Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards
nytimes.com
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I used to think that wall street was a target because they were seen as getting rich without producing anything, and were blamed for crashing the economy. If that was the reason, though, they wouldn't now be targeting companies like Google, who do produce things and were not responsible for the crash of 2008.
Because of things like this, I now think both protests were just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through.
Says the guy who didn't bother to do 10 minutes of research either in this thread or anything linked to in it. Heh.
Look, I don't think the violence is okay, and I do think to a degree, the protests against the buses and gentrification are poorly aimed. But these people are not protesting without cause.
A recent protest focused quite heavily on the number of evictions going around San Francisco, in an effort to raise the rent on the property. The gentrification here is stark- families who have lived here decades have seen their per-month payouts rise by hundreds, if not thousands of dollars over just the last decade. All of this in a city that by and large doesn't receive tax money from companies making the greatest profit(by working outside of the city's bounds and busing their people in), and can't afford to raise taxes very easily without hitting middle-income families.
Don't turn into just the caricature of someone too aloof to even attempt to understand.
If I was renting out a spare bedroom in my house to a college student for $500 a month, and then another guy shows up and says "I'll pay you $5,000 a month for that bedroom," what do you think my reaction would be? What do you think most people would do in that situation? I claim that nearly every one of the protesters, if they were in the position of the spare-bedroom landlord, would happily kick the first guy out and move in the $5,000 a month guy.
I can hardly imagine a way to satisfy the protesters' demands for cheaper rent without taking away that landlord's fundamental right to charge what he wants for use of his own property.
And by the way, tons of poor-ish and middle-class San Francisco home owners have made life-changing amounts of money from having their cheap homes increase in value when the tech industry moved in next door. But you never hear about them because they don't fit the narrative of the haves oppressing the have-nots.
There's two ways to do it, and that's neither of them: increase supply (build new structures; apparently SF has over-restrictive policies on building that could be loosened?) or decrease demand (e.g. make corporate-run buses illegal).
AFAIK, those buses aren't operated by the companies themselves, but by external transportation companies as contractors. What would you make illegal, "don't take Google as a customer"?
This is shockingly dismissive, IMHO. It's easy to be judgmental when it's not your job or your existence that is being threatened, but if you're the one who is being made obsolete by the ruthless march of innovation / technology, would you not be the protestor?
Do you think your superior intellectual realization that "There are countless other examples industry-and-job-destroying innovations, and from a long-term historical standpoint they've always been a huge net win for humanity" (quoting from an earlier comment by you) would be enough to prevent emotional strife as you accept your new minimum-hourly-rate job?
Those industry-destroying innovations tend to take many years to pick up steam, and anyone who's paying attention will likely see the writing on the wall long before it happens. I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?
If I was forced to accept a new minimum-wage job, I'd probably be angry, but that wouldn't mean that my discontentment was based in reason.
No, you'd probably be able to pull it off. If you have decent math and writing skills, those would transfer to a bunch of other jobs, and I'd bet that you're pretty smart. In other words, you're probably not a representative sample of the population.
I get your viewpoint that what's good for humanity need not be humane to ALL humans, just the overall concept of humanity. However, I can't escape the feeling that there is an unnecessarily ruthless resource re-allocation going on here. Killing one process and allocating those resources to another in an instant makes sense in OS design, but maybe processes that reallocate resources from some living beings to others can be more compassionate without compromising that much in terms of efficiency.
Even my web server (nginx) has a -s stop for fast shutdown and a -s quit for graceful shutdown. :-)
Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the house I grew up in is owned by my grandparents, so no one can ever force them off their own property (or me, if I wanted to live there). IMHO, it's stupid to complain that you can't rent someone else's property forever, and that they're throwing you out for a better deal. Rent is supposed to be short-term (or at least that's how it is in my country).
How can you understand what's valuable in tech if you can't even understand what's valuable in life. Having your parents being forced to move so you can't see them when they get old, putting off having kids until you might not be able to or giving up the job you love because you got sick. This isn't your opinion on Facebook vs. Snapchat, it's real life shit. One of the great things about being a geek was that you didn't have to blatantly accept society's stupidity. I guess no one could really foresee the magnitude of eternal september.
It's not like there is a lack of opportunities outside of SV, every techie went there by their own choice. If they can't handle having their ride to work disrupted once in a while, maybe it's time to leave when there's still some dignity left. But hey I guess there's some online petition they can all sign, I heard it worked great in regards to the Snowden revelation. Happy fucking brogramming.
Hopefully if that happens again, the criminals responsible will be arrested.
I believe in the right to protest (even if the protest against buses seems pretty misdirected), but that right doesn't include vandalism.
This is good for the environment and reduces the number of vehicles on the road. This seems obvious, but from reading the comments in this thread it seems like this whole kerfuffle is about the buses themselves.
I understand the anger, I got an earful of it volunteering as a big brother for at risk youth during college in south central LA. If a person doesn't have a vision of how they could get to be that person they want to be, they lash out at the symbols of those folks. Trying to convince young latino men that getting $100 a week for being spotters for the drug dealers really wasn't a path toward that life they wanted, even when it clearly was a path to getting some of the things they wanted right then and there.
Being a pedestrian isn't any safer as we had a record number of car vs pedestrian deaths this year.
We are massively under served.
To make a 40 mile run in an hour, a bus needs to do very few pickup stops in SF, drive nonstop to destination, then do very few drop off stops in Silicon Valley; then return empty to repeat. Same thing other direction for the evening trip. It's the sort of trip that only makes sense for a chartered coach, not a public bus.
If the route was provided by the local muni bus, people would protest that too - that tech employees were getting special treatment, that a SF tax funded agency was serving geographic areas well outside of SF, that stops should be added at all the intermediate cities (doubling the length of the trip), the system would be more wasteful as buses would run empty on company holidays, and that the companies should directly provide those routes themselves since they only benefit them.
The system presently in place actually makes far more sense than trying to expand muni because it's a very specific purpose and specific route.
For a company with no shortage of money, a shuttle makes complete sense.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!4m17!3m13!1m1!1sM...
(EDIT: Added 3 mile source since someone below questioned it)
The issue with Caltrain is that there are simply not enough trains running on it to ferry all the people who need to get to the South Bay. My ideal solution is better express routes through the city to the caltrain station and from there shuttles to the corporate campuses. We'd need some serious infrastructure improvements to the caltrain however.
I wish companies were more willing to spend their lobbying money on pushing politicians to commit to infrastructure improvements that could benefit a broader stripe of the population then just their employees.
Sure, want to put more money into that sink, and see it wasted?
I am amazed that my daughter will be, in the year 2020, living in the world I imagined and RPGd in at the same age I was at that time (I was 17 years old, playing cyberpunk RPG where my character was living as a 17 year old in the year 2020)
If you have ever been to Singapore, and seen the private security-police, Cisco (not the networking company), that is the city of the cyberpunk world....
I am in love with, terrified by and amazed at our world.
The “Google shuttle effect:” Gentrification and San Francisco’s dot com boom 2.0
http://svenworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Goldman_PRFi...
I was especially offended by the misuse of "externality" in the first page: "Lower income people should not bear the brunt of the negative externalities of economic development" (she is referring to housing prices, which are not an exernality).
Money is power. Power gets what it wants. The fight for San Fransisco is one-sided. The winners have been pre-determined.
But money is the power to obtain goods that you want, even if other people want those same things. In this case, it is living in SF. Googlers have the right to spend their money as they see fit. The government will always be there to take taxes and use them for the public good. But what is left in the employees paycheck is for them to spend.
I am much more concerned about the power of mobs, than the power of money (at least the money of small players like Google employees - billionaires like George Soros do concern me). This is actually a positive step in protecting an under-privileged group (nerds) from left wing thugs.
It's a company with lots of employees who live in a specific area. It makes economic sense for them to rent a bus, and it's better for the environment to reduce the number of cars.
A bunch of people start attacking the bus; they hire security. It's not sinister or scary, it's predictable.
If you're mad at income inequality, campaign to change the tax code for individuals. Don't attack people going to work in a bus.
The idiots shouldn't be protesting the Google buses, they should be targeting every NIMBY idiot who thinks that it is possible to keep San Francisco the same as it was before. Cities aren't meant to stay the same, they are meant to shift and change and adapt, and they always will. Want to keep the houses single family, the apartments low-rise, and keep the original buildings? Fine, the buildings will look the same, but the people living in them will be filthy rich, cause nobody else will be able to afford it.
The irony to me is that a city filled with people who claim to be environmentally focused is so dead-set on being low-density. Low-density development is, on the aggregate, worse for the environment, but hey, you get to pay 2500 for that bedroom in a Victorian, so why not?
Why don't the people of MountainView and surrounding towns build high-density developments on their own door-step near the employers? Why don't you accuse homeowners there of being 'greedy hogs'?
Why don't all the people who want to work at Google and Facebook move closer to work? Why do they have to be so selfish to want to live in the city? Why do they expect their employer to bus them to work for free? They're grown ups, they can pay their own way and take Caltrain or drive, and if that's inconvenient then move!
For every dollar that a Google employee does not spend on transport to work, that's a dollar extra of disposable income that can be spent on rent. Google perks can be considered a subsidy which is inflating rental prices. True, right?
Why doesn't Google, an Internet company, figure out ways to build software and products with distributed teams?! Why do you need thousands of people in the same building? How many people does the average employee really need to speak to face-to-face on a daily basis?
The issue here is of people choosing to live in San Francisco. If those Google employees wanted to live near Mountain View, and if building development there wasn't possible, then maybe your comment would make sense.
>> Why don't all the people who want to work at Google and Facebook move closer to work? Why do they have to be so selfish to want to live in the city? Why do they expect their employer to bus them to work for free? They're grown ups, they can pay their own way and take Caltrain or drive, and if that's inconvenient then move!
Because it's a free country, where you can choose to live anywhere you want. There's no legal or ethical reason why someone should feel obligated to live close to work.
>> For every dollar that a Google employee does not spend on transport to work, that's a dollar extra of disposable income that can be spent on rent.
If you want to be pedantic, maybe that's an extra dollar that those folks are spending in San Francisco when they come home after work. After all, they are paying high rents to live in San Francisco, so that they can enjoy the city - where do you think they spend their money on food and entertainment?
>> Why doesn't Google, an Internet company, figure out ways to build software and products with distributed teams?! Why do you need thousands of people in the same building? How many people does the average employee really need to speak to face-to-face on a daily basis?
Google can do many things, and they probably have many people working in a distributed manner already. They also have offices all over the world. None of that will change the fact that there are people working there who wish to live in a city that they love. Do you think that if these employees did not have to physically be in a building in Mountain View, they would go live in Lincoln, Nebraska?
At what point would Google charter flights? Obviously not for one employee, but hypothetically, would they do it if 1,000 employees moved today to San Diego? Or Maui? I think they would.
I ask because it's obvious that Googlers get to have their cake and eat it, only because their employer has the resources to pander them. This may be a reflection of how hard it is to find and retain tech talent.
Free food, free laundry(?), free child-care(?), free transport, etc. At what point does a company say enough is enough? How long can this party last for?
When they feel they're no longer getting value from it?
How is this any different the the "pandering" you describe?
"The City of Mountain View [...]expressly rejects housing as an allowable use in the area."
IIRC there was another rejection late last year, but I can't find it.
As to the SF vs suburb debate, it's definitely one of preference, and SF appeals to a lot of people. It's not that the employees are too lazy to drive, it's that the company doesn't want them working for trendy SF startups.
Could Google, FB etc attract the same level of talent if said talent couldn't live in a hip, young city instead of the dreary strip-mall suburbs of Silicon Valley? I doubt it. Also, there are a lot of jobs in SF, and many people might be in families or relationships where one partner works up in the city.
(Aside: As someone who used to commute via Googlebus, moved to MTV, and is now looking for housing in SF while not being at Google, I have to say I'm not quite sure where I stand on the whole issue. It's somewhat bittersweet to get off the Caltrain in the morning and walk straight past a Googlebus, or worse, see an empty one heading back down south in the evening!)
Better public transit would obviate the need for google busses. Caltrain, a low-frequency train operator with a limited route, is not the answer.
Allow RE developers to increase housing stock in SF as well as the Peninsula.
The alternative at the other extreme is Detroit. I'm sure all the 'have nots' are enjoying the fruits of the exodus of the haves from the city. Now that they have the city all to themselves, it's surely a blue collar paradise.
SF in the 80's was not a pretty place. Well, unless 'rust-belt'-city syndrome is pretty. Tech pulled SF (and SJ) out of their doldrums and slow decay.
Having a bus (or a guard) doesn't take away from the "have-nots" at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services#O...