Google’s 80-acre San Jose mega-campus is on hold | Hacker News Reader

Google’s 80-acre San Jose mega-campus is on hold

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88 pointssmaili37 comments

TBH Im not surprised. The quality of their products is worsening to the point Im looking for alternatives; Google Home is as stupid or worse (still no conversations or clarification WHY it doesnt understand certain input.) to their software missing basic features for ages now, like offline Google Maps missing speed limits or even addresses of spots you favorited.. Search becoming worse, No proper way to flag bad ads in Youtube. Not to mention them being behind on the AI battle or Cloud Computing.

The downturn affecting all of tech is a lot more salient than this narrative

…what would that have to do with them pausing work on a campus?

The OP is assuming that funds being directed towards a campus is extraneous spending that could've been directed towards making products better instead.

If they knew anything about Google they’d understand how wrong that is.

If any human organization to ever exist on the face of the earth has enough money, it is Google.

The reason why their products increasingly can seem long in the tooth is that corporate work is a huge game of telephone, where messages from the top to the bottom and vice versa get horribly garbled.

Add in a culture that rewards shipping features, but not necessarily good ones.

This is hard to believe given the quality of most software, but at some point, one might expect a decline in product quality to harm revenue and profitability, which would reduce or eliminate the need for headcount growth.

>Google Home is as stupid or worse

Now that "modern AI" is mainstream culture, the (lack of) capability of Google Home is astounding. It's 50/50 whether it can get even basic commands correct.

It turns out that giving the devices away and then losing money every time someone says something near them is a bad way to run a business.

Will this help to drop prices of homes in San Jose? I remember a lot of realtors selling the future of google

curious about this too

Only increasing housing density will decrease housing prices substantially.

Supply and demand. Without the expected demand of the San Jose Google campus, it's possible that prices drop without building anything.

Population growth and decades of supply constraints say hi.

Suggestion. Turn 80 acres into housing

Downtown San Jose has been on an overall downward trend since the start of covid lock down.

Any links?

Yes it’s been mostly people not needing to be in the office following post Covid work from home policies, causing people to move from areas where the main attractor was being close to their in person job.

Not as bad as downtown SF or downtown Oakland though.

data points to no:

https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/4th-look-at-local-hous...

prices may not rise but there’s no inventory.

I look forward to a world where we have 80 acres of housing rather than 80 acres of human hamster wheels.

I look forward to a world where comments like yours get upvoted instead of downvoted.

Insightfulness adds value, particularly when it happens to be humorous at the same time.

How many acres of housing would this have had? I honestly have no conception of how much space 4,000 people take up

The average lot size for a single-family home in California is roughly 1/5 acre, so 80 acres would be somewhere around 400 homes. Probably more like 300 after accounting for streets and stuff. Three-story apartment building are around 25 units per acre.

1/10 of an acre is a perfectly good size for a home, especially if you build several stories and a basement.

To say nothing of building 1+5 condos or even more dense highrise stuff.

It will probably end up just being one of the two founding dweebs latest mansion/estate or squatted on for eventual sale.

Adding more housing is like adding more highways. It just replicates the problem.

Which problem? Of humans that aren’t homeless?

In the USA we have enough space to build over 100 times more houses than we have now. Much of that land is very cheap.

Why don't you build some houses and be part of the solution?

You can put up a tent in my back yard if you want.

We should build more houses for, say, people working in the LA shipping industry in rural Minnesota. Miles of empty land!

True. We should house the ER nurses for LA in Death Valley. The line cooks at the Jack N the Box down the street can live in the Olympic mountains and the garbage collectors in NYC in the bad lands of South Dakota. Good plan!

What's your plan? Wait for someone else lose a bunch of money for the greater good?

Build housing instead of office buildings.

And charge crazy rents prices because it cost so much to build?

Plenty of unemployed section 8 tenants will spend the next 40-50 years living in the same Los Angeles rent-controlled apartment. It's not necessary to have the productive members of society drive a long commute when the unemployed are living near jobs.

The notion that poor people (especially the unemployed) have the "right" to live in any neighborhood (even the most desirable) is crazy. Plenty of seniors living only on social security move out of California to a cost of living they can afford. Others cobble together a basket of benefits like Section 8 or low income housing lottery, disability payments (spurious), free health care, subsidized utilities, and snap. They end up with the same consumption level as your nurse or line cook without any job. I'ts not easy to get on all these benefit programs. It takes a combination of luck and tenacity.

The idea that LA could just pay it's poor people to live in Adelanto wouldn't work. This needs to happen at a state or federal level.

Time for a real, no-cars neighborhood!

I'll allow for LSVs.

ChatGPT ruins everything.

.. everything that Google hasn't already ruined.

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