kelp

> Again, you are under the spell of the assumption that if you give someone a gun, it somehow magically changes them into willing to kill. Thats a very long reach.

I was not saying that at all.

I was specifically responding to the part of your comment that I quoted, where you said:

> The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms.

And I was specifically addressing that point and only that point.

> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?

I don't know.

But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen.

Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.

Yeah I moved to SF in 2009 and away in 2022. It got a LOT worse in the last few years, especially the area you talk about.

In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...

There kind of was a brief period, maybe 4 years? 2014 - 2018 or so when mid-market was looking up. Twitter was there. Square, and Uber.

Businesses were moving in, buildings were getting renovated.

Then it turned the wrong direction again, and now we have what we have.

> The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms.

I hope I'm not making a straw man here, but I think your argument is that people who are going to resort to violence will find a way, even if they don't have a gun.

The thing that always gets glossed over in this argument is how much damage you can do with various weapons.

Yes, there are people prone to violence for various reasons. And yes, people, do get beat with pipes, or stabbed (both big SF news stories lately.)

But you can kill much much more efficiently with a gun. So those prone to violence, with access to guns are able to do much more damage much more quickly and easily.

I lived in SOMA until a year ago. We had a dog and I'd need to walk her in the evening, and before bed. I usually felt fine.

My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her.

We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.

According to a posting on yelp (https://www.yelp.com/biz/harvest-urban-market-san-francisco) Harvest Urban Market was shut down recently by the city due to major vermin infestation.

Also it seems like they were threatening to close in 2019 due to exactly the kinds of issues that Whole Foods says is causing their closure: https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5...

Part of the different perceptions really depends on what part of SF you spend your time in and what parts you avoid.

Yeah the city is only a 7x7 mile square. But block by block it can be dramatically different.

Check out the map of violent crime halfway down this article: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-viol...

I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around.

Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere.

Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere.

The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy.

After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings. (This is the area where Bob Lee was killed

When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco.

A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.

I highly doubt the SF supervisors spend any time consulting actual experts on anything.

I know you're kind of joking. But ever been to Rio de Janeiro? Every restaurant and store in the nice neighborhoods, like Ipanema and Leblon has a least one guard.

Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat.

San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.

The Bob Lee thing was incredibly unfortunate (I used to work with Bob) but violent crime is actually fairly low in SF compared to similar sized cities in the US.

However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.

Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.

But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.

SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.

The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.

And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.

Because their previous Bluetooth implementation was broken in various ways, and no one volunteered to fix it. So they just removed it.

He left Square in 2014... 9 years is some pretty stale information. This makes no sense.

Whistleblower with 9 year old information? He left Square in 2014...

A few things about Bob that I found remarkable.

He was incredibly hard working, in the early days of Square he owned the engineering hiring process and was on the interview panel for every engineer up through the company having hundreds of engineers. It was just an amazing amount of work he put into this. When there weren't enough hours in the day, he started delegating, but the whole engineering culture was just incredibly shaped by his hard work.

In spite of being very accomplished as an engineer, he was humble and knew what he didn't know. I worked in infrastructure and Bob was much more of a mobile guy. He deferred to our expertise in the areas where he wasn't an expert.

Some years after we'd both left Square I was interviewing for at various companies. I noticed a shared connection at one company. I asked Bob for any background, and unprompted he sent a glowing recommendation to that company.

And then CashApp. That started as a hack week project led by Bob. It was all email based, I remember how excited he and Jack were about it. It was cool, and IIRC, we actually launched the email only version of it before Square Cash and then CashApp evolved into what it is today.

Your margins are going to end up being a lot better than any other PaaS that's built on top of the big cloud providers.

For a while in the early 00s one of those SPARCstations, I forget if it was the 1 or the 2, was doing NAT and firewalling for my home network. I ran OpenBSD on it. I remember it taking multiple days to do a 'build world' and in those days I ran -current and upgraded from source.

But yeah, it's mostly museum stuff now.

I had a NeXT Station with monitor and keyboard, Sun SPARCstation 1, 2, and 5.

Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up space.

I almost went for a Classic II. I took my first real typing class on one of those, so the nostalgia is real.

I didn't know about Prodigy Reloaded. Certainly going to keep an eye on that. Just wanted to share my versing of this.

Over the last couple of months I dove into the vintage Macintosh community. In the process of restoring a Macintosh SE/30 and waiting for a Macintosh Quadra 700 to arrive. I've collected a few somewhat rare upgrades, including a DayStar PowerPro 601 that is somehow new in the box. This is a card that can go into the Quadra 700 to add a PowerPC 601 CPU at 100Mhz.

But the things I'm most excited about is the new hardware the community makes to work with these old computers. There are devices like ZuluSCSI and MacSD that let you replace the spinning hard drive with a solid state device that uses an SD card for storage. There is PiSCSI which attaches to a Raspberry Pi and emulates multiple SCSI devices, including hard drives, CDROM, floppy and ethernet.

FloppyEMU acts as a SCSI floppy drive and lets you load up a bunch of floppy images and swap between them without having to make actual floppies.

ADB-USB Wombat lets you use an ADB keyboard with a modern computer, or a modern USB keyboard with an ADB computer. I'm typing this on an Apple Desktop Bus Keyboard (AKA Apple IIgs Keyboard) on my M1 Macbook Pro.

And I'm waiting for delivery of a modern clone of a MicroMac Carrera04 accelerator with an adapter and ethernet for my Macintosh SE/30. This puts a 68040 40Mhz CPU in my SE/30, which normally has a 68030 16Mhz CPU. These accelerators are hard to find so someone on the 68kmla.org forums reverse engineered them, and makes small batches of clones. I had to source my own 68040 CPU, as those are getting harder to find, but I have one on the way.

These old Macs also have a unfortunate tendency to self-destruct if not looked after. The motherboard batteries can leak and basically destroy the inside of the computer. And the old capacitors do their own version of this. So both need to be replaced. Because of that, there are also full logic board recreations for several vintage Macintosh computers, especially the compact Macs. Since the original logic boards have some hard to find parts and some proprietary apple ICs, it requires a donor board, de-soldering various bits, and putting them on the new board.

Much of this stuff is happening in plain view either at 68kmla.org or tinkerdifferent.com

I was at Square from 2011 - 2017 and talked to Jack pretty often, including about how he managed his time. And his calendar was public.

When I was at Square and Jack was also working at Twitter, he split his days evenly across both companies.

At Square we were frustrated he wasn’t spending enough time on us.

I don’t know what it was like after mid 2017.

The wildfire smoke every year impacts millions of people in the west.

Just this summer I was watching the Mosquito fire updates daily to see if we were going to have to evacuate. Fortunately it rained and prevented that.

There were days where we had to huddle in one room with multiple air filters going to keep the air breathable. Couldn't really go outside at all. The AQI outside was well over 500 for days at a time.

Not poor, and I'd say we were pretty impacted by it.

Yeah, you could be right. And from a very quick look, Viasat doesn't just have their prices right on the front page.

It says right on the front page:

"High-speed, low-latency, in-flight internet with connectivity across the globe. $12,500/mo-$25,000/mo with a one-time hardware cost of $150,000. Reserve now with deliveries starting in 2023."

I met with the founders sometime in the second half of 2017, I think before they had launched. I was looking for an eng leadership job and the just wanted / needed ICs. So it didn’t go anywhere.

But I came away with a strong sense that they would be quite successful. They just had this confidence and clarity of vision, that also didn’t seem like bullshit. And past experience building a company in the financial services space.

One funny thing I remember was Pedro (I think) saying their tech stack was Elixer, “maybe that’s crazy”. And interesting to see they have since started moving away from it. Seems they had some doubts about it from the start.

That is literally what happened. There is nothing brazen here.

You can see on their jobs page and 'our story' page, they are mostly in the US and The Netherlands.

It’s legal in the state of Nevada, at least in small counties.

It’s legal in Germany and the Netherlands.

Seems like there are some different views.

I think the op is talking in kilometers and you’re talking miles.

For cars, I much prefer getting on a wait list and paying MSRP than having to pay some huge markup.

We’ve been waiting on a Bronco since late 2020. Got bumped to a 2022 model year which is now built and on a train to the dealer.

Yeah, we could have had one sooner for like a 50-100% markup… rather wait.