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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate it when people pay taxes because I like public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television...

San Francisco is a pretty nice place to live. Sometimes you need to pay a little more for nicer things.

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public transportation? I live in Vancouver and recently flew in to SFO. Being from Vancouver I thought I know I'll save time and money and just take the subway in. BART is fucking disgusting and I couldn't sit down on the train for fear of picking up god knows what. In Vancouver if you start a startup and hire someone under 30 with a degree the gov't will pay you the first $15/hour of their salary, the rest you can avoid paying all taxes on if you make a SRED claim. All that AND we have public transportation you can sit down on, and even inside the tunnels you still have 3G connections. All that AND 'free' health care, and there is no f'ing way the city would ever levy a 1.5% payroll tax, let alone on stock options. In Vancouver we live in the best city on earth and pay less tax to the city than in SF.

If you include the portion of your federal & provincial taxes that are then granted/budgeted to the city, I bet the tax you're paying "to the city" is a lot higher than you think it is, and per-capita are probably on par with SF.

Also, unrelated question: How much harder is it for a 31-year-old to find work?

That question largely depends on your skill set and who you know. If you know lots of people in SF then it's going to be more difficult in Vancouver if you don't know anyone.

I'm not sure what age has to do with the question though? Either you have have marketable skills or you don't.

edit: After reading jackowood now I realize what the issue was, most places are up front about it and they look like really shitty places to work that are more concerned about saving $15/hour than figuring out how to make an extra $15/hour. They take a total labour mentality to programming instead of the view of code as a capital good with near-zero cost of reproduction. (aka, their idiots). I've never had a problem finding work in Vancouver and I'm 29 with no degree.

I think his point was that if that subsidy exists for hiring people <30, once that subsidy stops applying, you'd expect companies to be less willing to hire you. The idea being that they could hire someone with basically the same experience and also get the subsidy.

Hopefully you have more experience when you are older.

There's a discontinuity in desirability at 30, though.

I ride on Bart and sit down almost everyday no problem. Though from my limited sampling of Canadians you guys do seem to have a germophobe penchant.

http://www.baycitizen.org/transportation/interactive/intimat...

I would rethink that decision.

Oh please. There are bacteria everywhere, or do they dip those Vancouver trains in Lysol everyday?

The (biggest) problem is that BART has cloth seats, which are absorbant and more difficult to clean than plastic seats.

btw, the cloth BART seats pictured in that article are some of the cleanest I've seen. I ride BART every day. Most seats are collapsing, ripped, and filthy.

The problem with Bart is 1) cloth seats, and 2) a large homeless population. Not a great combination. There's been some talk of replacing the cloth seats with plastic seats, which will be less comfortable but much easier to clean. I'm not as creeped out by bart as you are, but it is kind of gross.

Vancouver is a great city, no question about it. I think San Francisco is bigger, more disgusting, more thrilling, and in my opinion uglier and more beautiful than Vancouver depending on where you're looking. Keep in mind that part of the reason for our homeless problem is that we're a magnet for the cast-offs of an entire nation with less of a support system than you have in Canada - it's not like San Francisco manufactures homeless people in some factory south of market and dumps them out on market street every morning. We're not purely innocent victims in all this, San Francisco has done plenty to earn that magnet status. Every now and then a mayors of some other city starts a kerfuffle by offering homeless people $50 and a one way bus ticket to SF (though SF actually used to bus its own over to Oakland).

I think a very well implemented national health care program can be a competitive advantage. The other things you mentioned seem less important to me, valuable at the margins, but not game changers in any way. It comes down to UBC vs (Stanford + UCSF + UC Berkeley). UBC is a wonderful university, don't get me wrong, but as long as the Bay Area has those three, it will be a huge player in high tech.

And yet you can't create a Zynga or a Twitter. Hmmmm.

It's up to SF to manage their city accordingly. If anything the city has been blessed by the types of organizations that keep it afloat. They can definitely tax, but they should look to make it competitive. For instance...the projected number of 3000 Twitter employees in 2013 at a rent rate of 1000 dollars per employee per month equates to 172M dollars in rent a year in the city of SF. Of course, not everyone will live IN SF, and perhaps the average will be lower -- but that's still an enormous amount of money moving out of the city (to pay for all those nice things you mention).

Furthermore, and I'm still figuring out the numbers on this one, I am curious to see what the sales tax losses (among others) will be when major companies like these move away from the city.

And really, it puts entrepreneurs in an awkward position of being forced to go to SF (because that's where all the talent want to be) and having to find a way to survive as well. San Francisco is definitely right to earn taxes on the many wealthy individuals that live in its borders, but I do think there is a more symbiotic relationship to be had.

> I appreciate it when people pay taxes because I like public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television...

I'll be sure to remember that every time the government raises taxes and pay up without asking any questions or being critical.

Umm, Mountain View/Sunnyvale/San Jose don't have which of the above? Btw, I upvoted you giving a nice list of things taxes support.

I don't appreciate the extravagant waste and the entitlement of the state to impose it's will on the people. With our taxes, we also support bailouts, wars, and other profiteering of those in control. Also, these institutions are basically monopolies, where the people in charge are not really accountable to run them efficiently or effectively.

Does giving the government more money make the government more effective?

I wasn't aware of the wars or bailouts the city of San Francisco has run. Could you elaborate?

Nice straw man. The originating subject was on taxes (since it takes more than a city to provide all of those services), not only SF taxes :-)

San Francisco residents live in the United States of America. The United States of America imposes federal taxes. Federal taxes have been used to fund wars and bailouts of various failed businesses.

Of course, no real city has the authority to have a military. The city does have a police force, which often acts in ways that do not better the lives of SF residents (parking tickets for example).

You seem to be arguing against city-level taxes with examples of the ways that federal-level taxes are used...

It's not like "public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television..." is entirely in the domain of the city government.

I just have a adverse reaction to arguments that claim I should appreciate a service provider that charges too much. Sorry, don't like getting ripped off.

  > bailouts, wars, and other profiteering

This was your original argument against being charged too much by the city government.

  > Sorry, don't like getting ripped off.

You could do without the snark. This came across to me like you were implying that I thought that you liked being ripped off or that you deserved it.

>Of course, no real city has the authority to have a military.

To be fair, Singapore does have a Ministry of Defence and an Army.

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