
San Francisco split by Silicon Valley's wealth - dmckeon
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-silicon-valley-backlash-20130814,0,762467,full.story
======
tolmasky
Are there any actual critiques to be had against Google busses other than some
vague misplaced anger? Here we have private companies using their own capital
to provide a more environmentally friendly way of getting their employees to
the South Bay. What exactly is the problem here? Would they prefer if things
were more like LA and everyone of these tech employees had their own high
priced car? Would that make the wealth disparity less apparent?

Then after a few anecdotes of assholes acting like assholes (as if that's
representative of anything), Uber is of course targeted. I find this
particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are
_exactly_ the tech companies who are working on real problems. Go ride in a
Lyft or Uber X and ask the driver how they feel about the company. Lyft is
providing real jobs and making use of resources that would otherwise be
_notoriously_ redundant and misused (cars).

~~~
mapgrep
I have gone through similar feelings and you raise a great point: The buses
from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly
doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among
other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good
thing.

Here's the flipside, although I've never heard anyone actually make the first
argument:

-Google the company actively dodges taxes, albeit through tactics common in the corporate world. So while it is pampering its own employees, it is undermining public transit by not paying nearly its fair share into the federal (and likely state) pools that help fund the transit for everyone else. Thus, Google is actively exacerbating inequality.

-Google's buses use public land intended for public transit to provide "stops" for its employees. Google can clearly afford to compensate for this, but, as far as I know, does not do so. This at a time when Muni and other transit agencies could really use the money. Free rent for large corporations is never going to be popular.

-Although there are environmental benefits to the buses, Google, Facebook, etc. are almost certainly not motivated primarily by the environmental benefits but by self interest. In other words, the freeways are full, and getting to South Bay each morning is a nightmare. And yet many desirable engineers etc prefer to live in SF vs South Bay. Hence, the buses, which make it easier for these companies to recruit. This competitive element then puts pressures on other smaller internet companies to run their own buses, even if those buses are not particularly full or if they are driving large distances within SF to pick up only a small number of people or single person at a given stop.

~~~
tolmasky
1\. Google does not "dodge" taxes. They follow the incredibly complex web of
rules the system specifically designed for this sort of use (or abuse). Its
absurd to expect any corporation or person to go out of their way to pay more
than they need to. (Milton Friedman Why Tax Reform is Impossible:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8)
)

2\. Muni does not need more money. SF does not need more money. SF's budget is
twice that of Idaho's, and we have far fewer people and far less space than
Idaho ( [http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-
ci...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-
u-s/) ). Look no further than the ridiculous extension of muni from China town
to downtown to see a clear indication of how funds are being completely
misused. No one wants to fix the budget problems in SF and its so much easier
to just blame whoever happens to be successful at the moment.

3\. I'm not sure I disagree with your third point at all but also don't
understand how its a negative thing. You are describing normal competition
between companies. I can at least provide one piece of information: I used to
work in the South Bay and hated the commute and would do everything in my
power not to ever do it again, bus or not. So there's plenty of incentive to
stay and work in a small company here, I assure you. Do you see lots of small
companies running buses (honest question, I'm simply not familiar)? I seem to
just see the flipside happening: more small companies simply being in SF.

~~~
mapgrep
I was framing the argument more than taking a side, I can see both sides of
this. Not sure what you mean about Google not dodging taxes though. Like I
said, it's common among large corporations, but that doesn't mean it's not a
fact that it's happening. Google's tax avoidance schemes are well documented,
whatever your opinion of them is morally there's no use denying they exist.

The broader point I was making isn't Google Is Evil For Not Paying Taxes. The
point was, if you're going to not pay taxes, you don't get to play the "I'm a
benevolent corporation helping make society a better place" card when you run
enormous luxury coaches all over town and use sketchy pick up locations.
People will assume the worst intentions.

I actually lean Google on this one. But that doesn't mean I have to buy the
argument they are doing this out of the kindess of their Googler hearts. I say
make them pay through the teeth for these stops like any red blooded
capitalist would. (Like, say, Milton Friedman.)

------
jseliger
_Her son, like most young people, wants to be able to move out and live on his
own even as the city gets more and more expensive._

These articles frustrate me because they rarely manage to mention obvious
factors like, say, supply and demand—a problem that I wrote more about here:
[http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/connecting-the-
dots...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/connecting-the-dots-between-
beliefs-an-example-from-density-and-housing-policy) . If you're unhappy about
rapidly rising housing prices, the simple solution is to build more of it. We
have the technology to do so and have for a hundred years.

One can argue that high prices are a reasonable cost for low density, but to
do so at least requires some basic knowledge of how supply and demand work.

On a separate note, articles like this also show why newspapers are having so
many problems: if a random commenter like me knows more introductory-level
econ than the reporter writing about such issues, the reporter has no business
writing about business.

~~~
Sheepshow
SV tech giants creates artificial demand in SF by providing premium buses,
without motivating any sort of supply. Developers can't choose to say, build
more housing near the place of employment in SF because there isn't one. The
closest would be to build near a bus stop -- which is completely ephemeral
real estate.

And that's the point of the article. How can developers __possibly __respond
to this demand?

~~~
malandrew
There's a lack of real estate for businesses in the city as well.

Getting an office for your tech startup isn't trivial nor cheap. A lot more of
these companies in the south bay along the Caltrain could be in SF if there
was more commercial real estate available.

------
vecinu
It amazes me how the examples given in the article as displays of wealth don't
resonate with me at all.

In the Middle East, you have Sheiks creating gigantic palaces that rival
wonders of the world, all for their display of wealth and power.

In the Balkans, you have rich gypsies throwing money on women at their
weddings and carrying more bling on them than you will ever have in your
lifetime.

I just left SF for a bit after living in SoMa for a year. People should
understand that spending YOUR money on YOUR wedding to make it special is not
an exorbitant display of wealth. Neither is having a corporate jet area at an
airport or a charter of private buses for that matter.

It could be worse; much worse.

~~~
marcusf
> In the Balkans, you have rich gypsies throwing money on women at their
> weddings and carrying more bling on them than you will ever have in your
> lifetime.

From my understanding, the throwing of money during a wedding is a tradition
in some cultures. It's either used to pay for the wedding, or the money goes
around and is used in another wedding.

I've given money at weddings, in an envelope instead of throwing it, but I
wouldn't call that a display of wealth. Not if spending YOUR money on YOUR
wedding isn't, at least.

------
DanBlake
Either build more housing, remove rent control or have SF no longer be
appealing. Those are the only options to stop rental increases. Anything else
is artificial and doomed to fail by introducing flawed mechanisms to try and
subvert the most natural process there is (Supply/Demand)

SF seems like one of the only places on earth where the general mindset is "I
have a absolute human right to live in San Francisco". Good luck trying that
attitude in Aspen or Greenwich. The bottom line is that so long as SF is one
of the most desirable places in the US to live, people are going to flock here
and capitalism will take over (SURPRISE)

Its really just simple supply and demand. There is a lot of people wanting to
live in SF (demand) and lots of low paying tenants who dont move causing
little vacancies (supply). The end result is astronomical prices.

~~~
ganeumann
Well come on, it's a little more complicated than that. Where you live is not
just a simple commodity to you, it's your home. Having lived through the
complete gentrification (Disneyfication) of Manhattan I found that, despite
being of the Liberal bent, it was hard to see old neighborhoods disappear,
look around at nice neighborhoods and realize a good percentage of the
apartments are owned by people who are in them only a few days a year, and
watch as the interesting fringe stuff (i.e. The Hat) was replaced by the
interesting mega-expensive stuff (i.e. Per Se.) It feels bad to become an
outcast in your own land, even though that kind of thing does not come into
play in Liberal thought.

I don't think that some people asking for some other solution than pure
supply-and-demand is untoward. Understanding how they feel: that their home
(meaning both the place they live in and their neighborhood) might be more
important to them than most other things. There's a certain amount of
suffering we cause them with our exercise of simple capitalism. While we can't
measure pain in dollars and cents, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about
it. Not everything should be measured in dollars and capitalism is not the
only moral system, nor is it inevitable.

I don't have answers (well, actually, I have plenty of opinions on answers but
none that are radically different than any other answers already given) but I
also don't think that the brou-ha-ha is useless: it's always useful to have
these discussions. The end result of this kind of public pressure is often
compromise.

------
scoofy
Gentrification happens, people get bitter when they don't own their homes.
This is normal economics that happens in every major city (e.g. Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, East Side, Austin, Mississippi District, Portland, Mission, SF,
etc., etc., etc.). Much of this has to do with the end of white flight, which
should probably be considered a good thing. The laws in SF are as renter
friendly as you can get in this country. I'm not sure what all the fuss is
about.

~~~
bitwize
Well, it kind of sucks that your options in the US are gentrification or
Detroitification. It's part of the price we pay for not having the social
safety nets and public investment in infrastructure that other countries have.

~~~
dmix
In Canada, similar gentrification is also happening rapidly in
Toronto/Vancouver. Detroitification happened on the Canadian east coast (when
the fishing industry died). And we have better "social safety nets". I don't
think social programs manage to keep cities alive or the same as they were,
nor would the overall country benefit from trying harder to do so.

The main difference w/ Toronto vs SF is that Toronto has a liberal condo
building policy so more affordable housing is being built by a (relatively)
booming real estate industry. Whereas SF's property development growth has
nowhere near reflected its population/income boom.

~~~
batbomb
The problem in SF is there is no middle class or family housing being built.
All these fancy new buildings going up are high margin 4k/mo rent and some
percentage of section 8. There's nothing going up even in the range of
1800-2800 1 or 2BR places.

What would probably be reasonable is 1400/mo studio, 2000/mo 1BR, 2800/mo 2BR.
What would be ideal is more like 1200/mo, 1700/mo, 2400/mo respectively. Yeah,
that's still expensive, but it's a newer building and hopefully older
buildings would be around 80% of that. But that's not going to happen.

Some additional policies like penalizing companies for letting new places be
unrented for some amount of time, or allowing developers to (temporarily)
displace SRO occupants while they demolish and rebuild higher density
buildings in the Tenderloin could possibly help change behaviors towards
increasing the supply of more modest housing, but that's not going to happen
any time soon. In the meantime, the city is fine letting people do what they
want at top as long as it benefits the people at the bottom, with no plans to
do anything for people in between.

~~~
muzz
Those rent prices are not even available in places like San Jose (one example:
[http://www.equityapartments.com/california/san-francisco-
bay...](http://www.equityapartments.com/california/san-francisco-bay-
apartments/north-san-jose/domain-apartments.aspx))

~~~
jedmeyers
You can rent a pretty nice 2b duplex in Mountain View for 2.5k. 20 minute bike
ride to Google.

~~~
muzz
Most of the 2 bdr units in Mountain View on Craigslist are well over 2500:

[http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/pen?query=&zoomToPost...](http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/pen?query=&zoomToPosting=&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=&bedrooms=2&housing_type=&nh=81)

------
donretag
This article is not the first on the subject, and it probably won't be the
last.

I should just save them and forwarded them to the Google recruiters that
contact me 1-2 times a year. Not going to work in the bay area. I like living
in a place where my neighbors do not work in tech. I like SF, but what made
the city truly extraordinary is gone.

~~~
throwit1979
_I like living in a place where my neighbors do not work in tech._

Out of curiosity, why? Where I live, finding real life interactions with
people in tech is quite rare, and I wish it were different.

Grass is greener.

~~~
donretag
Perhaps I should have phrased it as "I like living in a place where _MOST_ my
neighbors do not work in tech".

I am in agreement that having some interaction with others in the tech
industry is important. There should be a happy medium somewhere since living
next to nothing but tech workers and lawyers is boring. My current neighbors
are teachers, photographers, small business owners, but I wish there was a
techie in the mix.

~~~
johnward
I wish one of my neighbors worked in tech.

------
revelation
Yes, lets put up a divider between the relatively wealthy tech people and the
poor, so that the third parties (property owners, _government_ ) stay
unharmed.

Tech people also don't want to pay 40% of their net income to some rent seeker
for a studio appartment. This level of prices will ultimately be toxic to the
economy.

------
woah
This is due to not enough housing being built over the past 30 years

~~~
sirkneeland
Supply of housing kept artificially low (SF gov resisting building up for
decades). Demand for housing rising, as it should in any desirable city.

People seem surprised by this.

As long as we are adding CS to school curricula, maybe we should add some Econ
101 as well...

~~~
strlen
My high school (in Cupertino, CA -- 45 miles south of SF) did require an
economics course and the one I took (AP Micro Econ for part of the course,
regular macro econ for remainder) used rent control as an example of policies
with unintended consequences. I don't think ignorance is the problem here,
this is textbook stuff.

I think the real issues are these:

1) Economics is a science, it helps you build a mathematical model of ``what
happens if''. It doesn't immediately follow that even if rent control has
drawbacks (lowered mobility, gradual conversion of units from apartments to
TiCs or condos, higher rent and lower ability for those who move into the
city) that they aren't socially acceptable due to perceived benefits. I am not
making this argument myself here, by the way (I don't think social benefits of
rent control justify the costs); I am merely stating that it isn't as
straightforward (going from "rent control has unintended consequences" to
"rent control is a wrong policy" is an example of Hume's is-ought fallacy).

2) There are other legal/economics issues besides rent control. There are
certain tenant right laws that currently making it very difficult for one-
property landlords to rent their property out. In other words if you're moving
to South Bay/Fremont or Pleasanton for the next 12 years to better schools
(more on this later...) or to New York/London for 5 years to work in finance
sector it may be more monetarily advantageous to you to sell or AirBnB the
place. If you're an individual with a single investment property it makes all
the sense to sell now (or again, to AirBnB) as opposed to continue renting
out.

Tenant’s rights is a great concept and undoubtedly tenants should be protected
from unsafe conditions, predatory practices, eviction without any notice,
harassment, etc... However, some of the laws (e.g., difficulty of eviction for
legitimate reasons, bizzare laws that can require a property to wait for 10
years before being rented or sold again after an eviction in some cases,
etc...) clearly make things easier for slumlords (individuals/families with
more than a single property), large property management companies, and
apartment complexes.

3) Non-rent related political/economic issues: namely schools, transportation,
and safety. First, there is whole Western half of SF (Sunset, Richmond) that's
simply an amazing town: walkable mixed-use neighbourhoods, slightly larger
homes, lower rent, less crime. "Small" problem: it takes as long to get to
SOMA or FiDi from Inner Richmond as it does from Mountain View or Palo Alto.
Sunset is slightly better _when muni is on-time_ (that's like saying "JVM is
fast when you're not having a full GC" \-- at-grade transportation will
enviable suffer delays), but it's still a longer (and more exhausting) commute
than driving from, e.g., Daly City.

Second, schools are (literally) a lottery ticket. The known-good public
schools (e.g., Lowell) are magnets that are extremely competitive admissions
wise. Private schools would be fine, but become unaffordable when there's also
rent/mortgage to pay in SF. Child friendly neighbourhoods (likes one I
describe above) are generally removed from work areas.

Essentially this leaves only one option: if you're a family, due to
safety/space reasons you'll probably have to commute[1] anyway to get to work;
since you can commute from somewhere with either cheaper housing (East Bay) or
great public schools (South Bay, Fremont area, Pleasanton, etc...), or take a
job in one of these areas and have a shorter commuter, the costs of living in
SF proper outweigh the benefits...

4) Non-political factors: SF is at the end of Peninsula, with mountains in the
middle, and on its south side. It's also highly in demand. You can build up as
in Manhattan (and SF should) but even though SF is now cheaper than Manhattan,
Manhattan real estate is still unaffordable for most Americans.

In other words, imagine you've an NP-complete algorithm. You can apply every
optimization possible, but in the end you either have to throw a core with
more transistors at it (where you're limited by physics), throw more parallel
cores/distributed CPUs at it (_if_ it happens to be easily parallelizable), or
find a heuristic that doesn't give you a complete answer but is good enough
(like Miller-Rabin primarily test).

Ultimately I think (but may as well be proven wrong) that a combination of
these is what will happen here: reform of housing laws ("optimization") and
smaller housing in SF proper ("more transistors on a core"), more SF-like
dense urban cores in Bay Area, e.g., more jobs in Oakland/Berkeley, revival of
Downtown SJ ("more cores"), and "densification" with a move towards mixed use
residential/light commercial in suburbs/exurbs coupled with better public and
private transportation options ("heuristical solutions").

[1] To out of towners, here are some numbers from personal
experience/experience of friends:

Mid-Richmond to SOMA by bus -- 40 minutes Inner Sunset to SOMA by Muni without
delays ~20 minutes

Menlo Park to SOMA -- 35 minutes Daly City to SOMA -- 20 minutes at most
Saratoga to FiDi - 1 hour 5 minutes Saratoga to Palo Alto California ave area
-- 20 minutes Saratoga to Menlo Park - 30 minutes Mountain View to Menlo Park
-- 15 minutes Mountain View to Sunnyvale/Santa Clara - 5-15 minutes

Driving commute in SF proper is not a good option. First, you lose out majorly
on the savings of living in the city by having a car (the car itself,
insurance, gas, parking, maintenance. Second, there's very little freeway in
SF proper, but major job centers (SOMA, downtown) happen to be near freeway
exits -- driving on SF surface streets is simply not worth it in terms of gas
costs from idling/stop-and-go traffic, damage that happens to your car (with a
manual car it means having to replace a clutch more often; with an automatic I
can't imagine the stress put on the torque converter), and most importantly
the stress/discomfort.

------
jongold
Totally misplaced anger by non-techies - the housing problem in SF is down to
the planning restrictions.

~~~
calbear81
Agreed, that article totally missed the point here on the NIMBY-ism all over
SF. Look at cities like Vancouver (often voted best city to live in the world)
and their core is filled with dense skyrises that also ensure vibrant and busy
street level activity which leads to lower crime and safer streets.

------
ionforce
Whose "problem" is economic equality? It doesn't sound like it should be the
responsibility of the companies that happen to reside in/near the Valley.
Google's mission statement is to index the Internet, not to bolster the
Valley, so they optimize accordingly. The companies and its residents don't
owe their cities anything. Living there is merely an implementation detail.

Granted, I think it would be nice if San Francisco wasn't left in the dust so
to speak... But I can't think of how keeping the city propped up in a certain
way aligns with people's and corporations' natural inclinations.

It doesn't add up any other way, I don't think. What is happening is perfectly
logical. Maybe unfortunate. But logical.

------
coenhyde
The problem is the SF City gov. They are destroying everything they want to
protect about the city by restricting housing developments.

------
dmckeon
The buses are a convenient and visible symbol for SF activists to use as a
shorthand for the influx of tech workers and housing demand.

While buses clearly reduce roadway commuting loads, and are convenient for
those inside them, they are also highly visible at pick-up/drop-off points in
the City, and in HOV lanes on the freeway \- especially visible to people who
are waiting for a Muni bus, or who are in heavy traffic watching buses go past
in an HOV lane.

Activists who understand this keep talking about buses rather than about
people, or about the failures of the City to provide more competitive working
environments for tech companies and their workers.

------
cletus
I guess it's that time of the month again: class warfare and the effect of the
tech industry on SF.

> Fueling the growing rift is a common belief that the vast wealth being
> amassed by the tech industry is not spilling over into the community.

This is a deliberately naive view of economics. Unless tech workers spend
nothing they consume local goods and services and money flows through the
economy that way. If you profile tech workers who live in SF you'll tend to
find they're young (20s) and tend to spend a lot of their money on
"entertainment" (bars, restaurants, etc). How exactly does this not benefit
the SF economy?

> Instead, activists say, the high-tech invasion is driving up the cost of
> living to levels that more San Franciscans cannot afford.

No, ignorance of supply and demand, archaic zoning laws and other artificial
constraints on supply drive up the cost of living in SF and the rest of the
Bay area.

If, for example, you had high density housing along the Caltrain corridor
you'd probably find that a lot less people would feel the need to live in SF.

> She has seen a sharp uptick in evictions under the Ellis Act, the state law
> that allows a landlord to evict all tenants of a building if it is being
> taken off the rental market. And now she and the other tenants in her
> building

This is inevitable when you create artificially low rental prices. If you want
to avoid this sort of thing the only way to do it is either a) have a
government authority own the buildings or b) subsidize the rent paid on the
private market. Rent control is always going to leave owners looking for a way
to get out of it.

> So he's hunting for a job as a recruiter in the tech industry.

And who said this isn't benefiting the SF economy?

As for the private buses, I don't recall the cost per worker for the system
but I believe it's actually pretty low. BART/Muni/Caltrain/VTA/etc is actually
pretty expensive and government subsidized. The real problem here is that
public transit in the Bay Area is appallingly organized and run so companies
have no real choice but to go private.

But I bet the politicians love all this finger-pointing at tech companies. It
certainly takes the heat off them.

~~~
auctiontheory
_If, for example, you had high density housing along the Caltrain corridor you
'd probably find that a lot less people would feel the need to live in SF._

What are you talking about? There's plenty of housing by Caltrain. I myself
live within bed-shaking distance of Caltrain.

A shortage of residences near Caltrain isn't the problem. The problem is ...
all these cities SUCK. They are homogeneous culturally barren wastelands.
THAT'S why people want to live in SF.

But by moving to SF in such large numbers, with tech millions burning a hole
in their pockets, they are driving up rents and home prices to such a degree
that non-techies cannot afford to live there.

As this continues, SF itself will turn into a homogeneous culturally barren
wasteland - more like San Jose. And the yuppie bars and overpriced restaurants
that remain will be staffed by workers bussed in from somewhere else. The art
and music and quirkiness will be long gone.

------
Tiktaalik
I've read a few articles noting the tension between private bus services and
public space. I don't live in Silicon Valley, but it sounds like these private
buses are really taking advantage of public space and I think the city needs
to step in, write up some rules for fair use and generate revenue from this
private system.

~~~
sirkneeland
Generate revenue from these? (that is, make up and levy a new tax)

Were it not for these buses, there would be more cars on the road (and
jostling for parking spots, and more pollution) and more people piling into
Muni, Caltrain and BART during rush hour. These buses, like the bathrooms in
Starbucks, are a private company providing a public good.

I work for a company that doesn't give me these buses. I wish they did. I'm
plenty envious. But I am under no illusion that these private bus systems owe
me anything more than the lightened traffic burden they already gave me.

~~~
malyk
Or the people wouldn't live so far away from where they work thus freeing up
more housing and lessening (at least for a time) the skyrocketing rental
situation in the city.

~~~
sirkneeland
I don't think that is necessarily the case. I live in SF and work in Sunnyvale
and would ever even consider leaving SF as long as I'm single.

Even if the shuttle is convenient, it is still 2-3 hours of your day gone,
every day.

------
GoNB
> _Most young technology workers order food and supplies online, so she doesn
> 't run into them at the corner store. They keep their noses buried in their
> smartphones when they walk on the streets and don't volunteer in the
> community, Flandrich said._

This is true even outside Silicon Valley. A techies community is the Internet.
GitHub, Reddit, Hacker News, forums, etc. This trend will only get more
prolific as the Internet becomes more immerse.

------
duwease
What can be done? Build more housing I guess, but who's to say the most
desirable still won't be bought by those looking to pay the most?

Not to be dismissive of the impact to those who have up to this point been
able to afford it and now must change their lives.. but I don't know if
there's any 'cure' for people wanting to sell a scarce resource to the highest
bidder.

------
pslam
Just so the article is clear on which group it's trying to scapegoat: they
fail to mention any of the big biotech companies who also run commuter coaches
out of San Francisco.

There are so many reasons for SF's growing wealth gap and housing costs. This
is just an article with all the same hate-speech as one blaming a minority.

------
aet
It's funny how the article doesn't consider technologists to be intellectuals.

~~~
theo91
Sally the project manager, Ben the QA guy, and Amit the Rails hacker, who make
up 99% of the SV workforce, are decidedly not intellectuals.

~~~
geebee
Do you know any interesting people who you would consider to be intellectuals
who work in technology? If so, are their intellectual interests separate from
technology (ie., they have a second life as a musician/artist/writer), or do
they have technical interests that you would consider "intellectual".

------
GoNB
I don't live in SF but question about the techie bus stops: Do panhandlers
congregate there?

~~~
wooster
They've had some problems with muggings, but I haven't seen more panhandling
than usual near them.

------
dclowd9901
Pf, Silicon Valley is split by Silicon Valley's wealth. There are a huge
amount of people here who have $1m+ net worth, and an even larger number who
have moved in since to clean up their code (making far less). That's not even
mentioning the even greater number of support staff who make less than the
transit workers and cops.

The amount of money the top tier people are making around here should be
illegal.

~~~
sebkomianos
On what principle should "making huge amounts of money because you are top
tier" be illegal? And with what filters?

~~~
onebaddude
>And with what filters?

From my years of spending time on HN: being involved in banking or finance
means your wealth is undeserved and ill-gotten. When your business fails, you
should go to jail.

But the excesses of the technology world are lauded. Because, you know,
Napster.

It's some interesting hypocrisy.

~~~
sebkomianos
First of all, I wouldn't call it "hypocrisy". I would call it "not very clear
point of view". I doubt they/we do it by intention; they/we just don't get the
whole picture.

And I write "they/we" because I sometimes have the same "hate" towards the
banking/finance industry. But sometimes it's well-fed by its methods. Of
course I wouldn't demand a clerk to go to jail but I would like to see a few
bank bosses that always get away by bribing (or blackmailing) politicians
treated the same way a small store boss would be treated.

