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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

The non-tech parts of this town will be devastated by a tech slowdown. Absolutely destroyed.

Devested with it, devastated without it. In summary it sucks to be on the lower rung of the economy.

The more devastation there is, the less of everything else there will be to go around. A tech downturn will just add to the misery.

How's that? They seemed to be OK before the crazy upswing.

The relative power structure won't meaningfully shift. Levels will just change. The guy whose 1% of this pie is meaningful today may find that it is unsustainable tomorrow. The gal who lives richly on her 10% of the pie may have to tighten a belt or two tomorrow, but it's unlikely to become be existential. More tangibly, city services will pull away from non-core areas, projects and services.

I would argue that despite budget increases we have not seen an appreciable increase in operating service levels across the board - from transit to infrastructure to homeless outreach and everything in between. Hard to believe with a $9B (yes, billion) budget. [1]

(Yes, there are capital expenditures happening that are quite visible but do we really need an extension of the slow T-line to Fishermans Wharf?)

[1] - http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...

Well, I think the ones that were around before the tech influx will certainly be able to ride out slower times better than the restaurants/services that have come up as a direct result of the influx of tech folk.

Because that was before, obviously. Too much of the city relies on the tech economy now - the restaurants, the lyft/uber drivers, the building contractors, the dog walkers, the private school teachers.

But it transitioned towards a reliance on tech before now, there's nothing to suggest it cannot transition away to something else.

It certainly can and will. But not quickly, and with lot of suffering in the interim.

Biotech? Genentech will still be in South SF.

All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time.

Q: How many sandwiches and burritos must one deliver to pay rent in the Bay Area? How many of those people that have been requesting said sandwiches and burritos will be laid off, move away or reduce discretionary spending?

A: many.

I think this sentiment is exactly what gives tech workers a bad name:

> All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time.

"Only to service tech workers" - are you kidding? You sound like the aristocracy from Downton Abbey: "Thank god we exist to give all the peasants jobs to do."

For real. What companies do people even refer to when they say "service industry that only exists to serve tech workers"? DoorDash and TaskRabbit and the other outsource your chores apps? The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.

> The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.

If anything, the service industry would arguably be better without them, instead of service startups attempting to illegally classify workers as 1099 contractors in order to be more attractive financially to VCs expecting insane growth.

I like to call this the 'plantation owner defense'. Any mistreatment of other peoples can be justified by 'but they would be even WORSE without us.' The original plantation owner justification being that the 'workers' (ha, euphemism!) were wild savages in a wild land, and any kind of treatment they were put through HAD to be better than what they would otherwise go through.

The other place I've seen this defense used regularly is in South Asia. People treat their servants and house workers really poorly there, and then the defense is 'sureee, they may be given the same food as we give our dogs and cats, but they would be DYINGGG of thirst and hunger in their villages without us.' Fortunately for most South Asians, more and more people are getting out of the situation where they are pretty much bonded laborers.

It seems to me that things are going in the opposite direction in the US. I have a lot to thank the US for personally, but sometimes, I get this intense emotion of schadenfreude. The increasing wealth gap, the increasing racial hostilities, outright hate for anyone who doesn't happen to be in the 'in-group'. As an American, I would be terribly terrified. As a non American I am sometimes all 'HAA, you acted if you were above everything else, as if you were post-history. Now YOU bear the baggage of history the others have had to overcome'.

My favorite are the techie-engineer-objective types. The HN Bros. I've been told over and over and over again how "history is over" and "nothing in history matters anymore because technology" and "context doesn't matter because not we have the means to establish absolute truth". Like literally. When you value technology over people, the process over the end goal, things will break. And they seem to be breaking. I am secretly glad, even though I am myself a part of this env, and might lose my livelihood too if things go South.

...Relevant to the article because it was meant to reflect how things seem to be for people outside the core bubble.

Strangely enough, San Francisco was thriving 100 years before the computer chip even existed.

Don't overestimate your importance. The world will move on without you.

Thriving? I think reasonable people disagree.

The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. I think a lot of people have the golden age fallacy going on :)

The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago.

Let's see, I've been in the area for 40 years and your comment couldn't be more wrong or uninformed.

Here's Bill Wyman's old Salon piece on it; it represents 17 years, but he grew up in East Bay in the 80s.

http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

(I remember it because I had just moved to SF from Chicago, again, when it was published).

Given it's an opinion, based on a lot of data, i don't see how you can think it can be uninformed.

You are welcome to disagree with it of course.

But, again, based on what i have, i suspect you may be in the minority.

Time will tell, of course!

If you have data on your side, let's see it.

Errr, i already said it's from talking to many people (~100-200 over the course of the year) who have lived there a very long time (in most cases, 30+ years). Given i stated an aggregation of what their responses were, that's valid data. Not sure what more you want here.

It seems you just violently disagree, but that doesn't make you right. It just makes you a data point in the other direction.

I see you know absolutely nothing about the history of San Francisco.

So you don't think reasonable people can disagree about the quality of san francisco 25 years ago?

Interesting. It's good to know it's an objective fact with only one possible answer.

Your condescension is as misplaced as your argument, which is a truism verging on non-sequitar.

Cool. So you'll have no problem proving me wrong.

Do so.

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