Techies are paying $700 a month for tiny bed ‘pods’ in downtown San Francisco
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
There's a difference between having a place to sleep and a place to live.
It almost strikes me like two ends of housed/homelessness spectrum coming together in a loop
Edit: not trying to be cynical and think this has a use-case. Just kind of conflicted since it's billed as shorter term/monthly lodging but also compared to housing market in general
You also could add outdoor activities and other amenities so people could have recreation without needing to travel too far, and a library of tools, washer and dryers, recreational vehicles people could rent or check out free (RVs maybe have a 10 fee per day plus gas), everything else is shared and maybe have a recycle clothing thrift shop that's free, I guess more like a clothing swap...
I'd love to open something like this everywhere rent is too high to see if it can cause prices to drop to normal rates because of over supply.
Plus if your life was already set so you could live in one of these pods, and they were themselves modular, your “RV” could just be a trailer set up to carry and provide power to a handful of pods.
Someone should do this near Boeingville WA. The aero/def pay scales are hilariously incapable of meeting the CoL in the area, but I'd take a sleep cube and stay in the area, drive home weekends.
If you try to prevent things like this from existing then you are just forcing people into what is by definition a worst option (either homelessness, a more expensive place, or a place farther away).
Just like Tokyo which embraced urban decay once its economic boom of the 80s and 90s ended with a turn of its economic fortunes, the mighty capsule hotel lives on. Monument to humankind's quest to sacrifice everything for a better tomorrow.
When the AI wars had decimated SF's landlords by sucking talent to low-slung Nevadan and Midwest campuses with their giant on-site data centers where vital AI IP could be protected in-house from then-rampant corporate espionage, and tech workers became used to living on sprawling estates overlooking the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, the rolling plains and mighty rivers of the midwest, or even the snow-capped peaks of Colorado, all that remained in DTSF of its former glory days were the Capsule Hotels, now passed around through many owners, clinging to life through contorting themselves in gymnastic knots to satisfy the whims of frequently recalibrated zoning laws, relentlessly fine tuned by desperate councilfolks in a futile attempt to try to revive the once mighty tech city by the sea.
Somewhere, in a moldy and much forgotten capsule hotel, on a crowded steamy backstreet, in a once grand part of downtown San Francisco, a young techworker wannabe with a recidivist 90s grunge fashion sense, now all the rage, tries to corral their GPTBook into creating the next killer AR app. On the back of their torn black shirt is emblazoned the phrase, in deliberately aged white plastic ink: "Staring at the gutter, dreaming of the stars." above a logo of Elon Musk fighting Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight, with a Mortal Combat style "FINISH HIM" banner in red beneath the ironically pixelated color rendering.
Compared to things like factories and other big productivity centers, workers benefit uniquely little from being close to data centers.
I think under the thesis of a super hypercompetitive quadrillion dollar opportunity in AGI than will literally transform the global landscape, companies relocating their workers, not just to be close to the data center, but also to the remote rural campus / company town where they can be protected from espionage (it's been said that SF is like a spies dream, which is why there is apparently so much espionage there), will actually be a thing.
If every critical employee of your company is read in on the secret sauce of your AI engine, and we assume the opportunity is large enough, every employee will be under constant attack by adversaries. Just like with the National Labs, it's easier run secret projects out in the middle of nowhere. So, it's like "nuclear secrecy arms race" but with a corporate twist that replaces nukes with AI. The center of gravity of the largest companies will then suck all the other tech out that way, too. What do you think?
I admit that as stated in the story excerpt it looks pretty weak as migratory reasoning. But that above is kind of the back story, hopefully it makes it more strong.
In fact, enduring hardship to achieve a long-term goal is one of the most laudable things a human can do.
...is one of the worst lies of mankind. Used by those who wish to use other people for their own benefit.
Subjecting yourself to dehumanizing conditions will usually inflict long-term damage to your mind and your soul. We only have one life, each of us.
I get my teeth scraped by a dentist so that I can keep them longer.
I usually avoid getting all the sugar I want because I know that will kill me eventually.
When I was younger, I studied in school instead of playing video games, so that I could learn enough to get a paying job.
These are all examples of what some might consider a hardship.
Living in a better situation than in most navies for several hundred thousand dollars a year does not seem like all that bad of a deal to me.