I find it comforting to know that the group I belong to will be blamed for something, regardless of what the group actually does. We are free.
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/01/28/san-franciscos-tech...
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/01/28/san-franciscos-tech...
In any case, the fundamental underlying problem is that tech has created a monotonous economy in the Bay. No locality that has one has good economics for citizens.
I expect that if the tech companies were deeply involved in encouraging development and mass transit, then a sizeable percentage of people in SF and elsewhere would decide that this is bad. Most of the press would focus on individual personalities with bad optics and on sub-issues that involve sacred victims, since those are the kinds of things that the readers want to hear about, and "tech companies are villains who do bad things" is an established narrative that it's easy to understand new events by; public opinion follows naturally.
And if that's not the case, one of my takeaways is that there would be something else that people decide is intolerable about the tech companies. The issue is not the issues; the issue is the narrative, into which a limitless number of stories can fit.
Nothing is more disgusting than a human being that profits off of society and insists they have no responsibility to anyone else. Let the sham that is the social contract collapse and reveal the exploitative nature of capitalism for what it is.
[1] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
So basically you just want to watch the world burn?
Peculiar to hear this moral stance from a position of high self regard.
the social contract is a foundational concept of Liberalism. without it, the current relations of property, state, government, and people are unintelligible. a breakdown of the system is a breakdown means a breakdown of its premises.
I understand that you might expect something better to rise from its ashes, but it seems like in the short term it could be horrifically bad for many people.
History disagrees. Strongly.
Show one instance of assent to this contract. Or, maybe, just show us the text of this "contract".
Why are tech companies supposed to donate more than their share to "develop infrastructure"? No one has ever been expected to do something like this in the past, AFAIK. Just raise taxes in SV and publicly fund more of what you want.
They're not legally required to, but there certainly is historical precedent. I live in LA, and many of the parks, museums, university buildings, and charitable institutions bare the names of the cities oil/property barons. Even those that don't were still financed by that money. There's also the "company town," where the dominate industry in town shoulders even more of the infrastructure.
then there shouldn't be any expectation
And I'm pretty sure the robber barons are criticized more than the current Googles of the world.
What you are saying when you say these companies should be doing social projects and planning, is that the cities are failing the citizens to do those projects and planning.
I agree that they can do it from a perception point of view, but I've found that Social Justice is usually 80% distraction and opportunism, and real solutions should be properly architected by the right entities, and usually have the character of benefiting everyone, not just the oppressed group. Just as a couple examples: body cameras and inverting the clasroom, are not particularly "Black lives matter" solutions, more like improving "all lives" and yet they'd help more than Al Sharpton's opportunistic appearances and all that type of activism.
All these movements that make an enemy of those who they should instead try to enlist in the solution, just wind up doing more harm than good. Take for example the BDS movement. And before that, the other "social justice for Palestinians" movements. It's been decades and Palestinians are still stateless. Is BDS gonna topple Israel? No, it's just an outrage-fueled meme to protest Zionism. It doesn't actually help. The way things move forward is not by activists yelling against an enemy, but rather when people constructively get the stakeholders all together and do something that benefits everyone.
It's not ridiculous to think that the powerful and influential have a responsibility to the society that supports them. have we so fallen down the neoliberalism hole that civic duty is a completely alien concept? If the rich have no responsibility to society, liberal democracies will break down.
http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/04/17/money-doesnt-matter...
Abstract
Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (mgilens@princeton.edu). His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University (b-page@northwestern.edu). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good. For helpful comments the authors are indebted to Larry Bartels and Jeff Isaac, to the anonymous reviewers from Perspectives on Politics, and to seminar participants at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
Cities are not independent entities.
And good luck calculating what a "share" is.
In the UK, Google has come under fire for negotiating a risibly low tax payment.
That has as much to do with the current administration's dislike of corporate taxation as it does with Google. Even so - Google, like all corporations, benefits from the UK's education system, healthcare, transport investment, police force, legal system, and security services. It's hardly unreasonable to expect a larger contribution to all of the above than the company currently makes.
I expect the SV situation is similar, even allowing for local differences.
>If a lot of rich people live somewhere, that should be a windfall.
Not if rich people also own the government and manipulate the taxation system for their own benefit. This is exactly what is happening in the UK, and it's why public infrastructure is creaking while rich people all over central London are pushing up property prices by buying for investment and leaving huge swathes of real estate empty.
Society at scale should depend on mechanisms, not moral expectations.
danharaj, in what ways are tech companies relying on social and economic infrastructure to the detriment of others? I'm well aware of the tragedy of the commons, so what is the finite resource in this case?
The issue ultimately is that the people that constitute a city, work in it, construct it, maintain it, live in it, are completely subject to the whims of capital and private property. Whole districts can be destroyed or forced out by market forces and replaced with a more profitable set of human beings. We are supposed to accept this as not only natural and inevitable, but good! It is fundamentally undemocratic and inhuman. that's why people are angry, because there is no room for their interests in such a system. living in such a system is dehumanizing.
The compromise of Liberalism is that the people control the government, which acts as a counterbalance against the market. When government fails to mediate the conflicts between the workers and the capitalists and property owners, class conflict gets worse.
i would just like tech workers to realize that we're workers who sell their labor for a wage and that means we're exploited. Economic security, even petty wealth is always a temporary illusion for the worker. Events out of our hands can and often do plunge us into economically precarious situations. We have more in common with people who work for less than us than we do with the people who pay our salaries. furthermore, in a society that is increasingly based on technological structures, we have a civic duty to make sure that technology serves to create a more equal, democratic society.
one thing that i personally do towards that end is offer my clients reduced rates if they open source the code i write for them. i'd like to do more activist programming when i'm in between contracts.
I'm probably going to get rate-limited on my replies so i'll stop responding to comments. i sure kicked up a hornets' nest here.
But these trustafarian activists focus most of their energy on tech employees---who are just trying to find a place to live just like everyone else.