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Shbobdb posted:While there isn't much actual land, the land itself isn't well developed. The Bay Area is not vertically developed at all. It's time to start building up. It will never be a Manhattan because a lot of the ground isn't suitable for skyscrapers and earthquakes limit the maximum height but there is plenty of room for taller buildings. Everyday it seems like there is another petition to prevent another high rise from getting built. Mandate that X% (civil engineers can figure that part out) are affordable housing units and you've gone a long way towards relieving the pressure that the housing market is feelings. There needs to be more done about gentrification but making the housing market less of a complete gently caress-up is a good start. The "stop pretending it is a quaint little city with nice old houses" is a huge hurdle to accepting any sort of rational solution. Also, the people who hate the highly-educated tech workers are probably going to feel pretty miffed if a bunch of highly-educated planners and civil engineers start objectively re-engineering the city.
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May 5, 2014 09:25
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FRINGE posted:A BS in CS or CE doesnt really make you "highly educated" in that part of CA. Having a huge concentration of Stanford grads, tons of PhDs, and non-tech companies like Genentech/Abbot Labs that employ said PhDs makes the area pretty highly educated.
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May 5, 2014 10:32
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FRINGE posted:Thats what I meant. Addressing the average Apple/Google worker as particularly "highly educated" because ooh! technology! does not do justice to how highly educated the area is in general. (And those other highly educated people are getting squeezed as well by the tech money.) I'm not saying they should have been programmers, i'm saying that all of those other groups are lumped in with the techies: a bunch of highly educated people moving into San Francisco. They may not make the same money as Google or Twitter hires, but they have the ability to make that kind of money in the future, and are displacing the preexisting working-class as they move in.
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May 5, 2014 12:04
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Slobjob Zizek posted:This sentiment is hilarious though. Leftist locals are rejecting central planning! On top of that, tons of people complaining about this are outsiders who flocked to San Francisco as a counter-culture mecca. I know quite a few people from bumfuck areas of the US who moved to SF right after college, and they quickly started complaining about all the tech money.
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May 5, 2014 16:25
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Yeah, i'm sure Google hires a bunch of stunted manchildren when it recruits at top colleges. They are no match for the cultured Something Awful poster checking out the lastest anime Let's Play.
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May 21, 2014 07:44
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FRINGE posted:A source that computer industry engineers dont get art Everyone knows you can't appreciate art without an expensive art degree, which is why so many renowned artists went to expensive MFA programs at small private colleges.
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May 23, 2014 08:30
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FRINGE posted:If it was real art it would be created on a fine medium, like a playstation or an xbox. Not like those cave trolls mushing colored goo around on cloth. How many of those goo on cloth artists went to an expensive art school? Or how many great authors in the 20th century did a Literature MFA? All the names I could think of apparently did not do either of those things. on the left fucked around with this message at 09:13 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 09:09
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Shbobdb posted:What is the point of segregation if all schools are equally funded? That isn't what America is about It costs much less to educate rich children than poor children. On top of that, the best teachers are going to vastly prefer the working environment in schools without the major social problems associated with poverty.
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May 27, 2014 02:53
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Shbobdb posted:The most efficient free market seems to dictate that we spend the most on rich kids and the least on poor kids. If that weren't maximally efficient, clearly the market would correct itself. Fun experiment: If you went to a middle-class suburban school district, compare the per-pupil spending to the per-pupil spending of the nearest city/poor district. The results will probably not be what you expect!
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May 27, 2014 07:22
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Obdicut posted:My grandfather bought a house in Presidio Heights back in the 60s. I won't even tell you how much it's worth now, but holy poo poo, it's worth a ton. If you really care about low-cost housing in San Francisco though, you could take advantage of prop 13 and rent out the rooms at way below market rate. Selling the house to take care of taxes still results in a bunch of money for you and making SF a playground for the rich.
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May 30, 2014 01:05
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enraged_camel posted:I don't care about other people's stuff, I just want them to pay their fair share of taxes. And that "fair share" is more than 1-2% of your property's cash value, sorry. Fair share of taxes really should be determined by income level, rather than the value of illiquid assets. If people are on board with taxing such opaquely defined assets though, why not also count stuff like college degrees? We can value them at the current yearly tuition price of the school, and for schools that have been shut down, we can use an index of tuition rates nationwide to correctly assess value. Statistically, college degree holders are richer on average, so we can levy a small percentage tax and use this money to pay for schools in underprivileged areas.
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May 30, 2014 04:34
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enraged_camel posted:On the contrary, income is irrelevant. This is about wealth. Assets, illiquid or not, are part of someone's wealth. And if there is one thing Piketty's book hammers home, it is the fact that taxing income doesn't do much, and it is wealth that should be taxed. If you aren't actively converting an asset to money, how is it wealth? A good example of this in practice is something like highly-valued artwork owned by a family. Also, if assets are required to be valued at market value, this would dramatically change existing accounting rules, and not for the better: Many books have been cooked by using artificially high valuations of assets to create the illusion of income.
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May 30, 2014 05:27
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FRINGE posted:Completely and utterly wrong, of course. It's very easy to tax an asset when it is converted into money somehow. It's very difficult to tax an asset when it isn't touching the "real money" portion of the economy. Also, when it comes to housing, just because your neighborhood is getting richer doesn't mean that public services become more expensive. There are a lot of good reasons to value assets according to book value rather than market value. As I mentioned before, if you are so keen on taxing unrealized wealth, you should get behind an asset tax on total amounts spent on higher education. The 200k that you spend on a private education means you have a lot more wealth to spread around than someone who went to a public in-state college or didn't go to college at all. The low rate of 1% a year will be assessed to the combined yearly tuition of every institution attended after high school. If you cannot pay due to lack of a job, this can be added onto your student loans after interest and penalties.
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May 30, 2014 10:07
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FRINGE posted:If someone literally has some hidden buried gold, sure. Regarding houses, cars, yachts, and various paper rich-banker accounts, these are easily assessed. Why is it a bad idea to tax the possession of an extremely valuable asset whose replacement value is growing at double the rate of inflation? Why are houses and cars different from a college degree? We should ideally be taxing the people most able to afford it: people who went to expensive private colleges, especially people who doubled/tripled the investment by going to med/law/professional school. If you spent 200k+ getting a bachelors+law at a private university, surely you can afford to contribute 1-2k in extra taxes a year instead of forcing people who can't afford those things to pay the bill for society. The big reason you won't see support for that here though is because the user base here does have a college degree and doesn't own a house. Both groups spent hundreds of thousands in loans/cash to get something that was promised to appreciate in value and are viewed as a societal good.
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May 30, 2014 10:57
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FRINGE posted:You havent looked into the student debt issue at all, and this isnt the thread for that particular quote dump. If you are interested in it beyond just spitting out random ideas then hunt around for stuff. Hmm, you are saying that the high leverage people have take out to buy homes/pay for education means it's a bad idea to incur tax obligations on unrealized gains? The student debt bubble is exactly the same situation, and remember that if you try to measure wealth as assets minus liabilities, it leaves an insanely easy loophole to hide all your wealth (large, low-interest personal loans).
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May 30, 2014 13:54
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Family Values posted:Actually it kind of does. Services, whether public or private sector, are highly labor intensive i.e. they're performed by people who expect their wages to at least track inflation and cost of living. When you artificially restrict public revenue over time to a curve below inflation, it gets harder and harder to pay for those services. Those public sector employees live in the same communities that they serve and as we all know, cost of housing is a major component of cost of living, so yeah 'richer' neighborhoods - more expensive housing - does mean more expensive public services. The answer to that is that most critical public services should not be paid by a levy on property with no respect to income. The only things that should be paid for with property taxes is some stuff like garbage removal, sewage fees, and other basic infrastructure stuff that is easy to judge costs based on square footage of property and reflect the costs of a property. There's not much reason at all to pay for schools/fire/police with property taxes. It doesn't make sense to tax people on unrealized paper gains, especially when most businesses are prohibited from declaring such things as income for good reason. To bring up the college degree taxation idea again, why not tax college graduates on increases to the value of their college education, as determined by the rise in tuition yearly. If your alma mater was able to raise tuition by 10k a year, clearly your own college education has risen in value and you should therefore pay some sort of capital gains tax on this gain. on the left fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 16:31
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Family Values posted:Maybe so, but what's your proposed mechanism for effecting this change? Counties don't have the authority to levy income tax and the state has been gridlocked thanks to the our favorite prop. Yes they do, my county and even my small suburban city inside the county both had their own tax rates on top of state taxes. I had to look up my specific tax rate by zip code when I lived in Maryland.
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May 31, 2014 02:34
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AshB posted:Also, although I can see the argument that the focus should be on attracting better talent rather than figuring out who to fire, that's not really an argument for why tenure is good. Attracting talent and firing bad teachers are two distinct issues. The more persuasive point for keeping tenure is that it just gives employees a form of due process rather than meaning "you can't get fired." The problem there is that talented teachers avoid problem schools like the plague, as evidenced earlier in the thread. Given a choice between well-behaved students who want to learn, and students who won't listen and might stab you or beat you up, anybody with a choice is going to choose the better school. This effect would be bad enough with equal school funding (equal teacher salaries), but if most teachers turned down 20k in additional cash to work in a disadvantaged school, things aren't looking good.
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Jun 13, 2014 01:03
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Trabisnikof posted:First, that's a retroactive deal. They were operating in those stops illegally long before that. It's because people loving hate the incumbent taxi/hotel/bus industries. There are a ton of industries that people will cheer you on if you "loving bury" them, in the famous words of Steve Balmer.
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Jun 17, 2014 09:09
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't think your example of Napster and Audiogalaxy works because we never changed the laws, nothing is different between nowand then except that iTunes and Netflix is an idea that people invested in after the file-sharing revolution. With Uber's valuation, its clear investors assume that laws will change to meet Uber's desires. Uber could be choosing to work within the laws in all communities it operates in. It operates legally here in CA (for now), but if a community has rules that Uber doesn't like (say, requiring commercial insurance for all commercial drivers) they often just flaunt them in the name of competition. That idea, that rules can (and should) be thrown away when they get in the way, is very much what a segment of the tech industry argues. With Uber specifically, it's very likely that they are flaunting the rules with the express desire for an eventual crackdown on such behavior. The hope is that Uber will be able to transition to automated cars that neatly sidestep the rules regulating human drivers from picking people up. Their undercapitalized competitors will be shut down by the newly enforced laws, while still leaving them a huge competitive advantage against traditional industry that will allow Uber to destroy them. Pervis posted:I don't really think that's what is happening at all, actually. Maybe some investors are caught up enough in the bubble to think so, but I'd say most just plan on making money out of it before things go poof, regardless of the viability in the long-run. This is especially true when you start taking in to account the situation outside the US. I see little reason for foreign countries to not come down hard on Uber once there's more money at play (post-IPO/purchase), since the existing power structures aren't getting their cut. Uber might find a good fit in the US and some other places and continue to exist. Other countries have their own tech startups more and more. I predict creeping protectionism so that countries don't have to watch a bunch of Americans in California cripple traditional blue-collar employment and slow growth of domestic industry by poaching the best technical talent. You can already see it in action with various countries attempting to cripple Google with bullshit court rulings that try to impose bizarre rules. Just today Canadian courts have asserted a right to dictate what websites Google can keep in its database worldwide. on the left fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 17, 2014 |
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Jun 17, 2014 16:57
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Trabisnikof posted:Plus, there are tons of people who would love to pay a reasonable amount for access to the tech employee only bus network. So yeah, when the "young, white, male, elites only" bus rides up and blocks traffic and the entire bus stop for their passengers the classism is palpable. But they're tipping the city a dollar now, so that makes it all better. Tech companies aren't young white men only. Google specifically has only 60% white workers, compared to 80% white in the broader workforce. It seems really far-fetched to complain about companies providing high-income jobs and then turn it into some kind of race war because they treat their employees well. Such crab mentality.
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Jun 18, 2014 00:55
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Kobayashi posted:Yeah well it's 90% white+Asian, which in America is basically shorthand for "white." Also, the overall ethnic breakdown of Google proper is not necessarily the same as the Google bus ridership, or other private busses. Plus, gender and age contribute the stereotype too. If you only care about certain cherry-picked ethnic groups, that's fine, but it's not really something Google should worry about. One reason I know the diversity push is bullshit is that when Google was brought before a congressional hearing on diversity, congressmen focused on "How many black people do you hire?". Not asian, not hispanic, not native....black. gently caress those congressmen who care about black political patronage rather than actual diversity. As a non-black minority, I will never vote for any congressperson who does this. Yes, exactly, Google is far from a whites-only company.
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Jun 18, 2014 02:15
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Trabisnikof posted:It's a bit disingenuous to argue that the tech buses have no cost to the public. While they were operating illegally there were many documented cases of them making MUNI buses even later. Plus they are still using public resources for private good. Regardless, I'm saying that these companies could easily open these programs up to the public, with a public fare they subsidize for their employees. That's the way to turn this into mass transit that's more than just the physical representative of income inequality. They couldn't open them up to the public because then the busses would need to install the same lovely anti-vandalism fixtures that public busses need. Also, not that many San Franciscans need to travel directly to Google headquarters.
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Jun 18, 2014 02:46
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Trabisnikof posted:Plus we're not just talking about google and SF. Many tech companies run private buses to and from all over the Bay Area. Some of them chose to use public transit resources for private transit, without pre-agreement or payment and did so until outrage forced them into a payment deal. Somehow we shouldn't criticize them for this? I don't think that it's a big deal at all for a bus to have the audacity to pick people up on the side of the road. Anyways, i'll be laughing my rear end off when Google turns around and says "You are right, busses are terrible for San Francisco. We are immediately rolling out a fleet of self-driving cars that will be available to Google employees 24/7. To save money, they will never park, but rather clog the streets while looking for the next pickup. We hope that the rest of San Francisco will enjoy seeing all Google employees galavanting around the city for free."
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Jun 18, 2014 03:04
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computer parts posted:Why are there apparently insignificant numbers of Hispanics, despite California being a minority-majority state? Hispanics are only a tiny portion of UC admissions, which would explain a large part of the disparity. Also, if the immigration system were loosened up, you'd probably see a lot more immigrants from South America even out a lot of the numbers on white collar employment.
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Jun 18, 2014 05:53
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Trabisnikof posted:The thing is, is if the tech companies wanted to earn some respect from their communities it is relatively easy to work with transit authorities to pay for additional bus routes that cover your commuter need. Other large employers do this all the time, even here in the Bay. San Francisco could always take all that extra income tax it is raking in and spend it on expanded metro service. They won't do it though because it's a political mess, which is the same reason why even if Google agreed to run the entire public transportation out of its own budget, things wouldn't be fixed.
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Jun 21, 2014 03:03
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Trabisnikof posted:You mean the tax income SF is missing because none of these companies have their headquarters in SF and thus don't pay SF payroll taxes? If San Francisco is like practically any other city, they have an income tax on residents, regardless of where they work.
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Jun 21, 2014 04:48
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cheese posted:I love how patently ridiculous that claim is when you apply it to other standards. "Guys, I'm not selling unregistered handguns. I'm just storing them in a place and selling information about where they are. Its totally legal and not at all the same as you giving me money for a gun." You just helped a bitcoin startup with the next million dollar idea!
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Jul 1, 2014 03:01
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mA posted:If you're attempting to justify Google's hilariously pathetic hiring track record by appealing to UC admissions you should probably look elsewhere (nice try, though!). The UC system's newly admitted class is over 28.8% Chicano/Latino, which is a tad higher than a "tiny portion". The graduation rate of Black/Latino people is dramatically different from Whites and Asians, both in the UC system and in general. Getting them into school doesn't help if they wash out or have a poor GPA (a contributing factor in the washout problem).
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Jul 1, 2014 13:41
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computer parts posted:The UC system has an 85% 6 year graduation rate. ( http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/documents/accountabilityreport13.pdf , page 42) Yeah, but Black and Hispanic are in the 70-80% range, and Whites/Asians are in the 85%+ range: http://diversity.berkeley.edu/undergraduate-students-new-freshmen-6-year-graduation-rates
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Jul 1, 2014 14:11
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cheese posted:Its also important to remind everyone that Google, Facebook, etc have been lobbying the goverment to block the release of this data for years. These companies have known they have a huge demographic PR nightmare on their hands and have almost certainly been working very hard over the last few years to fix that (read: hire latinos, blacks and women - bonus points for black/latino women!). And THIS is as diverse as they could get the company. I'd love to see what Facebooks demographics looked like in 2010. No words. I am sure this is true for Africa as well, but there are plenty of well-qualified Hispanics in central and south America who can't get visas to come work for Google in the USA. If congress would fix the visa situation, a lot more diversity would take place. Hispanics are definitely hurt by the fact that immigration has been dominated by the uneducated/unskilled, who will then have children who are behind their peers, and so on and so forth.
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Jul 2, 2014 01:07
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computer parts posted:There are also plenty of well qualified Hispanics in America too but for *some* reason Google et all aren't hiring them. Only a small percentage of hispanics have bachelors degrees, and markedly less than the African American population:  The figures are really bad for men too, last time I checked. Black and hispanic women do the lion's share of keeping averages up for their respective races.
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Jul 2, 2014 01:19
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cheese posted:This might make sense if every one of Google's 50k employees was a CS/CE job. But its not. Only part of that huge number of jobs takes a specialized tech degree. They have thousands and thousands of people working non tech jobs in marketing, human resources, PR, art, social media, etc etc etc. Yes, and for those jobs they hire the top part of the class at selective universities.
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Jul 2, 2014 02:07
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Trabisnikof posted:Right, Google can hire anyone they want and if they wanted to hire well qualified minorities they could, unless you're actually arguing that they don't exist. Yes, I would be willing to bet that hispanics and blacks are mostly not dominating the GPA scale at the universities they attend, as evidenced by the much lower graduation rates.
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Jul 2, 2014 02:31
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cheese posted:So their only hires in all of those areas are top of the class grads from selective universities? You SURE about that bro? All their marketing interns are from Stanford? Not Stanford only, but I did find this graphic:  Top 5 schools for Google recruiting are Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon. I'm sure it's heavily influenced by the tech recruiting, but i've known a lot of non-technical people from Google who went to one of those schools, although mostly MIT. Trabisnikof posted:Why is google required to hire according to the % of graduates in a graduating class? Why on Earth should Google adopt those kind of hiring practices? on the left fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 03:00
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Trabisnikof posted:Google is the one saying diversity is important to them. If that was true, they could easily act on it. They have a workforce that is much less white than the American workforce at large. Mission accomplished! Trabisnikof posted:Edit: Also that chart is based on linkedin data and only accounts for the top 5 universities and less than 1/4th of Google employees. Top 5 universities is very good for determining the overall trends of hiring. on the left fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 03:14
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Trabisnikof posted:All this takes is restaurants requiring ID for that startup to die. But wow, the fact they give you a fake name to use at the resturant is extra ballsy. The next pivot is them taking your real ID and sniping desireable dinner reservations for you. Bots have been very common in online restaurant reservations for a while, with many people moving to techniques used by high frequency traders to get reservations within milliseconds of opening.
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Jul 4, 2014 02:18
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Trabisnikof posted:All 3 of those companies aren't doing anything new. I rented textbooks in 2008, a recruitment agency with a fancy website is just a recruitment agency, and trying to sell incredibly expensive equipment to power companies isn't exactly revolutionary. The impact is that they do it without as much human labor, and funnel those savings into the owner's pocket, while telling people who are now displaced by technology to go gently caress themselves.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:09
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enraged_camel posted:Wah wah, automation is taking our jobs away, wah wah. Honestly, I do think it's good, but not because of automation, it's because it allows small companies to eviscerate companies that have gotten too large and unresponsive. This is great if you are a young person, bad if you are an older worker who can't use a computer and is relying on that big company to provide a pension for the next 30 years.
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Jul 11, 2014 04:06
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Trabisnikof posted:Right and I wouldn't call Amazon "meaningful", "impactful" or "ethical" just because they're a business success. Amazon is only really as impactful as their market disruption, which doesn't translate into societally meaningful. Working for Amazon is about as meaningful as working for Walmart, bringing cheaper goods to the masses, yay. Amazon has dramatically impacted logistics and cloud computing as a side effect of running their business. Their kiva robots alone are revolutionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs
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Jul 11, 2014 04:26
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