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Apple announces plan to build $1 billion campus in Texas
Apple will build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, and establish smaller new locations in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, California, the company said Thursday. The tech giant based in Cupertino, California, says the new campus in Austin will start with 5,000 employees working in engineering, research and development, operations, finance, sales and customer support. It will be less than a mile from existing Apple facilities.
The other new locations will have more than 1,000 employees each.
Austin already is home to more than 6,000 Apple employees, representing the largest population of the company's workers outside of Apple's Cupertino headquarters, where most of its roughly 37,000 California employees work.
[...] The company also said it plans to expand in Pittsburgh, New York and Colorado over the next three years.
Apple press release. Also at CNET.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13 2018, @05:45PM (2 children)
"For the simple example of roads, what are you going to do, pay the private company that controls the road to your house what they want you to pay, or never drive to your house?"
So many logical fallacies in one sentence, I can't name them all... Good Show!
1) Assumes that all private ownership of roads must be by an unrelated "private company" (perhaps I own my house and my road, like so many examples today)
2) Assumes that all private companies are for-profit entities. Ignores possibility of not-for-profit, co-ops, etc. (perhaps the neighborhood association owns all the roads in the neighborhood, like gated communities do today)
3) Assumes that you need to drive to your house. (perhaps not a necessity for a walkable/bikeable urban/sub-urban environment. isn't this what all the government-first/statist-types want anyway?)
4) Assumes that a private road company can't be regulated like any other utility monopoly
5) Assumes that we will always need roads (flying cars are right around the corner :) )
I could see all sorts of unique financial models pop up to allocate the true cost of a road (again don't the statist-types complain that we are unfairly subsidizing cars via road building and maintenance):
All you can eat model:
1) homeowner/business pays connection fee to neighborhood/business park association
2) neighborhood/business park association pays connection fees to feeder road owners
3) feeder road owners pays connection fees to regional highway or national highway owners, etc.
-yearly connection cost determined by how much average load you put into the network
-once your endpoint is connected, your vehicles are free to transit the entire network
...just like the internet
Pay per use:
1) get a toll transponder and get tracked and billed for how much you use each private road
2) toll rates set by vehicle type and popularity of road
3) all sorts of discounting and incentives could happen (ex. take "my" road before 7AM and get a 10p discount per mi)
(statist-types would love this)
Some combination of both?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday December 13 2018, @06:52PM
That level of stupid hurts.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 13 2018, @11:27PM
And who gets to control the neighborhood/business park association?
There are 2 possibilities:
1. They're chosen by some body of people, say everybody who lives in the neighborhood.
2. They're self-appointed and have somehow and mysteriously acquired the power to levy a connection fee on the roads.
If you have a neighborhood/business park association with the power to set up and manage roads and force people to pay for said roads under control (via their votes) of the people who live in the neighborhood, how is that different from a municipal or township government with the power to set up and manage roads and force people to pay for said roads under the control (via their votes) of the people who live in the neighborhood? And don't give me "The government can use force, the neighborhood association can't." What do you think will ultimately happen if you don't pay your fees but keep on driving on the roads?
One final point: Real-life neighborhood associations (usually called "homeowners associations" or HOAs) are often far more draconian than anything the government comes up with. For example, there have been cases where HOA rule violations have led to people going to jail for a bad front lawn [slate.com]. And of course you'll argue that there wouldn't be jail time for that if the government wasn't involved, but (a) the government wouldn't have acted at all had the HOA not insisted, and (B) the government didn't come up with those rules nor were they primarily responsible for enforcing them, the HOA did. Your local zoning board almost definitely doesn't care if you choose to paint your garage neon green, but you can bet that your HOA does.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.