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Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

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Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#221

Post by irieid9 »

ehsankia wrote: post #116
mdkrkeo9 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things require Google per se Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it Which is hard since they are tasked with using their time to prop up big corps profit machinery most days I wonder if there’s economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into silos for the investment whims of a minority of global elites Curious if tha…

> None of those things require Google per se And it never did because it was never Google, it's Sidewalk Labs, which is a separate Alphabet company who's whole job is exactly to research and develop such plans. > Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it I really dislike this argument. "We don't need AMP to make sites fast, webdevs can just spend time hand optimizing their sites…

Thank you for the banal correction of Google vs Alphabet

And comparing website dev to community planning

And ignoring the argument that communities are stuck focusing on profit generation which is acting as a block on their agency to collectively improve their communities

Did you actually read the post or get stuck on the alphabet not google part and fill in the rest of the post with non sequitur?

Food delivery existed before “tech companies”

I’m not sure you are living on Earth. You do know society existed before the year 2000, yes?

We’re ridiculing tech companies for capturing our agency. It has nothing to do with their technology but the social aspects of curving the masses attention to profit generating fiefdom a minority control

Religion and monarchy before that operated on basically the same pattern in the abstract

We don’t talk of sky wizard but we do talk of appropriate behavior that aligns with economics models of men paid a lot to make those economics models. We rejected God but replaced him godly men of industry. Right back to literal fetishizing a minority of real men like they’re kings. Oh and look at what’s up in the Oval Office. Coincidence?

The bias is deep in the limbic brain which heavily influences our agency response

It’s why I don’t curate an online identity. I don’t need to fetishize some profile that goes away if the servers shut down

Stop importing other peoples semantic objects and applying your agency to their study and care. We still need tech but we don’t need Google

Invent your own

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#222

Post by WrkInProgress »

sudosysgen wrote: post #121
CaveTech wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone I know lives in a rented condo.

That's called an apartment, and is not what Google was building.

Condominium in Ontario (Toronto is in Ontario) is a form of ownership, it had nothing to do with the physical form of the home.

You can own a condominimum townhouse (a row of single family homes with front yard, driveways, garage attached by common walls) or a condominium apartment (in say a 30 storey building with 10 parents per floor)

And yes, you can rent out a condominium apartment. Approx 60 % of the rental units in the Greater Toronto Area are condominium apartments.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#223

Post by jacquesm »

neom wrote: post #88

4 years ago I co-founded a smart cities business. Basically a wysiwyg schema/api generator for non-technical municipal users. Idea being if you're procuring data generative "stuff" - municipal workers can define an integration point. In the first few months of starting the company, I met with sidewalk labs at their request. We talked about working together and I said that wouldn't be possible because we wanted to giv…

The hubris of Google is just incredible. Half-baked commitments and then to tell someone who is actually dedicated to the mission that they will run them into the ground. It's really nasty. I've seen the same behavior from the first CEO of 'Spotlife', exactly the same tone of voice, exactly the same ending.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#224

Post by v7p1Qbt1im »

na85 wrote: post #140

My issue with Sidewalk Labs was the incredibly obvious facade they put up: pretending to care about making cities better when it really was just a thin veneer over finding new ways to expand surveillance capitalism. In fact their "Head of Urban Systems" was quoted[0] as saying that public discussions over data ownership and privacy were "irresponsible". The true agenda is plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look.…

I‘m not defending massive tech companies. But in this case it might be a bit different. Back when Larry Page still did interviews he mentioned a couple of times that the concept of cities needs to be rethought. Talking out of my ass I‘m pretty sure that he more or less told Doctoroff to go wild and handed him 100 million.

Alphabet can kind of do this stuff because so far their still growing steadily and a majority of voting shares are with the founders.

So if there is any company I kind of buy, that they didn‘t necessarily have profit as the first priority, it would be Sidewalk Labs. They can always figure that out later.

Worst case they spend a couple hundred millions and nothing came of it. Except many theoretical ideas about city building would have been known to work or not.

Maybe I‘m naive. But imagine you had a gazillion dollars and owned one of the most powerful entities ever. Wouldn‘t you want to try crazy shit that you thought of as a kid. Well Page/Brin can I guess.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#225

Post by zaidf »

save_ferris wrote: post #219
zaidf wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your questions are valid. But you could pick holes about any party trying to bring about change, right? For example, you say "let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place"...my question to you is, which org does exist purely to make the world a better place? And moreover, how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?

> which org does exist purely to make the world a better place? I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a munici…

I could not disagree with you more. Are you in the Bay Area? The Bay Area avoided a calamity primarily because of private companies taking action long before the city and state.

I'd counter that if private companies were completely left in charge, the response may have been better (I would not have said this in January).

Private companies were called in because our public efforts failed. If private companies were leading the charge from day 1, I struggle to see how our response could have been worse than it is today. And I completely disagree that our poor response can be attributed to involvement of private companies.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#226

Post by sudosysgen »

triceratops wrote: post #211
sudosysgen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exorbitant HOA/Condo Association fees and regulations that make renting out a condo unfeasible, or outright banned.

Cool. So then people who buy condos for investment will have to choose between paying the non-occupancy tax or putting their money in property that isn't encumbered by those regulations. Accordingly the price of condos in buildings with such regulations should fall. Alternatively, if a city council has the votes to implement a non-occupancy tax, they may have the votes to nullify HOA clauses that forbid renting. Or l…

I would like to see that happen then. It might work.

However, even in Vancouver the occupancy tax is not being enforced nearly rigorously enough for such an effect, and the occupancy tax is still too little.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#227

Post by neilv »

"Ann Cavoukian, former Ontario privacy commissioner, resigns from Sidewalk Labs", 2018-10-21. https://globalnews.ca/news/4579265/ann-cavoukian-resigns-sid...

"Google's 'Smart City of Surveillance' Faces New Resistance in Toronto", 2018-11-13. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#228

Post by tenpies »

nostromo wrote: post #168
drusepth wrote: post #118

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This…

> got shut down by the locals That's not what happened though. Google was free to continue the project but decided not too, using Covid-19 as a fig leaf. I agree with the thrust of your comment (we need more experimentation with cities, not less) but this is Google doing what Google does: changing it's mind and abandoning projects.

And let's be thankful that it abandoned it now, instead of in 15 years when it would have created a horrible slum.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#229

Post by theklub »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #192
zaidf wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your questions are valid. But you could pick holes about any party trying to bring about change, right? For example, you say "let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place"...my question to you is, which org does exist purely to make the world a better place? And moreover, how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?

Plenty of orgs exists purely to make the world a better place: They're nonprofits. And many nonprofits work at a wide, international scale. Have you looked at how Disney built Disney World, and the way they... govern... Disney World? There's a lot of similarities in Google's plan and their requests with what Disney built with the Reedy Creek Improvement District[0]. Essentially a company territory with government, po…

Nonprofits are bogus in a lot of cases. They make tons of profit and make their founders/ceos rich.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#230

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

cactus2093 wrote: post #206
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who buy luxury condos are probably not vacating affordable housing to do so. Why would you think that to be the case? The Strong Towns link you provided gives two examples of apartments build approximately a century ago. Trickle-down economics at its best. Build luxury apartments, fine. Probably not exclusively though, as in many cities the need is more pressing than that.

affordable housing is a pretty loaded phrase at this point. In fact it has come to just mean government-subsidized housing. So by that definition you are probably correct, people aren't often moving from housing projects to brand new condos. Nobody is saying that they do. luxury condos is also a loaded phrase. In an expensive city, all housing is expensive, even if it is 50 years old and used to house working class p…

Yep, agreed, and all fair points.
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