My head is not in the sand. Your head is in the sand if you say that every single tech company condones sexual harassment. It's actually an extraordinary claim that's hard to believe, but it's become so common to make bold claims about the ubiquity and universality of racism and sexism that it sounds normal to us. The idea is that if a woman is saying she likes her job as an engineer and doesn't feel mistreated, there's something wrong with that story and I'm sure she could dig a little deeper and remember a night out where somebody made an inappropriate comment, or she wasn't invited along, or she was just in some way treated differently because of her gender. If you take it that far, you're not just fixing tech company cultures, you're fixing the patriarchy, and that's not something that a bunch of consultants can fix. I think we need to be more specific about what we're trying to fix and where the problem begins and ends, otherwise we'll just put together ineffective diversity initiatives that never really gain traction. It can't be taboo to be critical about the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion programs, otherwise we'll all just wind up with our heads in the sand, hoping we aren't next on some journalist's hit list.
That is absolutely absurd to me. I understand walking out, but getting the refund had to have caused some eye rolls and jokes at your expense after you walked out. Where does it end? Can you walk out and get a refund because you didn't like the last 20 minutes? I think this sort of speaks to the absurdity of some aspects of this "get mine" mentality cultivated among economists
One thing you might notice when traveling a lot, the US attitude towards refunds (ie. when reasonable, and I would argue even when "slightly" unreasonable in the interest of customer service) differs a LOT from most countries attitude towards refunds (which can be summarized as essentially only when convicted in a court of law - and even then)
While I'm sure he knows this, most reasonably social college students reflexively trade up in dating and I would hazard to guess they are near equilibrium. Economics basically reifies these implicit social concepts. That said, most dating market choices are not easily explained with the perfectly competitive market in a vacuum analogy that gets used in economics 101. For example, the sunk cost bias is actually metarational in the sense that it asks: "Am I really right about the grass being greener on the other side? How important is it to me to trade up?" which incorporates the concept of subjective beliefs and risk which is not addressed in the perfect information scenario and may not even be something that's tractable to explain in a rational actor model
This is a false dilemma. Higher wages cause rent to increase (as you mentioned), but new housing causes rent to decrease (as OP mentioned). If high wages are making housing unaffordable for people, you can increase the housing supply.
I think with the existing situation in SF where you have a lot of young people with high wages who will live in a run-down place in the mission and pay $2-5k, if you build a bunch of luxury condos and need people to fill them, those people will move out of the mission and into a luxury condo. As buying pressure for lower quality housing e.g. off Mission St. is released into the luxury market, prices come down and schoolteachers can once again afford the Mission, or Lower Haight, or wherever.
One valid point I see coming from the anti-development camp is that the new surge in tech jobs is caused by a credit bubble, and once that crashes, you'd have all this excess supply, and it will tank the SF housing market, making the NIMBYs worse off than if expansion happened gradually.
I guess it comes down to whether you "believe in" the sustainability of bay area tech.
