Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices", dressed up in some purple prose. And they're also to blame for high rents. But if they build apartments to help ease the housing shortage, that's a "company town" and we can't have that either. And Amazon is a "commandeering leech" which "suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep", but when Google offers Mountain View neighborhood benefits, that proves it's "seeking to wrest control of the city from its government".

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.”

The article is a badly written opinion piece that meanders through various topics, but your critique of it is beating a strawman.

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 also get evicted.

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.

If I'm a healthy individual then the risk that I need my healthcare insurance are low (But it has a big impact on my economy if I do need it). However the risk that I need some form of housing is 100% and the impact of not having it is huge which to me makes it a bigger risk. However YMMV depending on your situation.

>If I'm a healthy individual

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 ?)

I think the point is while losing healthcare insurance is absolutely a big problem, it's often not an immediate problem - there's a decent chance that a typical Facebook employee doesn't currently have a pressing need for healthcare, and even if they do, there's a decent chance they'll find new employment and be covered relatively quickly.

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.

That sounds like a case for health insurance. Just, you know, insurance. Not an account with a healthcare company with a subscription model (close to what the U.S. has now).

Circumstances change quickly.

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).

So you had a baby due to circumstances beyond your control? And you had an injury, again through no fault of your own? And the sum of those are over $350K.

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.

How do you feel about people with debilitating genetic diseases/disorders? Through no fault of their own other than being born into this world, and no health care provider wants to anything to do with them. They are guaranteed money losers, and if insurance companies didn’t have to deal with pesky regulations, they would happily find and drop these patients.

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.

I have no issue with society picking up after people who truly have catastrophic illnesses (though that's really what health insurance SHOULD be, not the way it is currently.) My issue is with people expecting society to pay for health care that's not catastrophic nor "accidental." If I choose to have a child, I should expect to pay for it. My partner and I had to have IVF, and we paid for it.

You paid for the IVF.

You likely didn’t pay for the prenatal care after the first trimester, and likely didn’t pay for the delivery beyond coinsurance.

The problem with litigation is that it takes forever. And while things are processing, you'll still be on the hook. If for example, you're the victim of a hit-and-run and the offender can't be found, you're still on the hook.

When this happens, the vultures will be circling. And this happens far too often.

I agree, there are lots of catastrophic events that can occur randomly. That's the ideal situation for real insurance (as opposed to what we have now). But statistically, most people use insurance for what amounts to either routine care, or care after they've neglected their health. And in the case of the poster I was replying to, he is basically giving up his agency and expecting society to make him whole.

Sometimes no one is at fault for an accident. Accidents aren’t always caused by negligence on someone’s part.

My wife had a baby. We knew about that part.

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.

OK but that doesn't make it positive or neutral to move even further in that direction.

Agreed. I was lamenting that it is seen as an essential part of the employer/employee relationship when the employer-as-landlord proposition seems so foreign and troubling. I thought drawing the connection would make people rethink the normal feelings we have about the American healthcare system.

Well, sure, I would like to see healthcare decoupled from jobs as well -- and frankly I'd think the startup lovers here would support it too, given that healthcare is actually a big barrier to entrepreneurship.

> If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare

Not in the US, at least not for 18 months anyway. It’s called COBRA and is available to anyone with work provided insurance.

Anyone with work provided insurance who can also afford the group rate the company pays.

Which is basically saying that when you lose your job they stop paying you.

It's a bit different because it's a hidden expense when it comes to budgeting. Six months expenses looks different if sometimes you emergency fund needs to cover CORBA that changes over time in a way that is transparent to you. If it all came out of your accounts, you could literally measure expenses and judicially tweak from there.

> you could literally measure expenses

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.

And that COBRA is not as free as people make it sound. In fact it's more expensive.

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.

You can also just ask your employer what their portion of the benefits is while you're employed. They'll be more than happy to tell you.

And is insanely expensive

COBRA was cheaper than a comparable ACA plan for me. It was also WAY cheaper than what a comparable plan pre-ACA would’ve cost. If you just need “emergency” coverage, sure there’s cheaper options. But if you have a chronic health condition, COBRA will more often than not be a lot cheaper and offer better coverage with lower out of pocket costs.

If $600/mo for a single young person is cheap to you...

1) The $600/month depends on how expensive the plan you had before. I've seen COBRA be as low as $350 to as high as $800, depending on the plan you had before.

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.

This is some William Gibson level stuff - in some of his stories the protagonists would be fixers who were hired to extract people from their companies they worked for.

I have been thinking about this with the Anthony Levandowski case.

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.

Good point.

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

My theory is there are three parties in this discussion.

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.

Seems like only Bay Area homeowners lose out if big tech companies decide to stop colocating all their workers in a handful of zip codes. And they won't get much of a say in that case.

The execs like the Bay Area..

Good point. There's more to the preferences of executives than they might care to acknowledge.

> 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.

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.

> "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)

Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't.

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.

> Actually, does Harold ever agree with either party? Tammy and Roy both want low housing costs, and Harold doesn't.

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.

There is a limit to the extent which the higher property taxes are tolerable and most people aren't really investors. However, as I understand it (I am on the East Coast), in California's case your property tax is actually locked in at the time of purchase regardless of appreciation.

While there are people who oppose high-density construction in general, the writer of this article isn't necessarily among them. There's a difference between the arguments "we shouldn't build high-density housing" and "having employees' housing, shopping, and most of their other needs provided by their employer has lead to some bad things in the past".

Appreciate the scare quotes, but company towns aren’t much fun for many employees to live in either.

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.

For many people at the big companies, the job is the community that feels diverse and functional. It's just a re-drawing of boundaries. In many modern American cities or suburbs, you don't get community anyway; I can tell you (having experience on both the inside and the outside) that Google has a lot more community than Sunnyvale does.

And what happens to (your access to) that community when you quit Google?

It's actually not too bad. I quit, and am still friends with them. You can still get a visitor pass to go boardgaming etc.

Of course that might be just a best case scenario..

Doesn't that seem a bit insane to you though? You're essentially saying the company is permitting you to continue your friendships. What about when they stop doing that?

They are permitting me on the premises. It's their offices after all. They have no say over what people do outside of those offices.

I just go over to their houses or invite them over to mine. I've kept up with many of my Google friends, and we usually hang out over homemade pizza every 2 weeks. There are others where I go to their parties or other events or just invite them out for dinner every couple months.

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.

but realistically, you'll be hanging out less often and you'll fade into feeling like an outsider?

Sure. Same thing as quitting a hobby you spend considerable time with and made lots of friends in.

I moved internationally so often, I'm used to building new circles of friends.

a hobby you can always pick up again whenever.

Harder to comeback to a job and much more awkward to hangout around old coworkers.

Having to get a "visitor pass" to visit friends sounds like something that would happen with high school or college students living in dorms, not something that should be seen as normal or acceptable in the adult world.

It's their offices.. You don't need no pass for visiting people at home or in a pub etc.

> This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices", dressed up in some purple prose.

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?

These people only know how to tear things down. I don't like FB or even Mark personally. But this is ridiculous and would not unfairly be characterized as sour grapes or simply not wanting progress at all to spite some good careers.

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)

Why don't FB/Google/Apple/etc expand to Auburn, CA? Or Lincoln, CA? or Lincoln, NE?

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.

It's not just about productivity from the employer's side, but also about the negotiating power from employees. When FB/Google/Apple are all in the SF Bay Area, one of their elite employees can more easily get competitive offers from the others.

Or the age-old water test, where you throw a witch into the river. If she floats, she's a witch! If she sinks, well, she's dead anyway.

Your last paragraph applies to so much in the media that it simply cannot be understated.

Thank you for sharing this. I wish other people could look at all articles through this lens to see the biases that authors have.

The fact that someone down voted me is just hysterical !

Funny how progressivism is cannibalized by progressives.It's almost like a disease or a mental disorder.

Would you please stop violating the guidelines, which ask you to post civilly and substantively?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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