Don't let Google take over Berlin
fuckoffgoogle.de
fuckoffgoogle.de
People think they are so incredibly open minded when they are pro refugees, but as soon as it's the "wrong kind of Ausländer" (the one where it's not possible to impose moral standards as easily as it's not possible to exploit their need for protection anymore) it's all evil all of a sudden.
People will need to realize that they will need to be welcoming to either everyone or noone, everything else is just bigotry. Let's be welcoming to everyone I would propose.
Being open-minded is a two way street, remember.
If you show up being German and wealthy, treatment will be way different unfortunately.
Try being wealthy while Swabian in Berlin.
Google's business model is fundamentally based on data mining as much as possible about their users, and what's changed in the past couple years is (a) a much greater awareness of the potential negative consequences of this data collection and (b) the sense that the American internet giants are becoming unstoppable juggernauts.
The hate against Google was inevitable.
You see, the point is, it doesn’t have to be.
Saying "the point is, it doesn't have to be" is like saying "Apple doesn't have to be a designed-focused company." True, they don't have to be, but they are, and that is a huge reason they are successful.
By firing James Damore, by allowing YouTube videos to be demonetized for holding the wrong opinions, etc. Sundar Pichai has destroyed the bonds of trust. It takes backbone to stand up to the ideologically possessed who are determined to play the zero sum game and to persuade them that their needs can be more sustainably met by other means. Sundar Pichai has no backbone! Nobody has any respect for a weak leader who habitually chooses the easiest path without regard to the long term consequences.
Do you honestly believe that if Pichai had kept Damore around that it would have engendered good relationships with "the community"? If so I hate to break to you but "the community" is a lot more than people who think like you.
You're missing the point entirely.
AFAICT, Germany hasn't accused the NSA of doing anything illegal after the Snowden revelations. Should Germany be welcoming to the NSA in your opinion, lest Germany be accused of bigotry?
If the answer is that it is a separate issue because the NSA is a government agency of a nation-state and not a citizen, then I think good faith requires that you grant FUGoogle an edge case to your argument as well. After all, the argument they are putting forward is that Google is a powerful organization that surveils, censors, and avoids paying taxes. (Also, they make the argument that Google can't legally say no to participating in U.S. wide-net surveillance programs.)
Argue the substance, of which there is much, but please don't branch off into, "They came for Google and I said nothing." It's low effort.
It's not like they said "People who are working at Google or have worked at Google are not welcome" - for me this is a clear message to Google, the company.
I don't have a real opinion on the matter per se, so please don't take this as taking a position.
If an individual or company violates prevailing prosocial norms within a community (not paying taxes in either case), the community reserves the right to remove them. If a company or individual threatens the long-term well being of the community (e.g. the business ecosystem) the community has the right to reject them. In the limit this is obvious (and provides a fairly robust counter-example to "Let's be welcoming to everyone"): a company can reject criminal or criminal organizations. Google's tax avoidance behavior has been pretty clearly antisocial (e.g. the double Irish Dutch sandwich arrangement), and arguably criminal.
There are limits on Uber in Germany and limits on AirBnB in Berlin (IIRC it is not Germany-wide) for exactly this reason. It seems that Berliners are similarly worried about negative externalities entailed by Google establishing a campus there. If Google is willing to conform to community standards it may well have a place there. But that would probably require paying some back-owed taxes :)
> It seems that Berliners
No, it's just some racist people operating a web site. They even suggest shooting Google ("bullets for Google", https://fuckoffgoogle.de/wp-content/uploads/photo-gallery/Ku...).
I'll wait a bit to see if they will make the connection to the Jewish world conspiracy (often refered to as "wall street", "financial elite" in such circles).
This is very important. It's so deeply rooted in all of this it has me full of disgust. But apparently it's ok as long as you're german and you're not making rap music.
You must not be accepting to those that destroy your society: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Gentrification is a problem, but long time renters in Germany are really having it good. An example of how does the system works here: I pay twice as much as some German friends living in my district because my parents didn't sign me up in a union 20 years ago. I'm OK with that, it's the game, but refusing new buildings/companies to keep the rents low is BS.
Kreuzberg is very well located, Berlin is huge, time to accept that 1989 was a long time ago.
I would like to see bigger companies that move new offices to areas to use their weight to push for more housing developments and permits as part of their local agreements. I think that would go a long way (though still short) in helping the situation.
I'm as yimby as they come, but I'm not sure this is true for everyone. It does mean that the local burger joint can charge more for hamburgers and that the line cooks can plausibly negotiate for higher pay. But its a pretty strong statement that this is true for everyone.
> real estate monopolies
In what areas are even 25% of residences owned by a single entity? In what areas are 25% of rental residences being offered by a single entity?
> People complain about the lack of affordable housing, yet building new residential areas is a tapestry of red tape.
True
This would only be true if everyone owned their own residences and profited from the increase in land values. In reality, the inhabitants of gentrifying neighborhoods are usually just evicted from their homes so the owners can sell to developers, and they end up worse off than they were before.
Wealthier people buy up houses and kick out residents living there since decades.
Wealthier people moving in does not mean that pensioners or factory workers will suddenly earn engineer wages.
Wealthier people usually even lead to a reduction of apartments, as they combine smaller apartments to a bigger one. Increasing density is not always possible and often connected with a reduction of life quality (e.g. less green)
There are many people trying to get good programming wages and that doesn't make them good programmers.
IMO Google -- and any other corp -- has a lot to lose if they close an office. Real talent doesn't just exist everywhere you go.
I am not supporting or attacking the website, just clarifying the above point.
Colleges outside cities, like the one I went to, are brimming with compsci students that are then forced to move when they graduate, like I was. I'm sure if companies set up locations in such areas, they'd be able to tap into a decent amount of people like me who'd take a moderate pay cut to be able to live and work in a less dense region - not just the graduates I mentioned, but people who'd moved away from their home town and now could move back, or at least to somewhere more resembling it.
Furthermore, emphasizing on hiring graduates isn't a very sustainable strategy; many startups prey on the naivete and energy of young people and their hiring strategy usually revolves around draining a wave of young people of their creativity and energy, fire them when they realize what's going and then hire the next wave of naive and energetic youngsters.
Many companies do that, not only startups. But for that model to work they need a big hiring pool. Not sure if rural-like areas have the volume of candidates for that hiring model to be sustainable.
I found this to be an interesting article on this topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/fashion/06love.html
I'm not saying all of their claims are outright wrong, but this borderline childish website did not persuade me of anything - if anything I have some antipathy against this movement now.
It's fully childish, it's called "Fuck off Google" and the call to action button is "WTF?", and it's promoting tagging graffiti on stores/public places with ugly slogans and calling it "street art": https://fuckoffgoogle.de/2018/04/17/street-art-against-googl...
> Google was caught red-handed participating in NSA’s illegall surveillance of almost everyone
PRISM was infiltration. The wiki also calls out Apple in this event, who are known to proactively limit surveillance. Many of the arguments also suffer from severely flawed logic, especially where the actions of others are held against Google.
There is some truth here, but it is far outweighed by false information.
According to the leaked documents, the companies were "partners". Of course the companies denied it, what else did you expect?
>Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...
Except for the slide where the Google inflitration is documented?[1]
> we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources
A "source" in intelligence does not not necessarily imply complicitness, an "asset" does.
[1]: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Edu6LPu...
Would Google's entry to Berlin trigger a rise of inequality for the city's inhabitants and make life difficult for everyone that is not working for Google? (for example private Google buses for their employees in San Francisco)
Also a company that is morally a bad one in the public eye, with all the data collection, appearance in NSA revelation, is not something that the citizens of a city would NOT protest...
Berlin has working public transit (for some definition of working, much better than Caltrain and BART though).
San Francisco has 700k inhabitants, Berlin has 3.5m inhabitants (half as many as the entire Bay Area, but much more cohesive).
Some of Google's money will flow to locals not directly employed by Google, but will this offset the increased cost of their living expenses?
Everyone in this area should have bought the flats they live in, or should have signed long term leases with inflation-pegged rent adjustments.
Other than that it's simply people trying to tell someone to not eat their cake, because they want it.
I think that, if the majority of the people in the area side with the author, there is an argument to be made to, through political means, block bringers of gentrifications such as Google from entering this area.
If the majority wants Google out, I want them to be able to do that. Currently, that decision is very likely not up to them.
> The boroughs of Berlin are not independent municipalities; the borough governments' power is limited, and subordinate to the Berlin Senate.
And even if it were up to the district/borough, there are 270+ thousand people there. They should hold a referendum, and let's hope for a high brow campaign.
Also, singling out Google is easy, and important. It's a milestone. It means that gentrification is already - very likely - going to continue to happen with full force there. Google picked the place because it's full of "talent", small startups, "cool places/parties", etc.
Don't you think they would have if they could?
But that's a general problem, completely orthogonal to Google.
Gentrification is just a big sign, that renting as a means for providing shelter is a very fragile system without proper market controls.
Of course, in general the inequality of the situation leads to exploitation of those who don't have enough money to buy something to hedge against rising rents.
The animation while clicking links/buttons typically gives away if something was designed to implement Material Design or not.
Can’t let the Chinese do all the work.
That's the short version of any EU-based competition to US companies in software. Dreams don't correspond to reality.
It's simply not a zero sum game. Google will bring culture and resources with it that could enhance Berlin.
Even if some local politician decides to block a construction plan, I’m not sure how they would stop Google from just buying existing stuff nearby their old office like Amazon does.
Google in Manhattan bought a building the size of an entire block essentially. It isn’t even what I would call a campus there either.
Germany is not broken how America is, so it’s easier to put people ahead of corporations there.
Does the city of Berlin?
> Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and software engineer. He is known for being the Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2017 and Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017.
That book surely will paint a fair and objective view.
I can't complain, I'm also just a yuppie whom Kreuzberger would probably hate, but if their claim about the tax regime is correct, then what's the point of attracting a cancer that would just make everything in your area more expensive...
I'm reminded of John Oliver's segment about tax incentives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bl19RoR7lc
But if locals want to keep it that way, then they need to show that they are the majority in that municipal area, or they should have bought the buildings a long time ago.
Or at least strategically important flats (the cheap ones on the ground floor next to the hallway, or just simply the cheapest ones, maybe just a lot in the basement, that grants private property rights) - though it depends on the co-owned property rights in Berlin/Germany, but I hope a condo cannot be sold without all the owners agreeing.
With regard to resources, Google has by far has the most sophisticated access to future tech (quantum, ML for example), the most infrastructure (GGC, oceanic fiber, DC/pops), and their incredible scale comes with great advantages.
No thanks.
What is this zombie apocalypse?
Like what? Berlin has a vibrant and energetic tech scene, what is Google going to bring that Kreuzberg is lacking?