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Google Building Tech Center Near Portland
jdray writes "It seems that everyone's favorite search powerhouse, Google, is building a tech center in The Dalles, Oregon. About 45 minutes by interstate highway from Portland, The Dalles is a small, economically depressed city near the world-famous Columbia River Gorge. The $60,000 average annual salary of Google employees is about double the average for Wasco county. With all the outdoor sports (windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing) in the area, sports-minded geeks should be flocking to apply for a job at the new facility."
I thought the same thing when they built one in Soho (London)... but then realised that their average salary was approximatly 100k under the average for Soho. Ho hum!
Formerly known as slashdot.
Seriously guys, it's getting to be a bit much.
Google is a company with a nice product. That's about it.
Are they all hoping for stock options, or are they working "for the glory"?
All tech houses seem to be in the North...nothing in the south? Why? Will this be called the GooglePlex?
sports-minded geeks
Who what now?
The coolest voice ever.
Ow, stop throwing things at me!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Is that some sort of oxymoron? True geeks play video games most of the time.
Did i spy geeks and sports in the same sentence?
Not that we windows users don't enjoy living dangerously.
no their search results suck
These sorts of locations are ideal for geek workers. If you're running a design or marketing agency, being out of town is going to really hurt your company, but for the sort of people Google hires, this is ideal. Your money goes a lot further out of town, so you can spend more on gadgets, and since they're indoor types anyway, it's ideal. Perhaps more tech companies should be getting out of the smoke and letting their workers live in more idyllic locations. I certainly appreciate being out in the sticks and getting less distractions.
Locals wonder about "internet" phenomenon.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
This is going to be The Next Big Thing. Such "Rural Sourcing" has been going on somewhat quietly for a while now and is giving offshoring your workforce a serious run for its money.
There's even a company named (imagine that) "Rural Sourcing, Inc." that is consulting companies on how they can open up call centers, technology centers, etc. in economically depressed or extremely rural areas of the U.S.
I'm a big tall mofo.
If you drive 120 miles an hour, maybe. It's at mile marker 82 or so. Do the math.
That Google search results really suck right now? What the hell happened to them?
The Yahoo story I read (several days ago) said that maybe 100 jobs would be created. Not a lot, folks...and that's 100 jobs total. Not "100 techie jobs"...100 -jobs-.
Those jobs won't be doing sexy things. The only reason you put a facility in the middle of nowhere is because it's cheap in terms of space. Skilled labor is virtually nonexistant and relocation expensive.
Google strikes me as being like the Army. They talk a great talk(in Google's case, innovation, exciting workplace, etc; in the Army's, it's "defending freedom" and "jobs skills") and show you eye candy galore, and when you actually get in, you spend your time wading in shit (metaphorically in Google's case).
Nevermind the locals are going to hate you because you're making twice what they are and you're "some city kid", etc. Experience has told me, "trickle down" is never popular until you forcibly remind people (for example, I've heard of companies exchanging cash to silver dollars for employees to use in the local town, to demonstrate to the community just how much of their income comes from employees).
No thanks, I'll pass.
Please help metamoderate.
This is just more proof of an under-reported trend in IT: insourcing. Google gets cheap(er) labor AND avoids bad PR from outsourcing to some foreign locale known for cheap labor. $60k annual for IT work is almost a joke in the Bay Area, but it's Big Bux in rural areas like the Dalles (Hell, even I don't make that much. Hmmmmmm...maybe I should consider getting a job there, despite my aversion to rural living)
I'm just saying...not where I'd put a data center. Many of the major data centers in Portland have moved elsewhere in the last 20 years for reasons such as this. (Yes, there are still some around...I work at one).
Advice: on VPS providers
We're all conservative rednecks out here and it's always windy, and we get snowstorms and ice storms.
Even now, taxes in California are high, and so is the price of property. Why else would management explicitly build a technology center far away from an elite university like Stanford University or UC-Berkeley?
If more companies would do what Google is doing, then the Californian government will start to lower taxes and to limit the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes.
$200,000 gets you an excellent, spacious house in most places in Oregon or Texas. That same $200,000 gets you, barely, a small noisy condominium in Silicon Valley.
The Dalles is a depressed area that suffers from a heavy criminal activities. Meth labs are common place in the area and meth junkies are prevalent everywhere. The drug has reached epidemic proportions there and I'm amazed google hasn't taken that into considering when deciding where the facility should be located.
Hopefully any geeks that decide to move there are well armed incase of any incidents.
Is anyone else noticing an interesting trend here as far as company location goes? Though Oregon already has a ton of high-tech companies(including Intel R&D), this is the second major Microsoft competitor to set up shop there in a year(the first being the OSDL). As an Oregonian I certainly welcome this, though I'm starting to wonder if I should get a bomb shelter should MS want to obliterate the competition in more ways than one.
When many of the pioneers of "the Valley" first set up shop, they were building on cheap farmland far away from the sky-high rents of San Francisco, and even Palo Alto. Look at a map of a place like Cupertino in the 60s...you will be blown away...nothing but farms. Some tech companies looked for cheap digs...and look at things now.
You have to float your wagon down the Columbia and avoid the rocks.
"Google, based in Mountain View, California, is expected to pay $1.87 million for the parcel of industrial-zoned land 85 miles east of Portland, with an option to buy three other area sites."
:)
Dude, around here, (Mountain View) 1.87 million will get you diddly squat. 1.87 million for 30 acres near Portland, OR isn't all that bad. That's a beautiful area, not far from Portland or the PDX airport (lots of flights to Seattle and down here to the Silicon Valley every day) and Portland also has a lot of young professional types.
Not a bad move overall.
Um. Obviously you've never been there, but I still don't understand why you posted that. There really aren't that many trees in The Dalles. It's mostly prarie-type high plateu... halfway between grassland and desert, and very dry.
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
and after all of you sports minded geeks flock to portland you'll realize that there arn't an people of color, but then again, it is the nw and ya know, oregon is the northern hot bed for neo-nazi's and the KKK so why would people of color exactly want to live in portland (hell, thats one of the reasons i moved my ass out of there this past june).
but rest assured, you'll have plenty of organic food, clean water, the wonderful dirty willamette river (well not if you live in the dalles but if you're in pdx then you're fine), and rain to your disposal. have fun!
windsurfing is so 80's.
No, I know for a fact they aren't going to build a Google complex in The Dalles.
How? I asked Google Maps
:P
I would assume you don't consider Texas part of the south than. There are probably as many tech companies there as the Silicon Valley.
Also RedHat and Epic Megagames are in N.C. Tiberon (makers of Madden Football for EA) is in Florida. There's definitely some.
CmdrTaco has cholera.
Found 32 pounds of food.
You broke a wagon tongue.
Ah, those were the good old days.
You are not the customer.
I guess that depends if you think $60k is a lot of money or not! Personally, I don't. You could get around 3 times that sum working for an investment bank, doing largely similar work, and you would get to live in a cool city like NYC or London.
yeah, and their free email doesn't have enough capacity
How about the web sites of some recruiters? I'll take that coin...
yeah but $60k doesn't go nearly as far in NYC than it does in portland - the land of no sales tax (god do i miss it)
sport-minded geeks?!? wtf?
My guess is that they bought property next to the defunct aluminum plant. There are no trees and a while back the port authority prepared the area for industrial use.
I live in a 4 bedroom house on 7 acres 15 mins from my job and the payment is 650 a month.
Of course the DSL is about 400kb down on a good day.
The problem with this is that the town growns so dependent on the two industries here that when trends cause employee moves, have the town goes belly up. The whole company used to be here but then they moved our merchandising and logistics departments to a new complex in the nearest big city and about half of this town has shutdown. Not to mention you are an hour away from any real forms of entertainment or good shopping.
This is positive as it's cheap, beautiful, and quiet.
It's negative because it's quiet, less technologically advanced, small town minded.
/My 2 cents.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Do I still have to raft up the Columbia River, or have they opened the newfangled "toll road" yet?
I'm sure Rick Cooper of the NSV will welcome you with open arms to our close-knit community.
Finally someone said it and managed to do so without getting modded as flamebait or trolling.
Now there's *two* employers in The Dalles, Wal Mart and Google. Could there possibly be two more diametrically opposed businesses in one small town?
Talk about your 'have's' and 'have nots'... Now we'll have a textbook example to follow along with.
...not that I'm a pirate.. Hell I've never even fired a cannon. - oldwolf13
- Typical Slashdot Reader
On the TheDallas page the article refers to, they have a link to a Yahoo Maps map of the area. I'm fairly certain they meant to link to Google Maps instead.
Better a sales tax than an income tax, especially if you're making a good wage.
Many of these Valley firms are hiring developers from the east coast, IIT (India) and universities in Russia and China. The proximity to Stanford and Cal is not relevant anymore. In fact I might say it is even irrelevant. These universities have moved on to biotech and to a lesser extent nanotech anyway as "big idea" fields.
Hanford Nuclear, where uranium becomes weapons grade plutonium, is not too far from The Dalles either. So when the earthquake comes, it will 1. Cause the dams to brake, which will create a flood, which will let free the nuclear materials and the gas. Of course, The Dalles is upwind. Chicago and Idaho and such are downwind....
I'd say more, but my guild is raiding.
"the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Say what now?
What fraction of the homes in california are populated by illegal immigrants? Now, what fraction of the NICE houses? Do you think that most illegal immigrants are taking high paying jobs and moving to Los Altos and Palo Alto and driving up the cost of property? You really think they're having such a dominant effect on the market, or are you just scapegoating?
I'm all for creating and enforcing reasonable immigration laws rather than the current don't as/don't tell open border situation, but someone's gotta pick the lettuce and I'm quite sure that nobody posting here is doing it.
In Oregon Trail The Dalles was the place where you got to control the raft going down the river. Everybody always chose that option. You were just dumb if you took the Barlow Toll Road. Looks like Google didn't crash into any rocks.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You deliberately tried to troll or to create flamebait.
Many legal immigrants are flooding the housing market. Due to strong demand, the prices are skyhigh.
Now, as for the lettuces, if the borders are shut tight, the wages in the unskilled labor market will skyrocket. Plenty of Americans will want to pick lettuces, tomatoes, etc.
you can find and afford solitude. thats the benefit of the boondocks, its something which is just not possible in the city. cost of living and all that, meh, details compared to a lifestyle.
i think we're slashdotting the google map servers with The Dalles, Oregon on them. in other news, my first official complaint about the google map server is there's no scale. LAME.
driving directions are 82 miles, which is a little over comfortably close enough range to portland, particularly when route 84 is about to get a heckuva lot busier. on the plus side you should be pretty far out of the city lights effect.
my real question is what is the primary focus of this location? just another datacenter, or some R&D too?
People who are deceptive in this way are usually liberal f*ckwads or Chinese bastards or Indian jerks. Only these kinds of people say that if there were no illegal immigrants, then the entire American population will starve because no one is picking the vegetables.
...if you don't get to take advantage of them b/c you are working 70 hour weeks?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Christ here we go with the typical /. attack on all those who have the gall to succeed.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I picked up on the inclusion of illegal immigrants as it was to me the objectionable part of the parent post. Did he say "legal/illegal" and really just mean legal? If not, then I'm assuming that he was arguing that illegal aliens are a non negligible part of the problem, and the direction of my response to that part of the post is sensible.
The issue of legal immigrants is a whole other can of worms for many reasons, not the least of which is the typical types of jobs affected is entirely different.
you can't buy any real estate for $200k in silicon valley. period.
Careful with that knee!
Theat area isn't heavily forested, more like open grassland.
With all the outdoor sports (windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing) in the area, sports-minded geeks should be flocking to apply for a job at the new facility
;-)
All two of them
Typical liberal bigotry.
Here we have a liberal f*ckwad who says that higher wages for farm workers means a lower standard of living for the rest of America. B*llsh|t. Higher wages for the farm help mean that they can now pay medical insurance on their own instead of getting free medical care that bankrupts the hospitals in Southern California.
Another angle here is that the liberal f*ckwad wants to have poor people in the world. The f*ckwad says that we need to have poor, desperate people in the world so that we Americans can live well.
Mainstream Americans say that we can still live comfortably even if there are no desperate, poor people in this world.
Why do they have to build a center so close to that cursed state of Washington, where you know who develops you know what.
The troll writes: " I picked up on the inclusion of illegal immigrants as it was to me the objectionable part of the parent post. ".
I don't get it. The original article clearly used "illegal" to refer to apartment rents. Most illegal aliens rent apartments. They are creating huge demand for housing.
You, Mr. Troll, then claimed that the original writer was saying that illegal aliens were purchasing mansions. You are deliberately trolling. It is quite clear that the original writer was clear on what s/he meant.
Then, you, Mr. Troll claim that illegal aliens have no impact on the housing market because they all just sleep in the fields or the streets.
You, however, are creating FUD and should be modded down as such.
Come to California! We got both!
Even a brief trawl searching for C++/Sybase shows one offering £700/day which equates to about £170000 before tax (around $200000 US) Admittedly you need some experience, but not much.
The cost of living in The Dalles, Oregon is MUCH lowre than the cost of living in Silicon Valley or Silicon Forrest.
"Then, you, Mr. Troll claim that illegal aliens have no impact on the housing market because they all just sleep in the fields or the streets."
I didn't claim they had NO impact on real estate in California. I, as 1 single homeowner, have an impact on real estate in California. I had issues with the original poster's claim
"The latter (legal/illegal aliens) is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
Not part of the cause, THE cause. That's a load, particularly for illegals. Their impact is only going to be felt on the lowest end of the shittiest apartments. Are you bummed about the high prices of shithole apartments in east san jose?
Weirdest use of "FUD" I've seen in a while, but then again I don't read this site often.
Kind of like "unbiased slashdot discussion" or "Microsoft-loving slashdotter".
Don't get out to California much, eh? ;)
There hasn't been a tiny, noisy 1BR condo for sale in Silicon Valley for less than about $350k for at least 5 years. Even then it's slim pickins.
Sigh.
Me, I'd take rural oregon any day if I could just move my job up there. Real purty.
Seriously, someone has to make a movie called "Debbie does Dalles".
I suppose that congratulations are in order for me. I actually got a troll to admit that illegal aliens impact the price of apartment rent.
Any reasonable person can reasonably parse this sentence: "The latter (legal/illegal aliens) is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes."
You, Mr. Troll, cannot because you are trolling. It is clear that "legal immigrants" refer to residential homes and both "legal immigrants" and "illegal immigrants" refer to apartments.
Mr. Troll then constructs a strawman argument by tying "illegal immigrant" and "residential homes". This is the typical behavior of a troll. The troll should be modded down.
The gorge is a nice area, but it's warmer down south, and I really like Ashland. It feels vaguely European in that it's small with a nice, well looked after (and, dare I say "vibrant") downtown. It's also got all the outdoor stuff - cycling, skiing, rafting and so on. Wonder what the high tech scene is like there. It's one of the areas I'd consider if I moved back to the states, although the "problem" right now would be my fiancee`, who is in biotech, which seems to go a lot more by clusters than IT does. Bay Area, San Diego, Boston... And I don't want to go back to the bay...
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Well Oregon, though some don't know it, is extremely well engineered for anything networking related. We have a lot of fiber laid down, designed for redundant links to the 'major' cities throughout the state, so for Google, there is a lot of bandwidth they can tap into, without having to worry about digging holes.
I'll take Oregon over Mumbai, India. At least they're staying domestic.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Was Chimney Rock already rented out? What about Snake River? Stupid Oregon Trail :)
If more companies would do what Google is doing, then the Californian government will start to lower taxes and to limit the number of legal/illegal immigrants flooding into the state. The latter is the cause of the high prices of apartments and residential homes.
Most Google employees are immigrants. Luckily, Google's immigration lawyers help them deal with all the visa crap. Making it even harder to get qualified employees is the last thing Google needs.
Quit your whining. Do you actually know anything about the real estate market here in the Valley? There are many 2BR/1BA condos for less than $300k. And they're not in bad neighborhoods and near railroad tracks, etc.
Hell, a coworker bought a 2BR/1BA ~800sqft condo in downtown Saratoga for $350k.
Kind of like study curious jocks.
Oooh they got the internet on computers now.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Most of the Google people are from California after all ;)
...
120 on a open highway isn't that far off.
-S
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
In Slashdot's eyes Google can do no wrong,
and in Fuckedgoogle's eyes Google is going down the well-worn path of dot.com excess and hubris.
Somewhere in the middle is the truth. But fuckedgoogle is a hell of a lot funnier. :)
Granted, they are just as one-sided about Google as Slashdot is, except in the OTHER direction. Funny shiat.
The Dalles, Oregon, is not really all that attractive of a place to live. It has more than its share of meth tweekers, gun freaks, and broke-ass rednecks. It can be a miserable little place. There is nothing near it except Portland. The nearest Fry's Electronics is 90 miles away to the West.
It is right on the geographic change line between the green and wet Pacific Northwest zone and the vast American 'empty quarter' that extends about 800 miles to the East, and to the South, and to the North.
The drive to Portland is quite beautiful through the Columbia River Gorge. And there are two exquisite mountains nearby; Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams.
Still, Google might have difficulty getting people to stay in The Dalles, OR.
school wise it's probably one of the biggest tech centers in Louisiana. Not great compared to some northern states, but they were one of the few to compete in that final robotics thing for the defense department.
there are other little spurts of growth that take care of us southern geeks as well, you just have to hunt harder =)
Portland and southern Oregon are not/ were not friendly places for non whites. Portland at one time
had a particularly bad reputation. May still have,
( I am a whitey).
As for The Dalles I don't know.
Nothin worth talkin about in Soho.
But here, you'd be just down river from
the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot and
the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
We're talking lifetime tech. employment.
Albeit, a slighly short lifetime.....
They're going to find The Dalles to be very pretty. When I lived in Portland, doing engineering work for an ISP, I took several weekend trips to Eastern Oregon, driving through this area. I remember wishing they had some sort of substantial industry there that I knew something about, so I could move there and watch the salmon go up the river, hike around in the hills, etc.
:)
You can still see wagon trails faintly on some of the hills nearby, out there, remnants of "the" Oregon Trail. Seems very appropriate that Google is physically returning to the frontier. I expect them to be much better stewards of the land than the industries of the last century, too.
*sigh* I wonder if it's too late to try to apply
The low lending rates for mortguages are causing the majority of price inflation for property. How many homeowners do you know of that refinanced or traded up over the last few years?
:)
The housing market is going through a similar kind of inflated bubble that the stocks went through. The only thing we don't know is what the crash is going to look like. A small downhil slide for a number of years or a stomach churning drop in valuations over the spans of a few months?
Google is opening offices in lots of places. Maybe we should have a slashdot story for each one!
This Oregon facility will only appeal to a niche market (and will only be 50-100 jobs they say).
Outdoors activities are great, but people will go to the Redmond office if they want that.
Young people like to live in, or near, major cities. It's exciting, there are more things to do. Since Google is mostly young people (median age under 30 I think), they won't have droves going to work in Oregon, even given the lower cost of living. Those types of things appeal to older employees with families.
That said, since in 10 years Google will have a lot more older employees with families, having this office may help later.
hey Dumbass - ever been there?! No trees to speak of around the Dales.
The continents continue to move, or at least try. Something's got to give at some point. Maybe not every 300 years on the button, but a lot of geologic events do tend to exhibit periodicity. In tectonics especially, the question is rarely "if"; it's usually "when."
Your real logic is interesting, but luckily other people are studying the actual processes involved in these things. So at least someone understands the difference between climate and faulting.
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-335099)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
Domain Name: googleplex.com
Hmmm, could be.
And if a flood, earthquake, chemical spill or tsunami doesn't kill off the computers, Moore's law will in about two years. *shudder*
I'm all for creating and enforcing reasonable immigration laws rather than the current don't as/don't tell open border situation, but someone's gotta pick the lettuce and I'm quite sure that nobody posting here is doing it.
My brother-in-law (ex) who lives in SoCal mowed grass for a living for a local gov't agency. He got laid off 6 months ago, and has been unsuccessful getting another mowing job, despite the large demand for landscaping there. So there you go, a white person looking for a job "noone else wants to do". Bull-fucking-shit.
Want to know why "noone wants to do it"? They don't want to get paid below minimum wage with no benefits and say "Thank you sir, may I have some more work...", that's why...
Those "jobs noone else wants to do", such as landscaping, are often run by some well-off person (usually white) who then hires a bunch of sub-minimum wage illegals for more profit for him (her).
The irony of this is when liberals mandate minimum wage and a ton of other labor laws, they ensure illegal alien labor will be used instead. THAT's why "no one else wants to do it..."
It's pretty genious from a policy standpoint actually. Wouldn't you love to not have to pay state business income taxes?
windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing
Uhhh.. You forgot skateboarding. Oregon has the best public skateparks in the world. Hands-down.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Real funny how Quest Software mostly keep the old farts and people with just newly borns, as if they are sensitive to families and people with commitments. All singles or people that were not married or just with girl friends, they got the boot. Maybe some manager read some book saying "staff with families are better complient workers" while the singles are rebellious out of control needy freaks.
Look, no ones gona run a 747 every day with no downtimes and engine checks, it'll over heat and crash, so people must be treated the same way, stick to 40hrs/week, give them downtime brain time.
Actually, that's not true.
In Austin are Dell Computer, Metrowerks, Motorola. In Dallas, you have Id Software (makers of Doom) and Texas Instruments, which make calculators. Compaq (until HP bought it) was a big company in Houston.
Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin produces a lot of engineers, and so does (surprisingly) Texas A&M, which counts among its faculty Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++.
Here's an article I found at http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=busin
Did you read this: http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932?
This it the remote isolate lab where they will begin working on the T-virus and regenerating human life. Of course this will create man eating zombies and we'll be forced to defend ourselves. I'm stock piling water/guns and wolf brand chili right now. I'll be ready!
The same thing happened in DC. All the government contractors and tech companies moved into the farmland along what is now the Dulles corridor, resulting in the worst sprawl in America. All the disadvantages of city life with none of the advantages. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I hope Portland is able to control this.
A Taco Bell opened in Navasota, TX. Who cares.
Sorry, in Oregon, income tax is about 3%, and you deduct it off your federal income tax.
Everywhere I've lived with a sales tax (WA, CA, IL. CA and IL also had income tax), the sales tax was at least 8%. Sales tax was over 10% in Cook County, IL, and 12% in Chicago...
It didn't take much to make it worth the 3 hr drive from Seattle to Oregon to buy stuff, and have the savings in sales tax pay for the motel room for an overnite stay.
I'll take Oregon's income tax with a smile. About the only other states, tax-wise, to want to live in would be Nevada and Wyoming.
The funny thing is, Oregonians have NOT A FUCKING CLUE what high taxes are. They bitch and moan about the small amount of taxes they do pay like stuck pigs.
On the flip side, our school district has a 4-day school week, in large part because of state's lack of (ability to provide) funding for K-12 education.
...so Oregonians are transparent? I'm kind of pinkish myself.
Are brown, black, and yellow such horrible words?
The other notable thing is that The Dalles is regularly one of the hottest cities in the state (often tying with the distant Medford). There is a federal hydropower dam in town, which might get a workout from the airconditioners.
Go a few more miles east and you get into sage brush though.
I think Arnie has helped quell some of the concern businesses had with previous governor Davis, and I do personally believe the State is getting back on track from some rather fiscally irresponsible years, but California does have wildly inflated property prices, high labor costs relative to other states, and an ever-growing illegal alien problem (which helps mitigate the expensive labor for manual labor jobs, but brings with it a high social services cost that must be borne by the citizens of the state).
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Yes, geeks participate in sports. Don't be so stereotypical.
Google is planning going to provide equipment for all the popular sports on the campus: nerf basketball, ping-pong tables, video game consoles, model rockets, and super soakers.
How the hell can you say "dont be so stereotypical" about geeks not playing sports when you provide a list of activities that are aren't sports at all?
I'd take 60k any day, that's four times what I earn now. And it would mean sitting down at a computer all day rather than doing any actual work. Also London isn't a 'cool' city. It's a horrible city full of southerners and flat beer.
Party line:
Now I need to go work on my early season tan with a nice hike through the neighborhood park.
My dad lives in Fremont (Silicon Valley)...he has a 1brm condo, 750 sqft....currently worth $160k. So much for the "nothing less than $350k" rant...