What are your thoughts on the tech protesters in San Francisco?

Foolishness on the part of the protestors, it's not the salaries that drive rent up, it's the influx of people and lack of supply. S.F. isn't getting any bigger or building any new residencesresidences (in quantity).

That being said, I find it hilarious when liberals turn on each other.

I was sympathetic early on, but more recently these protestors have been doing a fantastic job of making themselves appear increasingly unlikeable and immature...

I am in support of anyone who harasses Kevin Rose.

They sound a little bit old fashioned, with this anti-capital, anti-empire speech, which sounds more a like 1970s Latin American students protest agains the military juntas than anything else. It's quite sad really, and while I believe service workers deserve a fair payment, and for that payment to be enough to afford rent, food, leisure, etc., I don't think Google and other companies that are pouring millions into the city's economy are to blame for all their problems.

I can tell you exactly what is going on. Downtown by BART is prime real estate now. But before it wasnt. There are huge ghetto hotels and dirty housing units that people have lived in for years. Plus the Bay Area has a very active protester base. Not just students rough hippy types. They will not go down without a fight. Eventually they will lose cities need money more then the trouble they present. It will take time since we have a democracy and rich landowners don't want to give up their view to build high rises.

If they want better for themselves, it's called:

www.codeacademy.org

www.bentobox.io

It's free. It's takes a few months. It's forever. It's in demand. Baffled.

I work in tech, at a start-up, am largely self-education, don't live in San Francisco, and am mostly sympathetic to most of these protests.

I'm not really sure that kicking schoolteachers and garbage collectors out of their houses is a good way to make friends, especially when you the implicit mission statement of ever startup is "OMG we're so creative we're changing the world!!!! for the better!!!!"

It's also incredibly silly to say that potential employees "aren't skilled enough" or they don't have "in-demand skills". Sure, your startup doesn't need a school teacher, but your educational platform product sure as hell needs syllabuses and course content and lectures--which means, actually, yeah, you did need those school teachers. Beyond that contrived example the "lack of needed skills" arguement has been so thoroughly debunked that anyone claiming it is exclaiming a business-world shibboleth and nothing more.

The thing is, though, that it isn't "tech" or "startups" doing this. It's just obnoxious because startup kids are that, usually kids, and usually self-important. I hate to break it to you, but your cellphone app actually isn't going to do much of anything. But it's no different from the trajectory of business in general. Rents in NYC have gotten equally insane, tripling in some neighborhoods in ten years. DC has seen similar changes although they're less pronounced. I've known a fair share of people who have lived in one neighborhood for over a decade and been priced out. Even with the housing bubble, prices both for rent and mortgages remain high nationwide.

So it's unfair to target 'startups' alone for anything but obnoxious aesthetics.

I think it's a combination of unacknowledged jealousy on the part of the protesters, oblivious douchery on the part of some of the Google workers, and the high population of folks in SF who are allergic to reasoning, work, and showers.