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Construction of the Google Village with 20,000 employees in downtown San Jose will is start in 2025. This will be an interesting case study. San Jose has always been a bedroom community with more housing than industry and virtually empty in the day while surrounding cities and San Francisco are filled with workers. Google Village will bring more traffic to downtown. However, it will be located next to a major transit hub with VTA buses and light rail (Silicon Valley), Caltrain (Gilroy/Silicon Valley/San Francisco), Amtrak (San Jose/Oakland/Sacramento), BART (Coming Really Soon! San Jose/Oakland/San Francisco), and the bullet train (Coming Someday! Los Angeles/Central Valley/San Jose/San Francisco/Sacramento). If you can't afford rent in Silicon Valley, you should be able to afford something in the hinterlands.

Anti-growth policies keep more housing from being built, and extreme regulation drives companies away.

Google plans to build a new downtown San Jose campus for 20K employees. Apple is buying up land for a new campus in North San Jose. Adobe bought a lot across the street from their current San Jose headquarters to build a new tower. So much for "extreme regulation" driving away companies.

Great place to live if you like to surf. I have a surfer friend there. She lives three blocks from the beach. But it's not a high-tech place.

Highway 17, which connects San Jose to Santa Cruz, isn't a freeway. There are non-interchange intersections all along its length. This is because of opposition at the Santa Cruz end. Caltrans would like to make it a freeway, and put in a center barrier to reduce collisions. Even that was opposed. "The barrier makes residents and his business feel isolated", whined the owner of a motel. (Cars can no longer make left turns across traffic to get to his motel.)

According to the article, the biggest private employer in Santa Cruz is Plantronics, which makes headsets. 500 employees. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is an amusement park, has about 600, but it's seasonal. Santa Cruz is a seaside resort town. There's just not much industry there.

Then there's the mind-set, which is way too laid back to get much done. It's also very retro. There are towns near Santa Cruz which are still stuck in the hippie '60s, flower-print granny dresses and all.

The big industrial growth area near Silicon Valley is Fremont. It's hot and boring, but Tesla is there. So is Gillig, the bus maker. There's serious manufacturing in Fremont. There are jobs available now in Fremont for CNC machine operators, robot assemblers, automatic screw machine maintainers, master mechanics, and vacuum manufacturing technicians. Current Santa Cruz job openings: school crossing guard, dental receptionist, social worker, pool attendant, dog companion.

There is nothing of greater threat to national security than a HOMELESS hacker.

Homeless doesn't mean "unskilled." It may simply mean "unemployable." Morris County shelters see growing number of white-collar professionals becoming homeless

But are we looking at deep poverty here or a cyberpunk fantasy?

Feds: Homeless Computer Hacker Launched 'Anonymous' Attack Over Anti-Camping Law

After 23 nights, an area near the county courthouse steps is filled with sleeping bags, coolers, food, books, backpacks and other personal belongings campers have brought with them.

Homeless campers plead with Santa Cruz city leaders to change sleeping law

Environmentalists have a bad name because the industries that are doing all the damage find character assassination easier than actually cleaning up their mess.

Rigggght.... It's all a big conspiracy against environmentalists perpetrated by the big bad corporations. Environmentalists have never done anything to damage their own character

Here in Santa Cruz there are some coffee shops that have taken a hard look at the numbers and decided to not offer WiFi. I don't know what they are doing with ebook readers, but maybe it's too soon to tell. Lulu Carpenter's

I have known hundreds of such people in my lifetime.

If you've known "hundreds" who have been living underground, then they can't have been buried very deep.

It has never been easy for a fugitive to break all contact with the world he left behind. These stories tend o have much the same ending:

The manhunt for Daniel Hicks stretched to California after the 30-year-old fugitive made a collect call to his father from San Jose on Wednesday Seattle double-murder suspect arrested in Santa Cruz

Fugitive's Girlfriend Sentenced For Aiding & Abetting

Some 911 centers themselves were actually mostly down, unable to get calls routed to them except from local landlines that dialed directly. From a Santa Cruz Sentinel article:

NETCOM, the dispatch center for most police and fire agencies in Santa Cruz County, was able to receive 911 calls placed from hard lines, but could not receive calls placed from cell phones, senior dispatcher Stephanie Zube said.

, but "turdsicles" falling from aircraft toilets are more common than you might think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft)
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/Febr uary/12/local/stories/02local.htm

High fructose corn syrup in cola makes sticky mess - no one uses sugar anymore.

I would never know about all this stuff if the news didn't keep giving me such detailed instructions on whats new and hip in the we-don't-want-people-doing-this category. Let's hope they show the cheapest place to get projectors.

BTW, Here is an earlier story

There's been a whole host of developments in the ongoing SCO saga over the past couple of days. SCO have now filed law suits against Autozone and DaimlerChrysler on the same day as announcing growing operating losses. Despite securing a deal to license their IP with ev1servers, SCOsource only generated an income of $20,000 for the quarter. Today it has been revealed that Computer Associates, Questar Corp. and manufacturer Leggett & Platt Inc have all joined the ranks of SCO source licensees. Over at the Nasdaq the publicity stunts are beginning to wane thin with investors who sent SCO shares plummeting by almost 14% yesterday. In the courtroom, SCO was yesterday given 45 days to identify all specific lines of code they allege IBM put into Linux from AIX or Dynix; identify and provide with specificity all lines of code in Linux that it claims rights to.

If you want to try finding every rock the size of a beach ball in the entire volume of the solar system, be my guest.

There's actually not much point in trying to track all these objects. A lot of them are in eccentric orbits (like comets) and thus untrackable most of the time. The rest are no threat because they're in regular orbits that don't interesect ours. The ones that were in intersection orbits got swept up a very long time ago -- that's how planets are formed. The danger comes when these orbits change, after being disturbed by interaction with another object. So if we every get serious about looking out for killer asteroids, we won't try to track every one we already know about -- we'll just keep a general watch for new objects or old objects in new orbits.

Also, really small objects are no threat, because they burn up in the atmosphere. Objects big enough to punch through do hit pretty often, but I've never heard of anybody getting hurt by one. Which I guess indicates that we're not as big a planetary feature as we like to think, and also explains why there's such a short memory for these events. As indicated by the attention the Indian impacts are getting.

More common is damage to buildings and machinery. Speaking of which, if you find that your car has had a hole punched in it by something falling from the sky, do not get it repaired until you've determined the cause -- here are collectors who pay good money for cars with meteorite damage. But don't plan your retirement before you've made sure it's not just blue ice.

Secondly, we got swamped with that news because the media is stupid.

Just so long as there's no sneak attack on Santa Cruz (as I live there), although, there might have been a mini-sub paddling around out in the Monterey Bay yesterday, which could explain THIS!

Physicsnerd

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"Even logic must give way to physics" - Spock

It's happened.

"The Santa Cruz Transportation Commission voted Wednesday night to recommend that the City Council not wade into the debate over where the electric two-wheeled gizmo will be allowed to operate. Commissioners said that since no city employee or elected officials has ever seen the Segway in action, it's impossible to guess the machine's impact."

Jerkcity is the place to be.