Can GlassDoor visualize a company's score over time, including the amount of removed reviews to highlight when companies try and improve their score by getting reviews removed?
The perception of neutrality is very important for platforms like Glassdoor, otherwise no one would trust it. Showing any sort of visualization that would reveal that they remove reviews would be bad for this.
From the website it sounds like the favicon is changed. So the tab doesn’t go away it’s just on pause
Google: “ a discarded tab doesn't go anywhere. We kill it but it's still visible on the Chrome tab strip. If you navigate back to a tab that's been discarded, it'll reload when clicked. Form content, scroll position and so on are saved and restored the same way they would be during forward/backward tab navigation.”
In the future this will be updated to also use a serializer for discarded tabs.
I don't use Chrome so I have no idea what either of these extensions did, but FF's implementation of tab discarding causes it to reload the page when I switch to the tab, which means I have to wait for the page to load before I can do whatever I wanted to do.
I'd much rather have a way to just stop all JS on a "suspended" tab so that FF doesn't burn 20% CPU on tabs that aren't even visible. (Yes I'm aware that JS timers, etc operate at reduced frequency for unfocused tabs. I'm talking about stopping them entirely.) Discarding may be more efficient for the browser but it's less efficient for me the user, so I don't use it.
Fair enough, although that is not what Great Suspender did. Great Suspender also causes the page to be reloaded on resumption, just like an early version of tab discarding.
Tab discarding does have the slight advantage that it remembers what you typed in on the page and where you were scrolled (but nonetheless still causes a reload).
Making that behaviour more aggressive seems like it is liable to cause significant problems to the user experience with minimal benefits. E.g. background media playback would likely be broken, notifications, etc. Whereas you could simply use bookmarks instead of open tabs to get the same effect (EDIT: actually tab discarding would already be better than that method as you note).
>What you are asking for regarding slowing the performance of background JS is something browsers already do
As I wrote:
>>(Yes I'm aware that JS timers, etc operate at reduced frequency for unfocused tabs. I'm talking about stopping them entirely.)
>Making that behaviour more aggressive seems like it is liable to cause significant problems to the user experience with minimal benefits. E.g. background media playback would likely be broken, notifications, etc.
I want none of those things from the "suspended" tabs.
>Whereas you could simply use bookmarks instead of open tabs to get the same effect
How? Do you mean I would load the bookmark into a new tab when I wanted to visit it? That not only has the same problem that I described for discarded tabs (have to wait for a page load), but is even worse because it loses all the context that discarded tabs do retain. Not to mention the annoyance of maintaining bookmarks for arbitrary tab groups that I just happen to have open.
I'm not discounting that this was an annoying ordeal for this channel to go through, but if this is so easy, why don't professional criminals go after huge channels and take them down as easily?
There might be some subscriber count threshold or partner status that, once crossed, flags extra steps that mean a new violation is escalated for a closer look first?
Interesting. I noticed that the blog post mentions the Nymaim malware family. I read about Susam's case when it hit Twitter the other day and might have even followed a link to his URL. Then a few days later got an email from my ISP Virgin Media claiming they'd detected Nymain on my home network.
I run macOS only and as far as I can tell Nymaim is Windows only. Still, I ran an malware scan on my Macbooks and nothing popped up, so I'm pretty sure nothing infected my devices.
Still, I wonder if I ended up hitting the sinkhole, Virgin was somehow notified and this triggered their email? Or maybe it's just a complete coincidence.
I have been at the receiving end of German authorities reporting an uninfected server of mine to the hosting company as Avalanche-infected based on Shadowserver information. It was unpleasant, particularly because it happened a day before a family holiday, so my spouse was annoyed when instead of participating in preparations, I was researching what had happened and explaining my innocence.
Although my server wasn't infected, it had connected to a Shadowserver sinkhole.
While it's good that there are folks who work to sinkhole botnets, the next step of accusing others of being infected based of what the sinkhole sees needs more care. I'm disappointed that, evidently, my expression of these concerns to the German authorities three years ago hasn't lead to a substantial change at the Shadowserver end.
As can be seen from your case (and mine), you can get blamed even if the software at your end of the connection wasn't the botnet software. Considering how a basic premise of the Web is that it's safe to dereference a URL and everyone runs software that does so (Web browsers!), it's a bad idea that Shadowserver doesn't require a narrower indicator of compromise.
There'd be less chance of folks weaponising this system against bystanders by framing them as botnet-infected if the Shadowserver Foundation sinkhole required the other end of the connection to exhibit more specific hallmarks of the botnet software.
That is the purpose of sinkholes. That's why you don't just change the DNS record to 127.0.0.1 (or similar) - you want to log the traffic that you're seeing so that you know who is infected and can help them.
I'm unaware of this particular international cooperation arrangement but it's great to see.
I would say it should be concerning to you that your ISP is actually watching what DNS addresses you resolve. I'd either suggest using secure DNS or using your own DNS server or some DNS server not owned by your ISP.
Only if you care about that level of specificity of the results; and given that non-technical people love pasting code snippets into slack without the code fences, I'm guessing this change isn't even wanted by non-technical people, and only made detail-oriented folks upset
You don't need the key combo, just as you said, you just need another line, with text or a blank line. I guess before now you could but them right back-to-back? This has never been my use case, but if it was, I can see how this is annoying.
Here's the real question: Did the kid think he was being persistent and that eventually he'd be able to play his games again, or did he think guessing the password _was_ the game?
I don't see it when I inspect Google Search results. Instead I see a mouse down handler that rewrites the link's href to go through a google.com redirector. How did you spot the use of `ping`? Maybe they are running an A/B test.
If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities.
It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross.
There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.
The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..
To me, it shows haters' level of intellect. And perhaps explains why they feel left out. They're attached to an ideal of what 'art' (additionally, activism[1]) should be. An outdated, 20th century one.
I personally don't like Google. And I understand your framing is hypothetical.
But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
Why is tech equal to techbro?
Yea there are always bad apples. But I wonder what Da Vinci would think about holding art in the opposite category as tech?
I'd argue they're more synonymous than opposite. To me, there's creativity. Both art and tech are creative. Applied creativity pertains to both code or a paint canvas.
Either way, the best, most valuable work to society is often never been done before.
Can anyone name an art piece (or if I'm being generous, an art movement) in the last 15 years that's made the level of impact as Google? Or cryptocurrency?
Ultimately, to me, the 'artists' need to up their game. Big time.
[1] Protest city hall if you feel gentrified. Especially in SF where it's largely illegal to build housing. Also, regarding gentrification, you don't hear the positive stories of immigrant families whose businesses flourish because of increased capital in an area, or those who feel safer, or even those who cashed out and sold their 50k house for 1.2 million. Again you hear a largely misdirected, dated and one-sided argument.
The mutual exclusivity is valid. Being able to do stuff that requires a lot of time and doesn't make a lot of money (i.e. art) requires a low cost of living. Adding a bunch of people making $200k+ into a neighbourhood does the opposite of that, very rapidly and very predictably.
Most people working for tech startups (as opposed to for Google itself) don't make anywhere near that salary, especially not outside the major US tech hubs. This campus would have been a startup incubator, not a regular Google office.
That said, yes it would have still contributed to gentrification in a less extreme way than a true Google office.
A low cost of living is also a benefit to bootstrapped software/web companies (small blogs, niche publishers, other online content creators).
But gentrification still happens without big dollar companies showing up. It's often a side effect of the success of the arts in the area. As the wealthy kids move in to be hip and cool, and the businesses that enjoy their money move in afterward, rents go up and creators are pushed out.
If you want to be a professional artist, you need people to buy your art -- patrons. In cities without a large number of wealthy people (passing through, if not resident), there aren't many art galleries.
Artists often live in different districts or even different cities than their gallerists, but they tend to appreciate their patrons.
This may not be relevant, but the great majority of artists will never be professional. Most do their art because they love it, and if they can make some money from it, that is just frosting.
As being from an artistic community and a programmer at the same time, I can empathize with both sides.
However, it should be pointed out that there are really two different programmer cultures. There the corporate one, and then there's, for lack of the better word, "open source" one. The latter is very close to artistic culture but very different from corporate culture. The people are working on what they love, they don't have much money, often they are in precarious situations. I've seen them sharing working space with artists, I've been at parties that mixed hackers and artists without any friction. I've seen self-help institutions meant to help the artists going out of their way to host some kind of strange hacking event.
The issue is that Google wanted to go to the very specific and small space in Berlin where tons of artists are. Berlin is "big" (although not as big as you might think), so why would Google need to be in Kreuzberg when it can be ANYWHERE else.
I'm doing a PhD in Berlin, living in Kreuzberg and I can tell you far from all of the programmers that I know want to live here!
What makes Kreuzberg attractive for startups and a Google campus is that it's central and perfectly connected infrastructurewise. Most other regions like Schöneberg, parts of Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg and maybe Moabit, are all harder to reach from some other regions, even though more start-up employees live there. You can see on the maps of rental e-scooters like Coup how during the day there is a lot of activity towards Kreuzberg whereas after work the district is basically empty of their scooters. Imho kreuzberg is too dirty for most startupers. I guess they don't want to see the heroin junkies of Kotti when they do their grocery shopping.
In general I liked the sentiment of the activists against placing a Campus in Kreuzberg. Nevertheless I didn't like much of their public attitude ("bullets for google") and some arguments seemed superficial ("other Google campuses have increased rents" idk about the causality and factor here). I wouldve liked a Google campus in Schöneberg for example, just as I liked the Google campus in Madrid. In Madrid it offered a nice environment for work, some interesting talks and I didn't feel like it was in an artsy district that suddenly gentrified and turned hip. This could've added something to Berlin, but meddling with the activist scene in Kreuzberg was a poor choice.
I think your comment is extremely patronizing and arrogant ("To me, it shows haters' level of intellect.") and a "let them eat cake" attitude that to me shows a clear lack of understanding of why people have become so anti-tech over the past 2 decades.
Yup, on both sides of the argument. But in any way, there is some deeper truth here, the whole discussion went ad hominem already years ago.
Also it sucks for "the good guys" - literally - that tech has a bad reputation in that sense and on the other hand this is improving only so slowly.
On the other hand it's of course naive to say that artists are good people per se, that is just not true. This is almost biblical, considering that artists are always poor and thus good. We all need to progress, not only people in tech.
They're not empty terms. They're appropriate qualifiers. And they're not even close to being ad hominem. Don't invoke logical fallacies if you don't understand their usage.
How are Tokyo housing prices? Vienna's cost of living is kept down by large amounts of social housing, etc. Gentrification is a side effect of not building housing.
> Gentrification is a side effect of not building housing.
The pattern I've seen (excluding SF) is that an arty area becomes trendy because of its culture, then a bunch of real estate developers kick out all the artists to build high-density housing while bringing in residential zoning laws (no live music etc).
The artists flee somewhere cheaper, build up the culture, rinse and repeat, until you end up with somewhere like Sydney Australia that's had all its culture surgically removed.
Just so you know, your entire comments reacts of bitterness and ignorance. You think their view point on art is stuck in the 20th century, but that's only because you clearly don't understand the type of community you're dealing with. In fact your view point seems extremely myopic and appears to be constrained around your own motivations and hobbies.
>But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue. It's not tech vs. art. It's a "here's these people that make a lot of money and end up just being really big consumers" vs people that are the "creatives." The type that give a neighborhood flare.
Consider a programmer who perhaps love the "art" of programming and spends the majority of their time coding/tinkering without compensation (a rare prospect these days, admittedly), versus someone who works at a corporate job, does what they need to do, and goes home. Neither is better than the other, but they will end up creating radically different communities.
>Why is tech equal to techbro?
Because it's just the type of people it attracts these days. Name one neighborhood where a group of IT people came into that neighborhood and made it a creative space. Without fail, it just becomes a giant consumer hub with absurd rent prices. Artists tend to congregate in areas with other artists and areas that have cheap rent. Tech tends to drive up rent, and it certainly isn't an industry that attracts artists not centered around digital design.
>Or cryptocurrency?
The technology that did absolutely nothing, soaked up huge amount of raw resources, so techbros could play a game about who's going to be left holding the bag?
This is exactly why I used the term myopic. You might find it interesting and cool, and that's great! But it hasn't done anything for anyone else outside the tech sphere. In fact it's actually pretty easy to argue it's been a net-negative across the board.
I've lived in these communities of 'creatives'. For years. I know its a lot of drugs, idealism and not a lot of action.
Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system. Is that your 'another world is possible'? So maybe I am bitter...
Don't get me wrong, the system is fucked up in many ways. And I agree with your distinction of a grey blandness that permeates the tech culture.
I'm more interested in how all the enlightened 'creatives' can engage with this boring grey techbro community. Because frankly, they're the ones paying for most of their free shit.
You're right! The tech community absolutely needs to put forth the effort to engage with people who are unlike them. People who live different lives, have different bodies, and make different choices.
I hate to be the one to say it, but in some cases I can see why some people might be reluctant to engage. I know that for my own part, I am generally disinclined to engage in genuine, kind, compassionate, and empathetic ways with people who treat me with what can feel like open hostility. It's almost always less emotional labor to tell them "Have a nice day" and walk away, putting them out of my mind. My making this choice does nothing at all to further any kind of constructive engagement, and certainly nothing to improve their lives or alleviate their pain and suffering, but it does make my life easier that day.
Again, you're completely right. Techrbos need to engage! It's just that at times it can be challenging to convince people of this basic truth when they find unfriendly receptions.
> Within the tech community, it's really just ego and myopic view points and experiences.
I definitely understand that. Tech people are too self-centerd and shortsighted to look or care about others! If they tried, they'd surely find it a highly rewarding experience. It's patently obvious that none of these asshole techbros has ever actually tried at all, right?
After all, if they had stepped outside their narrow worldviews and bubbles of greed and privilege then it would be obvious. They would think differently. Act differently. Believe differently. Value other things than they currently do. It's not possible that someone could be exposed to the glory of art, creativity, and expression without being moved to value it!
They'd stop acting as locusts, devouring all they come across because it looks tasty and destroying everything in their paths. They'd start acting in considered, conscious, intentional ways. They'd value community.
> As a matter of practicality, it's easier to deflate the obstacle.
I confess, I'm really not sure what you mean by "deflate the obstacle". Or what this means beyond a metaphor I think I don't understand. Could you please help me here? I would very much like to be able to engage substantively with whatever it is you are trying to say.
> It's patently obvious that none of these asshole techbros has ever actually tried at all, right?
It's also pretty obvious when techbro's lack any kind of liberal arts education, or general praxis around the various subjects encompassed in liberal arts. You typically see this in discussions around government or social policies. But it can rear its head in literature to, like when the usage of satire is so out of place and crudely crafted one can't help but wonder how self-aware the person misusing it is.
> It's not possible that someone could be exposed to the glory of art, creativity, and expression without being moved to value it!
Well it certainly is possible and even likely. No one ever made any kind of point insinuating that, or even broached that subject about changing hobbies or what you enjoy. So you've definitely just misunderstood the entire discussion. I recommend rereading the topic post and this thread.
> I'm really not sure what you mean by "deflate the obstacle".
The obstacle being ego.
>I would very much like to be able to engage substantively
Well you can help yourself out by not wasting an enormous amount of energy and craftsmanship around... whatever it is you are doing.
Ah. Well. At least I now understand what you mean. Though I've found deflating the egos of every person in a discussion to be a difficult task. Telling a person getting a hostile reception to get their ego out of the way tends to come across a lot like telling someone to take the licks they deserve, complete with generally being discarded out of hand. Telling a person who feels righteous anger to deflate their ego tends to be seen as telling them their feelings aren't valid.
It's definitely possible for it to work! But I've rarely seen it accomplished.
> Well you can help yourself out by not wasting an enormous amount of energy and craftsmanship around... whatever it is you are doing.
Trying to understand you, establishing myself as someone who isn't your enemy, so we could have an actual discussion. And maybe help you understand the people you appear to viscerally despise as human beings with wants and needs and desires and goals and communities, just like the ones you love and wish to protect so that we can work towards what's best for everyone.
I'm sorry we couldn't have that discussion. I felt like it could have been productive for everyone. Have a wonderful day!
A lot of developers who work at places like Google also:
* Develop software on the side for free (art)
* Work on open source software during working hours sponsored by their host company
* Can afford to have families (I notice "vibrant" communities didn't include those with children in them)
> Or cryptocurrency?
Like it or not, Bitcoin is very artistic. Innovative, novel, spurs conversation and strong reactions...
I think it's you who's actually stuck in the 20th century mentality. Cultivating urban hipster hotspots full of "artists" is pure 20th century bohemian chic.
The building was originally renovated by ID Media, one of the largest digital media/web development companies in Berlin at the end of the nineties. It’s been filled with IT companies ever since they went bankrupt and currently has an incubator as one of the renters. It’s never been full of artists for the last 20 years.
So while I’m not surprised (and very much not sad) that the plans didn’t work out for a host of reasons I really don’t think that the campus would have led to substantial gentrification in that region.
Disclosure: we (still) have our office in the complex.
The mere mention of google already turned up into most housing and office space sale adverts. The effect on housing costs is real but the amount debatable. Rents in the neighborhood have gone through the roof the past couple years and protestors are looking for symbolic wins to make the city more urgently address the problem.
> Rents in the neighborhood have gone through the roof the past couple years
Exactly my point. The rents are on the rise with our without google. I really don't think that the victory is anything but a symbolic win. It does nothing to push the city to solve that issue.
Companies paying workers 3 to 10 times the average wage for an area adds real stress. Berlin's problems are that, and also:
+ A global shift toward freelance and remote work letting people take a risk and move to a new place.
+ The first German renaissance back toward the east after the wall fell. The older generation in the west still remember Berlin and people from Berlin in a negative light, but their children have quiet a different impression and their parents are alltohappy to buy property for them in under-priced Berlin. Additionally reunification gutted all industry in the east causing a renter exodus to larger east German cities
+ A global debt surplus and rich people everywhere looking for stable places to stash wealth with Germany's open markets an attractive destination. In some odd way financially conservative Germans think they win with this, not considering how it increases costs of all social services and thereby their tax burden as well.
Focusing on overpriced jobs is definitely only one of many places to start. Google just made it very easy that people target them first because their products are so disliked for their lack of care for privacy: post-snowden I'm not sure I know of a single service Google has switched to being e2e encrypted.
Since when is a bunch of nerds “techbros”? I really hate this term. If I like programming and computers and databases, am I a techbro? Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
Nobody dislikes a good-natured nerd. As someone from Germany maybe to give some local perspective, what people here really don't like is the sort of tech entrepreneur who builds themselves a castle in the middle of the city, considers the local population to be "riff-raff" and doesn't respect the communal nature of a city.
That's the sort of thing that invokes the image of a "tech bro" and this is what people don't want in Berlin. People don't want the local scene replaced with overpriced chain stores and electric scooters and multinationals dictating city development policy.
The CCC has its roots in Germany and we've always had a hacker and nerd friendly culture.
"what people here really don't like is the sort of tech entrepreneur who builds themselves a castle in the middle of the city, considers the local population to be "riff-raff" and doesn't respect the communal nature of a city."
What on earth are you talking about?
Who are these magical people who build castles?
And Berlin is not hugely more 'communal' than anywhere else.
Amazon, Google, Facebook. Look at the castles they've built in Seattle, you aren't getting in unless you are an employee or are escorted by an employee. None of those companies need this level of security, and most other businesses you can literally wander into during office hours, but that is generally not the case with these three.
You are not allowed into any corporate office, in any city - unless you work there.
Every company definitely has security, even small one's, and this has nothing to do with the FANGs.
Try to waltz into the UBS or Deutchebank building and see if you can just wander around.
Most banks have considerably more security than the FANGS and ever since 9/11 many NYC buildings have a ton of security.
You need to get a visitors badge with a photo they take of you on the spot to simply go to a meeting in some towers in the US. You need 15 minutes just to get in.
> You are not allowed into any corporate office, in any city - unless you work there.
Not sure what you've been exposed to, but having wandered many office towers up and down the west coast, vanishingly few have any form of security beyond perhaps a receptionist or a maintenance man who may harass you if requested to do so. Some do have elevators that attempt to enforce access control during certain hours, but this is generally a non-issue in the daytime.
> You need to get a visitors badge with a photo they take of you on the spot to simply go to a meeting in some towers in the US. You need 15 minutes just to get in.
This is an extremely rare request, and complying with it is consistently not worth it in my experience.
It started a few years ago when there were stories about how many new programmers don't have the traditional nerdy background and instead there are an increasing number of frat boy stereotypes getting in on the industry because it's lucrative (brogrammers). It slowly warped into a convenient catch-all for both misplaced anger at tech workers for causing gentrification* and frustration at a class of people who oblivious to social and economic problems, oblivious to how much power they have, and who think everything can be fixed with an app or the most intellectually lazy application of libertarianism.
* Gentrification is caused by landlords. If being a landlord was illegal it wouldn't happen (or at least the problems caused by it wouldn't).
What makes "artists" better to live around than "techbros"? Having lived in my fair share of neighborhoods inhabited by both, I can say neither is better/worse than the other.
It's basically the difference to people living off their parent's money (artists) vs. people living off money they make themselves (tech workers).
"gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists"
Or bring very high paying jobs that Germany desperately needs, and allow great students to actually do something with their education, which would in turn enable a poor neighbourhood to thrive with ancilliary businesses, restaurants, taxis etc. etc..
Gentrification doesn't benefit the people who actually live there. The block gets nicer buildings and more services, but land isn't people. People in poor neighborhoods rent, so when the cost of the neighborhood goes up they just lose money until they leave, and take on the costs of moving themselves. This is pure downside for them, of course they'd be against it.
It's not that simple. For Berlin, counterculture vibe is an economic resource, more important even than being the seat of government. It's what lures companies like Google there in the first place. Google wanted to be in Kreuzberg instead of Mitte, just like they wanted to be in Meatpacking instead of Midtown. Many companies are content settling down in neighboring districts, well within car-less commute range from Kreuzberg, but Google, in an impressive act demonstration of bad judgment, thought that with enough money they could just buy right into the heart of it. Even on a strictly economic level, it makes perfectly sense for the city to not want that to happen, in the same way that Rome would be stupid to allow the construction of hotels on the ancient forum even though they would surely "create jobs".
The good thing is that Google eventually understood their error (you can't buy the friendship of people who will despise you for trying) because any attempt to achieve this through regulation would have been a total shitshow for everyone involved.
It's basically the same story as the Chelsea Market building, but with gritty Berlin punks instead of cute but toothless Greenwich Village and in an environment where even rich conservatives agree with the left that money cannot overrule everything else. It's really not surprising that it turned out differently.
If you can replace techbros with $MINORITY and the artists with white people, you can see why I have no sympathy for that argument, or the people who put it forth.
And yet the results are the exact opposite - when the tech scene moves in, prices and rents go up. It's clearly not a good analogy if it produces the opposite result.
The article lists that reason (gentrification) explicitly. The only other one given in there is that Google is evil (data collection, tax evasion, etc.). Someone else pointed out that the type of hosted campus would not lead to the same gentrification when the startups don't offer high salaries, but I think the point is still valid. At least, I do not know of another Google campus where this was not the case... I could be wrong.
As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."
> The fear was that the incubator would accelerate gentrification.
Sort of understood, given that Germans are a nation of life-long renters (as opposed to home-owners). Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.
> Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.
Well not entirely.
Gentrification is started and driven by new groups of tenants moving into a neighbourhood. Property owners and investors will only jump onto the bandwagon afterwards. With German restrictions on rent-increases, being one of those original gentrificators (OG) you can lock in an incredibly low rent in a place where rents for new leases skyrocket. As long as you stay in your flat, you're shielded from those rent-hikes.
Growing up, I've had many friends who lived literally in city mansions (4m++ ceiling height, art deco, 6-10 rooms for a family of three) in a fully gentrified area paying a rent lower than I paid for my no-go-area 25sqm studio. All because their parents kept the lease from their 1970s flatshare (pre-gentrification, no-go-area then).
Today even more than 20yrs ago, those OGs often live in an opaque, inaccessible grey housing market: If they want to move (because e.g. the 6 people they share a flat with became 1 spouse and a kid), they first look out for other OGs to do a lease-switch. Which means their rent level stays pre-gentrification forever. If nothing comes across they can still "resell" the lease.
Gentrification is great for wealthy landowners. For poor/middle-class homeowners (in the USA, anyway), there is about 100 asterisks attached to that "great". And in various situations, gentrification can hurt poor/middle-class people even if they own a property.
well you would have thought that after a while Germans should have realised that renting (long term is a mugs game). - Just entrenches the power of the elites.
It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.
Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale".
Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide much more quality/€ to tenants than the landlord, who owns 1 flat and is always overstrained with the simplest maintnance requests.
> It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.
That's great in theory, but in practice has literally dozens of ways to be bypassed. Rents in Bavaria and Berlin have increased by nearly a quarter over these past 4 years.
One of the problems being that the Mietspiegel only accounts for new rentals, with steady increases in rent prices, it does not reflect the actual "average rent prices" because it's missing data for people who've been living in the same place for years and up to decades, with the same low rent.
You‘re comparing apples to oranges. Or in that case existing to new leases.
The latter has way more room for increase than the former - by law. Add to that, that owners often stop bothering increasing rents for longterm tenants (because the allowed increase is the more miniscule the more years pass by) and concentrate on hikes for new leases.
It's not like people had or have much of a choice, buying property ain't cheap in Germany, at least outside of completely underdeveloped and remote areas. Even reasonably wealthy people usually have to finance it through a extra credit.
Also ain't helping that over these past decades incomes have stagnated while job security got way worse, so people are less likely to commit to such long-term liabilities.
The distinction between campus vs. incubator is within the current gentrification discussion in Berlin probably not too important.
They main issue to tackle for the Berlin government—from my point of view—is to find the right balance of luxury and affordable housing. People making above average salaries in the growing tech scene should/would pay the higher prices for luxury properties, while the art and counter culture scene would not need to be gentrified if there was a higher supply of affordable housing.
As a Berliner for the past 5 years, I really believe that most the unique vibe of the city comes from the art and left-oriented community here. A lot of us working in the tech world support it, enjoy it and even adapt to their ways (while keeping quiet about how much more money we earn). I really hope that the government makes an effort on affordable housing to keep the balance that makes the city special.
I think everyone, myself included, who loved Berlin up till (roughly) 2012 is horrified by the sudden increase in rents that has occurred since the tech industry started moving to Berlin. In 2010 I stayed with a friend who was renting a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment in Neukoln for 550 euros a month. That was common back then. 8 years later, it is impossible to find that kind of rent. The city was much more pleasant before the tech industry showed up.
> There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.
From what I know about the protest - reading public statements, how the protests began, how they now publicly celebrate their 'victory', and from having seen their early campaign websites - they almost certainly had no idea what a Google Campus is about. At some point certain parts of the campaign learned, but many never left the black & white painting behind for a more nuanced assessment.
I live in Berlin and have not followed this topic closely, and only heard about this not being a typical Google office days ago when Google changed plans. The talk on the street over the last months was always centered on Google wanting to create a big office and the residents not wanting any big corporations there.
This could be how the message was advertised by some but most people i met from the protestors understood googles plans were at least recently rather moderated. They all understood google was a symbolic target for a bigger problem.
How many of them lived and worked there before that? How many of them are making the community around them better for this? Look, I work for startups, I'm not remotely out of this myself, but most startups create net-negative externalities on the places around them (I'd say that most create net-negative externalities societally, and I refuse to work for those, but that's a different kettle of fish.) It isn't "sad" that a countercultural and art-focused area doesn't want techbros milquetoasting the community and causing CoL spikes--even if that means they don't want me around, either.
Poor start-up founders! No wifi and cheap snacks for them. Instead, those spaces will be given to a non-profit donation platform and to an organization that supports children and young people in need.
at the end of the day, what matters is the supply of jobs vs the supply of places to live. And if there's already too many jobs to residential areas, then I think it's quite responsible of them to say no to more jobs. It's better to put those jobs in areas that have enough housing. the bay area was not so smart and look where it got us.
I don’t care what it is! Nothing good ever came out product-wise from Google other than search engine. Let Google search, period!
You can argue that we have second most popular operating system thanks to Google but you can’t argue that have not Google someone else would have filled in the void. And now that despicable news came out about Android founder and how Google covered for him, its akward looking at friends devices thinking to yourself: this has been invented by a total creep with a dream of slavery times being back so he can own people. Disgusting! I mean imagine if it came out that Jobs was a big fan of Hitler or enjoyed fantasizing about mass-blanket genocide! Would you still buy Apple products? And then there is that PR spin that it was fun kinky game of two. No it wasnt as she barely knew him! If I email 7 billion individuals with plan to own them and lease them, how many will come back defending me that it was okay because it was “only a kinky game.”
I applaud Germans for not being gullable when it comes to Internet. Germany amongst all European Union nations have the most strict rules and regulations protecting citizens first and foremost, not foreign entities that pay squad of taxes within German borders. Even on email protection alone you cannot email someone without double optins. We need similar protection laws in USA and Google needs to stick to search!
