Comment by sscalia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sscalia | Hacker News Reader

I really wish I knew how this problem pans out in the next 15-20 years.

Make no mistake, it is a problem - one that desperately needs attention.

If you think for one minute you will be sheltered from the concenquences of such income inequality, with your exorbitant compensation and home on the peninsula, you are sadly mistaken.

We are all interconnected; the generation of children raised in cites like San Pablo deserve an equal shot at success - the same as any privileged white, Asian or Indian child attending a private school in Palo Alto, Atherton, or Los Gatos.

I wish I had a solution. I really do.

I think it starts with wages; but it's hard to put that cat back in the bag.

I'm not sure when we decided it was okay for CEOs to make 300x what a worker does; or even that an engineer was worth 200k/year with a 100k signing bonus, while a skilled welder is worth half that, sacrificing their health and vision I literally build and grow this country.

Next time you negotiate another 30k on your employment contract, trade that for 2 weeks vacation and volunteer your time, ideas and money to those who could really benefit.

Reject the ever-rising insanity of our regions real estate, and try to be just a bit happier with what you have. A BMW 328i will get you to work in style - you don't need the M3.

I'm seeing the same conspicuous consumption that was often only seen in LA. If you want to see a pissed off populace, go ahead and get that Land Rover and Panerai.

See what happens when you're waking back to your car in the Mission.

It's far less complicated than you make it out to be. Demand for housing has pushed prices up. Artificial constraints on housing construction by local city councils and zoning boards has limited the supply, further pushing prices up. Get rid of those constraints and you'll have lower prices for housing plus a lot of construction-related jobs to balance out the snobbish tech workers.

+1 I could not agree with you more. Add in the pressure on jobs like stacking shelves at Walmart, picking food, etc. that will result in better and cheaper robotics and AI.

I just finished a 4 month consulting gig at Google in Mountain View (wonderful experience but commuting from my home in Arizona wore me down). I found the Google culture and work environment to be great (and I am sure Facebook, Twitter, etc. are much the same) but I thought a lot about the effect on the effect on the local communities. My stepson is a fireman in the Bay Area and he gave me a heads up about how so many people resent what the influx of tech wealth has done to the character of communities.

I would personally be willing to give up some of my own wealth in return for a more equitable society. I don't see how we can have a great quality of life if there is social unrest and crass inequality.

> so many people resent what the influx of tech wealth has done to the character of communities.

My parents met in the bay area, and... that ship has sailed. It used to be orchards and farms and rather bucolic, apparently. The fact that there are even "so many" people to resent the new arrivals is evidence of how much that area has changed in the past 50 years.

Yep. When Fairchild Semi was founded in 1957 most of the county was just orchards. It's only been half a century but there are no remnants of rural life in any vaguely flat part of the Bay Area.

A form of basic income is the only answer I see - I don't think enough good jobs are coming back on a reasonable time scale.

Wow, I'm shocked by the destructive anger in your post. Does it really bother you that much that someone owns a Land Rover, so much that you wish someone in the Mission would vandalize it? It's not enough that almost everyone owns a car these days, the cars have to all be equally good or we're going to start damaging the ones that are better because you think it's unfair?

> I'm not sure when we decided it was okay for CEOs to make 300x what a worker does

"we" didn't decide anything - the markets did.

Yes. The "markets" are to blame.

A bit more precisely: it isn't the market that sets the salaries, it's the board of directors. Hopefully someone can clue us in here why executive compensation in the US is so much higher than in Europe, and why it took off insanely sometime in the 1990s.

> why executive compensation in the US is so much higher than in Europe

+1 for something actually interesting to ponder in this whole thread!

So, we did.

Democracies can be characterized by "one person, one vote" whereas at best markets are "one dollar, one vote."

The public does not share equal responsibility for decisions of markets. Not by a long shot.

It's true, but every time we fail to participate in the democratic process to change the notion of how markets work, or every time we support corporations which do not share our beliefs in the system, we become complicit.

Given that most of the readers here are usually middle-class consumers, they can at the very least make a few choices regarding the purchases and lifestyle to reflect their principles; I'm afraid most people never consider that.

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