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Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.

I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.

I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.

As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).

Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

I’d be curious to know:

- how folks who work at X think about this move?

- how much remote work will be allowed?

- tax savings.

- lease savings.

I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

View on HN

That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa...

Here's one summary of it as of last year:

> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...

When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/

I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.

>> $10 million a year in lost revenue

That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.

Wow. I had to fact-check this. Wow.

https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.

This really looks like someone is stealing money. There is no way it costs that much

SF tried to build a $1.7M toilet.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-publ...

I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.

Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)

A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.

> $10 million a year in lost revenue

This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.

Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.

I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside.

About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks.

I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.

My first week working in a finance firm in midtown Manhattan there was a significant shooting. These things happen everywhere (edit: in the US) unfortunately. I'm not convinced that a more suburban location that forces people to drive would actually be any safer.

If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a shooting happening under your very office window is extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also. Criminals want the same advantages too.

Cities tend to have a lower per-capita crime rate, it's just dense and visible.

This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.

According to who? Do you have a source?

Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:

1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas City

If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it’s still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you’re getting your info.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

That list is of the 100 most populous cities in US, so by definition it does not include mid/small cities, towns, and villages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their crime.

Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.

This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely safer than being in a small town.

St. Louis is sketchy AF but it's hardly a large city, relative to actual large cities.

I think it's reasonable to measure crime in terms of crimes per area, rather than crimes per capita, especially when comparing suburban to urban.

I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to me.

You really don't see how that's reasonable?

People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.

By that logic, it would be reasonable for the government to outlaw the reporting of crime, as people would "feel" safer.

That's the worst possible interpretation of what that comment said.

- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.

- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.

So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.

The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.

Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.

Minimizing both is fine. But not minimizing the one that actually measures how likely you are to be a victim of a crime is … weird.

Because as the Zendesk example that started this pointed out, an entire building (probably multiple!) of people were affected by this incident. There was 1 victim. It's going to seem insignificant on a per capita basis. There's thousands of people impacted by it, and possible dozens in the immediate vicinity who could be suffering from ongoing trauma having witnessed it.

Crime is not random lottery. It is concentrated and specific to certain places and circumstances. Thus, pretending that it is a stochastic process that is well characterized by per capita number over the whole city, and that if more people move into a bedroom community 20 miles from you, you automatically become safer because per capita numbers decreased - is innumerate at best. If you are present where the crime is concentrated, you risk is high, regardless of how many people live 20 miles from you but still in the same administrative unit. This should be obvious but some people still insist on focusing exclusively on large-area per-capita numbers.

Regardless, the whole premise that started this argument is wrong. There is higher crime per capita in large cities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

I don't think you're reading those numbers correctly. The highest crime per capita is in Alberque, New Mexico, the 32nd largest city in the US, and that list is literally the crime rates of the 100 most populated cities, not the 100 cities in the US with the most crime.

Which small cities, in your opinion, are more dangerous than, say, Albuquerque? How many chances, say, a high-tech professional has to regularly find oneself in such a city because his company offices are located there and they have no choice but to go there regularly?

It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery, to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime level, the difference between the official picture and the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government whose interests are detached from the interests of the citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.

There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply don't do anything with reports and the problem solves itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's little point to reporting less serious crime once it's established that no action is taken. To that end, crime statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.

Ridiculous take. And not only because people obviously wouldn’t feel safer if reporting crimes was illegal.

Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.

Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.

Accidental victims are already included in the "per capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone, that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.

So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.

If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.

Not where it is lowest per square mile.

"There's only 1 crime per square mile!"

"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."

I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.

The correct claim is not that per capita does not matter but that it alone does not provide you with adequate picture. Imagine a street where 100 people live, and there's a shoot-out there every day. Now imagine a mayor made an order, and another 100 people are forced to move and live on the same street now, and there's still a shoot-out there every day. Can you honestly say the quality of life on that street improved 2x, even though you still have the daily shootings as before, but it's now twice as crowded? I think something is missing in this picture if you make such a conclusion. Of course, per capita numbers show some part of the picture, but you need to see the other parts too.

What you could say, assuming the number of shooting victims per day remained constant, was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting. If you moved enough people onto that street, again assuming a no change in the number of victims, the likely-hood of any individual being shot could be forced into a statistically insignificant number.

The reverse of your hypothetical is basically how high-crime areas come into being. If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.

While per capita is an imperfect number, it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"

> was that people on that street were now 50% less-likely to be killed in a shooting.

If shootings were randomly distributed by a mechanical process with uniform distribution among everybody who has the address registered on this street, it would be true. But that's not how shootings work. You confuse a simplifying assumption - that is made for the purposes of modeling, because it's impossible to model the life of every person - with actual reality of what is happening. What is happening is if there's a shootout every day on the street, and you live on that street, and you are a sane person, you would be afraid to go on that street, because the next person shot could be you. And that's the rational behavior, while "I don't care for the shots I hear, these numbers on screen say it's ok" is wildly irrational.

> If you have an area where 1 person every day is killed, and half the people leave, you would absolutely say the quality of life in that area declined. Everyone is twice as likely to die.

Again, no, because shootings aren't a random lottery allocated uniformly by independent metric, like an address. It's connected to your behavior, so if you go to the street where shootings happen, you risk being shot. And how many people are registered on the same street has very little to do with that.

> it's a crazy-good proxy for the thing we worry about – "how likely is crime in this area to affect me?"

And again, it would be, if we were dealing with uniform random distribution. That's not what actually happens - if 100 people live in a safe neighborhood and I have to walk the street where druggies hash out their quarrels - the averages are not going to help me. Remember, Bill Gates walks into a bar... how richer have you just become by sitting in that bar?

Show me where I said it doesn't matter.

What doesn't go into statistics is

1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.

2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.

> Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime

Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.

No it does not literally say that. It would if the crime were be allocated by a random uniform lottery to every person living in the city. That's not how the crime works.

No, crimes per capita express how likely you are to be that accidental victim.

No, it's not just suburban paranoia. Travel to Tokyo or Singapore and then to S.F.

Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt extremely safe.

Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.

SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.

We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1) individual piece of small rubbish on the street.

Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month holding timer resets.

People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.

As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.

well that just shows that to japanese people, even kangaroo courts are better than crime

You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.

Don't your police regularly jail people for non-violent speech? I don't see Musk moving to Germany.

They jail people for antisemitic and nazi speech, if for you this is "non-violent", I have a history lesson on 1939-1945 to show you.

I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day. Your country controls speech through force. Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country.

You certainly did not see an activist hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day.

So ... can you link that outrageous video, that we can judge whether it really was the way you said it was?

> it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country

And yet Musk proves you wrong: https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin

Tesla does not operate a social media platform.

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser. Apparently it is illegal to state that more Afghan refugees in Germany lead to more rapes in Germany.

https://freespeechunion.org/young-afd-politician-convicted-f...

Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.

Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?

If by non-violent speech you mean roman salutes or nazi quotes, yes.

It is more or less enough to in public say why you don't support Likud nowadays to be arrested in Germany.

Not "everywhere", as an European that grew up in a big city (Paris) that's unthinkable.

That's a really surprising example. Paris has nearly identical crime level to San Francisco.

From personal experience, I did not feel particularly safe in Paris when visiting (compared to e.g. Berlin).

Moreover, Paris has several neighborhoods and suburbs that are very unsafe and most people avoid going there. One could say Tenderloin in SF has a similar reputation, but it's very small and easy to avoid.

I think OP was referring to shootings. In France, as in most of Europe, it's not trivial to get access to guns. So the risk of getting shot in Paris is small, but of course you still might get stabbed.

I was talking only about shootings. But if we are comparing anecdotes regarding your example I happened to also live in one of these unsafe suburbs, and visiting LA, SF or Chicago and getting in the wrong neighborhood seemed order of magnitude less safe. Gangs are not armed, you don’t hear gunshots at night or people screaming in the city center, and you don’t encounter aggressive drug addicts. All of this never happened to me in decades in Paris but did in one trip to the these US cities.

You really need to normalize crime rates by population (including commuters) and avoid focusing on anecdotes

No, my point was that you would also want to factor in injury rates from commuting, which tend to dwarf crime rates.

Just another anecdote but I concur with you--10 years of commuting experience in the Bay Area tells me that the most likely bodily harm I will experience is behind the wheel on the freeway, not from homeless / mentally-ill people wandering the streets. I have been involved in two car accidents on 580 (not at fault) but zero bodily harm on BART.

Why would an individual living and working around some area care about the crime per population?

I would personally care way more about the crime density like per mile or something because that is what would actually be affecting me. Like how many crimes would happen in close proximity to me that could put me in potential danger.

I couldn't care less about the crime per population.

This doesnt make sense. You care about "per population" because you are 1 out of the population. You don't care about per square mile because you are not measured in square miles, you are measured in people (1).

Why should crime proximity to my location be completely ignored?

If the crime is higher per person, but the crimes are several miles away then why would that be a problem for me?

Compared to lower crimes per person, but the crimes are happening on my street.

If the crimes are happening closer to me I'm more likely to be affected by it in some way.

This is backwards.

Higher rate per person means it is literally more likely to happen to you.

High rate per area but low rate per person means I guess that you're more likely to be a witness. Low rate per area but high rate per person means you're likely to be a victim.

I am not only concerned about being a victim though. I don't want to be anywhere near it. I think I should be allowed to have that kind of a desire and preference.

I also think that whether or not you end up being a victim has a lot more to do than simply crimes per person.

I don't think whether you end up a victim is evenly distributed to every single person.

I think that the way you live and act and guard against things can affect your personal chances differently and that physical proximity can end up playing a role.

This is not typical in the US. I have never heard or seen a gun shot fired while someone committed a crime.

I have lived 39 years here in New Zealand and have never witnessed or been near a shooting. I'm not saying shootings have never happened in New Zealand, but the idea that these things "happen everywhere" is asinine.

I've lived in the Bay Area for 60 years, and never witnessed or been near a shooting. They do happen more often here, but violence is far lower than you would think from the media and online anecdotes.

San Francisco has nearly 8 times higher population density than Auckland.

Add to that other factors like the size of the CA economy (wealth attracts crime), a lax criminal system, attractive social services (compared to the rest of the US), etc etc. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

We both know it’s none of those things, it’s access to guns

Non-gun crime is a bigger concern in SF than gun-related violence.

This comment thread is about gun violence

It's just a very American-centric sentiment, because here in the states, that's true.

> I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger...

Like forcing them to drive to the office 2-5 days each week when they could continue working from home?

vs "I never understood why the company would not pay taxes to improve the environment around its chosen home"?

I don't think SF is an example of the place where the link between paying a lot of taxes and get the environment around improved is as obvious as you seem to imply.

Like paying $2m for a public bathroom?

*300k in reality: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...

Note though the reduction didn't come from anything getting in fact more efficient, but from "two companies donated materials and installation" - probably to quell the bad press. And it looks like $1.7m is still going to get spent, just maybe on two toilets instead of one.

The donated services and material was worth $425,000 [1]. The project costs came down on their own, meaning they never needed to be that high. It was an overestimate. If there wasn’t bad publicity then who knows if grift would have allowed it to stay too high or not, we’ll never know.

Where are you seeing the $1.7m is still getting spent?

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/noe-valley-s-pricey-p...

Yeah, because that works...

the most dangerous thing the average N American does every day is drive...

This is peak HN - "stop putting me in danger be making me leave my house"

Go ahead and complete the thought in the context of the comment I was replying to and review if your "dunk" is conflicting with the point I'm making...

Companies inconvenience and put their employees in danger (of varying levels) at the whims of management. They will sign a lease in a high-crime neighborhood to get a tax break, they will force you to come to the office because the CEO loves and misses the "energy" of having butts in seats and the employees will be forced to take on the non-zero probability of being involved in a traffic accident - its not nothing; auto insurance companies sent refunds during lockdowns because of this.

Imagine they had to work on a field or something,

[flagged]

Because in reality, as in statistically, SF is actually not that dangerous.

People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.

Per capita is such a stupid way to measure shooting danger. What really matters is average proximity to shootings (which does measure danger, since proximity to the bullet could lead to you getting killed, or the shooter aiming in another close direction). Obviously, this is higher in dense areas, hence the higher perceived danger.

Case in point, if you have a rural area of 1000 people and there are 10 shootings (1% shooting rate), the likelihood that any of the 980 people not involved was near any of those shooting is very low.

On the other hand, a 4 block stretch of a city with a 1000 people with ten shootings, you can bet that all 1000 heard / saw / were affected by the shootings.

Cities need to be safer than other places in order to feel safe. And until people get this obvious fact, cities will always have this reputation.

Right, but I'm saying there's a disconnect between perception and reality. The reputation cities have is based on their perception and not necessarily reality.

You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.

To be fair, cities do also generally have MUCH more public services available. They have shelters, food banks, and free mental health facilities out the wazoo as compared to rural areas. But there's only so much you can do.

> You can only make some place so safe in a country like the US. It's trivial to obtain a firearm, so naturally gun violence will always be a problem for us.

Absent a few violent neighborhoods, the American homicide rate is on par with places without guns at all. Nevertheless, homicide rate is pretty inversely correlated with amount of quality of life policing. Giuliani made New York city incredibly safe, one of the safest cities in the world, despite the preponderance of guns. Policing works. Consistent prosecution works. Continued imprisonment for those who are clearly dangerous works. The net economic benefit (not to even mention the environmental ones) is more effective than any welfare program

This is debatable. From what I've seen, increase of tough-on-crime policies and police presence does not make anything safer.

Also no, the rate of gun violence in the US is much higher than any developed country (and even a few undeveloped ones). Again, unavoidable and obvious.

I also think it's a bit hilarious when this talk of increased policies and tough-on-crime policies doesn't include... making it harder to obtain a firearm. Requiring ID checks, requiring registration, only allowing certified shops to sell. Apparently those policies are too tough and too much of a burden for law enforcement, somehow.

>What really matters is average proximity to shootings

Social proximity. Less than 10% of homicides are from strangers [1]

[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target. However, again, a targeted shooting in a spread out locale is less dangerous than one that happens a few feet from you for the simple reason that the bullet can miss

>Again, when judging danger in a situation, you as a random by stander are unlikely to be the target

Yes, shootings are terrible, but they happen everywhere because of our absurd gun laws. SF is not a standout, and is in fact rather safe despite your feelings.

Here's more stats for perspective:

- There were 53 homicides in SF in 2023, and per the FBI source, ~10% of homicides are random. So ~5.3 random killings.

- There were 26 traffic fatalities in SF in 2023 [1], all of which are random (They'd be a homicide otherwise).

You're 5x more likely to die from a motor vehicle than be randomly murdered in SF.

[1] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Visi...

I think you must live in a city. Literally everyone in your 1000 people rural area would be affected by 10 shootings.

No area in the United states has crime rates as high as in my hypothetical, but many rural areas of the South have homicide rates on par with a city.

That's averaging the crime over the whole city into one statistic. The point here is not simply that the office is in SF, it's where it is in SF that matters.

I have a feeling you're including suicide in "gun violence" here which doesn't really make sense (suicide isn't violence regardless of your feelings about guns generally). I would also expect suicide by gun to be disproportionately higher in rural areas but I can't exactly articulate why I think that.

Most non-suicide gun violence is gang related and you're going to have a tough time convincing anyone there's more gang activity in rural Nebraska than there is in inner city Chicago.

Fascinating how suicides are creatively included in "gun violence."

There is a gun, and it's violent. And keep in mind suicide isn't always clear-cut.

What about a 13 year old boy who grabs the gun from the safe? This could have been prevented, and it's also suicide. This is a rather common scenario, too.

Here's what Black's Law Dictionary has to say:

*violence.* Unjust or unwarranted exercise of force, usually with accompaniment of vehemence, outrage, or fury. People v. McIlvain, 55 Cal.App.2d 322, 130 P.2d 131, 134. Physical force unlawfully exercised; abuse of force; that force which is employed against common right, against the laws, and against public liberty. Anderson-Berney Bldg. Co. v. Lowry, Tex.Civ.App., 143 S.W.2d 401, 403. The exertion of any physical force so as to injure, damage or abuse. See e.g. Assault.

Violence in labor disputes is not limited to physical contact or injury, but may include picketing conducted with misleading signs, false statements, publicity, and veiled threats by words and acts. Esco Operating Corporation v. Kaplan, 144 Misc. 646, 258 N.Y.S. 303.

[Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 1570]

---

There's a stark difference between randomly being killed by someone else (i.e.: during a stick-up robbery in the Tenderloin) and consciously choosing to end one's own life: intentional blurring of these lines is often an exercise in bad faith.

These conversations are typically held under the frame that "gun violence" is a valid reason to abridge a Constitutionally-enumerated right.

Suicide, accidental mishandling, etc. are "user error" - not remotely-valid reasons to amend the Constitution or to chip away at rights using legislation. (Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions.)

"Likely to die" is a loaded phrase: why is one person of sound mind more "likely" to commit suicide in a rural area? (Is it that boring?)

> consciously choosing

This is remarkably hard to prove and also ignore that many people can play a role in suicide.

If you, say, bully someone every day and they take their life sure they made a decision, but you influenced it and you're partially responsible. People don't take their life for no reason. If you look at the reasons, it's incredibly complex and actually not mutually exclusive to gun violence. Meaning, their reasons may include there's a gun present.

>Confusingly, vehemently anti-gun folks often hold the most pro-euthanasia/doctor-assisted-suicide positions

Right, because I can just pop down to my doctor-safe in my basement, and I've got all I need to have a doctor-assisted-suicide, within minutes of the idea popping into my head./s

Banning coal oil stoves in Britain had a strong effect on their suicide rate, so its really not that much of a reach to think that if fewer people had access to another method of instant-gratification suicide, fewer people would kill themselves.

To be clear here, I am pro-gun-ownership, explicitly for self-defense. I oppose e.g. "assault weapon" bans. But if you're lumping opposition to spur-of-the-moment suicides in with opposition to suicide as an option for the terminally ill after much contemplation and confirmation, I'd say you're not really arguing the point in good faith either.

To address your final point, spur-of-the-moment suicides are frequently the result of long-simmering depression, punctuated by an acute event, without meaningful help. One of the common bits of advice if you think someone is suicidal is to not leave them alone (not just to prevent them from doing something rash, but also because companionship can itself help stave off suicidal ideation in the first place). In light of that, it seems sort of self-evident that people who are physically alone more often would commit suicide more often.

Like how suicide by opiates is included in "overdoses"?

To be clear on this - people pout about these suicides being considered a firearm death. They are.

They may not be "gun violence" against another, but they're still a firearm death.

Just as someone (and I've seen it several times, as a paramedic) who takes a lethal amount of opiates to commit suicide rather than for recreational use is still considered an overdose death.

It's not "recreational drug abuse", but it's still an overdose death.

Agree or object to both, or none. Guns don't just get a special pass such that shooting yourself with a pistol is somehow not a death by firearm.

"Pout?"

Nobody said these weren't "firearm deaths" - they're not "gun violence" regardless of how badly you want them to be for this strawman to work.

The problem comes when folks lump all of these deaths together and then attempt to legislate based on these inflated numbers: it's intellectually dishonest.

Someone choosing to kill themselves cannot impact my Constitutionally-enumerated rights.

Show me where suicide by firearm is described as "gun violence" rather than "death by firearm".

I totally agree with you. Suicide by firearm is not gun violence.

What I see is people seeing statistics that say counting suicide in firearm deaths is inappropriate. This is why the CDC has to call it out separately, to avoid the furore. (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...).

The big challenge with my comment, I admit, is that it very quickly gets into a debate about suicide rather that the right to bear arms or decide what you put into your own body. It is a good comparison, I believe, because both are effective at enabling suicide, but have legitimate - and illegitimate - uses.

Danger stress is an AOE (area of effect). A single shooting in a city mentally harms/affects 100x more people than in the burbs.

Note: “not that dangerous” means you will be confined in extremely stressful dangerous situations routinely. situations that, statistically, you and the frantic crowd will leave physically unscathed

Maybe we should add mental health to these statistics

> You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America.

Isn’t the vast majority of gun violence suicide? Because if that’s the case than your statement is disingenuous, you’re not less safe in rural America if you’re worried about being shot on the way to the office.

If it is taken into consideration that a vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, that doesn't mean "the vast majority of gun deaths outside of <insert blue city>". Statistically the same proportion of gun deaths are suicides both in cities and out of cities.

Eh, but if the incentives are set to roll & experience the dangerous subset dice, does your commentarys subject and the commentaries audience really overlap.

SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this.

Obviously others will have different experiences than me.

Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.

SF is a deeply challenging city, and you really appreciate this by traveling and visiting other cities. You are constantly on alert, in ways that simply you are not in other places despite the fact that there are “good and bad” parts of town everywhere else.

Perhaps caused by the unpredictability in SF of often finding “bad” in “good” parts of town, with unpredictable drug addict behavior on top, which adds to the unpredictability of the bad experiences.

Anecdotally, my family got assaulted with a hammer in a “good” part of town, while carrying our 6 months old in a stroller. The individual was visibly on drugs. There is no amount of “bad” in other cities that results in hammering and smashing the back window of a car - assaulting a young family and traumatizing a newborn - for nothing. It’s unwarranted violence, it wasn’t even a robbery. I travel 150k miles a year all over the world, including 3rd world countries, and I have only felt unsafe in San Francisco.

And I have a lot more examples like this one. A friend of mine got assaulted with a baseball bat in SoMa by an individual that wanted to steal their dog for drug money, for example.

The whole town is a social experiment where we put families and working individuals into a drug den and see what happens.

These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though. I can find similar stories in my relatively small but dense suburb. The statistics just do not back up the claims that SF is uniquely dangerous or has worse problems than anywhere else of that size/density.

> These anecdotes aren’t unique to a city like SF though.

But they are, because this is city that has established a record $1B+/year budget to solve the problem, without setting up a rigorous process to be accountable on how that money is being spent, with corruption cases (and arrests) linked to the recipients of those public funds [1][2].

Quite unique, indeed.

This speaks more to the inefficacy of the solution than the uniqueness of the problem to SF. Their problems are not unique, but as you pointed out, maybe the inefficacy of their solution is.

But what if you run out of air superiority and money to bribe those paying for this special party. And to have this is constant free adverisement for the right wingnuts..

I live and have an engineering office in SOMA and I've had the exact opposite experience.

In 8 years living here my dog has been viciously attacked twice, we've had people attack us on the Embarcadero and around the sidewalks and parks in our neighborhood, and just yesterday I was lamenting that there was a time in my past where I wasn't comfortable around drug use. Now when I walk out of my office and see someone smoking whatever or I injecting whatever else it's just normal to me.

That's the problem in this city, living like this, all of us, normalizes all these things that shouldn't be.

Even when I was there for GDC one week this year there was a young black woman who was being detained for assaulting an asian lady.

Would be somewhat normal except she started attacking the officer, stripping off and screaming racist slurs. She was clearly on drugs- which gave pause to the seriously large amount of homelessness and drug use that seemed incredibly normalised on my short commute from Mission to the Moscone Centrr

For what it’s worth homeless people were having sex on the windows of our office, another guy blocked our door by passing out with a needle next to him, and someone was stabbed and killed at a restaurant on the same block as my office within half a year of me being there. I also got yelled racial slurs and others tried to provoke me to fight them regularly.

Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences.

It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged.

I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

> I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.

That phenomenon isn't isolated to San Francisco, nor even to the US. The same mindset is also widespread in "progressive" Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, for example.

From what I can tell, one of the main pillars of the "progressive" ideology that's prevalent in such cities is that certain specific groups of people are declared to be "victims" or "disadvantaged", and these people are put on a pedestal and held in high esteem for some reason, no matter how awful they behave in public.

I suspect that most "progressives" inherently know that these sanctified people aren't the "victims" they're ideologically portrayed as being. Even if the "progressives" don't openly admit it, they themselves don't like dodging human feces on the sidewalk, nor the stench of urine emanating from building walls, nor used needles left in parks, nor addicts overdosing in bus shelters, nor smelly unwashed hobos sleeping on public transit, nor aggressive panhandlers demanding money from passersby, nor crucial retail stores closing due to rampant shoplifting, and so forth.

Yet, these "progressives" seem unwilling to admit that this main pillar of their ideology is fundamentally wrong. Perhaps they know that if they admit this, even to themselves, then the rest of their belief system will inevitably come crashing down because it, too, isn't built on reality.

Consider it an overcorrection to the sick and routine dehumanization of these individuals. I’ve actually seen people on this site say that they laugh at drug addicts on the street. If they could lock them in a dungeon and throw away the key, I’m sure they’d do it in a heartbeat.

This has been a legitimate problem of progressivism which strongly holds it back from gaining more popularity. You cannot be for public transit and environmentalism while simultaneously being against punishing anti social behaviors on public transit. If public transport doesn’t feel safe to riders they will use personal transport instead. But the notion that some people may hold some responsibility for where they may be in life by their own decisions is so repulsive that instead no one can be held accountable for the most extreme behavior in broad day light. Liberals should be thankful that Conservatives have collectively tied an anchor around their necks to someone so broadly repulsive and criminal as Trump, as if there were simply a boring Conservative alternative elections would have been blowouts against them.

As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)

I honestly think people like ahuth honestly don't see these sorts of things. I've found that a substantial portion of people who live in my lovely city of Portland for example, simply are not very good at observation, and will happily walk by incredibly dangerous situations and never notice. I've had to point out to my very progressive in-laws for example, needles in parks, drug deals in broad daylight, guns, etc, that they honestly just do not see. This complete lack of awareness is very common among a certain subset of residents, especially in cities, and probably explains why they vote the way they do.

I'm not sure how to go about teaching situational awareness, but I imagine voting patterns would change if people were aware at all.

Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.

Perhaps these situations just aren't as dangerous as you think? I can understand not wanting to see drug deals happening out in the open, but it's less of a threat to your personal safety than crossing a busy street.

Given the fact that I live happily in Portland, I think it's safe to say I don't find these situations necessarily dangerous. However, I'm aware they exist, which many of my neighbors are not.

Again, I do think voting patterns would change if people were simply aware of their surroundings.

Just thinking about the day-to-day elevated stress that this would generate makes me glad I will never live in a place like that. It is weird to read people trying to downplay it as if it is nothing.

An Onion headline comes to mind.

Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.

Because being scared because one drug dealer shot another makes about as much sense statistically as being scared because there was a car accident outside the office. Actually less so since cars kill far more pedestrians than violent criminals.

You are much more likely to die in a commute on your way to work than you are from some drug dealer.

Visited SF in the mid 90s, then again about 10 years ago, and the decline was real back then. Tents on the same streets we'd walked as tourists 20 years earlier. I can say the same with Paris as well. New York, not so much, actually.

Living in London I don't notice the day to day differences here, but I would imagine others on here will say the same about London. It seems 'the West' has a general problem.

When I was at Spotify in the Warfield building, something similar happened, and we dropped behind the windows. Later that day, a can of pre-made Starbucks coffee someone left on their desk exploded from baking in the sun. Caused quite a scare.

This sounds so ridiculous from an outsider perspective, it's absolutely crazy! Oh nvm, it's just a drug dealer shooting another drug dealer

"I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office"

I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood.

The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.

I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.

Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships.

I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.

For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit.

After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.

Any US company could randomly fire you for no reason and many US companies do.

> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes

I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis?

Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.

People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people.

Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.

> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park.

This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall.

Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.

> This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes...of course, I e-bike

The typical worker in SF doesn't bike to work. Only 3.4% of workers in SF biked in 2012 [1] and 4.2% in 2018 [2]. Furthermore, e-bikes represented 4% of the US bike market in 2022 [3].

There is value in considering how a company's location impacts the vast majority of its employees.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/archives/2014-pr/cb14-r09.ht....

[2] https://www.sfmta.com/blog/biking-numbers-san-franciscos-201...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1405949/electric-bicycle....

You don’t really need an e-bike to go from the Mission to SoMa as it is pretty flat. I don’t think it will take you much longer on a regular bike. But your statistic that you showed is a bit flawed as it includes people that commute from outside and into SF, hardly any of whom does so on bikes, so this methodology will always show bias against walking or rolling (I don’t know a better methodology, it is just something to keep in mind).

Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.

If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.

https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-mode-choice

> And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.

My point is that 16 minutes is not a a reasonable estimate for the commute the vast majority will experience from the Mission to SoMa. 40 is a more reasonable estimate and is pretty close to the grandparent's estimate of 50 minutes.

I know from experience that walking would take much longer than 16 minutes as would taking transit.

The problem with bikes is, in sf if a driver kills you, as long as they don't flee the scene, they'll be let off with a talking to or maybe a ticket. I don't know a single former coworker who regularly bikes who hasn't been at minimum doored.

45 minutes from mission and 24 to south park is about right if you use bart; see my timeline above.

A typical worker will probably work closer to Market and they may even live in the Lower Mission where the buses are a bit faster and land further south. So I think 45 min from Mission to SoMa is closer to the worst case commute rather then the typical commute between Mission and SoMa. 30-40 min is probably your average transit rider, and 20-30 min for the lucky ones.

Employee in question took Muni + Walked. I biked and did a baby bullet from Menlo Park.

My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.

It's not unreasonable. Biking in SF is a death wish.

If you take bart to Montgomery, it's an 0.8 mile walk to South Park. Calling that a bit under 20 minutes seems fair.

So a 10 minute walk to bart, a 5 minute wait, 7 minutes on bart, 3 minutes to exit the station, and 20 minutes to South Park is your 45-ish minutes.

Source: I used to do this commute. Getting around internally in sf is absolutely terrible the second you're not super close to the transit line.

> Employee in question took Muni + Walked.

Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?

> I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?

Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.

In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.

That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.

    > infrastructure improvements

Do you mean biking infrastructure? Also, what do you do during the rainy season?

Rainy "season" in SF? That's January, and the past few years even January had been pretty dry.

That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.

SF is rainy for Dec/Jan/Feb according to Wiki climate data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate

Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes.

Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short.

The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).

If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.

I think the point here is we are comparing Menlo Park best case scenario to the Mission worst case scenario.

If you live in the upper mission you can take the J Bart or the 14, and walk for 15 min from Mission or Market. In total this would be about 40-50 min. Or you could bike the whole way which would be around 20 min.

If you live in the lower mission (which I did) you can take the 12 which should take you there in 20 + 10 min walk. But you could bike there in about 15.

I actually worked a bit closer and could walk in 20 min, which I often did, and didn’t bother with buses.

Didn't Elon also give a politically motivated reason for moving his HQs out of California? [1]

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar...

Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.

He’d been threatening it since at least the Covid/Alameda County spat. It’s transparently just him trying to save 13.3% on capital gains taxes

I could imagine him having a variety of reasons, but in certain situations pretending it's only one of them, to apply pressure.

I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.

Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts...

Overpaid Executive Tax (OE)

https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi...

Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR)

https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...

I can’t find it because X search sucks, but Musk has stated before he despises the concept of remote work.

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