ghobs91

Far right: private businesses such as bakeries should be allowed to refuse service to whoever they want!

Also the far right: why is Facebook censoring my ability to spread hate speech!

I'm oversimplifying it, but the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is astounding.

Great point, something I've wondered myself. You'd think with the immense amount of money and influence tech companies and VCs wield, they'd do more to out-lobby the NIMBY homeowners and get denser housing approved.

Outside of having top notch universities, the biggest indicator of a city's ability to have a big tech industry is the size of the VC community.

VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy. As such, they have little incentive to move, and so founders will continue to flock there to start their companies.

I completely agree that shopping around for cities should be easier, so that city governments like SF are forced to get their head out of their ass and make their city competitive.

However, until SF becomes unpleasant to live in for rich people, not much is going to change.

The underlying network that's processing those payments still largely involves Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex. For Apple Pay to entirely replace them, they'd need to convince millions of merchants to get credit card terminals that use them.

Why on earth would it be pay per hour or per MB? Does Netflix charge that way? How about Spotify?

Time has shown that the best revenue model for these kinds of services is finding a monthly price, or multiple tiers of a monthly price, that adequately cover the costs incurred from heavy users and light users alike.

Why do you think they're under-zoning housing? Because office space tends to be built away from existing homes and doesn't face as much opposition from NIMBYs.

Housing, on the other hand, is blocked by them because that "gargantuan 4 story apt building" is going to lower their precious home value. I agree that infrastructure needs to keep up with development, but that's not impossible to do.

If NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc can do it, why does SF seem to have such a hard time doing so? Because SF local government is a shitshow that does nothing but serve the interests of existing homeowners, who somehow want to benefit from the prosperity of growing cities without the construction/density those cities require.

Which is why I don't blame the NIMBY homeowners for doing it as much as I blame the current system for being designed to allow nonstop input from local groups. There is such a thing as too much democracy, and this is it.

Zoning should be made on the state or county level, and for every development that's planned to be built, if it follows the zoning, approve it. Enough of this nonsense "yeah it follows zoning but I don't like it".

If it was property rights, they'd be voting on what can be built on their own property. Instead, NIMBYs vote on what can be built in the surrounding neighborhood and beyond, as if the purchase of a home also includes a guarantee that everything around it can never change.

It's elitist gatekeeping and deep selfishness masked as "wanting to retain neighborhood character".

Yes. If after that law passed, you still chose to donate, then it would show your intentions were to benefit your alma mater, and not to get your kids in.

These elite schools all have massive endowments, on top of the ridiculously inflated tuition they charge, so give me a break if you're trying to tell me they need these donations.

Otherwise, the idea of an elite school on your resume "signaling" something about you is meaningless. These schools are supposed to be bastions of knowledge and research, not expensive country clubs for rich kids to network with each other.

This is why they should make it law that your kids can't attend a university if you've donated there. This and the legacy admissions nonsense is beyond absurd.

It's why I roll my eyes so hard when investors say that attending a top school is a "signal" that makes you a better bet to invest in as a founder. That signal is pretty damn weak if those top schools so rampantly accept bribes.

Those who blame it squarely on unions, explain how Europe has strong unions and yet construction there is orders of magnitude cheaper than in the US?

It's because there isn't a proper bidding process. Politicians just give sweetheart bloated contracts to the same contractors every time, and those contractors then "donate to their campaign". If they instead used things like sealed bids and had contractors compete against eachother, it wouldn't cost $1B per mile for NYC's 2nd avenue subway, absurd.

NY Governor Cuomo surprisingly called this out recently, describing it as a "transit industrial complex": https://nypost.com/2019/01/04/mta-officials-are-fuming-over-...

Think about how many of the most popular apps right now would be unusable on a 3g connection. Uploading/viewing an entire feed of images and videos on social media, streaming shows and twitch, online shopping feeds that need to load tons of product images, etc. The speed bump from 3g to 4g was what allowed these entire industries to flourish.

In terms of the improvements from 4g to 5g, going from 40mbps to 400mbps may not yield super noticeable improvements right now, but you know what will? 5g's other big feature, wired internet levels of low latency. That means things that require instant feedback like remote controlling delivery drones or surgeons performing remote surgeries by controlling a DaVinci robot in the middle of africa from their office in the US.

So no 5g is not hype, the focus is just too much on the speed and not enough on the possibilities opened by 5ms latency on devices connecting miles away from a tower.

That may be generally the case for now, but as software becomes ingrained in more of our daily lives, especially things like healthcare or autonomous vehicles, bad code could absolutely harm/kill someone.

Not to nitpick, but the supply of doctors is limited first and foremost by the number of residency spots available every year. The length/cost of med school is a deterrent, but it by no means has prevented med schools from filling their seats.

Is this similar to what PrivacyBadger does, or would they complement each other?

If I had to bet, the majority of .dev pages will be engineers posting their portfolio, not startups building developer tools.

If they stockpiled revenue in banks, it would be counted as profit and taxed, which is clearly not the case.

A big part of it is that they reinvest a large portion of revenue back into the company in the form of growth. So while they're not paying income tax because of lack of profit, they're building fulfillment centers and hiring like crazy. This means income tax for all those new employees and property tax on all the centers they're building.

The last damn thing we need is a government run social network. We saw a preview of how that would be run when the current administration decided to manipulate/fake comments on the FCC site during the net neutrality debate.

The ideal balance for things like this is a properly regulated social network, where said regulation focuses on holding the social network responsible for spread of fake information and hate speech.

That's better than a tech landscape with no access to venture capital at all, and startups taking 10x longer to reach critical mass, if they even do.

There's a reason why the US tech industry is orders of magnitude larger than the rest of the world, access to capital. Go try to grow a startup in Europe with its risk averse investors, and see how far you get.

You'll start to see this effect even more in the biotech space, where up front access to capital is crucial in developing and testing products/medicines that must go through expensive FDA approval.

This is partly a side effect of tech becoming so big, it's segmenting into products vs services. For example, Tinder isn't directly selling software to anyone, it's selling a dating service that runs exclusively on software. You could say the same about Facebook, what software is it selling directly to consumers?

None. It's selling a social network service to its users and an ad network service to its clients, built entirely on software.

Sure the title may be jumping the gun a bit, but you're severely overhyping SF and underestimating NYC with your comment. The fact that Fog Creek and Reddit (moved to SF) were the companies that came to mind shows that you don't know the NYC tech landscape well.

On top of the condensed list below NYC has Columbia, NYU, and Cornell Tech in terms of talent pool, and one of the most extensive transit systems in the world.

1. Bloomberg 2. Oath (AOL + Yahoo) 3. Blue Apron 4. Buzzfeed 5. Tumblr 6. Etsy 7. AppNexus 8. Flatiron Health 9. Oscar Health 10. Shutterstock 11. Squarespace 12. IAC (Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, etc) 13. Zocdoc 14. Compass 15. Casper 16. MongoDB 17. Warby Parker 18. Vimeo 19. Betterment 20. Classpass 21. DigitalOcean 22. Foursquare 23. Fanduel 24. Stackoverflow 25. SeatGeek 26. Birchbox

etc.

It's something I didn't realize until recently myself. There are several things Europe does better than the US in, but earning power is not one of them.

The issue with most of the studies that say this is how they measure mobility. If the focus is on the ability to move up in income percentiles, then it's an unfair comparison.

Why? Because while it sounds nice to say "avg german child moves from top 50% to top 65% while avg american only moves from top 50% to top 55%", American salaries are much higher, and cost of housing is on par or lower than Europe, so top 55% is a much higher financial increase for the American.

Company valuation isn't based on the complexity of the product, it's based on potential/future earnings. Sure, valuations aren't an exact science, but the fact of the matter is the market has decided at the moment that Slack in its current state has more earning potential than SpaceX.

The entire point of H1B is to allow companies to hire skilled workers when there's shortage of said skill in the US. If the company suddenly doesn't hire H1B once they're forced to pay them equally, then you know their real motive.

Yup. I've always found it so bizarre that NIMBYs feel entitled to a neighborhood that remains exactly as it was when they bought their home. Is it reasonable to expect a 10 year old car to operate the same as the day you bought it?

It's especially absurd since we're talking about a global, dynamic city, not some small rural town. Can you imagine if 1900s NYC had the NIMBY culture of present day SF? It would've severely choked its growth.

SF's saving grace is its VC ecosystem and network effect between existing talent. You can barely even say they have a monopoly on talent pool, since the ivy leagues and many other top schools are nowhere near SF. These factors are gradually growing in other cities, and the bay area will get to a point where the cost of living will turn it into just another city. They've essentially created one of the worlds largest funnels of money into landlords pockets. So much wasted capital.

This isn't like the finance stronghold in NY or entertainment in LA, tech companies are involved in every industry, and don't need to be in SF to thrive.

I agree with you that the "war on Christmas" stuff is nonsense, but you'd be surprised at how many people write off Christian persecution, based solely on the fact that some of the most powerful nations in the world are "Christian nations".

This is why it's frustrating when some make it seem that Christians are incapable of facing persecution, based entirely on their experiences in the US.

The Christians in China are very brave for standing by their faith, and I wish them luck and peace.

The demand side of it is that with every decade, the midwest's manufacturing economy shrinks, and more of their population empties out into the coastal cities. The supply side of the problem is detailed here: https://i.redd.it/ibo81s465yy11.png