https://www.thestreet.com/investing/elon-musk-says-san-francisco-has-fallen Elon Musk Says San Francisco Has Fallen For several months the center of U.S. tech has been under fire from tech luminaries who charge the city's leaders with mismanagement.. LUC OLINGA It has become the symbol of the anti-woke offensive against progressive values. San Francisco has been under attack for several months now by those who have made it their mission to defeat what they call the woke mind virus. That's an expression encompassing progressive values and ideas. In the U.S. it is represented by the progressive left wing of the Democratic Party. The anti-woke movement, which usually brings together conservatives and far-right activists, accuses the affected progressives of trying to impose on society policies regarding racial diversity, gender equality and identity, and environmental, social and corporate governance, aka ESG, all with no thought about diversity of opinions and freedom of speech. They argue that woke people are intolerant and that wokeism leads to cancel culture -- in other words, to intolerance and dictatorship of thought. In addition, they say, wokeism advocates for lax immigration laws, civil disorder and defunding the police. The killing of Bob Lee, a prominent technology figure, on a San Francisco street last week has accelerated the attacks on the city. Lee, the creator of Cash App and former chief technology officer of Jack Dorsey's payments company Block, on April 4 was stabbed to death. "We are committed to bringing justice for this senseless act of violence," District Attorney Brooke Jenkins reacted in an email statement. For the anti-woke Lee's death confirms what they have been lamenting for months: that San Francisco is dying, the victim of progressive ideology. Musk just affirmed this point of view. He went further and depicted the image of an apocalyptic city gradually emptying of its inhabitants. "Downtown SF looks like a zombie apocalypse," the billionaire said on April 10. "People who’ve not been there have no idea." He was reacting to a report from The San Francisco Standard saying that one of the largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco -- the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets -- was about to close just a little more than a year after it opened, due to "high theft and hostile people." The article is causing a stir on social networks, generating many comments, most of them hypercritical of the city. One user wondered, for example, whether the official data about crime are accurate. "But but but all the data point to SF being a super safe, low crime paradise. Weird how everyone on the ground — from individuals to massive companies — acts as if the data are incorrect," the user wrote. Musk does not dispute the official figures. He advances a theory on why these official figures are low. "People give up reporting crime when no action is taken or the criminal is immediately released," the techno king, as he's known at Tesla, argued. "They actually call it 'catch and release.'" SF Tech Community Going Into Politics The tech community wants a drastic change and quickly. And its members now want to get involved in politics. The tech investor Jason Calacanis, who is a friend of Musk, declared on April 7 that he was running for mayor of San Francisco. Whether Calcanis is serious about his candidacy or not, his remark led Musk to pledge to double the investments of his companies in the city if Calacanis gets elected. "If you become mayor, my companies will double their investment in San Francisco. Such an incredible city has been used & abused by management for too long!" the billionaire said. "Looks like I've got my first endorsement!" said Calacanis, who has called on voters to oust Mayor London Breed. San Francisco is facing an intractable homeless crisis, with its corollary, a drug epidemic, linked mainly to fentanyl. The city has nearly 8,000 homeless people, about 1% of its population of around 835,000. This situation causes residents and businesses to complain about tent camps set up in the streets, dirtiness and vandalism. Public exasperation led to the recall of three progressive members of the San Francisco Board of Education last year. The district attorney was also ousted. Another issue: The lockdown put in place to prevent the spread of covid has emptied the city of its tech workers. The refusal of many employees to return to the office and the adoption of a hybrid model of work by many companies have left many commercial buildings empty. Office vacancy in San Francisco is among the highest in the nation -- with space in the city the quickest to empty out, according to Savills, a commercial real estate firm. The city’s vacancy rate grew to a record 32.7% in the first quarter of 2023 from 32.1% in the fourth quarter of 2022, Savills reports To comprehend the extent of the problem, consider the rest of Silicon Valley, less than an hour south of San Francisco. The office vacancy rate in Silicon Valley stood at 23.1% in Q1 2023, compared with 22.7% in Q4 2022. "We expect office availability (in San Francisco) to continue to increase in 2023 as the slowdown in the technology sector persists,” Savills said in the report. © 2023 TheStreet, Inc. All rights reserved. Action Alerts PLUS is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
WOOOOOOKKKKKKKKE!!! lol, does this clown have a minimum 4 Elon articles/24hr quota? https://www.thestreet.com/author/luc-olinga
I grew up intermittently in the Bay Area (my parents and generations past are from Northern CA) and lived several year in San Francisco, first as a college student and then working there, in the mid 80s and the mid 90s. I had come to hate the City as a student in the 80s. It felt so provincial, so bohemian hippie post progressive. The educated middle class hippies had moved on, to Marin county to become lawyers and psychiatrists while all that remained were psychedelic tee shirt wearing drug addicts and bums with no future. Dianne Feinstein may have been a Democrat, but she was a conservative mayor. San Francisco couldn't evolve out of its stereotyped peace and love city of the 60s. Gay politics consumed local government and the social sphere in an asphyxiating bubble. Construction was made so difficult that no one attempted to build. It's as if San Francisco was forbidden to grow beyond 700k people and it was expensive to live there. Upon graduation I left the City behind to wander the world and swore never to go back. By the mid 90s I was back in the City. I'd lived in Colorado, Africa and Europe, where work was hard to find with my background. I knew it was easy to find work in the Bay Area so I returned and immediately found work in San Francisco. By that time Willie Brown was the new Democrat mayor. He was my kind of mayor, a true progressive with ambitious ideas of what San Francisco could become and he molded the city to his vision. New construction was everywhere, Silicon Valley businesses were enticed to the city, entire decrepit neighborhoods were remodeled, Parisien street lights and public toilets where installed on main street Market street. Restaurants and clubs were opening everywhere, money had turned this once sleepy town into the capital of the West. I loved it, but I had to leave again to follow my true love who lived in Paris, and leaving a city for a woman was easy. I returned to the Bay Area with another woman and child around 2010. I had grown tired of Paris and my travels took me to Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Shanghai. There again, I found that work was easier to find in America. While we didn't live in the City which had become far too expensive to live in, we were across the Bay and I had plenty of reasons to go to San Francisco. Democrat Gavin Newsom had been elected mayor by then and the City had subtly changed. It was less eccentric, more business like. San Francisco had become the hub of successful Silicon Valley tech companies and thousands of employees had moved in. As a consequence, neighborhoods were losing their diversity, everything became ridiculously expensive. The atmosphere was more Wolves of Wall Street than 1920s speakeasies under mayor Brown. I didn't mind it so much, always believing in the progressive dynamic that a city lives through the people who live there. Tomorrow it should and will be different. I also had a sense that San Francisco had reached its peak, that something had to break. Too much concentration of wealth against a large but now subdued working class that ran the city, its shops and schools and restaurants. The frustrations were deep and amplified through the now ubiquitous phone apps. Latinos in the Mission versus new tech worker owners, Haight street derelict hippies versus new tech worker owners, poverty zones versus hip establishments catering to tech workers... We left the Bay and the US as soon as we could after Trump's election, right before covid. I had an opportunity to return briefly in 2021 to find a city devasted by the consequences of covid policies, broken supply chains, crime and drugs. It didn't help that during my stay it was particularly cold and rainy so everything looked gloomy. Market street businesses were boarded up or valuables were taken down from the store fronts to the back of the stores so thugs couldn't just break and take. Gangs of thieves were ramming luxury stores with cars and rushing in by the dozens to take anything they could. Despite the cold, drugs were being sold and used everywhere downtown. With supply chains in disarray, downtown malls barely had enough merchandise to fit the mannequins. I was in shock; I had never seen The City in such state, looking like the grim reports I'd watch about Detroit at its worst. Yes, San Francisco has fallen, a victim of itself and circumstances. It is in dire need of action that will offend some, but the alternative is in front of our eyes. The question is, can a mayor even take control of their city when neither Governor nor President can make decisions that aren't immediately challenged in a court for months and years. I have little faith.
nah, ignore the propagandist. Easiest done when the purported message is severely undermined by shaping it as clickbait.
So instead of addressing the message you go after the messenger... I read the writer's bio... Looks legit to me.
It's not his bio I have a problem with (you have to scroll down on that link). It's the fact that whatever integrity the dude has/had, he sold for the tesla/Elon clicks. Yes, I skimmed, but rather than present a cogent argument, he just couches it w/"Elon says" and "woke mind virus". It's garbage. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald had a decent bio and were well respected a fews yrs ago too.
But the guy doesn't write anything controversial, unless quoting Musk is enough to get you all worked up. Musk is controversial, not the article. The writer actually seems to be defending liberal values against the onslaught of right wing criticism and quotes Musk to that effect. But it's also fair to say that Musk spends a fair amount of time downtown in Twitter headquarters. He knows first hand what the area looks like. The closure of Whole Foods served as the catalyst for the article. But instead of arguing the points, you dismiss the writer!
You’re a lying sack a shit. You never lived in The City. You poached this from some click. It definitely has gone in the shitter but your analysis is off the mark except for the last part.