I thought they were already charging for access to the Google Play store and Google Apps like Maps. I thought that was why Android based devices like the Nook, Kindle; and Cyanogenmod releases didn't include access to Google Apps and the Store. Is that just a licensing restriction?
Is a 75 cent fee really significant to anyone that wants their Android device to have access to the Google Apps and Play store? It's not like there aren't alternatives (though the Google Maps alternatives are lacking).
The difference between an EV battery and propane tank is that if the propane tank gets dented, it doesn't cost $8000 to replace it. And the battery weighs a bit more, too.
I don't own the battery, and since I'm not going to swap out an 800lb battery myself, if it's dented, then either the automated machine or the service station that swapped it out dented it, not me so they can deal with it. (unless the car was in an accident, then insurance will pay for it).
I can guarantee that by 2030 we will not have batteries that are capable of taking a charge fast enough to make any of this feasible.
There is no battery capable of being recharged as fast as you can fill your gas tank.
Swapping batteries is an idiotic idea. Anyone who has ever exchanged a propane or other gas cylinder can attest to this.
EV battery range is already sufficient to meet the needs of almost all daily commute trips, why does an EV need to charge as fast as a gasoline powered car to be feasible?
I've swapped out propane cylinders hundreds of times on commercial forklifts, I don't see what the issue is? The supplier comes in once a month, takes out the empty cylinders from the storage rack and leaves full ones. Likewise, when I need a new tank for my BBQ grill, I take it to home depot and exchange it for a full one. In both cases, I don't really "own" the cylinder, the supplier does.
I've never swapped out an EV battery, but I don't see why it would be any different -- I pay a battery exchange fee and I assume that the battery will keep track of how much power I used - if I only got 70% of the power that the battery was supposed to provide, then I get a credit and the supplier takes that battery out of circulation.
You need 300 miles or more and a recharge time of 4 minutes or less for there to be parity between an EV and today's gasoline powered car.
Even if such parity is achieved, there is still no better alternative to utility generation from fossil fuels other than utility generation via nuclear power. Batteries don't generate power, they store it.
Yet even when an EV is powered by a fossil fuel burning plant, it's still more efficient and cheaper to operate than a gasoline powered car.
Lets say i relocate cross country. I can fill up at any gasoline station. I am completely shit out of luck with a Tesla. And believe it or not, people still do relocate. Or go on a road trip, or vacation or visit families.
The first time I relocated across the country, I towed the car behind a moving truck. The second time, I paid someone to haul it.
The last time we went on a big family vacation trip by car, we left the small commute car at home and rented a minivan.
It seems a little silly to design an entire fueling ecosystem around someone's need to occasionally relocate or go on vacation.
So unless there are countless charging stations nationwide or a program to swap out batteries when they're almost out of charge, it's not going to replace a gasoline engine anytime soon.
There already are countless charging stations and there will be more. The difference between an EV charge station and a gas station is that you can put an EV charger anywhere, so you can have them at shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, etc.
If an automaker made something like a Leaf, except with a small fuel tank (whatever fuel the customer wanted) and an Onan generator for that fuel, that would solve both short-range solutions, not to mention allow longer trips.
A Volt is decent, but what would be the next step is having the fossil fuel burner only have the function of charging the batteries, not part of the drivetrain.
The engineers that built the Volt apparently already did the cost-benefit analysis, and found that it still made sense to have the gasoline engine help power the car.
The fact that pure motor-generator electric drivetrains have been used in locomotives for decades, but still haven't made it to hybrid cars shows that it's really not (yet) the best way to build such a car. There are losses in taking rotational energy, turning it into electrical power, then turning that electrical power back into rotational energy, so it may be more efficient to use power from the engine to drive the wheels directly.
This would allow it to just run at one RPM (likely 1800 RPM if a four pole, 3600 RPM if a two pole, or 3000 RPM if a two pole and in Europe.) It is a lot easier to design an engine that just runs at one speed than worry about transmissions and power bands.
Then why wouldn't you just run the generator engine at whatever optimal speed you want, maybe 3117 rpm is best -- in a car there's no reason to generate power at the local AC powerline frequency, and there may be no reason to generator AC power at all - maybe generating DC directly would be better.
No kidding. They'll tax the hell out of electricity to make up for lost gasoline taxes...nothing is free... And just how expensive are these cars, and how long do you have to sit and wait for them to recharge?
I think it's more likely that they'll move to mileage based road taxes before they attempt to tax electricity in lieu of a fuel tax.
The charge times for various electric cars are available online, but for the vast majority of trips people make, the charge time is immaterial -- instead of a 10 minute stop at a gas station every week or two, you can spend 10 seconds each night plugging in the home charger to let it charge overnight (or perhaps eventually, just park it in your garage where the inductive charger automatically charges it). Whether it takes 2 hours or 10 hours doesn't really matter when the car is going to be sitting there for 12 hours anyway.
For longer trips, there are a number of solutions ranging from 20 minute fast chargers or fast battery swapouts to renting a more comfortable long-range vehicle for long trips and using the small EV for your daily commute.
There's no reason why an EV has to replicate a gasoline powered car to be useful.
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
I don't know the average power usage of a home in Washington DC. But let's say that the home uses an average of 1000KWh/month, and that they want to charge their 24KWh car 3 times a week, for 12 charges/month, or around 300KWh, so that means they need to generate 1300KWh/month.
According to this solar calculator, such a system in Washington DC would require 1100 sq ft of roof space, and cost $68,000 before incentives, or $24,000 after incentives. It would save nearly $200/month in electric bills, and is estimated to save the homeowner $90,000 over the projected 25 year lifespan of the system.
If they really wanted to fill a 5000sq ft roof, they'd be generating around 5500KWh/month.
That what buses where for. People who couldn't afford their own transportation They weren't created for better traffic, and they are the least green way to move people.
Why do you say that buses are the least green way to move people? Full buses are very efficient. An 8mpg bus with 50 passengers gets 400 passenger miles per gallon. 200 passenger mpg if it runs half the route empty.
Fill a 12 mpg Hummer H2 with 6 passengers and it tops out at 72 passenger mpg.
Even if the bus has only 10 passengers and runs half the route empty, it's still getting 40 passenger miles/gallon -- better than most cars on the road.
I think small passenger ferries take the crown for least-green method of travel.
3rd party surveys show that 46% of the Googlers would move if the shuttle buses went away.
How many would take public transit to Mountain View? I still say that most of the remaining 15,000 would commute by car , because unless you live close to Caltrain, taking Muni to get there is a non-starter. So instead of a few hundred buses on the streets, there'd be 10,000 cars competing for roads *and* parking.
It wouldn't be so bad if their drivers weren't pricks. I've been cut off several times by these assholes. At least VTA has supervisors that monitor drivers.
There are lots of pricks on the roads, I haven't found employee shuttle drivers to be worse than others, they are just more visible in those big white buses.
Build a skyscraper!? You really don't know anything about SF, do you?
I live there, though I can't say I've tried to construct a building there. How about you?
You do realize that pretty much the entirety of Mission Bay was built in the last year or two, right? Tons of tall buildings (that link is just condos) going up in that area, among quite a few others. I could count maybe a dozen 20+ floor complexes around the city that are opening within a year of today. That includes the 80-floor Transbay Tower.
Funny that you mention the Transbay Terminal -- planning for the Transbay Terminal replacement began around 2000, and the project isn't slated to be finished until 2017, nearly 20 years later. And this project fulfills a civic need to have a transit terminal, it's not just a private office building. Total cost for the center is projected to be around $4.5B. And it's already $300M over budget, they kept the project going by taking money from funds that were supposed to be used to extend the trains there -- you know, the whole purpose of a transit center... transit!
Somehow I don't think Google is going to commit billions of dollars and 2 decades to trying to build an office tower in SF. Especially given that many in SF already blame Google for the city's problems.
One does not need to operate completely in adherence or consistency with a concept or argument they're promoting in order for that concept or argument to be valid. Thus: nor is it valid to challenge someone's argument because they have failed to do so.
Argument pro tip: if you're focusing on the person (ad hominem) you're Doing It Wrong.
a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings
Don't expect someone to listen to your message if you choose not to follow the message yourself. Being a hypocrite may not necessarily mean that your message is not valid, but most people are not going to stop smoking when their doctor tells them to stop smoking while he smokes a cigarette. Do as I say, not as I do might work when you're a parent (and not often even then), but it's not going to win over people to your cause.
Argument pro tip 2: If you resort to quoting Latin to show why you're winning the argument, you've already lost the argument.
I don't particularly agree with these guys, but the argument of "you're not a ridiculously exaggerated shining beacon of the ideals I lay upon you, so your argument is worthless" is pretty piss poor.
So if I stand in front of you eating a steak and tell you that you need to be a vegetarian because your meat eating habits are cruel to animals, you wouldn't find me to be the least bit disingenuous? Realistically, I don't need to be a vegetarian to think that killing animals for food is bad, and really, why shouldn't I tell you that what you're doing is wrong even as I do the same thing myself?
Talking on an iPhone while giving a Google engineer a digitally printed flyer to tell him that his use of technology is forcing men and women in the Congo into slavery to mine gold certainly seems to be diluting the message. If they'd just stuck with things like privacy concerns, worries about robot cars on the roads, etc, that's one thing, but to tell someone that his use of technology is bad, while they are using much of the same technology themselves just comes across as hypocritical.
Just like the earth's climate can change, so can the business climate of a state, and California's has. Momentum will carry things for now, but the state seems determined to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
And if you think the San Francisco Bay Area has cheap rent, you are way off base.
I don't think California's business climate has gotten notably worse than the last tech boom, and yet companies still keep coming. It could certainly shift in the future, but shows no sign of doing so. I thought the Bay Area (Silicon Valley in particular) was going to die when a lot of the semiconductor makers moved out, but that hasn't proven to be the case.
The Bay Area is huge -- 7000 square miles and 7 million people, so any large scale shift will take decades. It's a lot easier to recruit people to grow your startup when you don't have to relocate employees, which is one thing that makes the Bay Area attractive despite the high cost of living.
I wasn't saying SF has cheap rent, just that people that say Google should move to Portland, or Austin or Wichita or wherever rents are cheap and land is plentiful (for now) are missing the point.
That could actually be a net win for long time residents since the Googlers would move closer to work and rent in the city would fall back to affordable levels.
Unlikely - even if the buses stopped overnight, employees can't move overnight since they have leases and other logistics to deal with.
There's enough demand to live in SF from employees that do work in the city that as long as the economy keeps at its same level, housing freed up from Google workers that choose to live closer to Mountain View will be filled without a large drop in rents.
Yeah, because having a whole bunch of high earning software developers paying income, property, sales, and liquor taxes within the city isn't enough.
San Francisco has no income tax.
They've long enjoyed being an employment center for the area so instead of a payroll tax paid by employers rather than an income tax. But the protesters aren't complaining about taxes, they are complaining that high paid employees are driving up rents and making the city expensive. However, if large employers continue to bus employees out of the city for jobs, then I'm sure SF will revisit the income tax issue.
Easy solution: These companies should open major offices in downtown San Francisco. Build a skyscraper (vertical campus!) that is walking distance from a BART subway stop. They already have one (very small) office in the downtown SF area (opened in 2007). Same with Yahoo (though they can't afford a skyscraper), who recently bought the old SF Chronicle building.
Build a skyscraper!? You really don't know anything about SF, do you?
So the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe are shuttled to work in their private Wi-Fi enabled comfort busses, free from having to deal with the riff-raff of society while the common folk are out their sucking on exhaust fumes.
I can't imagine a scenario where this turns out badly.
I can imagine one scenario -- if the buses stopped overnight and suddenly 30,000 people decided to drive to work instead of take a shuttle since public transit is so unusable for their commute. So instead of hundreds of buses, you'd have thousands of extra cars on the road.
I started thinking to myself, "Wow, I only live a mile from where they pick folks up, and they drop me off about a mile from work" Maybe SF should take into consideration that non-goog-app-fac employees might want to ride on the same line. These companies should consider allowing non-employees to pay a fare to use the busses.
There are few people that live in SF and work a mile from Google HQ in Mountain View that aren't already Google Employees -- I'm sure there are some, but few would choose to do that commute if they didn't have the bus service -- the peninsula is so spread out that there just aren't that many employers close to each other, which is why transit is so difficult t here . It wouldn't even be worth setting up a program to let those few people reserve a spot on a bus and pay the fare (which would likely have to be in the $20 range to cover costs of providing the bus service and fare collection)
So they're being too eco-friendly with the bus rides? Or everyone's jealous about the benefits? Or public transportation isn't crowded enough? I don't get it but I have the sneaking suspicion that these people are morons.
They probably just wanted revenue so they decided to tax the buses.
They aren't earning any revenue from the buses -- state law prohibits the city from earning a profit on the bus stop fees, so the fees equal the administrative overhead to collect them.
Sounds like the Tech companies need to get the hell out of Commie-Fornia.
They are no longer welcome, and that state HATES businesses with a passion.
If California hates tech companies so badly, then one must wonder why there are so many out there. I'm thinking that it takes more than cheap rent to attract a vibrant start-up culture. Perhaps it takes investment capital and qualified employees too. And good weather doesn't hurt either.
Who is the bigger moron -- those that protest against a Google Developer for his work on technology, or someone that reads about a protest in Berkeley and tells the people of San Francisco to stop protesting?
That said, Google could pack up and leave SF without making difference in the economy -- there aren't *that* many Google employees in SF. But if all of the tech companies (iuncluding those with significant presence in SF) disappeared overnight (like they did during the original dot-com Bust), then it would have an effect on the city -- both good and bad. Not everyone saw the dot-com bust as a bad thing, and are hoping for another bust.
There are men and women in the Congo, slaving away in giant pits in order to extract gold and other precious metals from the earth. This gold will go into phones and tablets made by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft
Unless they all walked there and are wearing homemade clothes from home grown cotton weaved by hand into fabric, and "printed" their flyers by hand by writing them using sustainably harvested carbon pencils on home made papyrus, and organized the protest through word of mouth (which was probably aided by the fact that they all live in the same cave) rather than using email and iPhones, they are being disingenuous by protesting against resources used for technology that they themselves use and enjoy.
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I thought they were already charging for access to the Google Play store and Google Apps like Maps. I thought that was why Android based devices like the Nook, Kindle; and Cyanogenmod releases didn't include access to Google Apps and the Store. Is that just a licensing restriction?
Is a 75 cent fee really significant to anyone that wants their Android device to have access to the Google Apps and Play store? It's not like there aren't alternatives (though the Google Maps alternatives are lacking).
The difference between an EV battery and propane tank is that if the propane tank gets dented, it doesn't cost $8000 to replace it. And the battery weighs a bit more, too.
I don't own the battery, and since I'm not going to swap out an 800lb battery myself, if it's dented, then either the automated machine or the service station that swapped it out dented it, not me so they can deal with it. (unless the car was in an accident, then insurance will pay for it).
I can guarantee that by 2030 we will not have batteries that are capable of taking a charge fast enough to make any of this feasible.
There is no battery capable of being recharged as fast as you can fill your gas tank.
Swapping batteries is an idiotic idea. Anyone who has ever exchanged a propane or other gas cylinder can attest to this.
EV battery range is already sufficient to meet the needs of almost all daily commute trips, why does an EV need to charge as fast as a gasoline powered car to be feasible?
I've swapped out propane cylinders hundreds of times on commercial forklifts, I don't see what the issue is? The supplier comes in once a month, takes out the empty cylinders from the storage rack and leaves full ones. Likewise, when I need a new tank for my BBQ grill, I take it to home depot and exchange it for a full one. In both cases, I don't really "own" the cylinder, the supplier does.
I've never swapped out an EV battery, but I don't see why it would be any different -- I pay a battery exchange fee and I assume that the battery will keep track of how much power I used - if I only got 70% of the power that the battery was supposed to provide, then I get a credit and the supplier takes that battery out of circulation.
You need 300 miles or more and a recharge time of 4 minutes or less for there to be parity between an EV and today's gasoline powered car.
Even if such parity is achieved, there is still no better alternative to utility generation from fossil fuels other than utility generation via nuclear power. Batteries don't generate power, they store it.
Yet even when an EV is powered by a fossil fuel burning plant, it's still more efficient and cheaper to operate than a gasoline powered car.
Lets say i relocate cross country.
I can fill up at any gasoline station.
I am completely shit out of luck with a Tesla.
And believe it or not, people still do relocate. Or go on a road trip, or vacation or visit families.
The first time I relocated across the country, I towed the car behind a moving truck. The second time, I paid someone to haul it.
The last time we went on a big family vacation trip by car, we left the small commute car at home and rented a minivan.
It seems a little silly to design an entire fueling ecosystem around someone's need to occasionally relocate or go on vacation.
So unless there are countless charging stations nationwide or a program to swap out batteries when they're almost out of charge, it's not going to replace a gasoline engine anytime soon.
There already are countless charging stations and there will be more. The difference between an EV charge station and a gas station is that you can put an EV charger anywhere, so you can have them at shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, etc.
If an automaker made something like a Leaf, except with a small fuel tank (whatever fuel the customer wanted) and an Onan generator for that fuel, that would solve both short-range solutions, not to mention allow longer trips.
A Volt is decent, but what would be the next step is having the fossil fuel burner only have the function of charging the batteries, not part of the drivetrain.
The engineers that built the Volt apparently already did the cost-benefit analysis, and found that it still made sense to have the gasoline engine help power the car.
The fact that pure motor-generator electric drivetrains have been used in locomotives for decades, but still haven't made it to hybrid cars shows that it's really not (yet) the best way to build such a car. There are losses in taking rotational energy, turning it into electrical power, then turning that electrical power back into rotational energy, so it may be more efficient to use power from the engine to drive the wheels directly.
This would allow it to just run at one RPM (likely 1800 RPM if a four pole, 3600 RPM if a two pole, or 3000 RPM if a two pole and in Europe.) It is a lot easier to design an engine that just runs at one speed than worry about transmissions and power bands.
Then why wouldn't you just run the generator engine at whatever optimal speed you want, maybe 3117 rpm is best -- in a car there's no reason to generate power at the local AC powerline frequency, and there may be no reason to generator AC power at all - maybe generating DC directly would be better.
No kidding. They'll tax the hell out of electricity to make up for lost gasoline taxes...nothing is free...
And just how expensive are these cars, and how long do you have to sit and wait for them to recharge?
I think it's more likely that they'll move to mileage based road taxes before they attempt to tax electricity in lieu of a fuel tax.
The charge times for various electric cars are available online, but for the vast majority of trips people make, the charge time is immaterial -- instead of a 10 minute stop at a gas station every week or two, you can spend 10 seconds each night plugging in the home charger to let it charge overnight (or perhaps eventually, just park it in your garage where the inductive charger automatically charges it). Whether it takes 2 hours or 10 hours doesn't really matter when the car is going to be sitting there for 12 hours anyway.
For longer trips, there are a number of solutions ranging from 20 minute fast chargers or fast battery swapouts to renting a more comfortable long-range vehicle for long trips and using the small EV for your daily commute.
There's no reason why an EV has to replicate a gasoline powered car to be useful.
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.
Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?
Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?
I don't know the average power usage of a home in Washington DC. But let's say that the home uses an average of 1000KWh/month, and that they want to charge their 24KWh car 3 times a week, for 12 charges/month, or around 300KWh, so that means they need to generate 1300KWh/month.
According to this solar calculator, such a system in Washington DC would require 1100 sq ft of roof space, and cost $68,000 before incentives, or $24,000 after incentives. It would save nearly $200/month in electric bills, and is estimated to save the homeowner $90,000 over the projected 25 year lifespan of the system.
If they really wanted to fill a 5000sq ft roof, they'd be generating around 5500KWh/month.
The bus stops are for public transportation.
Since SFMTA is "renting" the stops for $1/day, it turns out that the bus stops are for all bus transport.
That what buses where for. People who couldn't afford their own transportation They weren't created for better traffic, and they are the least green way to move people.
Why do you say that buses are the least green way to move people? Full buses are very efficient. An 8mpg bus with 50 passengers gets 400 passenger miles per gallon. 200 passenger mpg if it runs half the route empty.
Fill a 12 mpg Hummer H2 with 6 passengers and it tops out at 72 passenger mpg.
Even if the bus has only 10 passengers and runs half the route empty, it's still getting 40 passenger miles/gallon -- better than most cars on the road.
I think small passenger ferries take the crown for least-green method of travel.
3rd party surveys show that 46% of the Googlers would move if the shuttle buses went away.
How many would take public transit to Mountain View? I still say that most of the remaining 15,000 would commute by car , because unless you live close to Caltrain, taking Muni to get there is a non-starter. So instead of a few hundred buses on the streets, there'd be 10,000 cars competing for roads *and* parking.
It wouldn't be so bad if their drivers weren't pricks. I've been cut off several times
by these assholes. At least VTA has supervisors that monitor drivers.
There are lots of pricks on the roads, I haven't found employee shuttle drivers to be worse than others, they are just more visible in those big white buses.
Build a skyscraper!? You really don't know anything about SF, do you?
I live there, though I can't say I've tried to construct a building there. How about you?
You do realize that pretty much the entirety of Mission Bay was built in the last year or two, right? Tons of tall buildings (that link is just condos) going up in that area, among quite a few others. I could count maybe a dozen 20+ floor complexes around the city that are opening within a year of today. That includes the 80-floor Transbay Tower.
Funny that you mention the Transbay Terminal -- planning for the Transbay Terminal replacement began around 2000, and the project isn't slated to be finished until 2017, nearly 20 years later. And this project fulfills a civic need to have a transit terminal, it's not just a private office building. Total cost for the center is projected to be around $4.5B. And it's already $300M over budget, they kept the project going by taking money from funds that were supposed to be used to extend the trains there -- you know, the whole purpose of a transit center... transit!
Somehow I don't think Google is going to commit billions of dollars and 2 decades to trying to build an office tower in SF. Especially given that many in SF already blame Google for the city's problems.
Hello, Tu quoque fallacy.
One does not need to operate completely in adherence or consistency with a concept or argument they're promoting in order for that concept or argument to be valid. Thus: nor is it valid to challenge someone's argument because they have failed to do so.
Argument pro tip: if you're focusing on the person (ad hominem) you're Doing It Wrong.
Hello, Hypocrite:
a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings
Don't expect someone to listen to your message if you choose not to follow the message yourself. Being a hypocrite may not necessarily mean that your message is not valid, but most people are not going to stop smoking when their doctor tells them to stop smoking while he smokes a cigarette. Do as I say, not as I do might work when you're a parent (and not often even then), but it's not going to win over people to your cause.
Argument pro tip 2: If you resort to quoting Latin to show why you're winning the argument, you've already lost the argument.
I don't particularly agree with these guys, but the argument of "you're not a ridiculously exaggerated shining beacon of the ideals I lay upon you, so your argument is worthless" is pretty piss poor.
So if I stand in front of you eating a steak and tell you that you need to be a vegetarian because your meat eating habits are cruel to animals, you wouldn't find me to be the least bit disingenuous? Realistically, I don't need to be a vegetarian to think that killing animals for food is bad, and really, why shouldn't I tell you that what you're doing is wrong even as I do the same thing myself?
Talking on an iPhone while giving a Google engineer a digitally printed flyer to tell him that his use of technology is forcing men and women in the Congo into slavery to mine gold certainly seems to be diluting the message. If they'd just stuck with things like privacy concerns, worries about robot cars on the roads, etc, that's one thing, but to tell someone that his use of technology is bad, while they are using much of the same technology themselves just comes across as hypocritical.
Just like the earth's climate can change, so can the business climate of a state, and California's has. Momentum will carry things for now, but the state seems determined to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
And if you think the San Francisco Bay Area has cheap rent, you are way off base.
I don't think California's business climate has gotten notably worse than the last tech boom, and yet companies still keep coming. It could certainly shift in the future, but shows no sign of doing so. I thought the Bay Area (Silicon Valley in particular) was going to die when a lot of the semiconductor makers moved out, but that hasn't proven to be the case.
The Bay Area is huge -- 7000 square miles and 7 million people, so any large scale shift will take decades. It's a lot easier to recruit people to grow your startup when you don't have to relocate employees, which is one thing that makes the Bay Area attractive despite the high cost of living.
I wasn't saying SF has cheap rent, just that people that say Google should move to Portland, or Austin or Wichita or wherever rents are cheap and land is plentiful (for now) are missing the point.
That could actually be a net win for long time residents since the Googlers would move closer to work and rent in the city would fall back to affordable levels.
Unlikely - even if the buses stopped overnight, employees can't move overnight since they have leases and other logistics to deal with.
There's enough demand to live in SF from employees that do work in the city that as long as the economy keeps at its same level, housing freed up from Google workers that choose to live closer to Mountain View will be filled without a large drop in rents.
Yeah, because having a whole bunch of high earning software developers paying income, property, sales, and liquor taxes within the city isn't enough.
San Francisco has no income tax.
They've long enjoyed being an employment center for the area so instead of a payroll tax paid by employers rather than an income tax. But the protesters aren't complaining about taxes, they are complaining that high paid employees are driving up rents and making the city expensive. However, if large employers continue to bus employees out of the city for jobs, then I'm sure SF will revisit the income tax issue.
Easy solution: These companies should open major offices in downtown San Francisco. Build a skyscraper (vertical campus!) that is walking distance from a BART subway stop. They already have one (very small) office in the downtown SF area (opened in 2007). Same with Yahoo (though they can't afford a skyscraper), who recently bought the old SF Chronicle building.
Build a skyscraper!? You really don't know anything about SF, do you?
So the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe are shuttled to work in their private Wi-Fi enabled comfort busses, free from having to deal with the riff-raff of society while the common folk are out their sucking on exhaust fumes.
I can't imagine a scenario where this turns out badly.
I can imagine one scenario -- if the buses stopped overnight and suddenly 30,000 people decided to drive to work instead of take a shuttle since public transit is so unusable for their commute. So instead of hundreds of buses, you'd have thousands of extra cars on the road.
I started thinking to myself, "Wow, I only live a mile from where they pick folks up, and they drop me off about a mile from work" Maybe SF should take into consideration that non-goog-app-fac employees might want to ride on the same line. These companies should consider allowing non-employees to pay a fare to use the busses.
There are few people that live in SF and work a mile from Google HQ in Mountain View that aren't already Google Employees -- I'm sure there are some, but few would choose to do that commute if they didn't have the bus service -- the peninsula is so spread out that there just aren't that many employers close to each other, which is why transit is so difficult t here . It wouldn't even be worth setting up a program to let those few people reserve a spot on a bus and pay the fare (which would likely have to be in the $20 range to cover costs of providing the bus service and fare collection)
So they're being too eco-friendly with the bus rides? Or everyone's jealous about the benefits? Or public transportation isn't crowded enough? I don't get it but I have the sneaking suspicion that these people are morons.
They probably just wanted revenue so they decided to tax the buses.
They aren't earning any revenue from the buses -- state law prohibits the city from earning a profit on the bus stop fees, so the fees equal the administrative overhead to collect them.
Sounds like the Tech companies need to get the hell out of Commie-Fornia.
They are no longer welcome, and that state HATES businesses with a passion.
If California hates tech companies so badly, then one must wonder why there are so many out there. I'm thinking that it takes more than cheap rent to attract a vibrant start-up culture. Perhaps it takes investment capital and qualified employees too. And good weather doesn't hurt either.
You are morons.
Who is the bigger moron -- those that protest against a Google Developer for his work on technology, or someone that reads about a protest in Berkeley and tells the people of San Francisco to stop protesting?
That said, Google could pack up and leave SF without making difference in the economy -- there aren't *that* many Google employees in SF. But if all of the tech companies (iuncluding those with significant presence in SF) disappeared overnight (like they did during the original dot-com Bust), then it would have an effect on the city -- both good and bad. Not everyone saw the dot-com bust as a bad thing, and are hoping for another bust.
Part of their flyer says:
There are men and women in the Congo, slaving away in giant pits in order to extract gold and other precious metals from the earth. This gold will go into phones and tablets made by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft
Unless they all walked there and are wearing homemade clothes from home grown cotton weaved by hand into fabric, and "printed" their flyers by hand by writing them using sustainably harvested carbon pencils on home made papyrus, and organized the protest through word of mouth (which was probably aided by the fact that they all live in the same cave) rather than using email and iPhones, they are being disingenuous by protesting against resources used for technology that they themselves use and enjoy.