In A Divided San Francisco, Private Tech Buses Drive Tension

Don't build terrible, dehumanizing, sprawl-encouraging, traffic-encouraging headquarters out in suburbia.

This isn't my idea - it's what every progressive minded thinker that spends even two minutes thinking about urban/traffic/sprawl ideas arrives at.

If google, facebook, et. al, were in the city, the network and wealth effects would be staggering. How many boats would be lifted by that rising tide ?

2. People act like this is a simple matter of getting more money into public transit. This is silly, even if that was the only roadblock (pun intended!), building a new freeway takes a lot of time, and expanding public transportation takes a lot of time, and in the meanwhile makes things even more miserable for everyone. Just look at all the very modest light rail expansions in the city and how they've made those sections nightmares for traffic for years. Google and FB need solutions today, not 5 years from now, and personally paying for shuttling their own employees seems like an incredibly environmentally conscious and fair way to handle it: don't forget, they're decreasing congestion on muni/bart/caltrain for everyone else. Lastly, money isn't the only problem: there's a lot of politics in public transport. For example, the reason the BART doesn't go all the way to Cupertino is because they voted against it there. So when you throw around expanding public transport as if its a defense of poor existing SF residents, realize that it may also be a form of antagonization for people in other communities. Hiring your own bus seems to be the simplest, cheapest, least displacing, and fairest way of solving this problem.

The complaint that those buses stop in bus stops illegally is IMHO valid and they should fix it (i.e., stop somewhere where they're allowed to).

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/021311.html

That would be ten times the density of the peninsula cities today. Pretty nice isn't it?

They are most certainly encouraging better public transportation. This doesn't excuse blocking the bus. I wouldn't argue that they're doing it out of pure goodwill, but its crazy to ignore how much efficiency and value their apps have added to the system. Not to mention the drastically increased accessibility to people new or too confused to ride prior to this.

"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."

The point is everyone just 'does their job' regardless of any outside stimuli/judgement. Everyone is a hero in their own world.

Others in the thread have probably pointed out by now that the linked NPR story leaves conspicuously absent a key point in the "private buses in SF" narrative, i.e. that the recent ire (past week or two) flared up when some Vanguard type filmed himself pretending to be an obnoxious "let them eat cake" Googler. The next day, the even bigger story was that that video was a fake (not a hoax but a "true fake", to use Assange terminology). Indeed, were it not for the true faking of the perspective of one "side" of A Divided San Francisco, this NPR story, titled "Private Tech Buses Drive Tension" couldn't exist. Couldn't. So what? So whether the original was a lie or not has become definitively irrelevant - the length of its shadow is the same. The point being not that NPR is lying or something like that, but rather: that the Symbol has progressed on through to the fourth stage, that of the fully realized Simulacrum, now totally divorced from the "map-reality" (you remember the Borges fable about the nation-sized map at the beginning of the book?) which begat it in the first place. It now exists only on a plane of interaction with other Symbols (e.g., this is part of a series on Income Inequality, which, of course, has no non-wholly-symbolic connection to private buses) which have also divorced themselves of their original connection to reality and which also only interact with other Symbols. Baudrillard, you will recall, names this plane the "Hyperreal." Real because it is.