I don't see what the point of misdirect the discussion on this topic would be, unless a rationale examination of IT project failure is something some group would prefer to be avoided. Accenture maybe?

Besides, both parties have embraced the name Obamacare - the republicans started it thinking it was pejorative and then the democrats must have run a few test groups on the name and decided to try and "take it back" before the last election. At this point, I don't think the name is controversial at all. It certainly rolls off the tongue much better than any of the official names.

You know I read the summary and the article.

I feel bad for the young people. I don't feel bad for adults who chose to move there when they couldn't afford to buy; they couldn't afford to live in SF, and had no business moving there. If they could have afforded to buy, then they would have gained equity, and if they found they couldn't afford to live there any more, they could have sold and gone someplace cheaper.

I support a COLA, and I am gleeful about Utah's compassionate homeless solution of simply putting them up in housing, which is cheaper than dealing with them being homeless. You really know nothing about me.

I complain that you're providing anecdotes instead of statistics, and you respond by doing it three more times. You're batting zero.

So true.

I have basic, stupid cruise control on my car and it rarely varies more than 5mph (+/- 2.5mph) on a grade when set at 65. But it seems like any time I drive for more than 30 minutes on an uncongested freeway it is inevitable that I'll run into at least one numbnut who isn't using cruise control and lets their speed vary by 10-15mph. They'll catch up to me, sit in my blind-spot until I put on the brakes and force them to pass. Once they are well ahead, I turn the cruise-control back on at my original speed and then I catch up to them, at which point they speed-match me again. If I gun it and get past them, as soon as I settle back at the set speed they start to catch up again. I can not figure out what the fuck is going through their heads, but it is super aggravating and it happens all the fucking time. Vast open stretches of freeway and these guys must be lonely because they won't leave me the fuck alone.

And the best thing about your posts is that they are never wrong!
Narcissism FTW!

I don't care about any of those problems. I don't care if people are forced out of San Francisco. There's no particular reason why anyone who isn't making their property make money should be permitted to live anywhere in particular in a capitalist society. In theory, they should be permitted to live somewhere (right to life) but there's no right to a home on the California coast.

It's part of the natural cycle that places get gentrified and begin to suck, and people move to new places and make them cool, and then they eventually get gentrified and begin to suck. The fallacy is the idea that you can live near civilization and yet not experience change. You can live in the boonies and have stability or you can live where progress happens, and experience progress.

I'd rather the basis of our distribution of wealth permit cool people to live in cool places as a reward, but it doesn't. But on the other hand, cool places are mostly because of cool people. You can make a garden of the desert or a cultural wasteland of a highly populated city.

The people protesting get about 1/5 of the salary of those highly paid tech workers.

OTOH, the highly paid tech workers get about 1/100 of the total compensation package of their CEO. In practice, this gulf is even wider, because all that extra money can and will be invested, generating significant additional income that does not count as compensation.

I dare say there is a bit of a difference here.

The way you stated, but also paying property taxes, meeting any agreements which the council placed on their development to mitigate their impact, et cetera.

Free stuff is all around us. But it is portioned out on specious bases until some have more than they need, and some have less than they need.

I ask for statistics, I get back an anecdote. Welcome to slashdot, I guess.

It's true that wealth disparity is a big issue in US, but in this particular case it is a red herring - wealth disparity between blue collar and white collar workers, as is the case here, is so low as to be a blip on the radar. The true source of inequality are people who own most of the wealth, and live off the rent (stock dividends etc) from that wealth. When compared to them, it doesn't matter whether you're flipping burgers or writing code at Apple - what you get in return for your labor is chump change.

So 1950s income tax rates won't help, because they won't affect capital gains, which is responsible for 99% of wealth and income disparity. What we need in reality is to tax capital gains higher than "sweat of the brow" regular income.

At the same time, if low-income workers are going to harass high-income workers as this story describes, it'll push the latter to seek common ground with big capital. In other words, it will push the white collar labor force towards the right, and worse even, towards authoritarian "keep the rabble on the leash" right - and this is precisely how fascism is born.

But as far as techies go, it's also true: all they did was do a good, useful job, raise a family, and contribute to making a good community. Yet the protesters in question seem to think that the solution is kicking the techies out.

government intervention in the scientific process...

Involvement is not the same as intervention.

Scientific research is a public good.

I don't know that actually makes sense. The banks own (outright, through foreclosure) less than 8% of the housing in any given state and less than 2% in most states. In a few states, they might be able to influence it that much. But the problem is that a percentage of the homes they own will be damaged to the point that they are complete write-offs which are actually worth less than a vacant lot due to the cost of demolition...

The elephant in the room is mercantilism. Corporations discovered that under capitalism they could buy the government and turn it into their personal playground. The NSA is just one predictable arm of a corporate government.

You don't actually have to steal the vehicle. Armed assault on a vehicle is carjacking. If the window was broken out, it was probably broken out with a weapon. If used in an attack, a stick or rock can become a "deadly weapon". Courts tend to side with the driver, and courts tend to side against homeless and unemployed people. It would probably be pretty easy to show carjacking here with some video evidence of people beating on the bus with stuff.