Crazy. People on Hacker News are still upset at Google for shutting down Reader.
And their fiber-optic to the home ISP. That's quite relevant here.
Long term investment in telecoms plant isn't Googles thing
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
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Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#62Crazy. People on Hacker News are still upset at Google for shutting down Reader.
And their fiber-optic to the home ISP. That's quite relevant here.
Actually, I hope not. Nearly every building in this neighbourhood has fibre to the home, there are three different carriers with fibre into my condo. Most of the rest of the city has copper. While it gets a bunch of press, I hope this is more focused on applications and IoT than pipe.
Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#63Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#64Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#65I can't help but notice right now that Toronto's name has been increasingly pushed as some sort of "next tech centre" (well, many cities in the world want to be something like that). Can someone who's actually there fill me in on what's happening there? How does Toronto's scene compare to say, New York or Seattle?
More and more companies are turning towards Canada after all the immigration bullshit the US government is pulling.
I think this is it, and it does nothing to help the tech companies' reputations to move these jobs. The "immigration bullshit" was in response to outsourcing, immigration, and exploitation of visa programs to exploit cheap labor and keep wages down. By shipping these jobs overseas at the first sign of a worker/employer leverage shift, it shows us that these companies don't care about providing for its employees, they just care about their corporate profits and nothing else. Why should we allow employers in our country that don't provide growth for its employees?
Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#66Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Toronto is the finance & arguably tech centre of Canada. Great universities & access to VC cash, lots of startups. It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US, due to the weaker dollar, lower wages, cheaper medical insurance, and SR&ED credits that let you write off developer salary costs.
> It also shouldn't be ignored that labour costs in Canada are less than half of what they are in the US Should add that this works both ways. Most Canadians who can, do end up leaving for the US since they can easily make 2 - 4X the income, even after CoL and insurance. There is a non-trivial amount of brain drain happening in Canada.
A lot of us come back though. Five years ago I loaded up a truck and moved from Seattle to Toronto.
My wife and I didn't want to settle down in America, even if the money would have been that much better. Seattle is a great city, but it's still very American and that overall American culture never felt like home to us.
Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fiber is still alive. Here's an announcement from last month. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/googl...
Also it pushed the broadband industry forward by providing competition. AT&T and Comcast stepped up their development of Gigabit Internet in the US.
Maybe. AT&T started deploying FTTN to major cities like Houston and Chicago in 2005-2006 (four years before Fiber). Their gigabit buildout was based on that original plan (which dates to SBC). Comcast has been on the DOCSIS upgrade treadmill for years. In the 7 years before Fiber they went from 8 to 100 upgrading to DOCSIS 2.0 then DOCSIS 3.0. Gigabit is another 10x jump over a similar time frame, based on DOCSIS 3.1.
Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#69I don't have a source but I remember a panel discussion when Page came up with the idea to build a floating city in international waters. This way they could overcome the governmental regulations that slow down innovation, taxes etc. I can't help but think about Toronto as a testing ground for that. Add facebooks flying internet drones plus some space X space infrastructure. Sounds pretty cool to me.
How do taxes slow down innovation–considering all R&D costs can be deducted, and taxes only apply to profits? And which regulations, specifically, are holding back innovation at Google? Would their floating city allow me (to use one of your examples) to conduct rocket launches in my backyard?
I'm not from the US and the discussion was mostly about regulations from the states but what I got from it was:
- foreign skilled workforce is from their perspective still to hard to employ (and the Muslim Ban could be an good example for that)
- think about the massive amount of money that Apple has offshore because it's to expensive to bring it back to the US! Put that investment into R&D and the effect would be tremendous.
- I don't know how high the cost for using the public infrastructure is in the US but building it from ground up and managing it by yourself might be cheaper (I assume thats what the Toronto project is all about).
- do some research on costs for positions like "Governmental Relations Manager". google made some bad experiences in China with that
Re: Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City
#70> He’s also hinted at tech’s ability to overhaul zoning rules and control housing costs, a particular interest of Alphabet’s Page. Yeah, right. Toronto is one of the most retrograde cities on housing intensification (it still hasn't intensified around the Bloor-Danforth subway that was built a generation ago)[1]. In fact many neighbourhoods are losing population as the region grows due to extremely restrictive zoning…
> He’s also hinted at tech’s ability to overhaul zoning rules and control housing costs, a particular interest of Alphabet’s Page.
Yeah doesn't Silicon Valley and San Francisco have some pretty stringent zoning rules against intensification?