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New Tech Money, Same Old Problems
An anonymous reader writes "Following the publication in May of George Packer's alarming article in the New Yorker revealing the state of the communities surrounding California's tech boom, the LA Times reports that despite the wake-up call, things are getting even worse in the Bay Area as tech companies seek to completely insulate their employees from ever having to interact with the real world. Quoting: 'Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco, picking up thousands of young technology workers at dozens of stops and depositing them an hour's drive south. It's an exclusive perk offered by Apple, Facebook, Google and other major Silicon Valley companies: luxury coaches equipped with air conditioning, plush seats and wireless Internet access that ease the stress of navigating congested Bay Area roadways. The private mass transit system has become the most visible symbol of the digital gold rush sweeping this city, and of the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not.'"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco, picking up thousands of young technology workers at dozens of stops and depositing them an hour's drive south
Huh.
OK, maybe it's because I'm an old-school Missouri farm boy, but... that sounds an awful lot like cows at a stockyard.
They're just one beat off from installing cattle chutes.
MooooooooHeyisthataStarbucksooooooooo.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Wouldn't they complain if the busses stopped and there was a lot more congestion on the road? Don't they have to make the busses really nice in order to prevent people hopping onto those busses?
How DARE you refer to us as "cattle". We ARE NOT "cattle". We are RUBYISTS.
Ruby on Rails is my life. It is who I am. It is what I am. Ruby is what makes me A GOD among mere mortals.
We Rubyists are the ones who make the world go round. It is our code that powers all that is truly important in this world.
Because we are so critical to modern life, we deserve to be treated better than anyone else. We deserve to be driven around by those who require our services.
We are not merely humans. We are RUBYISTS. We are superior, and we must be treated well because we are the best there is, the best there has ever been, and the best that there ever will be. WE ARE RUBYISTS!
Driving in the Bay area is horrid. Getting bus service to and from work would be great. Could get some extra sleep too.
The buses are better for the environment and road congestion than if each person had to drive individually. And they don't cost taxpayers extra money. This sounds like a win-win to me.
I love how they harp on the fact that "the bus schedules are withheld from the public" like it's some sort of conspiracy theory. Unless your destination is their company, you've got no business sitting on that bus. I suppose they'd prefer the alternative, that employees drive themselves to work in private automobiles? Just more proof (if any was needed) that journalists ignore progress and immediately spring to interpret the next new events in whatever negative manner they can think of.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So we're angry at rich large businesses for doing what poor public schools do? I'm confused -- why is this news?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They are creating nothing of any real consequence. Everything made by Google, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, etc. is designed to be obsolete in months. They also have a habit of destroying working products and laying off workers for no reason at all.
I have a perfectly usable 2G iPod that is perfectly unusable because it's no longer supported and it doesn't talk to anything except the mothership that disowned it.
What was the last new (new as in it has no contemporary substitutes) COMMERCIAL software product (as in you pay real money to a company that employs people at grown-up wages to buy it) written in a real programming language and introduced with the same usefulness and value as say, Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks, Skype or Final Cut Pro?
There isn't one. Why?
Because all the developers are too busy shoveling pure crap into app stores as fast as they can to try and make rent.
Truth is the "high tech" industry in America was deliberately bludgeoned into a coma in 2000 and 2001. All advancement of personal computers stopped then.
Since no real efforts are being made to rebuild it, the industry will probably never recover. Any future high tech industry will happen somewhere other than America.
So, the author is pissed off at Apple and Google for solving their own transportation and parking problems instead of waiting around for the incompetent local politicians to handle it?
Guess it was a slow news day on the "bitching about non-problems" desk at the LA times.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Quote: the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not.'"
How 'bout a little perspective? I'm not riding on one of those buses, but I do recognize the fact that the people who do aren't just lucky. They are actually contributing to the "good fortunes", which trickle down to everybody else.
Sorry if you are one of those who only get a trickle, but that's a lot better than nothing - especially if you contribute nothing.
If you want to get "upstream", try going to school for something useful (like STEM) and not liberal arts.
Railroads have had private commuter club cars for a century. A bunch of wealthy people get together, purchase or lease a train car, add nice seating, waitstaff, & amenities, and pay Amtrak/Metro North/CNWR to haul it around with their regular commuter trains. In exchange for not sitting with the riff-raff, they subsidize everyone else's fare.
Every so often, some young journalist realizes that rich people can afford nicer stuff and attempts to spin it into a scandal.
Maybe these tech companies should be working on inventing some sort of technology that lets people communicate and collaborate without having to be in the same place at the same time.
So, if I understand this right...
One bus crash and then a hiring frenzy?
This is a logical extension of the sort of the carefully cultivated isolation you encounter on a university campus. Why subject your employees to the outer-world that is - let's face it - such a nuisance and an eye-sore. Who wants to deal with the unpleasantness of ghetto-fabulous Oakland or South San Francisco? Fuck that. Reality is for suckers.
To be fair, Silicon Valley merely compounds a problem that's been in the Bay Area for a while now - namely the ghetto-ization and nimby-ism that's been going on for decades now. The left-wing excesses begun in the sixties and seventies are now coming home to roost, though a lot of ex-hippies get to watch the drama unfold from the comfort of their homes in the Berkeley hills. Why yes I do bitter much.
Oil sands workers in Ft. McMurray.
The plants send out buses to pick up workers early in the morning, pretty much door to door service. Sys admins, truck drivers, and execs. BTW: truck drivers (big trucks - 400 ton) are highly valued, more so than lowly sys admins/IT workers.
Buses come early and suburb house lights are all out by 10pm. Next day same same all over again.
Lots of money to be made and not a lot of folk believe they are in a long term position.
Still, though some residents initially didn't like the buses, the talk now is we'd rather have a dozen buses than all the cars with the concomitant parking hassles. Our housing prices are up, but thanks to CA property tax law, it doesn't change what I pay.
I continue to work at home, with a sub-minute commute time. Sure pity the fools who have to wait outside for a bus in all weather and then blow another 1.5 hours on commute. I say we continue the bussing, have them bring tax revenues into San Francisco & leave the city nice and quiet during the day.
Guess that's why Google, Facebook, etc., etc. are trying to open larger offices in the city.
So organized door-to-door mass transit, reduces the environmental impact of rush hour, reduces roadway congestion in an already congested area, removing the need to drive the commute, your fellow passengers will be co-workers, so it's expected that they'll maintain a reasonable level of public decency, and you don't have to find and subsequently pay for parking, and it's not being paid for with taxes but as a perk to attract more workers - and somehow this is a class warfare thing?
This is just a capitalistic thing.
You wanna know how you can get on those luxury buses that ferry people from point A to a company's door? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can get those big salaries that are driving the gentrification of the worst parts of town, making them safe and livable for a family? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can end up a millionaire? Have an idea, work it, and sell it or start up a company to grow it.
This isn't a class barrier, it's a time, effort, skill, and experience thing. That's how our economic system works.
It does suck that an area becoming a better class of neighborhood results in raised rents, but that is literally the price to be paid. The good news is that the more affluent individuals are in an area, the better it is for everyone. It might not increase in equal measures, but it's been well documented - average pay goes up in those areas, following the trend for cost of living.
It's not like a downtown of a city is ever going to be static. It was different than it was 20 years ago, and 20 years before that, and so on. It's always changing, and there's not anything wrong with that. Besides, what comes to mind when I think of a successful anti-gentrification trend is Detroit.
You don't want to end up like them.
Google has to ferry their people. Mountain View voted down Google's plan to build a 1000-unit dorm complex.
Bear in mind that most Google employees are not "techies". They're sales reps selling ads. When you think Google, think "Mad Men", not rocket science.
You're committing the same flaw of the user you replied to.
Giving every user the same stereotype and personality.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The employees are paying their taxes, and many of them actually fall into the highest tax rate (35% on income above a level, don't remember exactly how much). These people pay more than their fair share.
Who drives the bus... and where does he and his family get to live?
My company is located very near Microsoft's Redmond campus, and the situation is the same here. MS runs a large fleet of various people-carrying vehicles that pick up Microsofties all around the area. All the while the mass transit that serves the rest of us is going downhill fast. Every time I turn around MS is working hard to avoid paying more taxes. Gotta love those guys.
What they are doing is better than nothing. Now it would be great if everyone lived within walking distance to work, but that's just not the environment we live in. It will take a lot to change it. That being said, buses are feasible right now and there's no good reason not to support them.
In what way is this a reasonable response to what I said?
How is riding a private bus not living in the real world? The same could be said for those of us who drive our cars to work vs. those who can't afford the privilege and rely on public transportation instead. And the same could be said for those who can't even afford public transportation and have to ride their bike instead. As for your example of wars, I don't see the connection.
The taxes are the same with or without the busses (except maybe lower gas taxes collected). It does have a positive effect on the "roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services," though; The busses mean fewer cars on the road, which means less road wear, fewer traffic cops, less congestion, less pollution and other benefits.
I work for one of these companies, it's 40 minute commute from my house to work on the private bus vs 3 hours by mass transit.
I am guessing the riders don't pay income tax on the value of the transportation
You guess incorrectly. We're taxed on it.
The real world is that public transit between SF and the peninsula sucks badly: it's slow, dirty, and inconvenient. You can't realistically commute from SF to SV by public transit unless you want to spend four hours doing it. So, the only real-world choice people used to have is to commute in their own cars. But that causes congestion, both in SF and on the highways. And now when tech companies spend a boatload of money trying to relieve the congestion and making life better for everybody, they are accused of "insulating" their employees. SF needs to stop whining and fix its transit system.
And, yeah, SF used to be a dirty, run-down, but cheap place to live, full sailors, social outcasts, non-conformists, weird artists, and recreational drug users, with a barely functioning city government. That had its charms. But people can't recapture that past and you can't preserve it by government decree. Until SF accepts that it has become an expensive city for the well-off, it will continue to be dysfunctional, and it will continue to be an overpriced dump. I used to live in SF but moved away; living there stopped being much fun, and it was way too expensive for the low quality of life it offered.
Now the people who work hard and are not egocentric enough to fill the highway by their personal ton of steel senslessly produced are having a "luxury". Company busses exist in Europe and Japan since a very long time, connecting the next station/city with big branches of a company, even for factory workers.
It is cost efficient and you have workers who are fresh and relaxed when they arrive at work. It makes economic sense for the company. Meetings start on time. It makes sense traffic-wise (for the space which one bus takes you can maybe have 3 cars, but there may be up to 60 people in the bus).
Further indicaiton that the article is biased: Coaches have air conditioning? That does not make them "luxury coaches". Every car driving there has air condition. The city busses in the city where i live have air conditioning. It is reasonable to have it in such climate. Plush seats? Really? No please tell me: The seat in the cars are probably made of wood. And When did the last time travel in a normal travel bus when the seat where not soft seats? The time that publi transport had wooden seats only is a long time ago. Wireless interent access? The budget bus line in germany has wireless interent access, as have the high-speed trains in germany, japan, austria, france (these are the countries i know of). Having interenet access in a mass transit system makes sense. Just because it does not make sense in a [personal car does not mean it is "luxury". If your employees can chek the mail on the way to work, this qquickly pays off.
So the bottom line is: This is not isolating the employees from the real world" but it is ecologically, economically, and socially reasonable approach. Only a complete moron woud turn around the need to hide yourself in your own car (and pay for it) as a sing of "being connected to the world". Instead of affording a car in a 40km ouside suburb i prefer to pay a little more rent, accept that there are time when the bus goes, get in the queue and relax, and do my private things by subway and walking/cycling.
The people commuting from SF to Silicon Valley are paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services, and they are paying some of the highest income and real estate taxes in the nations for that. In fact, SF residents paid for using their own car and the infrastructure that using their own car would require. In addition, they subsidize SF's lousy public transit. Sharing rides using corporate buses reduces the cost and impact relative to what SF residents have already paid for and have a right to use.
Income tax? You are going with that? Really?
If they drove themselves, or rode the bus, then what? How does that affect income tax?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
SF residents already pay real estate and state income taxes, which is supposed to pay for the infrastructure supporting their individual cars. If they choose to use company-provided buses, they are saving both the city and the state a great deal of money in terms of road infrastructure and environmental costs.
This is a huge win for both SF and CA, and the fact that anybody criticizes this shows you how broken California politics has become.
The fact that the need motorized transport to get around is indicative of an inherently inefficient and environmentally-unfriendly lifestyle.
Buses are a lot more environmentally friendly than cars. If you want everybody to walk to work, you have to go back over 100 years. When mass transit came along, lots of people started living further from work.
a long established wrecker of cities
So you're saying that San Francisco is falling apart because everybody wants to live there. I thought the problem was everybody moving out to the burbs.
No, it's a sign of poor city planning and poor politics. The cities in the valley are governed by suburbanites who do everything in their power to stop the kind of edgy urban culture that some young techies like. SF, on the other hand, is so full of red tape and so expensive that big tech companies would be foolish to locate there. So what do people do? They live where they want to live, work where they can work, and deal with the b.s. it takes to make it all work. The problem isn't techies, the problem is that city planners in all these cities are trying to impose their preferred lifestyles on the population.
Don't think in terms of small and half-baked solutions.
nuclear weapons = community renewal
Almost all the tech companies in Bangalore, Chennai, Bombay and Pune do this. Not just for top techies, for their entire work force. This practice started ages ago when factories were built far from the city but with major work force coming from the city. So factories would build "quarters" for essential staff who had to come at all odd hours, and bus the workers in for day shifts. The bus fleets of big public sector companies in Bangalore like BEL, HMT, ITT, HAL etc used to be comparable or even bigger than the city bus systems. Further the city bus systems are notoriously over crowded and wont be able to handle peak loads of shift changes in big factories.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco .. that ease the stress of navigating congested Bay Area roadways"
The reason the roadways are congested is that the car lobby acted to shut-down the public transport system way back in the early twentieth century.
AccountKiller
Depending on what your skill set is, and how much you are being paid where you currently are, 3X may be no problem. Wages tend to be significantly higher in the area.
They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable.
My guess is the OP will say that taxes are not actually spent on infrastructure improvements in the area in which they live. But who cares? Caltrans spends a lot upgrading roadways all over the state. Look at the 101 project now, FFS.
A comparison with Detroit in the 60's struck me as I was reading it. Certainly it was a different era, but the same hubris and ignorance seems to afflict the large firms in the tech industry as it did the Big Three. I suppose one benefit of the isolation of the tech industry is that it won't destroy the lives of so many people when it inevitably crumbles into dust.
Also, quoth the article:
San Francisco is becoming a city without a middle class.
This seems to be becoming true everywhere, not just SF. The middle class is getting absorbed into an enormous economic demographic of people who struggle with various degrees of severity to make ends meet.
Techology won't save us from that fate, it'll make it worse. There actually needs to be a social and political solution through income redistribution before we start witnessing real segregation - massive percentages of a community in poverty with awful basic services while the fortunate are shuttled to work from their gated communities and provided private company paid services, completely isolated from the city they work in. All while the company milks constant local tax breaks and leeches off the crumbling infrastructure.
If these people wanted to isolate themselves from their communities in San Francisco, then they probably wouldn't live in San Francisco at all. Why not just move closer to where they work, where the housing prices may be exorbitant, but still cheaper than San Francisco. The main thing these people are guilty of is wanting to get to work in a convenient and comfortable way. No matter how nice these buses are, they're still buses. It's not like they're taking limos or private helicopters.
So you just hates it when working class stiffs get enough power to get a decent pension?
You say everyone should just hop on the bus, but it'll sure suck when the whole place burns down because the garbage piled up (no garbage men) then caught fire (no firemen) and nobody could even organize the evacuation (no policemen). Of course they might not notice if they starve first (no cooks, waiters, truckers, farmers, etc).
Consider, in the ULTIMATE unregulated society (that you seem to want) the non-tech resident's most rational move would be to burn the tech companies out and shoot to kill.
Personally, I'd rather it not come to that.
Alas, we already know they don't pay their taxes.
I work for a company with offices in SF and Dublin (Ireland, not the one by Pleasanton). In both cases they strongly encourage the use of public transit, and we go out to local restaurants for lunch most days. Interaction with folks in the community is encouraged. Perhaps the issue here isn't tech, but rather the isolation that comes from working in remote suburban campuses far away from the city people want to live in. Thankfully I work in the center of both of these fine cities. If only most Googlers were so lucky! I assure you if these same companies put their campuses in places you could easily get to via BART (or even Caltrain; right now it's great for getting to a point 5 miles from your job) you'd see plenty of people taking normal transit instead of the private buses. As it is now I'd say it's a hell of a lot better to put one bus on the road than 45 cars.
You can't make public transport better. It doesn't meet the necessary requirements, and making it meet them would make it practically useless as public transportation. Here are the requirements:
#1: You only associate with the employees of your company during your trip, so that any work-chat isn't heard by an employee of a competitor.
#2: Any networking on the bus is secured to internal company network standards to avoid electronic eavesdropping.
#3: To avoid terrorism, targeted attacks on the company or its employees, or protest-based denial-of-employee presence at work via stopping the transportation, either through things like spike-strips or human chains, etc., the transportation must not be marked by operator, route, or destination (the "Google bus" in the movie "Interns" was a specially built prop; real Google busses look exactly like the Apple, Facebook, Genentech, and other tech company busses).
#4: The trip must be quick to maximize employee productivity; this means very few stops at either endpoint area, and no stops in between.
#5: The trip must be quick between origin and destination, in order to make it more attractive than taking a personal car, since everyone can afford to have a personal car.
#6: At the near end point, you can use personal transportation belonging to yourself; at the far endpoint, loaner personal transportation must be available in order to make up for not having personal transportation available. There should be no or low flat rate subscription cost for this loaner transport.
#7: The transport must run frequently; in general, this can be up to 12 times more frequently (5 minute intervals) for some areas.
#8: The transport must run exceedingly early, somewhat late, and sometimes exceedingly late, when there are company functions, such as "all hands meetings", "beer bashes", and so on.
#9: Alternate transport at no extra cost must be provided for a minimum number of "emergency" trips per month. There must be no extra charge unless this number is exceeded. Exceeding this number must be capable of being reimbursed on a case by case basis, and emergency trips must be counted as a single event for round trips with an arbitrary intermediate delay at the emergency destination.
#10: The transportation must be comfortable; there must be at least one restroom, adequate lighting, comfortable seating, etc.. ...I really don't see public transport meeting any of these criteria today, and I don't see it meeting 6, 7, 9, and 10 without a near-infinite amount of funding, given the way publicly administered transportation services have to spend about 60%+ of their budget funding pensions and benefits to union employees in California.
Live closer to work? LOL. Let's see, where are these companies located? Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park... Where STARTER homes are $1 million??? In the Bay Area it is impossible for a regular tech worker to live close to work. Your only real option is a long commute. I'd rather do it in an air conditioned bus with my laptop open than in my old beater with the fan on and my blood pressure rising...
Yikes. Apparently nothing works the Slashdot crowd into a lather quite like holding a mirror up to the narcissistic self-interests of Silicon Valley excess...
The taxes paid by their employees are not their entire obligation.
I really don't think commuting before private buses was insulating any body from the "real world." And if you know about the Bay Area, there's plenty of real world to go around after work.
I also don't think that the well-educated, extremely liberal Northern Californians in the tech industry who have nothing to gain from the two wars are to blame for them. The people who have the most to gain are the defense contractors squatting around Washington D.C., and the oil companies and their lobbyists. Taking a company bus is hardly going to make someone less connected to a war that's already halfway around the world. If anything, these people are probably more likely to use that time to follow the news and politics than if they were driving.
So what's you point?
The IRS gets the money, not local transportation districts.
This is totally non-germane.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Worse still because this from an industry that has been purporting for years to end commutes and the need to concentrate employees with their "innovations" in communications etc.
Yet the greatest irony is that they fail to see the irony. I live in the NY area and work on a fairly small project that's spread across 6 facilities in 3 countries and 2 continents, and it's no big deal. Maybe once every couple of months we get together somewhere. This despite the fact that our project involves custom hardware, so logistics is more difficult than with a pure software project. Would having everybody in one location make it easier? A little, but we have people with serious expertise in different areas, so it's not worth losing them for the sake of moving everything to a single location. There is nothing new about this - in WWII there were projects involving hundreds of subcontractors all over the country, and the only tools they had were mail and trains. Worked fine.
Silly Valley, for all their cosmopolitan heirs, is one of the most provincial places in the world. They think that the only places on the planet where their business can be done is the Bay Area and India. They could save a lot of money by expanding into other areas of the country, and pick up some great talent. Want great programmers? Try Pittsburgh.
Transportation is a benefit to you on which you must pay income tax.
But this tax goes to the Feds, not to the local cities or states, so it matters not a wit for the discussion at hand.
Remember that all public transit loses money. Every rider you add to the system costs the system more than the rider pays in fares. If the city/county had to add buses for this purpose it would be a much bigger loss.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
When those workers get to be about 35 YO, they'll be back to reality when they're looking for work and a place to live that they can afford.
Enjoy it while you can - your ass will be kicked to the curb before you know it.
Um... SF has a city-specific payroll tax based on the number of people your company has working in the city limits. Why would any potentially fast-growing company purposefully inflict additional taxes on themselves, in addition to some of the highest cost commercial rents in the area, when they can can just move 10 miles out and get the same staff?
Get out and see the country dude. It's called a commuter bus service. Used in many parts of the country for commuters traveling relatively long distances in and out of the city to their homes in the suburbs where the city or local buses do not go.
Tour style buses with plush seats, A/C, individual LED lighting and vents, and free wi-fi on quite a few of them. That is not something special.
I lived in Kitsap county Washington, Northern VA, and Queens and all had the same exact bus service between them and their respective metropolitan areas. The one I use now in Northern VA to DC has wi-fi on some of them too.
People don't care about where they live?
"They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable."
Exactly. When I've shown recruiters the math, they just moved on. Presumably to find some poor young soul who will swallow their (seemingly but actually not so) generous offer.
Recruiters, the new real estate agents... underpay the seller, overcharge the buyer, nobody gets exactly what they want.
The worst are the "stagers"; just like you can "stage" an apartment, they offer to "help write a good resume", hold "interviewing seminars/classes", and sell people in above their ability, and beat feet with their commission.
I guess for profit education, which is basically "seller pays fixer-uppers", may come a close second.
I've seriously considered trying to do something about this, starting with a ratings site, and going from there, up to the point of the equivalent of "the board of realtors" for recruiters, but I'd really hate to displace Paul Vixie as "The most sued person in America".
The public transport network is optimized for cost... whats the cheapest network we can run whilst still being useable and affordable to poor people without cars
The private bus networks have a different optimization goal... employee productivity... employees have 24 hours a day and their time is valuable... sleep, travel, work, fun, family... save them time and effort in the morning... and most importantly give them wifi on the bus (which you don't get on plublic transport)... suddenly you have an extra hour of employee productivity for the price of a bus ticket
They rent. Apartments. Or with roommates.
Stiletto is right about who is buying houses. The market hasn't actually recovered in the Bay Area, it's actually riding a bubble by people who believe that they can buy the property for rentals, or can do a fix-and-flip again. Actual housing prices in places like the Inner Sunset in San Francisco are in the $535/square foot range, which puts a $180,000 house in Utah in about the $750,000 range in the Inner Sunset. Some of the flip condos that have been fixed but not yet flipped are sitting at $650/square foot.
Compare this to Manhattan "Million Dollar Listing prices at $2600-$3000/square foot, which basically gets you a (purchased) apartment for in the $6 range. You have to work at it to find this in the Bay Area - like across the pond from the Columns Of The Palace Of Fine Arts park. Or near Robin Williams house in the Sea Cliff neighborhood.
"They might be paying for the bus, but they sure as hell aren't paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services they need to run them."
Commercial vehicles are taxed as is the fuel they burn. Not even a good troll.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
'By reading the second paragraph of the article you linked to':
..
Thanks for pointing that bit out, now could you provide an original source for that quote, something like this would do
"The second count charged that the defendants had violated Section II of the Sherman Act by conspiring to eliminate competition in the sale of motor buses and supplies to National City Lines companies" ref
AccountKiller
If I'm too dumb to imagine how stupid I am then that means I lack the cognition to feel bad about it. The alternative state of mind demonstrated in your post seems like a less desirable outcome. I think I'll stick with my strategy.
Silly Valley, for all their cosmopolitan heirs, is one of the most provincial places in the world. They think that the only places on the planet where their business can be done is the Bay Area and India. They could save a lot of money by expanding into other areas of the country, and pick up some great talent. Want great programmers? Try Pittsburgh.
Wrong. They don't think that. You can imagine that people who run a business have heard of the idea that they can hire anywhere, can't you?
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
I was talking to my husband on the way to work yesterday that we aren't that far away from 2020, as in CyberPunk 2020. I wrote a con module over 10 years ago called Wimbledon 2031 using the UK Sourcebook, it's not that far away from me dusting it off and offering to run it again in 2031. It will be interesting to see how much of the tech in the game (and the environmental disasters) has become reality.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
It consists of everyone who can pass a drug screen and isn't too drunk to make it into the FedEx parking lot.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
A private bus from work to the suburbs avoids dealing with the public who live and work in those places in between. Being on Wi-fi the whole time means they aren't engaged in the world around them. However, you do make a great point about driving one's own car vs. public bus, bicycles or walking. It's all a matter of degree and we're all looking for more protection and separation instead of engagement.
That's a laugh. The way I see it, and you've any familiarity with rush hour traffic, the last thing you want to do is engage another driver. I've taken trains as well as commuted various distances and I much prefer my time spent relaxing instead of dozens of minutes focused on the road. Sounds like SF is your ideal destination for engagement activities, have you considered the Folsom Street Fair? Plenty of unprotected, non separation engagement there, you might even choke on it.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
So you think that a house in San Francisco is less expensive than a house in Silicon Valley?
Alla y'all can shoot off your Slashdotting mouths, but this issue directly affects my life in a major way. I am an educator and artist with a strong technical skill set. But I am of no use to the Apples and Googles of the world, and they are, frankly, of no use to me either. So there is no place for me in the Bay Area any longer. After 20 years in San Francisco, I am forced out by the spiraling rents. And why is the rent going out of control? It's precisely because of the gold rush described here. The Mission neighborhood, in particular, is being gentrified at an extremely alarming rate. Rents have increased more than 400% in 20 years. That's a quadruple factor, my friends. And yet, the crime and misery on the street continues unabated. There are literally thousands of homeless on the streets of this one neighborhood alone. And the private buses taking the technorati to their business parks in San Jose are symptomatic of this very real problem. As for me, fuck it, I'm moving to Portland. This place makes me sick, and I used to love it. End of line.
No, but a house in Walnut Creek or Gilroy is. That's about how far most of the people I work with commute.
This post might as well have been called "Kids cho0sing to live in trendy SF instead of cultural vacuum of Silicon Valley"
The valley is dull - really dull. You need a car to get from one store to the next, let alone to get anywhere interesting. That means you have to be sober the whole time, which is dull. SF on the other hand, has decent public transport, has some cool places to go, and because you're on public transport you can have a drink whenever you want.
If anything's getting worse, it's the lack of public transport between SF and the Valley.
This is the plot of T Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities
Which is a story. The GP never said where he read the story, did he?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Workplaces should offer dormitories for those who want to avoid commuting.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
SF has always been a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, to some extent: I moved to SF from the Peninsula in '93.
Caltrain is simply not capable of being a full solution to the problem of getting people out of their cars, so the buses are a very reasonable solution. I'm lucky enough that my company moved to SF this year, so it's Muni every day for me. (Sometimes a mixed blessing!)
Not to be too cynical, but San Franciscans will always have something to complain about. My grandmother didn't like all the "new development" out in the Sunset, which since it happened in the 1920s gives you some perspective. I love my crowded quirky little city, and certainly don't begrudge the Apple, Google, and Genentech buses in my neighborhood, though I do wish they'd coexist better with Muni.
I sort of laugh at the people being shocked at "houses built right next to each other": um, have you never been to a city before? (I'm talking about Paris, Manhattan, London, or Tokyo, not someplace spread out like Phoenix.) We have the density but not the height, lots of trees and parks, and many neighborhoods are very walkable.
In short: cities are dense, people like to complain, and private mass transit is good at moving people from once place to another.
There are a whole lot of workers in the oil patch that get flown in for a week from wherever in the country they live, and then flown back home at the end of the week.
This replaces the old "company town" model, where the company would actually move whole families closer to the work site. The downside is that there are an awful lot of familes that are effectively single-parent half the time.
One of my friends is currently doing this, and it's terribly disruptive for his kids--it takes several days to adapt when conditions change.
And company stores for those who want to avoid leaving the corporate campus entirely.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
They sure do seem to, though. I've been working in the industry for about 18 years now. I have worked with numerous companies here on the East Coast, and currently live and work about 40 minutes outside of Boston, with an easy ~15 minute commute to work each way. My cost of living is pretty good, the schools in my community are good, I can access the city within an hour by mass transit, and I have a nice little house with a yard where the kids can get some fresh air and exercise. My cost of living - and Boston isn't really the cheapest place to live by any means - is about 50-66% of what I'd have to pay for a comparable lifestyle in the Bay Area.
Yet the offers I've gotten from Bay Area companies tends to be on the order of a 5-10% pay raise, plus modest one-time relo/signing bonus. And every one of them that I've offered "How about I work remotely, and just travel out to SFO once every couple months for a week with the team?" has looked at me like I'm crazy - despite this having been a perfectly acceptable and successful arrangement I've worked out with companies in NYC, Dallas, and DC in the past few years for 6-12 month contracts.
All of this is even more curious, given the collective tech industry's gasp of outrage and horror when Yahoo ended remote work benefits a few months back. You'd think that people in what's commonly regarded as the "hub" of the tech industry would be a little more open to the idea of "remote work," but every company I've dealt with out there (some big, some small) have been absolutely insistent that everybody who works there must live out there, too. And since they're not offering to double or triple my salary to cover the disparity in living costs, I pass - their loss, not mine.
From the George Packer article in the New Yorker:
That I think is Exhibit A. Cupertino sucks so badly that Apple has to offer to bus new employees in from San Francisco, but instead of putting some of their much vaunted design genius to work on improving the town, they're building a round pentagon to protect themselves from it. There's a medieval fortress vibe about this scheme that really should give one pause, (if one were capable of finding the pause button on one's slyFad 9).
(By the way, before you start singing the praises of San Francisco's hills and harbor, consider that the Mission district has nothing to do with that stuff. If urban communities are just a matter of brand creation and network effects, a place like Apple really ought to be able to figure it out.)