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alanlewis

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From the article (which note is published on the Howard Jarvis Tax Association website): "Howard Jarvis told the story of watching an elderly lady suffering a heart attack while visiting the Los Angeles assessor's office when she couldn't convince the authorities to change her tax bill." Doesn't mention the woman dying, just that she had a heart attack.

Also, the anecdote comes from Howard Jarvis himself. Was he lying to further his agenda? This source casts doubt on his story: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blog/happy-birthday... - from that source: "White notes that “even though the age of the deceased woman varied as Jarvis repeatedly told this story, the feelings it generated resonated with the public.”" Smells fishy to me...

Lemme guess: google employee? Part of what the city council has been blocking is (according to the linked Verge article) stopping Google from doing an environmental report necessary to develop land adjacent to one of their campuses. Why? Because, surprise!, the council members noticed that the environment reports paid for by large companies always happen to come back with a result favorable to the company who paid for the report.

In short, read the article -- lots of sides to the story: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-g...

The conclusions in the report seem tenuous. Read the article, and you'll learn that this is all based on the Gallup "Q12" poll (read the report for yourself: http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-globa...) That poll is made up of 12 yes or no questions. 12. Including ones like "I have a best friend at work." Google "Gallup Q12 criticism" after reading the original survey, read what you find, and see if you still take it seriously.

From the platform provider's point of view, it doesn't make business sense to offer features like this to an OS or to other apps. Someone like Facebook wants you to have to come to the experience (app, website) that they control, and that they monetize. Want to know if someone is online? Come to our app and find out. And maybe while you're here you'll browse your feed and see an ad or 2 (probably more like 10).

Headline is wrong. 2 data points that the article is based on: 1) Google has spent 21 billion dollars on Capital Expenditures since 2006 (presumably gathered from SEC filings) and 2) "Google says the majority of its capital investments are for IT infrastructure, including data enters, servers, and networking equipment." (source unclear)

So, Google has spent at least 10.5 billion on "data centers" since 2006. There are notable disclosed expenditures that are clearly not "data centers" mentioned in the article, including 2 billion spent to purchase NYC office space. Still a huge number, but off by many, many billions.

The reasonably priced inventory around in downtown San Jose has been snatched up. The lowest price place I could find on real estate sites that is within walking distance from the Caltrain station is a 429K 1 bed/1 bath in the Axis tower. The housing market has turned around very quickly in SV, most of the newer condos were built before the housing crash, and it was only recently that most of them have sold the original inventory.

Possibly. I've been hoping to find some candidates who can help train other developers here on Rails. We do pair development, which has proved to be tricky to do remotely. Anyone with experience doing remote pairing/remote training?

1) The data is grouped by zip codes, not by neighborhood (notice that "pacific heights" spans multiple zip codes.) Better would be to have data derived from neighborhood polygons that delineate clear neighborhood boundaries 2) The prices are from listing prices (homes for sale), which could obviously vary from zip code to zip code and 3) You're relying on the accuracy of Trulia's data, which... well I won't get into that.

Real names are valuable in so far as they can be used to build gender (and possibly ethnicity?) models. I doubt this is the primary reason Google is insisting on real names, however. More like: Myspace allowed fake names and it failed. Facebook enforces real names and it has succeeded.

Hi Brian. We should chat more in this comment section, because going down the hall to converse in meatspace is so time consuming.

I can give you the summary online: "pretty darn cool". For the complete dish, feel free to contact me.