
San Francisco is a 'train wreck' of inequality - rfinney
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/san-francisco-apos-train-wreck-110300091.html
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throwaway98121
I was recently in SF for the first time to attend QCon. Beautiful city with a
lot of character and culture IMO.

I made the mistake of taking an Uber from my hotel, about 1 mile away from the
convention center. Traffic is horrendously bad and it took about 40 minutes to
go one mile. It did give me a great opportunity to sit back and just sight see
some buildings and what not for 40 min.

For the week I was there, I walked a lot after the conference each day to see
the city. The thing that really stuck out was there was no new construction
and certainly no high rises. Well of course, why wouldn’t prices go up then?

The roads were also pretty atrocious. I understand taxes are high. What
exactly do they spend tax dollars on? Serious question.

I’d certainly would like to visit again but honestly it’s not a place I’d want
to live in.

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chrisdhoover
The city government is bloated, pension plans are unsustainably generous,
there is corruption of course, there is a homeless industrial complex that
sucks up funds and does little, there are costly building codes that were
written to benefit various trades, even though fire prevention has improved
greatly, the SFFD spews FUD everytime a good government type suggests a few
firehouses could be closed, Police refuse to do their jobs and blames the City
Attorney, and it is true the City Attorney doesn’t do their job bit its no
excuse for the SFPD, MUNI has the highest cost per mile in the US, and on and
on.

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jungler
As one SF Chronicle article put it in describing CA Governor Newsom, SF
politics are a lion's den that produces strong candidates for the national
stage.

Which in perspective says not that SF functions well, but rather that it
functions so poorly that you have to have immense skill to survive.

And like other established cities with some history, there is a vein of the
upper crust - people whose parents owned property, went to the local prep
schools and now own some property themselves. That's a thing that contributes
to the quagmire, since it creates more complex entanglements than the basic
economics would suggest. A lot of the tech billionaires have made moves to
muscle in on this scene, which has perhaps helped it from getting too
stagnant, but contributes to its overall incoherence.

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tabtab
SF is a sign of a bigger problem, not the cause. The world is becoming a
winner-take-all economy. The best and brightest get bestier and brightier
because they get to work on the latest and greatest and know the latest and
greatest. If you "miss the train", you have to grovel with the masses for the
scraps.

The Internet has made it both easier to find who and what you are looking for,
and to filter out the rest. Inefficiency of info sharing used to act as a kind
of socialism, giving average people & shops sales and opportunities. Now it's
winner take all, the rest be damned.

Same with countries also; it's why the 3rd world is finding it hard to keep up
with the big powers.

Let's face it, some of Karl Marx's predictions about "owners" growing ever
larger like a snowball rolling downhill are coming true. (Whether his
"solutions" work are another matter.)

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wpasc
I agree with sentiments of parts of what you say. However, the 3rd world
countries have had the largest gains in the last 30 years. Global extreme
poverty, child mortality, lifespan in 3rd world countries have had the most
improvements BY FAR.

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tabtab
In many cases they went from super-poor to just poor. While an improvement,
they still lag way behind the so-called industrialized countries.

Put another way, if we divide a family's economic condition into very poor,
poor, middle class, and wealthy; the world system(s) appears to be bunching
everybody into "poor" (and perhaps a few more into "rich") while the other
categories are shrinking. The ideal would be to have most of the population in
the middle-class.

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esotericn
It may well be the case that the steady state is '~everyone is poor'.

Can the world function if everyone lives the life of a 50-100K/year income
American?

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tabtab
Since machines can do a lot of the "real work", yes. Our methods of income
distribution may need to change if robots become the "new slaves". We can
maybe learn something from ancient Greek society. Our current problem is that
the wealth is not trickling down from the machine owners to regular folks.

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downrightmike
Reading that article, they basically just say the same thing over and over
each paragraph. Like echo echo echo. No real substance.

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scarejunba
It is this way by design and it will remain this way by design. I'm fine with
it.

