[brokenkebab]

It's hilarious to read all these militaristic wordings about techies waging "battles", and "conquering" the city, as if it's about barbarian hordes which came down on peaceful SF, pillaged, raped, and burnt everything to the ground. Sure, why scritinize California's, or the city's political theater, why questioning law enforcement inefficiency. Can it be somehow related to drugs, prostitution, and theft? No, it's all software developers' fault.

[YorkshireSeason]

Interesting variant of dehumanisation [1] that often precedes the act of taking property without compensation. The gap between the article's "the city [the tech workers] fought so hard to conquer", and the reality that is squarely the opposite (tech workers did not engage in violence at all, did not fire a single shot) is remarkable, and scarily Orwellian.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization

[atoav]

Technology has a transformative effect on society and the way we live. This is why old cities look like they look (built before cars and trains were a thing) and this is why most US cites look like they look (built during the prime of the car age).

Similar things are certainly true for other technology, even for the (tolerated) side products of said technology. Is any single person at fault here? Probably not. They mostly acted rationally within their small horizon, but together they created a problem, even for themselves.

We have similar problems when it comes to markets and global warming. Many individually rational decisions can lead to negative outcomes for the whole.

There is a very good episode on the Omega Tau Podcast on precisely that problem: https://pca.st/t8Yd

The interviewed Scientist Dr. Igor Nikolic focused on the design of a co-evolutionary method for constructing Agent Based Models of the evolution of Large Scale Socio-Technical systems in the TU Delft in the Netherlands and tries to tackle problems like these, where you'd be lost without a more systemic view of the problem.

[brokenkebab]

I appreciate your effort in trying to explain your opinion, but it's unclear how it is related to my comment above. To clarify: it's sarcastic reaction to the story's bias, and shallowness.

[atoav]

It seems I didn't get your sarcastic tone then, sorry for the inconvenience.

[smsm42]

Well, in a way it's their fault too. Somebody votes for the city government that thinks the way to handle the problem is allocate budgets to yet another NGO that makes the money disappear and produces a nice report, without actually solving anything. Somebody votes for the government that makes naked people running in the middle of the street the new normal (I am not kidding even a little bit, seen that in SF several times with my own eyes), camping out and excreting right on the city's main street pavements the routine and perpetuates the whole sorry state of affairs for many years. SF is not a poor city, judging by amount of megacorps in there and shiny towers already built and being built. I can not believe making the city not look like a wasteland is a problem of no resources. It is a problem of mismanagement. And this management did not come from Mars and conquer the city. Somebody elected them and keeps electing them.

[bubblewrap]

So inhabitants of SF hate tech workers because they vote Democrats?

[smsm42]

No, I did not make this claim. What I claimed instead is that tech workers, along with other inhabitants of SF, share the blame for the sorry state the city is in as much as they voted for the people who put it into that sorry state and who are unable to fix it, despite being the city with excellent climate, lots of thriving industry and extremely affluent (by the standards of any other place) population.