Google has gotten approval to build a "multi-billion dollar megacampus" in San Jose, California, just 10 miles away from the other giant campus the company is building in Mountain View. CNBC reports that city officials approved Google's "Downtown West" project on Tuesday night.
Google's sales pitch describes the development as a "mixed-use urban destination" built around the Diridon Station transit hub. When the project is completed, Google will own an 80-acre chunk of land that will have 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 housing units, 15 acres of "parks, plazas, and green space," and 500,000 square feet dedicated to "retail, cultural, arts, education, hotels and more." One thousand of the 4,000 houses will be designated as "affordable" housing. Google's San Jose development director, Alexa Aren, described the project as "much less the corporate campus" and more like "a resilient neighborhood." It sounds like it's essentially going to be a Google Town that employees can live and work in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:54AM (6 children)
It will be helpful for Google to monitor their employees 7x24, including in their homes and entertainment venues. This way Google can identify and liquidate any rogue AI SJWs before they cause any public embarrassment. I think I'll buy some more Google stock on Tuesdsy.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:57AM (4 children)
I checked out the development plan at San Jose city hall, and sure enough one of the proposed buildings is a solar powered crematorium. Not creepy at all.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:01AM (2 children)
Or it might be the facility that will provide the GoogleGreen that all the residents will eat.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by captain normal on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:22PM (1 child)
Funny that you should mention Soylent Green, I notice that that all the illustrations of people in the happy-happy Google Town show only people in their 20s and 30s with a very few young children. Apparently no one over 40 nor babies or dogs are allowed in Google Town.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:30PM
Now that 1984 has become a documentary, we're on to Logan's Run.
Think of the environmental benefits!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:34AM
I also saw a room marked "gas chamber" where the plan says they will exterminate all the poor white male victims.
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday May 31 2021, @06:48PM
Pretty much my thoughts as well.
This will prevent anymore leakers or wrongthinkers, since they will not only lose their job, but their housing, neighbors, and supposed spouse who they met at googleapolis. One large groupthink cult in the making.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:00AM (3 children)
No mention of parking spaces / structures?
Around here, if you build a commercial building there are rules on how many parking slots you need to provide... Yes, we have public transit (buses), but they don't carry many people, even in the best of times.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:31AM (1 child)
None needed when you "work from home".
Or didn't you get the idea that's expensive way of buying hammocks for the company employees, who live in a company tent, so that they rarely need to stop working?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday May 29 2021, @11:43AM
They've even got a theme song set up for their megasweatshop [youtube.com].
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday May 29 2021, @03:27PM
It's really odd because most of their proposed development now is parking for the rail station and the SAP Center.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:12AM (1 child)
What are they gonna plant? Habaneros I hope...
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:25AM
Blackberries and apple trees, probably.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:27AM (8 children)
80 acres isn't "mega" anywhere outside of a city. I don't even think it's very "mega" for most cities. Six city blocks, in Manhattan, maybe? Roughly 1/10th of New York's Central Park?
Maybe megacampus refers to their mega egos.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:45AM (2 children)
Well, if you're talkin' New York City, like Manhattan or Brooklyn, probably just an opportunity for them to splay Eruvs around the town buildings and offer their filthy Metzizah B' peh services to someplace inside California. Their filthy New York City-approved practices coupled with L.A.-approved Rabbis will be able to traffic children and organs and molest to their hearts' delights selling America out to China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:54AM (1 child)
I was looking onto a new liver. Homeless livers are cheap, $500 to $1000. Next step up is Soylentnews AC liver, $1200 to $1500. Aside from being stained Cheetos-yellow, AC livers are quite serviceable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:38AM
A thousand bucks! That ain't cheap. Tell my what you blood type is and I'll get you a brand new one no questions asked.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:21AM (4 children)
Subtract the 15 acres reserved for parks, and you get 65 acres.
If we ignore the non-residential, that is room for just 260 small cheap homes. These would be your standard 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1500 to 2000 square feet, on a quarter acre lot. Trim off a bit for roads, and it's about 250. It's definitely not anything like 4000 housing units.
The non-residential floor space is 179 acres. WTF, only 80 acres are available. It looks like this place is going to be built like Kowloon Walled City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:36AM (2 children)
What took you so long to get it?
Even better (for Google), it's a Company's Kowloon Walled City - you're evicted when no longer working for Google.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:40AM
Happy fun times.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Monday May 31 2021, @04:24AM
Thats no joke. It won't be long until they have their own Google Security team. It wouldn't surprise me to see San Jose require that under an order for Google to "Help pay for the policing in this area."
Corporate law is a thing. We're just getting started baby!
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:33PM
> ... 65 acres. If we ignore the non-residential, that is room for just 260 small cheap homes.
Well that's a WTF until I recall my trips that side of the pond. Here new housing goes up at average density of 45 per hectare, which is about 18 per acre, which is over 1000 units.
But that's the average, so small / cheap housing will be higher density than that.
It's also the average across the country, so city density will be higher again.
My back-of-an-envelope calculations put my house at 1500sq ft gross internal on roughly 1/18th acre plot, it's a relatively large house for the area and a relatively large garden, not in a city.
This ain't kowloon, not even close - nothing in this town is even over 5 floors, most are 2 or 3.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:31AM (2 children)
Did anyone notice where it *isn't* being built?
San Francisco is so toxic now that nobody is going to locate there now. See ya!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:40AM
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:52AM
San Francisco is so nasty they're talking about relocating Gay Bay to Portland, Oregon.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:55AM (2 children)
I owe my soul to the company store.
Designated canary?
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday May 29 2021, @05:46AM (1 child)
Here's your gold watch and the shackles for your chain.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:40AM
FTFY.
Now, yer clowns, for the amusement of your masters, try unionizing.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @03:36AM (4 children)
Would be better to let that fade from memory, then announce
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:44AM (3 children)
"To work for Google is to be secure"™
Gated community, no guns inside, military grade security provided.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Troll) by choose another one on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:40PM (2 children)
It'll go way beyond no guns inside, there won't even be any hate speech, you won't ever hear anything offensive, in fact there won't be any white/male/right-wing opinions voiced at all.
Because the instant anyone does they'll find themselves jobless, homeless, outside the gates and "we'll ship you your stuff when you give us a new address and pay the storage & shipping charges".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:44PM
They will just throw the stuff in the solar powered crematorium.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:46PM
Shut up and eat your avocado smoothie, comrade.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:03AM (4 children)
Just a day or two before that news came out, it was announced that Santa Clara (the county SJ is in) is facing mandatory water restriction [sfchronicle.com] because it already can't keep up with demand during the drought.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @10:41AM (3 children)
Not a problem. These are Google employees... they drink imported bottled water and shower in the tears of straight white males.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @11:46AM (2 children)
shower in the tears of INSELs
fixed that for you
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:35PM
Good god, if you're going to try to be an edgetard at least spell things correctly. That just makes an otherwise cringey post even worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @10:15PM
Incels don't cry, they just masturbate furiously while cursing non-ugly people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:28PM (1 child)
"As the world's biggest tech hub, the area could support giant skyscrapers, but local politics prevent them from being built."
Look at a map, assholes.
They don't build skyscapers downtown because it is on the approach flight path to San Jose Airport
People will be pissed if they engulf the only Caltrain station with their company town.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @05:43PM
And downwind of San Francisco, so on warm days you get the fecal aroma of the homeless.
(Score: 1) by Snort on Saturday May 29 2021, @05:26PM
At work!
Please wear your Google watch and keep your google Assistant near! We care about you!
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:41PM (2 children)
We need a currency - Google Dollars - the only accepted currency in Google Towns.
Yeah we decided it was illegal long ago, but we did the same for anti-competitive monopolies. But come on, it's 2021 already! Times change.
Let's Make Company Scrip [wikipedia.org] Great Again!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:51PM
Just use Disney Dollars to get that happiest place on earth feeling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @08:22PM
I'm sure there's a suitable cryptocurrency. Dogecoin?