Zucktown, USA
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
I suppose the next step is to blame the Google buses for being "elitist" and "gentrifying", while in the next paragraph, blaming Google for putting cars on the road and making traffic worse....
“Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis (‘prudence in criminal cases’) in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away.”
It's not making the "you can't win" argument that tech companies should be critiqued whether or not they build housing.
Rather, it's that they're supposedly constructing "company towns" in the sense that the housing stock they build won't be for sale, and presumably only rented to employees. If you get fired you also get evicted.
Furthermore they'll own the nearby retail space as well. Will an Oculus competitor be for sale in the Facebook-owned chain of stores? Will someone trying to organize a Facebook union be allowed to use the meeting spaces at the Facebook town hall?
If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement for some reason.
I'm married, things happened, and we ended up having a baby. Due to various circumstances beyond our control. That cost $100k.
As a healthy guy in my 20's, I suffered an injury through no fault of my own that led to me needing a serious back surgery. Net cost -> $250k.
Rolling the dice on something that fundamentally life altering, and expecting society to pick up the tab for the consequences of your risk management is bullshit. It is a good illustration of why you can't treat healthcare as a market driven thing unless you're willing to drop the moral obligation to preserve human life (and expect the providers to "absorb" it).
Who is responsible for your health? I'd argue that the baby is entirely on you, and $100K for a delivery is insane unless you had incredible complications.
And if the back injury wasn't your fault, you could seek redress from whom is responsible. If it's work related, then work should pay. If it's an accident, then whomever is negligent should pay.
Unfortunately, no one wants to take responsibility, and expects "society" to make an individual whole after a loss.
I make no judgements on your moral character, but to follow your philosophy requires a fundamental acceptance that certain human life has less intrinsic value than other human life.
You likely didn’t pay for the prenatal care after the first trimester, and likely didn’t pay for the delivery beyond coinsurance.
What was out of control was a complication that nearly resulted in her death.
Those types of things happen. If you are married to someone who has a stroke, should you be sentenced to a lifetime of ramen noodles and destitution because your spouse needs care that costs $500/day.
When this happens, the vultures will be circling. And this happens far too often.
I don't think I know any family without a member of it having some kind of medical condition. (bad turn of phrase, but do I get the point across ?)
On the other hand, being evicted from your home is going to affect everyone, and there's no avoiding the upheaval - you're forced to find new housing in a famously overpriced market at the exact moment that you just lost your job.
Not in the US, at least not for 18 months anyway. It’s called COBRA and is available to anyone with work provided insurance.
2) Everything is relative. $600/month is certainly FAR FAR cheaper than the $10k/month the medicine I critically take costs. Comparable ACA plan w/o outrageous deductible is usually $700-900.
Lesson to be learned is, just because it isn't cost effective in your eyes, doesn't mean that many can't benefit from it! Feel lucky that your health needs are so basic, it almost certainly won't stay that way forever.
I haven't worked for a company, Fortune 50 to small startup, in the past 20 years that provided medical insurance and didn't provide the employer covered cost data in an easy place for access on demand.
I pay $3.00/month for the group policy at work, but when I get fired I will also lose the company's payments to the plan on my behalf. So my expenses actually go up as a result of trying to take advantage of COBRA. Whereas if I were paying for my own policy, I would be aware of what it costs and would be paying the same price for insurance regardless of my employment status.
How long does it take before someone has expertise valuable enough to go full Count Zero and extract them outside the reach of legal consequences? It's basically the approach Samuel Slater took, and I keep expecting to see it repeated today in either AI or biotech.
The bus thing is not the only example those people are contradictory against themselves. They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price, which to certain degree is justified. But at the same time they also oppose any construction of high density accommodation, blaming the company for destroying the neighborhood culture, talking about the good old days with orchards and trees.
I think what is really important here is, story like this fits into the narrative that big companies are inherently evil, and live their success on the misery of everyone else. I think you will be surprised how wide-spread it is, even on HN.
My biggest issue is their motivation: it is completely destructive. The only resolution, if according to them, is to reverse this, which I don't know how to accomplish, without severely disrupting the local economy, but I guess they don't care either, they got the clicks already. shrug.
They blame techies for the hike of real-estate price,
[...] they also oppose any construction of high density
accommodation
Renter Roy can't afford a house, and thinks tech companies' money is bidding up prices. Homeowner Harold has lived and worked in this neighbourhood for 40 years and doesn't want its character to change and his house's value to fall. Techie Tammy wants somewhere to live, she'd prefer not to spend a fortune to live in a hovel while her neighbours shame her for gentrifying.
Any pair of Roy, Harold and Tammy can get on OK - but it's just not possible for all three of them to get what they want.
There seems to be a contradiction - but that's because any time Roy and Tammy are about to agree, Harold is motivated to enter the conversation and disagree - and the same thing happens when Harold and Tammy are about to agree.
Sure, you can get to an armistice with Harold and Tammy: Housing costs are high but your salary is such that even spending 66% of your pay on housing leaves you with an ample amount of money.
But I wouldn't call that agreement anything other than begrudging.
This seems like the essential problem. Harold isn't actually a buyer in the housing market; he locked in a fixed-rate mortgage 20 years ago. If he's planning on retiring somewhere outside the city, or to a managed community, he might never be on the buyer's side of the market again.
But he's definitely a seller - that house will presumably be sold or passed on to his kids. Property taxes are a pain, but they're a manageable one for a house bought as an investment. Harold is actively opposed to Roy and Tammy; if their rent doubled that would be a good outcome for him.
We keep treating this like all the residents of the city are a group, but that's not true. Renters own zero units of housing, homeowners own one unit, landlords own multiple. It's not at all guaranteed that homeowners align with renters more than with landlords.
But this is a dilemma (or in this case a trilemma) only for individuals, "don't change the nature of this neighbourhood" shouldn't be something policymakers care about.
Who do you think votes for those policymakers? (And donates to their campaigns)
Lots of people want to be part of a community that feels diverse and functional, rather than be part of some weird polarizing over-class just because they took a job.
Of course that might be just a best case scenario..
Even in the most company-townish scenarios, I can't really see a company forbidding you from leaving the premises. If you wanna stay friends with a Googler, just invite them over.
I moved internationally so often, I'm used to building new circles of friends.
Harder to comeback to a job and much more awkward to hangout around old coworkers.
It seems to me that the article's main topic is that tech companies are building company towns, comprising not only housing units (The expansion of its headquarters will boast fifteen hundred units of housing, 15 percent of which it claims will be “offered at below-market rates.”) but also commercial spaces to provide town services such as retail stores and police stations.
The article goes on about what the author perceives as being the perils of a company town, complete with emotive platitudes regarding capitalism, but it is in fact an article about company towns, not "tech companies are building big offices".
I really don't understand how you were able to completely miss the whole point made in the article. Have you actually read it?
Society never moves at the pace of life. It always lags --even in command economies like China's or to a degree S Korea and Singapore. Adjustment takes time. At the same time as you point out, often times it's damned if they do, damned if they don't.
It's almost as if they would feel better if FB automated all the jobs away --not just manual labor low hanging fruit, but all jobs so that they would not have anything to blame on FB --except now everyone who used to work for them is now unemployed (presuming much of the industry learns from FB and also automates --in a purposely extreme example)
I really don't think that putting the next 5000 employees next to the last 10000 employees improves productivity. Spread out. Spread the wealth and the pain. Make yourself less vulnerable to a single point of failure.
Thank you for sharing this. I wish other people could look at all articles through this lens to see the biases that authors have.
Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly how all "evil" companies of the past became evil themselves.
[1]: https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-wit...
This is what worries me the most about something like Facebook running the town. I can imagine their Zuck-net would have plenty of mining to flag "potential unionizers" and snuff them out before they have a chance to begin.
Unions are really the only answer to balance the corporation's power and I fear they won't stand a chance.
SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has seen the same inequality.
At this point BART or other mass transit access to your workplace is itself a sort of privilege, perhaps not for the tech elite who wouldn't take mass transit anyway, but for rank and file skilled employees.
For many of them, mass transit is preferable to hours spent in car traffic. I'm one of those who feels privileged to be able to take BART to work.
It's service workers who have often been pushed out beyond the Bay Area into mega commutes.
Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference, and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.
I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support, benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich people".
(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.
- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.
- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.
- PNAS is a bad sign.
- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign, it's not even clear if those things work.
- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.
- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost cartoonishly bad.
My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy headline".)
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
They wouldn't have to do this if the local government wasn't so restrictive either. These companies don't care if their employees own their own homes or not. But unfortunately big companies are the only groups with enough power and resources to push through new housing development.
But perhaps a bigger question is, what about all the people who work at Google or Facebook who are not in-demand engineers? It seems like once you've established the principle it's easier to expand it to less prestigious positions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
It would be creepy having to live in a employers' housing unit. But if it is subsidized enough many would jump on it.
The interview process at many of these company is already geared to bring in college graduates. So a dorm of sort would make sense. Then they could outfit them work spaces so you could live there and maybe work remotely (but only from a company provided housing unit).
How about just letting people work from home to begin with so they don't all have to be crammed into one town or one building so that they can then all type on a computer? It is rather interesting I think these companies sell digital connectivity, collaboration, -- but when it comes to themselves they like to shove everyone into buildings.
And you'd pay with zuckbucks
citation needed :)
Matches my experience at FB & Apple. I spent about 2 years at each.
If that's true, it raises the question of why. The look isn't all that exceptional, he's just somebody who works out a fair bit, and didn't when he was younger. He's not exactly Erik Prince. So the focus on it, and the frequently malicious tone, sort of parse as "he doesn't look like nerds do anymore, that's suspicious".
This could all be apophenia, obviously. It just raises an eyebrow since I've seen athletic programmers greeted with "but you don't look like a programmer!"
I am troubled by privately-owned "public" spaces but the writing of this article isn't doing anyone any favors.
(As a mildly interesting example of a similar phenomenon: the pro-business libertarian / neo-liberal FDP party in Germany still proudly calls itself 'liberal'.)
I keep hearing this meme and I'm skeptical. Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?
Usually when people claim that companies should try to recreate Silicon Valley in some cheaper "heartland of America", they are talking about flyover country. And demographically, many people still in flyover country may well be poor saps who haven't yet figured out how to move to the coasts, as statistics show a steady drain of young people to the coasts or at least a few major metropolitan areas in their part of America.
I think the causality is at least more complex than the aforementioned meme implies.
I hope this comment was not made in earnest, because this attitude is exactly why SV is a dumpster fire that I have no desire of taking part in. I'll continue living my poor ramshackle existence here in flyover country, thank you very much.
As far as the bay area goes this is possible since most residents are foreigners or 1st and 2nd generation Americans who are probably more open to the idea of living in a skyscraper.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/02/google-backs-down-from...
"Google has backed down from a threat to deny badly needed housing in Mountain View if it isn’t given more office space for its futuristic new “Charleston East” campus."
I would tend to agree with the tech-ie opinion that unions are becoming obselete in the US. Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and interchangeable; the endgame of tech is to automate all those jobs. But obviously I’m not a labor scholar and this is just an unfounded opinion.
They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules, working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in tech.
Some sort of worker-administered group could make a lot of sense. But maybe a guild or cooperative instead.
Services that would be useful, especially (or only) if employers weren't paying the bill:
* Personal negotiation agents
* Career consultants. Lots of engineers are very underpaid and need some help holding their boss accountable. Or finding the next job.
* (Re)training. Engineers shouldn't specialize themselves into early retirement.
* Lobbying and marketing. Do you want BigCo telling your congressman what you think?
* Independent research and reporting on work environments. Some push back on penny-wise, pound-foolish facilities decisions.
* Charitable technology work not under a corporate brand
* Insurance, modulo whether competitive tax advantages can be arranged. Setting up pools for disability and life insurance, at least. Maybe healthcare if the tax advantages can be worked out.
However, the organizations you list have gone in strike as leverage in collective negotiations. That is an aspect I doubt makes sense for tech outside of basic health or ethical concerns. Both the collective bargaining and the striking.
If that was the case, no one would have been whining about H1B import companies killing US knowledge jobs.
Because your employer in tech can afford to give you a lifestyle easily in the highest couple percentiles doesn't mean you aren't replaceable and that you won't need representation as a class of worker at some point.
I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer.
(And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies.
Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)
The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.
I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time.
The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.
That's why we need to keep working on lowering barriers to entry. (Not just in software but all industries.)
Whenever there's an industry where owning a company confers outsized excess returns, I want a hundred copycats to come in and compete away the margins. (For lots of industries one of the most straight-forward way to get that is to make entries by foreign companies easy. This way a country can benefit without necessarily having to grow a local ecosystem of startups first.)
I am happy to encourage everyone and their dogs to become coders, if they can hack it. Over the long run and average over many people, income is ultimately determined by productivity. Let's grow the pie.
That can easily be fixed by plugging tax evasion loopholes and generally taxing higher.
If there's a will then there's a way, the problem is pretty much finding the way everybody agrees on.
Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base".
On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time.
If you can read German and like some historical musings in this direction (including about money), do read Silvio Gesell. https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/gesell/nwo/nwo.pdf
I think that's pretty offensive to a lot of tradespeople. If you think plumbers, carpenters, or electricians are unskilled, try doing what they do. Unions protected both skilled and unskilled workers. Whether they continue to do so, or whether they can serve in that role for information workers, is quite an interesting question, but skilled vs. unskilled is not at the crux of it.
On a historical note, I am currently reading A Generation of Materialism. The book has some very interesting bits about the early history of unions in Europe.