Google's rank and file are not the bad guys. Irritating them does no good to anyone. When poor proletariat fight somewhat richer proletariat over their rides in "luxury buses", the real bad guys win. Divide and conquer.
The real bad guys aren't "techno riche". They invest in and manage software companies, but they don't know (or care) about technology. They couldn't write a line of code to save their lives. Those software execs making $250k++ per year while working 11-to-3 are MBA-culture colonists (Damaso Effect) who came in because we, as technologists, failed to prevent them from conquering us and drawing off almost all of the wealth we produce. We're very good at busting our balls (and ovaries) to solve hard technical problems, but we're terrible at protecting our own interests, especially as a group.
Actually, there's something worse for a typical company than a typical exec making $250k++ while working 11-3: that same exec working a full day.
if you're a corporate exec making $500k+, the company owns you. When the CEO calls at 2:00 AM Sunday and says, "We've got a problem is Shenzhen", you're on a plane a 6:00 AM, too bad if your daughter's senior recital is 2:00 PM that day.
That's what they want you to think, so you don't hate them or covet their jobs. Ever hear of the complain-brag? It's not true. The politicking involved in getting those jobs is quite competitive, but once you're in the club, it's a pretty easy life if you want it to be. [ETA: being a CEO of a small or mid-sized company, on the other hand, is usually quite demanding.]
Isn't Mountain View (or pretty much anywhere else in the valley) cheaper than SF? If these people have no time outside of work to appreciate SF and can barely afford the rent, why are they living there?
They're transient because screw-the-newcomer policies like Prop 13 and rent control make it unaffordable for many of them to settle down here. And it's disproportionately young men because these same policies, in conjunction with anti-development measures like 40-foot height restrictions across the street from BART stations, make it nearly impossible to live here without a tech worker's salary.
Are we sure this isn't how it's supposed to be?
But artists need a place to live. When artists leave, they can't afford to move in because of anti-development policies that discourage investment in the housing stock. The rent control policies protect existing inhabitants of existing buildings, but wind up crushing everyone else. Good intentions, but terrible unintended consequences.
That's not really how WiFi works. Chances are his router is on the same frequency as the buses and he can fix this by changing to a different frequency. Even more likely (since one SSID shouldn't make too much of a difference) is that his WiFi router crashes at random and there's some amount of false causation there.
I know this isn't the beef of the article, but this sort of magical thinking that insists on forcing every little thing into a framework of a class war between the upper middle class and the lower/lower middle class is.
But sure, use a partial understanding of technology to generate a narrative in which this guy has only a self-created problem, and take from him the benefit of the doubt. Then we can turn off our empathy circuits, reject this very dear example, and continue pretending that its workers (and users) are not pawns of a malevolent Google.
Why is that? Do these buses frequently drive next to each other?
(Honest question. I don't live in the Bay Area, nor do I work for Google.)
Gives a new meaning to "noise complaint".
Actually, what constitutes "noise" in the context of noise volume laws? Devices have to accept interference as per FCC regulation, but isn't "overpowering" a specific WiFi frequency fundamentally the same thing as blaring music?
His setup is defective. He can either complain and live with it, or he can fix it.
If you want a frequency nobody else has the right to use, you are going to have to buy your own spectrum.
The NIMBYs are responsible for the complete lack of new market housing in SF, and have hilariously priced themselves out of the market.
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/08/all_48000_san_fra...
I'd guess that there are NIMBY building costs that prevented housing construction until the rent got so high, but it does look like an end is in sight.
She misses an opportunity to make a similar point about antidevelopment San Franciscans being insulated by their rent control, but she comes close to it when talking about the Ellis Act. What makes this law so terrifying to longtime, usually antidensity, residents is that it puts them on equal footing with all the new arrivals. It forces them to lie in the bed they've made.
It's like how the draft can turn hawks into doves amongst people who wouldn't otherwise have children in the military.
It's up to your own personal politics to decide which of those is more desirable though.
The problem is that Caltrain (and BART outside SF proper) has its stations along the periphery instead of the heart of town. You can't jump on Caltrain in the Mission or Noe Valley or even Market St, and on the southern end, it's not going to drop you off anywhere near anything.
This is because California, and the Bay Area in particular, follows a policy of "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many", and when previous generations were deciding where to put stations, they didn't use eminent domain like most municipalities would; instead, they built them either in the few parcels of vacant land off on the periphery, or along the freeway land they already owned, which is perhaps the most pedestrian-hostile arrangement possible.
Isn't this just another argument for the innovative promise of remote work? That both the old centralized model of the company town, and the hub-and-spoke suburban campus model, impose all kinds of costs and limitations on employees and the community as well as the company? It's surely impressive that certain companies have become cultural forces in their region, but it's not always eventually a good thing (see the Great Lakes area), and the inevitable cultural conflicts are bloody and never-ending.
Also, I wonder if other parts of the continent (whom would probably buy Google the buses to transport people in or out of their city) laugh or cry when they read about these first-world-economy problems.
In the post-WW2 era, suburbs like Irvine here in the LA area built up a large economy by providing growing industries with land use they couldn't find in the metropolis. And the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System provided an infrastructure that citizens appreciated and trucking companies were able to use to diversify goods movement. Maybe forward-looking municipalities or larger government entities have an opportunity to enable further economic progress by providing superior access to high-speed connectivity.
The problem is that there are few other nucleation sites that a viable tech community can condense around. The major tech employers are not spreading out to lower their impact. There's no reason why 2000 employees all need to be on the same campus. There is no way in Hades you are cross-pollinating your divisions to that extent.
Spread out and invest in connectivity technologies that make talking across the continent as easy as over a cubicle wall.
What? There are lots of places that could fill this role.
Uh, what?
This is kind of a silly point, but I think it exemplifies how misplaced all this tension is.
For example, mayor LaGuardia put a TON of work into forcing the privately owned transit lines to become a public good in NYC. The "captains of industry" didn't improve public transportation - they just started their own transportation companies. It took a lot of hard work by a lot of great government officials for the NYC subway to become the awesome service that it is today (incoming jokes about the L train).
The city of San Francisco's biggest enemy in this whole "nouveau riche" problem is the city of San Francisco. But everyone's too busy cuttin' each other's throats to realize that.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-eviction...
The solution to the rising price to rent is to increase supply. Anybody in SF should be able to drive up Market and see evidence of the massive number of units just opening up.
The idiocy of this article is disturbing:
"Twitter got this tax break to stay in San Francisco that they blackmailed out of the mayor" (They "blackmailed" him? Really?)
"young men coming in, and they’re transient. They’re not committed to the place" (which is why they bought a house in a dump neighborhood to fix up and keep for the rest of their lives. Jesus give them time, they're not going to settle down, get married, and have kids right after college.)
It seems no journalist is willing to see this from the other point of view. Which is blaming San Francisco's politics. 1 of 4 things is happening here:
● Politics have bought out journalism to such a degree that a serious conversation criticizing San Fran cannot take place.
● Journalists today really are that one sided.
● The media is trying to fuel a class war, they just got done fueling a race war with the Trayvon Martin trial.
● Somebody has a serious hatred for Google in particular because all of this anger is directed towards them.
Isn't that similar rhetoric that was employed in the 20s and 30s? That comment conjures up memories of reading Of Mice and Men.
She should just have the balls to say she's anti-immigrant, wherever they're from.
Now, I can afford to continue living there, so maybe it's easy to hold this view, but I never felt I could get too upset about this situation.
First: It's a great sign that the neighborhood's so desirable that people will spend to move there. It's bringing in business (and helping existing businesses). It's making things safer. Making things more interesting.
Second: I've been around for longer than many people, but I transplanted there at some point, as well.
Third: Neighborhoods and cities change. No way around it. Much rather they grow and become popular with smart, upwardly-mobile young people (with a creative streak) than grow stale or decay.
Fourth: If something is a limited resource but in high demand, the price goes up! While I don't believe people should be kicked out their homes willy-nilly, I also believe that if a ton of people want something, then it's fair for the market to respond by raising prices (with some constraints, of course, which I'm not going to get into here). To me, this is one of the downsides of renting. You run that risk. If that's not appealing, then one should try to own (which could be a nice investment if your area is booming).
Am I being a douchebag gentrification-sympathizer? Maybe I'm just one of the people the "real residents" get to hate on -- a white male with a bit of extra disposable income.
Anyway: Not SF-specific. But certainly other parts of the country are having similar issues. (I lived in Austin for 27 years, and though I don't keep up with local politics there, I bet they're also going through a light-weight version of this in areas.)
I think here you have touched on the root of all of these sort of "issues": the notion that people how have lived in a neighborhood longer than others are somehow "better", "more deserving", or "'real' citizens".
Maybe. Do you interact with poorer and long-time residents, or only other wealthy people? Do you support longstanding shops, or just the new expensive ones?
This is from Rebecca Solnit's Wikipedia page. This is the longest way of saying, "Dropped Out of High School" I have ever heard.
I think she's on to something here... A smart community activist in conjunction with a pro-active real estate developer with a really long term vision could 'organically' help create neighborhoods ready for gentrification (and profit handsomely) and help create great places for artists, writers and activists to live at the same time.
All that's needed is a website that organizes groups of artists, writers and activists to tell them where to go live next, flash mob style. Once the artists, writers and activists have sown the seeds of gentrification, the developer can then provide the members some financial (or non-financial) reward to move on to the next neighborhood and start the process anew.
Basically it'd be comp'ing the group for all the work they have done to create a live-able, dynamic neighborhood which is not happening today.
We don't acknowledge other people in the street. We draw arbitrary lines between "scary" people and "less scary" people, but in reality are using race and class markers to make those decisions. And we treat somewhere between "the scary few" and "everyone not white" as if they don't exist. We don't shop at local shops and restaurants, we leave the area to go to restaurants that either appeal to their class background or their racial comfort zone.
I'm not trying to place blame, or say we are "classists" or "racists". As someone who tries and often fails to do the opposite, I can see how hard it is. There are real dangers to be afraid of. It's not easy to walk into a barbeque place where you're the only white person and have that be your Date Night go-to spot.
That said, I think a lot of people moving out here aren't even trying to understand what it's like having a different class of people move into your neighborhood and "walk among you" as if you don't even exist, terraforming the space you struggled in your whole life with a snap of the fingers.
I know San Francisco is a different place, and it's more white, which changes some of this stuff. But in the Mission I know there are similar things happening in Latin@ neighborhoods. People who have been living in those neighborhoods for decades who were central contributors to that place are being pushed out to the East Bay and elsewhere because they can't afford rent.
Maybe it's inevitable, and maybe it's no one's fault. But I don't see how anyone can deny that important cultural institutions are being destroyed so that rich tech folks can have nice apartments to live in in "funky" neighborhoods.
This lady is out of her gourd. She appears to be talking about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/science/new-3-million-priz...
This alone makes it obvious what her real problem is. She wants people to give their money to causes that she supports. She does that by stating that they aren't civicly minded but she's just belittling what civic-minded tasks they're doing because she thinks other ones are important.
Entire article was a waste of time to read.
If they got enough political control over the zoning board or the city council they could make it impossible for new businesses to be approved, make it harder for the ones there now, and generally make it difficult to impossible to create new condos. Either they suck at local politics or they're being too anti-authoritarian to accomplish their goals in a meaningful way.
"I met a guy who lives at 24th and Valencia [Street]. He says the Wi-Fi signal on the buses is so powerful that when the Google bus pulls up in front of his house, it uses all the broadband and his Wi-Fi signal crashes. And that’s like a tiny thing that happens to one guy, but it signifies, “We are so mighty, we are crushing your reality.”"
The upshot is that I'm way more conflicted than I might have been otherwise. And while it's not like I, as an individual, have some great sway over this debate, I can't imagine I'm the only leftie who feels sympathetic but alienated.
Maybe that's that cost of doing business here, so to speak. It's no secret there's a huge libertarian streak running through tech. And it's not difficult to imagine how unpopular a lot of obnoxious young white men in tech might already be in some areas.
And finally: big name tech companies = big headlines.
Disclosure: I work for one of the big companies discussed in this piece.
The problem is really, that the train tracks were built in the 1860's when all these places were little towns linked by farms and fields. Then the automobile took over and there was just not seen the need for branch lines. Now it's solid industrial/suburbia all the way up and eminent domain would be way too expensive both in terms of money and politics.
No, and that's sort of my point. I've lived in SF since the summer of 2008, and not once in all that time has Caltrain ever been useful to me. It doesn't pick up anywhere near anything, and it doesn't run to any place I want to go.
Meanwhile, when I lived in New York, I rode the subway, the LIRR, the PATH train, Metro North, and even Amtrak all over the place, in no small part because Penn Station and Grand Central are located right in the middle of everything and thoroughly connected to local transit.
http://ctchouston.org/blogs/christof/wp-content/bart_row.jpg
The purple lines are the tunnels. The yellow lines are the stations built along freeways. Only the tiny non-purple, non-yellow fragments were built where the actual demand is.
(Source: http://www.ctchouston.org/intermodality/2006/05/06/tale-of-t...)
Meanwhile, people have to get to work.
What we're seeing is the result of a number of strong, independent, competing systems (transit, property rights, rent control, NIMBY, etc), working in isolation, resulting in a massive, fustercluck that doesn't have a solid solution that does anything other than continue to perpetuate it's own bureaucracy.
And again, saying that the companies are not doing anything to "solve" the transit problems ignores the fact that busing employees, in fact, are part of "solving" transit problems, specifically those of highway traffic (and second order impacts like greenhouse gas emissions and roadwear).
[0] this makes the internet rounds with Bay Area people every few months, https://www.google.com/search?q=bart+map+1950s
[1] http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/02/06/geary-brt-advisor-resig...
Per the legend, that's "existing right-of-ways" which include freeways and existing railways.
> Only the tiny non-purple, non-yellow fragments were built where the actual demand is.
Well, except for much of the East Bay (certainly the two northern lines, which I'm most familiar with), where the freeways BART follows (including the tunnels that follow them) also run right through the heart of the main cities.
Just because they had existing right of way of leverage doesn't mean that it wasn't where the actual demand is.
Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was
about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown
became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
(Also, assuming the wifi on these buses is not in violation of FCC regulations, this really is this guys problem, not Google's.)
During the time New York was building some of it's latter public transportation infrastructure, my father and his brother, as teenagers, were wandering around what is now Xerox Parc and surrounding tech campuses and what would become 280 with their 30-06 rifles shooting anything they pleased. No one cared because there was no one around. It was just unused hill country. Much of the explosion of building in the Bay Area has been recent and during a period that no one wanted public transportation, they wanted a car. New York built up much of it's rail infrastructure before the car became commonplace and people really wanted to use it.
Consider this: how late in the history of New York were those grand stations built? Compare that to how far in to San Francisco's history they are building the Transbay Transit Center...
You're saying that the region's transit was built up during a time when people didn't care about public transit. I think that's mostly true, and it led to a milquetoast "well, let's just sort of put some train stations around the edge but not do anything that might upset anyone" plan that, today, serves the region a lot less well than New York's strategy of "let's cut-and-cover tracks right down all our major avenues".
> Consider this: how late in the history of New York were those grand stations built? Compare that to how far in to San Francisco's history
If you think you can't build good transit late in a city's history, how do you explain London or Paris?
And this is the crux of my point. Those CalTrain stations, when they were built, were EXACTLY where people wanted to go. The center of each down town. Look on a map. Caltrain is a very direct route to San Jose. The opposite of your argument that it is in any way "milquetoast". Even BART served where people wanted to commute to when it was planned out. The Bay Area has exploded with building since then.
"If you think you can't build good transit late in a city's history, how do you explain London or Paris?"
Uh...train technology not existing for most of those two cities histories?
It's somewhat ironic (and telling about SF) that as a suburban commuter I've made better use of public transit than you have in the city, but it really is pretty convenient if you're going to any of the downtowns on the Peninsula, anything BART-accessible, or Candlestick Park.
Who said I don't take transit? My wife and I both take trains to work, and ride transit whenever possible. The primary factor in choosing our home was to be within walking distance of transit.
It's just Caltrain that I've found totally useless.