I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the preferred metonymy for corporate evil. As if replacing each bus with twenty cars would make SF a better place for anyone?
My theory for this is that Google is essentially a functioning welfare state which is geographically co-located with a dysfunctioning welfare state. If it weren't the Google bus it would be the Google food kitchens, the Google social insurance, the Google healthcare, the Google subsidized apartments, the Google free education, etc etc.
Nothing so frustrating to hear that your dream polity has been realized in your town and you're not invited.
I'm not sure I'd call Google a "welfare state". They're not really tolerant of slackers, if you stop pulling your weight then you're out in the street.
Among the type of people who think "'welfare state' describes the kind of society I wish to live in", welfare state does not mean "we pay people to be slackers", it means "we have fairly robust systems for preventing the vagaries of life from materially impacting our citizens."
n.b. Not to infringe upon the HN politics rule but, for avoidance of doubt, the above does not describe my personal politics.
I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the object of ire given that, from my perspective, it seems like most of the growth is being driven by startups now preferring SF as their home base of operation rather than bussed employees to south bay companies.
AirBNB, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber etc are all thousand people companies and almost all of the employees live in SF.
The theory is that without buses Silicon Valley employees would stay in the valley, causing less competition for housing. Of course, this theory ignores all the tech companies with offices in San Francisco.
I'm not sure that's the core of the issue so much as disappointment over the tech companies preserving the status quo making it easy for those in power to avoid the issues.
You assume that either is this solution or no solution, which isn't necessarily true. In fact I would argue that this proprietary solution makes other solutions less viable. Both from a political and economic standpoint, with less pressure on the government and less usage for any public solution.
I appreciate this link. I read it through, but I'm afraid it doesn't really present much of a case for... whatever it is Solnit wants to do about housing policy in SF, besides sneer at tech workers. I found the piece frustratingly long on vague innuendo and ressentiment, and short on arguments about what we ought to value, and how we ought to achieve it.
Many of her arguments, such as they are, seem to follow backwards from the desired conclusion that tech workers are awful and their employers, even worse. For example, consider:
> The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car ... the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train.
Of course, if the companies didn't organize shuttle buses, then they'd be accused of ruining the environment by letting their employees drive nine hours every day. "How come the most powerful corporations in the world can't shell out for a shuttle bus", you can just imagine the author asking. Furthermore, suppose Google et al. did lobby California for a fifty mile commuter rail project from SF to SV that serves practically no one but... Google et al.'s employees. Headline: Greedy Corporations Buy Off Transit Authority for Tech Nerd Express, Shift Costs to Public. In general, I'm a big fan of public transit because I think it's a situation where collective action can often improve efficiency. But arguing that Google is destroying civil society by not 'heightening the contradictions' in order to get the transit authority to build a railway to nowhere is kind of rich.
Solnit's discussion of rent control is also pretty amazing. She punctuates her (completely understandable) complaints about the rental market with astonishment that the textbook unintended consequences of rent control persist despite rent control, never considering that they might be due to rent control. Prospective tenants supplicating to landlords, live-in couples occupying two units just to lock in tenancy, landlords dis-preferring long-term tenants, the overall lack of response in the housing supply to demand; these are classic symptoms which noted conservative Paul Krugman diagnoses in the article I linked elsewhere in this thread. If someone wants to write a piece in LRB defending rent control in SF, I'd sincerely like to read it. But you have to argue for it, not simply assume the desirability of a policy which is practically unanimously opposed by the people who study it professionally.
Finally, although I'm of mixed mind about whether I even want to indulge this line of thought, I find it pretty stunning that someone with Solnit's pedigree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_e...) presumes to speak for the poor and downtrodden, those "more frail", in a first-person piece called "Diary". It's the same sort of tenor you find on flyers like this one (http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/...). The author, who fancies themselves immersed in "poverty, homelessness and death..violence and degradation", makes it painfully obvious that they have at least one liberal arts degree.
From what I've read so far, it seems to me like the "opponents"* of tech workers in the bay area are basically the cultural ancien regime, upset about losing their cool digs and relative status to a bunch of nerds (Solnit is pretty explicit about this). If that's what this is about, I wish they'd just say it. And if they're genuinely concerned about the legitimately poor,* they should recommend serious proposals, and would probably have the support of many of the "technocrats" Solnit so despises. But mixing and matching leaves me short on both pathos and policy.
---
* I use scare quotes because I still don't understand what they want to do about tech workers in SF, except disdain them so hard. Which, have at it...
* * A group that, by the way, has practically zero intersection with the set of people to whom it would occur to hand out passive-aggressive, Flesch-Kincaided-out typeset essays concluding with "GET THE FUCK OUT OF OAKLAND"
* * * I also suspect I am less outraged than Solnit is that a man cannot make a living as the almost-Poet-Laureate of San Francisco, and must find a cheaper place. I'm not making this up.
Oh, I agree completely. I largely mentioned her and that piece because, AFAIK, she was the actual progenitor of this idea that the busses are The symbol of disparity, suggesting even that they should be protested against. I mean, the busses aren't anything new. At best, they've been really annoying, but this whole outrage thing was born in 2013, not 2012 or even 2010.
