It seems to quire naive to give unions all the credit while failing to America’s declining quality compared to Japan and failure to listen to loud market trends.
GM ignoring Deming’s TQM while Japan wholeheartedly embraced this philosophy should be mentioned.
The rapid increase in oil prices and the big 3 ignoring the data and sticking with the “Americans want big gas guzzling cars” philosophy would also be mentioned.
This last one combined with the oil crisis is how Honda killed Harley Davidson, as well as how Toyota and VW killed the big 3. When the oil crisis hit the 15-mile per gallon american behemoths just became irrelevant.
Containerized shipping and a lack of import taxes also had far more to do with the USA losing its doninance.
We wanted cheaper, smaller, more reliable cars. The big 3 wanted to pretend like it was still 1955.
Turkey is the same way. The government says 99.8% of the population are Muslim by default but it’s probably closer to 60%.
Until a few years ago religion was listed on government identification cards. When you’re born your parenrs must state a religion for your birth certificate or it is automatically listed as Muslim.
You had to go through a burdensome official process as an adult to change this, and once you did this you legally admitted to Apostasy, which opens you up to discrimination (and future consequences if the government were to fall to islamists or neo-ottomans).
Furthermore, it was very common to be discriminated against by HR departments / hiring managers if Islam was not present on your Kimlik (government ID).
This only went away with recent passport and national id standards changing in their futile attempts to join the EU.
(Consider that Turkey is by far the most liberal and secular Muslim nation.)
Seems like a potentially great way to transfer a lot of wealth from taxpayers to the aerospace industry for a very long time with little oversight or roi.
I agree with you. It's driven by nothing more than sci-fi fantasy. Robots are the future of space travel and public funded inventions for those do end up bringing useful technological advances in the future.
Is that not what has been going on with the possibly questionable cost-plus approach of NASA, let alone the US Military contracts and similar government grants for feasibleness research without commitment?
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? Your account has been sliding into flamewar repeatedly already, including nationalistic and regional flamewar. We're trying for something other than that here.
Even public prisons are primarily run and populates through the formiddable lobbying power of police and prison guard unions. Their influence is far more insidiuous than that of the comparably small for-profit prison industry.
Also an opportunity to question your union stance.
> The cost of upgrading infrastructure in a busy city is enormously expensive. San Francisco is on a peninsula with no room at all to expand outward. The only solution is to build up and that’s a real problem in an area prone to earthquakes.
People always ignore this fact. Infrastructure isn’t free. When all is said and done the Central Subway extension will likely have cost over $2bn for 1.7 miles of subway. [1] The new transit center cost $2.2bn [2]. Rebuilding 1/2 of the bay bridge cost $6.5bn. [3]
Consider that money for all of this is artificially restricted by Prop 13, and by California being a net-giver state, paying about $40bn per year more to the fed than we receive back, effectively being a piggy bank for poorer states.
> Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building.
Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
Well that's just inefficiency or graft. The rest of the world is able to achieve far more for far less cost.
> Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
Furthermore, it’s not even a big city problem. California High Speed Rail has been an immensely expensive project so far, an order of magnitude more than comparable systems, and the only segment built is in Central California, not the expensive coasts.
> Well that's just inefficiency or graft. The rest of the world is able to achieve far more for far less cost.
Citation?
> Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
All costs below are in $USD nominal per mile of fully-underground subway system.
NYC subway extension, east side: $3.7B per mile.
SF Central subway: $928M per mile.
Tokyo: $400M
Beijing: $240M
Berlin: $327M
Naples: $194M
Milan: $175M
This is backed up by a Citylab analysis:
Alon Levy at Citylab shows approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile and $1 billion. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile.
The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.
And of course plotted in Tableau [5].
> That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
It should be noted that San Francisco is surrounded by bay and ocean on 3 sides and also contains a significant amount of land which is not really seismically sound, and 50% of which is protected parkland.
Those other 3 cities have significantly more capacity both to build up and out. Blame the electorate all you want but geography is geography.
San Francisco is a small city, only 49 square miles, 1/2 of which is parkland and a significant portion is landfill which liquifies in a serious earthquake. It’s also surrounded by water on 3 sides
I don’t understand why so many HN commenters seem to think it could magically become a dense metropolis like Manhattan or Chicago.
Even in the Gold Rush in the 1800s SF was unscalable the rent was unaffordable. It was always a high crime city. Just read about the history of the barbary coast.
Everybody who comes here purely for money wants this city to be something it just isn’t.
It could be three times as populous by developing its existing residential land to Paris or Barcelona proportions, neither of which have Manhattan’s physical form. The vast majority of residential land (nearly 80%) is unremarkable single family housing.
Sure, but we don’t want that. There is an incredible amount of space in the bay area
which could be turned into droid housing and office buildings. ALL of those places have cheaper real estate, fewer homeless people (the #2 complaint of everybody here) and warmer weather.
It’s 2021 and Covid-19 has shown that remote work is viable.
Back in the day large tech companies like Sun, Peoplesoft and Cisco built offices all over the bay so that people had the option to work at facilities close to their home.
SF wasn’t even a significant tech destination before 2007.
My wife and I are actually moving to Barcelona when Covid is over, under the Non-Lucrative residency permit. If you think San Franciscans have a Nimby attitude and hate outsiders then you should go visit Barcelona.
“Unremarkabe single family housing”. So what, you want to take peoples’ housing via eminent domain and build more of the hideously dugly condo boxes they’ve stuffed all over SOMA and the Missiom?
I happen to love my unremarkable home in the Sunset in which my family has lived for 55 years.
Great that you love your home. That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be able to redevelop their own homes, but that’s currently illegal. It also doesn’t make your house or its architecture remarkable or worth preserving if you wanted to do something else with the land.
It’s quite rude to refer to housing for people as “droid housing.” What makes you any better than them?
It’s quite rude for you to say my home is not remarkable or worth preserving. You’ve never even seen it. You know nothing of my tightknit, diverse community which cares about things of more importance
than ipos and user engagement.
“Droid housing” is san francisco slang for the soulless eyesore boxes containing cramped, slapshodnfaux “lofts”, usually painted a bluish slate grey or salmon pink on the outside, entirely devoid of character or quality.
Thankfully San Francisco’s direct democracy works well to keep this city small. There are many soulless sprawling cities which are seismically stable, devoid of character, flat and inhabited by people who don’t care enough to resist.
3x as dense??????? We are already 17,000 per square mile. New York is 28,000 per m^2.
You seriously think San Francisco would be livable at 51,000 pe m^2? It would literally cost $500bn in infrastructure investment to make that possible just inside the city.
101 and 280 would need to be 15 lames wide each, bulldozing 1/8 of the peninsula. We would need a half a dozen new transbay bridges and tunnels.
SFO would probably need another couple of runways and terminals.
You’re talking trillions of dollars in investment because tech companies prefer open office spaces to Zoom.
Koreatown in los angeles is a bit more than 1/3 the size of SF and achieves 42,000 per mile and is basically a mix of single family homes and 3-5 story apartments over parking. There is a subway that comes every 10 minutes. The 101 through here is not 15 lanes wide each, it's 4. The city still functions at this density, and could probably stand a lot more and function just as well.
Tripling the density of residentially zoned land is not the same as tripling the density per square mile. There’s lots of non-residential land between roads, parks, commercial areas, etc.
Why would we need more freeways if amenities are local? In fact, we could probably demolish freeways if more people who worked in San Francisco could afford to live here.
People don’t disappear if you don’t have housing for them. Why is building infrastructure in Phoenix preferable to growing it here? There are returns to scale with all of this. OAK is underutilized as an airport as well.
Have you considered that San Francisco is a pleasant place to live, and people want to live here independently of their employment situation? Prices were high before technology employment.
GM ignoring Deming’s TQM while Japan wholeheartedly embraced this philosophy should be mentioned.
The rapid increase in oil prices and the big 3 ignoring the data and sticking with the “Americans want big gas guzzling cars” philosophy would also be mentioned.
This last one combined with the oil crisis is how Honda killed Harley Davidson, as well as how Toyota and VW killed the big 3. When the oil crisis hit the 15-mile per gallon american behemoths just became irrelevant.
Containerized shipping and a lack of import taxes also had far more to do with the USA losing its doninance.
We wanted cheaper, smaller, more reliable cars. The big 3 wanted to pretend like it was still 1955.