Google owes $500 million in fines for the stops they made. It is $271 per incident. There are people paying that right now for doing what Google did. Only Google is getting a free pass.
It's against the law to use SFMTA stops if you are not driving an SFMTA vehicle. Period. What you are thinking of as a cap is actually the fact that there is no legal way to enable a private company to pay for a pass that lets them be the only one to break a law.
It would be impossible for SFMTA to support all the private transportation in the Bay Area stopping at its stops. That is why it is illegal to do so. There would be no room for SFMTA riders or buses if that were the case. We're supposed to have equality under the law. There is no defense for giving Google an exemption to be the only private company that can abuse SFMTA infrastructure.
Nobody gives a shit if Google buses are a net benefit to the city as a whole. The issue is that they used SFMTA stops without permission, without payment, and in violation of the law. Then when the people of the city asked the government of the city why the fuck Google is allowed to do that even as all other companies and individuals who do that are fined, the city said, well, Google will pay something to charity? How is that? Not fucking good enough. We have equal protection under the law in this country. You can't fine me for doing something and not fine Google.
If the Google buses are indeed a net benefit to the city as a whole, then they should be part of the public transit. They are no benefit to me if I live in SF and I work in Mountain View, but not for Google. In that case, they are just a bus that I'm not allowed to take. But they are not part of the public transit because Google doesn't pay its fair share of taxes, and neither do most Silicon Valley companies.
Google can't have it both ways. They can't not pay taxes, not contribute to public transit, then run their own buses and say they have a right to use public transit infrastructure. And they can't skip out on the fines they owe and at the same time say they are doing good for the community.
But the one city that does have urban density and great public transit is San Francisco. Who is apparently expected to run free bus stop infrastructure for Google and look the other way even though Google is breaking the law.
What is amazing is all the knee-jerk libertarian sociopaths here who think San Francisco or SFMTA have victimized Google in some way. One of the major reasons this is all controversial is that the San Francisco government and SFMTA LOOKED THE OTHER WAY while Google did all this. SFMTA cops fined riders who didn't pay their fares, they fined tour buses that stopped at SFMTA stops, but they didn't interfere with Google. They just thought “Google is rich and benevolent” and let them be. It is only after the community asked why are SFMTA cops giving out $1 million in fines to riders who don't pay their fare and non-Google private buses that use SFMTA stops, but nothing for Google, who ran up $500 million in fines all by themselves?
When you get onto an SFMTA vehicle and pay the fare, you are paying not only for that vehicle, but also for the stops. There was a guy who didn't pay his fare recently and SFMTA cops shot him dead. Meanwhile, the same SFMTA cops looked the other way as Google buses rolled up to stops and didn't pay anything. And now, Google is giving some charity. It's not good enough. This is a massive black eye for Google and also for their employees who live in San Francisco, who are quite deserving when their neighbors shun them.
> The only part of this making it at all an unusual situation, Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
Silicon Valley is not in San Francisco. There is no gap in SF's public transit system. Google is not even in the same county as SFMTA. AND, there is plenty of public transit between San Francisco and Mountain View. There is a giant fucking train leaving 3rd and King in San Francisco every half hour that takes you right to fucking Mountain View.
The *problem* is Google pays 6% in taxes and runs its own buses and also wants to use SFMTA facilities for free. They don't support the SFMTA with taxes or fares, but they want to squat on their facilities. The further problem is, when Google got caught, instead of paying the $500 million in fines that they legitimately earned, they worked out some deal where they give some money to charity. Even as everyone else who broke those same laws is still expected to pay their fines. Actual San Francisco citizens and businesses were fined $1 million by SFMTA last year for breaking these laws, and SFMTA cops even shot one guy dead for not paying his fare.
But the idea of Google being treated equally is controversial.
Another problem is Google wants to be seen as part of the community (“our buses are environmentally friendly”) but they don't pay into the community. They barely pay taxes. In that case, OK, run your own buses, but don't use SFMTA stops, and don't complain that the public didn't already build you a fleet of public Google buses. The reason for that is no tax money, because Google and others like them didn't pay taxes.
Imagine if you lived in San Francisco, paying taxes into SFMTA, and you work in Mountain View, but not for Google. You go out to the bus stop outside your house one morning and its suddenly crowded by Google employees. A bus pulls up to the stop it has paid nothing to use, and takes the Google employees directly to Mountain View. You, however, pay to get onto SFMTA and then pay to get on CalTrain and go to Mountain View. Why can't you get on the bus that is direct to Mountain View? Because Google doesn't pay their fair share of taxes. If they did, there could be a new SF-to-Silicon-Valley transit system that served everyone who needed to get between those 2 places, and Google wouldn't have to run their own buses.
So what Google has done is the worst of all worlds. Pay almost no taxes, do nothing to help the community create a public transit system between SF and Silicon Valley, complain about the lack of that public transit system anyway, then run your own buses, squat on public transit infrastructure you don't pay for, then not pay the fines you accrued by doing that, then give some “charity” instead that amounts to a small percentage of the fines, and in the whole process, enable your employees to live somewhere they don't work and don't contribute, so they can drive people out of their homes in San Francisco with their artificial Silicon Valley money.
> Yes. Google is allowed to run a bus service for it's employees without regard to whatever service > San Francisco wants to run. Maybe San Fran ought to hire Google to run it's busses.
First, it is Google that interfered with SFMTA buses, not the other way around. Not sure how you missed that.
Second, you are using a strawman. There is absolutely nobody who said Google doesn't have a right to run buses.
The issue has been entirely about Google doing what Google very definitely does NOT have a right to do:
- Google does not have a right to break the law by squatting on SFMTA facilities (but they did that anyway) - Google does not have a right not to pay the fines they accrued while squatting on SFMTA facilities (but they did not pay them anyway) - Google does not have a right to complain that they have to run their own buses only because of a lack of public transit infrastructure for its workers when Google pays 6% in taxes (but they did anyway) - Google does not have the right to expect the City and County of San Francisco to artificially subsidize a bus service run by a private company in an entirely different city and county (but they apparently did expect that)
If Google has a right to run buses without San Francisco interfering, surely you would agree that San Francisco has a right to run a public transit system without Google interfering? That is all that the citizens of San Francisco are asking for.
> * Rich people can be criminals too but they tend to commit different sorts of crime.
No. Rich people commit all the same crimes as poor people. There are rich Harvard guys selling cocaine to other rich Harvard guys.
What is different is that rich people don't get arrested nearly as much. Rich people don't get terrorized by cops. Cops who want to make their arrest quotas at the end of the month don't go into a rich neighborhood and frame a bunch of people — that is what poor neighborhoods are for. And if a rich person is arrested, there is a bunch of nodding and winking as their rich lawyer gets the rich judge to let them off easy.
You exposed the flaw in the environmentally friendly excuse that Google is hiding behind. But the core issue here the lack of equality in the US. The rich take what they want without paying, they break whatever laws they want without being arrested or fined, while the rest of us have our wages frozen for 40 years, get fined or arrested or shot by a cop at the drop of a hat, and now can't even get a fucking place to stand at a bus stop.
During the time when SFMTA cops failed to fine Google buses for stopping at SFMTA stops, the SFMTA cops gave out $1 million in fines to regular, everyday people. Google ran up over $500 million in fines that they are not even being asked to pay. So they give some charity to make it gloss over. Nobody wanted charity. What we wanted was EQUALITY.
There are people appealing their SFMTA fines and saying, “I used an SFMTA stop once and was fined $271, Google used them thousands of times and was fined nothing. So why should I pay?” The only answer to that is, “you are a second class citizen who must obey all laws and Google is a first class citizen who doesn't have to.”
The idea that there was no subtext in the original comment is absurd.
> You appear to see only the negative impacts of gentrification, but like many social issues it is a double edged sword.
You are speaking in some kind of academic terms, but forgetting that we are not talking about rich displacing poor in some fair way. Wages haven been frozen for 2 generations while the cost of everything soared, even as worker productivity soared. Taxes on the rich have fallen through the floor even as they use more government services — the rich use more cops, more firefighters, more military, more trucking lanes, more air traffic controllers, more of everything the government does than the poor do. And there is a radical, artificial health care system in the US that is a genocide on anyone who is not rich, and is a moral obscenity according to every single religion in the world.
So we are not talking about some natural gentrification, we are talking about a deliberate war on anyone who is not rich. Everyone who takes home a paycheck should be taking home at least double what they are taking home now, and the high taxes they pay should already include their basic health care and basic education. People who are rich right now are being artificially made richer and people who are not rich are being artificially made poorer.
This article is about a giant corporation who pays 6% taxes riding atop the publicly-created Internet and deciding it can also use the public transit stops for its own bus fleet without even paying. The sense of entitlement is outrageous. And at the same time, there are working people who make less money than their grandparents and can't get in to see a doctor.
So there may be some academic good side to gentrification in your mind, but there is no good side to genocide. There is no good side to robbing the poor and giving to the rich. There is no good side to having no equality. There is only massive human suffering and waste.
> Uh, no - it means people who make significantly less money than me tend to live in unsafe places.
They are unsafe because of poor schools, poor policing, the wage freeze, and the drug war.
When rich assholes want cocaine they go to the “bad” neighborhoods and start asking people to sell them cocaine. That creates a huge demand for cocaine dealers in that neighborhood. Then the cops show up and incarcerate the cocaine dealers, who later return to the neighborhood and the only job they can get at that point is cocaine dealer. The rich assholes are never incarcerated.
And the rich assholes complain that their taxes are too high, so they get reduced and the schools in the “bad” neighborhoods get closed.
Cops take the cue that the people in the “bad” neighborhoods have no political power and they terrorize them.
The vast majority of the people in a “bad” neighborhood work hard all day at jobs that keep society functioning. They are health care workers and supermarket cashiers and factory workers and transit operators and teachers and military and so on. And their wages have been frozen for 30 to 40 years, even as the cost of everything went up. Even as rich people continued their private health care scam that causes health care to cost many times what it costs in other Western countries, even as we don't care for everyone.
The fact that your solution to all this is to drive everyone out of that neighborhood and put in rich people who the cops will a) protect, and b) not incarcerate for drug offenses shows that yes, you believe people who aren't rich aren't human. You're happy with a society in which you have to be rich to be safe, and so fuck all of the people who aren't rich.
The irony is that one day you will have a heart attack or be in a natural disaster and your life will be saved by someone from one of those “bad” neighborhoods that you didn't want to share tax money with, that you didn't care were being terrorized by police, that you didn't care were being terrorized by rich assholes who want to buy cocaine, that you didn't care had flat wages for the past 30 to 40 years, that you didn't care were being driven out of the neighborhoods where their families lived for generations in order to make yet another neighborhood for rich people.
I sure hope you are not a Christian, because you're exactly the person that Jesus of Nazareth said wouldn't get into heaven.
The problem is not just that housing prices have gone up. The bigger problem is that wages have not gone up, even as worker productivity has soared. And taxes on the rich have gone down, even as they use more government services than ever. So the country is operating for the benefit of a very, very small number of citizens who just take for granted that they can have someone else's home if they want it, because that person is a wage slave who only has a 1980 level of income and can't defend themselves against 2014 accounting.
You must make an awesome contribution to your community. Wishing you could cash out and leave.
The people who are being displaced by income inequality are the ones who volunteer at an old folk's home, or restore a park, or who are raising the next generation of leaders and inventors and hard-working members of the community. Their wages have been frozen for 30 years even as their productivity soared. Their taxes have remained high even as rich people's taxes have plummeted. They have been suffering a kind of genocide as the United States is the only country that fails to live up to its responsibility to provide health care for all of its citizens, and instead has its doctors running an income-extraction con game.
The problem is, you lack empathy. Either because there is something actually wrong in your head, or because you are too ignorant of the real world to have developed it.
With 30 years of flat wages, 40,000 people dying unnecessarily and millions more suffering unnecessarily every year because of lack of access to health care, African-American kids being shot with impunity by cops and even private citizens, I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY HARD-WORKING FAMILIES BEING KICKED OUT OF THEIR HOMES IS A BAD THING.
Harlem was never a shithole. It is a fountain of culture that you would respect if you had any culture yourself.
But even if you are right, why were the roads crumbling before and not now? Why was there a lack of policing before but not now? When has Manhattan ever been poor?
> Income inequality in the US is not entirely the fault of politicians and CEO's, it is the unintended side-effect of > a society that still believes they too can become obscenely rich through honest, hard work - if they could "just get a break".
No, that is incorrect. That is absurd. That is blaming the victim. A victim who doesn't even have a way to see a doctor.
The US has always lacked equality. There was slavery for generations after every other Western country gave it up. There was Jim Crow after that. There was the Drug War after that, which locks up poor marijuana smokers and cocaine users for decades while rich marijuana and cocaine users become President of the United States. The country was started by rich slavers and the laws are all written for the benefit of rich slavers.
People in the US work really, really hard, and they don't even have health care. The country is filled with people who work 40 plus hours per week and can't afford to pay their rent and feed their kids. The work that people do to help their community (for example, picking vegetables to feed people, or working as a supermarket cashier to feed people) is totally disrespected, totally undervalued. The lack of a health care system is a genocide on anyone who is not rich. Firefighters who were injured on the job can't get health care. Cops have trouble feeding their families. Military are the biggest users of food stamps. Wal-Mart workers are the biggest privately-employed users of food stamps, even though Wal-Mart is outrageously profitable.
Income equality in the US comes from all that anti-worker attitude plus the fact that worker productivity has soared over the past 30 years, but wages have remained stagnant. The benefit of all the productivity gains went only into profits, not into wages. And, taxes on the rich have fallen and fallen and fallen, even as the rich use most of the infrastructure such as cops, trucking lanes, air traffic controllers, subsidies, massive bailouts, and all the oil and other natural resources that they are exploiting.
It's not possible for you to understand what life is like with no real public schools or public medicine. The people you are thinking are somehow waiting for a break that makes them rich got almost no real schooling, and in many cases not able to go to college even if they had the marks. And the majority have never had a medical checkup in their lives. Their vote may note even be counted, let alone, count for anything. Life is so much harder in the US than in other Western countries.
So what I'm saying is that workers are powerless in the US. You can't blame them for income equality or any other problem in the US. The country is designed to be a hell-hole for workers and that benefits the rich who run the companies and own the politicians. The US politicians of the 1940's discovered that universal health care was necessary when they called up the country's young men for WW2 and only 75% could pass the physical, and that is why UK, Germany, and Japan have universal health care since WW2. But in the US, that was ignored for almost 100 years now, solely to commit a genocide on the poor. The US is designed this way. The people who are to blame are the people who benefit from it and refuse to reform it.
> Just because people already live there doesn't mean it's safe for them to do so.
WTF are you even talking about?
San Francisco is a very, very safe city.
The people who are being forced out are not criminals, they are not living in slums. They are hard-working people with jobs and kids and ties to the community.
You need to get out more. Your concept of the real world is not accurate. Your ignorance is pathetic.
So what you're saying is, the Google buses can just stop in front of your house.
The Google employees can just show up one day, unannounced, and hang out on your lawn, sit on your fence, drop garbage on your property.
You will be happy to clean up after them, repair damage to your property, because hey — Silicon Valley!
Right? I mean, you're pretty quick to volunteer SFMTA property and maintenance to Google. You must be willing to give your own, right? Or are you a fucking hypocrite?
When SFMTA was building stops for each streetcar or bus line, were they supposed to build them big enough for the SFMTA vehicles and riders, or were they supposed to build them big enough for any private company to also run buses through there? If you engage your brain for about a half a second, you can easily see it is impractical to open up SFMTA stops to all private vehicles. You can't have 10 people waiting for a Google bus, 10 for an Apple bus, 10 for an Oracle bus, 10 for an HP bus, and 10 for an SFMTA bus at a bus stop that only holds 15 people. That is why it is illegal for private companies to use the public bus stops. Because it's not possible for everyone to do it. So nobody can. It's not possible for the public transit system to build and maintain stops for private companies.
Should SFMTA be forced to hire more transit cops and supervisors and garbage collectors and build more seating and shelters and expand every stop because Google wants to use the SFMTA infrastructure for free?
> carpool
You also can't carpool at an SFMTA stop. There is no room for that. There is barely enough room for SFMTA vehicles and riders. If you carpool, you have to stop someone other than the bus stops, because the buses are already stopping there. It is clearly marked. Google simply chose to ignore the law because they feel they are special.
This is not fucking Texas. San Francisco is 10 km by 10 km, the entire city. Many bus stops already do not have enough room for just the SFMTA riders.
> slums
There are no slums in San Francisco. Gentrification is not the process of some kind of bad people that exist in your head being forced out, and some kind of good people that you approve of because Silicon Valley moving in. The people who are being forced out were born and raised there and worked to build the city all their lives. The people who are coming in are from elsewhere and they want to live in pretty San Francisco that the people they are forcing out built for them.
It's almost funny that you think some tech worker coming in and taking an apartment from a hard-working family is something to celebrate. The irony is, one day, San Francisco will have another huge earthquake, and the tech workers will all die because they don't know how to take care of themselves without a ton of infrastructure and a ton of people propping them up, but all the people who could have saved their lives will be in Oakland and Berkeley and so on. The SF neighborhoods will have no resilience because they have no diversity. It'll just be a bunch of tech people complaining the 4G is down while they starve to death and get malaria.
> Like it or not, Silicon Valley didn't destroy SF, it made SF
That is not true. SF was a thriving city for generations when Silicon Valley was just an orchard. But even if it were true, why would that give Google the right to break the law?
Are you saying there are 2 classes of citizen? One that gets fined for breaking SFMTA bylaws and one that doesn't? Are you saying that a firefighter who breaks an SFMTA bylaw should be fined but Google gets off? Because the firefighter doesn't contribute like Google does? Google, who pays 6% taxes? Or are you saying that the people who feed Google employees through farms, restaurants, and grocery stores are just low-class trash who should have to obey the law, but Google doesn't have to?
I guess that is what you're saying.
You're pretty much exactly the kind of sociopath that has given tech people such a bad name and lead to so much tension here in San Francisco.
And the community had to pay for the land for the stops, and the cleaning of the stops, and the garbage collection, and the signage, and the transit cops who patrol those stops, and the seating at those stops, and the accessibility studies and improvements made to those stops, and the studies that figured out how big the stop needs to be to serve only SFMTA vehicles.
Just because something is a public sector company does not mean it is free for your taking. Google stole from SFMTA just as if they had setup Google stores inside a mall and didn't pay for the retail space.
Public transit is very, very important in San Francisco because the city is too small for everyone to drive. One of the major symbols of the city are the cable cars, because cable cars and street cars are how most people get around. The idea that a private company has the right to squat on SFMTA stops is absurd. When they are a giant, hugely-profitable advertising company who pays 6% in taxes? Then you really piss people off.
The defenses of Google here are absurd. There's no defense for stealing. Doesn't matter what it is. When you're rich and you steal, that is even worse. When you steal from the community, that is even worse.
How would you like to be a garbage collector for SFMTA and you go out one day on your route to empty the garbage at SFMTA stops and suddenly there is twice as much garbage at every stop because now they are combination SFMTA/Google stops? You're not getting paid by Google, only by SFMTA, but now you have to pick up Google garbage also.
How would you like to be an old lady who can't get a seat at her local street car stop anymore because Google 30-somethings are sitting in all the seats? She is paying for SFMTA with her taxes and by paying fares, and Google is paying nothing for the stops and barely pays any taxes at all.
Google didn't stop on a public road and pick up passengers, they stopped at San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) stops, which are paid for by SFMTA, and are for the exclusive use of SFMTA riders, who contribute to the building and maintenance of those stops with the fares they pay on SFMTA vehicles.
How would you like to go to your local bus stop for your morning commute and find a crowd of Google employees there, blocking your way? What if you needed one of the 2 or 3 seats that are at every stop because you have a mobility issue, and those seats were filled with Google employees? How would you like the garbage can at your bus stop to always be overflowing because the stop is now serving double the riders it was built for, and those extra riders are all Google employees? And how would you like it if one of the buses you take was shut down because of lack of funding when there are people at your bus stop all the time who are not paying and who are not taking the SFMTA?
San Francisco is a very, very small city. (10 km by 10 km.) The SFMTA stops are very small and very cramped even without the Google employees. You can miss your bus because two arrive at the same time and you can't get over to the one you want to take because there is no room at the stop. How would you like to find out that you must missed your bus because you couldn't get past a bunch of Googlers who shouldn't even be at that stop? And who aren't even contributing to public transit by paying fares, and whose company pays about 6% per year in taxes?
We have laws that are supposed to apply to everyone equally. It's not possible for 20 or 30 private companies to pull up their buses to SFMTA stops, therefore it is illegal for anyone to do so. That's the most basic law-making, and the most basic protection for equality. The fine for a commercial vehicle using these stops is almost $300 per incident. The SFMTA cops who give out $70 tickets to riders who don't pay their fares just ignored the Google buses. The SFMTA supervisors (who are also cops) just ignored the Google buses. Meanwhile, they gave out $300 fines to cab drivers who stopped at SFMTA stops, and to tour buses, and anyone who was driving for a small company. Google should have been fined and then stopped right away. Instead, Google racked up over $500 million in stops. Why? Turns out it was just simple Texas-style “the rich can do what the fuck they want.”
> land of the Free
You mean the freedom of the rich to be above the law? Because that's what you're promoting.
The camera in Glass is there for one reason only: to violate privacy.
Oakley's goggles don't have a camera.
Glasses are for the user to see, not to let another person look out of those glasses.
This woman got what she deserved. Out of all the places it is unacceptable to use Google Glass, a bar is in the top few. People are in there to enjoy a drink and social time, not to be part of your home movie.
The thing he is missing is that I don't hate Microsoft anymore. Today, I just don't think about them at all because they are totally irrelevant to me in every way. Hate gave way to forgetting.
In 1999, a publisher forced me to write in MS Word in order to use their template. Today, I can't remember the last time somebody even mentioned Microsoft to me.
Slashdot Mirror
> Apple has once again proven their overbearing stranglehold on everything they touch.
AKA “security.”
and get to 100% of all malware FTW.
and yet millions of dollars have gone missing and the Bitcoin inventor apparently requires anonymity?
Google owes $500 million in fines for the stops they made. It is $271 per incident. There are people paying that right now for doing what Google did. Only Google is getting a free pass.
It's against the law to use SFMTA stops if you are not driving an SFMTA vehicle. Period. What you are thinking of as a cap is actually the fact that there is no legal way to enable a private company to pay for a pass that lets them be the only one to break a law.
It would be impossible for SFMTA to support all the private transportation in the Bay Area stopping at its stops. That is why it is illegal to do so. There would be no room for SFMTA riders or buses if that were the case. We're supposed to have equality under the law. There is no defense for giving Google an exemption to be the only private company that can abuse SFMTA infrastructure.
Nobody gives a shit if Google buses are a net benefit to the city as a whole. The issue is that they used SFMTA stops without permission, without payment, and in violation of the law. Then when the people of the city asked the government of the city why the fuck Google is allowed to do that even as all other companies and individuals who do that are fined, the city said, well, Google will pay something to charity? How is that? Not fucking good enough. We have equal protection under the law in this country. You can't fine me for doing something and not fine Google.
If the Google buses are indeed a net benefit to the city as a whole, then they should be part of the public transit. They are no benefit to me if I live in SF and I work in Mountain View, but not for Google. In that case, they are just a bus that I'm not allowed to take. But they are not part of the public transit because Google doesn't pay its fair share of taxes, and neither do most Silicon Valley companies.
Google can't have it both ways. They can't not pay taxes, not contribute to public transit, then run their own buses and say they have a right to use public transit infrastructure. And they can't skip out on the fines they owe and at the same time say they are doing good for the community.
But the one city that does have urban density and great public transit is San Francisco. Who is apparently expected to run free bus stop infrastructure for Google and look the other way even though Google is breaking the law.
What is amazing is all the knee-jerk libertarian sociopaths here who think San Francisco or SFMTA have victimized Google in some way. One of the major reasons this is all controversial is that the San Francisco government and SFMTA LOOKED THE OTHER WAY while Google did all this. SFMTA cops fined riders who didn't pay their fares, they fined tour buses that stopped at SFMTA stops, but they didn't interfere with Google. They just thought “Google is rich and benevolent” and let them be. It is only after the community asked why are SFMTA cops giving out $1 million in fines to riders who don't pay their fare and non-Google private buses that use SFMTA stops, but nothing for Google, who ran up $500 million in fines all by themselves?
When you get onto an SFMTA vehicle and pay the fare, you are paying not only for that vehicle, but also for the stops. There was a guy who didn't pay his fare recently and SFMTA cops shot him dead. Meanwhile, the same SFMTA cops looked the other way as Google buses rolled up to stops and didn't pay anything. And now, Google is giving some charity. It's not good enough. This is a massive black eye for Google and also for their employees who live in San Francisco, who are quite deserving when their neighbors shun them.
The issue is not whether a company can build where they think it is appropriate.
The issue is whether or not a company can break the laws of a city in the next county over and get away with it.
I would love to hear your defense for that.
> The only part of this making it at all an unusual situation, Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
Silicon Valley is not in San Francisco. There is no gap in SF's public transit system. Google is not even in the same county as SFMTA. AND, there is plenty of public transit between San Francisco and Mountain View. There is a giant fucking train leaving 3rd and King in San Francisco every half hour that takes you right to fucking Mountain View.
The *problem* is Google pays 6% in taxes and runs its own buses and also wants to use SFMTA facilities for free. They don't support the SFMTA with taxes or fares, but they want to squat on their facilities. The further problem is, when Google got caught, instead of paying the $500 million in fines that they legitimately earned, they worked out some deal where they give some money to charity. Even as everyone else who broke those same laws is still expected to pay their fines. Actual San Francisco citizens and businesses were fined $1 million by SFMTA last year for breaking these laws, and SFMTA cops even shot one guy dead for not paying his fare.
But the idea of Google being treated equally is controversial.
Another problem is Google wants to be seen as part of the community (“our buses are environmentally friendly”) but they don't pay into the community. They barely pay taxes. In that case, OK, run your own buses, but don't use SFMTA stops, and don't complain that the public didn't already build you a fleet of public Google buses. The reason for that is no tax money, because Google and others like them didn't pay taxes.
Imagine if you lived in San Francisco, paying taxes into SFMTA, and you work in Mountain View, but not for Google. You go out to the bus stop outside your house one morning and its suddenly crowded by Google employees. A bus pulls up to the stop it has paid nothing to use, and takes the Google employees directly to Mountain View. You, however, pay to get onto SFMTA and then pay to get on CalTrain and go to Mountain View. Why can't you get on the bus that is direct to Mountain View? Because Google doesn't pay their fair share of taxes. If they did, there could be a new SF-to-Silicon-Valley transit system that served everyone who needed to get between those 2 places, and Google wouldn't have to run their own buses.
So what Google has done is the worst of all worlds. Pay almost no taxes, do nothing to help the community create a public transit system between SF and Silicon Valley, complain about the lack of that public transit system anyway, then run your own buses, squat on public transit infrastructure you don't pay for, then not pay the fines you accrued by doing that, then give some “charity” instead that amounts to a small percentage of the fines, and in the whole process, enable your employees to live somewhere they don't work and don't contribute, so they can drive people out of their homes in San Francisco with their artificial Silicon Valley money.
Google is paying for their own buses because Google barely pays taxes.
It would be absolutely awesome if Google paid more than 6% in taxes, because then there would be some money to create new public transit for Google.
> Yes. Google is allowed to run a bus service for it's employees without regard to whatever service
> San Francisco wants to run. Maybe San Fran ought to hire Google to run it's busses.
First, it is Google that interfered with SFMTA buses, not the other way around. Not sure how you missed that.
Second, you are using a strawman. There is absolutely nobody who said Google doesn't have a right to run buses.
The issue has been entirely about Google doing what Google very definitely does NOT have a right to do:
- Google does not have a right to break the law by squatting on SFMTA facilities (but they did that anyway)
- Google does not have a right not to pay the fines they accrued while squatting on SFMTA facilities (but they did not pay them anyway)
- Google does not have a right to complain that they have to run their own buses only because of a lack of public transit infrastructure for its workers when Google pays 6% in taxes (but they did anyway)
- Google does not have the right to expect the City and County of San Francisco to artificially subsidize a bus service run by a private company in an entirely different city and county (but they apparently did expect that)
If Google has a right to run buses without San Francisco interfering, surely you would agree that San Francisco has a right to run a public transit system without Google interfering? That is all that the citizens of San Francisco are asking for.
> * Rich people can be criminals too but they tend to commit different sorts of crime.
No. Rich people commit all the same crimes as poor people. There are rich Harvard guys selling cocaine to other rich Harvard guys.
What is different is that rich people don't get arrested nearly as much. Rich people don't get terrorized by cops. Cops who want to make their arrest quotas at the end of the month don't go into a rich neighborhood and frame a bunch of people — that is what poor neighborhoods are for. And if a rich person is arrested, there is a bunch of nodding and winking as their rich lawyer gets the rich judge to let them off easy.
You exposed the flaw in the environmentally friendly excuse that Google is hiding behind. But the core issue here the lack of equality in the US. The rich take what they want without paying, they break whatever laws they want without being arrested or fined, while the rest of us have our wages frozen for 40 years, get fined or arrested or shot by a cop at the drop of a hat, and now can't even get a fucking place to stand at a bus stop.
During the time when SFMTA cops failed to fine Google buses for stopping at SFMTA stops, the SFMTA cops gave out $1 million in fines to regular, everyday people. Google ran up over $500 million in fines that they are not even being asked to pay. So they give some charity to make it gloss over. Nobody wanted charity. What we wanted was EQUALITY.
There are people appealing their SFMTA fines and saying, “I used an SFMTA stop once and was fined $271, Google used them thousands of times and was fined nothing. So why should I pay?” The only answer to that is, “you are a second class citizen who must obey all laws and Google is a first class citizen who doesn't have to.”
The idea that there was no subtext in the original comment is absurd.
> You appear to see only the negative impacts of gentrification, but like many social issues it is a double edged sword.
You are speaking in some kind of academic terms, but forgetting that we are not talking about rich displacing poor in some fair way. Wages haven been frozen for 2 generations while the cost of everything soared, even as worker productivity soared. Taxes on the rich have fallen through the floor even as they use more government services — the rich use more cops, more firefighters, more military, more trucking lanes, more air traffic controllers, more of everything the government does than the poor do. And there is a radical, artificial health care system in the US that is a genocide on anyone who is not rich, and is a moral obscenity according to every single religion in the world.
So we are not talking about some natural gentrification, we are talking about a deliberate war on anyone who is not rich. Everyone who takes home a paycheck should be taking home at least double what they are taking home now, and the high taxes they pay should already include their basic health care and basic education. People who are rich right now are being artificially made richer and people who are not rich are being artificially made poorer.
This article is about a giant corporation who pays 6% taxes riding atop the publicly-created Internet and deciding it can also use the public transit stops for its own bus fleet without even paying. The sense of entitlement is outrageous. And at the same time, there are working people who make less money than their grandparents and can't get in to see a doctor.
So there may be some academic good side to gentrification in your mind, but there is no good side to genocide. There is no good side to robbing the poor and giving to the rich. There is no good side to having no equality. There is only massive human suffering and waste.
> Uh, no - it means people who make significantly less money than me tend to live in unsafe places.
They are unsafe because of poor schools, poor policing, the wage freeze, and the drug war.
When rich assholes want cocaine they go to the “bad” neighborhoods and start asking people to sell them cocaine. That creates a huge demand for cocaine dealers in that neighborhood. Then the cops show up and incarcerate the cocaine dealers, who later return to the neighborhood and the only job they can get at that point is cocaine dealer. The rich assholes are never incarcerated.
And the rich assholes complain that their taxes are too high, so they get reduced and the schools in the “bad” neighborhoods get closed.
Cops take the cue that the people in the “bad” neighborhoods have no political power and they terrorize them.
The vast majority of the people in a “bad” neighborhood work hard all day at jobs that keep society functioning. They are health care workers and supermarket cashiers and factory workers and transit operators and teachers and military and so on. And their wages have been frozen for 30 to 40 years, even as the cost of everything went up. Even as rich people continued their private health care scam that causes health care to cost many times what it costs in other Western countries, even as we don't care for everyone.
The fact that your solution to all this is to drive everyone out of that neighborhood and put in rich people who the cops will a) protect, and b) not incarcerate for drug offenses shows that yes, you believe people who aren't rich aren't human. You're happy with a society in which you have to be rich to be safe, and so fuck all of the people who aren't rich.
The irony is that one day you will have a heart attack or be in a natural disaster and your life will be saved by someone from one of those “bad” neighborhoods that you didn't want to share tax money with, that you didn't care were being terrorized by police, that you didn't care were being terrorized by rich assholes who want to buy cocaine, that you didn't care had flat wages for the past 30 to 40 years, that you didn't care were being driven out of the neighborhoods where their families lived for generations in order to make yet another neighborhood for rich people.
I sure hope you are not a Christian, because you're exactly the person that Jesus of Nazareth said wouldn't get into heaven.
The problem is not just that housing prices have gone up. The bigger problem is that wages have not gone up, even as worker productivity has soared. And taxes on the rich have gone down, even as they use more government services than ever. So the country is operating for the benefit of a very, very small number of citizens who just take for granted that they can have someone else's home if they want it, because that person is a wage slave who only has a 1980 level of income and can't defend themselves against 2014 accounting.
You must make an awesome contribution to your community. Wishing you could cash out and leave.
The people who are being displaced by income inequality are the ones who volunteer at an old folk's home, or restore a park, or who are raising the next generation of leaders and inventors and hard-working members of the community. Their wages have been frozen for 30 years even as their productivity soared. Their taxes have remained high even as rich people's taxes have plummeted. They have been suffering a kind of genocide as the United States is the only country that fails to live up to its responsibility to provide health care for all of its citizens, and instead has its doctors running an income-extraction con game.
The problem is, you lack empathy. Either because there is something actually wrong in your head, or because you are too ignorant of the real world to have developed it.
With 30 years of flat wages, 40,000 people dying unnecessarily and millions more suffering unnecessarily every year because of lack of access to health care, African-American kids being shot with impunity by cops and even private citizens, I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY HARD-WORKING FAMILIES BEING KICKED OUT OF THEIR HOMES IS A BAD THING.
Harlem was never a shithole. It is a fountain of culture that you would respect if you had any culture yourself.
But even if you are right, why were the roads crumbling before and not now? Why was there a lack of policing before but not now? When has Manhattan ever been poor?
> Income inequality in the US is not entirely the fault of politicians and CEO's, it is the unintended side-effect of
> a society that still believes they too can become obscenely rich through honest, hard work - if they could "just get a break".
No, that is incorrect. That is absurd. That is blaming the victim. A victim who doesn't even have a way to see a doctor.
The US has always lacked equality. There was slavery for generations after every other Western country gave it up. There was Jim Crow after that. There was the Drug War after that, which locks up poor marijuana smokers and cocaine users for decades while rich marijuana and cocaine users become President of the United States. The country was started by rich slavers and the laws are all written for the benefit of rich slavers.
People in the US work really, really hard, and they don't even have health care. The country is filled with people who work 40 plus hours per week and can't afford to pay their rent and feed their kids. The work that people do to help their community (for example, picking vegetables to feed people, or working as a supermarket cashier to feed people) is totally disrespected, totally undervalued. The lack of a health care system is a genocide on anyone who is not rich. Firefighters who were injured on the job can't get health care. Cops have trouble feeding their families. Military are the biggest users of food stamps. Wal-Mart workers are the biggest privately-employed users of food stamps, even though Wal-Mart is outrageously profitable.
Income equality in the US comes from all that anti-worker attitude plus the fact that worker productivity has soared over the past 30 years, but wages have remained stagnant. The benefit of all the productivity gains went only into profits, not into wages. And, taxes on the rich have fallen and fallen and fallen, even as the rich use most of the infrastructure such as cops, trucking lanes, air traffic controllers, subsidies, massive bailouts, and all the oil and other natural resources that they are exploiting.
It's not possible for you to understand what life is like with no real public schools or public medicine. The people you are thinking are somehow waiting for a break that makes them rich got almost no real schooling, and in many cases not able to go to college even if they had the marks. And the majority have never had a medical checkup in their lives. Their vote may note even be counted, let alone, count for anything. Life is so much harder in the US than in other Western countries.
So what I'm saying is that workers are powerless in the US. You can't blame them for income equality or any other problem in the US. The country is designed to be a hell-hole for workers and that benefits the rich who run the companies and own the politicians. The US politicians of the 1940's discovered that universal health care was necessary when they called up the country's young men for WW2 and only 75% could pass the physical, and that is why UK, Germany, and Japan have universal health care since WW2. But in the US, that was ignored for almost 100 years now, solely to commit a genocide on the poor. The US is designed this way. The people who are to blame are the people who benefit from it and refuse to reform it.
> Just because people already live there doesn't mean it's safe for them to do so.
WTF are you even talking about?
San Francisco is a very, very safe city.
The people who are being forced out are not criminals, they are not living in slums. They are hard-working people with jobs and kids and ties to the community.
You need to get out more. Your concept of the real world is not accurate. Your ignorance is pathetic.
> Seriously, San Francisco - What the fuck?
So what you're saying is, the Google buses can just stop in front of your house.
The Google employees can just show up one day, unannounced, and hang out on your lawn, sit on your fence, drop garbage on your property.
You will be happy to clean up after them, repair damage to your property, because hey — Silicon Valley!
Right? I mean, you're pretty quick to volunteer SFMTA property and maintenance to Google. You must be willing to give your own, right? Or are you a fucking hypocrite?
When SFMTA was building stops for each streetcar or bus line, were they supposed to build them big enough for the SFMTA vehicles and riders, or were they supposed to build them big enough for any private company to also run buses through there? If you engage your brain for about a half a second, you can easily see it is impractical to open up SFMTA stops to all private vehicles. You can't have 10 people waiting for a Google bus, 10 for an Apple bus, 10 for an Oracle bus, 10 for an HP bus, and 10 for an SFMTA bus at a bus stop that only holds 15 people. That is why it is illegal for private companies to use the public bus stops. Because it's not possible for everyone to do it. So nobody can. It's not possible for the public transit system to build and maintain stops for private companies.
Should SFMTA be forced to hire more transit cops and supervisors and garbage collectors and build more seating and shelters and expand every stop because Google wants to use the SFMTA infrastructure for free?
> carpool
You also can't carpool at an SFMTA stop. There is no room for that. There is barely enough room for SFMTA vehicles and riders. If you carpool, you have to stop someone other than the bus stops, because the buses are already stopping there. It is clearly marked. Google simply chose to ignore the law because they feel they are special.
This is not fucking Texas. San Francisco is 10 km by 10 km, the entire city. Many bus stops already do not have enough room for just the SFMTA riders.
> slums
There are no slums in San Francisco. Gentrification is not the process of some kind of bad people that exist in your head being forced out, and some kind of good people that you approve of because Silicon Valley moving in. The people who are being forced out were born and raised there and worked to build the city all their lives. The people who are coming in are from elsewhere and they want to live in pretty San Francisco that the people they are forcing out built for them.
It's almost funny that you think some tech worker coming in and taking an apartment from a hard-working family is something to celebrate. The irony is, one day, San Francisco will have another huge earthquake, and the tech workers will all die because they don't know how to take care of themselves without a ton of infrastructure and a ton of people propping them up, but all the people who could have saved their lives will be in Oakland and Berkeley and so on. The SF neighborhoods will have no resilience because they have no diversity. It'll just be a bunch of tech people complaining the 4G is down while they starve to death and get malaria.
> Like it or not, Silicon Valley didn't destroy SF, it made SF
That is not true. SF was a thriving city for generations when Silicon Valley was just an orchard. But even if it were true, why would that give Google the right to break the law?
Are you saying there are 2 classes of citizen? One that gets fined for breaking SFMTA bylaws and one that doesn't? Are you saying that a firefighter who breaks an SFMTA bylaw should be fined but Google gets off? Because the firefighter doesn't contribute like Google does? Google, who pays 6% taxes? Or are you saying that the people who feed Google employees through farms, restaurants, and grocery stores are just low-class trash who should have to obey the law, but Google doesn't have to?
I guess that is what you're saying.
You're pretty much exactly the kind of sociopath that has given tech people such a bad name and lead to so much tension here in San Francisco.
And the community had to pay for the land for the stops, and the cleaning of the stops, and the garbage collection, and the signage, and the transit cops who patrol those stops, and the seating at those stops, and the accessibility studies and improvements made to those stops, and the studies that figured out how big the stop needs to be to serve only SFMTA vehicles.
Just because something is a public sector company does not mean it is free for your taking. Google stole from SFMTA just as if they had setup Google stores inside a mall and didn't pay for the retail space.
Public transit is very, very important in San Francisco because the city is too small for everyone to drive. One of the major symbols of the city are the cable cars, because cable cars and street cars are how most people get around. The idea that a private company has the right to squat on SFMTA stops is absurd. When they are a giant, hugely-profitable advertising company who pays 6% in taxes? Then you really piss people off.
The defenses of Google here are absurd. There's no defense for stealing. Doesn't matter what it is. When you're rich and you steal, that is even worse. When you steal from the community, that is even worse.
How would you like to be a garbage collector for SFMTA and you go out one day on your route to empty the garbage at SFMTA stops and suddenly there is twice as much garbage at every stop because now they are combination SFMTA/Google stops? You're not getting paid by Google, only by SFMTA, but now you have to pick up Google garbage also.
How would you like to be an old lady who can't get a seat at her local street car stop anymore because Google 30-somethings are sitting in all the seats? She is paying for SFMTA with her taxes and by paying fares, and Google is paying nothing for the stops and barely pays any taxes at all.
That is factually incorrect.
Google didn't stop on a public road and pick up passengers, they stopped at San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) stops, which are paid for by SFMTA, and are for the exclusive use of SFMTA riders, who contribute to the building and maintenance of those stops with the fares they pay on SFMTA vehicles.
How would you like to go to your local bus stop for your morning commute and find a crowd of Google employees there, blocking your way? What if you needed one of the 2 or 3 seats that are at every stop because you have a mobility issue, and those seats were filled with Google employees? How would you like the garbage can at your bus stop to always be overflowing because the stop is now serving double the riders it was built for, and those extra riders are all Google employees? And how would you like it if one of the buses you take was shut down because of lack of funding when there are people at your bus stop all the time who are not paying and who are not taking the SFMTA?
San Francisco is a very, very small city. (10 km by 10 km.) The SFMTA stops are very small and very cramped even without the Google employees. You can miss your bus because two arrive at the same time and you can't get over to the one you want to take because there is no room at the stop. How would you like to find out that you must missed your bus because you couldn't get past a bunch of Googlers who shouldn't even be at that stop? And who aren't even contributing to public transit by paying fares, and whose company pays about 6% per year in taxes?
We have laws that are supposed to apply to everyone equally. It's not possible for 20 or 30 private companies to pull up their buses to SFMTA stops, therefore it is illegal for anyone to do so. That's the most basic law-making, and the most basic protection for equality. The fine for a commercial vehicle using these stops is almost $300 per incident. The SFMTA cops who give out $70 tickets to riders who don't pay their fares just ignored the Google buses. The SFMTA supervisors (who are also cops) just ignored the Google buses. Meanwhile, they gave out $300 fines to cab drivers who stopped at SFMTA stops, and to tour buses, and anyone who was driving for a small company. Google should have been fined and then stopped right away. Instead, Google racked up over $500 million in stops. Why? Turns out it was just simple Texas-style “the rich can do what the fuck they want.”
> land of the Free
You mean the freedom of the rich to be above the law? Because that's what you're promoting.
The camera in Glass is there for one reason only: to violate privacy.
Oakley's goggles don't have a camera.
Glasses are for the user to see, not to let another person look out of those glasses.
This woman got what she deserved. Out of all the places it is unacceptable to use Google Glass, a bar is in the top few. People are in there to enjoy a drink and social time, not to be part of your home movie.
The thing he is missing is that I don't hate Microsoft anymore. Today, I just don't think about them at all because they are totally irrelevant to me in every way. Hate gave way to forgetting.
In 1999, a publisher forced me to write in MS Word in order to use their template. Today, I can't remember the last time somebody even mentioned Microsoft to me.