Hacker News Reader

Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

So it's hipsters versus nerds now? Has it come to this?

I wouldn't call it hipsters or nerds. The nerd angle has little to do with it actually, in another city it would be financial workers, or lawyers, or local university students.

Anyone that can be spun into an "outsider".

The problem is that a big corporation like Google gives less than it takes as of now, tax wise, and guarantees their employees a standard of living out of reach for most americans now, or the rest of the world for that matter.

A standard of living paid for, in part, by the very same taxes they manage to avoid, along with several other big corporations. Not to mention they are no stranger to the US government, and probably might have helped the very development of those formerly secret and hated programs, also with direct knowledge transfer http://cryptome.org/2013/08/assange-google-nsa.htm

Don't tech employees pay the same income and sales taxes as anybody else? Every age has its booming industry, technology is our generation's. You can either accept reality and try to acquire relevant skills that are in demand, or act hurt and expect to get handed what others have to work for.

Actually, they pay more taxes than the average resident. Higher-income people have higher income tax rates, buy more stuff (hence more sales tax) and live in more expensive real estate (higher property tax). If not for high-income people, the cities they live in would not be able to offer the services they do to low-income people.

Nail Meet Head. It's convenient to ignore this fact.

Subtext: if you make good money, you have no social responsibility beyond paying the taxes your accountant can't get you out of paying

Google shelters a great deal of tax money outside of the us...

Money that was also earned outside the US.

Google is an American company in an area that desperately needs the tax revenue. Even the money they "earn in the US" is washed through subsidiaries overseas.

The people of Google however, pay their fair share of taxes, and don't deserve to have their mode of transportation attacked.

The couple billion in taxes Google is managing to dodge is not what enables them to pay their employees so well.

Google earned $10.7b in profit last year. Go ahead and take the 20% they 'dodged' in taxes. How exactly does that alter what they can pay their employees (you know, only making $8.x billion)? I'd love to see an explanation for that.

Well the taxes don't have to do with anything. Nobody deserves to have their daily commute violently disrupted.

I don't think people deserve to be displaced from their homes in massive numbers.

I don't think today's action will magically end the displacement, but I think people should have some compassion and show several orders of magnitude more concern for groups like the elderly on fixed income and the working poor facing Ellis Act evictions than for a group of techies who will be OK even after a disrupted commute. The issues being raised here are important, and I think it's more important to identify real solutions to the problems rather than focus on evading blame.

This is not to say it's either/or but I do want a world where the concerns about displacement and mass evictions are prioritized and addressed far more concern and resources than the kinds of 0th and 1st world problems that googlers (as a group - many of us have real world problems as well, of course) have.

I completely agree with you, but the action was violent, or at least scary to the people on the bus. Plenty of marginalized people have managed to assert their dignity without intentionally scaring people. My main point, however, was simply that the tax bracket of these passengers has no bearing on whether the protest was acceptable.

So... attacking the individual workers in this corporation sends the right message... how?

If you want to attack Google over Google's practices, be my guest. But attacking commuters on a bus? What the hell? Heck, the bus doesn't even seem like it was owned by Google.

It is one thing to protest unethical Corporate Practices, unfair tax rules that they're abusing, etc. etc. But its another thing entirely to attack the innocent workers on a bus.

Despite what they say, they are not upset at the corporation. The corporation is faceless and their reaction is very emotional driven with little rational thought. Hell, most of these 'professional protesters' probably have Android or Apple phones.

They actually hate the people. Why? Because they think that they are different and this is a form of entertainment for them.

Let's be real. Some of the nerds are also hipsters.

It's hipster haves versus hipster have-nots. Where's the sense of hipster fraternity?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com