The machine building itself is end game. At that point you're suggesting singularity. I don't see how any profession survives that.
There's so much hype around AI right now, it's absolutely unhinged. Yes, we have semi-conversational AI. Yes, image detection is pretty good. It's all supervised.
Sociopaths, the clueless and losers. This great essay analyzing The Office argues that in a modern business context you're one of the three. [1]
Those "functional elites" you mentioned? Usually they're working 20-50% more for 0-25% percent more pay. They're called the clueless because they've been conned into working more for less, usually under some clever guise like company being family or company values or the promise of a promotion that's always a cycle or two away. The essay then goes on to argue that losers are really just the clueless once they "get it." Losers understand the treadmill and lean into the tedium always aiming to save their time by playing dumb as needed. Sociopaths break out of the cycle by operating only with concern for power and switching up how they talk to folks based on whether they're clueless, losers or fellow sociopaths.
Sociopaths speak in powertalk -- an exchange of information on clear terms. It's usually veiled because the clueless and losers listen in and it makes them feel uncomfortable. If it weren't veiled it would probably sound like lawyer-jargon with lots of plausible deniability, conditions, arguing and explicit shared definitions.
Losers and clueless speak in their own languages based on who they're talking with. It's basically just lots of trying to feel okay... except for when it comes to losers speaking with sociopaths. There the only communication is straight talk, which is basically just direct requests of a master-slave dynamic (i.e. "do this"). The essay is well worth the read!
Not every place in life is a place of struggle and fight. Some people actually enjoy their work. This just sounds like "class struggle" and "proletariat and bourgeoisie" under different names. Also thinking of your colleagues and people as "elites", "losers" and the "clueless" gives me some understanding to the state of mind of who writes this.
To keep it lighter, in the companies I've worked in the architypes of people were more like:
- The "anger problem that shouts every once in a while" guy
- The "chronic nervous person that is paralyzed by impostor syndrome"
- The "i find more problems than solutions" guy
- The "i'm here to socialize, make friends, maybe get married"
- The "i gave up 10 years ago and just want my paycheck"
- The "i'm a kid learning everything I can and am just excited to be here"
- The "i'm working on my true passion outside of work while hanging out here with you guys"
etc etc
People have their own lives, not everything is just a power play of losers and elites.
I'll be honest, even if the world was exactly as you described, which it isn't, I'd choose to not see it that way so that my life wouldn't be such a bleak existance. Rather be a naive happy fool than enlightned and depressed.
The article uses struggly words like sociopaths and losers, but defines them very differently from common use, often the 'losers' have the most fulfilling and rounded lives, i.e. true winners
- The "chronic nervous person that is paralyzed by impostor syndrome" - clueless
- The "i find more problems than solutions" guy - clueless
- The "i'm here to socialize, make friends, maybe get married" - loser
- The "i gave up 10 years ago and just want my paycheck" - loser
- The "i'm working on my true passion outside of work while hanging out here with you guys" etc etc - loser
It's a rough model of org interactions with poorly named categories.
>The article uses struggly words like sociopaths and losers, but defines them very differently from common use, often the 'losers' have the most fulfilling and rounded lives, i.e. true winners
They're "losers" from the point of view of capitalism and corporate hierarchy. If you're not committing your life to ruthlessly climb the ladder to grasp at wealth and power by any means and you don't buy into the game or its rules, you're basically a defective cog, a useless part of the machine.
If you're unaware that success is a rigged lottery designed to find and promote sociopaths and actually believe that reward comes with hard work, determination and passion, you're clueless. A mark. A rube. If you're smart enough, with enough abuse you'll eventually wake up and become a loser.
> They're "losers" from the point of view of capitalism and corporate hierarchy. If you're not committing your life to ruthlessly climb the ladder to grasp at wealth and power by any means and you don't buy into the game or its rules, you're basically a defective cog, a useless part of the machine.
You have too narrow a definition of capitalism and of corporate hierarchy. What you describe is one outworking of them, but not the outworking.
This is pervasive across US corporate culture and present in 4/4 different sectors I have been employed.
Based off your statement in another thread "I've never really been to the US, other than a couple of brief work trips" - I can understand your view, but it is indeed the most common paradigm. Will happily review your sources that refute my experience.
Working for oneself is how we're meant to work, not to be a cog in someone else's machine. It is sad that for the past ~100 years it has become the norm and we idolize entrepreneurs, as if they are mythical creatures.
I hard disagree here. That's what capitalism wants us to evolve into: individual enterprises. But no, there's nothing inherent in the universe or human nature that determines individualism as the true way of working.
You don't have to go far to see people contributing to bigger causes that are not owned by someone else. Open source is a great example of this.
The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because they symbolize capitalism's perfect individual. There's a reason society today wants everyone to be an "entrepreneur", but it's not some higher meaning. It's just capitalism.
> The main reason people idolize entrepreneurs is because they symbolize capitalism's perfect individual
That's some deep revisionism right there. Humans have worked for themselves, for no master, since before we became Homo Sapiens.
The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of your needs.
> Humans have worked for themselves, for no master, since before we became Homo Sapiens.
Sure, humans worked for themselves, but that was not what ultimately got us here. Humans only survived and thrived by working together. Homo Sapiens won the evolution race because they managed to grow tribes more than others, not because of more individualism compared to other species.
I get that working alone is an absolute joy and for many tasks that's the most efficient way of doing something (I certainly prefer that for programming). But that's not true for every task or the way it was "meant" to be, like I refuted in the first place.
> The big societal achievement of capitalism is killing any entrepreneurial spirit and telling you you need to go to a good school and then find a good employer that takes care of all of your needs.
That's one aspect of it. But capitalism is inherently paradoxical and also would LOVE to not think of humans as... humans. If everyone was an enterprise they can profit a lot more. It's what we see today with the gig economy. A race to the bottom where everyone is their "own employer" with zero benefits, all the risks and easily replaceable. It's a wet dream for pretty much every capitalist. How many startups we have/had describing themselves as "Uber for X"?
Another aspect is that fostering entrepreneurial spirit is actually profitable. Whoever already has capital will pretty much always win, so if a naive person wants to bet all of their savings in a business that fails, that capital is transferred to the existing capitalists. It's a win for them. If they somehow succeed, the most likely outcome is that at some point this enterprise will be acquired by a larger company. It's a win/win for them.
IDK if we live in very different bubbles (it certainly seems like it) but I see an extreme amount of push from society towards entrepreneurship, not against it. It's simply a very good way to funnel money from the bottom to the top.
There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.
Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?
There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt.
Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.
I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power.
I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.
I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world.
When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?
It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s
> Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.
Its simple because only few people find it condescending or nonsense. Most people I know either ignore it without judgement or find it valuable at work.
Ignoring soft skills or social graces work fine in some privileged roles where hard skills have some great premium. As one can see in case of top chefs, doctors, movie stars, sports people, high skill engineers etc.
For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.
>For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.
Pretty sorry state of affairs, correct? Implicate in all this talk of soft skills is the fact that it can also a force for manipulation of the holocaust league.
What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?
And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.
>What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?
in a manner speaking, yes it's a radically charged analogy, I'm making.
>And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.
There's a collective price that we all pay when we regard all those sermons to be just a simple nuisance. A familiar quote will put it in a better perspective than I can: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." Of course I agree that if you're the only one who opposes the sermon, you risk your livelihood.
> I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig.
The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause.
> Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.
Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there.
Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems.
> But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?
That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed.
The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:
1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next.
2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it.
What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted.
But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment.
Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do.
An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across.
An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!
It's a terrible bet. But it's the direction American corporate leadership has overwhelmingly been heading for the past couple decades [1] [2].
I get the sense you've had the good fortune to run and work in smaller startups in The Bay Area that have been unprecedentedly democratic in the scheme of human enterprise. I'm guessing you've also had the good fortune to do that during a 3 decade span of falling interest rates that drove money into VC and startups in a similarly unprecedented fashion. Everyone plays nice when they're eating good.
I studied social sciences / economics and it gave me a lot of perspective when I went to SF for tech work. The history of American labor is one of asymmetrical power and blood. This isn't a notion we've disabused ourselves of and grown beyond. Between the early 1800s and early 1900s the US saw decades of terrorism against workers by corporate leaders. Look into Labor Wars [3], The Pullman Strike [4], The Battle of Blair Mountain [5], The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [6]. After labor laws cemented and wars settled, corporate leaders moved towards globalization to start the process all over again in other countries and hollowed out middle America to do so.
Historically, the defining traits of American corporate leadership are amorality and self-pursuit. Startups have this silly habit of sitting around to LARP as altruists that might, maybe stumble into billions of dollars. Like if they talk about company values, truisms, and team building enough it changes gravity. Who is getting paid what? That's all that matters. If you're making a half a percent over four years as the 5th hire at a startup, you're getting screwed unless your founder is the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. I think workers and the general public are waking up to this and getting tired of lip service and signaling from leaders that play altruist or cut throat as they see fit.
I'm using the pronoun 'you' in that last paragraph generally, more as in the pronoun 'one.' I'm not specifically berating you. I'm glad you exist and I appreciate you sharing your experience and talking with me! It was a rewarding discussion. All the best.
> If you're an altruist, prove it. Make less than 200k a year, including stock grants (with appreciation factored in).
I did, with the exception of when the sale happened. For the first three years, I paid myself $30k. For the next two, $50k. For the next one, $70k. For the next one, $90k. Only in the last two years did I pay myself $160k.
When we sold, I gave up over half my RSUs and distributed them across the engineering team. I tried to give them all up (because I was well covered by the cash portion of the sale) but the acquirer wouldn't let me, since they wanted me to be incentivized to stay.
My cofounder gave up none of hers, despite being equal partners with me.
I suspect most of my team would work for me again, whereas the same is definitely not true of my cofounder.
Being cutthroat works short-term, and you may win big. But you get one shot at that, usually, with only a few "star-studded" exceptions (Adam Neumann, for example).
Being "altruistic" (which is not the word I'd use; I'd use "a decent human being who understands how negotiation works and what a BATNA is") works long-term.
Lack of corporate regulation and labor organization have led to a real asymmetrical arrangement for workers. It's a classic power imbalance. CEO-to-worker pay is at its highest level in 100 years [1]. Seems to me senior corporate leadership and founders are basically full of it. If scientific discovery is subject to multiple discovery, leadership just can't be a unique skill and founding a company just can't be a unique occurrence [2]. I'm confident there are 1000s of qualified folks capable of outperforming senior leadership in any position at any fortune 500. I'm confident if it wasn't Tesla, it would've been another American electric car company 6 months later. Buuut do we pay CEOs or founders as though they're replaceable? They play golf with board members and send their kids to summer camp together. They're dilettantes, hucksters, shmucks, dorks. For example, I'm always amazed when this type holds an all hands to discuss company culture un-ironically. As though leadership principles or company values or whatever pseudo-religious structure they divined might actually take us in? How can you even respect yourself? I suppose the pragmatic, sociopathic voice in my head might justify it: "If they can see this as more than work, I can extract more from them. If they can see me as more than another person fumbling around in the dark, I can elevate myself above them." I just couldn't live with the constant lying to myself.
Always makes me chuckle when folks blather on about risk-reward premiums while relying on public infrastructure -- postal service, education, military, internet, rail system, roads, power grids, democracy, freeways, bridges, etc. Start or run your business in war torn Afghanistan and I'm happy to talk about 400:1 pay ratios between leadership and lowest paid employees. No? Alright then. Sit down, shut up, and just be happy folks aren't pulling out the pitchforks... yet.
Oddly I quite like these people -- provided they're internally and externally consistent. It's refreshing to say, "you're being an asshole" and have a friend go, "oh my bad, I do that sometimes."
Most young folks can't imagine having been an asshole and they call themselves emotionally intelligent without realizing their feelings are a tyranny. They've unsubscribed from anything that ever brought them even minor discomfort. Their social contract basically amounts to "lie to me and I'll lie to you." They are huge wusses.
If a friend asks you if their hair looks nice, it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust. If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut. Modern day stoics IMO. They're smart enough to know how to be like-able, they understand the fluff-each-other's-shared-delusions game, they just don't want to play. When they tell you something kind, you know it was real.
Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible. They want that from others too. It can be super off putting, especially if you need to believe certain things about yourself.
> provided they're internally and externally consistent.
People claiming to be "brutally honest" is usually a red flag because they are almost never consistent about it. Its usually a phrase used to self-justify brutality with little regard for honesty.
Its sort of like the whole "if you dont accept me at my worse you dont deserve me at my best". There is nothing wrong in principle if it is taken literally - everyone has bad days and its unreasonable to expect perfection all the time; humans make mistakes, etc. But pretty much everyone using that phrase uses it as a self-justification to do what they want without regard for who they hurt.
Idk, im always wary of any phrase that can be twisted to justify behaving badly towards others. Some people hurt other people, and they'll take any turn of phrase, twist it, in order to self-justify to themselves that what they are doing is ok.
> It's refreshing to say, "you're being an asshole" and have a friend go, "oh my bad, I do that sometimes."
Would the apology not be more effective if it didn't include the attempt at excusing one's behavior?
> Most young folks [...]
Would your argument not be more effective if you made an attempt to avoid unnecessarily painting a broad, diverse demographic with one brushstroke, especially given that your argument doesn't actually hinge on the people being young specifically?
> If they told me that, I'd piss my self laughing even if I just paid $70 for the haircut.
What about the things you don't realize you're sensitive about? Is it possible your friends are merely the same brand of insensitive as you, and therefore insensitive in a way that is acceptable to you? Is it possible that you're demanding that everyone around you have precisely the same flavor of insensitivity as yourself?
> Most of my friends who are brutally honest try to say the things they're thinking as much as possible.
Isn't this a really ineffective and imprecise way to communicate? Won't this lead to a pile of followup questions from folks who don't understand the implicit social cues you share with those you're close with?
Being honest doesn't have to mean being unfiltered and brash. Being an effective communicator means taking into account how your message might be received and tailoring it so it's not easily misunderstood.
And calling people "wusses" for merely not subscribing to your brand of communication is itself an ironically cowardly act, a running away from the responsibility you might have for the words you say. It is exactly the kind of thing someone who needs to believe certain things about themselves might say instead of growing up and treating others with respect.
> it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust.
Honestly, you seem extremely naive with a very basic take on this situation. Your friends can say this stuff to you, _because_ you trust them, not the other way around. If a stranger were to make that comment to you, it would be unbelievably silly to take it at face value and not assume they are trying to sabotage you or get one over you in some way. And what exactly is the point of the insult, do you just go around assuming that everyone has the same sense of humor as you, and everyone who doesn’t is wrong? Haha.
Just take my comment for example. Am I being constructive or simply being condescending to you to make me feel better? Hard to tell because you don’t know me, isn’t it?
Sorry, but a little bit of brutal honesty for you. If this is how you're living your life, you are leaving a trail of people behind you that think you're an absolute dick.
The people you responded to spoke about conversations where they didn't attack their friend/partner ("you're being an arsehole"), they spoke honestly about how they felt ("Whoa, that hurt"). Both are honest, but yours is defence through attack. Their's is laying themselves bare. It's very different.
You probably like people with thick skins because they are the only people that stick around you.
...and yes, I realise I'm attacking you, but hopefully you'll take it as a friendly gesture.
I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd recommend the same to everyone.
Tenants are a liability for landlords in SF. You cannot end a tenancy, not with any amount of notice. That's a big deal and a huge policy mistake. Really messes up incentives. Let's say you and your partner have a duplex with two 2B/2BA units. You eventually decide to have kids and your parents are retiring. You want them to move into that unit so they can be near and babysit now and again. You could evict, but it's going to be costly and time consuming especially if the tenants are protected. Lawyers are going to tell you to buy the tenants out. Tenant buyouts in the city are usually mid five figures and they end up restricting some of your uses of the property forever. It will take months (maybe more than a year) and may end up creeping up towards six figures. You would've been better off never renting it out in the first place.
Landlords aren't idiots and they aren't evil, at least not more so than anyone else. Put yourself in their shoes and figure out how the incentives would cause you to act. IMO it's as simple as fixing the policy issue: Landlords can terminate tenancies in good faith with two years notice. Seems very fair for everyone and I bet you get reduced vacancies without needing to increasingly ratchet up heavy handed market interventions that are themselves prone to unintended consequence.
But then why own property beyond your primary residence ? Them's the rules. If you don't want the hassle, sell and move on. The fundamental issue is lack of liquidity in the market coupled with artificially low supply. This applies to both buying and renting. Nobody moves because everyone has a sweet deal (renters locked in rent control, owners locked in low property tax rates).
I mean, very few of them are; SF's vacancy rate is crazy low. If the dynamic you're describing exists, very few people are doing it. Places with even stronger renters rights regimes have higher vacancy rates. SF's problem is just supply.
The vacancy rate doesn't tell the whole story. Short term rentals and self reporting likely mask the effect I've mentioned.
I generally agree, SFs problem is 100% supply. But I think that ends up being caused by slow approval processes and highly restrictive tenants rights. Why would you ever subdivide your property in SF to add another dwelling unit? You can't give a tenant any amount of notice to end a tenancy. You can't ever merge those units back together. SFs property market is really crazy in this regard: older buildings with lots of units are often worth less than large single family houses. Properties with tenants sell for 25-50% less than vacant comparables.
This is the crux of it. Maybe individualsamd organizations should be capped on the number of single family residences they can own in a city. Real estate is a unique property and we should all have a place to live.
I don't own multifamily property in SF, so I'm not whining about my ability to do anything.
When tenants rights are restrictive enough property owners view tenants as a liability and that sets up perverse incentives that cause inefficient markets and underdevelopment. Occupied multifamily properties sell at steep discounts compared to their vacant counterparts. Property owners price in the potential longterm loss of use caused by a tenant. Do we want to heavily incentivize property owners to sell their properties without tenants? Do we want a housing market where multifamily properties sell for the same amount as much smaller single family homes? Do we want a development market where subdividing property is inadvisable and actually lowers property value?
At the end of the day, everyone deserves dignity. Part of that means acknowledging property owners take significant risk tenants do not and as such deserve fair use of their property. That means owners need to be able to give notice to end a tenancy amicably without eviction -- maybe that required notice is measured in years. That's plenty of time for any tenant to find another place. It means we need to stop conflating romantic ideals of "home" with actual ownership. If tenants watched themselves priced out over a decade, they're going to have a hard time. City programs should provide safety nets there, but it isn't their landlords burden to take carry them like a dependent. Tenancy is a very simple proposition: renters don't have to come up with downpayment, if the city goes to shit they can leave in a month, if the foundation gets water damage or an electrical fire breaks out they have no liability, their monthly payment is significantly less than a comparable mortgage payment. Tenants trade optionality for equity. As a tenant I never lost a single night of sleep worrying about electrical fires or new sewage pipes or the heater going out. I'd never have the gall to squat on a place for 10 years while paying inflation adjusted rent (far under market rate) and come out the other side with my hand held out for a tenant buy out. I would be absolutely ashamed of myself as a tenant in such a situation. If I'm being honest, I suppose I'd still do it and find ways to justify it. I'd tell myself it was after all "my home" and the landlord had more than one house so it was only fair. The story is just all too common in SF.
Yep, If you don’t want to manage a rental, don’t own one. If later you need 2 properties instead of 1 + 1 rental, sell the duplex and buy somewhere else.
According to the article, as the owner of the duplex, you would not be subject to the vacancy tax ("It applies to buildings with three or more units, not to single-family homes or duplexes").
As for your other points, yes, the government is trying to incentivize that inventory back on to the market (by disincentivizing keeping it off). Yes, they are doing it in response to a situation they took part in creating. Is this more or less likely than tenant termination freedom to result in more housing being available? That sounds like every market de-regulation argument ever.
There are schemes to knock a tenant out, but generally in SF county, 12-month leases roll over into monthly terms with very little the landlord can do as long as the tenant keeps paying and abiding by the terms of the original lease.
Now, raising the rent (in a non-rent controlled unit) and then renegotiating the lease are options but if the tenant does not comply and keeps paying the original lease's rent there are a LOT of protections in favor of the tenant.
Won't comment on if these are all fair or not, but there has been lots of bad behavior on both sides to cause regulation to come up. Being a landlord in SF is not easy, but simultaneously, finding a place to live which is affordable is tough as well as a renter.
It's pretty coercive. Taxes are levied against transactions. A tax in the absence of a transaction is really just a fine. And fining people for not selling something violates most folks conception of basic property rights and privacy.
I get that the city is looking for a way out of 50 years of systematic underdevelopment, but this just feels wrong. I don't trust government overreach to fix decades of bad governance.
Most people don't think you should be able to buy up a precious thing and squander it. Locke--the guy who came up with life, liberty, and property, based the property right on the owner's ability and duty to improve. Leaving apartments vacant doesn't sound like improvement.
Taxes also aren't coercive; even SCOTUS hasn't held that. They've held that benefits can be, but not taxes. That's a right-wing anti-tax talking point that has no other principle. What amount wouldn't be coercive? Under what conditions would it be not coercive? What taxes are and aren't coercive: gas taxes, capital gains taxes, sales taxes? The idea is to just say "taxes are coercive" and close the book, which Grover Norquist might buy, but we've got a civilization to run so we need to do better.
> Taxes also aren't coercive; even SCOTUS hasn't held that
They are, and it has; see McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819). Coercion doesn’t generally make them unconstitutional (coercion is, ultimately, what governments do,the states under their broad general police powers, and the feds, Constitutionally, under more limited powers, but including explicit taxation poeers), though it can when, e.g., states attempt to tax federal institutions (as was the issue in McCulloch).
IDK if McCulloch established that. Maryland wanted to tax the Bank out of existence, and Marshall clearly addressed that use of taxation, not taxation in general:
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation. A question of constitutional power can hardly be made to depend on a question of more or less. If the states may tax, they have no limit but their discretion; and the bank, therefore, must depend on the discretion of the state governments for its existence. This consequence is inevitable."
This is about destruction, not coercion. In this case, an example of a destructive tax would be "we levy a tax 100% of the value of your property. That isn't what's happening here.
FWIW governments do more than coerce. Ours does stuff like pay millions of teachers and explore space. That takes money, so governments raise revenue. That's not coercion, that's funding stuff we want and need.
No, McCulloch said taxation can be coercion, but not necessarily. Maryland wanted to tax every local branch of the national bank $15k/year, which is $350k/year in 2023 dollars. That was seen an unconstitutional state usurpation of a policy that had been approved by the US Congress.
> Most people don't think you should be able to buy up a precious thing and squander it.
What does it mean to "squander" and who decides? I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd recommend the same to everyone.
Tenants are a liability for landlords in SF. You cannot end a tenancy, not with any amount of notice. That's a big deal and a huge policy mistake. Really messes up incentives. Let's say you and your partner have a duplex with two 2B/2BA units. You eventually decide to have kids and your parents are retiring. You want them to move into that unit so they can be close by to retire and babysit now and again. You could evict, but it's going to be costly and time consuming especially if the tenants are protected. Lawyers are going to tell you to buy the tenants out. Tenant buyouts in the city are usually mid five figures and they end up restricting some of your uses of the property in the future. It will take months (maybe more than a year) and may end up creeping up towards six figures. You would've been better off never renting it out in the first place.
Most landlords are individuals that own a few units [1]. Maybe a couple decided to buy a second home instead of investing in the S&P500. That's a lot more common than you'd expect. These are the folks navigating renters protections. Large companies don't have issues with them. They hire professionals to follow the rules. Or they build newer buildings so those protections don't apply to them.
And really this is the bleak reality of heavy handed, top down market manipulations: They're not going to hurt the big guys. You're not going to get even with some multinational real estate syndicate somewhere. You're mostly going to transfer wealth between varying shades of middle class. And really largely, you're transferring it from folks that saved for a downpayment and risked a 30 year mortgage and financially put their ducks in a row and those that spent years and years renting while knowing full well they were getting an affordable monthly payment in exchange for not building equity.
My point in saying all this is that usually if you look at a market and see folks "squandering," you probably don't understand the market. There are probably competing incentives that cause that market to be inefficient.
See, the casual way you say "you could evict" makes me think you don't appreciate that that's someone's home, maybe even a family, and you're uprooting them for personal convenience. I think a law preventing that would be a good one.
Your argument sounds like, "if you let landlords evict as much as they like, they would rent their places out rather than treating them like pure investment vehicles." But how does that help renters? Great they can now maybe rent that vacant place, only to maybe get evicted with little to no notice, for any reason?
I think where we want to get to is a place where people who rent homes have stability, and don't get kicked out because their landlord's in-laws want to move in instead. You're not lending a bike or renting out lawn equipment. Families live in these places. Going full "I should be able to do whatever I want with my property" is at best insensitive.
I'll also say that SFs problems seem to be 100% supply related. The vacancy rate is 3% [0]?? That's crazy low. I don't think this is a complex market that's beyond my meager understanding; they just need more supply.
> the casual way you say "you could evict" makes me think you don't appreciate that that's someone's home...
It's their home and your property. I'm not advocating anything crazy. As that hypothetical landlord your tenants deserve dignity, but it's your property and that has to confer certain rights beyond their tenancy. Otherwise, you don't really own it. You should be able to ask your tenants to leave with some amount of notice. You should be able to plan on your parents living in that unit at some point. Make the amount of time and planning for that very large, say 2 or 3 or 4 years. Doesn't that seem pretty fair?
Restricting ending tenancy in good faith all together creates perverse incentives. It pits your interests as a landlord against your tenants. If you bought a duplex in SF today, it would be in your best interest to do everything you could not to rent out the other unit. That is the problem.
I mean, not being able to do literally anything with my property doesn't mean I don't own it. You can't run a meth lab in your house--you still own it. Etc. IDK if I'm making a straw man here, but just want to say there's always limits.
I think a year or two is reasonable, but I generally don't like the mechanism of eviction. I live in the Netherlands and they do either fixed term or indefinite contracts here. Details are here [0], but the gist is that tenants get some stability while landlords can chance a vacancy period and raise rents while they're vacant and not rent controlled.
> It's pretty coercive. Taxes are usually levied against financial transactions. Taxing not selling something violates most people's conception of basic property rights.
First off, it isn't taxing "not selling something," it is taxing "buying a 2nd/3rd/999th home that nobody will live in and holding it vacant as an investment strategy." It is a financial transaction in that sense.
Second, baseline property taxes have existed for some time in every US state. If you own a home, you must pay taxes in alignment with how your locality has decided it will tax houses to maintain and operate itself. More expensive houses get taxed more, independent of how much of the local budget is spent on serving the house. SF decided that unoccupied 2nd/3rd/999th houses get taxed more than those that don't.
What if they raised taxes for everyone, but gave tax breaks to homes occupied by owners or renters, with a 1 year grace period? That is effectively the same as this bill.
That seems like the fairest way to do it, make it part of your property taxes. Before, your property taxes are $T. Now, your property taxes are $T + $T x F x M, where M is the number of months in the year the property is unoccupied, and F is some factor. For everyone whose home is actually lived in, your property taxes don't change. A supercharged version of the homestead exemption.
I posted something to this effect elsewhere, so forgive me for repeating myself. I do want to get your take though.
First, the implementation of the fine isn't so important as the fine itself. Most landlords are individuals that own a few units [1]. Maybe a couple decided to buy a second home or a duplex instead of investing in the S&P500. That's a lot more common than you'd expect. These are the folks navigating renters protections. Large companies don't have issues with them. They hire professionals to follow the rules. Or they build newer buildings so protections don't apply to them. We're not going to get even with some multinational real estate syndicate somewhere through a vacancy tax. We're mostly going to transfer wealth between varying shades of middle class. And really largely, we're transferring it from folks that saved for a downpayment and risked a 30 year mortgage and financially put their ducks in a row and those that spent years and years renting while knowing full well they were getting a comparatively affordable monthly payment in exchange for not building equity.
Second, I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd recommend the same to everyone.
Tenants are a liability for landlords in SF. You cannot end a tenancy, not with any amount of notice. That's a big deal and a huge policy mistake. Really messes up incentives. Let's say you and your partner have a duplex with two 2B/2BA units. You eventually decide to have kids and your parents are retiring. You want them to move into that unit so they can be close by to retire and babysit now and again. You could evict, but it's going to be costly and time consuming especially if the tenants are protected. Lawyers are going to tell you to buy the tenants out. Tenant buyouts in the city are usually mid five figures and they end up restricting some of your uses of the property in the future. It will take months (maybe more than a year) and may end up creeping up towards six figures. You would've been better off never renting it out in the first place.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that most owners letting their properties sit vacant are probably doing it because of bad policy that deprives them of fair use of their property. Not because they don't already realize they're missing out on rental income and would see the light if they had to pay a little more tax each year.
You've framed tenants as a liability rather than an important part of the housing ecosystem, combined with treating second/third/fourth homes as investment vehicles instead of alternatives. I sympathize with how eviction policy creates bad incentives on both sides, but I also recognize that this is largely also about supporting a healthy city of a blend of homeowners and renters.
While I think normalizing vacant properties is a worthy goal, I do think there's other ways of achieving this goal, such as other commenters have suggested around instead of an additional tax, reducing tax write-offs for vacancy, along with a better definition of what a vacancy is. For example your suggestion, the having your friend move in loophole for some non market exchange. This has the potential to subvert the principle of the referendum.
> Maybe a couple decided to buy a second home or a duplex instead of investing in the S&P500.
Just want to address this particular point. That’s the problem. People want to use houses as an investment vehicle rather than a place to actually to live in. You want a buy a second, third , or even fourth house fine. But what should not happen is others are unable to live in the same city because people wanted to make more money from a fundamental need.
People buying a second home are not the problem. A healthy housing market needs rental housing stock. We have to have places for people in transitory phases of life, for people struggling, for retirees that want to live off the value of their house after downsizing or divorcees or folks trying the city on for size.
Supply is the problem and bad governance created it. Why do we keep turning it around on individuals that made rational investment decisions as though they've done something predatory? It seems absolutely backwards.
Build more housing stock. This is it. There's no bad guy, no magic bullet, no righteous fight. We just need to build more.
> ...unless the org is completely dysfunctional they are responsible for the ultimate deliverables.
This is true in theory if everyone has perfect knowledge. In practice I've never seen it play out. A large part of management is framing (i.e. playing off imperfect knowledge). It happens before and after success or failure is decided. Smart managers commit, but frame their responsibilities or outcomes in favorable terms. They find ways to de-risk. They publicly share risky deliverables with other teams or increase scope to push decision making up the ladder. They commit to only what their team can slam dunk. They make sure to only lead rockstar teams (this is huge). They cherry pick metrics to make failure look reasonable and success look incredible. They leave before major failures are realized or hand failures off before they sour. Remember: In large human systems, feedback cycles can easily take years.
It's a game and there's lots of clever ways to play. But the only way to lose is to publicly accept loss. When you do, it's very honorable and moving. But I've never seen the hit to perceived competency offset by perceived integrity. Because at the end of the day, companies make money. There's no company metric for honor. It's politics, whether we choose to see it or not doesn't really matter. For an extreme example, take a look at the presidency. Incumbent presidents lose in election year recessions. Period. Never mind most economic crises are a decade or so in the making.
People in aggregate are much simpler than we like to think. And so leadership is much more sleight of hand than our nobler ideals would have us believe.
I guess it's all relative. To be honest, I would be over the moon to never "work" again. Don't wanna be needed, don't wanna have to report to anyone, don't wanna be part of a pyramid scheme earning some CEO or founder 50% of company payroll.
I could very happily set and achieve little goals for the rest of my life -- in video games, education, little creative pursuits, and hobbies -- and never once look back. Really don't care for externally set goals or validation.
I hope that you reach this point (not having to work) sooner rather than later.
It is funny though, the number of people I know who got there and then went back to work for "the man" again. Not for the money, but for having people they could hang out with and talk about things with. They sometimes find happiness working for a company where they have the freedom to be completely honest because "losing your job" isn't a threat that bothers them.
In the US managing health care is annoying, of course if you can live without working in the US then you can likely live as an ex-pat in a country that has decent health care included. It has its own set of tradeoffs (languages, community, Etc.)
And for some the "little goals" start to feel dishonest, kind of like knowing that you could do "anything" with your remaining life and you are doing little goals you made up for "fun." I know it doesn't sit well with people who were raised to "make a difference" and "be the change."
Giving back can be rewarding, mentoring younger people, people who are coming up the ladder. Working with organizations staffed with volunteers brings its own set of quirks. Sometimes "prima donna" doesn't quite capture it :-).
At some point you really internalize "hmm, I'm going to be dead and do I care what others think of how I spent these years?" Facing mortality sometimes re-arranges what is, and what is not, important to you. Depending on how close one sees the "finish line" that can be either empowering or depressing. Often a little of both.
I wonder, why? Sisyphus was condemned to aimlessly push a rock forever, but isn't that basically just the human condition? Most of us convince ourselves we're doing something, but it's narrative. Very little materializes, very rarely as intended. We like feedback and certainty in the face of randomness -- it's the attraction to slot machines. But musicians rarely predict their most popular songs (and sometimes come to hate 'em), founders toil away pivoting for years before they stumble on something that works (but most give up first), artists often only have their work recognized posthumously.
I'm drawn to characters like Jerry in Parks and Rec or Stanley in the Office because they embrace the rock. They aren't revolutionizing or disrupting. In a certain way they're really very heroic. They meet the soul-crushing apathy and uncertainty of their place in the universe head on without complaints, excuses or lies. Though mocked and derided as lazy, incompetent fools they steadily carry on. They're stoics in a modern bureaucratic context. And really there's a certain beautiful zen to that. It's very unrelatable for me and, I assume, most of the tech world.
It's still company time. You don't get to play video games. The draining part is pretending to work.
It's not like you get a private office and nobody ever sees you. You have to go the weekly meetings and tell them about how much you worked on X which you didn't.
If you could convince the company to make you a part of a mini skunkworks team with the freedom to do anything as long as it benefits the company then I don't think anyone would object to it from a mental health perspective.
> mini skunkworks team with the freedom to do anything as long as it benefits the company
This is my lived reality right now. It's not necessarily super fun in the long run. It can get draining to work on new thing after new thing, only for it to get shut down because it doesn't _quite_ fit the company strategy or they can't find anywhere internally to anchor it.
Plenty of good ideas have died that way.
That said, I think it also heavily depends on the company. If the work you're doing is directly feeding into the development pipeline, it sounds like fucking heaven. Mine, however, is not.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...