We are all Slave now.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Are you seriously suggesting anyone here does not try to hook up friends of all backgrounds? You only do it for your white friends? Really?

I’m not of any tribe but people I know and like. I don’t give a fuck where you’re from, your skin color, your religion, or anything else... if you’re a friend and I can hook you up, I’ll try to do so.

And that includes dumb white kids, yes. And dumb black ones, Asian ones, Indian ones, gay ones.

You misunderstand how the inside handshakes work, and how the “tribe” is defined.

This is either amazingly, shockingly, mind-blowingly naïve or intentionally stupid.

White people don't even fucking know non-white people. You're just being intentionally ridiculous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.f69d378774c8

TM

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

Very few people eat out every day for lunch. Throughout history people have managed to feed themselves through a combination of eating out, bringing lunch, and going to the company cafeteria. Traditionally, company cafeterias have mostly existed in areas with otherwise very limited outside options.

The new trend by these huge companies with endless cash is to keep everyone inside. Google in Chelsea owns a full city block (and then some). I've visited their cafeteria. It's insane. Anything and everything you could possibly imagine. No one leaves that building and the surrounding businesses, which flourished before they arrived, have turned over at a rate that is way out of proportion for the neighborhood. I imagine it's even worse in areas of the country that aren't as dynamic as the west side of NYC.

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.

The other problem these massive cafeterias have apparently caused is that they are taking chefs away from businesses, which is also driving them to fail.

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

And it creates a culture of exclusivity. The people who work at these behemoths aren't connected to the community. It breeds animosity, distrust, and separation.

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.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/t...ant-scene.html

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.

I don't see a fix like this as some slippery slope to the end of innovation and progress. It seems like a fairly sensible solution to keep the balance of a neighborhood and something that businesses should have to consider when they basically take over a neighborhood.

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.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

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.

I was going to continue the conversation, but this was the first sentence, so I give up.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

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.

Also, this is just pure, unadulterated bullshit. Google isn't trying to compete with local restaurants. They have many multiples worth of resources to burn when it comes to providing food. The local guy around the corner can't compete on any level, especially when the food is free. So ridiculous.

Whatever. This conversation is no longer even interesting to me.

TM

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Are you seriously suggesting anyone here does not try to hook up friends of all backgrounds? You only do it for your white friends? Really?

I’m not of any tribe but people I know and like. I don’t give a fuck where you’re from, your skin color, your religion, or anything else... if you’re a friend and I can hook you up, I’ll try to do so.

And that includes dumb white kids, yes. And dumb black ones, Asian ones, Indian ones, gay ones.

You misunderstand how the inside handshakes work, and how the “tribe” is defined.

I'm betting you have never been on a hiring committee, part of an admissions process, or otherwise involved in the sorting process.

Either that, or, as TM noted, mindblowingly naive or intentionally stupid (or both).

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Surely you get that people treat their friends better than strangers, and that people's friends tend to share their background. We're having a conversation here about how white people resist the idea that racism is pervasive and not just a quest of Bad people with Bad intent, and your answer is to say you're not Bad. Uh, try again. You are unintentionally proving the point.

Bingo.

[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?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Not Bob

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?

The free cafes are all part of creating the self-absorbed, totally inward looking, truly obnoxious tech culture that has emerged especially in the software/internet/social media world and especially in SF/SV.

These companies should be taking a wrecking ball to them just so their employees will become somewhat sufferable.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

TM

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

TM

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

Also, this is just pure, unadulterated bullshit. Google isn't trying to compete with local restaurants. They have many multiples worth of resources to burn when it comes to providing food. The local guy around the corner can't compete on any level, especially when the food is free. So ridiculous.

Google is trying to compete with other employers. Years ago, it didn't have to offer as much money as other employers because people were willing to take less to work there. So Google paid below-market wages. Google absolutely has too much money. It's not providing food for no good reason. Have you eaten there? I have. The food is good.

I have worked at two places with on-site cafeterias. The first, a federal courthouse, had terrible food, the kind you would eat only out of desperation. The second, in a suburban office park, had decent food with prices that were supposed to be subsidized but weren't as far as I could tell. I ate there all the time because I was lazy, but many of my co-workers went to food trucks that parked outside, or to restaurants in the strip mall across the street. Since I left there, they have changed providers and the new food is better.

The idea that my second employer should have been barred from providing a cafeteria to help the food trucks and the restaurants across the street is nuts. Taking choices away does not make people better off. It's like banning Netflix to save Blockbuster, which was a source of foot traffic and a nice thing to have in a neighborhood.

Seems like a big part of the problem you have with Google in NYC is the size of its offices, and maybe a better way to get at that is to zone to make it hard to bring in large employers. But politicians, not wrongly, want the jobs there.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Not Bob

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?

If you have a street with a Wendy's and a Taco Bell on it, and you open up a Chick-fil-A and take some of their customers, the Wendy's and the Taco Bell are harmed, but they are harmed by the increased competition, and it's not an externality. The same is true if you open a company on the same spot and feed your workers so many donuts that they no longer go to the Wendy's and the Taco Bell.

The fact that a company's workers do not go to neighborhood restaurants is only an "externality" if you think that the restaurants have a legal entitlement to their business. No one thinks that. Not every effect on others is an externality.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

The free cafes are all part of creating the self-absorbed, totally inward looking, truly obnoxious tech culture that has emerged especially in the software/internet/social media world and especially in SF/SV.

These companies should be taking a wrecking ball to them just so their employees will become somewhat sufferable.

Present company excluded, of course.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Surely you get that people treat their friends better than strangers, and that people's friends tend to share their background. We're having a conversation here about how white people resist the idea that racism is pervasive and not just a quest of Bad people with Bad intent, and your answer is to say you're not Bad. Uh, try again. You are unintentionally proving the point.

Thank you for defining the conversation. I'll forget that numerous posters have written numerous things far outside your definition.

On that last point, I can't be bother to find an "I saw what you did there" gif.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Present company excluded, of course.

Of course.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I'm betting you have never been on a hiring committee, part of an admissions process, or otherwise involved in the sorting process.

Either that, or, as TM noted, mindblowingly naive or intentionally stupid (or both).

Fuck no. I found reasons to avoid even interviewing people. If it wasn't billable, it didn't happen. Recall, I detest the profession. It's an ATM. Gimme a check and get me the fuck outta here.

But I have helped people with college and grad school applications where I have some connections.