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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they were public buses instead of company buses, would they clog the streets any less? Whoever owns and rides them, they are mass transit. Only in San Francisco would people complain about folks using mass transit. I'm no big fan of Silly Valley and its satellite communities like San Francisco, but this has to be one of the silliest, and most hypocritical, complaints I've ever heard.
No, you are missing the point. There busses, Caltrain and BART already ... instead of these corps. helping to make public transit even better they are opting out of paying their fair share and spending it on MORE busses that only their employees can ride ... which clog the streets even more. I pass a bunch of them each morning on my ride in. *shrug*
Wait, What? Opting OUT?
Do these companies somehow not have to pay all the local taxes that other companies pay to support the public buses that always run in the RED? Do these private buses opt out of all the road tax, licensing fees, gas tax that the public buses are exempt from paying?
Would not the local buses also have to increase vehicles on the road to compensate if these private services were discontinued? Would those buses be direct routes? With WIFI, comfy seats, and no smelly vagrants sitting next to someone trying to write an email or looking at some proprietary code?
Basically, I don't see the problem here, other than the local bus systems are deprived of the opportunity to LOSE MORE MONEY for every rider the private services handle.
That and a great deal of envy and jealousy on your part.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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 cost of living is much more than 2X, especially for housing, which can be up to 10X the cost of normal areas in the USA. When I moved out here from "flyover" land, my salary increased by about 1.5X but my cost of living practically tripled. It was not a good deal.
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...
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.
Simple. They can't.
Homes out here are not being purchased by middle-class families. They are being purchased by:
* Foreign (mostly Chinese) investors
* Hedge Funds
* Real Estate investment trusts
* Multiple families pooling their money (and planning on having 15 people living in a 3 bedroom house)
If you're making 60 to 80 thousand a year, you're not even close to being able to afford a home. You're living in a 1br or studio apartment in a not-so-nice part of San Jose.
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.
California has some, shall we say interesting, minimum wage laws.
The back story of these laws was that there were some companies that were hiring HB-1 visa holders at far sub market rate and using their immigration status to keep them in essentially indentured servitude. One of the results of this has been that desirable locations in California have become heavily populated by computer professionals.
Work bio at MMWD
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.