

Tech Rides Are Focus of Hostility in Bay Area - jbae29
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/technology/tech-rides-are-focus-of-hostility-in-bay-area.html?hpw&rref=technology

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acangiano
It might be an unpopular opinion, but frankly I find the protesters to be the
ones with an entitled attitude, more than the techies working their asses off
40-90 hours a week.

If there is an injustice going on regarding tech buses, sure, bring it to city
hall and demand that they fix it. But everything else is entitled bullshit by
protesters.

They have zero rights to interfere with how much money, say, Google pays
employees or complain about how much these employees pay for fancy lattes. And
it's especially repulsive how they showed up at the house of that engineer
terrorizing him and his family.

Seriously. All these techies are guilty of is being successful and choosing a
very rewarding industry-location combination.

Should we go harass NFL and NHL players because they do even better than us
economically?

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vishaldpatel
One of the reasons it is easy to throw a stone at a big white bus is because
it dehumanizes it's occupants. This makes it easy for people to treat them
differently.

The target is not the employees. The anger towards the city, which has failed
to provide good public transportation for it's residents.

The tech companies recognized that the public transportation sucks and built
their own. The protestors could just stand outside of city-hall, but
disrupting tech-buses is a much louder and more effective message.

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Frazmataz
These aren't executives & owners riding the bus; they're employees. Do the
protesters think the answer to income inequality is paying lower wages, that
an increased load on the public transit and increased cars on the road is
better than private shuttles?

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malandrew
I find it amazing that no one has yet pointed out that the people increasing
the rents are their fellow San Franciscans. The overwhelming majority of
landlords are people who have lived in San Francisco for years. Yes, new
people can move into an area raising demand, but at the end of the day it is
San Franciscans who control the properties and decide who to rent to.

One of my good friends is 64 and has lived in SF since the early 70s and says
that that most landlords try to create a situation where housing rotates over
and over by making the rents unsustainable so people eventually have to move
so they can jack up the price again. She owns an apartment in a 3-unit
building that survived the 1906 earthquake and her neighbor below inherited
the property from their parents ~30 years ago and has been using this strategy
for years. He was born and raised in SF, but moved out and now just collects
rent checks on the property. The three bedroom unit below her is now being
rented for just shy of $5000/mo.

Beyond those people I've met many few San Franciscans who have decided to move
out of the city while maintaining the lease on their rent-controlled apartment
and now sublease the apartment for the difference in rent control and market
rate.

Pretty much everyone in a position to extract rent in this city is doing the
most they can, and almost all are long time San Franciscans.

With all this in mind, I don't understand why all this ire isn't also directed
at the supply side of the market, which is as culpable as the buy side of the
market.

