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[Not Bob]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

When you say "keep everyone inside," what you mean is that they are offering food that's good enough that people don't want to leave. No one, not even Palantir, prevents its employees from leaving. Rather, they are offering food as a perk to make people want to work there, and to work longer. So employees are better off when they get to choose to go to a cafeteria. Restaurants are worse off, because they have new competition. Like bigger companies in our ostensibly free market, some of them would rather go to the government to put their rival out of business than up their game.



If tech companies are driving up wages for chefs, awesome. In other words, they are competing for talent.



This makes no sense. Twitter stayed in San Francisco because that's where its workers live. Likewise Google in NYC. The tech giants are competing for talent and so they're locating where it lives. Once upon a time, Google was in Mountain View, and it had more and more trouble persuading people that they wanted to work in the suburbs. (And it started providing food to its workers because MV is suburban and you can't walk to food.)



That's an interesting article. What's it's saying is that Bay Area rents are sky-high, and that it's harder to run an ordinary business because you have to pay ridiculous business rents and you have to pay ridiculous wages so that the people who work for you can afford to have a hovel to live in. The fundamental problem is zoning, with places like Palo Alto (the subject of that article) that want to preserve a suburban character with single-family houses and lawns even though demand is through the roof. No one can afford to live in Palo Alto anymore. So it's no surprise that it's increasing hard to run a restaurant there. I don't think it has anything to do with cafeterias per se.



It's not a slippery slope to much of anything, but it's a lousy solution to technological change, much like rent control is a crappy solution to housing shortages. I think I'm hardly an apologist for free markets, but here you having companies competing by offering something that their workers like, and government responding by preventing them from doing it.

JFC. Surely you are familiar with the concept that free markets can create externalities, no? How is TM’s point (which I agree with, needless to say) conceptually different from telling Google that their Chelsea location can’t exude noxious odors caused by their profit-making activities?