71–80 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making money is agenda number one for both companies regardless of what their respective PR departments say.
If you must make money to pay for your living and take care of your spouse and kids so that they may have a better future than the life you have lived, is your agenda number one to make money regardless of what you tell your friends you are working for?
At what point is Google going to officially become a consulting company? Right now, they seem to be playing arbitrage with engineering talent. They buy up engineers with large salaries and fancy perks. Those people, who now span almost every industry, are then used on projects like these. This has nothing to do with Google's core business or any branch of it at all. It seems like Google is designing all sorts of prod…
That could happen. It happened to IBM[1] and HP[2], both of which were once product companies.
[1] http://ibm.com/consulting [2] http://www8.hp.com/us/en/business-services/it-services/it-se...
People comparing Apple and Google on everything forget that both companies are very different in their missions. It's not about right and wrong, it's just different.
Making money is agenda number one for both companies regardless of what their respective PR departments say.
Someone needs to develop a public toilet that's self-cleaning but doesn't cost more than some houses. The problem is making it homeless and drug dealer proof. SF has had major problems with their self-cleaning toilets.[1] Portland succeeded, but theirs is armored to contain a velociraptor and provides limited privacy.[2] [1] http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/occupied-san-francisco-... [2] http://www.citylab.com/de…
From their homepage: "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems." Yes. People move into a few big cities because companies companies like Google congregate there, ultimately creating problems such as skyrocketing rents, congestion, declining real living standards, homelessness. Google holds an obvious solution in its hand. By altering…
And it's not a panacea: the car-oriented nature of suburban life is environmentally pretty terrible (not to mention that detached single-family dwellings are less efficient to climate control, and more expensive to provide services to for municipalities). And suburban life brings with it the long commute, the length of which is a better predictor of happiness (negatively, of course) than almost any other demographic factor, including income, marital status, house size, or any of the other things people think make their hour and change in a car every day worth it.
From their homepage: "By 2050, the population in cities will double, intensifying existing socioeconomic, public health and environmental problems." Yes. People move into a few big cities because companies companies like Google congregate there, ultimately creating problems such as skyrocketing rents, congestion, declining real living standards, homelessness. Google holds an obvious solution in its hand. By altering…
While one of the reasons I live in Manhattan is because the job market is very good, I also enjoy it precisely because there is diversity. I can walk down the street or take the train and see hundreds of people working hundreds of different jobs in dozens of industries. That's why people are moving to cities - they're exciting. There's things to do and people to meet.
Google is going to start building infrastructure. Rail, fiber, cable, etc. All the things the US Government should have been doing
Why should the government be doing it?
Consider another scenario: A country has cities A, B and C. Assume that the govt doesn't do infrastructure like building roads. So a private company comes in and builds road between A and B because there is a net profit for them. One problem is obviously, now everyone must pay to use this road. If you are poor and can't pay then you can't use that road even if you need it go to hospital or send your kids to school or start your new business. Again, the result is that lack of infrastructure puts poor people at the severe disadvantage from making progress.
Further, private companies may decide never to build any road between B and C because their analysis shows C only has 1000 people and they can never recover their cost. Now, you can argue that 1000 people needs to suffer for making a bad choice about where to live and should not expect other people to pay up. However if you go in that line of thought, I bet most of the cities would never could have been connected. The crux of the issue is we as humans are only good at finding "local optimums" and it's impossible to see for us what could be "global optimum". What that means in nutshell is that we need to allow possibilities even though it may look venture of loss and foolishness because sometime those possibilities are what leads to huge outcomes.
I don't understand the desire to do vague announcements. Why bother announcing at all until you have something more concrete? What does "time to get to work" even mean here? Doing what?
This is a huge undertaking where public support and co-operation is paramount. They cannot come out one day and tell people what they have done and what to do. They need to give a heads up. Is it only me or does HN take all announcements cynically?
I don't understand the desire to do vague announcements. Why bother announcing at all until you have something more concrete? What does "time to get to work" even mean here? Doing what?
Also, more practically, ideas for this kind of venture can come from anywhere. Maybe someone reading this has a brilliant idea for improving city life, but doesn't have the money or entrepreneurial ability to make it happen. Maybe some startup has a great product in this area, and could really benefit from a partnership with a company with Google's resources. Maybe some city government wants to commission a project to track and optimize their energy usage, I don't know. Why would you intentionally work in isolation when there are potentially great ideas out there?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is switching really that easy? I'm a new hire, and I've been given the choice of working on one of two teams, neither of which particularly align with my interests.
I suspect you won't hear as much from the ones that had a hard time switching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias