The east coast of the USA was settled first, recall. What did they do back east to 'solve' this problem of "we're running out of space"? They increased the density of occupants per unit of land -- they built UPWARD.
That will have to happen here too. It's already happened in LA.
There will always be crybabies like this attorney during the growing pains of a popular 'destination city.'
For now, think of turning the Peninsula into tall buildings, concrete and asphalt. Think how the picturesque drive up highway 280 to San Francisco from the South Bay will be affected.
Everyone wants the nature. Not the tall buildings, concrete and asphalt.
Crybabies need to do precisely what this gal chose -- LEAVE. There's the door. That's how markets work -- when the price of a good or service is too high, demand drops. Well, she's a living example of a smidgen of demand disappearing.
People who don't like markets should move to Venezuela or North Korea or Cuba.
There is no free market in housing. Supply is very tightly constrained by the city via a system of very stringent zoning (3 stories max most of the city, only 3% of the city is even zone for multifamily housing) and taxes. What you see happening in the Bay Area isn't the result of the laws of supply and demand, it's the result of the laws passed by city councils. There's no developer in the world who wouldn't love to build more housing in one of the most booming places in the country. They're not not doing it because it doesn't make financial sense or because there's no demand there. They're not doing it because the housing market in the Bay Area has been regulated to death.
I don't normally bother commenting, but I thought I'd offer a few observations here.
First, the second you start using all caps to make an argument, in effect yelling, you significantly lose any credibility your argument might otherwise have had. If you want to make an effective argument, and for readers to not otherwise ignore your point, I'd recommend not doing that. It does no one involved any good, and essentially shuts down the conversation.
Second, your overall tone here seems incredibly condescending. I realize it's often difficult to judge tone on the internet, so if I have misread that tone, I apologize. However, condescension is another quick way to short-circuit any fruitful conversation you might have otherwise had.
It's fine to disagree with someone, even to disagree vociferously, but talking down to someone is not going to convince them of anything. Quite the opposite, in fact.
If you want to not only convince someone of something, but also have a fruitful conversation where hopefully everyone involved actually learns something, it's generally wise to assume the person you're talking to is an intelligent human being who has valid reasons for believing the things they do, regardless of whether you agree with those reasons or not, and treat them accordingly.
> If Palo Alto could suddenly pop up a few skyscrapers of apartments and condos, that supply would be taken up quickly. The same is true for San Francisco.
This is a sign that a few skyscrapers of apartments and condos is not enough to match demand. But (there's a little law out there called "Supply and Demand", if I'm remembering right), there's a correct amount to build that would. Saying that the necessary supply to meet demand is infinite is quite silly.
> >"There is no free market in housing." Not true. Go visit large geographic areas that are not 'destination cities' like Stockton; Modesto; Vallejo.
What you're seeing here is that we have land-use policy that allows us to sanely build cities up until a point, whereupon speculation over land value will make new development economically and politically infeasible.
Nobody wants the extra land in Stockton very much, but everybody wants Palo Alto land. The problem is that the land is held for very little cost by people who don't want to actually use it. (The market is giving a very strong signal, via price, that is should be developed for housing with much higher density.)
Is Tokyo a destination city? Yes. Total urban population? 38 million people.
I don't think you realize how attractive a beautiful city really is to the people of our planet.
While I'd agree that 38 million people is not 'infinite' -- it's a lot of people. Palo Alto is at 66,000 people right now.
Did Tokyo's decision to allow high density housing solve their 'housing is too expensive in Tokyo' problem?
NO. Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities on the planet to reside in.
Again, adding supply to a Destination City will NOT bring down housing costs. The crybaby lawyer failed to factor in the difference between Palo Alto and Stockton.
And it will be a big surprise to her -- Santa Cruz is very pricey. And won't be getting any cheaper.
Why yes, it did. Take a look at the graph in that article. Housing in Tokyo is still expensive, but it didn't get even more expensive the way other cities did, like San Francisco. That may not be perfect, but it is a clear win.
Tokyo's pretty cheap to live in compared to the US. Apartments are affordable even in the city, since they're so small (and remarkably ugly). Once you have a family, even if you live out in the suburbs you only need one car, if any, and don't use it to commute.
BTW, the sign Tokyo is affordable is that all those people manage to live there. Japanese salaries are set very low to prevent anyone from thinking of having fun or quitting their salaryman jobs before the appointed time.
> For now, think of turning the Peninsula into tall buildings, concrete and asphalt.
No, the opposite. Urban density reduces sprawl. The more people you can accommodate in the city core, the less you need to spoil the surrounding countryside.
What you're missing here is that the market delivers rent to the holders of a natural resource (land) far in excess to its marginal product-- which is to say economic rent.
Landowners in the Bay Area are rentiers, and unless we enact policy to reverse this, we'll never have a competitive market in housing.
Maybe this type of FB behavior will finally kill that awful web site.
Sites like this have become a 'punitive tease' -- it's hard to know when the rug will be pulled out from under you, yet you're lured into using it because "all my friends are on it."
There really is a need for a neutral Twitter, a neutral FB. It won't happen though due to entrenched network effects.
I suspect the only way FB and Twitter could be killed off is if they:
1) listed all the banned users and the reason each was banned
2) disclose the current "reasons to ban" list
3) and freely admit that banning is a subjective choice for these websites, that the "reasons to ban" list is not fixed.
It's only anecdotally we hear about someone being banned, we have no idea the numbers of users, the scope, involved.
If you were invited to a dinner party but were given a list of reasons why you'd be asked to leave ('talked down about person X', etc.) and also told "our list of reasons to kick a person out of our dinner party is evolving and is subject to change without notice" -- hey no one's putting up with a manipulative, baiting host like that, no one's going to that party.
FB and Twitter, were they to be transparent about the scope of their banning, their DAU would crash.
Don't hold your breath; this kind of thing is not new by any means.
Five years ago I published a large collection of public domain documents that had been, before then, locked up behind a high priced paywall by jstor; along with a brief manifesto ( https://github.com/thejeshgn/philosophical_transactions_brow... ) decrying the restriction of important academic work by third party publishers (work which was often publicly funded or is legally in the public domain).
All links to my release or the write up were silently hidden everywhere on facebook, hidden in public feed, hidden in private messages. People who sent them were not informed that their contacts did not receive them.
As a private service Facebook is within their right to behave this way. The only answer is to minimize your reliance on private services to carry your communications. But it seems their billions of users do not understand or care about the control over the lives and, really, minds that they're handing this private corporation. I don't doubt it will change, but it won't happen over night.
INSIGHT: Being in a position to observe the behavior of users -- MANY users -- over a period of time, and non-users in the same settings.
Most of you probably don't have that experience.
- Parents do. Ask parents "how did your kid change after commencing use of pot?"
- Teachers do, if they know a student imbibes. These days teachers have a great chance to see the difference between regular students and those who smoke it.
- Property managers of apartment properties do.
I'm the latter. I made my Silicon Valley startup bucks and have been buying and operating apartment properties since 1993, 2 years out of college.
Here's what I experience:
1) my pot using tenants do not like following rules compared to other tenants.
2) they are defiant in their attitude to varying degrees, challenging things they initially agree to ("no smoking", "new occupants must pass the same tenant screening you did and must be added to the lease", "no guest parking", "no loud parties/noise after 10pm", etc).
RECENT EXPERIENCES
- tenant moves in, it's a no smoking building, they begin smoking pot in their unit EVEN THOUGH there are 'no smoking' signs everywhere and the lease clearly calls for 'no smoking cigars/cigarettes/marijuana'. THAT'S HAPPENED 18 TIMES (18 different tenants) IN THE PAST year and a half.
- tenant moves in, gets a warning for their car blocking other tenants in the parking lot, they kept blowing it off, parking and blocking others. FIVE TIMES over a 2 month period until they were evicted.
- tenant moves in someone without adding them to the lease (a requirement), we catch them, the added person does not pass the normal tenant screening process and they have to leave, the original tenant keeps them there anyway, we catch them, gave them a final warning, they ignored the final warning, and got evicted
Just a very small set of examples.
IF YOU SMOKE, you are the LAST person to know if your pot use has changed you, added some negatives to your behavior. "A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient."
I myself imbibed for 3 years as a teen. WHAT AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER. Normal recreation time was clouded by intoxication.
If you prefer being intoxicated in your leisure time, how would you feel telling people that?
"I like being intoxicated. It's my recreational activity."
OR
"I like being intoxicated during my leisure time."
OR
"When I spend free time with recreational pursuits, I like being intoxicated."
VERY FEW pot users will admit that to arbitrary others. Deep inside, we know to ourselves "I shouldn't need intoxication to enjoy myself."
You should not need to live in an altered state, intoxication, and if you are frequently choosing intoxication from pot as 'recreation', something is wrong.
" Parents do. Ask parents "how did your kid change after commencing use of pot?"
- Teachers do, if they know a student imbibes. These days teachers have a great chance to see the difference between regular students and those who smoke it.
- Property managers of apartment properties"
Indeed, being in a position of authority is an incredibly dangerous gateway drug. Makes you start thinking that you've got all the answers. Next thing you know, you're shouting at strangers on the street just to get the next fix of self-righteousness.
How exactly do you know which of your tenants are using cannabis? Do you drug test your tenants?
> You should not need to live in an altered state, intoxication, and if you are frequently choosing intoxication from pot as 'recreation', something is wrong.
Your comment is ironic evidence for insobriety. Anger, stress and frustration are all palpable, and you may need some help to unwind. Hell, I could use a beer after reading it.
Imagine showing vacant apartments to prospective renters since 1993 -- for 23 years. Lots of units, lots of prospective tenants.
In 1993 I had no pool of 'before move-in/after move-in' experience with tenants. 23 years on, I have a large number of 'before move-in/after move-in' tenant experiences.
So when a tenancy went bad, over time I started making a mental note of
1) the social cues the tenant made when I first met them
2) what their behavior was after move-in
I started seeing patterns. After 23 years of "before move-in/after move-in" experiences, I developed predictors.
In my mind, I suspect that Judges, teachers, cops, hiring managers, any profession where you have a lot of "before/after" experience with lots of people -- have developed similar wisdom, similar predictors.
It's probably a survival skill humans have -- if you get burned over and over, you start connecting "is there any way I could have used this person's before behavior to protect myself from their after behavior?"
Here are some of the screening-out cues I use:
1) during the initial showing of the unit and meeting, does the person forget something I just told them ("It's a one year lease")? Did they exhibit more than one memory lapse like that?
2) was the person inarticulate in writing (on the application), or in their speech?
3) on the continuum of demeanor (behavior and body language) from "street people behavior" to "my professional peers" -- was the prospective tenant closer to "street person" demeanor or closer to "professional peer"?
4) does the person smoke cigarettes? Over 23 years most of my pot-smoking tenants smoked cigarettes. It makes sense I guess, smoking cigarettes for nicotine, smoking pot for thc.
The list of 'cues' I have is not perfect; people are still moving in and smoking pot inside my properties in violation of the lease.
I understand that you've had some bad experiences with people who also happen to smoke marijuana, but you are painting with much too broad a brush.
You must ask yourself: how accurate are you in your assessment of who smokes marijuana and who doesn't? For some of your tenants, I'm sure it's obvious that they partake. But, I'd wager many of your 'good' tenants do as well, and you have no idea. It's really not hard to hide marijuana use from your landlord. And from what it sounds like, the tenants who don't make any effort to be discrete with their marijuana use are also the tenants who don't care if their car is blocking another car. Perhaps a DGAF attitude would be a better thing for you to screen for than marijuana use.
'DGAF' is not always evident in the short time we meet, interact with a new tenant. Unlike a job interview process (several stages of contact: phone, in person several times, etc.) it's not practical for landlords to spend that much time with each prospective tenant.
The 18 tenants I've evicted in the past year and half -- they ALL slipped 'under the radar.'
My "cues/indicators" list above is 100% NOT all inclusive.
Until you've dealt over many years with pot smokers, in quantities, you really, really have no idea how defiant/grouchy/uncooperative/troublemaking they can be, behaviors you can only witness over a period of a lease.
Here's another example. 31 yo male, he should know better, right? About the useless 'crutch' of drugs and alcohol as the foundation for personal recreation?
Smoked up a storm. He befriended surrounding tenants, and so no one complained. NOTE: in our non-smoking properties, keeping in mind that very few people smoke these days and make an effort to only live in non-smoking apartment properties, if a non-smoker is exposed to 2nd hand smoke, do they complain to Management? Oh my god. Especially pot smoke. We get complaints like "the person below me is smoking pot, you said this was a non-smoking property, I don't want to get high from their 2nd hand smoke" -- we get COMPLAINTS. It's understandable, very few people smoke or want to be in close breathing proximity to smokers these days.
Well, I had to catch him in the act, he chummed up with the surrounding tenants "in range" and somehow got them to not complain. It wasn't easy. Caught him over the course of 2 weeks on our security cameras.
We didn't tell him "Joe, we have video evidence you're smoking" we just served the 3 Day Notice. He refused to stop. Went to eviction court, he lied to the Judge. HE'S UNDER OATH. "Judge, I stopped smoking weeks ago." Lied to the Judge while under threat of perjury. DEFIANT.
Then my attorney brought forth the photos and entered them in the record. The Judge looked at Joe. I'm thinking 'it's perjury, is Joe going to jail?' The Judge must have been in a good mood. He looked at my photo evidence for 20 seconds, BAM the gavel dropped, "judgment for the plaintiff."
Pot smokers are T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
It depends on how long they've been smoking. Those 3 years I smoked it as a teen, it was in the final year I started with bad behavior, and bad experiences I finally realized were not me.
So I don't really care how much a pot smoker says "it's fine, I'm fine, it's harmless."
My philosophy with ANYONE who uses pot, and this is solely because of my 3 years personal experience and the screwed up behaviors from pot smokers over 23 years of landlording:
get away from me. Stay away from me. I don't care if you compromise your personal life by thinking intoxication is a good foundation, just don't do it around me.
That stuff is a disaster in many ways BECAUSE the damage is so incremental, that the build of up negative consequences is invisible to the user.
I have personally walked the path and I now also have 23 years of screwups, pot smoking tenants causing weird problems no other (sober) tenant causes.
Let me say, I feel deeply sorry for anyone who leans on drugs and/or alcohol for 'recreation.'
If you find yourself frequently intoxicated for 'recreation' - from pot, alcohol, whatever -- MOST people are going to have problems from it. You can throw the dice with it over the long term if you want.
Pot smokers make bad decisions MUCH more frequently than sober non-users.
I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties
It doesn't matter if 100,000 non-experienced people tell me my opinion (based on personal experience across 23+3 years) about pot smokers is wrong.
I actually have THE EXPERIENCE.
But, as I've said, and as I tell prospective tenants, it is not for me to tell you how to behave. My job, if you are a fan of repeated intoxication, is to keep you out of my apartments. That's all I do.
And in the past year and a half, 18 people have slipped under the tenant screening radar -- and got evicted for smoking on the premises.
We go to so much trouble to help people realize "hey, these people are really serious about this 'no pot' rule, this place isn't for me"
18 people in a year and half. Despite the fact we TOLD them, UP FRONT, no pot smoking (or cigars or cigarettes) on the premises. Before we even take a deposit.
Think about that. 18 pre-warned-and-now-evicted pot smokers. THAT'S THE POT. That's the bad decision making.
And you don't see or experience that. So I understand it's hard to grok, these pot smokers.
> "I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties"
This is the crux of it. You simply cannot know for certain who the non-users are. I guarantee you over the course of your 23 years, there were tenants who you assumed fell into the non-users group but actually didn't.
I may be younger than you have been renting out apartments for, but it seems to me that the first 3 cues in particular might not be that effective in discriminatory power?
1) I'm estimating memory lapse / brain fog etc in the general population is much more prevalent in non-pot-smokers for general reasons -- hell, depression affects something like 5-10% of Americans which iirc is many times over the fraction of people who would wake and bake prior their apt. showing. Yeah, memory problems are a strong signal when you know a specific person is blazed, but across the whole of the population this is going to be a filter with a really high false positive rate.
2) kinda seems like a proxy to their parents' wealth, maybe that matters to you but really should the equivalent of an SAT score really predict the ability for a tenant to keep to the contract?
3) there could be a couple of effects at play here. Kind of another proxy to parents' wealth. People might also put their guard up once they notice you sizing them up. But conveying professionalism as a game theoretic 'signaling' strategy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption
Cigarettes though? probably not a bad indicator. I think as a whole they probably do more damage to the building and other tenants, too.
That list of "cues" is hilarious. Guaranteed you know professional people who hide it from you because, well, you know why. And to reiterate, you need to unwind. Holy crap.
This really leads like a list of reasons for your prejudice and stereotyping/profiling people. You only actually have positive confirmation for the ones who disrespect others and violate the rules of the lease, while you may have many people who consume regularly and are still able to respect others. By doing things like respecting the fact smoking inside makes a huge smell (and take edibles/use a smokebuddy/vaporize/go for a walk and smoke) and respecting parking rules, or even other social rules such as not smoking cigarettes (a more outwardly "rebellious" behaviour), these individuals don't make problems, can interact nicely, and you totally forget about them.
This all just reads like a 23-year long confirmation bias building up.
> IF YOU SMOKE, you are the LAST person to know if your pot use has changed you, added some negatives to your behavior. "A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient."
This is key. As someone who has previously been on various prescribed medications which alter brain chemistry, I can absolutely say that you can't tell how it affects you while you're on any kind of drug that alters how your brain chemistry works. You may notice later, things that you didn't do or didn't enjoy, while you were on medication that affected your brain chemistry. But you'll always feel like you're thinking "normally", because that's how your brain chemistry is operating at the time.
You seem very certain that all users have noticeable behavior changes. How would you correctly count users who do not have noticeable behavior changes?
Was building hardware devices for musical pursuits (guitar effects) and my 1st degree was in EE. You can graduate with an EE degree, having taken a course or two or three in basic programming but it falls out of use and the depth was never really there anyway, more of a "here's programming" intro.
When I tried to change jobs as a 'hardware guy' I had limited options, unlike my software engineer friends who had a gazillion options it seemed. Makes sense, hardware is built once, but a piece of hardware can have an infinite number of programs written for it; thus one hardware engineer and an infinite number of software engineers for one piece of hardware.
They (my software engineer chums) also made A LOT MORE MONEY than me.
Went back to school, focused solely on software. Best decision I ever made.
Money as a motivator to learn to code is questionable but I got lucky as I learned to love it after becoming engrossed in it.
EDIT: Point being -- if you have a big enough "Why" you simply will learn to code. If you can't make money or have an enjoyable hobby doing coding, your motivation will be to do something else more enjoyable. Everyone saying "I couldn't figure it out so I quit" -- BALONEY. You can figure anything out, really.
Easy to buy a condo in Silicon Valley on an Engineer's salary. For as little as $350,000 you can have your own place. If you're a first time buyer you can come in with 10% down; an engineer can easily save up $35,000 not long after they graduate from college.
Once you buy the first property, you hold it for 5 years, sell it and move up to a bigger place, single family home.
No one is expecting a newly-graduated engineer to buy a $1 million dollar home. Who CARES what the big ones cost, these types of headlines are hyping a scene that doesn't exist, "a million dollars! I'll always be a renter!" NO, save up $$ for a year or two and buy that first condo. Then you're on your way as a 'move-up' buyer every 5 years or so -- selling the old place, buying a bigger place.
It works when the market is stable or is going up but this is a highly leveraged investment on a basically illiquid asset.
Always understand that the price can go down ~30% within a year, forbidding you to sell and locking you for years with a stupidly high mortgage.
It happened in relatively "stable" places like Paris. There it was just linked to the real estate market speculation and not linked to a single industry bubble like here in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately the price compression is incredible. You can buy a structurally sound piece of crap for a million dollars, and you can buy an unsound piece of crap for $995,000, in a bidding war with ten all-cash-offer parties.
Arrogance from a seller of a good or service alienates/pisses off their customers.
SCENE: You walk into a large retail TV/tech/stereo store. There are monitors displaying ads. NOT in a ubiquitous way; in an annoying ubiquitous way (ie. every 5 feet you walk in the store aisles, a monitor drops from the ceiling and displays an ad and you get used to counting your steps and every 5 feet you have to duck around the ad-bearing monitor).
You find a device online that disables the 'monitor drop' and bring it with you to that store.
Staff notice this and tell you "either turn off your device or leave."
What will you do? Phucking leave and never come back, that's what.
What if Best Buy was the dominant seller of TV/tech/stereos and the only place to get the Best Buy experience?
Monopolies don't last. Especially arrogant monopolies. It might take a while but if Best Buy was forcing people to view ads every time they visit the store -- and their customers started not showing up after being harassed by staff to 'stop using your monitor-drop blocker device' --
Best Buy would either
1) stop annoying their customers and find other ways to monetize
2) go out of business
The thing that people may forget here is the arrogant belief of this particular monopolist (Zuckerberg et al). That belief is "we got them locked, they can't get this experience anywhere else, we're #1"). Well that's a mistake on their part.
Can you imagine Jeff Bezos saying "effective immediately we're employing a FB ad model and stopping our users from ad-blocking -- I want more money."
Bezos is 100% opposite Zuckerberg.
- Bezos knows Amazon is the monopoly
- and yet he still he busts his bauls to make the site as non-annoying as possible; read a case study of how much attention Jeff pays to no-friction interaction for users of the Amazon site
Arrogant monopolists die. Zuckerberg needs to find a different way to monetize.
The mere fact that the dummazz thinks so little of his users that he comes up with "we'll force them to consume ads" instead of a Bezos "make users as happy as possible" shows Zuckerberg is an azz.
But then we all knew that because he stole the FB idea from someone else. NO FREAKING RESPECT. No respect extended from the guy -- so NONE GIVEN.
No it's actually true, and everyone knew from the context I meant commerce monopolies in capitalist economies, such as Microsoft, IBM (in the early days of computers you apparently could get fired for writing a P.O. for a non-IBM machine), etc. Not talking about utilities. I meant commerce monopolies in a competitive market place, a monopoly that develops with 'network effects', 'switching costs', etc.
Here's all it takes for a monopoly to fail:
(switching costs become low enough) + (current monopoly has become a pain/overpriced/etc.) = get thee down satan and the monopoly is gone.
Friendster, Myspace lost their market as we all know. SO WILL FACEBOOK. There is no 'secret sauce' there, just network effects, and minor switching costs of transferring/losing the data you've put on your FB account.
Switching costs for desktop operating systems are dropping incrementally for obvious reasons.
Lloyds of London has been around a long time but that doesn't mean they're a monopoly.
The Feds are probably furious. Replacing the U.S. currency is seen as a threat; any and all alternative types of 'medium of exchange' have been ruthlessly attacked/shut down by the Feds. They could step in and appeal this judge's ruling in the Federal courts to either overrule this Florida judge, or to extremely limit the application of her ruling.
The Feds one year ago sought to take down coin.mx and they will not likely want this Florida judge's ruling to confuse the legality of transferring bitcoin between parties.
Why would they worry? You still need to pay your taxes in USD, and that's not likely to change. Coin.mx didn't report suspicious activity, not because they were at risk of replacing USD
Here's an interview question I might pose to candidates (for a coding job):
"Which torrent site with access to popular songs and movies over the past 5 years has been the best, meaning the one you use most?"
My candidate responds and says "Pirate Bay" or "Kat".
If I have several candidates, this guy will be the last possible choice if every candidate is qualified because I'm assuming he's okay with using copyrighted works without paying.
Consider these scenarios -- stealing in your opinion?
- go to a restaurant, eat a meal, then leave without paying (you enjoyed something you were supposed to pay for but you did not pay)
- use public transit and not pay for the ride
- hail a taxi then run away when you arrive at the destination and not pay
If I asked a candidate "would either of these 3 scenarios above be okay?" -- would they expect me to hire them if they said one or more would be acceptable?
If I asked the candidate "how many times have you enjoyed a copyrighted film or recording -- and not paid?" -- 99.99% sure that every candidate would say 'never' even if they'd done so dozens of times.
Why would they lie to me about that? "If I tell the hiring manager I watch, listen to copyrighted stuff without paying, he might think that was wrong and not hire me, so I have to lie."
"It's not stealing, I just disagree with copyright laws/distribution channels/etc."
Even as a hypothetical, it is an example so laden with meaning and implication that the only true measure of your argument will come when you actually apply it during a recruitment drive. Please go ahead and discuss this with a recruiter and see what they say.
GOOD RIDDANCE. The example of Zuckerberg stealing the idea for Facebook and getting rich has contributed to the foolish belief that it's okay to "enjoy the benefit of something that was SUPPOSED to be paid for -- and NOT PAYING".
"I didn't steal any copyrighted material, my site just helped people who WANTED to enjoy the benefit of copyrighted material that was SUPPOSED to be paid for but didn't pay. So I'm in the clear!"
NO. Torrentz "Drove the getaway car", taking thieves to where the crime was committed.
The problem with calling out 'jerks, bozos and assholes' is contextual -- social norms/what works in NYC is quite different from small-town Indiana for example.
Two ways to handle someone you think is being a 'jerk/bozo/asshole':
1) what percentage of their behavior is 'bad behavior'?
2) what is my threshold percentage for what I personally consider bad behavior?
After I got married and witnessed PMS in action, the proportion good/proportion bad became essential.
The same is true at work.
And there is no OBJECTIVELY jerk/bozo/asshole behavior.
What you think is jerk/bozo/asshole may not even CHART with what your boss, friend, family member think is jerk/bozo/asshole behavior.
If I hire a sales guy who blows away the next 10 sales guys but 25% of the time he is reported to be a jerk/bozo/asshole I'm NOT firing him/her.
This is life and people have different psychological makeups and histories.
If you're going to set your "tolerance level" for bad behavior to, say -- 5%? 10%? at home, or in the workplace -- you'll meet highly effective people who add value to relationships and businesses who will make you unhappy.
They're out there.
"For better or worse."
"Take the good with the bad."
"Lighten up Francis."
That will have to happen here too. It's already happened in LA.
There will always be crybabies like this attorney during the growing pains of a popular 'destination city.'
For now, think of turning the Peninsula into tall buildings, concrete and asphalt. Think how the picturesque drive up highway 280 to San Francisco from the South Bay will be affected.
Everyone wants the nature. Not the tall buildings, concrete and asphalt.
Crybabies need to do precisely what this gal chose -- LEAVE. There's the door. That's how markets work -- when the price of a good or service is too high, demand drops. Well, she's a living example of a smidgen of demand disappearing.
People who don't like markets should move to Venezuela or North Korea or Cuba.