Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

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To be fair, it's not quite 'economy 101'.

Or rather, 'economy 101' is that anyone with enough leverage, will use monopoly powers in one area, to take control of an adjacent economy.

American Oil empires were not built on some new amazing way to get at oil, it was because some had control of the railroads, and charged their competitors a little more to transport therefore putting them out of business (through aggressive consolidation).

The FB cafeteria example is not a very good one admittedly, but an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'. Which they very well could do, and it would then seem kind of crazy, no?

Economically speaking, it would be 'above bar'. After all, 'free market', right? If neighbourhood residents want to eat in a restaurant, screw them, they can go across town!

We live in communities, not economies.

The city ordinance is stupid, but the motivation is not.

Ironically, these are 'rich people problems' ... the kinds of things that happen when little dots of wealth blow up and there is a huge economic inequality, even if most people are 'kind of well off'.

As it turns out, poverty doesn't cause crime. It's relative poverty that causes crime. Basically, if people are low down enough on the dominance hierarchy, they feel like they have no hope of getting anywhere, then why shouldn't they start acting up?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE

(On the other hand, in societies where everyone is poor, there can be peace.)

well, wealth creates a market opportunity. when everyone is poor, there is no market opportunity.

Obviously, we don't want everyone to stay poor. At the same time, we don't want certain people to be so low on the dominance hierarchy, that they think violence is their only alternative.

i don’t believe it has to do with position on a dominance hierarchy.

i think it has more to do with dignity.

i don’t believe it has to do with position on a dominance hierarchy.

i think it has more to do with dignity.

Those two are the same thing. Dignity == not being at the absolute bottom end of a dominance hierarchy.

Since human society is very complex, there are many somewhat orthogonal dominance hierarchies. That revered old statesman in your esoteric music fandom might be a school janitor somewhere. Those local-star music scene musicians might get ushered into a billionaire's party through the back door of the kitchen, then be strictly warned not to touch any of the food.

being treated with dignity hasn’t nothing to do with one’s social status.

to be treated with dignity would be for the billionaire’s staff to escort the low status individuals with grace and provide food for them in a way that affords them respect while satisfying whatever other constraint which precludes the billionaire from involving these persons in the main event.

to risk ruining my point by being petty: sounds like a billionaire with no class.

Low social status has inherent indignities.

Or maybe it's the other way around - crime causes poverty.

Crime can absolutely produce a bad feedback loop to a community, but I would love to see more research on what causes what. We can see that countries that become a lot richer and keeps wealth inequality under control has a connection with drops in crime, like in Australia for example. However, I don't think drops in crime caused the resource boom there and I don't think Detroit's crime rate caused the Japanese and German economies to become more advanced and outperform the American auto industry.

If you're in a society where everyone is poor, there is not peace, there's extreme violence being applied by a government that is responsible for everyone being poor (it's not just a subtle thing for everyone to be poor, that requires an incredible amount of persistent violence and rights denial by a central authority with overwhelming power). You're just swapping one type of violence out for another.

There's no need for a central power for that.

Tribes constantly warred with each other, because they saw that as a good way to get resources.

Of course, during the middle ages it was feudalism, which was not centralized at all, it was stratified. Classes, classes, classes. Haves and have not-s. The haves of course arranged things in a way to keep what they have, so they come up with rights for themselves, which were very much not egalitarian ones.

And of course there's the real centralized one-party autocratic setup, where instead of noble houses openly competing with each other, people just play the subtle game of extort those who are under you, which makes inequality even worse.

If you're in a society where everyone is poor, there is not peace, there's extreme violence being applied by a government that is responsible for everyone being poor

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. To have oppression, there has to be enough of a surplus for a ruling class to extract. For many 10's of thousands of years, our ancestors didn't have the means to have a surplus.

Also, we have many examples of local societies which are egalitarian, but embedded within a larger, distant feudal hierarchy. In some of those cases, there can be very little violence directed locally, though in other cases, people can be so low in society, again, their only hope for advancement is violence.

Where there have been increases in the general standard of living, it has been through the adoption of new technology and the increase of trade.

> an alternative could be 'they buy up all the restaurants in the area and make them exclusively available for FB staff'.

If Facebook is willing to pay substantial amounts of money for a restaurant, while at the same time guaranteeing customers to those who refuse to sell, it would seem the number of public restaurants in the area will explode.

In Monaco, there are a small number of 'Monegasque' i.e. actual ethnic people from Monaco - they are just 'regular folk' - not like the bankers and millionaires ex-pats that make up the most of the actual citizenry.

The 'wealth inequality' issue is obviously a problem, so the government mandates that 'all citizens get meal chits' as part of their comp - this is to ensure that Monegasque folks literally are not priced out of food.

But everyone gets them - bankers included (the uber-rich don't work ...). So you go into a restaurant there and these dudes in $5K suits are pulling out their 'meal cards' to pay for stuff, it's kind of funny.

But it has to be that way.

If facebook et. al. has set up their own 'shuttle bus' system, there's no reason to believe they won't set up 'private restaurants' around town to get around the city's regulations, which will sure to cause even more angst and obvious concern.

Better to just let them have their cafeterias ... but the weird kind of inequality thing is not going to go away.

Would you say this situation in Monaco is kind of like "universal basic income"? Has it caused any issues?

No, because the meal chits are paid by employers. No job, no chits. Moreover, it's a tiny, incidental cost. More resembling the American healthcare system (in terms of how it's paid, not in terms of cost). Also, the scale is so small ... there are 20K citizens there and only a couple thousand actual Monegasque, they literally are 1 or 2 degrees of separation from one another and 'the government' if you can even call it that. Literally Google serves more free lunches every day in their cafeterias than are served in the entirety of Monaco's restaurants and kitchens.

Not if most of the people in the area, or even a decent chunk of them, work at Facebook.

If there are ten restaurants and one of them is pretty much the default choice for 25% of the people, that leaves the rest of the restaurants with an effective 75% of the market, which shrinks their customer base quite a lot.

The other customers are still there. Facebook's office is replacing old retail space, which is not much used on weekdays either. This will only increase traffic to those restaurants even without forcing Facebook to send all its employees their way.

>We live in communities, not economies.

The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.

It's hard to imagine your local city bus is so unpleasant to be called a dystopian hellscape.

While I was a BART commuter, I walked a gauntlet of slumped-over hard drug users, sprawled-out homeless people, human urine, and feces every day. Fortunately, I've only seen people drop their pants and take a shit on the sidewalk in front of me twice. Missed a random stabbing on the stairwell into my station by about 5 minutes.

This is Civic Center Station, which serves Twitter, Uber, and Square. No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

Video doesn't even show the worst part, but helps to illustrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk

> No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

And policing will just drive the problem somewhere else. What America desperately needs is a new approach to a lot of issues that goes way beyond ever more police, courts and jails:

- drugs and addictions (now that enough white middle class people suffer from heroin or worse, something hopefully will be done beyond the "put them all in prison" attitude that caused the War on Drugs in the first place)

- mental health resources, whose lack of is directly affecting or even causing much of the homeless population

- medical resources

- housing

What's worse than heroin? I thought it was the most addictive thing we knew.

Fentanyl

carfentanil. 50 000 times stronger than heroine. (allegedly.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COduXp6Cw3g

What matters is effects per dose, not effects per gram.

It matters if you want to smuggle the stuff.

Which nobody was talking about.

And until we discover and universally [0] implement that "new approach," public space will be avoided at all costs by those who can help it.

[0] San Francisco welcomes the downtrodden from everywhere in the world; it's not enough to solve poverty in the US to clean up SF's streets; you must eradicate it from every inch of the Earth.

That's not an inherent problem of public transit. It's just a symptom of failing to take care of poor people in your society. Try taking public transit in a civilized country like Germany or Japan.

I have, in fact witnessed someone defecating beside an U-bahn track in Germany. It may be less common, but it still happens.

there are untreated mentally ill people everywhere, just like there is poverty and corruption everywhere. It's a matter of scale & proportion.

We don't have this problem in New York. From an outside perspective at least San Francisco seems to be a uniquely fucked up place in this department.

That's because New York gets cold enough that trying this in New York will kill you through the cold. You'd freeze to death in the first year.

No, it's a symptom of lax policing and lax justice system.

I didn’t say it was an inherent problem of public transit. But it is an inherent problem of compelling people to share space in San Francisco. The library, for example, is a similar story.

The array of policy, economics, and values that make Germany and Japan work so well are not going to magically appear in an American city just because you try to cargo-cult some of their second-order effects. Public space in those countries is genuinely good; you don’t have to ban alternatives to get people to use it.

Perhaps move out of the third world city you live in and move to a developed one?

Only problem I've encountered on public transport on 5 continents is the occasional drunk group singing on Friday night.

I've been to third world countries and they were much more civilized than this.

> video: "... the city's jurisdiction ends when you head down those BART stairs."

That's shocking to me. Get city policy in there if the commuter cops can't handle it.

NYC cops be in there removing people stat if this happened here.

I always thought that force would work pretty well to build a dystopian hellscape.

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