Since the original agreement was not to sue and not to say something, and that got broken, nothing to keep him from taking them to court and suing over the original thing.
You're absolutely right... if the school's lawyer was blindingly incompetent. Otherwise, the settlement contract was in two sections, one of which settled the question in exchange for a token payment (e.g. $1) and the other of which contracted for non-disclosure in exchange for $80K. Further, a competent attorney would have ensured that both parties agreed in front of the judge that the token payment had been made and that the original issue was settled, and that the judge then dismissed the suit with prejudice, barring it from ever being raised again.
She was the focus of the case. Not a block of wood.
She was the focus of his age discrimination case? He was 69 when they declined to renew his contract, and he sued for age discrimination. How did that involve his daughter?
Then they screwed up already by signing the agreement. I don't think it's realistic to have this kind of stuff happening in your family and then not telling you teenage kid the end result. I mean, after a year of mom and dad being nervous and stressed about the thing you will - not say a word to your kid? WTF kind of parenting is that? So they should not have taken an agreement that had that kind of a clause in the first place.
Telling her wasn't the problem. Her telling everyone via Facebook is the problem.
Legally, telling her was the problem. Unless she was a party to the contract (which, as a minor, she couldn't have been), then they had a contractual obligation to keep it from her. In practice, had she not spilled the beans there'd have been no impact of the breach, but it was still a breach.
Of course, if the school district really wanted to keep it quiet, they should have contacted the family and demanded that she take the posting down and re-commit to silence. Because by exercising their right under the settlement to declare a breach and refuse payment, they ended up highlighting it on national news. Streisand effect. I wonder if law schools these days are including discussion of the Streisand effect, because lawyers really need to understand it and consider it when advising their clients. Publicity has always been an issue that has to be considered carefully, but the Internet has made it orders of magnitude more important.
I'm going to put outlets every six feet along every wall, plus outlets wherever it seems like I even might someday want one. I did that in a previous remodel, and it was nice.
Why should we applaud the good prince's largesses? Yes, this is actually nice, encouraging the use of public buses and giving short change for that.
But I find it weird that a giant company wants to substitute itself with what should the town's/muncipality's/local government's duties. And it's a PR move anyway, one that reinforces the notion that a giant private company can appriopriate public space, pay little to no tax and do whatever it wants with no accountability.
You don't understand what's going on here.
People have been complaining that Google uses public bus stops without paying for them. Google thought that was reasonable and offered to pay the city for the use of the stops, but state law doesn't allow the city to charge a reasonable amount for their use. So, Google and the city worked out what they thought would be a reasonable amount, and Google is paying that in the form of a donation, buying bus passes for kids. Meanwhile, Google is helping the city lobby to change the state law, so that the company can simply pay for the right to use the bus stops.
Google has been trying to do the right things here, from beginning to end. Providing buses reduces congestion and greenhouse gases, and is a nice perk for employees who want to live in the city.
Google hides its profits in the Carribean and pays no taxes. What about fixing that. Hire well paid accountant/fiscalist lawyer types to try and close as many of those fucking tax loopholes as they can.
Are you proposing that the city should do that? The city doesn't have any right or power to tax Google (though it collects a lot of property taxes and sales taxes from the Google employees who live in the city, as well as property and other taxes for Google's building in the city). The taxes you're talking about that Google manages to avoid are largely federal, so San Francisco wouldn't see a dime of them anyway. Frankly, no one would see anything; they'd disappear into the federal deficit without making a ripple.
In any case, not only is your tax argument completely irrelevant to the question, it's pretty ridiculous. Do you pay more federal taxes than you have to? If a company can legally avoid paying billions, do you seriously expect them to volunteer it? If you really think this is a problem, talk to your representatives about changing the federal laws.
Personally, I think that corporate taxes, like all other forms of hidden taxation, are evil. All taxes are ultimately paid by the people as a whole, and taxing various, intermediate cash flows obscures how much the people are paying. Money Google pays in taxes is money that can't be paid to investors (which is taxed as capital gains), can't pay employees (which is taxed as income), can't spend on goods and services (which are taxed in all sorts of ways -- some of them also evil), and can't invest (which pushes the money to other companies which may buy stuff, pay employees, etc.). Taxes are necessary, but they should be transparent. Property taxes are good. Income taxes are good, including capital gains income taxes -- though mandatory withholdings are obnoxious. Sales taxes are okay, and it's even fine to tax different goods differently -- taxing luxury cars harder than food, for example, makes sense. The key is that all taxes should be directly paid by and be visible to the voters.
Any significant industry is going to be ridiculous if you first cherry-pick your examples, selecting for lunacy/idiocy, and then state them in the most exaggerated, sensationalist way you can think of.
I've had my moments of frustration with making Ethernet cables, but like most anything else it's a question of practice. At first, only about one end in five worked, then I got to where I could make them quickly and correctly... but then I went a couple of years without doing it and struggled the next time I had to make a few. At this point, having done it on and off for enough years, I know that the first cable or two I make has to be done slowly and carefully, double-checking everything, but it'll work and the next few will be quick and easy.
Here in a few months I'm going to wire my new house myself, so I expect to get extremely good at it. The house is new construction so I'm going to take the opportunity while the walls are open to wire the whole thing very heavily with Cat 6 -- by "heavily" I mean, an end point every eight feet in every wall in the house, with all lines down to a rack in the basement. I'm debating putting conduit everywhere, too for future-proofing, but I honestly think that Cat 6 is probably future-proof enough. It'll enable at least 10 Gigabit connections, perhaps faster, and the future seems to be going mostly wireless anyway.
Those 'conservatives' at the meeting were really agitating for Apple to make decisions based on their short-term ROI rather than their long-term ROI.
I don't think so.
You're definitely right that short-term thinking can damage a company's long-term prospects, but I don't see how increasing energy costs today to be green does anything to help the long-term ROI. Of course we all need to eventually shift our energy production to less-impactful sources, but that'll happen at roughly the same pace no matter what Apple does, and Apple could just choose the lowest-cost route now and then shift when greener sources become more cost-effective. It does make sense to make some projections of future energy costs and make decisions regarding long-term capital investments (e.g. the design of data centers), based on expected net costs, even if the long-term best option means front-loading some of the costs, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about paying more for today's energy.
No, I think Tim Cook was 100% honest when he said that it's not about the profit motive. Many slashdotters want to reduce corporate decisionmaking processes to pure bottom-line evaluations, probably because we like to have simple, black and white rules we can logically evaluate. But the reality is that corporations are made up of people, and people go off in all sorts of directions.
Now, corporate executives do have a legal obligation to fulfill the promises made to shareholders in the articles of incorporation and the information provided in public offerings, and those documents nearly always do specify that the company's primary goal is to make money. But except in extreme cases those obligations are pretty hard to enforce, and in practice execs have a great deal of freedom of action. With something like green energy, it's very easy for leaders to follow their own personal moral compasses and, if they ever need to, they can easily justify their decisions based on arguments about maintaining good relations with local governments, or building brand image, or any of a dozen other squishy yet unquestionably valuable things.
But the justifications are very likely to be just that: post hoc explanations used to provide an apparently rational basis for decisions that were actually made on an emotional basis. The explanations may well be perfectly reasonable and rational, but that doesn't change the fact that they were made for other reasons.
This assumption of perfect profit motives often causes people to misunderstand corporate decisions, in both positive and negative directions. It often makes those who are skeptical of corporate power believe that companies have nefarious ulterior motives for any apparently socially-responsible decision (we see this in slashdot posts *all* the time), and it often makes those who are convinced the free market can do no wrong believe that corporate leaders are immune to personally self-serving decionmaking and other truly nefarious moves because the market should drive out such inefficiencies, especially in the long term.
It's wise to always keep in mind that while corporations are legally "people" in some senses, they're really agglomerations of people. Further, they're rarely strictly hierarchical, either; it's not at all uncommon that one portion of a corporation works toward one goal while another works for the opposite, and the two efforts may never be reconciled. Corporations also change directions frequently due to changes in leadership, which may not even require the replacement of any leader, but merely shifting degrees of influence among the same set of people. However, these directional changes are tempered by corporate culture which is a very real thing, and one that changes more slowly (though it definitely does shift over time) -- but keep in mind that some companies' culture really is "anything for profits".
"screws with a tamper-proof coating, revealing if a person has tried to disassemble it"
I'm pretty sure I would notice if someone took a dremel to my phone.
No you wouldn't. You'd just know your phone was gone. And you'd believe that at least your data was safe, because the self-destruct would have been triggered when the thief removed the screws. Except it wasn't.
I don't think that's it. I'm almost 50. When I was growing up very few people had computers in their homes but we had them available in high school. Maybe there weren't computer nerds but there were technology nerds. Programmable calculators were all the rage.
I'm 44. I got my first computer (at home) when I was 14. A good friend of mine had his first computer at home when we were 9. I used to go over to his house and help him type in games that we got in magazines. With my talented-and-gifted class, I wrote code and ran it on a local bank's mainframe when I was 7 -- utterly trivial stuff, but still.
Bill Gates started playing with computers (at school) in 8th grade, age ~13 -- and that was 40 years ago, when I was 4.
But in the sort of work I do - infrastructure and backend stuff - I've never seen a hint of it. We welcome anyone who's a competent coder and who actually wants to write the sort of programs that don't have UIs. It's a fairly introverted and inoffensive bunch even by developer standards, so it's not like "inappropriate comments" are likely regardless.
This is my experience as well, and it applies to all forms of social discrimination, not just gender. Race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion (well, except for vi users), national origin... none of it matters in the slightest. The people who can do the job are so scarce, and all that other stuff is so irrelevant, that no one cares.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Many companies (like Google) are convinced that diverse teams produce better results, and are fretting over the lack of diversity. So anyone who isn't the stereotypical white or asian male has an advantage. Not enough to overcome inability to do the job, of course, but still an advantage.
As a 44 year-old software engineer who works with a lot of others in their 40s, 50s, and 60s (as well as many in their 20s and 30s), my personal experience doesn't support this. That doesn't mean it's not true, of course, but I wonder if the causal arrow is in the direction that these articles presume. Most of the former SWEs I know who are now doing other things made the career change by choice, either because they got tired of writing code, or because they felt like they could get more money doing other things.
Trying to recruit more women is a politically correct way to encourage folks to enter the profession, increasing the supply and subsequently reducing wages.
This article is about Google incenting girls to try programming, Google's issue is not that they're not paying enough, but that they simply can't find the people.
The Google office I work at (Boulder) experiences a near 100% offer acceptance rate. Almost every engineer who interviews and gets an offer takes it, which is a pretty strong indicator that the compensation is fair -- and Boulder is a tech-heavy area, and within the extended Denver metro area, so engineers here have lots of options and salaries in the region are pretty decent. The problem is that the vast majority of the people who interview don't make the cut. AFAIK, the situation is the same at other sites. The company pays plenty well to attract talent... there's just not that much talent to be had. I think most of the big Silicon Valley tech companies are in the same boat.
What you is true some places, of course. There are a lot of companies that pay crap salaries and then wonder why they can't find anyone. But I don't think that's the case with any of the big tech giants.
With the current wording GEMA looks like the bad guy.
So... the current wording is correct.
I actually believe copyright law is valuable and has a place, when appropriately balanced, but it's tilted so far in favor of content owners right now, and the record labels and their associations are so abusive, that my starting position is always to assume they're in the wrong.
(Disclaimer: I happen to be a Google engineer, but I don't speak for Google and Google doesn't speak for me. In addition, my opinions on this matter long pre-dated my employment at Google -- in fact they're derived primarily from the year I spent working for Universal Music Group. Based on what I learned there, if you assume in any dispute that the labels are being slimy and abusive, you're basically always right.)
I don't know about most people, but if I'm driving more than an hour or two, I'm renting a car so as not to put the miles on my own cars. I would never drive my commuter long distances
I often rent for long drives, too, but I do it because my commuter car can't drive far (Nissan LEAF), and my family car / toy hauler is a gas guzzler (Dodge Durango). So if I don't need to haul a bunch of people or tow the boat or something, renting a Prius costs less.
other people visit and just don't get the attraction.
Got that right!
But I'm pretty much the polar opposite, I guess. I'm building a house in rural Utah, on a small five acre lot. I like the distance to my neighbors measured in miles.
I cycle to work and I prefer a road bike. But my ride is 25 miles one way, and takes better than an hour on my road bike. I also have a more comfortable bike, but it takes a good 20-30 minutes longer to get to work if I ride that.
But most people won't ride as far as I do.
It's definitely not a dangerous area (like most of Manhattan these days), but it's not anyplace you can live either; the cost of living there is astronomical. There's a reason so many Manhattan workers are moving out to Brooklyn, Queens, and northern New Jersey, or even out to Connecticut or Long Island.
I've made a few visits to the NYC office, and it's even worse than you say. Probably half of my peers there do live in Manhattan, near the office, but they live in tiny single-room studios while their families live in Connecticut. So they spend most of every week living alone in an oversized closet because that's all they can afford (and it's not like Google doesn't pay well), then go home on weekends.
I can't figure out why they do it. I mean, I know why they work for Google, but I don't know why they choose to do it in the NYC office.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
On the other hand, the vast majority of employees at Google's Mountain View campus do not live in the city, and don't want to. There are enough who do to make it worthwhile to run buses, but most don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the original agreement was not to sue and not to say something, and that got broken, nothing to keep him from taking them to court and suing over the original thing.
You're absolutely right... if the school's lawyer was blindingly incompetent. Otherwise, the settlement contract was in two sections, one of which settled the question in exchange for a token payment (e.g. $1) and the other of which contracted for non-disclosure in exchange for $80K. Further, a competent attorney would have ensured that both parties agreed in front of the judge that the token payment had been made and that the original issue was settled, and that the judge then dismissed the suit with prejudice, barring it from ever being raised again.
Really, lawyers do know their business.
She was the focus of the case. Not a block of wood.
She was the focus of his age discrimination case? He was 69 when they declined to renew his contract, and he sued for age discrimination. How did that involve his daughter?
Then they screwed up already by signing the agreement. I don't think it's realistic to have this kind of stuff happening in your family and then not telling you teenage kid the end result. I mean, after a year of mom and dad being nervous and stressed about the thing you will - not say a word to your kid? WTF kind of parenting is that? So they should not have taken an agreement that had that kind of a clause in the first place.
Telling her wasn't the problem. Her telling everyone via Facebook is the problem.
Legally, telling her was the problem. Unless she was a party to the contract (which, as a minor, she couldn't have been), then they had a contractual obligation to keep it from her. In practice, had she not spilled the beans there'd have been no impact of the breach, but it was still a breach.
Of course, if the school district really wanted to keep it quiet, they should have contacted the family and demanded that she take the posting down and re-commit to silence. Because by exercising their right under the settlement to declare a breach and refuse payment, they ended up highlighting it on national news. Streisand effect. I wonder if law schools these days are including discussion of the Streisand effect, because lawyers really need to understand it and consider it when advising their clients. Publicity has always been an issue that has to be considered carefully, but the Internet has made it orders of magnitude more important.
I'm going to put outlets every six feet along every wall, plus outlets wherever it seems like I even might someday want one. I did that in a previous remodel, and it was nice.
Why should we applaud the good prince's largesses? Yes, this is actually nice, encouraging the use of public buses and giving short change for that. But I find it weird that a giant company wants to substitute itself with what should the town's/muncipality's/local government's duties. And it's a PR move anyway, one that reinforces the notion that a giant private company can appriopriate public space, pay little to no tax and do whatever it wants with no accountability.
You don't understand what's going on here.
People have been complaining that Google uses public bus stops without paying for them. Google thought that was reasonable and offered to pay the city for the use of the stops, but state law doesn't allow the city to charge a reasonable amount for their use. So, Google and the city worked out what they thought would be a reasonable amount, and Google is paying that in the form of a donation, buying bus passes for kids. Meanwhile, Google is helping the city lobby to change the state law, so that the company can simply pay for the right to use the bus stops.
Google has been trying to do the right things here, from beginning to end. Providing buses reduces congestion and greenhouse gases, and is a nice perk for employees who want to live in the city.
Google hides its profits in the Carribean and pays no taxes. What about fixing that. Hire well paid accountant/fiscalist lawyer types to try and close as many of those fucking tax loopholes as they can.
Are you proposing that the city should do that? The city doesn't have any right or power to tax Google (though it collects a lot of property taxes and sales taxes from the Google employees who live in the city, as well as property and other taxes for Google's building in the city). The taxes you're talking about that Google manages to avoid are largely federal, so San Francisco wouldn't see a dime of them anyway. Frankly, no one would see anything; they'd disappear into the federal deficit without making a ripple.
In any case, not only is your tax argument completely irrelevant to the question, it's pretty ridiculous. Do you pay more federal taxes than you have to? If a company can legally avoid paying billions, do you seriously expect them to volunteer it? If you really think this is a problem, talk to your representatives about changing the federal laws.
Personally, I think that corporate taxes, like all other forms of hidden taxation, are evil. All taxes are ultimately paid by the people as a whole, and taxing various, intermediate cash flows obscures how much the people are paying. Money Google pays in taxes is money that can't be paid to investors (which is taxed as capital gains), can't pay employees (which is taxed as income), can't spend on goods and services (which are taxed in all sorts of ways -- some of them also evil), and can't invest (which pushes the money to other companies which may buy stuff, pay employees, etc.). Taxes are necessary, but they should be transparent. Property taxes are good. Income taxes are good, including capital gains income taxes -- though mandatory withholdings are obnoxious. Sales taxes are okay, and it's even fine to tax different goods differently -- taxing luxury cars harder than food, for example, makes sense. The key is that all taxes should be directly paid by and be visible to the voters.
Did you read beyond the first paragraph of my post?
You didn't read the post you responded to.
Any significant industry is going to be ridiculous if you first cherry-pick your examples, selecting for lunacy/idiocy, and then state them in the most exaggerated, sensationalist way you can think of.
I've had my moments of frustration with making Ethernet cables, but like most anything else it's a question of practice. At first, only about one end in five worked, then I got to where I could make them quickly and correctly... but then I went a couple of years without doing it and struggled the next time I had to make a few. At this point, having done it on and off for enough years, I know that the first cable or two I make has to be done slowly and carefully, double-checking everything, but it'll work and the next few will be quick and easy.
Here in a few months I'm going to wire my new house myself, so I expect to get extremely good at it. The house is new construction so I'm going to take the opportunity while the walls are open to wire the whole thing very heavily with Cat 6 -- by "heavily" I mean, an end point every eight feet in every wall in the house, with all lines down to a rack in the basement. I'm debating putting conduit everywhere, too for future-proofing, but I honestly think that Cat 6 is probably future-proof enough. It'll enable at least 10 Gigabit connections, perhaps faster, and the future seems to be going mostly wireless anyway.
No my beef is with Google/Android's weakness at letting users control their apps, I'll keep using my iPhone, thanks.
Because Apple/iOS gives you such strong control over your apps?
Those 'conservatives' at the meeting were really agitating for Apple to make decisions based on their short-term ROI rather than their long-term ROI.
I don't think so.
You're definitely right that short-term thinking can damage a company's long-term prospects, but I don't see how increasing energy costs today to be green does anything to help the long-term ROI. Of course we all need to eventually shift our energy production to less-impactful sources, but that'll happen at roughly the same pace no matter what Apple does, and Apple could just choose the lowest-cost route now and then shift when greener sources become more cost-effective. It does make sense to make some projections of future energy costs and make decisions regarding long-term capital investments (e.g. the design of data centers), based on expected net costs, even if the long-term best option means front-loading some of the costs, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about paying more for today's energy.
No, I think Tim Cook was 100% honest when he said that it's not about the profit motive. Many slashdotters want to reduce corporate decisionmaking processes to pure bottom-line evaluations, probably because we like to have simple, black and white rules we can logically evaluate. But the reality is that corporations are made up of people, and people go off in all sorts of directions.
Now, corporate executives do have a legal obligation to fulfill the promises made to shareholders in the articles of incorporation and the information provided in public offerings, and those documents nearly always do specify that the company's primary goal is to make money. But except in extreme cases those obligations are pretty hard to enforce, and in practice execs have a great deal of freedom of action. With something like green energy, it's very easy for leaders to follow their own personal moral compasses and, if they ever need to, they can easily justify their decisions based on arguments about maintaining good relations with local governments, or building brand image, or any of a dozen other squishy yet unquestionably valuable things.
But the justifications are very likely to be just that: post hoc explanations used to provide an apparently rational basis for decisions that were actually made on an emotional basis. The explanations may well be perfectly reasonable and rational, but that doesn't change the fact that they were made for other reasons.
This assumption of perfect profit motives often causes people to misunderstand corporate decisions, in both positive and negative directions. It often makes those who are skeptical of corporate power believe that companies have nefarious ulterior motives for any apparently socially-responsible decision (we see this in slashdot posts *all* the time), and it often makes those who are convinced the free market can do no wrong believe that corporate leaders are immune to personally self-serving decionmaking and other truly nefarious moves because the market should drive out such inefficiencies, especially in the long term.
It's wise to always keep in mind that while corporations are legally "people" in some senses, they're really agglomerations of people. Further, they're rarely strictly hierarchical, either; it's not at all uncommon that one portion of a corporation works toward one goal while another works for the opposite, and the two efforts may never be reconciled. Corporations also change directions frequently due to changes in leadership, which may not even require the replacement of any leader, but merely shifting degrees of influence among the same set of people. However, these directional changes are tempered by corporate culture which is a very real thing, and one that changes more slowly (though it definitely does shift over time) -- but keep in mind that some companies' culture really is "anything for profits".
he couldn't justify obtaining the necessary necessary agency time to get the warrants to track the spammers
Snowden's documents showed that the FBI was getting information from the NSA on drug traffickers without obtaining warrants.
Yeah, but that's DRUGS. Don't you know there's a war on DRUGS?
"screws with a tamper-proof coating, revealing if a person has tried to disassemble it"
I'm pretty sure I would notice if someone took a dremel to my phone.
No you wouldn't. You'd just know your phone was gone. And you'd believe that at least your data was safe, because the self-destruct would have been triggered when the thief removed the screws. Except it wasn't.
I don't think that's it. I'm almost 50. When I was growing up very few people had computers in their homes but we had them available in high school. Maybe there weren't computer nerds but there were technology nerds. Programmable calculators were all the rage.
I'm 44. I got my first computer (at home) when I was 14. A good friend of mine had his first computer at home when we were 9. I used to go over to his house and help him type in games that we got in magazines. With my talented-and-gifted class, I wrote code and ran it on a local bank's mainframe when I was 7 -- utterly trivial stuff, but still.
Bill Gates started playing with computers (at school) in 8th grade, age ~13 -- and that was 40 years ago, when I was 4.
The GP's argument makes no sense.
But in the sort of work I do - infrastructure and backend stuff - I've never seen a hint of it. We welcome anyone who's a competent coder and who actually wants to write the sort of programs that don't have UIs. It's a fairly introverted and inoffensive bunch even by developer standards, so it's not like "inappropriate comments" are likely regardless.
This is my experience as well, and it applies to all forms of social discrimination, not just gender. Race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion (well, except for vi users), national origin... none of it matters in the slightest. The people who can do the job are so scarce, and all that other stuff is so irrelevant, that no one cares.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Many companies (like Google) are convinced that diverse teams produce better results, and are fretting over the lack of diversity. So anyone who isn't the stereotypical white or asian male has an advantage. Not enough to overcome inability to do the job, of course, but still an advantage.
As a 44 year-old software engineer who works with a lot of others in their 40s, 50s, and 60s (as well as many in their 20s and 30s), my personal experience doesn't support this. That doesn't mean it's not true, of course, but I wonder if the causal arrow is in the direction that these articles presume. Most of the former SWEs I know who are now doing other things made the career change by choice, either because they got tired of writing code, or because they felt like they could get more money doing other things.
After that you statistically will flat-line compared to other options.
Cite?
Trying to recruit more women is a politically correct way to encourage folks to enter the profession, increasing the supply and subsequently reducing wages.
This article is about Google incenting girls to try programming, Google's issue is not that they're not paying enough, but that they simply can't find the people.
The Google office I work at (Boulder) experiences a near 100% offer acceptance rate. Almost every engineer who interviews and gets an offer takes it, which is a pretty strong indicator that the compensation is fair -- and Boulder is a tech-heavy area, and within the extended Denver metro area, so engineers here have lots of options and salaries in the region are pretty decent. The problem is that the vast majority of the people who interview don't make the cut. AFAIK, the situation is the same at other sites. The company pays plenty well to attract talent... there's just not that much talent to be had. I think most of the big Silicon Valley tech companies are in the same boat.
What you is true some places, of course. There are a lot of companies that pay crap salaries and then wonder why they can't find anyone. But I don't think that's the case with any of the big tech giants.
LOL no one cares that you work at google dude
Lawyers do.
With the current wording GEMA looks like the bad guy.
So... the current wording is correct.
I actually believe copyright law is valuable and has a place, when appropriately balanced, but it's tilted so far in favor of content owners right now, and the record labels and their associations are so abusive, that my starting position is always to assume they're in the wrong.
(Disclaimer: I happen to be a Google engineer, but I don't speak for Google and Google doesn't speak for me. In addition, my opinions on this matter long pre-dated my employment at Google -- in fact they're derived primarily from the year I spent working for Universal Music Group. Based on what I learned there, if you assume in any dispute that the labels are being slimy and abusive, you're basically always right.)
I don't know about most people, but if I'm driving more than an hour or two, I'm renting a car so as not to put the miles on my own cars. I would never drive my commuter long distances
I often rent for long drives, too, but I do it because my commuter car can't drive far (Nissan LEAF), and my family car / toy hauler is a gas guzzler (Dodge Durango). So if I don't need to haul a bunch of people or tow the boat or something, renting a Prius costs less.
other people visit and just don't get the attraction.
Got that right!
But I'm pretty much the polar opposite, I guess. I'm building a house in rural Utah, on a small five acre lot. I like the distance to my neighbors measured in miles.
I cycle to work and I prefer a road bike. But my ride is 25 miles one way, and takes better than an hour on my road bike. I also have a more comfortable bike, but it takes a good 20-30 minutes longer to get to work if I ride that. But most people won't ride as far as I do.
It's definitely not a dangerous area (like most of Manhattan these days), but it's not anyplace you can live either; the cost of living there is astronomical. There's a reason so many Manhattan workers are moving out to Brooklyn, Queens, and northern New Jersey, or even out to Connecticut or Long Island.
I've made a few visits to the NYC office, and it's even worse than you say. Probably half of my peers there do live in Manhattan, near the office, but they live in tiny single-room studios while their families live in Connecticut. So they spend most of every week living alone in an oversized closet because that's all they can afford (and it's not like Google doesn't pay well), then go home on weekends.
I can't figure out why they do it. I mean, I know why they work for Google, but I don't know why they choose to do it in the NYC office.
Really.
Apparently the thousands of tech workers that Google, Apple, and others are shuttling from SF to the Peninsula want to live in a city.
On the other hand, the vast majority of employees at Google's Mountain View campus do not live in the city, and don't want to. There are enough who do to make it worthwhile to run buses, but most don't.