peanutgal2600

I love whataboutism and deflection. It shows a lot about your character.

Screw the world, I got mine, and someone else did it before me, so it's not my fault!

How much business was lost through the two summers of rotating brown-outs? Datacenter outages? Maybe Enron didn't impact America, but thanks to America's pro-business, anti-consumer laws, Enron really hurt California.

Poor people are forced to spend more on everything. Finance is a great example. In the USA, banks find poor people unprofitable. To remedy this, they created two institutions:

* ChexSystems, a credit reporting service for bank accounts

* Payday loans, a predatory lending system which takes 4-8% of a person's paycheck to cash it instantly instead of waiting a couple of days.

ChexSystems is designed to identify poor people and ban them from the banking system so that they have to give their round of flesh to shylocks in order to buy food and pay rent. This is one of the more egregious attacks on the poor in the USA, but there are tens of thousands of them to be honest.

In the 1990s we thought Pearl Jam was being silly for trying to bring up an anti-trust lawsuit against Ticketmaster, and the nation had lost it's will after Microsoft's joke of a settlement. In retrospect, that was a real loss. Ticketmaster and Livenation abuse their monopolies to the harm of consumers globally.

Aristocrat is a bad word.

Oligarch is more appropriate.

This doesn't seem much different than planned obsolescence to be honest.

If he had done this to 100 companies, then he would be considered an enterprise, not a criminal.

The happiest man I know is more intelligent than anybody on HN, a wild violinist you'll see playing wild roma, turkish, and arabic standing on top of newspaper boxes in north beach and the mission, when he's not traveling abroad. A genius with perfect pitch who memorizes books and speaks 10 languages.

He decided in University he would be happier without anything, and has been homeless since he was 16. He makes about $40 per day busking, and gives half of it to people less fortunate than himself. say hi to him if you see him.

Money is a placebo.

What an incredibly sad reason to be somewhere you hate. I cry for you.

The culture still thrives, but not how it was, for sure. The older guard of the tech community keeps it alive, but for the most part, the brogrammer wave we got hit with in 2007, when everybody "did social", definitely sucked the life out of the area.

One side effect is that you are a lot less likely to find out. Spaces I used to attend which were generally "if you can find it, you can come" now have guest lists and sometimes vouch lists with the intent of keeping the bros out.

It exists if you want to find it. Hint: It doesn't exist inside of a startup's office space. I've been to 60 countries, and there's nowhere in the world that has SF's diversity of music, art, food, cultures, peoples, points of view, businesses, and climates. The underground warehouse scene is still alive and well, as is the underground/aboveground bdsm/sex scene, the world music scene, hip-hop, bluegrass, techno (ugh).

If you know who to talk to, you can go to an illegal, underground restaurant where guest chefs like Michael Minna cook. The are no less than 5 hacker warehouses focused solely on robotics development. Two of the old goth warehouses are still available. Sure, and there are bars/night clubs, hundreds of music venues. The closeness to natural beauty combined with all of this is almost unfair. 45% of the city is public parkland.

That's just San Francisco, not mentioning the rest of the bay area. If you can't find a niche in the bay, you would be happier living somewhere that you can find a niche. Why be unhappy just for money?

Nowhere in the world is even close. Maybe Berlin, but I'm not a big fan of Germany.

People come to San Francisco, and just lie about what they see. They don't really observe anything, they just repeat the myths and paranoid lies that they read on reddit and HN!

The city that I know, have supported, run companies, run punk venues, run hacker houses, and taught children to program does not bear any resemblance to the views of recent techie imports.

If you leave those few neighborhoods that techies never leave? The Sunsets, West Portal, Portala, Hayes Valley, the Outer Richmond, Noe, Glen Park, the Excelsior, the Outer Mission, Bayview / Hunter's point? The areas where brogrammers don't venture are filled with screaming children, obnoxiously so.

20 years after Roe vs Wade.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen anyone on HN say, and I've seen people defending rapists.

I lived in San Francisco for 20 years and never, ever saw that. I'm not some boring techie who never leaves SOMA or the Mission, I've walked every street in san francisco (according to my Garmin), I've had a drink in every bar, I've made music in almost every park.

Have you ever even been to San Francisco?

Hey, off-topic question. My father built the fare collection system for the Montreal metro in the early '80s. Do you still have the awful system they built that gave you two paper tickets (one for proof, one for transfer)?

I personally am willing to pay up to a 200% premium to take the train versus flying if the length of the overall trip isn't more than 2x the length of an overall air trip (including security, getting to the airport, waiting in lines, waiting for baggage, late takeoffs, getting suck in holding patterns, extra security scans, etc).

A fast train is always a healthier and more pleasant experience than an airplane. Hint: trains have windows.

Disclosure: I'm a private pilot and have lifetime status on two major carriers. I still hate air travel.

"Companies don't have thoughts or emotions."

This statement alone should be enough to reverse Citizens United vs FEC.

In pretty much any small city in developing nations, AirBNB is the only viable option. Many of these cities have experienced rapid growth thanks to EU and Chinese loans, but the hotel infrastructure has not kept up. In one Balkan city I visit frequently, I can pay $150/night in a 40 year old Holiday Inn that was condemned a few years ago for structural reasons (then the decision was reversed), or I can pay $15 a night in an AirBNB some poor schlub making $200/month is renting out to make ends meet.

I'm going to choose door number 2 every time. Any time I am given the choice to buy something, especially a higher-quality experience at a lower price, from a human being versus a corporation, the human gets my money.

Just like I prefer Uber to taxis, I prefer AirBNB to hotels. Even Hostels now, if I go into Amsterdam I will pay $35-$50 per night. If there are two of us, the $50 per night AirBNB is our choice.

These businesses flourish because the social contract is broken. Creating artificial scarcity will harm the community in the long run, preventing tourism and limiting the ability of home owners / tenants to make a couple of extra bucks on under-utilized resources.

Whatever this social contract is, I've never signed it, and I don't really recognize anybody else telling me I must abide by this contract upon which I was given no opportunity to vote or discuss.

All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy.

Call it discrimination, but when I interview people for my team I filter out those who don't have lives or a multitude of interests / passions. I just don't want to be around robots 40-50 hours per week. I apply that same discrimination in my personal and romantic life as well. After 25 years, a computer is just a burden.

When it comes to getting his fair say in, Gerry Adams from Sinn Fein is a master. He never interrupts others, except to tell them to stop interrupting him, and his approach is very effective. When somebody talks over him, he talks over them saying "I didn't interrupt you, don't interrupt me" in a polite but authoritative tone, then he continues speaking until his turn is up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_QJtKLuXYc

He's so good at it, somebody recorded a parody song about it (a rip-off of a Boy Named Sue).

I had a business partner who was a great engineer, but kind of an elitist snob and never let people speak. He cost us a lot of sales that way, so I actually had to begin texting him "Slow down. Let him answer. Stop interrupting, I need to pay rent this month". Consistently calling him out on it in a private way significantly changed his communication style and we stopped losing sales that we should not have lost.