Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/01/16/technology/16reuters-techbuses-security.html?ref=technology&_r=0

by RougeFemme • 13 years ago

31 54 13 years ago

nytimes.com

aeberbach2• 13 years ago

William Gibson's zaibatsu come to mind. When they stop people getting off the bus rather than on it will be complete.

joelrunyon2• 13 years ago

Can you expand on some context for this?

aeberbach2• 13 years ago

In Gibson's books the zaibatsu are huge corporations where the top employees are not free to leave. Switching jobs involves your new employer hiring a team of mercenary specialists to extract the new hire. Often the principal does not survive. See "Neuromancer"and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and they should be enough to get you hooked!

samstave• 13 years ago

As someone who came of age in the 80s completely infatuated with all things cyberpunk growing up, and now having worked in Silicon Valley my whole career, taking me all over the globe working on computers: I am so amazed that the world Gibson laid out for 2020 is exactly what we have been building.

I am amazed that my daughter will be, in the year 2020, living in the world I imagined and RPGd in at the same age I was at that time (I was 17 years old, playing cyberpunk RPG where my character was living as a 17 year old in the year 2020)

If you have ever been to Singapore, and seen the private security-police, Cisco (not the networking company), that is the city of the cyberpunk world....

I am in love with, terrified by and amazed at our world.

rhizome• 13 years ago

One wonders if they'll close the loop on this particular piece of history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services#O...

klipt• 13 years ago

Well a bus window was smashed in Oakland: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231758/protesters-target...

Hopefully if that happens again, the criminals responsible will be arrested.

I believe in the right to protest (even if the protest against buses seems pretty misdirected), but that right doesn't include vandalism.

gaadd332• 13 years ago

Why don't the tech companies just fund improvements to actual mass transit instead of the busses? It seems like in the long run, if they continue to grow, that would make far more sense.

russell_h• 13 years ago

This is California we're talking about. Public services are like black holes for money. The SFMTA (which is only one of many bay area transit agencies) has almost a billion dollar annual operating budget, and "usable" would be a generous term for their service.

justinzollars• 13 years ago

As a San Franciscan, mass transit really sucks. Busses are irregular, BART closes shortly after midnight and its connections are limited. MUNI trains were faster a century ago, and are often blocked in traffic as they share roads with cars?

Being a pedestrian isn't any safer as we had a record number of car vs pedestrian deaths this year.

We are massively under served.

pkteison2• 13 years ago

It's not the sort of route that a mass transit system runs. This isn't going a few miles and stopping every few blocks. It's an express-style route, 1-way-at-a-time, to a location 40 miles away which nobody has any reason to go to unless they work there.

To make a 40 mile run in an hour, a bus needs to do very few pickup stops in SF, drive nonstop to destination, then do very few drop off stops in Silicon Valley; then return empty to repeat. Same thing other direction for the evening trip. It's the sort of trip that only makes sense for a chartered coach, not a public bus.

If the route was provided by the local muni bus, people would protest that too - that tech employees were getting special treatment, that a SF tax funded agency was serving geographic areas well outside of SF, that stops should be added at all the intermediate cities (doubling the length of the trip), the system would be more wasteful as buses would run empty on company holidays, and that the companies should directly provide those routes themselves since they only benefit them.

The system presently in place actually makes far more sense than trying to expand muni because it's a very specific purpose and specific route.

gaadd332• 13 years ago

What about trains? I thought CalTrain ran down very near to most of the tech campuses, admittedly the companies would still need a minimal bus system to ferry people from the station to the office park.

Meekro4• 13 years ago

California already has crazy high state taxes, which these companies pay. That money was supposed to be funding things like mass transit. It gets wasted and public transit is still crap, but we're supposed to believe that if Google only paid even more, everything would suddenly get better?

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

Or have a huge office where the employees live.

kabdib• 13 years ago

The politics around transportation in the Bay Area (and CA in general) are pretty bleak. BART still doesn't cover the south bay. The light rail in San Jose didn't go anywhere interesting for about a decade. Bus service is horrible.

Sure, want to put more money into that sink, and see it wasted?

supersystem2• 13 years ago

Why would companies that are so afraid of competition that they buy their aspiring rivals for billions willingly give up such a strategic advantage?

guelo• 13 years ago

And thus the inequality divide will continue to grow. The haves will build bigger walls with more guns surrounding expanding exclusive spaces. They will enact police harrasment laws to keep out those that don't belong. They will make it more and more expensive to even visit the city to keep the have-nots out, except those that need to come and keep their city clean.

Money is power. Power gets what it wants. The fight for San Fransisco is one-sided. The winners have been pre-determined.

mullingitover• 13 years ago

Leave it to SF to make taking a bus to work into a mark of extreme privilege.

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

Taking a bus, and having people hate you so much they attack your bus. That is privilege.

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

Money is indeed power, but ideally it would not be political power.

But money is the power to obtain goods that you want, even if other people want those same things. In this case, it is living in SF. Googlers have the right to spend their money as they see fit. The government will always be there to take taxes and use them for the public good. But what is left in the employees paycheck is for them to spend.

I am much more concerned about the power of mobs, than the power of money (at least the money of small players like Google employees - billionaires like George Soros do concern me). This is actually a positive step in protecting an under-privileged group (nerds) from left wing thugs.

bernardom• 13 years ago

For those of us not in SF: can you keep the hyperbole down?

It's a company with lots of employees who live in a specific area. It makes economic sense for them to rent a bus, and it's better for the environment to reduce the number of cars.

A bunch of people start attacking the bus; they hire security. It's not sinister or scary, it's predictable.

If you're mad at income inequality, campaign to change the tax code for individuals. Don't attack people going to work in a bus.

JPKab• 13 years ago

Thank you. Shit like this is why I love to visit, don't want to live there. Let's be straight: The homeowners who live in San Francisco are greedy hogs: they refuse to share their city with the newcomers by building denser housing, and the government caters to them at the expense of the poor.

The idiots shouldn't be protesting the Google buses, they should be targeting every NIMBY idiot who thinks that it is possible to keep San Francisco the same as it was before. Cities aren't meant to stay the same, they are meant to shift and change and adapt, and they always will. Want to keep the houses single family, the apartments low-rise, and keep the original buildings? Fine, the buildings will look the same, but the people living in them will be filthy rich, cause nobody else will be able to afford it.

The irony to me is that a city filled with people who claim to be environmentally focused is so dead-set on being low-density. Low-density development is, on the aggregate, worse for the environment, but hey, you get to pay 2500 for that bedroom in a Victorian, so why not?

mc32• 13 years ago

Two things:

Better public transit would obviate the need for google busses. Caltrain, a low-frequency train operator with a limited route, is not the answer.

Allow RE developers to increase housing stock in SF as well as the Peninsula.

The alternative at the other extreme is Detroit. I'm sure all the 'have nots' are enjoying the fruits of the exodus of the haves from the city. Now that they have the city all to themselves, it's surely a blue collar paradise.

SF in the 80's was not a pretty place. Well, unless 'rust-belt'-city syndrome is pretty. Tech pulled SF (and SJ) out of their doldrums and slow decay.

gkoberger2• 13 years ago

This isn't a privilege thing. The (as you put it) have-nots have attacked Google buses, unfortunately making it a necessity.

Having a bus (or a guard) doesn't take away from the "have-nots" at all.

bedhead• 13 years ago

Haters. Just good old fashioned haters.

qq66• 13 years ago

This isn't surprising -- the wider the gulf between rich and poor, then the rich find themselves living next to people with little to lose. Cf. Mexico, India, Brazil.

Meekro4• 13 years ago

So now that Occupy Wall Street has failed to accomplish anything, like-minded people are kicking off Occupy Silicon Valley?

I used to think that wall street was a target because they were seen as getting rich without producing anything, and were blamed for crashing the economy. If that was the reason, though, they wouldn't now be targeting companies like Google, who do produce things and were not responsible for the crash of 2008.

Because of things like this, I now think both protests were just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through.

quaunaut• 13 years ago

Because of things like this, I now think both protests were just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through.

Says the guy who didn't bother to do 10 minutes of research either in this thread or anything linked to in it. Heh.

Look, I don't think the violence is okay, and I do think to a degree, the protests against the buses and gentrification are poorly aimed. But these people are not protesting without cause.

A recent protest focused quite heavily on the number of evictions going around San Francisco, in an effort to raise the rent on the property. The gentrification here is stark- families who have lived here decades have seen their per-month payouts rise by hundreds, if not thousands of dollars over just the last decade. All of this in a city that by and large doesn't receive tax money from companies making the greatest profit(by working outside of the city's bounds and busing their people in), and can't afford to raise taxes very easily without hitting middle-income families.

Don't turn into just the caricature of someone too aloof to even attempt to understand.

Meekro4• 13 years ago

You're right, they do have a claimed reason for protesting that I didn't mention (rising rents), but I think it's a very poorly thought out one, based on emotion rather than rational thought.

If I was renting out a spare bedroom in my house to a college student for $500 a month, and then another guy shows up and says "I'll pay you $5,000 a month for that bedroom," what do you think my reaction would be? What do you think most people would do in that situation? I claim that nearly every one of the protesters, if they were in the position of the spare-bedroom landlord, would happily kick the first guy out and move in the $5,000 a month guy.

I can hardly imagine a way to satisfy the protesters' demands for cheaper rent without taking away that landlord's fundamental right to charge what he wants for use of his own property.

And by the way, tons of poor-ish and middle-class San Francisco home owners have made life-changing amounts of money from having their cheap homes increase in value when the tech industry moved in next door. But you never hear about them because they don't fit the narrative of the haves oppressing the have-nots.

angersock• 13 years ago

Arguably there's a bigger beef with the Valley folks--after all, they're the ones who've built the world's largest surveillance networks and data-gathering systems.

vijucat2• 13 years ago

just whiny children crying but it's not faaaaaaair!! without bothering to think anything through

This is shockingly dismissive, IMHO. It's easy to be judgmental when it's not your job or your existence that is being threatened, but if you're the one who is being made obsolete by the ruthless march of innovation / technology, would you not be the protestor?

Do you think your superior intellectual realization that "There are countless other examples industry-and-job-destroying innovations, and from a long-term historical standpoint they've always been a huge net win for humanity" (quoting from an earlier comment by you) would be enough to prevent emotional strife as you accept your new minimum-hourly-rate job?

Meekro4• 13 years ago

You seem to implicitly concede one of my core points: that all this crap is based on appeal to emotion, rather than a rational reason for protest.. if we at least agree on that, I'm glad.

Those industry-destroying innovations tend to take many years to pick up steam, and anyone who's paying attention will likely see the writing on the wall long before it happens. I'd like to think that I'd be able to re-train for a new profession before getting steamrolled, but perhaps I'm too optimistic?

If I was forced to accept a new minimum-wage job, I'd probably be angry, but that wouldn't mean that my discontentment was based in reason.

supersystem2• 13 years ago

You act like there's some significant difference between moving money around for a large corporation and moving data around for another large corporation.

How can you understand what's valuable in tech if you can't even understand what's valuable in life. Having your parents being forced to move so you can't see them when they get old, putting off having kids until you might not be able to or giving up the job you love because you got sick. This isn't your opinion on Facebook vs. Snapchat, it's real life shit. One of the great things about being a geek was that you didn't have to blatantly accept society's stupidity. I guess no one could really foresee the magnitude of eternal september.

It's not like there is a lack of opportunities outside of SV, every techie went there by their own choice. If they can't handle having their ride to work disrupted once in a while, maybe it's time to leave when there's still some dignity left. But hey I guess there's some online petition they can all sign, I heard it worked great in regards to the Snowden revelation. Happy fucking brogramming.

vinkelhake• 13 years ago

The buses are not the problem, just a convenient thing to attack. Each bus ride keeps a great number of cars off the roads for that day.

This is good for the environment and reduces the number of vehicles on the road. This seems obvious, but from reading the comments in this thread it seems like this whole kerfuffle is about the buses themselves.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Nah, the kerfuffle is about the symbolism. See people know they can't get a job at a tech company, they have to slog to work in horrible traffic to make just enough money to cover the cost of vehicle maintenance, rent and food. While this busses, they carry the kind of person they want to be but aren't, carried in air conditioned comfort from home to work, where they make more money and they don't even have to drive and they get free lunches.

I understand the anger, I got an earful of it volunteering as a big brother for at risk youth during college in south central LA. If a person doesn't have a vision of how they could get to be that person they want to be, they lash out at the symbols of those folks. Trying to convince young latino men that getting $100 a week for being spotters for the drug dealers really wasn't a path toward that life they wanted, even when it clearly was a path to getting some of the things they wanted right then and there.

hendrik42• 13 years ago

Black ski masks? Curly wired-earpieces? Jotting notes on yellow stick-it pad? Jerky answers? That doesn't sound like google at all, more like yet another fake. Remember this one?: http://www.sfbg.com/googleshoutdown

syntern• 13 years ago

It seems that one can write even a master's degree on this topic:

The “Google shuttle effect:” Gentrification and San Francisco’s dot com boom 2.0

http://svenworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Goldman_PRFi...

yetanotherphd4• 13 years ago

Even though that is a Master's thesis, the writing is sophomoric.

I was especially offended by the misuse of "externality" in the first page: "Lower income people should not bear the brunt of the negative externalities of economic development" (she is referring to housing prices, which are not an exernality).

Latest Perk on Google Buses: Security Guards

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