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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

When I lived in San Francisco, backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car. High-school students might carry a backpack, college students might carry a backpack, people on the bus might carry a backpack, but mostly not professionals who drove to work.

Maybe that's changed, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zwWpqsI_3s purports to be from 02022, and in its first minute, I count 17 pedestrians of whom 4 are wearing backpacks. So maybe backpacks are mainstream in SF now.

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Maybe it's just startup life, but living in SF during the 2010s decade, I didn't know many people who drove to work. Who wants to sit in traffic and then pay like $300 a month in parking fees when you can sit in traffic on MUNI vehicles for much less, while doing something useful?

Even people who lived in the farther-out suburbs usually drove to BART.

These comments always make me laugh a bit. When the conversation is about cars, people chime in about how owning a car is dumb and public transpo is great. Yet, when the stories pop up about how public transpo is failing, people complain about how horrible the experience of using public transpo is and it's just easier to own a car

Two different groups of people commenting different things.

It's possible to have lots of different experiences across the many people with different lifestyles who might interact with public transportation. I loved my bus lines when I lived in sf because they were safe and super convenient and I hated city parking and I don't have kids. I can imagine the bus being crappy if those things aren't true.

I didn't say owning a car was dumb, just that driving to downtown SF specifically for an office job is pretty inconvenient and expensive and therefore most of my startup colleagues didn't do that.

Also it's hardly a hot take, I am sure 90% of the ones who do that commute would agree!

Even if it's marginalized, you can still just use it. I think I used to think that way in high school, but it's hard for me to understand functioning adults avoiding a type of bag, otherwise useful, because it's associated with being poor.

Maybe you're used to being around functioning adults who don't need other people's approval, for example because they're rich.

You don't need to be rich to have enough backbone to do your own thing, and not worry what someone else might think.

Not if you're willing to die. Otherwise you do.

Are people... dying for using unfashionable laptop bags? That's terrible.

No, people are dying because they can't get good enough jobs, which is 100% contingent on what other people think of them, or because they've been ostracized from their previous support structure, or because they're depressed and commit suicide, or because they're divorced and alone. Very few people can get away without worrying about what anyone else thinks of them.

Perhaps it's a coincidence that Joe O'Brien died this week at 48 or 49 https://old.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1nn3jel/joe_obrien_1... after being ostracized from the Ruby community†. But there aren't many people who die that young. Social isolation is a top risk factor for depression.

______

† for, in my view, good reason: he fired his employee after she turned him down when he sexually assaulted her in a bar. I don't think he deserved to die for this, but I also wouldn't have wanted to hang out with him.

Maybe... I mean in the sense that the median lifestyle in North America is 90-some percentile in the world. Is that even true?

> backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car.

The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...

This has been true for at least a decade. The trend, even ignoring COVID, is that a decreasing proportion do so.

  The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car

A plurality do (35% in 2022 vs 17% via transit). Remote work knocked down the percentage that commute by car a bit, but took a bigger chunk out of the other modes (e.g. 34% used transit in 2018 but 17% in 2022).

I've used a messenger bag for decades and never felt marginalized in the least. Plenty of other folks seem to rock employer swag backpacks. vOv

Sure, it's just ...pretty odd? for OP to say "backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car" when it's 65% of people who do not use a car in this context at all.

(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)

This was 20-25 years ago. No Uber Cab, no Google shuttles, no e-bikes, no rental scooters, Caltrain was diesel and hadn't been renovated, and there was no real-time tracking of Muni buses' positions, so unless you were taking an express bus, you had no idea when the bus would arrive at the stop. And a large part of San Francisco's population was still poor.

There were a lot of people who didn't use a car in that context at all, but people who could mostly did.

Isn’t looking poor a good strategy for being an unattractive target for theft?

No, police punish theft from rich people, not theft from poor people.

Good thing my backpack was stolen so I won’t look poor when I go into the police station to report the theft.

Police (and DA) in SF don't punish any theft from anyone in my experience.

> Isn’t looking poor a good strategy for being an unattractive target for theft?

Looking poor is also an expression of wealth where wealth is defined money one has not yet spent which provides options in the future. (Source "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.)

Also keyword is "looking" poor. 300 hundred dollar jeans, fifty thousand dollar hybrid civics -- meanwhile, my Casio got a lot of curt remarks.

> fifty thousand dollar hybrid civics

Bro - the highest trim line civic hybrid has an MSRP under $35k…

Type R gets up there

Type R isn’t the hybrid civic

>When I lived in San Francisco, backpacks were marginalized as being associated with being too poor to own a car. High-school students might carry a backpack, college students might carry a backpack, people on the bus might carry a backpack, but mostly not professionals who drove to work.

Huh? By extension you seem to be implying anyone who doesn't drive to work is not a "professional", which is bananas.

Smart people took Caltrain, BART, or a company sponsored gentrification shuttle into work and reclaimed the time they'd spend driving to "work". (AKA shitpost -- I noticed a remarkable uptick in trolling during commute hours back in the days I lived in the bay during rush hour.)

Anyways, no, carrying a backpack is not a sign someone is "poor" in SF, or anywhere else -- it's usually a sign they value their back.

Some folks wear messenger bags instead, but those were usually bicyclists.

The time I'm talking about was before company-sponsored gentrification shuttles and before shitposting. I agree that the society was pretty bananas, which is part of why I left.

In this millennium humans have not yet begun using five digit years. Otherwise, nice job covering your time travelling tracks.

Kragen not human?

How long ago was that? I’m 40, grew up in the SF Bay Area, and never had that impression.

I see people who look like hedge fund managers wearing backpacks (obviously not Jansport). VCs and founders certainly do. Go on Bart- most people have a backpack. Nothing to do with whether you own a car. Driving to and/or parking in the city is a nightmare.

I'm in the suburban Seattle area, and many, many adult professionals carry a backpack...even when they commute a few miles by car and walk 100 feet into their offices.

I'm glad to hear it.

By car? Where they all parking?

Suburban office parks still have lots of parking.

As do suburban neighborhoods.

What is 02202? A postal code?

I'm guessing they use 5 digits for displaying the year. 02022 = 2022.

He wrote 02022. It's the year in a Long Now [0]context, avoiding the Y10K problem that's just around the corner.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

It's only a Y10K problem if people assume that a year that happens to be 4 digits is existing in a system that doesn't permit years of 5 or more digits.

But as soon as you put a leading 0, (besides confusing people) you seem to be telling people to definitely use arbitrary fixed lengths for years and analogous purposes. Even though they weren't necessarily doing that before.

Sincerely,

    "neilv                           "

Honestly I don't know how date parsing code coped back when we ticked over from 999 to 1000, a lot of monastic accounting software must have shit the bed.

Anyway I'm creating the Long Long Now Foundation to solve the shortsighted 5-digit year issue. Look for more news in Q000001 of 002026

Assuming it's an octal number: 1042.

Cringe (him, not you)

You may be in the wrong place. Hacker News is not for posting comments about how you are superior to people you find contemptible. Kindergarten is that way →

No, it's an affectation.

I'm sure you can find even more things to sneer at me about. Perhaps you would find my choice of programming languages flamboyant and my attire effeminate, as well.

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