I'm from the Bay and no longer live there but for how massive the region (functionally: Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz; SF to Antioch+) is the public transit is pretty good. Obviously not perfect and a lot of room for improvement.
I've spoken with old timers who would talk about the days before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, to name one piece of the puzzle.
Which is a problem in and of itself, at least theoretically. I don't live in SF, but I do live in a highly balkanized area (Atlanta) where the proliferation of local governments is a weight around the neck of the region overall
There are a couple of metro areas that escaped this problem by having regional government, Mpls/St Paul, MN and Portland, OR.
Minnesota has the Metropolitan Council which derives its power from state statute and can supersede the decisions of local governments. The same people that bitch about ‘my tax dollars’ complain about the Met Council but I feel it provides a cohesive regional planing organization and they provide water, sewer, transportation, and regional parks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council_(Minnesot...
You say that, but if your SF tax dollars were paying for VTA you'd probably have stronger complaints... Moreover, public transit isn't evenly distributed even within SF so I don't think the transit agency count is an important variable.
They're all tied together through Clipper, so it doesn't make a difference to end users anyway.
It matters in that it's impossible to reliably and efficiently coordinate routes across that many agencies. Even if a rider can go from South San Jose to Oakland to Petaluma in a single trip on a single fare transferring as they go, okay it's an optimal payment experience but the routing and interlocking between systems surely isn't
Check out the storied history of RM2. Taxpayers literally voted to raise sales taxes to fund a rail corridor, and the money was reallocated to a different county for an unrelated project that did not benefit the counties in question. Never mind that an actual functional Dumbarton Rail could be a huge improvement to life on the Peninsula if done well.
Imagine a genuinely fast transfer between any one of the Caltrain stations (say Palo Alto or Menlo Park) and one of the East Bay BART stations. Of course, getting the western portion past all the expensive neighborhoods in the way sounds like a real mess.
One of these doesn't require a multi-decade approval process for good reason. (Figuring out the logistics and civil engineering planning is a real thing and building it out isn't trivial) . Of course this could change
It is a plain fact that there would be more interest in public transit if it was as clean, as safe, and as reliable (if not cleaner, safer, and more reliable) than driving using personal vehicles.
Excluding the fact that drug addicts are still humans deserving love, care and the opportunity to recuperate - fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.
Maybe the moral depravity of SF breeds truly irredeemable addicts, but as someone whos met a lot of troubled people and ridden a lot of public transit your statement seems alarmingly and unhelpfully critical
>fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.
In your opinion, what is that solution? If we take a survey of the highest ranked transit systems, it seems like most solutions involve not allowing drug users to use transit systems, whether it's the unthinkable in Asian countries or peppering the system with officers and cameras in Berlin and London. Is that really treating them with love?
Considering how much often I smell alcohol and weed in Waymos, maybe it's actually the most tolerant solution.
London's public transport was safe before the cameras became common. Its something everyone used, and everyone let their kids use, decades ago. Affluent people commuted from the Surrey "stockbroker belt" to London at least as far back as the 70s. Kids used trains and busses to go to school- some of my friends did at least as young as eight.
Loving or caring for someone is not giving their addiction a Carte Blanche, it can often be to allow them access to treatment and a path out of their situation.
They can access treatment. There are a lot of options. The question is should we force treatment at some point.
Use the veil of ignorance to answer that.
Suppose your loved one was one of these afflicted individuals literally killing themselves on the street. Would you want to force them to get clean or would you want to make their lives "easier" by giving them some "harm-reduction" that will allow them to persist in their zombie state?
Or what if you were in the grips of this lifestyle. Would you want someone to force you to get help or facilitate you killing yourself?
I don't know what the "tenderloin" refers to, but I guess it is a part of a US city.
That's generally the point I am trying to make. By letting these people suffer from addiction and homelessness, not offering good medical and social care, you are not caring or loving them, which is a kind of cruelty.
FWIW if you search "tenderloin city" the answer appears immediately.
It's a big internet, sometimes people will mention neighborhoods or customs you're unfamiliar with. In my experience, the polite thing is usually to take 3s to make the Google.
This is the problem with context and language and assumptions and algorithms. Even with that I get two restaurants and one Wikipedia article on meat before I get anything resembling a city district in my search results.
Can we really blame individuals when we have recorded, legally admissable evidence of corporations knowingly pushing the over-perscription of extremely addictive drugs while claiming they are safe and non-addictive?
Yes. I don't think the typical homeless drug user is relying on pharma provided research on the substances they're ingesting when deciding to pick up the habit in the first place.
The situation is weird. No one thinks like this, or it isn't a problem, in cities that actually have good public transport. A drug addict has never entered my mind when riding public transport in London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, etc.
Even when a transit system is bad, you often find people use it anyway in situations where large events make driving a fool’s errand. There’s a hard incentive and comfort hurdle we’re decades from alleviating via impossible fuel prices for your average Joe
There are a lot of unviable transit in the US. Most transit systems have large unviable parts even if there is a viable core (generally in the city center). People often blame the unviable on lack of density, but there are examples of viable transit systems elsewhere in the world that have US suburb density.
Nothing specific, but when you look at European cities you discover many of them have areas with similar density to a US suburb and yet have good service.
I do browse on Google Maps from time to time, and I do see areas with similar-ish density. I also see a lot of cars. I've known a few people who have lived in such places, and they say their transit is near useless (poor service intervals, limited hours, doesn't go everywhere, etc) and most people drive if they can. Which will be less than in the US, as operating a car is often considerably more expensive there than here, tipping the math towards just accepting the poor transit service.
Which is why I was curious about specific experiences.
And I do say, better than many US suburbs which have absolutely no service at all.
I'm sure people in those areas do drive a lot. However, the question was about transit and from what I can tell the trans system gets enough ridership to support decent service that is a bus every 10 minutes which is not ideal but acceptable.
I definitely agree, when it comes to connecting into the larger metropolises the rail is pretty effective from what I hear from those places, and once in the big cities its usually not too bad.
Maybe with gas inching towards $9/gal we'll finally get people in the US demanding actually decent transit options.
The busses around me are either natural gas or EV, so they're pretty disconnected to the current energy crisis.
I live in the heart of the Mission and I endorse that quote from the parent comment 100%.
Once every few days I even share public transit with a homeless person! Oh, the horror!!
The people I see out on the street are suffering terribly, sick, unable to escape the gravity of their situations, and the vast majority are not malicious. Anyone who does not see this has chipped away key bits of their own soul.
Or hasn't been smacked in the face yet , or had someone unhinged on the nyc subway state they are going to kill everyone on the train in a manic episode.
These are not un-rare events at all, it's just in a city with millions of people, most may never have it happen but we've all seen it. Nobody wants it to be them that day.
IMO the root cause of problems you guys are having is internalized classism and strong affections with the idea of natural selection. You can have a homogeneous society with good welfare and not worry too much about spoiling ourselves, a near or even actual communism with extremely subsidized educations can still have bloodbath levels of internal competitions. You can do that and then you can make it weird for tons of over/under class people with absolutely no way out to be just there in plain sight.
No
Absolutely not.
I have had enough to do with them to believe this lie.
They are broken people that are ruled by the drugs they are taking. they can be manageable when they have had their dose, but their entire life and existence is ruled by the need to find drugs for the next shot.
And believe me. When they feel that withdrawal they do not give a flying F about you or your rights. They need that drug.
People should not be forced to be around junkies
Not to get too political, but if you're right, why does it seem like societies which do not tolerate drug use have much fewer problems with rampant drug use than societies which tolerate it?
“Tolerate” is doing a lot of lifting here. You responded to someone saying treatment and support make addiction manageable. In the United States we had drug companies devising as many ways to make a profit off pain pills for years, so there’s tolerance, but when people started losing their jobs and their minds in mass due to the poison these companies were knowingly getting their customers addicted to, there was no plan or inclination for treatment or support.
Killing people as punishment for poor choices they enact on their own bodies is such a medieval take that it frankly can only be satirical or gallows humor.
But it does fit with the puritanical punishment fetishizing culture that the USA has fostered. Instead of rehabilitating people let's just liquidate them. Sure why not.
I tried to find a good term for this trend and the best I could do is "defining deviancy down" defined as "the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible."
It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
Having lived in SF, LA and NYC, I find it very hard to believe that the homeless or the addicts roaming the streets in big cities are being thrown into jail for much of anything short of overt violent behavior. You can see people drop a deuce in the middle of Mission St any day of the week and nobody bats an eye. As people say, "it's just a normal part of life in a big city".
A far less compelling narrative is to handwave it away as "it's not really the system." The hyper-competition that capitalism breeds (for relatively little benefit) is the moral bane. More specifically, the recent history of touting capitalism while demonizing socialism has caused this shift, as opposed to the era of the New Deal, when social safety nets and public works were promoted as a net good. While there is a bill to pay for some programs (such as Social Security), the broader approach has largely been vindicated. Capitalism has produced severe wealth inequality, benefiting only a select few and breeding blatant corruption.
Please don't bring your whole self to work, the rest of us don't need that from you. Be polite, congenial and professional. You have the rest of your day to let it rip however you'd like.
Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.
> Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.
Work is not a safe space. The people who say they want everyone to feel safe in their speech usually (actually, almost always) want people who agree with them on
> family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing,
Pretty much this. For those of us who had to live through the Great Awokening in places like San Francisco, the workplace became a place to be questioned and re-educated in your political and moral beliefs, unless you already had the correct opinion.
Except, even if you did, you could always be just a little purer. You could show off to your coworkers how you were a better ally than them, maybe they would be as good as you if only they “did the work" harder.
The answer for years was to just keep your mouth shut while the hysteria subsides. It still is likely the right answer. In theory bringing everything to work would be great in a perfectly liberal environment, but we just don't live in that world. The illiberal and the intolerant will just gain leverage over you in a competitive environment such as the workplace.
Then I hope you have an extremely flat company structure, not just formally but in practice.
Don't try to fast-talk people into opening up. They have a better idea than you what's safe to talk about, about their lives. If they think they can't open up, they're probably right.
I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."
Sure, but that sort of behaviour is plainly abusive unless you're actually working in an explicitly religious setting.
But merely saying "I'm taking next Wednesday off to celebrate Eid" ought to be fine everywhere, as is "this weekend I'm singing in my church choir then going for a picnic".
Similarly, wearing a wedding ring or mentioning that you have a partner should never be a problem, but issuing a company-wide invite to your next sex party likely will be.
"Personal" isn't a synonym for "intimate". It's reasonable to assume that people are able to share the former without forcing their colleagues to deal unnecessarily with the latter.
One persons level of comfort is not the same as others, so just saying I want people to be comfortable having their religious opinions respected is not a simple request.
Some religious opinions are basically oppression of others. I refuse to allow people to be bigots in my presence regardless of their reasoning.
Having previously been a member of such a religion, and having left it specifically over human rights issues, I am delighted to inform you that there are many individuals who identify as members of such religions but who are not personally bigoted, and who in fact may privately be uncomfortable about that aspect of their religious belief. If you already know someone, and you have reason to believe they're not bigoted, but then they out themselves as a member of some such group, you don't have to assume the worst.
Also as someone who was a member of church which had anti-christian ideals, pointing out the hypocrisy can be the only way for them to question what they are in. Doing and saying nothing helps no one.
There's a large middle ground between saying nothing in the face of bigotry and proceeding immediately from "oh you're a member of <group>?" to an itemized list of hypocrisies, without stopping to find out what the individual person in front of you actually thinks about said hypocrisies. All I'm advocating for is that last: talk to people like they're people, not like they're mindless members of <group>.
Some religions and cultures are more accepted than others. I don't think that works for less accepted groups. People are very intolerant in general. And they are especially not intolerant of those who are intolerant...
Silence is always the preferable choice in those matters.
I'm spending almost a third of my life at work, no shade to the people having to work to pay the bills, but I'd like to get a bit more than just that out of that time: Learn new skills, meet interesting people, have good conversations, have fun. Having something akin to friendship with long-term coworkers and collaborators makes all of that much easier.
I'm not saying that people should talk about this all the time, but are you saying you don't want people to feel able to mention key details of their personal life?
It's fine if people feel like discussing certain details of their personal lives. What the gp specifically urged people to discuss (In particular - disability and religion) are topics that have been considered not good ideas for the office for a very long time. Apparently some people want to change that - as I said, don't want this.
I want to be free from being burdened with your unmet social needs and I want to feel safe when rejecting that burden you wish to push onto me. Make some friends or pay for a therapist, your coworkers aren't there to be your social support.
>I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture
Yes, you want to feel like the people around you feel safe to share it. Everyone with things that are uncomfortable to hear have learned that they're not. They know the polite fiction to talk around it and make you feel like they're open. They're not.
Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.
To me, either the culture bubble is extremely strong in your area, or being able to admit alignment with ideas shared by a major political party in an area where another party is more popular is an very low bar.
On the scale of topics that I conceal about myself, politics is as easy as talking about the weather.
That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.
For example? Because usually, people who say this have something in their mind about which they should rightfully be ashamed. Like people who want other people to have lesser rights.
Anything class, caste, race, gender, etc. clustered can draw fire if they aggravate group harmony and conformity enough to someone.
For example, I currently deal with the knife and gun collector crowd, hunting fans, weed guys, even genz sneaker aficionados bring the ire of various classes or camps that are more dominant at workplaces.
I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.
Say you join Anthropic now as an employee. What are the chances of your equity appreciating in value? I don't think we have any historical precedents to this.
It's always a very borderline idea to hold equity in the company you work, argument being that if the company goes south or severely underperforms, you may find yourself laid off and with worthless equity.
So you're assuming lots of risk and putting it all in the same basket.
There's no shame in getting 100k $ worth of stock, selling it and putting it on some vanguard fund and diversifying, in fact it's statistically the best move you can do.
Of course, you can be like those many googlers that did this and then regret in hindsight.
There's a super long episode on The Drive going deep into the mechanics and economics of the US healthcare system, could be a useful addition to the conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqrpFICtqpQ
She didn't apologize, what she said can be used by any harasser. "I was harassed by girls when I was young so now I adopt their language and harass women." Also I didn't know there is so much harassment online towards young south korean girls.
sarcasm is easy, but I'd be willing to hear any earnest objections you have. my assumption is that you don't have any that aren't themselves hypocritical or contradictory, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong about that!
ETA: in case it's unclear - this is not me trying to platform OP's bullshit in good faith, this is me calling OP's bluff. I don't think ne can articulate an actual problem that isn't self-defeating, which is why ne retreated to sarcastic implication rather than outright accusation.
Shouldn't we celebrate her for changing and growing instead of trolling the web for 12 year old edgelord tweets that she has already apologized for? Since then, she has become a strong and rational voice on the national scene, and there is nothing to indicate that her change in beliefs and apology was insincere.
I don't think I was a "bad person" at that age, but I certainly know that I said some cringy, stupid stuff that I certainly don't stand by anymore.
Quite frankly, I think it is far more concerning if a person can't identify anything that they have changed their mind on. We should celebrate when people change for the better instead of attacking them for having been bad in the past.
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