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Protesters Block Apple and Google Buses In California
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Business Insider reports that protesters have stopped a bus filled with Apple employees in San Francisco and a Google bus in Oakland. Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook provide free buses that take their employees from San Francisco to their headquarters in the suburbs. Protesters are mad at the tech companies because the wealthy tech employees have driven up the price of housing in San Francisco, which is pricing out some people. The buses also use public transit stops, and some protesters think that's wrong. Between 70 and 100 protesters gathered for the blockade of Apple private tech shuttle to protest evictions in the city of San Francisco. The activists in San Francisco were from Eviction Free San Francisco, Our Mission No Eviction, Causa Justa /Just Cause. Protesters stood in front of a white shuttle bus holding banners and signs. Some peeked through cardboard signs fashioned in the shape of place markers on Google maps, with "Evicted" written across the front. Meanwhile violence occurred in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and "Fuck off Google" and "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window, making glass rain down on the street. Cold air blew inside the bus and the blockaders with their banners departed." Two weeks ago, protesters stopped a Google bus."
I hate to make it sound like I'm pissing on the protesters, but how is it the fault of techies that house pricing is going up?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
I love the ACs below that slings arrows from hidden view. girlintraining makes a value point and I'd mod her up. If you are going to protest, TIme and place do matter. Also you audience matters and picking on a bus load of techies expends too much cap;ital on a little target. Had they protested in front of google, had the, as she suggested, parked themselves in front of the people who are really driving up prices then they could garner more positive interest in their cause. All they did was pissed of people who work for a living, negate any value attempted by using violence, and most likely hurting, not helping their cause.
To the ACs, get some brains cells to stop the knee jerk reaction, or come out of the woods so we can put a name to the small minds that carry it.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
If it's not Google or Apple employees, somebody else is going to want to live there. Popular living destinations always attract high costs of living...
It's popular in part because of the tech employees. You're not looking at this quantitatively. While SF has never been cheap, the tech employees increase demand and hence price. Regardless of whether you agree with the protestors, they do understand supply and demand.
Can other people than employees use ride those buses?
Note: I'm not arguing against or in favour of it at all since it doesn't concern me. I'm just curious.
In my country, Finland, I know of one example of a start-up doing that since almost all of their summer interns were from the same university campus which clearly nobody objected to. Furthermore, there are various financial schemes to encourage people to use public transportation more for their daily commute because "everybody" thinks "everybody" should use public transportation more to reduce congestion but to me the solution is obvious: Pricing should be subsidized to zero because we even have a domestic example of it working well. A tiny city with only two bus routes pays for the bus operations through taxes (and the city is so small that the idea of a congestion problem there is laughable). I'm convinced that it would work on a larger scale as well. Getting on and off buses would first of all be more convenient and faster when neither the driver nor the passengers need to care about tickets and no inspectors would need to be employed, which would also save costs. Furthermore, the increased use of public transportation would not only reduce congestion but obviously also reduce the costs of street and road maintenance. It's not even a hard argument to sell to taxpayers - people who already commute would pay about the same amount extra in taxes as they pay for tickets now and people who still would need to drive would probably not mind paying a little extra for less congestion, which would reduce fuel consumption and thus even offset the tax increase a little.
Actually, I don't see the problem here. If a city prices out all its low-paid workers who keep the toilets and streets clean and the buses running, then something will change. It's a self-correcting problem.
"The buses also use public transit stops, and some protesters think that's wrong."
Some protestors think that's wrong, because it is wrong (in violation of the law). I live in San Francisco and run a small tech company near YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno. The connection between the private buses and the rising cost of housing is weak, and there are several problems with the protestors targeting their housing concerns at buses full of techies.
I am strongly against these private corporations illegal use of public space for their own benefit. The public has, like it or not, designated bus stops, fire lanes, etc. set aside for a public good. Any vehicle other than the Muni buses stopped in SF's bus stops should be ticked and towed. Private vehicles such as my own are ticketed quickly, but the tech buses are not. Both the tech companies and local law enforcement are to blame there, and deserve to draw the ire of the public as they take a public good for their private benefit.
The corner near YouTube is a red fire lane, and daily filled with google's gleaming white buses in the morning and evenings. Often, so the poor techies don't have to walk an extra 20 yards, they will double park, blocking one of two through lanes of traffic, or nose in, leaving the rear of the bus blocking a through lane of traffic. I call the police every time a through lane of traffic is blocked, but I doubt that they have come by. The fire lanes there are set aside by the public though city government for the safety of all in the area, including my business nearby, as well as for the safe flow of traffic at the intersection there. YouTube's daily willingness to put the public at greater risk and great inconvenience by blocking traffic and fire lanes, including blocking my workforce that is trying to get to and from our office, by using a public good for their private gain is the issue, and deserves the public's response.
That's what I think of all the SF tech companies. They are all just advertising companies with a delusion of being innovative.
Actually, that seems to describe all the NYC tech companies to me.
I have lived in the SF Bay Area almost my entire life. In this area, every single time anyone tries to build new urban housing, the left shows up and protests. Are you trying to build a new condo building? PROTEST. Trying to build new apartments? PROTEST. The political left has fought, tooth and nail, for decades, to restrict severely, or even to reduce the supply of housing in the SF Bay Area, and ESPECIALLY urban housing like high-rise apartment buildings. Then, the consequences of their actions occurred: the price of real estate went up, especially for renters.
When the price of real estate started going up, because of absolutely restricted supply, the left started rebelling against the consequences of its own actions. They started protesting again--not against themselves who actually caused the phenomenon, but against Google, who had nothing to do with it. Now the left has people holding banners saying "FUCK GOOGLE" and "Techies not welcome here".
Of course, if the protestors really succeeded in "fucking Google" etc, and tech companies were really not welcome here, then silicon valley would have to move somewhere else. Then the tech industry which supports this entire area (like GM used to support Detroit) would vacate, and the tax base would implode, and San Francisco would increasingly resemble Detroit--not at first, of course, but gradually over decades. Then the left would protest the consequences of their own actions, once again. "FUCK GOOGLE FOR LEAVING", "FUCK TAX RECEIPTS FOR GOING DOWN" and so on. Perhaps they would demand that tech companies and workers continue to pay local taxes despite not working or living here anymore.
I find it ironic that one of the protesting organizations is called "just cause". Because "just cause" is what was already happening. People are getting what they DESERVE--unaffordable real estate--which is what they caused by their own actions. That is what "just" means, or used to mean.
Frankly, I think it should be easier to evict renters. If they do not allow the construction of new housing units, and they have never bought a house, then they should have nowhere to live. They have only themselves to blame.
North Dakota has the nation's hottest economy, with a growth rate five times the national average.
We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions.
Starting to? The revolution came, and its high water mark was about a year ago when Homeland Security's jack-booted thugs coordinated a nationwide crackdown, arresting and imprisoning over six thousand protesters in a single day. Anyone remember Occupy? Nope. The police came and erected giant tarps and then moved in tanks, troops, and industrial equipment, and did a clean sweep of every protester on Wall St. in just a few hours, then took down the temporary walls, shined up the signs a little, and buffed out the dents where the protesters were thrown into walls, the ground, etc. And nary a word was spoken about it in our press.
Dude, look at China -- how often do you hear of protests there? You don't. Because the people there get rounded up and are never heard from again. And now in America, we have the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country on Earth. Put two and two together.
There was a revolution... We lost.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I own a house in Sunnyvale, near the Yahoo headquarters. My neighbors and I do not want more urbanization for the simple reason that it will increase the housing supply and lower our relative property values. That is the primary reason you do not see more urbanization in SV - the people who already own there do not want their property values to go down. We also tend to vote in the local elections much more so than renters.
Additionally, the transportation infrastructure in SV is strained as it is. It can literally take 45 minutes to an hour to drive 5 miles across town, public transit sucks, and there is not much hope of that improving. That makes it even harder for high-density developments to be approved - the infrastructure is not really there to support it and the people already living there do not want even more traffic to deal with.
'They became violent.'
According to the story 1 person became violent and attacked property, and with 'they became violent' you unfairly called them all violent, a word which is most often used to describe actions which physically harm people.
Gov't agents have a history of infiltrating organisations and promoting or committing violence in their name in order to discredit them, you should remember that before blaming the action of 1 person on the whole group that they claim to represent. /they're still all idiots though, the supply and demand of housing is down to the gov't and property developers, not a few of Google's minions.
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