
Why San Francisco's way of doing business beat Los Angeles' - diogenescynic
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-storper-how-sf-beat-la-20151025-story.html
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kristopolous
Many tech people such as me strongly prefer Los Angeles over the bay.

The bay "way of doing business" really irks and alienates me - polite people
who couldn't care less about you baldly lying with a smile; constantly
appeasing you as if you're a docile imbecile.

It's deeply insulting and incredibly disrespectful. No sincerity, humanity or
compassion - void of substantive human interaction. It's a process, not a
person.

For example, at events there I'm a networking point in a social elbow running
contest. I've had people turn away from me pretending I don't exist if I'm not
connected with who they want. it means that the pleasantries of the social
interaction was a total farce - the "personal connection"? 100% grade A
bullshit. The acrimony and inhumanity of it disgusts me.

Makes me ill just thinking of it. What a dreadful place. Terrible 8 years of
my life.

~~~
joelrunyon
> if I'm not connected with who they want. it means that the pleasantries of
> the social interaction was a total farce - the "personal connection"? 100%
> grade A bullshit. The acrimony and inhumanity of it disgusts me.

This made me laugh. I'm not sure about the tech scene specifically, but LA in
general has this reputation for the entire city & cited as the main motivation
by everyone I know that has moved away from it.

~~~
oneJob
>polite people who couldn't care less about you baldly lying with a smile;
constantly appeasing you as if you're a docile imbecile

Same here. Was attempting to figure out if this was sarcasm or not. This is
how I'd describe LA, with one small difference. In LA you're treated as if
you're super cool, rather than a docile imbecile. Had to laugh.

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shalmanese
Or: The high cost of housing has pushed all the poor people out of SF.

~~~
jtmcmc
if you read the article it's comparing the 10 county area of the bay vs. the 5
county area of la

~~~
shalmanese
All 10 counties have seen a housing squeeze. My point is the article doesn't
distinguish between existing poor residents getting richer vs poor residents
being displaced by new, richer immigrants. Both would produce an increase in
average GDP but through different means.

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Animats
At least LA _has_ low and medium wage jobs.

~~~
ill0gicity
San Francisco does as well. I'm going to sound like a rich white male when I
say this, and it's not intended that way, but who do you think takes out the
trash at all the tech companies? Where do those tech bros eat their meals when
not provided by said tech companies? Who builds out all the tech companies'
new offices? Who-- Oh.

The problem San Francisco seems to have is all the low and medium wage jobs
appear to support the tech companies. There are few artisans and craftsmen in
SF.

~~~
markdown
> There are few artisans and craftsmen in SF.

I've been led to believe the exact opposite. Apparently web designers (they
like to use fancier names these days) from SF spend all their time artisanally
_hand_ crafting websites.

~~~
chris_va
Organic, shade grown CSS.

------
blumkvist
What a journalistic diarrhea.

Google l.a. population: 3.884 million

Google san francisco population: 837,442

also, hoards of javascript developers making 100k and more, so yeah...

~~~
iolothebard
More like 18m for the LA area vs 7m for the SF area.

Not sure why that pisses you off, but rage away.

~~~
blumkvist
Because he is comparing apples to oranges and making conclusions.

