You think you’re old? When I saw @anon72705028’s Metreon joke at the top of the thread the first thing that jumped to mind was the “Airtight Garage” arcade.
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Man that place sucked. So overpriced, but it was one of the first places on the west coast to get DDR so it had some clout.
Also, Sony Metreon.
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It’s not just you. I love Cory’s writing, but his article titles are the worst. I come to BoingBoing from my RSS reader and I can pick out which stories are from Cory just by the title.
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/adjusts digital earnhorn
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Hey, I remember the “Airtight Garage” getting serialized in Heavy Metal; and the name changing when Moorcock decided he wanted his character back 
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Reminds me of the scene in “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse where he climbs a tree and shoots at passing automobiles. Hey, Tech Sector, act like assholes and you get shot at!
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Damn, I actually know that of which you speak; I moved to SF in 99, and I was there for the opening days of the original Metreon and all it’s overpriced stores.
Damn near 20 years later, and almost none of the original venues are left of that endeavor, aside from the movie theater; what a waste.
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Apple and Google install free wifi for work use only on busses and wonder how windows are “accidentally getting smashed” as they get an extra free 45 minutes of work out of some poor tech shleps.
As long as the corporate masters are harvesting that time as active work hours. 
They can’t drop below 50 miles per hour or boom. 
The bigger question is, are they auto-driving busses? Because I think all their employees should have to commute via auto driver BEFORE they unleash that on the public. You know, "eat your own dog food"™
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This interactive map will give people unfamiliar with the area a visual idea of what you’re talking about. Turn off the “everything else” option to see just public companies and “unicorns.” The site also has a separate map of public transport. The place defining a lot of the future is a sprawling car-culture 1950s-legacy mess where halfway decent housing will cost you at least 30% of your gross salary.
The arcade at Sony Metreon was indeed overpriced and most of the “exclusive” games were sucky, but it was a nifty looking space.
[…]
[…]
As for Moorcock, he put the character out there for anyone to use, but while he liked Moebius he felt the guy in the comic wasn’t really Jerry Cornelius and Moebius agreed to change the name when he heard.
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That’s shitty but not surprising coming from opportunistic corporations… but they can’t force employees to do work before they’re even clocked in, it just means that the ‘free wifi’ is a scam.
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I’m sure it wouldn’t be easy.
But getting billions in tax breaks took years of work- so - it’s not that
their gov relations people aren’t up to the task if the will was there.
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How exactly? Not offering the service means employees either suffer public transport or drive. And while the public transportation benefits slightly from the extra ridership the employees who choose to drive cause extra congestion and carbon emissions.
Realistically these private buses make employees happier and eliminate cars on the road, it’s a win-win. Plus the fact they’re busing to and from work means they’re used to busing and have less need of a car, so they become more likely to use public transit in their free time.
Maybe something could be done to improve the optics, but employers doing this strikes as a benefit to everyone involve.
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Whoever is doing this will surely will never find out where the new route is.
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Well, at least it’s not time spent driving, Talk about wasting your life. And given how many people I know who work in the Bay Area but can’t afford to live here, they’d love to have such a short commute, especially if they weren’t stuck behind the wheel.
People seem to confuse symbol with symptom, in this case.
Well, there’s that, but I think it’s less about the buses themselves and more about how people are pissed that one has to have twice the average income to live in San Francisco (and increasingly the rest of the Bay Area). The buses are the symptom of that inequality, the people riding in them beneficiaries of it.
Not really possible, for the most part, unfortunately. The Bay Area has poor-to-nonexistent public transportation infrastructure, it’s a big, low density area (i.e. a lot of sprawl), and they’re limited in where they can build. That said, Google is in the planning process for building a new, major complex right next to the Caltrain station in San Jose. That won’t help anyone living in the East Bay because Caltrain doesn’t go there, and even people on the peninsula will probably end up driving to a train station (that doesn’t have sufficient parking), but… Also a lot of people are unhappy with the decision because it’ll drive up the cost of housing in San Jose (which is already high for what it is).
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This. As has been pointed out here before. The surrounding communities are happy to have the new business park but then balk at having new housing that would make for sane commutes for the employees which forces them all to fight for the existing housing far away.
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In the film, FAHRENHEIT 451, they used a perfectly straightforward mode of transportation: A MONORAIL cruising high above ground serving a great and practical purpose for all.
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Public transportation services and infrastructure in the form of roads, etc., are largely funded by taxes.
Big Silicon Valley firms like Google, Apple and Facebook are notorious and serial tax dodgers, scrounging on infrastructure which they happily let the taxpayers supply. If they paid their taxes, I believe public transportation could be up to scratch …
Apart from that, yes, you have a point … but the other side is quite valid too. I don’t support physical attacks on buses, but I do understand the kind of ire all of these gentrifying hipsters can cause in the communities they ruin.
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Ah, Children of Men was so good. That one long cut with the battle is the reason I made my friends watch it with me. Though it was great for many other reasons.
As for some of the comments, holy hell, which of y’all are ready to start throwing your bodies upon the machines to halt the gears of the “corporate overlords”. LOL.
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Applaud the mass transit option. I know traffic in that area is way worse than what I deal with, so not only is this a service to the employees, but the community sees dozens if not hundreds of cars not on the road clogging shit up - and all the benefits of this (green house emissions, etc)
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The housing situation in SF and other places is, from what I have gathered, fucking insane. This isn’t the fault of the employees in the least. (I don’t think it is the fault of the companies either, but possibly they have some role in this - I don’t know enough to make a firm statement.)
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Shooting out or throwing rocks at bus windows is completely unacceptable. I see some “not that I support this, but not feeling bad about the extra commute” posts. Which is pretty fucking soft on the condemnation of this.
This sort of thing is incredibly dangerous, for both the people on the bus, and anyone around them. What happens with what ever they are using misses and hits another car? What happens when said car or the bus get hit in a manner that the driver ends up wrecking?
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During their extra 45 minutes, let them eat cake.
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