Bay Area workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations

> If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement.

I knew this (now retired) public agency executive who couldn’t get enough money in her budget to keep the lights on, but the board was much more willing to fund new projects. Her solution? She’d get funding for all these new projects, use that to hire all these contractors, and quietly direct them to spend 50%+ of their time on “keeping the lights on” but bill 100% to the project. For example, funds appropriated for an identity management project paid for a network engineer who was supposed to configure the firewalls and load balancers for that project, but the project also paid for the weeks he spent upgrading outdated network switches in office buildings even though that had no logical connection with identity management. To my knowledge she never got in any trouble; on the contrary, I’m led to believe that “budget hacks” like hers are common in the public sector, and a lot of public agencies would just utterly collapse without them. Whereas, one of her underlings ended up in prison, because (apparently unbeknownst to her) he was awarding sham contracts to a company controlled by his friend. I think a big difference is the enterprise actually benefited from her redirection of funds, whereas it got absolutely zero out of his.

I think these employees do have a problem in they appropriated company property such that the direct immediate benefit was solely to themselves. If they’d appropriated it in a way which benefited other employees as opposed to just themselves personally, I think that would have made it much harder to prosecute. The same public agency, there was an internal dispute over whether it was appropriate to use public funds to pay for expensive (>$1000) coffee machines for staff break rooms - other divisions were doing it, she insisted hers couldn’t because it would be a misuse of those funds. But as far as I know the divisions which did do that never got in any legal or other trouble. The managers who requisitioned these expensive coffee machines shared the benefit of them with their teams. I think she was more afraid of the press and politicians than the law but the press and politicians never found out (or else maybe they did but just decided they had bigger fish to fry than coffee machines)

If someone else was on duty at that site next week, then that person would be staying in the apartment.

I suspect that is what these were.

So the only real crime is violation of zoning laws.

How is that worse than the management having too much space in their office than needed or leather covered office chair?

edit omg it didn't. that city is so f'n corrupt that a guy trying to build affordable housing was eventually forced to sell to a hotel magnate. That's hilarious.

The premise of unions is "bargaining power". Bargaining power comes from having alternatives. Nobody can make you take a deal worse than your next best alternative, so the way to get a good deal is to have a lot of alternatives. The best way to get it for labor is to have lots of prospective employers for people with your skill set, i.e. for your industry not to be a monopoly.

Unions nominally do this the other way around. Instead of giving employees more options, they try to give employers less. But most of the time that doesn't work. You can unionize some baristas or something, but then you go on strike and the company hires different baristas and doesn't care.

By contrast, if the employer is a monopoly, then they often have to hire most of the people with that skill set. If they're all in the union, the employer can't just replace them because there are no more. This is when unions can behave like a monopoly themselves and dictate terms.

But monopolies are bad. When a union has a monopoly, they do exactly the sort of things which are happening in this case, which is terrible for society and especially anyone who needs the product the union makes.

The correct solution isn't unions, it's to break up monopolistic employers so that individual workers -- and customers -- have bargaining power. Which is to say, alternatives, not their own adversarial monopoly.

Then more labor sectors should unionize! Make the wealthy pay the true cost for living in their communities. Not live with all this government protection and regulations, then outsource production to a free state a thousand miles away. If regulation and taxes are the problem, then fix the problem. You can't have it both ways.

Suppose that land is extremely expensive. A single acre of land is ten million dollars. How much is a housing unit? An acre is 43560 sq ft, so a building that allocates half the size of the lot to housing units could have at least 10 housing units of 2000 sq ft per floor and a 50 story building would have at least 500 units making the land cost per unit $20,000.

You can't get a 2000 sq ft condo in San Francisco for anywhere near $20,000. The difference is attributable to zoning and construction costs.

But it's worse than that, because if building tall buildings wasn't inhibited then the land wouldn't cost as much because the inability to make space-efficient use of the land drives up its scarcity.

The law enforcement & security org leaders who went ballistic over one elderly homeless man, who dug himself a little dirt cave to live in, should have been forced to undergo psychiatric evaluations. What's next? Arresting poor kids for chewing gum, because "what if the gum was plastic explosives, and they were actually suicide bombers!"?

Apparently the DA declined to share pictures.

It feels like whatever -ism you want to organize society under, you have to have checks and balances, in order to prevent things like grift causing 900k apartments...

In a monarchy, long term interests win out over short term interests because they're dynastic and stay within a family. There is a natural incentive for long term thinking that comes with a monarchy.

This problem is not democracy itself, but the incrementalism that occurs in democratic systems. At least in representative democracies, every few years another person is elected to carve out provisions to benefit their special interests. In theory, this would be the constituents. But in practice, after the politicians realize voters are unorganized, uninformed, and as self-interested as everyone else, the politician also focus on themselves (and you would too). Compound that over hundreds of years and it's should be clear as day why democratic governments inevitably grind to halt, become ineffective, collapse, and are recreated from a clean slate.

Well that's one way to try and make the point.

The funny thing is there is a long history of the bay having art predict its own downfall. Mostly with imported talent at that.

Thompson was probably the first. He has some choice quotes about the 60's and high water marks. And riding a bike to Oakland high...

But this round falls squarely to Willam Gibson.... He pegged the class and culture fall out of corporations. He picked the wrong part of Asia as a motif but was close there. He nailed the homeless camps but had them a bit east on an abandon bay bridge.

You could make this same statement, and make it standing on the shoulder of a giant. It could be far more effective and resonant. Go read some Gibson, it will blow your mind ;)

All that aside, what the hell is a pipe gun? What exactly did they find? A length of PVC...

https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/homeless-man-livi...

What he did was embarrass the system. That's what the prison sentence was for.

The piece of PVC pipe found in a junk pile.elsewhere in the park was just the excuse they pointed at.

Things that may be adequate in a large open floor office may not be when turned into individual separated dwellings.