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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

#231

Post by 52-6F-62 »

gabbo wrote: post #196
52-6F-62 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough the city is actually making some real changes due to the pandemic. They're currently in the process of opening up certain roadways to pedestrian and cycle traffic and closing some of them off to cars save for local traffic. They've stated some of these changes are temporary, and some possibly permanent. This includes expanding the current bike paths and speeding up implementation of already approved path…

If you've been following Toronto politics for long, you'll realize this move from Tory is just another in his (and Toronto's) long history of poorly-delivered half-measures which come well after other major cities have already turned the corner. I would not laud the city for "making some real changes" as much as I would criticize the mayor for being a stale, retrograde leader who is clearly in the business of deliver…

I wasn't singing the man's praises, I'm just hopeful that something will actually happen.

They did point to SF, Portland, and other cities as the inspiration for actually making the step—even though citizens and newspapers have basically been crying out for this very thing for weeks.

I'm just glad they're finally moving to do it. I was glad with how they stood strong on the King St traffic project. Hopefully many of these items will persist.

I've enjoyed the sweeter air due to the lessened traffic so, so much.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#232

Post by thewebcount »

crazygringo wrote: post #139
supernova87a wrote: post #57

Google doesn't need to invest in the gadgets and electronics in the walls that appear to make cities smarter. That money would be better spent on enabling city governments, elected policymakers, and especially their constituents to be smarter and able to make better choices and designs about city planning, building permits, incentives, taxation, traffic, etc better. The rest will follow. What we need is for people to…

Why not both? First of all, it's not either/or. Second of all, better democratic decisionmaking has nothing to do with Google's expertise. There are plenty of political scientists and think tanks working on better decisionmaking processes. Spending Sidewalk Labs' money on them makes as much sense as asking for Kraft Foods or ExxonMobil to do so. But third, good democratic governance requires data and provides service…

One way it's not a win is because all things Google involve them collecting the data in a way that can be monetized. That collection is generally problematic to a lot of people.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#233

Post by sandworm101 »

true_religion wrote: post #203
sandworm101 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Leaving a place empty/inhabited should be very expensive. Vancouver is finding that difficult to enforce. How do you tell if a unit is "occupied" or not? At the moment it is largely voluntary. The city cannot tell whether someone is living in a unit or it living overseas ten months out of the year. They aren't going to be sending inspectors to knock on doors. I'm a good example of the difficulties. I was away on t…

There would probably be an exception for people in the military or government service. If on the other hand you spent 6 months in the US working for a private business like Google, then it would be fair to tax you.

Setting aside fairness, how would the government work out whether I am gone or not? Lots of people go away for several months. Policing the system becomes impossible, which is why I described vancouver's system as voluntary.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#234

Post by andechs »

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.

Most of Toronto's rental stock is privately owned condos, rented out. There is next to no Condo Corporations in Ontario that aren't senior specific that ban renting the unit to long term tenants (many ban short term AirBnb in their bylaws).

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#235

Post by WalterBright »

sudosysgen wrote: post #201
WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> super simplistic The law of gravity is super simple, but it produces all kinds of complex results. Underlying the complex behavior of the real estate market is supply&demand driving it.

The law of gravity is actually not super simple. Relativistic gravity is an incredibly difficult and complex concept to understand, and the Newtonian law of gravity is simply wrong, enough that it has big impacts on the real world. Whereas the law of supply and demand is not only preceded by a lot of assumptions that never are true in practice, and even with all those assumptions still has serious exceptions that app…

> Relativistic gravity is an incredibly difficult and complex concept to understand

You're right, but the underlying rules are simple.

> leading to empty buildings, while prices still rise

That's still supply & demand. In this case, it is likely that the demand is rising fast enough that delaying renting the building will result in higher rents in the future for that building.

It's a chaotic system, and I mean that in the mathematical sense, where simple rules lead to complex (and counter-intuitive) behaviors.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#236

Post by acdha »

leoh wrote: post #24
pupppet wrote: post #17

TO dodged a bullet. It's Google's nature to lose interest and abandon their products. You think it's bad with software, imagine them building part of your city.

The cynicism here boggles the mind. You can talk blue in the face about all the products they haven't killed that power the world and people will just shake their heads in dismay and walk away muttering about Google Reader.

The problem is that they have killed or mismanaged (Talk/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/Meet, Nest) enough products without any executive suffering consequences that it’s not unreasonable to ask how committed they are to anything which doesn’t sell ads. It’d be different if there was new management but absent a correction the same pattern seems likely to repeat for anything which isn’t a cure product.

For anything involving infrastructure, you need a much longer attention span than has been on display.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#237

Post by [deleted] »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #220
WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> super simplistic The law of gravity is super simple, but it produces all kinds of complex results. Underlying the complex behavior of the real estate market is supply&demand driving it.

You’re disregarding the site guidelines here. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Are you interested in address the core of my argument, or only those two words in isolation?

[deleted]

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#238

Post by WalterBright »

sudosysgen wrote: post #202
WalterBright wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in almost no cities has supply outpaced demand? Detroit. Rural communities. In real estate, it takes a while (years) for supply to catch up with demand. What you're seeing is simply city populations are rising quickly.

Detroit has some of the greatest increases in rent in the US[0]. Despite its population decreasing [1]. As for rural communities, they are not comparable in the slightest to cities. [0] : https://detroit.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21164568/detroit-rent-ra... [1] : https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/detroit-populati...

> As for rural communities, they are not comparable in the slightest to cities.

Anything can be proven by discarding data that doesn't fit. Rural population is in decline, and prices drop with it. You can even buy entire towns in Appalachia for a song.

> Detroit

Your own cite says: “New housing construction has barely kept pace with the growth in housing demand over the past decade.”

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#239

Post by marcinzm »

theklub wrote: post #229
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Non profit CEOs make a fraction of what they’d make at a comparably sized for profit company.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#240

Post by seneca »

monadic2 wrote: post #214
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?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say maybe privately owned capital explains why most orgs fail to do good.

> I’m going to go out on a limb here and say maybe privately owned capital explains why most orgs fail to do good.

Nonsense. Efforts to eliminate private ownership have lead to many of the largest events of mass human suffering in history. Spouting empty political claptrap like this degrades the conversation.

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