Things San Franciscans Should Be Thankful For | Hacker News Reader

Things San Franciscans Should Be Thankful For

blog.modeanalytics.com

44 pointsdereksteer28 comments

If TFA is meant to say San Franciscans should be grateful for the gentrification of the city, then it's pretty insulting, and frankly, emblematic of the entitlement and lack of awareness in the tech community. If anything, TFA proves that life is getting better for a small segment of the population of San Francisco.

1. Chart does not discuss why unemployment is down. Is it down because there's a ton of tech workers moving in while the unemployed poor are priced out of the city?

2. Same argument for #1

3. Data comes from self-reports on Glassdoor, which polls mostly from white-collar workers. So this chart should really say "Job Satisfaction Scores by City for White Collar Workers."

4. This chart measures against the national income distribution, which is a comparison that makes no sense, given San Francisco's insane cost of living.

5. Yes, San Franciscans should root for sports teams that are given money from municipalities to rich owners to build stadiums. This is money that could have been used to fund initiatives that actually improve the lives of low income families. The chart talks about playoff games that most people can't afford to attend, or if it's on cable, most people can't watch.

10. You can fly to a vacation destination. If you can afford it.

TFA reminds me of the saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."

What's TFA?

Acronym for "The Fucking Article" although in this case the 'a' is an advertisement.

For extra context, this was (originally, I think) used on /. because people would comment without reading the articles. The 'fucking' is used to communicate annoyance that it wasn't read in the first place.

An example, for this article:

OP: "Yeah, there's a lot to be thankful for, but I get delayed out of SFO because of fog almost every flight."

Reply: "TFA actually has a chart that shows that flight delays due to weather are not a problem, at least compared to other cities."

Urban Dictionary agrees with /. as the source but derived from RTFM -> RTFA -> TFA which makes sense:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA

Blaming tech workers for misguided public policy is the kind of awful thinking that drives votes that leads to bad public policy.

I'd like to see HN do better.

Regardless of social economic status, what the article points out are still many valid reasons to be thankful.

Regarding #2, I've heard an interesting statistic recently.

The blue workers average salary went up 5% in one year in France. The reason? Recent waves of layoff impacted lower salaries more than the others. So the average went up, but the lucky ones who kept their job didn't see an increase on their paycheck.

Is there any statistic showing "people are doing well" that you wouldn't dismiss as a sign of "gentrification"?

I lived in SF for four years and I loved it, but the one thing that always bothered me was the smug sense by some people of how great they are compared to the rest of the world just because they live in San Francisco.

I want to see the list things San Franciscans should NOT be thankful for. Let me think of some things:

1) crazy high rents

2) lots of homeless people

3) urine smell every where

4) horrible parking and traffic

5) foggy cold summers -- maybe a plus in your book

6) poop in addition to urine

7) public transportation that goes on strike several times a year

8) 2) except with untreated mental issues due to lack of UHC and others

9) Clouds of second-hand drug smoke. And I don't mean cigarettes.

> 2) lots of homeless people > 3) urine smell every where

As a recent visitor to your city, the large number of people sleeping rough was a shock. I am from a small social-liberal democracy though, so we typically have less homelessness in general, but yeah, it was confronting.

Down by the ferry terminal (on the Embarcadero I think?) there was two homeless people sleeping under a tarpaulin at the base of a flagpole proudly bearing the American flag. The juxtaposition was so ironic that I wonder if they were part-time performance artists when they weren't sleeping outdoors.

How do Americans reconcile the homeless to their place as the wealthiest nation?

San Francisco has nearly 40 restaurants per 10,000 households, which is 40 percent more than the second highest city.

Is this the right way to determine the variety of restaurant options available to a city resident? I think maybe a better metric might be restaurants per square mile? As somebody who has lived in both SF and NYC, I'm a bit confused by a result that says that SF has more restaurant options than NYC. Just a thought.

I kind of have an instinctive dislike of the notion of "thankfulness", like these are pure grants of fortune we shouldn't look too deeply into. The truth is that policy & other things that are actually changeable have a hell of an impact on where and who prospers. You might be "lucky" in a Rawlsian sense to be born in a wealthy area, but the fact that money has been dumped into the SF Bay area for 70 years or so, for vacuum tubes to integrated circuits to microprocessors to AI research to social media startups, has been the result of choices specific people have made.

This is the sort of self-righteous, living-in-a-bubble article you could only count on San Francisco to churn out.

The Loma Prieta was not "the big one."

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/seismologists-say-bay...

This piece is incredibly myopic and somewhat appalling. A more appropriate title would be "Things affluent tech workers should be thankful for."

The list doesn't offer any sort of context for the numbers presented, nor does it demonstrate causality in any way, shape, or form. In all likelihood, the reason that life is so good in SF is that all the people for whom life is difficult have been forced out of the city or into homelessness by entitled, privileged tech workers.

In my opinion, there is no reason to be thankful for gentrification. Gentrification destroys cities, and is responsible for the wholesale homogenization of culture. If you are thankful for the state of affairs in SF, you are part of the problem.

There are four demonic elephants (named Housing Prices, Cultural Erosion, Age Discrimination, and Limousine NIMBY Leftism) the size of tanks in the room. They're all shitting highly radioactive nuclear diarrhea by the truckload per minute and you can actually taste the alpha particles. But this article came along to say, "look, 10 cute kittens!" In fact, the kittens are all dead of asphyxiation from the vapors coming off the putrefied elephant feces, and covered in liquid shit, which makes them a lot less cute.

This article ignores the demonic elephant-monsters and tries to bring attention to the kittens. Poor kitties.

> Limousine NIMBY Leftism

Are you able to elaborate on this one?

Sure. New York and San Francisco have a lot of people that are total assholes to everyone (especially their subordinates and colleagues at work) but consider it OK because, after all, they're Democrats. They're not "those people" who overtly espouse economic inequality; they're couth enough to covertly support it. They also tend to be the people who (a) keep housing prices high in places like San Francisco and New York by pushing NIMBY regulations that block housing deveopment, and (b) choose not to vaccinate their kids on pseudoscientific grounds and are singularly responsible for the resurgence of third-world childhood diseases in places like the Bay Area. It's all OK, though, if you're working on a "world changing product" and promise God to "help Africa" (price discriminate with said product) once you've made it to the top.

You know how potheads lose motivation because when you're high, even goofy stuff feels like real accomplishment, and some eventually lose that need to experience substantial achievement? That's why limousine liberals are poisonous. They and their acolytes and their inefficient nonprofits (often with top executives making $350k on a 10-to-3 workday) give a bunch of people the satisfaction that comes from helping people-- the feeling of having done something-- without actually helping people much.

We need real liberalism and real environmental protection and a real social safety net, not fuckheads using phony environmental arguments to push NIMBY policies that keep their houses overvalued.

Cheers mate, that explains it. I was struggling to reconcile the Bay Area's famed leftie tendencies with the realities of inequality on the ground.

I wonder what all the non-tech job holders think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

We should all know how good we have it. I know I'm making more money than I ever considered possible writing code and I know I love my job. What I want to read about is what happened to everyone who was in SF before this tech thing started and what's happening to all the people who are not part of the tech-wave & startup-parties. All those coffee-shops, bars and restaurants that the tech-crowd hang out at; how are the employees of said places making ends meet? Do they live near their jobs? Does half their salary go to transportation to/from work? When I worked at Gamestop while in school, that was the case for me. Those were the days; a paycheck that was less than $400 =/ I really don't know how my co-workers who didn't live with their parents or going to college were living on that or what they're doing nowadays.

Speaking of which, https://foursquare.com/v/gamestop/4a29d524f964a520e4951fe3

How in the world can Gamestop afford that store on Market street? I walk by it almost weekly. Doesn't look very busy to me. What must the rent be there? How many games, consoles, controllers, etc. must they be selling a month to make that worthwhile? What are the employees salaries? Where do they live??!!!

They probably live in East Bay and have an awful commute every day.

Even Bay Area tech workers don't have it that well, except for those useless parachute executives/PMs brought in by VC king-makers. First, there's the cost of living that precludes savings even on a salary that would be enviable in most of the country. Second, that creepy culture of age discrimination (which has no place in tech) thanks to VC chickenhawks means people have about 20 years to make money.

One day I was waiting to meet somebody and I ended up loitering by that GameStop for a good chunk of time on a weekend afternoon, as such I watched a lot of people window shopping or making occasional purchases.

First thing that surprised me: they seemed to sell more used iOS devices than anything else.

I don't know if it's always like this, but most people I observed in there did not look all that well-to-do. They seemed like mostly local kids (not kids of yuppies) who just hopped off muni and aspired to save up for months to buy a refurbished 3-generations-ago iPod touch. I saw a few kids of that description make purchases. Nobody all that ostentatious, or anything like all the "playground for the rich" stuff that people in SF rail against. It was actually refreshing to see kids excited about what most HNers would consider "unusable" tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com