Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

So now that Occupy Wall Street has failed to accomplish anything, like-minded people are kicking off Occupy Silicon Valley?

I used to think that wall street was a target because they were seen as getting rich without producing anything, and were blamed for crashing the economy. If that was the reason, though, they wouldn't now be targeting companies like Google, who do produce things and were not responsible for the crash of 2008.

Because of things like this, I now think both protests were just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through.

View on HN

> Because of things like this, I now think both protests were just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through.

Says the guy who didn't bother to do 10 minutes of research either in this thread or anything linked to in it. Heh.

Look, I don't think the violence is okay, and I do think to a degree, the protests against the buses and gentrification are poorly aimed. But these people are not protesting without cause.

A recent protest focused quite heavily on the number of evictions going around San Francisco, in an effort to raise the rent on the property. The gentrification here is stark- families who have lived here decades have seen their per-month payouts rise by hundreds, if not thousands of dollars over just the last decade. All of this in a city that by and large doesn't receive tax money from companies making the greatest profit(by working outside of the city's bounds and busing their people in), and can't afford to raise taxes very easily without hitting middle-income families.

Don't turn into just the caricature of someone too aloof to even attempt to understand.

You're right, they do have a claimed reason for protesting that I didn't mention (rising rents), but I think it's a very poorly thought out one, based on emotion rather than rational thought.

If I was renting out a spare bedroom in my house to a college student for $500 a month, and then another guy shows up and says "I'll pay you $5,000 a month for that bedroom," what do you think my reaction would be? What do you think most people would do in that situation? I claim that nearly every one of the protesters, if they were in the position of the spare-bedroom landlord, would happily kick the first guy out and move in the $5,000 a month guy.

I can hardly imagine a way to satisfy the protesters' demands for cheaper rent without taking away that landlord's fundamental right to charge what he wants for use of his own property.

And by the way, tons of poor-ish and middle-class San Francisco home owners have made life-changing amounts of money from having their cheap homes increase in value when the tech industry moved in next door. But you never hear about them because they don't fit the narrative of the haves oppressing the have-nots.

> I can hardly imagine a way to satisfy the protesters' demands for cheaper rent without taking away that landlord's fundamental right to charge what he wants for use of his own property.

There's two ways to do it, and that's neither of them: increase supply (build new structures; apparently SF has over-restrictive policies on building that could be loosened?) or decrease demand (e.g. make corporate-run buses illegal).

> decrease demand (e.g. make corporate-run buses illegal).

AFAIK, those buses aren't operated by the companies themselves, but by external transportation companies as contractors. What would you make illegal, "don't take Google as a customer"?

> just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through

This is shockingly dismissive, IMHO. It's easy to be judgmental when it's not your job or your existence that is being threatened, but if you're the one who is being made obsolete by the ruthless march of innovation / technology, would you not be the protestor?

Do you think your superior intellectual realization that "There are countless other examples industry-and-job-destroying innovations, and from a long-term historical standpoint they've always been a huge net win for humanity" (quoting from an earlier comment by you) would be enough to prevent emotional strife as you accept your new minimum-hourly-rate job?

You seem to implicitly concede one of my core points: that all this crap is based on appeal to emotion, rather than a rational reason for protest.. if we at least agree on that, I'm glad.

Those industry-destroying innovations tend to take many years to pick up steam, and anyone who's paying attention will likely see the writing on the wall long before it happens. I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?

If I was forced to accept a new minimum-wage job, I'd probably be angry, but that wouldn't mean that my discontentment was based in reason.

> I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?

No, you'd probably be able to pull it off. If you have decent math and writing skills, those would transfer to a bunch of other jobs, and I'd bet that you're pretty smart. In other words, you're probably not a representative sample of the population.

I think we are in agreement. However, I don't see distress at getting fired or forced to move out of the neighbourhood in which you grew up as an illegitimate reason for protest.

I get your viewpoint that what's good for humanity need not be humane to ALL humans, just the overall concept of humanity. However, I can't escape the feeling that there is an unnecessarily ruthless resource re-allocation going on here. Killing one process and allocating those resources to another in an instant makes sense in OS design, but maybe processes that reallocate resources from some living beings to others can be more compassionate without compromising that much in terms of efficiency.

Even my web server (nginx) has a -s stop for fast shutdown and a -s quit for graceful shutdown. :-)

> However, I don't see distress at getting fired or forced to move out of the neighbourhood in which you grew up as an illegitimate reason for protest.

Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the house I grew up in is owned by my grandparents, so no one can ever force them off their own property (or me, if I wanted to live there). IMHO, it's stupid to complain that you can't rent someone else's property forever, and that they're throwing you out for a better deal. Rent is supposed to be short-term (or at least that's how it is in my country).

You act like there's some significant difference between moving money around for a large corporation and moving data around for another large corporation.

How can you understand what's valuable in tech if you can't even understand what's valuable in life. Having your parents being forced to move so you can't see them when they get old, putting off having kids until you might not be able to or giving up the job you love because you got sick. This isn't your opinion on Facebook vs. Snapchat, it's real life shit. One of the great things about being a geek was that you didn't have to blatantly accept society's stupidity. I guess no one could really foresee the magnitude of eternal september.

It's not like there is a lack of opportunities outside of SV, every techie went there by their own choice. If they can't handle having their ride to work disrupted once in a while, maybe it's time to leave when there's still some dignity left. But hey I guess there's some online petition they can all sign, I heard it worked great in regards to the Snowden revelation. Happy fucking brogramming.

Arguably there's a bigger beef with the Valley folks--after all, they're the ones who've built the world's largest surveillance networks and data-gathering systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com