Discovered via A VC.com, the best rant you’ll read on the internet this month is this talk given by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard:
On Poland vs San Francisco:
It struck me as I looked out window for hour after hour that everything I was seeing—every car, house, road, signpost, even every telegraph pole—had been built after 1990. I’d been visiting Poland regularly since I was a kid, but the magnitude of the country’s transformation hadn’t really sunk in before. And I felt proud.
In spite of all the fraud, misgovernment, incompetence, and general Polishness of the post-communist transition, despite all our hardships and failures, in twenty years we had made the country look like Europe. The material basis of people’s lives was incomparably better than it had been before.
And San Francisco:
if you visit San Francisco, [the extent of the homelessness and poverty] is something you’re likely to find unsettling. You’ll see people living in the streets, many of them mentally ill, yelling and cursing at imaginary foes. You’ll find every public space designed to make it difficult and uncomfortable to sit down or sleep, and that people sit down and sleep anyway. You’ll see human excrement on the sidewalks, and a homeless encampment across from the city hall. You’ll find you can walk for miles and not come across a public toilet or water fountain.
… You can’t even get a decent Internet connection in San Francisco.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but you don’t have to agree with a rant in order to appreciate it.