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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 08 2018, @06:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the on-the-bicycle-recovery-team dept.

Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:

"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.

And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.

Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.

The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:

Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:16PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @10:16PM (#619747)

    I see you have contempt for the people who make America great. We'd be 3rd-world without them.

    Essentially none of those people are in the KKK. (the chance being about 1-in-a-million for a random American) Even if they were KKK though, they wouldn't have to participate in violence. There is a KKK chapter that sponsors a section of highway for clean-up. That chapter goes out there and picks up all the garbage left by other people.

    Some people drop trash, paint graffiti, break windows, and steal copper pipe or wire. Other people clean up messes and fix or replace things that are broken. There is a difference, and yes there is a reason that places like San Diego and San Francisco have shit on the streets.

    I'm guessing you're pissed because you are part of a culture that trashes things, or you don't want to admit that a culture you despise is the one doing the most to make things nice.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @11:20PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @11:20PM (#619769)

    I'm guessing you're pissed because you are part of a culture that trashes things, or you don't want to admit that a culture you despise is the one doing the most to make things nice.

    Yes, fix things and make them nice. Like if only we could gather all these homeless hippy-like libtard drug users into some camps, sort of to "concentrate" them. And then we could teach them to fix things, too! We could put a little sign over the entrance to the camp, saying "Work Makes You Free!".

    Why are Southern Republicans so stupid and easily duped? Make America Nazi Germany, Again? Seriously?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:11AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:11AM (#619778)

      Globalist Socialist: Obama, Bernie
      Globalist Capitalist: Romney, Bush
      Nationalist Capitalist: Trump
      Nationalist Socialist: Hitler

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:31PM (#620069)

        Hitler wasn't a Socialist. Yes, he said he was, but that was just to get more members in the party. He was lying.

        https://soylentnews.org/politics/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=22973&page=1&cid=607372#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @11:46PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @11:46PM (#620269)

          His policy was pretty damn socialist.

          You just don't want to have your precious socialism associated with somebody you've made out to be the purist possible expression of evil.

          Tough shit.

          Right in the link you gave, Reziac and bradley13 do a great job tearing that "no true Scotsman" nonsense to shreds.