

Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards - RougeFemme
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/01/16/technology/16reuters-techbuses-security.html?ref=technology&_r=0

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Meekro
So now that Occupy Wall Street has failed to accomplish anything, like-minded
people are kicking off Occupy Silicon Valley?

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.

~~~
quaunaut
> 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.

~~~
Meekro
You're right, they do have a claimed reason for protesting that I didn't
mention (rising rents), but I think it's a very poorly thought out one, based
on emotion rather than rational thought.

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.

~~~
devinj
> 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.

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).

~~~
ahomescu1
> 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"?

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klipt
Well a bus window was smashed in Oakland:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231758/protesters-
target...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231758/protesters-target-
silicon-valley-shuttles-smash-google-bus-window)

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.

------
vinkelhake
The buses are not the problem, just a convenient thing to attack. Each bus
ride keeps a great number of cars off the roads for that day.

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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Nah, the kerfuffle is about the symbolism. See people know they can't get a
job at a tech company, they have to slog to work in horrible traffic to make
just enough money to cover the cost of vehicle maintenance, rent and food.
While this busses, they carry the kind of person they want to be but aren't,
carried in air conditioned comfort from home to work, where they make more
money and they don't even have to drive and they get free lunches.

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.

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gaadd33
Why don't the tech companies just fund improvements to actual mass transit
instead of the busses? It seems like in the long run, if they continue to
grow, that would make far more sense.

~~~
pkteison
It's not the sort of route that a mass transit system runs. This isn't going a
few miles and stopping every few blocks. It's an express-style route, 1-way-
at-a-time, to a location 40 miles away which nobody has any reason to go to
unless they work there.

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.

~~~
gaadd33
What about trains? I thought CalTrain ran down very near to most of the tech
campuses, admittedly the companies would still need a minimal bus system to
ferry people from the station to the office park.

~~~
gkoberger
Caltrain picks up in only one location in SF (meaning employees would need to
get to CalTrain), it takes over an hour from SF to Mountain View, has no WiFi,
and drops off about 3 miles from the Google campus[1].

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...](https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!4m17!3m13!1m1!1sMountain+View+Caltrain%2C+600+W+Evelyn+Ave%2C+Mountain+View%2C+CA+94041!1m1!1sAmphitheatre+Pkwy%2C+Mountain+View%2C+CA+94043!3m8!1m3!1d3677!2d-122.0770258!3d37.3946411!3m2!1i800!2i891!4f13.1!5m2!13m1!1e1&fid=0)

(EDIT: Added 3 mile source since someone below questioned it)

~~~
sbilstein
Google runs shuttles to the caltrain and it isn't three miles away from
campus. Campus is huge; I see plenty of google employees on caltrain. There
are 2 Caltrain stops in SF.

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.

------
aeberbach
William Gibson's zaibatsu come to mind. When they stop people getting off the
bus rather than on it will be complete.

~~~
samstave
As someone who came of age in the 80s completely infatuated with all things
cyberpunk growing up, and now having worked in Silicon Valley my whole career,
taking me all over the globe working on computers: I am so amazed that the
world Gibson laid out for 2020 is exactly what we have been building.

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.

------
syntern
It seems that one can write even a master's degree on this topic:

The “Google shuttle effect:” Gentrification and San Francisco’s dot com boom
2.0

[http://svenworld.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/Goldman_PRFi...](http://svenworld.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/Goldman_PRFinal.pdf)

~~~
yetanotherphd
Even though that is a Master's thesis, the writing is sophomoric.

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).

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hendrik42
Black ski masks? Curly wired-earpieces? Jotting notes on yellow stick-it pad?
Jerky answers? That doesn't sound like google at all, more like yet another
fake. Remember this one?:
[http://www.sfbg.com/googleshoutdown](http://www.sfbg.com/googleshoutdown)

------
bedhead
Haters. Just good old fashioned haters.

------
qq66
This isn't surprising -- the wider the gulf between rich and poor, then the
rich find themselves living next to people with little to lose. Cf. Mexico,
India, Brazil.

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guelo
And thus the inequality divide will continue to grow. The haves will build
bigger walls with more guns surrounding expanding exclusive spaces. They will
enact police harrasment laws to keep out those that don't belong. They will
make it more and more expensive to even visit the city to keep the have-nots
out, except those that need to come and keep their city clean.

Money is power. Power gets what it wants. The fight for San Fransisco is one-
sided. The winners have been pre-determined.

~~~
mullingitover
Leave it to SF to make taking a bus to work into a mark of extreme privilege.

~~~
yetanotherphd
Taking a bus, _and_ having people hate you so much they attack your bus.
_That_ is privilege.

------
rhizome
One wonders if they'll close the loop on this particular piece of history:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services#O...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services#Origins)

