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calichoochoo

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I predict a lot of wrong conclusions will be drawn from this. This paper does not preclude the possibility that there exist high-priced headphones with better-than-average or even spectacularly good frequency response. It only says that if you bin together all of the high priced items, their aggregate quality is no better than any other price bin.

The "Mountain View" campus now sprawls from Sunnyvale to Redwood Shores. It's a 20-mile bike ride from one to the other. The Redwood Shores office is so unabashedly exurban that you'd have to walk 3.5 miles to the nearest public library, 3.9 miles to the nearest coffee shop, and 4.5 miles to the nearest point of public transportation. These are Google's newest offices, reflecting their current thinking on "sustainability": everybody has to drive everywhere.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/10/23/google-se...

Salesforce somehow manages to house 7000 of their employees in San Francisco, and Wells Fargo somehow seats 8000 of theirs. Nobody is suggesting that Google should move all of their people to SF, but I am suggesting they should consolidate into larger offices in the centers of principal cities: San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.

The office component is such b.s. that it throws the rest of the report into doubt. While solar panels and shuttles are small gestures in the right direction, Google continues to make the wrong large decisions by putting their offices in the middle of nowhere, miles from any real place, surrounded by acres of parking. The sustainable thing would be to put their buildings in cities and adjacent to mass transit so employees can walk and ride to work from their nearby homes.

I guess that would be a sensible argument except those people aren't exactly carrying the state on their backs. Santa Clara County has only twice the population of Fresno County, but it pays 15x more in state income taxes. State revenue in general depends almost wholly on the Bay Area, LA Basin and San Diego counties.