It doesn't take a vast conspiracy to rid prospering metropolitan areas of working class non-white people; it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.
It's not a race issue; it's a class issue. The non-white people that SV companies employ tend not to be the underprivileged people that are driven out of metropolitan areas due to gentrification.
Well, you painted it as at least partially a race issue in your previous comment. If it's not a race issue, you shouldn't reference race in whatever point you're trying to make, unless you're just trying to be incendiary for its own sake. And if you can't make a point without being incendiary about it, realize that whatever point you're trying to make is almost certainly objectively wrong, or perhaps your philosophy is more about maintaining a romanticized self-image than actually trying to make the world a better place or even acquiring basic wisdom about anything.
Bomb (or brick) throwing is trivially easy and makes the thrower feel like a badass without actually helping anyone. Actually trying to look at all sides of a complicated issue, figuring out what should be done about it, and trying to make a difference is hard, thankless, and humbling. It will make you feel stupid and inadequate for the task, because it's hard and it's worth doing. People who care about those things don't have your comment history; people who are feeding intellectual conceits do.
Wealthy people move in, raise property values, spur local economy, but displace lower-income families and the kinds of independent marginal businesses that served them. Or, wealthy people move out, property values plummet, services are slashed, land goes vacant, crime skyrockets, and kids can't safely get to school anymore.
What is the middle ground? I'm asking seriously. Imagine you were a city planner or the mayor of SF or Detroit or BDFL of California or whatever. What's your plan?
If I were a city planner, I'd require that all new (or renovated) appartement buildings include a percentage of "affordable appartements", with fixed limits on the cost per square foot. That's how cities like Vienna keep rents affordable.
Isn't the majority of all housing in Vienna controlled by the state? It's probably easy to make rent controls work if you can bypass incentive problems by simply making all housing public.
Gentrification is often a problem of inefficient or overly segregated housing supply. Historically, many cities have benefited from highly productive industries without becoming gentrified ghettoes of the rich.
Didn't San Francisco's city management exacerbate this problem by imposing new low-density zoning restrictions at the same time as an influx of wealthy professionals starting driving prices up?
In "Pandora's Hope", Bruno Latour goes to great length to attack the artificial subject-object and nature-culture separations that are the legacy of the Cartesian paradigm. It's a highly intriguing book. Here's the foreword, which deals directly with the brain-in-a-vat:
The author has been writing / working on the implications of drone technologies regularly in various contexts for the past few years. He didn't dedicate a separate piece to the Amazon news at the time, and the political underpinnings of drones (which he has most often dealt with in the military context) and extraordinary / unjust rendition are not at all unrelated.
I understand the author is interested in military drones. But that doesn't mean that Amazon's annoucement has anything at all to do with the story he is trying to write.
> Aren't we supposed to be the champions of the future?
If you mean as "hackers", to pick a word from the name of this website, who were for a long time, rightly or wrongly, supposed to be conscientious watchdogs of present and future technology, no.
If for no other reason, as technologists who witnessed Stallman, Assange, Bradley, Snowden, so on in their lifetimes, you're supposed to be first and foremost astute critics of the future that dominant forces of the realm of technology such as Amazon are aiming to build. And rather than enthusiastically applaud whatever new and possibly exciting technology they bring to the table that contributes to your present or future paycheck and their private profit, you're supposed to take political responsibility for the future you help build by being their employees, customers and unpaid evangelists.
We're talking about delivering packages, not stealing your privacy or freedom. Now, I'm sure we can think up ways on how it can be used for evil, but that hasn't been the focus of all the negativity. Landing on small children and having your packages stolen are hardly concerns I'd associate with names like Stallman, Assange, Bradley, and Snowden.
I was commenting in a general sense, on the notion I quoted, of which the current discussion is a mere symptom; not specifically about Amazon or package delivery. Yet the point is: when a technology giant talks about delivering packages in a new and technologically novel, yet questionable way, we shouldn't be talking about delivering packages; we should be talking in a broader sense about the political and economical implications of that new way, and how it's going to affect people in the foreseeable future.
The notion of being unquestioning "champions of the future" is a general trait of most HN participants, and in direct contrast to what you problematize, what I find problematic is the great wave of instant enthusiasm we're seeing among so-called "hackers" for Amazon's stated intentions.
How HN page rankings really work: you vote stuff up, and then the flag mob and hidden moderators axe right off the front page whatever irritates the pro-capitalist internet-libertarian techno-optimist idelogical sensibilities of the
white male Californian HN hive mind even in the subtlest of ways.
Isn't that the point of this site? That's mainly why I come here, to peer into the collective unconcious of the californian ivy-league portfolio-owning hivemind. It's like a zoo but with tesla owners instead of chimps.
I don't imply an ideal of neutrality; no online community is ideologically neutral, and neutrality isn't a merit to strive for. It's just that most participants seem to have internalized a supposedly meritocratic "whatever is interesting to good hackers floats to the top" mental model regarding how HN works, when that simply isn't the case. Every online community turns into a self-censoring echo chamber with time, and given its origins and initial purpose, the precise kind of echo chamber that HN has been turned into shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The part that bothers me is that it's not self-censoring. It's being actively censored, and sometimes the motives being the penalization are obnoxious; everything that doesn't directly promote california imperialism gets shunted to the side.
I believe it to be uncontroversial that all communities need some moderation, but the lack of transparency or involved around these parts has always made me feel uncomfortable.
I distinctly recall some articles on gender inequality in the industry…
Well, duh. The actual purpose of HN is as an advertising and recruitment tool for YC. It's certainly not for the benefit of casual commenters like ourselves. I think of it as a more tech-oriented form of television. Possibly one of those high-hundreds cable channels.
Wait, everyone thinks its a clean pure meritocracy but it is actually a complicated system of structural penalties and personal bias that sees specific apparently meritorious posts prevented from reaching the top? That reminds me of something....
HN is far more coastal-liberal than any flavor of libertarian. With a few exceptions, of course: people favor some policies relating to tech on which the conventional left doesn't have a strong opinion.
Not sure -- to me it looks like at least the majority of commenters are quite strongly pro-regulation: e.g. look at all the discussions of AirBNB vs. zoning just a few weeks ago, or 23andme more recently. Sure, voter and commenter demographics could be different, but probably not that much.
For a contrasting perspective to the technology-centric, access-oriented view of "public benefits" that is typically dominant on HN, see the documentary "Google and the World Brain":
In the past year, I've emailed info@ycombinator.com about what I thought were perfectly legitimate and thought-provoking, yet not-exactly-in-tune-with-the-HN-hive-mind submissions getting axed off the front page by moderators, on more than one occasion. I haven't received a reply.
While that is true, Feldman did encourage people to walk out, do their daily chores, have some fresh air etc. and come back in if they wanted to, in the brief introduction speeches to some of the performances of his longer (5+ hour) pieces.
