It has a spectacular vantage point. The other things California have are: less annoying creepy crawlies, more variety of scenery and microclimates, weather, food, and relatively cheaper property taxes.
Moving to Palo Alto was definitively not in the cards
Raising a kid in SF is definitely tough, but places in the Sunset have yards, and there are some top-notch schools e.g. Lowell High School, UHS, Lick, etc.
A lot of tech people come from out of town and don’t take any time to adjust to the fact that SF has very distinct neighborhoods. Many will just draw high salaries and gravitate towards whatever is popular / flashy without considering the consequences.
Regarding schools, school catchment is based on an esoteric lottery system loosely related to the area you place you live. If you have money, there are ways to game the system but otherwise it’s a low probability roll of the dice that you get a good school. Also, I didn’t have money
Also, Day cares generally have a waitlist that starts before children are born.
It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.
Of course a small portion of all crimes is committed due to poverty. But it's super easy to come up with counter-examples.
Mass murderers are committing crime because they're evil / crazy, not poor. There have been lots of rich mass murderers.
Ponzi schemers do it because they're greedy. Just think Bernie Madoff - already super rich, then decided to steal some more.
Gangs do it because for them it's a business. Again, the gang bosses are already rich but they keep going.
Not one single rape has ever been about inequality.
And so on. In the past, inequality was much worse and more entrenched than it is today, and yet crime during certain historical periods were much lower. Here's an example from the UK: https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/oly...
also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might even keep grandpa healthier, longer.
and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad the ambulance can get them there ASAP.
and then you have more food options, more entertainment, etc.
[1] https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...
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?
Relocating wasn't such a big deal when most family models were single income and women were basically all slaves and would follow their husband without having any say on the matter. These day, any relocation involve a discussion between 2 parties on the merit of relocating and possibility of career development for both. It is much more difficult.
Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?
I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:
In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.
While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.
There were launch parties in SF every week in the late 1990s. Often multiple per week. The startups coordinated to not conflict. It was a very active scene. The first wave ended in the early months of 2000. There were a few very slow years after that, but things were picking up again around the time of Twitter's 2006 launch (and 2007-2008 scaling).
We in SF didn't consider ourselves part of Silicon Valley back then, so that might be throwing off the search results. The relabelling came later, when the never-formally-defined scope of "Silicon Valley" expanded to include SF city (but still skipping the bedroom communities between the city and the Valley proper).
(Edit: sibling of GP is correct, SF was mostly internet and media startups, agencies, etc. The Valley got most of the hardware startups. Twitter was a descendant of Blogger/Odeo/Pyra/etc, so SF city was an entirely expected location)
Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.
If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.
Oakland has crime now but 80s San Francisco had the drug wars with actual machine gun battles between the now gone high rise projects on Army (now Caesar Chavez).
Many cities including tier-2 cities have a variation of one of those "international" schools that parents seek and there's no significant difference in the quality of education between them.
Apart from the usual cycle of available talent + job opportunities, Bangalore has better weather and location wise it can attract talent from 4 states(these 4 states are major contributors to IT workforce compared to other states) while not being too far from place of origin.
Also, are these single men with hobbies that don't take up a lot of space like gardening or woodworking?
> It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.
I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X, Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than good to the discourse."
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.
Does it still apply if the company offers relocation benefits and a reasonable time for (say) school transfers?
> South Bay & Peninsula housing is actually more expensive than SF
San Francisco is $957/sqft median listing price [1]
Palo Alto is $1800/sqft median listing price. [2]
Hell, I live in Redwood City and the median is $996/sqft.
1. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Franci...
2. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Palo-Alto_...
I’m very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called bopping. Isn’t this real, or is it far less common than those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this from people in SF.
As a resident, it’s extremely disheartening and must be fixed. The Tenderloin has been bad for years, but fentanyl has taken it to the next level.
However, most neighborhoods are different. Most are free from encampments and open-air drug use. Many residents just avoid downtown and some aren’t wise to how bad it really is.
Hence why the city is still so expensive.
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.
I dont think thats true once you get east of 4th and for sure 3rd street.
I actually work up near that area and would still say you'll have interesting characters, but not something like 8th and Mission where I feel terrible for everyone who runs a business around there.
Most new apartment buildings I saw for my move a few years ago were concentrated around the civic center + market area.
Regardless of what people say here, walking around is the most effective way of ensuring that you're comfortable with where you are planning on being.
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.
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.
It shouldn’t be like that, but those are the priorities we (as society and electorate) decided on.
So here we are, at a point where people not only self-censor, they will even get violently aggressive or simply will suppress speech or even the ability to read or hear what someone has said if it diverges from the cult rules that have been imposed on our whole civilization.
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)
That must do a number on your nervous system long term. I live in NYC where I'm on high alert in specific areas at specific times that amount to maybe 30% of my time outside home and office. Otherwise I'm earbuds in enjoying something, or staring into the middle distance processing something on my mind. Both feel essential to my mental health.
> In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without trying, and can avoid or handle them)?
Or more like someone who has that basic street savvy, but who is also feeling like they found themselves in a rougher neighborhood at the moment (e.g., getting closer to military head on a swivel mode, and looking to not spend more time there than necessary)?
The actual violent crime rates in SF are still below the national average, but the drug issues are just very, very visible.
>In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.
do you not realize this is really bad and not some reality of the world? Just the terrible city you live in?
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...
Think “city, but instead of walking, you drive”.
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.
There is compelling evidence crime is correlated with inequality.
Either way, my community was one of the last diverse communities to get priced out of the Bay (around the early 2010s). Yet, you can find my community in any other populated place along the west coast. The bay definitely has a diversity issue when it comes to interesting people.
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.
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.
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.
(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...>
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.
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.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Jose_C...
The Santana Row neighborhood ("Winchester Orchards") is pretty comparable, at $910/sf though. I was actually thinking of Mountain View & Sunnyvale, which are considered decent places to live in the South Bay but aren't quite as elite as Palo Alto. They are both about $1.2K/sf:
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Mountain-V...
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Sunnyvale_...
> I never once heard that from a woman under 50.
Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.
Not a certainty, but a real possibility.
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).
At least that’s what the people I know who worked there told me, I don’t have any real inside knowledge and the stories could be wrong despite being plausible.
P.S. Late stage capitalism === Early stage communism
How so? Will you please indulge me you explain this a little?
Genuinely curious.
Even if your solution is 100% workable, your statement is like saying a man must really like drowning because they dont know how to swim.
I guess I dont think it isn't very constructive.
https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=san+francisco+homeless...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10574586/#:~:te....
The people in SF like their million dollar shoeboxes to appreciate in value, with zero regard for the externalities that scheme creates[1].
1. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
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.
But what that guy said was "the street scene is very bad in that part of SF." and he's dead right.
I love this city, but misleading people on the Internet is not right. Tell them the truth. I've lived here as long as I have because I think the benefits outweigh the pains. But not because there are no pains.
Men are attacked by strangers at a much much higher rate than women are.
Maybe what’s the reason they can avoid getting physically attacked by strangers better than men.
(Although if you’re truly hardcore you don’t care what the street looks like, you sleep under your desk.)
Given the density of SF and how quickly spaces can change you cannot realistically compare the two.
The values conflict may be relevant. If, for example, you think it's critical to allow and facilitate your fellow man to become total enslavement to drugs that destroy their lives and health and eventually kill them, then I can get that you won't want to do anything to stop it, even if you have to live in squalor for that to be the case.
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.
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>
A town of 100k in Europe will feel livelier than a metro area of 3 million in the US.
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.
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).
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.
I don't know if they're right at all, but the point seems pretty clear. And they're not saying anyone is safe.
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://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.
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.
Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/noe-valley-s-pricey-p...
/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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't think you know what ad hominem nor sycophancy mean.
Have a good week!
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.
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.
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.-...
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.
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.
Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics
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.
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.
Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
*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?)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It is a great tragedy that the US with all its money and diversity of geography and people has only really managed to produce a single walkable city and a scattered handful of “I don’t always use my car” neighborhoods, which are always the most expensive places to live. So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.
Have you considered, then, that many people do not actually want this?
>So many cities outside the US manage to do this on a fraction of the budget.
Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"
I'm from Europe but I would be very careful with claiming it's just a few cities or neighborhoods in the US. I made a list of places I could move to eventually, and it's at least two dozen, and that's just because I was focused on cities with significant tech/business scene.
Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good.
Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market)
Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.
A child in the suburb will need a chauffeur to get anywhere outside their immediate subdivision, and sometimes within it. Children are perfectly capable of taking public transit and using their two feet, though.
You might get served in Honolulu. Quite often you're flying to the mainland, though.
That said, living right in the city isn't necessary at all. The 'burbs have almost every facility you could want.
That said I watched my dad die of cancer and let's just say he would have been better off chillin' on a beach or a balcony staring out into the ocean.
The doctors couldn't really do anything other than misdiagnose him and then put him on meds way too late.
I'd pick quality of life over fear of a potential medical issue.
The main reasons are
- crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night
- lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither)
- rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects
- not clean
- Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont
I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.
Most Asian public transit systems blaze past all the cars on the surface. They actually save time from driving.
But the failing schools push many parents out against their own and their own childrens' preferences.
This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's really not that different to how a lot of third world cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and there's no real net savings for society, it's just money left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.
I'm curious how folks who happily live in the city with kids approach it
Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.
Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there).
Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows).
Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.
Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment.
Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.
Right, sprinting back-and forth, ear-piercing screams at the top of their lungs, kicking chairs - all things we should just accept at a restaurant, for the sake of the parents. What terrible people we are for wanting a decent dining experience.
Any child older than a toddler should be able to sit quietly and respectfully eat a meal. If they can't, that's bad parenting.
Some kids' parents irrationally believe cities will be bad for their kids for one reason or another or consider the suburbs to be more personally convenient for the parents. For the kids themselves, cities are wonderful while suburbs are often boring and repressive.
I grew up in a mega city and I agree that cities are wonderful for kids, at least they were wonderful for me and my friends. I'd venture to guess that kids don't care. Cities or not, the world is just so much fun and exciting.
I don't know if suburbs are prisons for kids, though. My kids love suburbs, and they also love cities when they spend days and nights there.
It's not that parents falsely think that cities are bad for kids (it may be a factor for some people, of course), but that parents themselves do not want to live in a busy city. For instance, I have zero interest in bars or clubs. In fact, they are way noisy for my social needs. Instead, I just want to have walking distance to woods and shaded trails. And I want to have access to those large club houses that have full gyms and swimming pools and cozy libraries and all kinds of activity rooms, instead of those smallish ones in SF (probably because I'm not wealthy enough, but that's also my point). Or take Asian supermarket for another example. There are really not that many choices in SF or NYC. Even for the available ones, let's say H Mart in NYC, I really don't like the cramped space. I want to have those spacious walkways and shelving and big food court and etc.
This doesn’t describe Seattle or any other city I’ve lived in. We literally have 3 huge ball fields within walking distance of my town home, all full up on weekends and even most weekday nights with soccer, baseball, etc…
Leaving NYC my son was disappointed in almost any park we'd go to. Most smaller cities and towns have a few decent playgrounds but in the city we had 3-4 in walking distance that were amazing and another 10 within a single subway stop.
"...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?"
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.
- 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...
Even I, a non-homeless tech worker, have been forced to pee in the bushes next to a sidewalk in SF, because I was refused restroom access by 5 businesses in a row and I was already getting heart palpitations trying to hold it in.
I have never been refused restroom access (and there was almost always a public one within 100m at all times) in most modern Asian cities. Or even south bay (which is basically Asia), people are usually nice here about letting you use restrooms.
I see kids in restaurants these days and mostly find their behavior appalling. And it's sad the best-behaved kids are only quiet because they have an iPad in front of them. (No headphones, of course, so that's another annoyance the rest of us have to put up with.)
Nowadays kids aren't expected to behave in a restaurant, so they don't. It's about expectations.
Same as minimizing the amount of flights you have with a baby.
People with a baby that take multiple flying trips a year are rude, bordering on douchey.
Just because you want an experience doesn't mean you get to ruin it for hundreds of others. Who not to mention paid for it. Height of egocentrism.
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?
The concept of supply & demand shows people obviously do want this, given that the cost of living in that walkable city and in walkable places is so high.
The real reason? Americans become infatuated with the latest technological marvel too easily. For a while, this was the car. And unfortunately, rolling back all these car subsidies takes a while and is heavily fought against because people hate the feeling of having something taken from them.
If so, the European city planning wouldn’t be popular within the US, but it’s the opposite. The few European style cities are incredibly attractive to live in.
> Young yuppies with their Silicon Valley salaries get to spend time in European city AirBnbs and wonder "why can't America be like this?"
Right.. and? They’re not representative? Or it’s unrealistic? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask for those that do get the opportunity to see functional dense urban areas in other places, especially as they don’t require anywhere near SV salaries yet are still lively and safe.
I don’t think the US will drop car centrism, partly because of the perpetual lower class social issues that make it dangerous to share public space with strangers, but you can get pretty far if you mix in high volume public transit like in NYC (or even SF BART for a smaller example), which greatly reduces the dead spaces that prevent walkability.
I never quite figured out why the US is so allergic to enforcing the public order laws already on the books with any degree of vigour
He said the MRI would have been a 4-week wait in Hawaii.
But it's a choice, for sure. There are lots of medical time wasters that are not life-threatening.
I'd much rather optimize for the happy days than the shitty ones.
?? might be a typo but I don't know for what
It seems like an interesting dichotomy - I didn't see any obvious correlation between other traits in my informal survey but I am very curious to see if there is some set of personality traits that correlates with reading vs ignoring user names.
Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space.
Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.
> Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower
This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.
But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.
The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or separated from the road by trees. That's the difference. You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.
But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do well to introduce traffic calming, improve pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of about 20 miles/hour.
It would also make streets much safer to reduce the proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks. Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit government policy goal.
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...
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...
At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:)
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 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.
It would be a significant benefit to the people of SF if the western half of the city were significantly upzoned with a lot of new housing construction here and throughout the Bay Area, and ideally rent and house prices cut by something like half (gradually rather than in a market crash), so that more of the people necessary to run the city could afford to live here.
I’ve long pointed out to conversation mates IRL that for a technological civilization like ours, shelter costs are a straight deadweight, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation cost upon the innovation throughput that is the civilization’s lifeblood. In the U.S., healthcare pricing policies are as well, but that’s a different conversation. Both are stranded capital that need unlocking towards increasing the technological development pace.
But most people with mortgages are trapped like a monkey’s fist around a fruit in a jar, by the siren song of house appreciation.
I’d rather have fusion, life extension, solar system colonization, mind uploads and AGI sooner than be “rich” in real estate.
If you believe otherwise, you will learn the hard way when you seek your reforms and find that none of the people spouting the high-minded capitalist rhetoric support the actions that would bring it closer to reality. In short, the monkey's hand isn't trapped. The monkey is masturbating into the jar. It knows exactly what it is doing and you will not be thanked for interrupting.
If by "great" you mean "where the jobs are" then I agree.
That has been the primary driving force behind urbanization since at least the industrial era.
End result: cities have more fine-grained amenities. People who want more amenities live in cities.
The city is convenient and fun: it provides easier transportation, more amenities, more other people to engage with, more companies of all types to do business with, etc.
Totally. There seem fewer kids in the neighborhood than before too. Play-date is such a suburb concept for the US kids. As a kid, I used to hang out with neighbor kids, sometimes more than a dozen, every day. Not any more for my kids in the suburb. To that end, I admire my Indian friends. Even during the most panicking days of Covid, they would organize weekly meetups of multiple families, so kids got to play together.
Club houses? What are we talking about here? Country clubs? Our society is largely devoid of the fraternal organizations that colored 18th and 19th century social life, and the social isolation of not having any 'third places' to go is in fact one of principal complaints about suburbia.
I think they literally mean "Club house" -- the shared services center for the housing development. High-rises often have them, large developments have them.
In NYC, our high-rise had a reading room, yoga room, gym, entertainment center, as well as a paved playing area for building residents inside building premises. People met each other regularly at these places and socialized. This is very common (minus the paved playing area, which is rare.)
In the burbs we also have most of these, and also tennis courts and a pool.
Many of these served as a "Third Place" for residents, especially once you have kids because it isnt as easy to hang out elsewhere. Unlike previous centuries, I'm constantly on my phone or on call explicitly or implicitly, at least in my profession, so social clubs seem unrealistic, though I know the wealthy folks go there regularly.
Personally, I grew up in a suburb that didn't have transit and it was miserable. I barely saw my friends until I got a car. Every time I go back with my lady it's miserable for both of us because, besides family, there's just nothing there but some cookie cutter parks. There was one historical park that's still nice but its also a mile away from my mom's house and there's inconsistent sidewalks (it's either take a much longer route or risk walking alongside a 1 ft wide shoulder with a 35mph speed limit and curves.
I suppose it heavily depends on the suburb.
Most places that have woods at all also have this.
Golden gate park+presidio in SF, discovery+arboretum+Seward+ a bunch more in seattle, central park in NYC, fairmont park in Philly are all places I've loved walking/biking around (and to).
They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city. They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way they are because a great majority of Americans want them that way.
It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at. Americans that want to walk are a small minority.
I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into the city and take the bus to the city parks around me with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.
I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving further and further out into the burbs, into developments that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one neighborhood.
No, I don't. Thank you.
I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US
Can you cite this?
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.
the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and ideological
Instead, Elon continues to make decisions like closing Twitters headquarters.
For example, let's take a relatively common hobby of sewing. The two stores in downtown closed tens of years ago, and the only ones left are in the suburbs, unreachable without the car.
I think at this stage, the only advantage of city is bars, restaurants, and expensive clothing/jewelry. If you like something else, you are better off in suburbs with a car.
My last apartment wasn't super high-end and it even had a golf simulator in it along with a billiard room kind of a theater room with a giant TV and some big couches.
Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.
I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”
This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
* 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...
I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)
In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a decent part of the local economy.
Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.
All that to say nothing of the students. The population of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro. These are obviously not all local students, but students from all over the world who have come to Boston for education.
I didn’t mean directly that the schools had money, but that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the hills limit how far you’d walk.
None of the jobs where I grew up were in the city (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, largest employers were all suburban campuses save for the electric company and some colleges. Even the hospitals were off the highway.).
All the fun stuff was in the city though, so that's where we'd go once you got a friend of driving age.
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.
> Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%
Cities like SF tend to be okay for families in two different (and polar opposite) classes - those who are working poor, and the scare factor of public transit and hassle of traffic is something they just have to deal with, or quite wealthy - and they can afford drivers and/or private schools.
The public school system in SF is also notoriously terrible to deal with, even by US big city standards, as ‘equity’ changes results in bussing kids all over town so there are no ‘good’/‘bad’ schools due to demographics. So siblings will often end up in schools on different sides of town, or kids in a school very far from where they live.
The middle class tends to go to the suburbs where things are less crazy and easier to handle, and they get ‘bad’ things like a school where all the neighbors kids also go, and siblings can all be in the same school. And they can buy into a ‘good school district’. Among other things.
Siblings get preference for the same school, so it's pretty unlikely they'd be on different sides of town.
SFUSD has tons of problems but you are not accurate in your description of what they are.
The real problem is that the kids of parents who can't drive them to school end up having to go to a local school anyway, so the egalitarian idea of having kids go to any school did not actually work out as a positive for anybody but kids who were already privileged enough to have someone drive them to school.
School bus routes have been decimated in much of the country, creating long winding routes with horrible wake up times for children. And a school bus doesn’t take you to any place outside of school and the home.
Growing up as a school child in New York with a transit pass, it was nice to hang out with friends, or go to a museum, or head to a new park, or try a new restaurant, or any number of things without having to involve parents for transport. And I went to a pretty good public school.
this is much safer/practical in suburban environments. do you really believe public transport, in SF, is as safe for a kid?
e: md fix
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.
A child can walk to say a cornerstore in the US many places no problem but the parents will be placed under arrest for negligence. Most any other place they'd like to go is most practical with public transit involving a long wait or driving by what appears to the child as a private car chartered at his convenience.
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 not sure where Americans get the idea Europeans don’t commute by car.
And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.
I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"
Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.
That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.
This sounds terrible. I would much prefer driving 10 minutes to my suburban sports complex.
Now this setting sounds familiar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?
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.
In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code.
(please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
E.g. the replacement of plaster walls with sheetrock and massive beams with dimensional lumber
We didn't do those things because they're better: we did them because they're cheaper.
On the other hand, modern insulation, vapor barrier, windows, and electrical are strictly superior to what came before.
but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today, quality is all because there is caulk (greatest invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint. Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries, regardless of when it was built.
In some important ways quality was due to the availability of materials, but cheap labor played a big role too. Many building practices before WWII were extremely labor-intensive compared to today. Lathe and plaster walls, knob and tube, board sheathing, fieldstone/rubble foundations, mortise door hardware, etc.
Thin walls, poor sound insulation, poor thermal insulation, poor structural durability, poor quality building materials, poor quality flooring— cheap.
> (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)
I don't need to link you to anything because I'm talking about places I've lived and as of thus, I've presented exactly as much empirical evidence as you have. And few of the building were brick— almost all of the places I've lived were timber framed. Look up pictures of Southern New England neighborhoods if you want to see what I'm talking about. The television show "This Old House" is entirely based on renovating New England homes from that supposedly poor quality era and it's been on since 1979.
It's clearly different where you live. I know about a half dozen carpenters, including my best friend of thirty years, and every single one of them deliberately sought a house from this era because they are excellent quality.
> thanks mostly to the building code.
The building code will reduce the risk of fires and reduce the risk of dying in them if they occur, it will ensure that people looking to make a quick buck flipping a shoddy will have a harder time doing so, it will ensure your plumbing will probably work for a while— but better building materials were much cheaper, as was skilled labor, and there were quite a number of known good designs for the areas quirks with weather, etc. They were generally just plain-old good?
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.
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.
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.
From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.
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.
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.
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.
But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
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.
2014 1.4
2015 2.2
2016 2.5
2017 2.4
2018 3
2019 3.4
2020 3.7
2021 5
2022 4.4
2023 3.4
2015 304
2016 313
2017 310
2018 298
2019 312
2020 347
2021 362
2022 401
2023 421
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.
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."
So... you mean the bot detection is now more broken?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Assuming all $114M is profit, Elon dropped what, $43B on this?
Which ever way you look at it, it looks pretty bad.