$1 per stop is chump change for a company like Google. I don't see how this fee will create any difference for what the protestors are demanding.
And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.
The purpose is to deal with the issues arising from the physical presence of the buses, and $1 a stop might be enough for that.
The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
On the East Coast, it is not unusual to have private bus systems that share street stops and bus terminals with public buses. More public transit is a public good, and it's smart to keep fees low to keep people out of cars.
+1 to this suggestion! Something that feels as seamless as Dropbox would make my dreams come true. And even better if it could sync to different providers of my choosing, e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. etc.
I believe F1 is the SQL DB that powers ads (AdWords, AdSense, etc.) and is used in production for consumer-facing apps. Dremel is more of a data/log analysis tool, but doesn't typically interact directly with consumer-facing apps. Dremel (externally: Google BigQuery) is still widely used at Google across all product areas; F1 is used in a few products but not many.
Presto is designed for OLAP type workloads and is thus primarily used heavily internally at Facebook for data analysis and reporting. It won't be replacing traditional databases (like mysql) that are typically used for user-facing features, but may be suitable for serving user-facing traffic doing OLAP type queries such as generating dashboards. We are actually looking into doing something like that right now for Facebook.
Tesla's still a young company and is bound to have some quarters ending in losses for various reasons as they try to reach economies of scale. As an investor, I still feel confident that Elon Musk's "master plan" (see: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-p...) for Tesla is starting to get underway with the latest developments on Model X (and I'm sure other models as well). The future is bright for Tesla, this loss isn't necessarily a sign of decline.
I agree with you for the most part, but I think the point the author's trying to make is that "poor" people may not see it that way; instead, to them, lavish riches create a sense of belonging.
We live in a culture where Fergie can get up and talk about living a jet set mentality and there are songs on the radio today talking about Maybachs, etc.
Couple that with a lack of education on financial well being, and suddenly you have people making unwise choices.
I had a similar experience with my cousin, except with Chrome OS. His laptop died and he asked to borrow any extra laptops I had around, and the only one I happened to have was a Chrome OS machine. I was worried he'd need a more desktop-like environment, but it turned out he loved it -- everything we do is on the web these days and there wasn't really anything that he was missing. He moved from Excel to Google Spreadsheets without much trouble and didn't really need anything else. Just a browser. Amazing where the web is going.
I like this article as a thought experiment, but I think in practicality, it would probably be miserable to fly to-and-fro 4 days a week.
The main cost that was ommitted that would give us an idea whether the commute is worth it is the opportunity cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost). While it'd be difficult to estimate how much the author's time is worth, if we assume that he/she gets paid an hourly wage of W, and it takes H hours to commute to and from London, then the opportunity cost would be something like W x H. If that opportunity cost is greater than the 387€ in savings, then it would not be cheaper to commute from an economist's perspective.
Yeah that's absolutely correct. Google has more initiatives than they can produce internally and so a lot of work is contracted to external vendors/agencies, which can have security concerns. The withgoogle.com domain allows Google to host externally-created sites that do not have any access whatsoever to internal user data.
And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.
Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...