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a foolish pianist posted:Let me out myself as a midwest techbro - I did an ML phd at UofM, and I got a job as a python dev at an Ann Arbor startup (not Duo). Ann Arbor is a weird case, in that housing has gotten SF prices in the past five years - new construction averages about 600k, and the median house price in the market is mid 400s, well out of reach of most everyone who isn't a GM exec looking for a home in really good school districts. That’s not really close to SF prices, only about half.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:01
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Curvature of Earth posted:(1) Healthcare is not real estate or the internet (2) we are facing the consequences of chronic underinvestment in healthcare, not massive overinvestment. We're facing the consequences of chronic stupidity about the concept of civil society rather than either under- or over-investment.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:04
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Baby Babbeh posted:It is distressingly common in the SF Bay Area for people to live in like Stockton and spend 2 hours on a train every day commuting to a job in the city. The problem of housing affordability isn't negated just because housing is affordable some other place. People should be able to live where they work. It's weird that you treat a whole 2 hours on a train a day as some ungodly amount. That's a mere hour commute each way and you don't have to be paying attention to driving or anything. It's wholly routine in places that have public transit. I get that you're on about them having had to first drive all the way to/from the train station before/after that, but you seem to be treating the 2 hours on the train as just as much a problem. It's hard to remember sometimes, but the entire Bay Area is merely the population of New York City, only it's splattered out across an area practically the size of all of Connecticut. This could all be served much better by public transit than it is now (especially since a lot of that population is concentrated in defined corridors relatively easy to serve) but the area's flaked out on such things just as much as it flaked on housing and everything else. In a sane world SF proper would be nearly entirely mid rise and high rise structures scattered with some parks and some very rich people homes that maintain low heights and wide space, and the general density type of much of SF would be outside the tiny city limits. And there'd be multiple tubes crossing the bay to handle rail traffic. Plus you wouldn't have multiple cities down all around the bay where there's like 4 office jobs for every 1 person's living space or whatever ludicrous levels those places have reached now. Stuff like this is why it's really ludicrous that NYC and SF/bay area housing prices even get mentioned in the same breath. You can live in NYC plenty cheap as long as you don't want to live in the trendiest bits of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and if you insist on having a single family home there's tons of affordable and nice places in the surrounding suburbs with typically good, close-by, transit access into the city and some regional suburban employment centers. In short, it's a functional metro area instead of an insane real estate dream.
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Oct 27, 2017 03:20
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2 hours a day probably meant 2 hours each way, because let's be real, there's no loving way you're getting from Stockton to SF on a train in only an hour
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Oct 27, 2017 03:34
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Steve French posted:2 hours a day probably meant 2 hours each way, because let's be real, there's no loving way you're getting from Stockton to SF on a train in only an hour To get to SF from Stockton actually by train, you'd normally take 3-4 hours by the routes actually available during commuting periods. You can take a train from Stockton to Oakland that takes an hour 50 minutes between the two, but there's only 5 roundtrips a day with the first Oakland-bound departure leaving at 8:33 AM for a 10:26 AM arrival. Not practical for most working people.
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Oct 27, 2017 04:02
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fishmech posted:It's weird that you treat a whole 2 hours on a train a day as some ungodly amount. That's a mere hour commute each way and you don't have to be paying attention to driving or anything. It's wholly routine in places that have public transit. I get that you're on about them having had to first drive all the way to/from the train station before/after that, but you seem to be treating the 2 hours on the train as just as much a problem. Yeah, absolutely (except for the bit about Stockton to SF, its 2 hours each way). But this gets back to a lot of the reasons as to why housing in the Bay Area is so expensive to begin with. At some point, if you have more and more people moving to the area, many of them with well paying jobs, putting them all into high rises in downtown SF (or anywhere) is going to cause property values there to skyrocket. If the surrounding area is undeveloped, it is inevitably going to become economically attractive to build outside the city, where housing will be cheaper but commute distances are still reasonable. And if the population and economy keep growing, that place is going to become expensive and the sprawl will just continue. Ultimately, sprawl in the SF Bay Area is a consequence of all of its negative costs being externalized, while it's primary driving force--moving away from rapidly rising property values--is something that is actively coveted and encouraged by the people who already own property in the place that it's becoming more expensive. Fixing this would require a degree of planning and government intervention that doesn't exist now and certainly didn't exist when these places were developing. It's also worth mentioning that a lot of the population and economic growth in the bay area from the ~50's straight up to the mid 90's was driven by semiconductor manufacturing and related industrial activity that was not and could not feasibly be located in SF. So a lot of what eventually became these weird sprawling commercial suburbs didn't grow out of SF but rather out of smaller cities/towns like San Jose, Palo Alto, and Fremont. Saddling a major metropolitan area with unforeseen and rapid growth tends to result in sprawl; dumping that same growth into nowhere out of nothing essentially guarantees it. Edit: to draw a comparison to NYC; In 1950, the population of NYC was ~7.9M, and in 2010 it was ~8.1M. The population of the 9 county SF Bay area in 1950 was ~2.6M in 1950, and in 2010 was ~7.1M. Morbus fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 04:07
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Why do companies have to set up in expensive areas like SF as opposed to a neighboring town with cheaper rent? Is it because of access to VCs and industry events draws them to the core of the city? Sorry I don't understand how business works.
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Oct 27, 2017 04:18
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Ccs posted:Why do companies have to set up in expensive areas like SF as opposed to a neighboring town with cheaper rent? Is it because of access to VCs and industry events draws them to the core of the city? i live in sf and i aint loving commuting to palo alto gently caress that noise
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Oct 27, 2017 04:38
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Mostly because the talent pool lives in SF or East Bay and would much rather work in SF than somewhere else. VCs will go anywhere, i think most of them are on the peninsula but they'll gladly take meetings in the city because you're making them money.
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Oct 27, 2017 04:40
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Ccs posted:Why do companies have to set up in expensive areas like SF as opposed to a neighboring town with cheaper rent? Is it because of access to VCs and industry events draws them to the core of the city? I mean property values in the bay area were off the hook before you had these VC inflated neo-tech companies deciding to build offices in SF. And even today most of them arent located in SF. Historically, a lot of the growth in silicon valley happening where it happened had to do with things like the location of Stanford University, cheap property values (lol), and the fact that William Shockley relocated from NJ to Palo Alto to be closer to his sick mother. For these and other mostly accidental historical reasons, a lot of the computer / electronics / semiconductor industry sprang up in the area just south of SF (Shockley Semiconductor Lab started in Palo Alto, people left that to form Fairchild Semiconductor in San Jose, people left that to form Intel in Mountain View...). That industry experienced massive growth over the next 40-50 years so by the 90's the entire area became a "tech" hub even for things totally unrelated to it's original manufacturing history, partially due to the huge numbers of engineers that had become concentrated in the area.
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Oct 27, 2017 04:40
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Ccs posted:Why do companies have to set up in expensive areas like SF as opposed to a neighboring town with cheaper rent? Is it because of access to VCs and industry events draws them to the core of the city? there's a locational advantage to setting up in specific locations for specific industries. think about how a few centuries ago factories would need to be near rivers and ideally waterfalls, to take advantage of moving water to power their equipment. or how factories might want to be near sources of raw materials sometimes, this locational advantage is social. newspapers want to be near cities, to have more readers. law firms would also want to be near cities, to have more clients in the case of technology startups, they need access to 1) office space 2) universities or technical schools 3) amenities that people like 4) sources of capital. san francisco has these like most other major cities, but san francisco also has specific cultural advantages, like a long tradition of technological development which means that the secondary firms in the city (lawyers, furniture dealers, venture capital firms) are used to dealing specifically with technology companies and know their particular needs think about it this way - if there werent significant business advantages to cities, why wouldn't people just spread across the landscape to minimize their costs? many small and medium sized companies do this, but to prove you're a big league company you typically want to have prime downtown real estate until you move to the next level, which is building your own campus. at this point companies do tend to move a bit to the edge of town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters
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Oct 27, 2017 04:44
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Morbus posted:
That's with NYC first dropping to 7 million by 1980. And also a shitload of the places you could live in NYC you can't live in today because they're taken over by commercial or other non-residential uses, and on the flip side, a ton of the places you can live today used to be straight up industrial/dock/commercial facilities where living was illegal. So there's had to be a lot more housing build and change than it first appears from "the population only went up slightly", especially since NYC has literally added another 500,000 people since 2010. Also the NYC metro area jumped from 14 million in 1950 to 24 million today, just for comparison's sake. That metro area is almost exactly double the land area of the SF Bay 9-county area, but we can average that out that it also needed to add roughly 5 million people over the same time period and same space, once you account for that from the 10 million total increase. luminalflux posted:Mostly because the talent pool lives in SF or East Bay and would much rather work in SF than somewhere else. Most of the actual talent pool lives in the Northeast, especially NYC and Boston, lol. Of course, fart app developers have a much lower standard for "talent" than say, high frequency trading or companies that make real things as well as being on the internet.
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Oct 27, 2017 04:56
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Intel, AMD, NVidia, SanDisk/Western Digital, Seagate, Cisco, Apple, Google, Oracle, NetApp, Agilent, Applied Materials, off the top of my head, each employ thousands or tens of thousands of people in the bay area. Many of them still have actual factories there, and the lions share of process development is done in CA, in many cases virtually all of it. There really doesn't exist the same concentration of technology talent or activity elsewhere in the country, and certainly not in Boston or NY. This becomes even more extreme if you restrict things to companies and people that "actually make things" as opposed to software. Just because a bunch of VCs are desperately throwing money at every techbro with a fart app they can find doesn't mean that's all we have going on over here, jeez.
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Oct 27, 2017 05:59
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Morbus posted:Intel, AMD, NVidia, SanDisk/Western Digital, Seagate, Cisco, Apple, Google, Oracle, NetApp, Agilent, Applied Materials, off the top of my head, each employ thousands or tens of thousands of people in the bay area. Many of them still have actual factories there, and the lions share of process development is done in CA, in many cases virtually all of it. There really doesn't exist the same concentration of technology talent or activity elsewhere in the country, and certainly not in Boston or NY. This becomes even more extreme if you restrict things to companies and people that "actually make things" as opposed to software. Just because a bunch of VCs are desperately throwing money at every techbro with a fart app they can find doesn't mean that's all we ha going on over here, jeez. Actually there does. NYC, Boston and its Route 128 Corridor, DC-MD-NOVA contractors and general tech companies. SF and sv are grossly overrated. Hell a shitload of all the great coders in the country are up with Microsoft and Amazon all across Seattle area. Google's operations wouldn't stay up without the NY and Boston offices. And so on. Of course those other cities mostly do "boring" things like actually own a market or turn profits for decades on end.
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Oct 27, 2017 06:37
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^^^^^^ Do you live in 1985? Ccs posted:Why do companies have to set up in expensive areas like SF as opposed to a neighboring town with cheaper rent? Is it because of access to VCs and industry events draws them to the core of the city? Please don't encourage them to go elsewhere. Sacramento housing prices are already getting dumb (remember we're all on state worker salaries) because apparently some people think the 3 hour each way amtrak ride to SF is reasonable. nm fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 07:02
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Tech startups start in SF because that's where the investors are. When they grow, they don't leave because they have irreplaceable employees that refuse to relocate and could get another job in SF in a day. These people are often in senior roles where they manage a whole team, so the team needs to stay in SF too, along with all the support staff they require. Even if they open another office somewhere else, they can't put much of importance there since all the key people are in SF, and they can easily quit if asked to travel too much.
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Oct 27, 2017 08:00
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Sand Hill Road isn’t in SF
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Oct 27, 2017 08:48
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Curvature of Earth posted:(1) Healthcare is not real estate or the internet (2) we are facing the consequences of chronic underinvestment in healthcare, not massive overinvestment. Lots of money does get shovelled into healthcare in the US, especially by private insurance, but the money is used in a mind-bogglingly inefficient way, because there's no single entity that can regulate and enforce prices on HMOs, drug companies, etc., and because the money is channeled through the system as profit or or spent on operating inefficiencies (like lawyers figuring out how to screw people out of their insurance) instead of being used for actual healthcare.
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Oct 27, 2017 09:27
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As far as I can tell, the entire NHS system costs less per capita than what we spend just on Medicare + Medicaid, which is insane. If the US actually got even remotely good value for what we spend on healthcare, we could have far and away the best universal healthcare system in the world...
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Oct 27, 2017 09:47
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Build ugly communist cement apartments in the Bay Area and build them in huge numbers then it a day
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Oct 27, 2017 10:03
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eschaton posted:That’s not really close to SF prices, only about half. Konstantin posted:Tech startups start in SF because that's where the investors are. When they grow, they don't leave because they have irreplaceable employees that refuse to relocate and could get another job in SF in a day. These people are often in senior roles where they manage a whole team, so the team needs to stay in SF too, along with all the support staff they require. Even if they open another office somewhere else, they can't put much of importance there since all the key people are in SF, and they can easily quit if asked to travel too much. Cicero fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 11:33
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fishmech posted:Most of the actual talent pool lives in the Northeast, especially NYC and Boston, lol. fishmech posted:Of course those other cities mostly do "boring" things like actually own a market or turn profits for decades on end. Absolutely remarkable how quaint New York City provincialism manages to transform a nominal leftist like fishmech into a defender of the industry most deserving of the guillotine.
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Oct 27, 2017 11:39
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Curvature of Earth posted:Mm yes, the famously productive and stable finance industry. I see that and raise you a New York State Capital District rose-tinted self-image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHV4wk1cXjs So
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Oct 27, 2017 13:18
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fishmech posted:Actually there does. NYC, Boston and its Route 128 Corridor, DC-MD-NOVA contractors and general tech companies. Don't forget Seattle.
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Oct 27, 2017 13:55
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He didn't.
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Oct 27, 2017 15:05
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"Leftism" isn't an excuse for passing on misinformation. The press reflexively uses Silicon Valley as a symbol for all things tech even when it's not geographically accurate. So you often find Microsoft and Amazon in lists of SV companies, and the importance of offshore labor is ignored. There's a significant degree of ideological construction that goes on. The bay does have several material advantages, most of which stem from the development of Solkanar512 posted:Don't forget Seattle. Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Oct 27, 2017 |
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Oct 27, 2017 15:09
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https://twitter.com/business/status/923896028721504256 I dunno guys, I feel like we might be in some kind of bubble here.
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Oct 27, 2017 16:59
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Curvature of Earth posted:Mm yes, the famously productive and stable finance industry. What the gently caress are you even talking about dude. Are you seriously so blinded by Silicon Valley that you think there's nothing that exists in this world besides the financial industry and fart app production? But I will say that the worst banker in the world is probably more moral than whoever's running Uber this week, though that's hardly a high bar to pass. Gazpacho posted:"Leftism" isn't an excuse for passing on misinformation. This, exactly. Most software development in the country isn't anywhere near SV/SF, not least because it simply can't afford to be. Every big company related has at least a campus or two there, sure, but they also have campuses in every major metro. Silicon Valley is mostly really good at selling itself as the essential place for things to be, not actually achieving that.
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Oct 27, 2017 17:26
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fishmech posted:What the gently caress are you even talking about dude. Are you seriously so blinded by Silicon Valley that you think there's nothing that exists in this world besides the financial industry and fart app production? But I will say that the worst banker in the world is probably more moral than whoever's running Uber this week, though that's hardly a high bar to pass. I have been in both SV and Route 128/Mass during market collapses (helloo, the Great Minicomputer Black Hole of the 1980s). In SV, there continued to be jobs, although in different sorts of companies. In Route 128, I wound up moving out of state. Your market collapse may vary. Re midrise high-density housing, look at this pretty.
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Oct 27, 2017 18:42
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fishmech posted:But I will say that the worst banker in the world is probably more moral than whoever's running Uber this week, though that's hardly a high bar to pass. I will say that this is an incredibly stupid statement
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Oct 27, 2017 18:44
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Arsenic Lupin posted:"Most software development in the country" is not on standalone products. It's IT for various non-software companies, or contracting to same. Most software developers in the country work for Duke Power or [insert your favorite level of government] or Citibank or [medium-size company with 5 IT guys]. I've seen surveys, now way obsolete of course, in which most of the software development in the USA was done in Visual Basic. For the specific case of standalone software companies, when you do find one outside the major centers, it's likely to be the only gig in town, and you are well screwed if (A) you dislike the gig or (B) it goes face-down, nine-edge first. Both of these have happened to my family. Right but there's hundreds of thousands of such jobs right back there on the 128 Corridor and in Boston/Cambridge themselves again. Admittedly with much less direct manufacturing work compared to the old days but that's certainly true of SV. Because all the universities and military and contractors that drove such jobs in the first place are still there.
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Oct 27, 2017 18:49
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fishmech posted:Right but there's hundreds of thousands of such jobs right back there on the 128 Corridor and in Boston/Cambridge themselves again. Admittedly with much less direct manufacturing work compared to the old days but that's certainly true of SV.
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Oct 27, 2017 19:05
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fishmech posted:But I will say that the worst banker in the world is probably more moral than whoever's running Uber this week, though that's hardly a high bar to pass.  That’s quite a take, Fishmech.
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Oct 27, 2017 19:34
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skull mask mcgee posted:
You're going to defend whoever's in charge of Uber right now?
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Oct 27, 2017 23:35
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fishmech posted:You're going to defend whoever's in charge of Uber right now? Nice attempt at misdirection, but none of us claimed that Uber is good. It's just hard to beat the finance industry for the sheer scale of harms they commit. From a utilitarian perspective, Uber is small potatoes. They're evil, certainly, and absolutely ruinous to those it has harmed. But the bar is stupidly high considering that F.I.R.E. tanked the economy (and would very much like the capability to tank it again) and the oil industry furiously lobbies against any acknowledgement of and mitigation of global warming.
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Oct 28, 2017 00:10
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Uber is bad but bankers are the ones who keep giving them money
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Oct 28, 2017 00:13
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only a small fraction of Uber’s capital has come from banks
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Oct 28, 2017 00:18
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Open a guillotine factory in Detroit so that there'll be enough guillotines for all these fucks. (then make Uber but for guillotines)
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Oct 28, 2017 00:30
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Of course other tech regions in the country exist and of course you can find competent developers everywhere, and of course a lot of stuff gets outsourced to places where workers are easier to exploit. Seattle, Boston, and New York are major hubs of technology. But it's also just not factually accurate to say they have the same gravity or importance as the Silicon Valley ecosystem. VC investment is a pretty good heuristic for how much new technology activity there is, especially as larger companies have opted to slash their R&D budgets in favor of acquiring startups. And this is not even close. The Bay Area is about 15 percent of the worldwide venture capital market just by itself. For most regions, their tech sector is centered around either a specific industry or one big anchor company. Silicon Valley is home to 3 of top 5 largest tech companies in the world, and the rest maintain a sizeable presence. It is a major hub for enterprise software, biotech, semiconductor design, mobile apps, artificial intelligence, gaming, networking, adtech and applied physics. This has led to a concentration of cross-functional talent that's hard to match elsewhere, and it's made it more resilient to industry specific shocks than most other technology regions. All this is more due to a quirks of history rather than any inherent virtue of Silicon Valley, the same way Hollywood becoming the center of universe as far as film goes is largely accidental. It isn't entirely rational, and certainly things are becoming more evenly distributed over time. But network effects are real and they play a part in where companies decide to locate
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Oct 28, 2017 00:31
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Time posted:only a small fraction of Uber’s capital has come from banks To be honest I pretty much equate bankers with private investors despite being aware that it's not really the same thing
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Oct 28, 2017 00:32
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