Blogs Mar 20, 2014 at 8:16 am

Comments

1
Which really means "I'm too unmotivated to improve myself and get a better career so I'll remain envious with a bad attitude."
2
2edgy4me...
3
In defense of the vandal, Pheobe, it would appear he's got at least enough motivation to re-scrawl his impotent little slogan after it's been scrubbed off the sidewalk.
4
Without the better off who would the moochers have to tax? Can you tax hobos?
5
I just don't understand commuting from Oakland to Mountain View. You'd think the 1.5–2 hour drive would be a deal killer, fancy bus or no.
6
There is a periodic rejection and embrace of technology and technocrats ("nerds!", geeks, burn the witch! etc). they are the problem! (e.g. anti-intellectual right-wing, the GMO imbroglio) and then they are the solution (often Hollywood, mostly unsung during epidemics and similar crises). but the one constant to both states is that those evincing the emotion are displacing it from the proper target (typically economic forces)
7
@1: I know, right? Don't those fools realize there are enough $200k/year job openings that everyone in the United States could land one if they were just motivated enough?
8
@7: $200K? I think that there is a far greater likelihood of an $80K job as a tester. Why do you think the tech giants have to go overseas to recruit to fill in their missing headcounts?
9
@7, don't feed the trolls.
10
@3:

Actually, they just painted over an old "DIE YUPPIE SCUM!" graffito...
11
Whaaatever. Some scruffy white trustafarian who was playing with his iPhone no more than three minutes after delivering his sidewalk sloganeering.
12
The author makes a good case.

Goodbye cruel world, I'm logging off today... deleting my cache, history, and cookies... I will not be renewing my ip address lease...

- Techie Scum
13
@5 My cousin in law takes the google bus to mountain view from Oakland and they pay you for the time you're on the bus. Getting paid to read the paper and fuck around on your phone is a pretty good reason to make the commute.
14
@8 According to Paul Campos at the Univ of Colorado for working age adults (18-69) for every 10 workers there are only 3 jobs that pay more than $30,000.
15
Us civilized folks will always have superior technology to crush the Luddites, so... *brush shoulder*
16
@1: While there's certainly an unmet demand for quality tech talent, there are large number of people who lack the ability to ever pull themselves into those positions, and the rule of thumb in tech is to find a way to eliminate human workers as much as possible.
17
@8, you never cease to amaze, Nancy. There are virtually no $80,000 a year jobs in Oakland (or anywhere else), and the few that exist are two hours away and not open to poor people from bad neighborhoods. And even if you make $80,000, that's barely enough to live in SF, or, increasingly, in the nicer parts of Oakland -- the parts of Oakland that used to be affordable until these tech assholes started pushing everybody out.
18
Blaming people for having the skills/work ethic/luck/background to get a good job is really lame. You want to blame Sergey Brin and Larry Page and other 1 percenters, fine. But a coder who makes $100k (in an area where you can't buy a house for less than $800k or rent an apartment for less than $2k is really undeserving of your scorn.
19
Agreed with theophrastus @6. The tech workers themselves are the wrong targets.

Maybe this isn't what bothered that graffiti artist, but what bothers me is the existence of those private bus services. Here's a private business serving its needs by withdrawing from the community rather than contributing to the community and making things better for everyone. This "every man for himself," "every business for itself," "every problem has a private solution" attitude only takes an economy and a civilization so far, and it's a big reason (along with globalization) as to why our economy is spinning its wheels now, forgive the metaphor.

I'm sure it's no piece of cake, but couldn't Google and other Silicon Valley companies have collaborated with the local transit agencies to create some kind of express bus service to serve the various campuses, so that it isn't just the Google bus for Google employees? Of course, there's the broader question of these companies basing their operations on these far-removed, auto-centric campuses to begin with.
20
@19, so much ignorance of the Bay's regional politics in one post! To know why so many companies have employees in SF, offices in the South Bay, and private shuttles going between, you need to realize that

(1) office space is impossible to acquire in SF,
(2) housing is more plentiful in SF,
(3) EVERY SINGLE MUNICIPALITY in the region is ridiculously resistant to ever building new housing for anyone, ever, even as the population grows,
4) the South Bay has policies that explicitly encourage office real estate while discouraging housing that might require more amenities from them (for example, you can't have parking on site for 100% of your employees),
5) the South Bay refuses to allow public transit lines that might make it possible to have an efficient route between SF and the towns there, and
6) the local population is ridiculously NIMBY-ish and terrified of all change that might happen.

And this is what you get for it - offices in the South Bay (where they're available), housing in SF (where it's available), private lines going between (because it's the only way to get it done), and perpetually angry locals. It's ultimately not any one tech company's fault that the region has such irresponsible policies about growth.
21
Phoebe @1: Which really means "I'm too unmotivated to improve myself and get a better career so I'll remain envious with a bad attitude."

What Phoebe says here isn't necessarily wrong, but it's failing to see the forest for the trees.

It's what's so exasperating about Tom Friedman's columns lately in The New York Times. He keeps going on about how Americans need to re-invent themselves and be adaptable and marketable--to effectively become one-person entrepreneurs--in this hyper-competitive flat world we live in today. And while that might be relevant content for a self-help book, Tom Friedman isn't writing a self-help book; he's writing an opinion column that, like it or not, is about how our American society organizes itself politically and economically. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to become a top 10% income earner by definition only works for a small slice of the population. It's like Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.

So yes, the graffiti artist is stupid. But the knee-jerk response isn't exactly smart either.
22
And Fnarf@17, you need to read @20 as well before going off about tech assholes.
23
@7: So, too hard, don't try. Got it.
24
Morosoph @20, the challenges you speak of are what I was getting at with "I'm sure it's no piece of cake,..." But hey, I do kinda get your point, and so I want to apologize for picking on defenseless, innocent, little companies like Google who I'm sure tried ever so hard to make things better before they gave up, realizing they clearly are powerless in the vast pit of Bay Area politics.
25
@24, well, however large or defense-ful they may be, they haven't always had much success against that vast pit. Just one example:

http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012…
26
@17:
And even if you make $80,000, that's barely enough to live in SF.

So, people accommodate and get roommates/housemates - or is that a foreign concept to you?
27
@26

Sure, that works great for a society that's decided the poor aren't allowed to have children.
28
@27 - Rest assured, you can always retort with pathetic and depressing generalized statements that are hyperbole: "not allowed to have children" -- please. The pessimist can always play the most implausible stretch of common sense and win - simply because its vogue in our popular culture to be that way. Didn't used to be.
Robotslave: 1, Phoebe: 0.
29
Dude probably Instagramed it.

@20 is right. Despite current SF's residents reputation as preservationists and the City's non-existent free space, SF is actually outpacing surrounding municipalities in new housing construction (I wish I could find numbers on meeting our state mandate but some new solar energy law is burying the search). The new supply may do little to ease the current situation, but 5, or 20 years from now it could create a bigger window for people with less means to move here.
30
@26 my google friend has 4 roommates in an illegal sublet. Does that make you happy? He is considering moving to Seattle where he could afford a townhouse. And probably get blamed for rising rent here too. That's what he gets for escaping his abusive family to overcome the odds by succeeding at college.
31
@5,

In decent traffic, it takes less than an hour.

@20,

It's not "impossible" to get commercial real estate in San Francisco, what companies can't get is the huge "campus" that they want, where their employees are basically trapped there all day, and they get car washers and dry cleaners and dentists to show up at the office to wash employees' cars, clean their delicates, and fill cavities so the employees never have an excuse to leave the office between 8 am and 8 pm. That tech "culture" is impossible in San Francisco, which is why those companies set up shop in Mountain View.

I also strongly suspect that San Francisco, with its existing strong tax base, isn't as interested in giving tech companies the same sweetheart tax deals they can get in Cupertino or Redwood City.
32
@30: I am happy that you have a friend moving to the area, and I trust you'll help him find a townhouse he wants and can afford. I'm also quite happy that he escaped his abusive family and was able to get an education and employed at Google. Have you thought about what you might want to serve for his welcome to Seattle dinner?
33
@30 - SF still has a particularly low office space vacancy rate:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/…

... and there are challenges to building more, so even if you want a nontrivial amount of "normal" office space, it can become a big problem.

You're right about the tax deals, though: the SF payroll tax is a big sticking point, and the special exemptions (e.g. Twitter) have certainly been a big liability politically. Payroll taxes have always seemed like the wrong way to raise revenue, though - especially if you're a city like SF, and have lots of people living in the city that you'd rather not see working outside of it.
34
I was going to rant at length, but @20 beat me to it on all counts. Read what he wrote: every letter of it is correct.

There is nothing suspicious, immoral or unethical about moving to a place where you are offered a job (in the middle of a goddamn decade-long recession) and renting an apartment at the most reasonable price you can find once you land.

Fnarf, you know I love you, but you're off in the weeds here. The actual assholes in this discussion are the bay area's landowners and policy makers, all of whom have been quite happy to avoid the cameras (they don't take the google bus or any bus at all to work) and watch their bank accounts grow while existing residents and new arrivals fight over the remaining scraps of housing left.
35
As a postscript, I offer this handy little web page:

http://www.statjump.com/lists/vacancy-ra…

Put in the name of any silicon valley or east bay burbclave, and you will find it. Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, Cupertino, Menlo Park, you name it: every single one of them has a rental vacancy rate of 2.2% or lower. Southeast-bay shitholes like Fremont and Union City have rates of 1.7% and 1.3% respectively.

San Francisco itself has a 2.5% vacancy rate, and Oakland's is in the neighborhood of 5%. It is estimated that over 50,000 people will move to the bay area this year because newsflash there is job growth here and the rest of the country has double-digit real unemployment. Rotsa ruck holding back the tide with graffiti and bitching about busses.

The building permitting and building process in the bay area is broken and corrupt on a scale that is extremely difficult to explain to outsiders without frothing at the mouth, and has been that way for decades. And now all of the bills have come due at once.
36
While this vandal comes across as a bit of a dip shit, so does Phoebe from Wallingford.
37
@8 According to a fellow Frenchie who went to work in Santa Clara for a few months :

"because Americans preppies working in computer science are so lazy and arrogant, you wouldn't believe, always thinking about how they could do less for the same amount of money and never about doing some decent work ; the only ones who work their asses off are immigrant scientists from everywhere, like India, and they are rewarded with despise from the wasp crowd".

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