That's interesting and I hope it can be improved -- but with all due respect to Clem Tiller's expertise, I disagree about it affecting even 12% of the most important figure.
My understanding is that the primary overall improvement is about the additional service hours that can be provided by the new trains.
Yes, it's nice to shorten the time for an individual traveling SF <-> SJ... but the benefits compound even more because now Caltrain can offer more trips per day using the same number of train consists.
> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue.
> https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.
> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.
A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
In addition to the overall benefits of not having non-compete agreements, California's software startup ecosystem also benefits from not having to deal with charging sales tax when selling SaaS[1][2]
If they are selling SaaS to an entity in California. Which is the same for anyone selling SaaS to an entity in California, regardless of where the seller is located. I do not see why this would give California a competitive advantage in where a business's employees are located.
While I have mixed feelings about The New York Times's coverage of certain topics these days, this is one topic where their reporting has (positively) shaped events. They had a big investigative piece earlier in the summer about pharmacy benefit managers: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/business/prescription-dru... And that likely led to the recent FTC announcements.
NYT is still good at coverage, I'd just argue that the optics of their coverage can be removed from their original, erm, style, at times. (I don't want to say "politics" but we all know I mean politics.)
Still, they do excellent work to this day, just with questionable detours.
HN often links to articles on sites like The Verge that are literally just a summary of actual reporting performed by reporters at Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or another media outlet with a "hard subscribewall." The Verge and others are just leaching off the reporters and media outlets doing the actual work.
And then there's open contempt for linking to sites like 404 Media that charge.
Don't get me wrong — I sometimes use archive.is myself to bypass paywalls.
But it sure looks like HN as a community is letting itself be shaped by whoever will offer their content for free.
Most of their articles are free and just require you to log in with an email, but the median HN poster finds that as repellent as a paywall so it may be a moot point.
> and most notably Rust has Cargo – quite possibly the most widely loved package manager tool in existence.
I thought Rubygems was "the most widely loved package manager" given how often it's been used as inspiration for other languages' package management systems... but maybe I'm just getting old :)
My understanding is that it was a two-part exploit:
1) The Solarwinds product was hacked to allow backdoor access to organizations' on-prem networks.
2) The hackers then took advantage of the "Golden SAML" vulnerability in Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS) to leapfrog via "seamless SSO" from the on-prem network into the organization's cloud resources hosted by Microsoft.
The article is all about how various Microsoft leaders and staff did not fix #2, because many said it would never be an actual issue exposed to the world.
This is extra damning because Microsoft is selling components at the core of both governments' on-prem and cloud systems, so if they don't take security extra seriously, their systems can present passive vulnerabilities.
And at the risk of annoying everyone, a GPT summary:
This article investigates how Microsoft, in pursuit of profit and market dominance, overlooked significant security vulnerabilities that left the U.S. government and other entities exposed to cyberattacks by Russian hackers. The whistleblower, Andrew Harris, a former Microsoft cybersecurity specialist, discovered a serious flaw in a Microsoft application used for cloud-based program access. Despite Harris's persistent warnings over several years, Microsoft delayed addressing the flaw, prioritizing business interests, particularly securing a lucrative deal with the federal government for cloud computing services.
The security loophole was within Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), which if exploited, would allow attackers to impersonate legitimate users and access sensitive data without detection. Microsoft's decision to deprioritize this issue, despite internal and external warnings, eventually led to the significant SolarWinds cyberattack, affecting numerous federal agencies and demonstrating the consequences of the security oversight.
Microsoft's response to these accusations has been to emphasize its commitment to security, stating that they take all security issues seriously and review them thoroughly. However, ProPublica’s investigation reveals a culture within Microsoft that sometimes places business growth and competitiveness over immediate security concerns, reflecting broader issues within the tech industry related to balancing profit-making with customer security.
The article sheds light on internal conflicts, the company's handling of security vulnerabilities, and the broader implications of such practices for national security and customer trust. It also highlights the challenges faced by whistleblowers and cybersecurity professionals in advocating for swift action on security issues within large corporations driven by profit motives and competitive pressures.
My understanding is that the primary overall improvement is about the additional service hours that can be provided by the new trains.
Yes, it's nice to shorten the time for an individual traveling SF <-> SJ... but the benefits compound even more because now Caltrain can offer more trips per day using the same number of train consists.