Where No Google Buses Go | Hacker News Reader

Where No Google Buses Go

darwinbondgraham.wordpress.com

60 pointsmgunes66 comments

    "BNSF is the rail road of the world’s fourth wealthiest man, Warren 
    Buffet. Through San Pablo it pulls thousands and thousands of tanker 
    cars filled with hazardous crude petroleum and refined petrochemical 
    products. Warren’ Buffet’s net worth of $53.5 billion is 45 times 
    greater than the total assessed value of all the land and buildings in 
    the city of San Pablo. In 2013 Warren Buffett’s wealth grew by $37 
    million a day. In contrast, the average worker living in San Pablo 
    earned $106 a day."

Yes, it would be nice if every one of Warren Buffett's investments never did no wrong, but I found this to be a supremely unfair criticism of Warren Buffet, since the overwhelming majority of those $37 million dollars per day is going to go toward philanthropist aims once the man croaks. Furthermore, he's is the most ardent promoter of getting most wealthy people to most of leave their money to charity as opposed to their heirs.

At the end of the day, WB didn't invest in the chemical plants their. He invested in a railroad company that built the road to the plant. I guess you could say his company is an enabler, however that railroad was going to be built one way or another because a wealthy customer willing to pay for it existed and there is nothing illegal or immoral about paying to have someone build you railroad access for your business.

If the author wants to villify someone, he should focus on Shell and Valero instead of WB.

On a related note, I remember when Buffet started investing in rail.

As with virtually everything he does there was a chorus of analysts calling him senile and subsequently laughing at the lack of instant returns.

Although his incredible bankroll surely affords him an ability to invest in ways others simply can't, he consistently seems to "get it" in ways others just don't.

> If the author wants to villify someone, he should focus on Shell

Why vilify Shell? Because they extract the oil you're happy to use for your daily commute, travels around world, visiting your family or going to a wedding, every piece of plastic or oil derived products you're happy to use. Knowing that they do so by exploring the deep seas, digging using amazing technologies in extreme places around the world hiring plenty of people and offering the result at less than a few cents per barrels before taxes. Isn't that amazing?

Why be mad at or vilify them? If anything, we should thank them for doing that amazing work on so many levels and making our lives better. Now sure, accidents happen, but we have to take risks in life if we want to progress otherwise we'd still be cavemen. I know it's cool and all to vilify oil companies, but it's hypocritical to say the least when you enjoy their product every single day.

The railroad has been there for 125 years. Warren Buffet merely owns it at the present.

In fact, he only bought it in 2009.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/33599744/ns/business-us_business/t...

the overwhelming majority of those $37 million dollars per day is going to go toward philanthropist aims once the man croaks

Is it better to distribute economic surplus immediately through higher wages or later through philanthropy? Economists have probably studied this question but I don't know how to find that research.

I don't think it's unreasonable to hold the extraordinarily wealthy to extraordinary standards.

> In San Francisco the have-it-alls are now as busy purging the middle class as they are the remaining working class communities of color.

Uh huh.

I'm no fan of San Francisco and was quite happy to leave a number of years ago, but it seems to me the problem is one of housing supply, rather than some kind of vast conspiracy to rid the city of working class non-white people.

Who votes this kind of bullshit up, anyway?

Edit: there are real problems with poverty that are serious and very worthy of our attention, but this whole bizarre attempt to blame everything on people who happen to be making some money in that area just seems like so much horse shit to me.

The same people who get angry when one suggests that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window might not be an action at ethical par with voting or circulating a petition. Try skimming the comment histories of the people who seem most invested in these stories. They're illuminating.

I find your closed mindedness disturbing. I have tons more sympathy towards people struggling against gentrification, however they believe is appropriate, than overprivileged silicon valley employees who believe the world is anything approaching a meritocracy.

You and others can believe that those of us who feel this way are noncontributing leeches or don't belong here or what have you, but I am a Google engineer who works hard in this industry. There are things that are downright unfair in this world and the continuous displacement of peoples, many of whom have had little opportunity and faced constant oppression, ranks high among them in my book.

Another signpost characteristic of the kinds of people who vote these stories up: the belief that someone who says it's wrong to throw bricks through the backs of bus windows must also believe that "gentrification" and displacement are good things, or that lower-income people are "non-contributing leeches". The people throwing bricks might be leeches, but what makes them all the worse is the disservice they do to a legitimate cause.

Yes it's sad. But what are the options? Are you saying neighborhoods should never increase in property value? People complain when wealthier residents "invade" a poor neighborhood and lower the crime rate and raise the property values but no one says anything when poorer residents move into a neighborhood and increase the crime and lower the property value. And there are a LOT of cities like that. In St. Louis alone: South St. Louis, Spanish lake, Bellfontaine, Ferguson, Dellwood, Maryland Heights, Black Jack, Hazelwood have all had this happen to them.

Is it true that no one says anything when poorer residents move in? In general, suburban America is very good at keeping poverty out, it plays out every time when public transport or affordable housing is suggested to be built somewhere.

The next thing that would need to happen is that the police department gets extra funding because the two suburban cops currently there have neither the manpower nor the expertise to deal with the increase in crime.

The locals tend to vote against either, and who can blame them? It's the system that's at fault, especially the fact that a substantial amount of taxes is raised and spent locally.

This is going to be downvoted, but it needs to be said: voting and petitioning is part of the political process, but so is participating in politics as an elected or unelected official.

Being a politician gives you an entirely different set of powers, because you get to decide what people get to vote on. You can put facts on the ground. "Direct action" also puts facts on the ground and gives some balance to the political process.

I don't know what you're trying to say here because you use a term, "direct action", that means different things to different people. The people I know personally who are involved in labor politics use the term "direct action" to refer to sit-ins and picket lines. But hobbyist black bloc forums use the term as a euphemism for throwing bricks through glass.

So let's be specific: did the comment you just write try to communicate your belief that throwing a brick through the back of a bus full of people "puts facts on the ground" and "gives some balance" to the process?

I'm one of those people: I submit that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window is ethically superior to voting or circulating a petition. Please skim my comment history.

I'm curious about the rest of your moral framework. How would you sort the following list, in order of increasing ethical superiority?

Voting

Circulating a petition

Doing nothing

Throwing a brick through a bus window

Sending death threats

Spraypainting "[ethnicity] GO HOME" on someone's house

Leaving a burning cross on their lawn

Hm, what about lynching a couple of Google engineers? Ethically superior or inferior? If inferior, then why? I'm actually genuinely interested though may sound sarcastic - I'm very curious where people like you draw the line between "good" violence and "bad" violence.

I did have a look at your submission history, thanks, some nice reading there.

Quote from OA

"...one in ten mortgages was foreclosed in San Pablo. At the same time San Francisco’s rate of foreclosure was a mere 2 percent."

Those rates are huge! At the worst of the recession, we hit about one per 300 in the UK, and that was considered bad enough for urgent action to support arrears and find ways for people to restructure their debt.

The BNP in the UK and golden dawn in Greece also believe in direct violent action against the minorities they disprove of so thats ok then?

It doesn't take a vast conspiracy to rid prospering metropolitan areas of working class non-white people; it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.

If SF was undergoing business-as-usual capitalist growth, a lot more housing would have been built, and fewer people would have been displaced.

Last I checked Indians, Asians, Whites and all sorts of people from Jewish to Hindu are a part of silicon valley companies.

Next time you see a SV company, click on its about page and look at the faces before you turn this into a race issue.

It's not a race issue; it's a class issue. The non-white people that SV companies employ tend not to be the underprivileged people that are driven out of metropolitan areas due to gentrification.

Well, you painted it as at least partially a race issue in your previous comment. If it's not a race issue, you shouldn't reference race in whatever point you're trying to make, unless you're just trying to be incendiary for its own sake. And if you can't make a point without being incendiary about it, realize that whatever point you're trying to make is almost certainly objectively wrong, or perhaps your philosophy is more about maintaining a romanticized self-image than actually trying to make the world a better place or even acquiring basic wisdom about anything.

Bomb (or brick) throwing is trivially easy and makes the thrower feel like a badass without actually helping anyone. Actually trying to look at all sides of a complicated issue, figuring out what should be done about it, and trying to make a difference is hard, thankless, and humbling. It will make you feel stupid and inadequate for the task, because it's hard and it's worth doing. People who care about those things don't have your comment history; people who are feeding intellectual conceits do.

The alternative is Detroit. Which would you rather see?

No, the only alternative isn't Detroit.

Wealthy people move in, raise property values, spur local economy, but displace lower-income families and the kinds of independent marginal businesses that served them. Or, wealthy people move out, property values plummet, services are slashed, land goes vacant, crime skyrockets, and kids can't safely get to school anymore.

What is the middle ground? I'm asking seriously. Imagine you were a city planner or the mayor of SF or Detroit or BDFL of California or whatever. What's your plan?

If I were a city planner, I'd require that all new (or renovated) appartement buildings include a percentage of "affordable appartements", with fixed limits on the cost per square foot. That's how cities like Vienna keep rents affordable.

Isn't the majority of all housing in Vienna controlled by the state? It's probably easy to make rent controls work if you can bypass incentive problems by simply making all housing public.

How do you keep wealthy people from renting all the cheap apartments in the not-cheap buildings? I'm not sure I comprehend the plan.

Gentrification is often a problem of inefficient or overly segregated housing supply. Historically, many cities have benefited from highly productive industries without becoming gentrified ghettoes of the rich.

Didn't San Francisco's city management exacerbate this problem by imposing new low-density zoning restrictions at the same time as an influx of wealthy professionals starting driving prices up?

I live in Detroit and I'd rather live here than San Francisco.

> it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.

Eh? Capitalism is about making money. Racism is the other thing. Sometimes the two mix, but they are different things.

Yeah, I'm normally pretty fucking Marxist, but having nearly spent some time temporarily homeless during my internship last summer, having to rely on a friend to lend me his couch, entirely because of rental prices and vacancy rates in Silicon Valley, it makes me think that maybe we shouldn't be talking about the Tech Master Race Oppressing the Innocent. We should be talking about the Tech Salariat and the Bay Proletariat coming together to attack our real mutual enemy: NIMBYs and real-estate rentiers. Also the boss class of capitalists, but they're a little less relevant here.

EDIT: Actually, you know what? The boss class gets my OK here, just for once. Why? Because I've heard Google has literally offered to pay the city of Mountain View to kindly allow Google themselves to sponsor construction of dense, walkable-to-work urban-style housing intended to be rented to Googlers. The real-estate politics in the Bay Area are so incredibly fucked up that Google has to offer money for the right to build a company town where they can finally have enough space to house the workers they need, and the city turns them down.

This isn't NIMBY, even. It's full-blown BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anywhere. It's just outright silly.

It seems that the Bay area is weaving a story that blames tech for displacing everyone else earning less money, rather than fix the artificial scarcity of housing that drives prices up.

Edit: suggestion for people riding the busses: be prepared with fliers to hand out to the demonstrators, urging them to fight for city growth as a way to combat the high housing costs. This could help turn their energy to positive benefits for everyone. I can already imagine how the news articles would cover the scenario of trapped bus riders handing out fliers.

I'm sure a large fraction of the ‘gentrifiers’ would actually rather not spend a couple hours every day on a bus — they themselves are simply priced out of homes close to work by the entrenched SV residents who vote to prop up their own property values with extremely unbalanced zoning regulations, bringing in ego edifices holding tens of thousands of employees while excluding anywhere for them to live.

This is absolutely not true. It's way more affordable for pretty much every single one of them to all live in the South Bay with a 10-20 minute commute. They live in SF because it's less "boring", as if boredom comes from where you live rather than one's own lack of imagination. I know tons and tons of people who do the SF/SV commute every day, but only one of them lives in the city for any other reason.

"Priced out" is not strictly accurate - San Francisco is still more expensive than the peninsula. But it's only slightly more expensive, so the cost factor doesn't provide much incentive to skip the city. If I'm going to pay through the nose anyway, I might as well live somewhere I'll like.

Blame, blame, blame. Blame companies and jobs for increasing the population in an area. Only in San Francisco.

While $2.9 ->BILLION<- DOLLARS are spent building a new trans bay center for the upcoming High Speed Rail Project linking it with Los Angeles. http://www.sfcta.org/delivering-transportation-projects/tran... which will bring even more people into San Francisco, the city that refuses to grow or change.

● No one in the city planning department understands housing supply and demand.

● San Fran is obsessed with itself; it wants everything to stay the same. Keep its views, keep its victorian houses, keep the skyline the same, keep Twitter and Tech Startups ->IN THE CITY<- yet somehow keep prices the same.

● San Francisco has had these issues long before all these tech jobs flooded the area. It's had these problems and flaws for a long time now and still hasn't addressed them the way a sane human being would.

● "Everything was fine until all these high paid tech jobs came in" says San Francisco. While cities all over America are spending millions trying to create their own silicon valley and kickstart gentrification to fix up blighted neighborhoods and pay for police and schools.

● The whole city is run on emotion rather than logic and compromise.

Blame those who fix up neighborhoods, increase property value, pay more property taxes that will go to schools and police, bring in more people to the bay area while NOT BLAMING the city for doing the exact same thing with it's polices. The city's busted politics are at fault. Not the tech companies, not the tech workers.

I find this title funny since one day google's busses will go to these neighborhoods and then there will be protests about those residents being displaced.

And you'll probably be sitting in your armchair nitpicking on the title of another article you didn't read that steps on your ideological toe.

Its not nitpicking the title. Its nitpicking the argument. While I don't live near San Fransisco and can't immediately relate to the geographical arguments around Philadelphia I have heard the same arguments for the past two decades. Neighborhoods protesting because they are "forgotten" as anyone with the means to do so leaves the mess of crime, drugs, and poor schooling. Then as the neighborhoods are revitalized bringing with them the resource to tackle those problems the same residents complain that they are being displaced and that its just a conspiracy against minorities, and the working man.

By and large, articles here should not step on 'ideological toes' because overtly political articles are not supposed to be here:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One could be forgiven for not noting that though, given that the moderators aren't all that thorough about nuking them.

Pretending that one can live in a world that isn't deeply political requires a massive amount of privilege, ignorance, or both. Discussing those who are left out or even harmed by the economic and technologic trends that our industry contributes to is a lot more important, valuable, and relevant than reading about some kid's failed startups again and again.

Who said the world isn't political? Did I say that? Did I say I don't care about politics?

Pretending that Hacker News is the whole world is kind of bizarre. I do not appreciate your condescending attitude.

My criticism is of the idea of a "no politics" (overt or otherwise) policy, not you for pointing it out. Said policy on a news site backed by entities with serious capital who work to change the world is troubling.

Sorry for the confusion.

It doesn't take an overtly political article to upset ideological sensibilities. Since technology is inherently intertwined with ideology, it's not possible to have a fruitful discussion on any topic concerning technology (perhaps aside from certain pure technicalities) without stepping on any ideological toes.

Looking from outside:

How did you happen to land in such an unfortunate racial/cultural* segregation situation?

* What you call 'latino' isn't a separate race for most part, sorry.

Well, it's simple.

-Greedy elites in England monopolized land and subjected working people to indenture, peonage, servitude, and low wages. The elites got richer and richer as living standards stagnated.

-Urbanization and the early stages industrial revolution created opportunities for working families. Wages were driven up in the countryside. Elites wanted to import slaves to drive down wages but the English people blocked them.

-Elites formed colonies in America and imported slaves in vast numbers. African-Americans eventually gained citizenship and freedom but are still exploited as a low wage class. Civil rights measures are only slowly improving African-American wages.

-As African-American wages started to rise, elites in America wanted to import a cheap underclass to drive down wages of working people. The Reagan administration and Congress agree to stop enforcing immigration laws so that big employers can exploit millions of illegal immigrant workers from Latin America.

-Latin American immigrants are attracted by the promise of eventual amnesties and then exploited by a system that expels them from the country if they demand their rights as workers. The civil rights and labor laws are effectively nullified and a vast underclass develops.

Interesting that a city with a median household income of 40k is the poorest of the poor the UK's median house hold income is around $8000 less than that.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/mro/news-release/average-incom...

I really wish I knew how this problem pans out in the next 15-20 years.

Make no mistake, it is a problem - one that desperately needs attention.

If you think for one minute you will be sheltered from the concenquences of such income inequality, with your exorbitant compensation and home on the peninsula, you are sadly mistaken.

We are all interconnected; the generation of children raised in cites like San Pablo deserve an equal shot at success - the same as any privileged white, Asian or Indian child attending a private school in Palo Alto, Atherton, or Los Gatos.

I wish I had a solution. I really do.

I think it starts with wages; but it's hard to put that cat back in the bag.

I'm not sure when we decided it was okay for CEOs to make 300x what a worker does; or even that an engineer was worth 200k/year with a 100k signing bonus, while a skilled welder is worth half that, sacrificing their health and vision I literally build and grow this country.

Next time you negotiate another 30k on your employment contract, trade that for 2 weeks vacation and volunteer your time, ideas and money to those who could really benefit.

Reject the ever-rising insanity of our regions real estate, and try to be just a bit happier with what you have. A BMW 328i will get you to work in style - you don't need the M3.

I'm seeing the same conspicuous consumption that was often only seen in LA. If you want to see a pissed off populace, go ahead and get that Land Rover and Panerai.

See what happens when you're waking back to your car in the Mission.

It's far less complicated than you make it out to be. Demand for housing has pushed prices up. Artificial constraints on housing construction by local city councils and zoning boards has limited the supply, further pushing prices up. Get rid of those constraints and you'll have lower prices for housing plus a lot of construction-related jobs to balance out the snobbish tech workers.

+1 I could not agree with you more. Add in the pressure on jobs like stacking shelves at Walmart, picking food, etc. that will result in better and cheaper robotics and AI.

I just finished a 4 month consulting gig at Google in Mountain View (wonderful experience but commuting from my home in Arizona wore me down). I found the Google culture and work environment to be great (and I am sure Facebook, Twitter, etc. are much the same) but I thought a lot about the effect on the effect on the local communities. My stepson is a fireman in the Bay Area and he gave me a heads up about how so many people resent what the influx of tech wealth has done to the character of communities.

I would personally be willing to give up some of my own wealth in return for a more equitable society. I don't see how we can have a great quality of life if there is social unrest and crass inequality.

> so many people resent what the influx of tech wealth has done to the character of communities.

My parents met in the bay area, and... that ship has sailed. It used to be orchards and farms and rather bucolic, apparently. The fact that there are even "so many" people to resent the new arrivals is evidence of how much that area has changed in the past 50 years.

Yep. When Fairchild Semi was founded in 1957 most of the county was just orchards. It's only been half a century but there are no remnants of rural life in any vaguely flat part of the Bay Area.

A form of basic income is the only answer I see - I don't think enough good jobs are coming back on a reasonable time scale.

Wow, I'm shocked by the destructive anger in your post. Does it really bother you that much that someone owns a Land Rover, so much that you wish someone in the Mission would vandalize it? It's not enough that almost everyone owns a car these days, the cars have to all be equally good or we're going to start damaging the ones that are better because you think it's unfair?

> I'm not sure when we decided it was okay for CEOs to make 300x what a worker does

"we" didn't decide anything - the markets did.

A bit more precisely: it isn't the market that sets the salaries, it's the board of directors. Hopefully someone can clue us in here why executive compensation in the US is so much higher than in Europe, and why it took off insanely sometime in the 1990s.

> why executive compensation in the US is so much higher than in Europe

+1 for something actually interesting to ponder in this whole thread!

So, we did.

Democracies can be characterized by "one person, one vote" whereas at best markets are "one dollar, one vote."

The public does not share equal responsibility for decisions of markets. Not by a long shot.

It's true, but every time we fail to participate in the democratic process to change the notion of how markets work, or every time we support corporations which do not share our beliefs in the system, we become complicit.

Given that most of the readers here are usually middle-class consumers, they can at the very least make a few choices regarding the purchases and lifestyle to reflect their principles; I'm afraid most people never consider that.

Yes. The "markets" are to blame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com