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It's funny. Laugh.

Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF 240

Posted by timothy from the punctuation-plus-three-deadly-letters dept.
marks writes "Wired is carrying a story about some folks in San Francisco that are going around and putting up anti-dot-com stickers such as 'blowthedotoutyourass.com' and 'ButIDon'tNeedMyToothPasteDelivered.com.' They even have a website (blowthedotoutyourass.com) where other people can download and print their slogans and paste them other places. Its funny, in that sick, twisted, 'If I hear one more website commercial I'm gonna kill someone' way."
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Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF More

Anti-Dot-Com Slogans Pepper SF

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  • San Francisco - The City Of Hate (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just moved to SF from Silicon Valley. I like it, but it's pretty amazing how full of hate this town is. People who work at internet companies are regularly refered to as "dot com slime" in mainstream media. The alternative media, which is big here, is much worse. The level of complaining at anything and everything is stunning, especially anything originating from outside of city limits, which is seen as one large uniform unsophisticated redneck barbary by many here.

    A lot has sure changed since SF was the City of Love, and welcomed change!

    (I'll post anonymously for once, since I don't want to get in trouble over this.)

  • Re:Sour Grapes? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd bet against it. If many of the people leave they tend to drive down the prices of housing etc. Good? Maybe but then you have people who can't pay thier mortgages dumping the buildings back onto the banks that lent them the money? Still not a problem. Those banks end up holding a bunch of property they either hold onto or dump onto the market further driving down the value of everything else. Still don't care? Those banks now have smaller capital bases. Maybe they are close to legal limits and the government decides to close them down. Maybe they don't get that bad but they are still hurting for capital. Still don't care? Those hurting banks start to really tighten who then lend money to. Want to start a company,buy a house or even get a loan for school? Don't be surprised how tough it gets. Still not worried? Watch good companies with nothing to do with things start having trouble getting normal fiancing. Things like lines for credit. They start having to close because they can't get the money most companies need to go from shipping a product [issuing an invoice] to actually getting paid. More people get laid off. More mortgages get called. It keeps spiralling. You think it can't happen? Well think Tokyo. Property bubbles almost always end nasty. The people who get hurt often have nothing in common with the people who drove up the prices. On the issue of all those improvements that have been put in [fiber,buildings etc] they don't go anywhere but an empty building is an empty building. Doesn't matter if it's guilded in gold or in rat droppings. By the time they do get filled they will be outdated and need to be brought up to the new standards. Whatever they are at the time. I'm not saying it will happen but if it does happen it won't be pretty. NB I haven't even mentioned what will happen to all those people who thought they had retired on stock options when those options go to money heaven.
  • Is that the whole thing strikes me as hollow geek chic. I can just picture it. Late at night on a dark corner in San Francisco: "See! We have a sense of humor about ourselves.. The dot com ads are *soooo* rude!! oops, hang on, gotta take this cell phone call.. " "Sorry I'm late, I had to synchronize my pilot and avantgo before leaving just in case I suddenly had the urge to go see a movie or rudely read news bits in the middle of our conversation." "See! I'm part of The City. I'm fighting the man. Dot commer slime are ruining the city!! Wait, they're ticketing my illegally parked Z! Be right back." "Okay, I'm here, let's do it!! Sorry I'm late, I printed the sickers on the color laser at work but couldn't find a space big enough to part my 'Runner. I squeezed it into one of the 'compact' spaces down the block. Whoops, another cell call, hang on." There's a long list of things that are rude, socially irresponsible and obnoxious about the tech culture around here (and most places) that have very little to do with the advertisements. For any sensible person, the ads aren't even in the top 10. Given the atmosphere in SF, by the end of the month, it'll be Geek Cool to bash dot-coms in an attempt by the (largely unaccepted and seriously bashed in the free press) geek contingent to be perceived as cool and accepted. Christ, it's highschool all over again and the geeks still haven't gotten over it. They're still being made fun of and they're still responding by trying to sound cool by bashing themselves. -RSR

  • Re:is anyone else distressed by this: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm afraid that this has lost me a little...

    Yes, it has. There are some important issues you're not getting.

    This isn't about how people spend their money. The problem is that long-time residents, including many who made SF a desirable place to live in the first place, are being kicked out onto the street. It's not just artists; ethinic diversity is being lost too.

    Please remember that the dot-com explosion in SF arose from the multimedia industry in SOMA in the mid-90's, which was started by artists in the early 90's because they could get cheap warehouse space there. And the artists are here because of the tolerant and multicultural environment that SF used to have.

    It's not as simple as "people not wanting change", no matter what Mayor Brown says. Let's say I corner the market on food and means of its production, and then refuse to give you any. I bet you'd complain about that "change" too. The housing crisis is not about aesthetics, it's about desperate situations and even SURVIVAL for some people.

    Please don't pretend class differences and struggle don't exist. Yuppies and high-tech people (and I'm one) are in much greater positions of power than most working class people, and most white people (and I'm one) are in greater positions of power than non-white people. This is why your comparisons to racial segregationists are invalid. When the non-powerful try to defend what little they have against the powerful, to avoid becoming homeless, it's hardly the same as white people trying to keep black people out of the neighborhood. In Detroit and Chicago, the sheriff didn't come to the door with a gun to physically remove white people from their homes. In SF, he does.

    You clearly haven't been in SF very long, or thought very deeply about social issues. Most yuppies don't, because they don't have to. You can maintain your illusion, as long as you have money.

    I'm not dismissing your ideas out of hand. I'm dismissing them because I've heard them a hundred times before and they still don't stand up to scrutiny by anyone who's familiar with the issues.

  • Re:Pressure in SF (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe it's time that The City feels the same pressure that the South Bay has been under for the last five years.

    I grew up in Sunnyvale, and now that I'm in my twenties I'll probably never be able to afford housing in my home town.

    I think the whiners up north should try coming down here for a while and realize they aren't the only ones being forced out by slicon implants.

  • IPO? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But when is their IPO?

  • Re:San Francisco - The City Of Hate (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All cities change, no city can remain an undiscovered haven for creative people. I'm surprised San Francisco held this reputation for this long. I'm living in New York now, another city which once had a repution for being a haven for creative and interesting people. You think dotcom MBAs are obnoxious, try 23 year old frat-boy wall street bankers who wish they were dot-com MBAs.
    Anyhow, my point is that any established 'cool place' probably isn't. Look for someplace new, especially if it sounds uncool (Portland, Lincoln, etc.)
  • "Of course it's a bad thing. Since about '94, or so, the internet has become a twisted, mutated bastardization of what it once was."


    94 was the year I got on the internet. Coincidence? I think not.

    //Caine - caine@evilconspirations'r'us.com

  • I was going to reply to the parent article, but you pretty much covered all the bases. I second your opinion.
  • SOMETHING to angst about, perpetually. I read the statments made by the guy behind this, and honstly, I think there's more truth and heart in the "Andre The Giant Has A Posse" stickers. By the way, generation X is mid 30's by now, proudly I am not, I've stopped bitching about mass media, and I'm getting on with my life.
  • I'm sure I'll catch a load of garbage for this: but when someone is unable to say something without resulting to "shock words" (which no longer shock anyone anyway) my instant gut reaction is to stop listening to them. Not because they are "evil" -- just because they are usually an indicator of low intelligence and an unsupported (or unsupportable) position.

    When these people are able to come back with some reasoned position instead of a bunch of vulgar slogans which they use to vandalize public porperty, they can come talk to me.

    --

  • Are you honestly going to try to say that the
    modern grown internet is more usable and nice
    than the old internet? Sheesh!
  • just a sidenote, but wasn't the mission yuppie eradication project a hoax put out by the sfbg to expose the ignorance and consistent failure to check facts of other local media? btw: agree about the polarization of this town and the threat to it's heritage. every time some little one off business closes down, we get another baby gap or a freakin jamba juice.
  • I assume you mean Vancouver BC, which is a cool place.

    Yeah, a friend's going to school there (and I passed thru while on a cross-country vacation about 16 years ago.. Vancouver, Seattle, Spokane, Portland, then east thru Idaho, Montana, etc.. Very cool to have teachers for parents, as they have 2 months to burn on a trip like that) and he loves it.. Very free up there, though the gas is real expensive ;)

    Cheers,
    Your Working Boy,
  • Look for someplace new, especially if it sounds uncool (Portland, Lincoln, etc.)

    New Rochelle (where my loft is located) is about as uncool as you can get, though you _can_ get ?DSL, and isn't that all that matters? ;)

    Your Working Boy,
  • In the Star Trek universe, hasn't money been obsoleted on Earth, and can't people teleport to work? At which point all those San Francisco dotcoms become meaningless or don't need to locate anywhere in particular or both and all of a sudden there's a lot of available real estate there. : )
  • And you haven't unleashed your trained attack lawyers yet?
  • How would you have felt if someone had "thrown" an old Ferrari or D-type Jag on the fire?
  • I thought it was supposed to be an ironic play off the fact that some of us are not all that bright.
    ---
    icq:2057699
    seumas.com

  • Re:uhm (Score:1)

    by pen ( 7191 )
    Quick! Grab it! It's still available! :)

    --

  • Almost as silly as dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.
  • Did anyone notice the Giant Has a Posse "Obey" poster in the upper left of one of the street shots? San Francisco, where the subversive postmodern billboards have to fight one another for space.

    ObSpellCheck: It should be "MoreNippleWaxThanAnyone.com."
  • Yes, I should make it more clear that I'm of mixed views about Rent Control. On one hand, I understand the problems that led to Rent Control, and I'm glad that I live in a rent controlled apartment.

    On the other hand, it does create a situation where some people are paying far below "market" rents, while others who have just moved in are actually paying far above the market rents. The difference between the below-market rent (that artists etc can afford) and the above-market rent (that computer professionals can afford) is so great that eventually the Landlord figures out some way to evict the tenents -- even if they could afford the 'average' rent somewhere in the middle. This is radically changing the population of the city.

    It's the law of unintended consequences, I guess. And there isn't a really good way to fix the problem. (God help us if they repeal rent control at this point.)

    BTW, Rent Control in SF applies to any building built before 1979 with two units or more. That's probably ~80% of the rental housing stock. As for Marin County, it's an upper class enclave and there's almost no rental housing there, except way up in Novato. I have a few blue collar cousins that grew up in Marin and were basically forced over to the East Bay because of the lack of even moderately affordable housing.
    --
  • Actually, i submitted it like two days ago. What probably happened is that it was put into the queue to wait for a slow news period (like a sunday morning).

    -mark
  • Well, somebody wanted to use that free advertising for his website!

    whois blowthedotoutyourass.com@whois.register.com
    shows that the domain is registered to somebody in Chicago, and there even is a web server at www.blowthedotoutyourass.com [blowthedotoutyourass.com].

  • Oops, it was already in the header. Sorry, 'bout that.

    There goes karma ;-))

  • Funny, I'm one of these hated "rich silicon valley technogeeks". I don't recall asking any of the local business owners to please raise the prices here. Just because we have the money doesn't mean they *have* to rape us. They took it upon themselves to raise the prices, we didn't tell 'em too. If you want to complain, complain to the local landlords/business owners.

    Regards,

  • What gives you the right to tell these people how to spend their money? The money you spend on your education could feed plenty of destitute 3rd worlders. Just shut up.

  • I found an article [salon.com] in Salon that might be interesting to reproachful SFO implants.
  • When 9/10 of these companies go under, two things will happen.

    9/10 already go under. In fact if 1 in 10 businesses that you invest in make it, you've got a pretty nice profit. Consider that dotcoms that score big, will give you 100/1 profits. And it's not like the businesses that fail leave the city in ruin. It happens every day, yet the unemployeement rate stays at an all time low. I don't see any kind of crash you are refering to anytime soon.
  • Unamerican Activities, is a good start. they have all sorts of thought invoking [unamerican.com] stickers....
    UA is remotely related to The-Revolution [the-revolution.org] in that remote viewing kind of way.
    i will have to try to add T-R and UA meme to the DC LUG's Protest of DMCA [slashdot.org] just because DC needs laugh, here and there...

    nmarshall
    #include "standard_disclaimer.h"
    R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
  • slashing tires or burning crosses or what have

    I assume you mean they're burning someone else's cross, other than their own?

  • Another great site for spoof ads can be found here [adbusters.org]

    My favorite is the one for Obsession [adbusters.org]

    Prion

  • Well, where would you all the awful more-affluent people to live? It shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve...it's not like they're human beings who have every right to try to rent a place to live. And the people who own houses and rent them out don't have right to try to actually charge as much rent as someone is willing to pay them.

    Attempts to fight off normal market interactions through rent controls or overt violence and intimidation (yeah, sure, such a movement would really stop at scratching up some SUVs if it got any momentum) only serve to disadvantage a community at a later time, as demand fades, property values plummet, and insurance rates rise in response to a poor rent market and perception of high criminality.

    And, yes, this sort of xenophobic response is exactly like the reactions minorities get when they move into white neighborhoods. The hostility is always framed in a claim of the need for economic self-defense, and many people come to believe their rationalizations for it, but the hostility always originally comes from the strangeness of the newcomers. Mix in the envy of artistic types who currently aren't faring well in the marketplace for techies whose skills are in great demand, and there you go. Instant grass-roots outrage.

    As for "Anti-dot-com"...Were there people who had such a reaction when businesses started including phone numbers in their ads?

  • Avoid the valley crush - get an overpaid dotcom job in Austin instead :-)
  • Oh, Oh, Oh, please say the B.F. Day kids freaked the fuck out too?

    They built the (a Adobe building?) Adobe building _right next_ to my ol' elementary school! Grr!

    Methinx I haven't been there since....

    Latez,

    --"LEVIATHAN"
  • I disagree - there is an excellent reason for people to pursue this kind of anti-advertising campaign. Half of these STUPID web-blender.com sites are put up because people want them, or they hear about it, and think it's a good idea, for some god-forsaken reason. If they can show Joe Average Consumer how absurd most of these websites are, by giving examples of just slightly more absurd sites, they might cut down on the willingness of the consumer to put up with that kind of crap.
  • Well, I think the ads are really funny, but they are being posted all over the streets for everyone to see. The only problem I have with it is kids can read those ads too. I don't think I would want my friends little sister saying "What does BlowItOutYourAss.com mean?" or "Why did they say FuckYou...com?". I have no problems with obsenities around adults, but these sticker people need to think that they are posting in a public street where little kids can read this stuff too.

    JOhn
  • No doubt brought to you by the same sad, jealous losers that brought you the "yuppie eradication project". If me and my money force people like that down onto the peninsula, well, err... hooray.

  • You don't get it, do you? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They're not -against- tech. Hell, they -are- geekworkers. Just trying to bring some perspective back into life.

    My favorite part:

    "Shiny, 24-year-old people who were all very hip and cool [were] going into this thing. We just couldn't believe that this is what it had come down to -- that this was a cool thing in the Mission -- to go to these kind of dot-com opening parties and stuff. So we came back and threw some eggs at them."

    Face it, we're the next generation of yuppie scum. Even if you're not rolling in pre-IPO stock, you're exposed to such backlash, by merely whipping out your Pilot, or saying you do 'computer stuff'. Sometimes it's a groan & rolling of eyes, or you get passed off to the other geek in the room, or better yet, they glare & report that 'I hate computers'. And really, I can't blame them. We're pummelled with it, especially in the Bay Area... it's not so much the 'net & computers, but the inane corporate.com culture that's in our face, 24-7. It was all fun & games until the barrage of ads began.

  • related.. (Score:2)

    by joey ( 315 )
    I was in San Fransisco today and one of the MUNI stations is a huge Microsoft advertisement. However, as the main add comes into site on the way down the escalator, you see: "MICRO$OFT". Someone's added some strategic white tape in just the right places. Caused quite a double-take.

    --
  • It's a boring town full of wankers who are too busy gazing into their own navels to be interesting.

    People have asked why I don't consider moving to CA to be with the other tech nerds ('in my element' is the frequent refrain), instead of staying in NYC. This is why. Then again, maybe between the Doge everyone loves to hate and the NYPD ('Hold on officer, it's a wallet!') the citizenry doesn't have enough attention-span to spend on loathing tech nerds. Either that or there's _waaaay_ much more building space on which to sell ads.. (or maybe people've just been hating me for decades and I don't really give a shit anymore)..

    I'd definitely consider the Pacific NW (Vancouver, WA, OR, been to all and enjoyed them a lot) or NH or VT tho, as long as the gun laws are adequately free (hell, in VT IIRC you can carry a loaded pistol concealed in your car, and I don't know OTTOMH any other state that's legal)..

    I gotta admit though, I get a chuckle when I see that Doubleclick ad by the Flatiron building.. I just keep thinking about how many pennies they're not getting thanks to me using Junkbuster [waldherr.org].

    Your Working Boy,
  • They are amusing themselves and others at the expense of people like you who are getting all worked up over this. You're reaction shows that they hit a sore spot.

    Sounds like they've already solved this problem [cnn.com] in South Africa..

    Your Working Boy,
  • Absolutely. I've never understood the "Look I'm a vandal so I'm a cool insightful rebel" attitude. There is a lot of hype about the net, granted, but why not write a book about it? Stoll's "Silicon Snake Oil" was not bad, but it really was written too early to focus on the current situation.
  • They call the company "Sun" because the people who work for it don't see it often.
  • Remember, just because the pot calls the kettle black, doesn't mean the kettle isn't black.
  • Here's an important three-fold distinction between intolerance, resentment, and justified anger:
    1. Your neighbor and you are roughly within the same economic class, but with different lifestyles. You could probably afford his house and vice versa, your incomes are in the same order of magnitude. He buys an SUV; you buy a lot of beer and a trip to Jamaica. You frown on his choice as bourgeouis and tacky (not because of the environmental consequences of that choice) - you key his car because you think he's being a Yuppie. That is intolerant, just as it would be intolerant for him to have your ancient Beetle towed because it's an eyesore. No argument there.
    2. Your neighbor makes a lot more money than you do. Perhaps he won the lottery, perhaps he worked his little tuckus off while you sat around eating Cheezy Poofs and watching Iron Chef, perhaps he got lucky or you got unlucky or both. You can still afford your apartment. You can still afford to eat and go to the same restaurants you've always gone to. If you rent, no one is offering your landlord 5 times the current rent for your place. If you own, the city hasn't appraised your land based on an escalating market and increased your property tax 10 fold, and no developer has tried to get your building condemned so that he can put up a loft-condo. Your neighbor just has nicer stuff than you do - and it isn't a difference in taste, either: if you can afford it, you'd get it. You key his Land Rover, because you wanted a Land Rover. That's resentment. In a way, it's both pettier, yet more human than intolerance. On a micro level it's destructive, but less so overall than intolerance.
    3. You've been living in a neighborhood for a while, you work and get by. Perhaps you own your place, perhaps you rent, there may be others around who do better and worse than you do, but you have a life. However, property values skyrocket as a new class of people with remarkably high levels of disposable income move into the area. You may even like some of them as intelligent and personable people, but this is a mass phenomenon, with tens of thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. The city adjusts its tax code to cater to the new money. The vacancy rate drops. Units for rent at 5 times the amount you can afford (where they were in your range two years ago) have hundreds of wealthy prospects interested in moving into them. Your landlord is becoming hostile. Or, your property taxes have quintupled. (This does, I will admit right now, present much less of a problem for someone who owns property who is willing to sell it.) Because of the parking crunch, parking meters are installed in front of your house - if you aren't lucky enough or rich enough to own a place with parking, you have to pay for offsite parking if you can find it. Where restaurants used to cater to your income, the vast majority of them now charge 5 times more per meal than you can afford. After all, commercial rents have just quadrupled. Your favorite neighborhood bookstore closes because they can't afford the rent. Your neighborhood cafe, where they know you by name when you come in every morning, closes because they can't afford the rent. You have fewer options. You are afraid that the landlord could serve you an eviction notice at any time. It may have already happened to people you know. You wish that you didn't have to compete for local resources with a large class of people with significantly more wealth than you have. If you are a minority, you notice that your new neighbors call the police when they see you walk home at night, and you get stopped by cops a couple times. You are angry and scared - you key a Land Rover that is parked in front of your house. The act may be wrong, but the motivation is neither simple intolerance nor simple resentment.
  • Actually, if you look at the dates, you'll notice that this is the Wired effect, not the Slashdot effect.

    --
    Dan
  • that an anti-website group has their own website?
  • I don't live in one of these areas and so didn't know it had gotten that bad but I think this observation makes the choice of the Sam Lowry moniker pretty appropriate. Makes me want to dim the lights, put a magnifier in front of my old Mac's flickering 9 inch screen and set it to churn out old typewriter noises while I'm at work churning out websites for new dotcom ventures.

    Wouldn't Tuttle have been a better choice? Or was that Buttle...?

  • I had commercials on television and radio generally but the dot com commercials I hate even more. I know how these guys feel. Some of the most annoying commercials are dot coms second only to the Warehouse music commercials with the people singing out of tune. South side California probably isn't as bad but we've still got our load of dot com billboards. I'm making a blowitoutyourass.com t-shirt as I type. You're going to moderate this down.
  • Obscenity is the last refuge of the inarticulate motherfucker.
  • Has anyone considered the possibilty that this is just another stupid ad campaign? I'll admit that this is a low-probability scenario, but bear with me. With a few bucks worth of stickers, these guys have gotten people all over the net talking about their website (which appears to have been taken down at the moment). If they put up a new, commercial website tomorrow, with all the buzz going around the net, a lot of people would see it. For all we know, it could be some RealNames-type company trying to publicize a new, proprietary addressing scheme.
  • Stanford University Network.

    The machines were originally built as networked boxen that lived on the network and could be produced for much less than the "mainframes" or whatever of the time. Ironic that many SUN workstations are now being replaced by Linux and (sadly) NT workstations because they are cheaper..

  • Stop spreading those stickers! I wanted to squat all those wonderful domains! Now, since everybody knows them, you've ruined my potential business, and my IPO!

    Just HairyDrunkenLactatingSpottedMonkies.com should be worth $300M alone!

  • A lot more people take notice of an advert than read a book. Plus when something is done as succintly as "Idon'tneedmytoothpastedelivered.com" it's a bit boring to stretch it out into a 300page book.

    Although by the looks of things Andre the Giant still has a posse.
  • A lot of the pictures on their site showed their posters were stuck on top existing advertisements, which themselves were stuck on public and private property. So they're actually bringing attention to corporate-sponsored acts of vandalism, and keeping the cost of the removing their own ads to a minimum.

    But then again, they also stuck them on steet signs and legitimate ads.

    I imagine it has more to do with the person placing the posters than the organization itself. Do you think Nissan, Nintendo, and HBO condone vandalism?
  • In Seattle ("The San Francisco of the Northwest") the latest grafitti craze (no, not Grafitti (tm)) is "NoMorePrisons.net" spray-painted on sidewalks. To me this is the perfect undeniable proof that grafitti can be a positive act. I saw the grafitti, I bought the book, and though I just read it yesterday I literally think it's changed my life.

    I don't know how annoying the SF labels are. I do know that spray paint on sidewalk will wear off in a few months, and that it has a hell of a lot less negative impact on my quality of life than a lot of billboards (or worse, TV screens in airports). I'd much rather give the right to spam my environment over to those who care (yes, that includes sidewalk evangelists) rather than those who just have more money than I do.
  • Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.

    I'm sorry -- trying to draw a distinction between hating someone because you don't like where he puts his money and hating someone because you don't like where he puts his penis is puerile it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is sophistry.
    /.

  • This reminds me of something here in Fremont (A district in Seattle.) A couple years ago, Adobe built a nice shiny new building here which blocks the view of the water. A while ago, Someone went around and stuck stickers all over the area that say "Fuck Adobe". The best part is the irony. They used a distinctive Adobe font for the stickers.

    --GnrcMan--
  • Seattle has had some billboard terrorists. My favorate was a billboard for Merit cigarettes. It shows a person excitedly holding up a pack of Merits with the slogan. "I've got Merit". Well, they changed the slogan to read "I've got Cancer!".

    --GnrcMan--
  • I'd definitely consider the Pacific NW (Vancouver, WA, OR, been to all and enjoyed them a lot)

    I'm in Seattle. I assume you mean Vancouver BC, which is a cool place. There's a town in WA, right across the border from Portland, called Vancouver. It's kind of a shithole.

    I would recommend against Seattle. It gets on your nerves and wears you down. Traffic sucks. Costs are outrageous due to the abundance of dot coms and MS millionaires. People here are so apathetic it isn't even funny. And everyone drives an SUV and bitches about how much gas costs. I'm only here because my girlfriend is finishing up her Classics degree at UW.

    Portland, OR on the other hand, is a wonderful city. I'd move there in a second. If you are going to move to the Pacific Northwest, that is the place to be. Just watch out for a scary man named Lon Mabon.

    --GnrcMan--
  • Just what do these people think they can accomplish with their juvenile acts of vandalism?

    Easy: they get a lot of people's attention very quickly, just like e-marketers do. And that, of course, is the whole point here -- they're trying to make a point to a lot of people very quickly. Looks to me like it's working.

    Writing a book about it is in this case pretty much pointless -- anyone that picks up the book is probably a sympathizer in the first place. Making a web site will only draw so many hits unless it becomes a meme (which has actually begun to happen in this case, just as it did with Mahir et al). Taking to the streets with posters is just... so... non-digital, I can't really take that seriously for this effort.

    No, I think Mr Lowry is on the right track here -- these pseudo-ads are great, and I hope to see them pop up all over the place. San Francisco, Boston, London, everywhere. We're in the midst of a gold rush with a dirty little secret: there ain't no gold to be found! It's time that news became a bit more well known, even if it does kick your startup in the belly. Sorry guys, them's the breaks -- the party needs to end & we need to clean up the mess we've made.



  • The problems that SF is facing is of it's own making.

    I think you're ignoring a lot of (not so recent) history and geography ...

    Internet companies didn't make it practially illegal to build new housing in SF. SF politicians did.

    More like it has something to do with the fact that almost every square inch of SF has been developed for decades now - even out in the far avenues there are row after row of 2 story houses - if you want to build new housing you have to knock down housing that already has people living in it - that becomes a political problem

    You could argue that the political corruption scandals that resulted in San Mateo county being broken off from SF county at the turn of the century were "of it's own making" - but no one involved is still alive to my knowledge

    Internet companies didn't refuse to do anything about traffic or parking, and then complained about the resulting mayhem. SF politicians did.

    Of maybe it has something to do with much of SF being built up before cars were in common uses - all those victorians with 4-6 apartments in them don't have garages for a reason - people didn't have cars when they were built - and there was good public transport - now each of those people living in those apartments want their own SUV and street parking is a nightmare. This is nothing new - I had the same problem when I lived in the Haight 15 years ago - in the end we ditched our car and used the buses - we usually got where we wanted faster anyway.

    Internet companies didn't impose a state of war between renters and landlords through rent control. SF politicians did.

    This has been going on for a couple of generations SF has a really big problem with spiralling rents for people on fixed incomes - the politicians are after all just representiung the voters. Rent control has been viciously fought over every 3-4 years for as long as I can remember

    However, SF politicians didn't invent blaming all their problems on the nasty subhuman outsiders. That one is universal.

    Actually SF politicos seem divided on this one - in fact it's a historical divide - between the ones who represent and suck up to downtown big-business and the more populist ones who try and represent the voters. Besides after a few years the 'outsiders' become locals and start griping about the latest batch of immigrants

  • Opening up your own .com to poke fun at another .com ?

    It's like a drunk making fun of Budweiser while finishing off the last drop in his 40oz bud.
    _______________

  • This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'.

    Jealousy of Seattle ? The NW Slackers got to have their revolution, and now SF wants its own.

    -- Reclaim The Trustfunds

  • I don't agree that ending the transient state will be a good thing.

    A crunch is a crunch. People get hurt. Small investors will take a very big hit on the collapse of the ecomm boom. Let's face it, we like to think of VCs as those lovely rich people who keep us in big lunches and new G4s, while we bleed them dry, but where did their money come from ? A lot of the fund money floating around now is either Joe Sixpack's own little day-trading adventure, or it's Doreen Bluerinse's life-savings in a Fund that was late into .com and still can't tell the difference between Amazon and Lastminute, or Cisco and Iridium.

    What happened in '29 ? Banks got burned, and when a bank gets burned, it takes it out on its smaller creditors. Rockefeller didn't find a bank trying to repossess his mansion, but a lot of poor Okie farmers did.

  • This is fairly amusing, but don't you all think there are significantly more important issues that need attention. Sure, a lot of the people who read/post/submit to /. care about those things, and that's great, but this anti-dot-com thing, with all its bumper stickers and whatnot is going to get way more public attention than any of the stuff that really matters. Sure, anti-IP patent bumperstickers aren't going to be as interesting, and probalby are not the best idea, but it's far more relevant.

    I guess this is just showing me that all the discussion and arguments and thoughts that take place on /. are hampered by the fact that /. is one of the few places they can take place. So how can we spread the word about more prevelant issues than the dot-com sillyness to the mostly ignorant public? The deCSS t-shirts would seem to be a start, except I doubt they make much sense to most people, and line upon line of seemingly random characters isn't all that appealling.

    The anti-dot-com fanfare is ok, but it's only really going against something that's not all that important, and will die out soon enough anyways. I'm not sure how serious the people running it actually are, but if they really want to change the future of the internet, they should focus on something relevant.

  • Why is it that internet startups (any high tech startup FTM) feel the need to be located in the Bay area, NYC, Boston, SoCal or Seattle given the physical locationlessness (new word) of the internet?

    I understand that it provides a method for new companies to recruit talent from other local companies without requireing the employee to move but it would seem to me that a company could either startup or move to somewhere like Ann Arbor, Madison, Boulder or Austin, still offer the same stupidly overvalued salaries and allow the employees to live like kings in some pretty cool cities. Why does this not happen very much? Are the VC's trying to drive up the values of their real estate investments?

    Any other reasons for this?
  • At first I thought that these flyers may have been the result of regular people who had become tired of E-this and E-that everywhere and .com's everywhere you look especially in San Francisco. But after rereading the article I begin to suspect that this campaign may be the product of embittered tech folk who are in the land of IPO plenty and yet feel they are going hungry (by Silicon Valley standards). I also suspect they are either owners of a failed startup, wannabe CEOs who didn't obtain venture capital, and recently fired valleyites.
    The domain names picked although funny are also very revealing about them e.g. ShredsOfSomeonesSoulForAuction.com, FuckYouAndTheStartupYouRodeInOn.com. After all in Silicon valley everyone feels they should be a millionairre and since does not hold true it seems the losers (again by Silicon valley standards) have decided that if they can't have it no one else will. I wonder how native SFer's feel about these ads and all the wealth being thrown around by snot-nosed geeks with more money than they know what to do with.

    PS: I submitted this last night and it got declined. Go figure.
  • I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block.

    You miss the point...it isn't about how some snot nosed programmers and geeks are lavishly spending their money . This is about people and organizations who have lived in San Francisco for years and perhaps even generations that are being forced out of their homes simply because they are not as well to do as the snot nosed geeks who showed up in the city less than five years ago. I'll give you 2 true life examples that show exactly how different the San Francisco situation is from the racist scenario you liken it to.
    • Recently in the city of Atlanta (which has the second largest gay population in the U.S.) members of the gay community decided to start moving into low cost inner city housing which until then had predominantly occupied by blacks. This had the effect of driving up property values since most of the homosexuals were yuppie white people with good income. Very soon some of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, some of which had lived there for decades, started a campaign against the newcomers because they were forcing them out of their homes. Of course, the media picked this up and it became a blacks vs. gays issue as opposed to an issue with economic undertones. This is similar to what's happening to native SFer's and the geek newcomers.
    • Atlanta is described as "The white donut". This is because the city is predominantly black but completely surrounded on all sides by predominantly white suburbs consisting primarily of gated communities. Since most of the suburbanites work in the city, there is a considerable amount of rush hour traffic on a daily basis. Yet efforts to extend subway service into the suburbs have been consistently blocked by the suburbanites because they don't want to give easy access to the city people (blacks) to their neighborhoods so they don't reduce their property values, rob & steal, bring the inner city bums with them, etc. This is an example of racial seclusionary behavior
    I hope you can see how different the situation in San Francisco is from that of old white suburbanites who don't want black folk reducing property values. Personally it is my opinion that San Francisco is probably the most tolerant city in the country especially when juxtaposed with southern cities.

    PS: Full disclosure. I am a black, snot nosed punk programmer who hopes to launch a startup. :-)
  • I have to agree with this group of individuals after living first in Palo Alto and then in San Jose. The point is that all these high paying dot coms in the area have driven prices sky high. I was appalled to find out that at $50,000 per year I was considered poverty level... and it was tough, it never seemed like my wife and I could make ends meet. Finally I told IBM and the whole silicon valley area good-bye and moved back to Utah. So you can imagine what it is like for the "regular" people like gas station attendants, school teachers, etc... Both parents work and yet they still struggle to even pay their rent or mortgage. The whole silicon valley area is divided into two distinct groups, the rich dot- commers and the poor regular folk.

    It is no wonder there is such a backlash against them. In fact, when I was there this whole thing was already gaining steam with some groups in San Francisco openly vandalizing rich dot-commers cars and property, in hopes to drive them out. I don't condone such actions but it goes to show just how desparate the situation is for many people.

    I think the solution to this problem is already taking form as many dotcoms are actually locating in other places that have a lower cost of living and thereby alleviating the already exploding situation in Silicon Valley.

    Just my two cents.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
  • This is exactly the things I've been hinting at - the start of new revolution. They're not opposed to the web, or even to the technology. What they're deploring is the hype that appears to create money from thin air.

    Let me put it clearly for you: NASDAQ is the biggest, baddest pyramid scheme on the planet.

    The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value.

    Part of the problem here is that you have everybody eying the wealth that appears to be getting created from thin air on NASDAQ, and thinking "I'd like some of that."

    There is, however, a fundamental principle of economics. That is, if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation.

    While we're not quite at that point, we are getting a ludicrous number of people being ludicrously wealthy, and that is simply unsustainable. The system is headed for a major breaking point.

    The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism. The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.

  • andicantwaittillitsover.com

    And to drive this point home, I just ran out to the store to pick up a few items and happened to glance at the 3/27 issue of Time magazine. &nbsp Guess what's on the front cover? &nbsp Stephen King, his face and upper torso as a picture on a computer monitor, with his hand reaching out of it to a keyboard directly in front.

    Front cover title of this journalistic brilliance? &nbsp "'icandoit.com' and you can too".

    I live in Philly - whoever has those "anti-dot com" materials that the article mentioned were going to be handed out here on the east coast - PLEASE GET THEM HERE FAST!!!!

  • San Francisco is the hideous mega-capital of obnoxious real-world advertising. We have flatbed trucks with billboards mounted in the back, whose sole purpose is to drive around town showing a giant ad for some lame web "business".

    We've got those and the barges in Philly too. &nbsp First time I saw one of those flatbed truck signs was a couple of years ago. &nbsp I thought it was just one company's unique way of advertising. &nbsp Then I kept seeing them and seeing them and cursed having to drive behind one too! &nbsp Please don't forget the small planes dragging a banner through the sky with some "dot com" on it and I've even seen some sky-writers spell out "dot com" companies as an ad! (true).

    Alot of this sort of thing started when alot of cities started banning billboards in residential neighborhoods, so the advertisers "took their show on the road" so to speak.

    One thing that's interesting is the massive increase in radio advertising for these "dot coms". &nbsp Probably 3/4 of the ads I hear on all-news stations are either for "computerjobs.com" or some other "tech-relatedindustry.com".

    And I know that tech and businesses on the internet have brought an amazing amount of jobs and wealth but I'd like to see the field mature a bit, without all the hype. &nbsp Okay, it's here, so lets move on. &nbsp JMHO.

  • andicantwaittillitsover.com

  • And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)

    And I was gonna point out NASA's Beowulf cluster [beowulf.org] but then you'd say... ohhhhh... &nbsp fsck it! &nbsp ;-)

    Actually want to make a point that hasn't been touched here yet and that is this: &nbsp Remember learning in U.S. History about what happened, oh... &nbsp around 1849 in San Fran? &nbsp A little thing called the "gold rush"? &nbsp Looks like we're seeing a repeat in history here some 150 years later...

    And for those who are new to that area and/or are considering the latest dot com gold rush, remember that the last sortof big earthquake occurred when? In 1989? &nbsp And they're looonnngggg overdue. &nbsp I remember watching the World Series when Candlestick Park (OOPPPSSS!!! &nbsp WRONG NAME! &nbsp Ahem. &nbsp "3COM Park", I believe it was later called) was literally being shaken apart. &nbsp If you like San Andreas fault living, be my guest. &nbsp Zico and me will stick with the Linux-caused hurricaines and blizzards and tornadoes on the east coast!

    And by the way, regarding the real estate there? &nbsp ALL that stuff has to go - the Presidio included. &nbsp I mean come on. &nbsp How the hell can they start building Star Fleet Academy with those damn dot coms in the way, huh? &nbsp Let's start moving to the REAL technology!

    ;-)

  • time to face the facts. every media industry that has boomed thus far has only boomed because of advertising. without advertising things don't get noticed, or they loose all financial backing. before advertising came in the web was still crawling around in diapers but since avertising has came in the internet has boomed reaching more people then it could ever have on it's own.

    I think this is a given. &nbsp In order to "get noticed" to sell a product or service, a company needs to advertise. &nbsp My complaint is not so much companies advertising, but doing a "me too" by making a big production out of being "dot com" companies as well - and this is in reference to many of your "traditional" companies who have been pressured to become a "dot com". &nbsp And the straw that breaks the camel's back is the media's obsessive reporting on the whole "dot com" phenomena. &nbsp So what you basically get is advertising + media reports == more (now free) advertising which means overkill.

    Last night, I heard a "personal business" report on an all-news station which described some "ecommerce" (sigh... more "e"s) local shopping portal site and how they plan to expand to include more stores to choose from. &nbsp Now unless this particular web site (which is a commercial business) happened to have paid for the fact that they were featured in this brief report, what did they get? &nbsp Free advertising! &nbsp And from an all-news station that presented this thing as if it was some kind of "community affairs" or "for your information" type thing. &nbsp Previously, these kinds of things reported on non-profits and maybe what they were doing in the business world or they reported on market trends or gave advise on stocks or business ventures, etc. &nbsp But to feature a web site (again unless it was really a paid-for infomercial rather than a report) as a "report" is downright misleading!

    oh and btw anyone ever think about the fact that the com in XXXXXX.com means commerce?

    I thought it meant "commercial"... ;-)

  • There's no way in hell Microsoft is behind this. Many of the slogans are far too...um..colorful, for any big family-friendly company like Microsoft to be involved with them.
  • weather maybe? At least I dig Bay Area weather.

    and "coolness" factor of being in SV.

    and consider how many dot.com's in SV are started by or recruit heavily from either UCBerkeley or Stanfurd grads who really don't care to move out of the area just yet -- a lot of them dig the Bay Area and don't even LOOK outside of it for work.
  • yeah but there's a difference that the .marketing dweebs aren't just moving in, they're displacing those who were here by driving rents through the roof, doubling in the past two years and san francisco wasn't cheap to begin with. Every week it seems theres another story about some little non-profit going under or moving out of the city (if they can) as they can't afford their rent doubling. This week it's cartoon art museum (which was I think the only museum dedicated to cartooning) next week it's be somebody else.
    Here [sfgate.com] is a nice story from sf on the dot.whatevers impact in SOMA.
  • San Francisco is a constantly evolving city, dropping and adopting cultural motifs as fast as they emerge.

    While people may regard SF as a home for hippies, flakes and freaks, it wasn't always this way. This radical transformation in the 50's was as hard fought as the hippie/dotcom struggle is today.

    Those fighting progress in SF now are cut from the same cloth as those at the heart of the tumult forty years ago.

  • This kicks ass (Score:3)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @06:34AM (#1170290)
    I love seeing this stuff around town. San Francisco is the hideous mega-capital of obnoxious real-world advertising. We have flatbed trucks with billboards mounted in the back, whose sole purpose is to drive around town showing a giant ad for some lame web "business". Then there is a giant billboard mounted on a barge that they tow around the bay and position close to major bayshore freeways.

    Couple that with the rather annoying fact that a lot of these pointless (and hopeless) businesses are making money for their employees anyway, and you have a pretty silly situation. It's good to see someone publicly decrying this absurdity.

    -jwb

  • Re:Sour Grapes? (Score:3)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @07:15AM (#1170291) Homepage
    I know plenty of people who are ridiculously successful by these standards, who still don't like what income polarization is doing to San Francisco and other metropolitan areas. It's better to win a horrid game than to lose it, but you can still recognize it as a horrid game and wish that it didn't exist.

  • Re:is anyone else distressed by this: (Score:3)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @08:14AM (#1170292) Homepage
    I find it ridiculous to compare hostility to the newly arrived rich with hostility to blacks and other minorities. But I'll attempt to explain the reason for the hostility a bit more, anyway.

    You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.

    The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.

    There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this [dnalounge.com] sometime.)

    People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley [jwz.org] to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'

  • Re:Pressure in SF (Score:3)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @09:16AM (#1170293) Homepage
    I disagree with your observations about rent control - after all, rent control only applies to buildings over 30 years old, I think, and yet the newer-than-30-year-old housing is showing greater inflationary trends in rent costs. When some people note that rents are high in cities with rent control, they blame rent control for the high rents. It's sort of like blaming the earthquakes in San Francisco on the seismic codes, because cities without seismic construction codes don't get earthquakes: rent control was introduced into these cities because of ongoing problems with escalating rents and exploitative landlords. Berkeley's rent control law was gutted, and rents skyrocketed with no signs of coming down. Oakland still has rent control, and lower-middle and working class people can afford to rent there - but developers are working to change that.

    Some details to be aware of are that there is no commercial rent control, which has a whole slew of corallary effects on market motivation.

    That said, your point about the exploding cost of housing in other (non rent-controlled!) parts of the Bay Area is quite accurate, and I'd forgotten it. One little irony is that Marin County, once the most beautiful expensive counties in the Bay Area, has become remained a lot more affordable (especially for renters) and largely avoided the crunch of the rest of the Bay Area. It's not cheap, by any means, but their decision to NOT invest in a lot of transportation infrastructure, and to keep many of their interior roads one-lane and to completely control growth (it's virtually impossible to build on green land in most of the county) has made the portions of it that are far from the freeway an unattractive option to commuters, and kept housing prices stable.

  • Re:Read the comments in the html (Score:3)

    by FigWig ( 10981 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @11:09AM (#1170294) Homepage
    score: revolution 1, .com 0

    This gives me the idea that they are bitter overgrown adolescents getting off on their 'subversiveness'. Please. Maybe these people can grow up actually do something that will help their community. I'm glad that they are trying to voice their opinion, I just feel that without a constructive aspect, their campaign is pure egotism.

    Anyway, I was much more subversive than this when I was in high school. Maybe I'm just jealous because nothing I did was published on a web site.

  • Re:Pressure in SF (Score:3)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @08:58AM (#1170295) Journal
    I live in SF, and have to admit that I'd like to see the Beauty Bar burned to the ground when the revolution comes as much as the next guy. But, in general, San Franciscians are actually a pretty small minded lot, and only see the 'big picture' in a ten block radius from where they live.

    A couple things are happening here:
    1) Land values are skyrocketing around the whole bay. There simply isn't enough land to go around, and poor people and industrial usage are feeling it. Unlike in the 1980s boom, San Francisco hasn't been excepted this time, and rents here are actually similar or lower to Cupertino or anywhere else. The perception is that SF is being 'invaded' by computer jocks that want to enjoy the lifestyle while destroying it. The reality is that many people are being pushed here by the more intolerable situation in SV.

    2) Rent Control is having the reverse effect of increasing evictions, rather than decreasing them. Quite a few people have been holed up for years in a victorian flat paying $800/month, split 4 or 5 ways. Obviously, if the landlord can slap on a coat of paint and get $3000 for the same flat, he'll find a way. And since he doesn't want to get into a situation where he's below market again, he might jack that $3000 up to $3500. This sort of thing totally distorts the economics in a city where most people rent.

    But anyways, you're right. The days of San Francisco being a real artistic center are probably over. Most of that community is either trust funded or entrenched and over 35 years old. The fear is that we'll end up like a big version of Carmel-by-the-Sea or Sausilito, and the art will be pastel pictures of balloons and seagulls floating over the golden gate.
    --

  • Gentrification (Score:3)

    by laborit ( 90558 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @07:35AM (#1170297) Homepage
    or
    Maybe we need this dotshit

    I hate to sound like a gun manufacturer or a child pr0nographer, but it seems like the eToothpaste eDelivery eServices and the trade-stocks-at-3-AM and dancingsquidtitties.com wouldn't be there if people didn't want them. Their movement into the web is more or less the inevitable result of the common folk moving into the web.
    So, while I understand the frustration of one of the most empowering communication and information-transforming tools ever created being used to sell crap even more useless than the crap we sold last week, it may be a great opportunity for those with brains. The eOverload lowers the noise-to-signal ratio, but it doesn't drive good information out. If little Johnny's dad gets a shiny new computer and a DSL line so that he can buy underwear at the speed of light using the Business Model of the Future, that doesn't stop Johnny from visiting GNU [gnu.org] or Bartleby [bartleby.org] or the DXM FAQ [frognet.net]. I'm talking about guerilla education here. Let's let the dots put a computer in every nook and cranny, build powerful internet backbones and make everyone need high-speed reliable access as one of life's basic requirements.

    That's when we move in...
  • You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.

    I'm afraid that this has lost me a little-- I'm failing to see how disliking how a community member chooses to spend his/her money is any different than who a comm. member chooses to associate with, or how he/she chooses to worship or whatever trite comparission you care to walk around the block. Destroying folk's property (i.e. slashing tires or burning crosses or what have you) doesn't sound tollerant-- although both certainly express resentment (and how!)

    Also, I didn't want to sound like I didn't understand the hostility. I totally understand why any set community dislikes an interlopper-- people don't like change. That's fine. But it's interesting (which isn't to say significant) that the same excuses ("they're screwing up our community's values, messing with our property values, edging us out, taking our rightful places from us") are trotted out by old white suburbanites and younger, hipper artsy San Franciscans.

    Just food for thought. Don't dismiss this out of hand, please.

  • End the TLD Tyranny! (Score:3)

    by Wellspring ( 111524 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @12:04PM (#1170299)

    OK, you won't usually hear completely crazy ideas coming from me. But this is different. Those SF people were the usual anti-freedom antitech luddites, but this is an excuse to promote my agenda:

    End all TLDs!!!!

    This sounds funny and/or sarcastic; I fully expect this time to be moderated into the floor. But ever since Ralph Nader's group started advocating whole new TLDs just for their pet causes, it has occurred to me that the whole notion of .org .net .whatever is silly.

    It made sense in the old days, when you needed to know at a glance if you could access a site for regulatory reasons (ie certain mil domains accessing com domains, etc). But what purpose do they serve now?

    More web addresses? It doesn't address the limited number of *.*.*.* addresses (there are other solutions for that). Most companies reserve all possible TLDs which could violate their trademarks-- add more TLDs and you won't even see more lawsuits-- the same squatters and the same trademark holders, just more names to fight over.

    It hardly serves as an organizing principle. Is an American private school a .com, .edu, or .city.state.us? The latter is ruling of self-appointed Masters of American Domains at USC. They want coke to be coke.atlanta.us. Why? Really, I can't tell. I don't need to look at a web address to tell if I am at a gov't, private or network provider's homepage.

    What we need aren't more top-level domains, but less. We have to drop this .com hack and type http://slashdot. Current dot-whatevers can keep their distinctions, but let's let EVERYTHING be a TLD.

    End the TLD Tyranny. In your heart, you know I'm right.

  • imadumbassvandal.org (Score:3)

    by dotgpb ( 161780 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @06:41AM (#1170300)
    Just what do these people think they can accomplish with their juvenile acts of vandalism?

    If they have some kind of point to make, other than whining, there has to be a more productive method of protest than plastering avery labels all over the place.

  • Read the comments in the html (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2000 @07:09AM (#1170301)

    read the comments in the html

    Commando Unit One:

    The glass on the Muni platform in front of Pac Bell Park
    the corner of 3rd and Townsend - in view of everyone coming off 280 and
    driving to the Fin. Dist.
    the front of usweb/cks - Oh yeah baby
    Kearny and Bush - Wall of the building next to the Academy of Art - for all
    of the students to enjoy as they pass
    Montgomery and California - Bus Stop - deep financial dist.
    Montgomery across from the Trans America Pyramid - Bus Stop - the Union 41
    stops by there on it's way from the Marina
    Montgomery and pine - Wall - Financial Dist.
    Broadway Tunnel - West bound lane on the right.
    Fillmore and Lombard - My personal favorite spot - The buss stop
    Chestnut and scott (I think) - Buss stop

    Stickers:
    all down chestnut and union and Van Ness/Union bus stop


    Commando Unit Two:

    here is the break down of our evening. after everyone went off into the rain soaked night, my spirits were also slightly damp. x, y and i went out to the car to begin our appointed rounds. just then a cab pulled up with x joining the party late. naturally we went back into the bar and had a couple shots of tequila to get him up to revolution speed. when we came out, x and y ran up to us flush with energy reporting that they had just pounded south park into submission and then ran off into the night.

    we got in the car and started driving looking for good spots. all i wanted to do was put one at the corner of townsend and fourth by the train station. as we pulled up to the light we saw two huge posters already in perfect position, a huge victory cheer went up (x, was that you?), as far as i was concerned, the revolution had won.

    the vw golf then got a little confused about where to go, we headed into the financial district. at one point a white cop car drove by us, obviously checking our whole situation out. oblivious, we drove around the corner and started putting some posters up across from gassers. sure enough the cop circled back around and drove by. everyone jumped in the car and i took off. remembering a dukes of hazard episode i saw once, i blew a red light and sped off for townsend st. eventually the white cop car caught up with us, pulled up right next to the white revolution mobile and deemed us not worthy of pulling over. if he only knew...

    we decided to change venue and went into the heart of the mission. we got a couple of good ones up before soldier x started coughing up his lungs and we had to call it a night.

    score: revolution 1, .com 0

  • Re:Sour Grapes? (Score:4)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @07:26AM (#1170302)
    I don't feel so bad about the income polarization in SF, because I feel it is transient. Up until the bottom falls out, money is absolutely pouring into the SF Bay Area. Basically all these high-tech startups are taking money from clueless investors and depositing it right here. When 9/10 of these companies go under, two things will happen. The people who flocked here only for the money will leave, which will alleviate the housing crunch. And, all of the permanent investment that has been made will still be here even after those companies go under. The renovated buildings, fiber installations, new sky scrapers, and the rest aren't going anywhere. So the bottom line is that after everything goes to shit, SF still ends up with a net increase in capital wealth.

    What the government (state and local) needs to understand is that they must funnel these huge tax surpluses that the Internet economy is creating into capital improvements for school and transportation. If they do, we'll cruise through the recession with new schools and low taxes that just break even on the operating costs.

    -jwb (-= 0.02)

  • Except that's not what this is all about (Score:4)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @11:00AM (#1170303)

    (Whoa, I'm replying to a JDax post! ;-) )

    Everybody gets sick of stuff they hear all the time, whether it's Brittney Spears or "Cha-ching!" However, you don't very often see people going around vandalizing property over it. The reaction that this article (and many others that you can find at the SF Weekly or SF Gate) is talking about is a different phenomenon.

    Namely, it's all about jealousy and class warfare and the incredibly immature (although we've probably all done it at some point) "I got here first, so I'm better" attitude.

    Jealousy and class warfare? This shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone anywhere, but San Francisco (no, I refuse to call it "The City") is particularly notorious for it. The bonus is that it takes no thought whatsoever to join this movement -- just go after anything that looks like a yuppie status symbol: in order, the pager, the cell phone, the SUV, and San Francisco real estate.

    An aside: I never really understood why yuppie youth thought they were cool because they carried a pager on their belt. To me, it's saying, "Yeah, I lack so much independence that I have to be at the beck and call of other people 24 hours a day." But I digress.

    As for the third attitude I mentioned, it's hardly unique to San Francisco, but they seem to do it better than just about anyone save possibly New York City dwellers. Recently, a decent number of gay folks thought it would be fun to start vandalizing people's cars, because too many straight people were moving into their neighborhoods. (How's that for discriminatory irony!) You see it among the Slackers of NYC, too, because the mayor actually had to gall to make run down areas like Times Square safe for families to visit at night. Gasp! This definitely isn't limited to real estate, either, if you've ever heard anyone whine "Man, BandX and TVshowX were so cool, but now they suck because a lot of people like them. Mainstream bastards!"

    In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that we're one of the groups that has moved into a place that was vacated by an organization mentioned elsewhere in this thread at Slashdot because they could no longer afford the rent. It still wouldn't change my opinion on this, though, as I've never been harrassed over it, nor has any of my property been vandalized.

    I will say, however, that the San Francisco land grab is pretty ironic. Technology, and more specifically, the Internet, are supposed to increase our abilities to work together remotely, yet we're all fighting to squeeze into San Francisco, and paying through the nose for the honor.

    And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Re:This kicks ass (Score:4)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @10:45AM (#1170304)
    Yes, the sticker idea is a really good one. It requires no central orginisation and it allows you to communicate with a lot of people. Slashdoters should take notice of this idea because these are exactly the qualities we require too.

    Example: Many companies are selling (so called) mp3 players which are SDMI compliant. We could run a stickering campaign to attach stickers to the devices (on store sheleves) warning about all the bad things SDMI dose. Stickers could also be attached to shrink wrapped censorware which would warn the consumer about all the good sites the software blocks (like blocked feminists sites, 70% bad blocks in the .edu domain, Utah library tests show 1 of 20 blocks is a bad block, etc).

    Anywho, the sticker campaign could be really effective for "make people think issues" (like the SF thing) or "get the word out issues" (like my examplkes). The only question is "how do we distribute the stickers?"

    The safest way to distribute the stickers would be to run a web site providing the materials necissary to order the stickers from the various custom sticker outfits online.

  • there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.)

    There were campaigns like this in the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago in the 60's, too. But, those were to keep African-Americans and "foreigners" from moving in or staying. Isn't this a sort of distressing reaction to a shift in population demographic? Isn't SF supposed to be an almost mystical land of community tolerance and acceptation? If "artists" (you know, the voice of culture, those who spend every day slaving to prove that human beings are at least a notch above rabid dogs) are stooping (or, god forbid, gladly taking up) subtle (and not-so-subtle) terror tactics, isn't the art scene already dead?

    As for BlowItOutYourMonkeysButt.com (or whatever the hell it's called,) some of the material is funny (in a sort of AIRTOONS [airtoons.com] kinda way), but it seems to me that the whole campaign is just howling-at-the-moon brand rage: futile not only in its tacit attempt (stickers will kill this dot-com bullshit about as quickly as a water hose will put out the sun) but also in its execution (by setting yourself up as not-A [we hate them dot-com coloninc services!], you basically guarantee that every time you impress your message on someone[look, honey: those artists really hate e-colonics], you're also passing on the much-loathed message you're trying to resist [honey, do you think we should get ourselves colonically irrigated online?]. )

    Oh, crap; does any of this make sense?

  • The internet pisses me off too! (Score:4)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @06:34AM (#1170306)
    I'm sick of this internet BS too...everyone is E-this/E-that. I just want to read a book or something. Even my boss at work seems to be into this whole internet thing...he's always asking me, "Did you restart those webservers?" or "Hey..is that E4500 back up and working yet"/"Damnit, why has our bandwidth dropped?"

    Personally, i don't know what he's talking about. I just took this job as a...i think they call me a SysAd or something...because they have a foosball table. Besides - no one has told me why they call the company i work for "Sun" anyway. I mean...it's really not that well lit around here anyways.


    -FluX
    -------------------------
    Your Ad Here!
    -------------------------

  • Pressure in SF (Score:5)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Sunday March 26, 2000 @06:43AM (#1170307) Homepage
    The new economy in San Francisco has polarized people: this is just one amusing sign of that. The invasion of dot-com wealth has created a new title for the people who are coming up from Silicon Valley: silicon implants.

    With a significant segment of the population here taking in income that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the general, non-high-tech population, a local inflation has made it very difficult for the working poor and artists who had long considered this a home to survive. The service industry here has gotten outright hostile to people it percieves as part of that economy - especially the MBA types (less so the geeks, since we're less into conspicuous consumption, even though we are just as guilty of pushing up rent costs.) Jobs at restaurants and cafes that pay $10 an hour go begging.

    Also good targets for abuse are people who buy and drive SUVs in a crowded city without parking - there was a campaign encouraging locals to vandalize SUVs and luxury cars, partially out of vengeance and partially to scare away the rich arrivers, who are pushing up the cost of living. (It was called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.) Another source of contention is the property-tax exemption for so-called live-work spaces. Originally designed to motivate artists to move into troubled neighborhoods and convert industrial space into studio and work space, the vast majority of so-called live-work lofts are new construction that simply is built in an industrial style, which is bought for $200,000 to $600,000 a unit by trendy nouveux riches. Then these people pay no tax into the local school system, while local residents in regular housing (including those of us who rent, since it is part of the cost of renting) pay property tax.

    I see a lot of vaguely guilty sympathy for these anti-tech-yuppie efforts among the creatives of the web industry - after all, many of them had hoped to be artists themselves - as well as among the more thoughtful tech geeks. Most real artists, unless they are very rich or married to someone who is, are leaving the Bay Area; San Francisco is in danger of falling off the art map.

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