The main reasons are

- crime -- SF isn't like Asian cities where I can walk around safely at night

- lack of public transit AND lack of parking (either convenient parking OR good transit would be fine, but SF has neither)

- rents are unaffordably high and I need a lot of space for projects

- not clean

- Asian food is mediocre compared to suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont

I love cities like Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei, and Chengdu, though. These cities have everything I like about cities. Good transit, cleanliness, safety, and good food (by my standards) everywhere.

But the failing schools push many parents out against their own and their own childrens' preferences.

This is one of the weird dysfunctions of the USA. It's really not that different to how a lot of third world cities leave a lot of potential wealth on the table by having poorly functioning electrical grids with scheduled black outs. In both cases nobody really benefits and there's no real net savings for society, it's just money left on the table and burned away and is the biggest reason cities are seen as child-unfriendly when in fact they are inherently more friendly to children than a suburb where you're a prisoner till you get a driver's license.

Parks in the city tend to be focused on art. They often lack kid basics like swings and sand. They tend to be too small for a ball game. Often the people who are there will yell at kids for running off the path, yelling and the other ways kids play.

Bars and clubs are not kid friendly places. Middle age folks are much less interested. If you are middle aged and hang out in a bar you are an alcoholic. Clubs often have an minimum age, so going means an expensive babysitter. (bars might allow kids to eat there).

Theater is similar to bars - kids might not be banned, but they are not really welcome either. Both because the shows are not what kids would be interested in, and because they will kick out the kids if they are noisy (which they will be - not kid friendly shows).

Restaurants will allow kids, but often you get dirty looks for bring kids. Many of the others do not like kids and will let you know if your kids are misbehaving - what they define as misbehaving is normal for kids.

Then we add in costs - all of the above is affordable when it is just 1 or two adults, but with kids it is either a lot more expensive to bring this with or you hire a babysitter. You also need larger apartments - most are 1 or 2 bedrooms, but a family wants at least 3 and likely more. You can buy a house in the suburbs with 4 bedrooms and other extra rooms for less than the month payment on a city apartment.

Last there are schools which tend to be bad quality. I've concluded that this because of the other factors above - few families live there and so not enough people care to make them good. It does however stop many families that might want to try living in the city.

also if you're not able to drive cuz your eyes or reaction time are bad, being walkable helps -- that exercise might even keep grandpa healthier, longer.

and in the case of my in-laws, a big draw was proximity to (good) medical care. literally walkable to the local hospital and medical services, and if something goes bad the ambulance can get them there ASAP.

and then you have more food options, more entertainment, etc.

Basically to have thriving arts scene you need people in the 20s-30s to be able to live on a minimum wage job and do art/music/whatever in their spare time. Even better if it is a part-time job or some sort of government scheme.

If your cost of living is too high then you are restricting yourself to trust-fund 20yo and older people with a bit of spare time. Also high property reduce the number of venues.

I’m very much not in the Valley or even the U.S. but I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of SF streets being littered, about homelessness, drug use, something called bopping. Isn’t this real, or is it far less common than those videos make it out to be? Interested to hear this from people in SF.

[1] https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

Can you name a handful of known startups headquartered in SF in the early 2000s?

I tried searching for stats on this but it seems more difficult than I have time for. So I turned to chatgpt, which (FWIW) agrees with my recollection:

In the year 2000, Silicon Valley startups were predominantly located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in cities like Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. San Francisco itself was not as prominent a hub for tech startups at that time.

While exact percentages are difficult to ascertain without specific data, it is generally understood that a relatively small percentage of Silicon Valley startups were headquartered within San Francisco city limits in 2000. The tech startup scene in San Francisco began to grow significantly later, particularly in the mid-2000s and beyond.

It shouldn’t be like that, but those are the priorities we (as society and electorate) decided on.

https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=san+francisco+homeless...

But what that guy said was "the street scene is very bad in that part of SF." and he's dead right.

I love this city, but misleading people on the Internet is not right. Tell them the truth. I've lived here as long as I have because I think the benefits outweigh the pains. But not because there are no pains.

(Although if you’re truly hardcore you don’t care what the street looks like, you sleep under your desk.)

Given the density of SF and how quickly spaces can change you cannot realistically compare the two.

Not the case at Twitter

Still I probably wouldn't do the amount of overtime they require of workers at SpaceX and Tesla

What a waste of talent ...

Liberalism isn't about shutting down opinions you disagree with, it's about keeping an open mind and engaging with opposing views. Demonizing Musk and downvoting any questions about this demonization is a sign of immature behavior.

https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.

People say this about any vaguely blue city, which is almost all of them. But they forget Urban areas are very dense. You're actually more likely, per capita, to die to gun violence in rural America. It's just very hard to see that because the coverage isn't there and the actual amount of deaths is lower.

Obviously others will have different experiences than me.

Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.

Relatedly, this increases my sense of having made the right decision by staying away from the US despite the significant wage disparity.

I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.

After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.

Even so, this methodology still shows 13% walks to work in SF in 2019, and 36% took transit. So if we thinking about the typical worker in San Fransisco, they do indeed either walk, bike or take transit.

If we are only thinking about a typical worker that lives in the Mission and works in SoMa, I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes well over 80% that walks, bikes or takes transit (and most likely a mix of all of the above). And I very much doubt they spend more than 40 min commuting each day in each direction.

https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/commute-mode-choice

If you take bart to Montgomery, it's an 0.8 mile walk to South Park. Calling that a bit under 20 minutes seems fair.

So a 10 minute walk to bart, a 5 minute wait, 7 minutes on bart, 3 minutes to exit the station, and 20 minutes to South Park is your 45-ish minutes.

Source: I used to do this commute. Getting around internally in sf is absolutely terrible the second you're not super close to the transit line.

Is this a safe enough space to say that taking the Muni anywhere is kind of foolish?

> I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

You and I have a lot in common and face many of the same personal and business headwinds in the Bay Area community. Neither of us have really been affected by the business tax, have we? Whereas the far more impactful Prop 13 and Costa-Hawkins: where is the leadership around repealing / amending those laws from tech industry executives? Or from anyone? What to make of how homes are the de-facto savings mechanism for Americans? Or that everyone is driving everywhere, even when they don't have to? Or that our schools, private and public, kind of work like Ponzi schemes, where all the smart kids are concentrated in a few places, making everywhere else worse until those schools close and then, where do those kids go?

Many issues, no leadership, just leavership: solving your problems by changing the community you live in, not by changing your community. This is fine, we have little choice.

In my opinion, in order to show leadership, you have to be able to say, "The Muni is a bad choice for most white collar tech workers." You have to be able to tell people they are doing something wrong, and then also figure out how to tell them without hurting their feelings or violating the totally imaginary idea that your choice of commute is righteous, infallible, subjective self expression, like choosing your hair color or the lift of your Doc Martens. You'd have to write Hacker News comments like, "Well is biking really a death wish? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?" to high-drama anonymous Internet personalities, whose power to downvote is the same as yours, so how could objectivity ever thrive? That's hard.

That said, most tech workers should be working remotely. But also, most tech companies have bloated payrolls, so we shall see how that all plays out.

That is in fact why I think SF has a bad rap for being dirty: it doesn't rain very much. I've lived in SF since 2007, before that I'm Chicago for 14 years. I was recently back in Chicago for a few weeks. It gets just as dirty as SF or any other city, but it rained three times in a single week in Chicago (two with tornado warnings), which does wonders for washing away just about everything, including all kinds of smells, detritus and (human or otherwise) excrement.

They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac app so... no

I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...

[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-sha...

At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.

Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.

Does it still apply if the company offers relocation benefits and a reasonable time for (say) school transfers?

Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.

For a map and list of the organizational insanity, see https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/blog/transitagencieslist (2019).

(Large tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple avoid all this by using private employee-only shuttles which take the freeway where possible).

BART from the East Bay is in the process of being extended to downtown SJ (latest estimate: "2036", they are still debating single-bore vs twin-bore tunnel, to save money in construction).

It's not fair to just blame BART vs Caltrain though, there are multiple cities that need to cooperate with other too: as we saw in the neverending saga of the CA High-Speed Rail project, people wanted a midpeninsula stop, but no midpeninsula city (Redwood City vs Palo Alto vs Mountain View) wanted to be the one to incur the increased traffic and enormous construction disruption from underground multistorey parking lots, so it was dropped.

At least, Caltrain electrification is finally promised, fall 2024: https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-be... (more reliable (=> fewer breakdowns and delays), less noise, cleaner air quality)

(Both are still faster by far than driving, particularly during rush hour.)

CalTrain: <https://www.caltrain.com/media/22502/download>

BART's Green Line (Daly City - Beryessa / North San Jose) departs every 20 minutes from 4:55 am though 7:36 pm (southbound) and 4:59 am through 6:49 pm (northbound):

<https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/January%201...>

As an X employee, if you had optimized your commute around the mid-market area, you could be living less than 45 minutes away on a single mode of public transit, but it could double or triple to commute to the new X offices. Any time you have a transfer with the commuter systems in the Bay Area, it's going to be a clusterfuck from time to time.

If it's not I encourage you to go look at the stellar success of the boring company in places like Las Vegas and reconsider your assessment of the future.

https://knight-hennessy.stanford.edu/

Think “city, but instead of walking, you drive”.

Imagine New York vs Dallas for example. I think it is fair to say that some cities are more spread out and low density, making them feel like a suburban sprawl.

A town of 100k in Europe will feel livelier than a metro area of 3 million in the US.

Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.

That must do a number on your nervous system long term. I live in NYC where I'm on high alert in specific areas at specific times that amount to maybe 30% of my time outside home and office. Otherwise I'm earbuds in enjoying something, or staring into the middle distance processing something on my mind. Both feel essential to my mental health.

> In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.

Are we talking only about having basic city street savvy (e.g., you're perceived as a savvy native rather than easy pickings, can spot the usual threats and risks without trying, and can avoid or handle them)?

Or more like someone who has that basic street savvy, but who is also feeling like they found themselves in a rougher neighborhood at the moment (e.g., getting closer to military head on a swivel mode, and looking to not spend more time there than necessary)?

>In terms of security, If you keep your head on a swivel then you're fine. I had the same alertness that I have when traveling a foreign country. You need to be on high alert all the time.

do you not realize this is really bad and not some reality of the world? Just the terrible city you live in?

I dont think thats true once you get east of 4th and for sure 3rd street.

    > It’s interesting you feel you can judge the type of person I am almost no information. The internet makes everyone overfit their priors.

I think the prevailing attitude is more like, "Yes, crime is a function of inequality, but it's also a function of X, Y, Z other things, and leaving them out does more harm than good to the discourse."

There is compelling evidence crime is correlated with inequality.

I don't remember there being homeless camps on Market but maybe I missed them. I saw them in other places around SF though. So unless there's more to it I don't expect just cleaning up the homeless camps to be enough to fix SF.

> Does Elon think that the talent he has in SF will just magically move?

How much talent does x/twitter require? Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Google/Microsoft have 20-30-50-100 different products each, some of those products with 50-100 teams for different parts of the product. X seems like it has 1 product with 4-ish features. Posts, Ads, Video, Direct Messages. Is there more?

If you say "Twitter", people know what you're talking about. If you say "X", are you talking about "X" marks the spot? Rated "X"? "X" the former project name for Paypal? "X" as in an unknown quantity? "X" is used in a lot of different contexts. I think if you want to use the name "X", then you should probably say "The company, X,".

Twitter is a verb, but when you use it as a noun, the listener instantly knows that you are talking about the company "Twitter". Plus, it's the name we are all familiar with.

I do agree that the headline shouldn’t be editorialized, though. “X (formerly Twitter)” at most.

Not saying it's a strong case, just that it tilts that way. Others would call it differently and that's always the case with a close call.

Just because you buy something doesn't mean you get to change popular usage by decree. There's a whiff of corporatism about that which sticks in my craw.

(I am not, god help us, making any implicit point about the muskwars.)

That’s the status quo until they rescind that as well. The companies who transitioned to hybrid early have been ending it since mid-late 2023 and the efforts have only ramped up in 2024.

Hybrid is a great way to cripple remote work too: remote work requires good communication hygiene in the company, hybrid makes that falter by reinstating the old direct back-channels, now you can degrade systematic communications and hobble remote workers, then justify RTO on those grounds.

And then remote work and quality of life is back to being a perk of upper management, “as it should be”.

Not all organisations or executives have a vested interest in commercial real estate. Especially this late in the game when plenty of orgs have had an opportunity to let their leases expire.

Not all RTO action is due to some perverted desire by incompetent managers to see subordinate butts in seats, either.

There is a sizeable contingent of leadership that legitimately sees in-person work as the best means of eliciting productivity from their staff, and are willing to trade off taking a hit from some staff not being happy about this, and potentially leaving. You might not agree with the strategy. You might strongly feel that it’s wrong. But the reality is that they believe it.

Furthermore there is certainly a sizeable contingent of staff that would prefer a hybrid role to full WFH. I’m not talking about faceless sales leadership extroverts as techies often put it. I’m talking about ICs. I’m talking about developers.

And there are certainly, certainly people that just don’t feel as strongly about it as a lot of the people here.

I’d love for just one WFH-related thread to not devolve into faux-intelligent basically-xeroxed screeds about commercial real estate and dumb management.

[1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...

[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...

That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.

1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/californias-...

That being said, seeing it first hand is pretty shocking for sure. We stayed a couple of blocks from Tenderloin a few weeks ago and at one point drove down a side street that was just full of people doing meth (I think). Whatever SF is doing, it sure seems like it needs a course change.

i guess it's the new Facebook, social network for old people who will not open a different app ever, for some small groups?

when you stop dwelling on the random hot yoga posts while scrolling, after an ad scroll by, they will pump it up to other engagement content to feed the pavlovian cycle.

The previous twitter had (somehow) moderation. You would think what you want about it but you were free to use your free speech right elsewhere.

The difference is that Musk says that it gives you this canal but he lies because he is still moderating the network, except the moderation now favors far right content.

That’s not more free speech than before, that’s just a pro-fascist moderation.

See e.g. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/journalist-sues-twitter-...

Getting banned for wrongthink on the old Twitter was a rite of passage, almost every content creator I follow (mostly gaming youtubers, nothing spicy or even controversial) got banned at least once.

Look at the two Tweets they used as a justification of his ban [1]

> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!

And

> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.

Of course, in the blog post, Twitter claims to have "assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy"

If those two tweets are glorification of violence, then your post is calling for genocide.

[1] https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension

Either way, this is just like normal government laws. One of the big criticisms that Libertarians have over laws is that they're not universally enforced, so they end up being selectively enforced, which just means that "those with power" wield the laws against those they don't like. Same goes here with platforms like Twitter. The rules are vague, opaque, and their enforcement is seemingly random and at the whims of some faceless entity behind their enforcement process. If we all knew these supposed "terms of service" and they did, in fact, have very clear rules and guidelines then there would be absolutely no room for conservatives or anyone else to cry about being targeted.

Free speech, at least on the Internet, means say what don't get the majority nod and enjoy getting harassed to literal suicide, death, mental health consequences, or all of above. Right makes might, not the normal way around.

IOW, free speech do come with consequences, and it's super-proportional on the Internet.

Twitter is a complete dumpster fire (revenue down 80% since he acquired it, and is now making only around 10% of the money required to even service the debt from acquisition). Basically every company he's involved with is doing terribly, except for SpaceX, which fortunately has Gwynne Shotwell at the helm. But even SpaceX isn't doing so well with their latest rocket, Starship; the upper stage is simply way too big and heavy for most uses, and will require up to 15 (!!) additional refueling in-orbit refueling launches to fully refuel a single Starship for missions beyond LEO, like the upcoming lunar missions. This is a huge liability that casts doubt on the overall architecture. Contrast with the Saturn V, a smaller rocket that could nevertheless do an entire self-contained lunar mission with a single launch.

I was a huge Elon fan for many years, but everything he's been doing recently has been a swing and a miss.

https://x.com/RobinDiAngelo/status/1814664120307704118

No one who depends on popularity for their income leaves.

If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.

Anyone could browse Twitter anonymously, since the beginning.