Mountain View — home to some of Silicon Valley’s most profitable companies, including Google — is one of the most expensive places in the world to live, thanks to the sky-high wages commanded by techies, who have gone on to bid up all the real-estate in the region.
Continue reading “To chase out low-waged workers, Mountain View is banning overnight RV and van parking”
Tag: silicon valley
UC Santa Cruz asks professors to rent their spare rooms to students who couldn’t get housing guarantees
The director of housing for UCSC’s Silicon Valley campus asked the university’s 6,000 professors to consider sheltering their students to help bridge the shortfall between university-subsidized housing and the student body’s needs, amidst the whitest of white-hot property markets in the nation.
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Liberaltarianism: Silicon Valley’s emerging ideology of “disruption with economic airbags”
Boing Boing favorite Steven Johnson (previously) has written at length about the emerging politics of “liberaltarianism” in Silicon Valley, which favors extensive government regulation (of all industries save tech), progressive taxation, universal basic income, universal free health care, free university, debt amnesty for students — but no unions and worker acceptance of “volatility, job loss, and replacement by technology.”
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Bosses seed Silicon Valley Christmas parties with models who impersonate fellow employees, after briefing them with back-stories
Business is booming for Silicon Valley modeling agencies that specialize in “ambiance and atmosphere models” who are sent to company Christmas parties after being briefed with back-stories that allow them pretend to be super-good-looking fellow employees, thus lulling the workers at the company into thinking that it’s a kind of haven for extremely beautiful people and raising their self-esteem.
Continue reading “Bosses seed Silicon Valley Christmas parties with models who impersonate fellow employees, after briefing them with back-stories”
NYC civic hackers invite frustrated Silicon Valleyites to do good in New York
We Want You in NYC is a group of civic hackers who believe in using technology to improve people’s lives; they’ve launched a provocative campaign aimed at disillusioned Silicon Valley techies who are tired of working on products that are “designed to kidnap our–and our kids’–attention, only to maximize profits” and want to help “large segments of society to participate in the economic benefits of technology innovation.”
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7 years later, Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla loses bid to privatize public beach
For 5 years, we’ve been tracking the tribulations of billionaire Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who, in 2010, bought land adjacent to a public beach in Half-Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, and then fenced off the beach and hired private security guards to chase swimmers and sunbathers off the public land.
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Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing
Silicon Valley’s legendary housing crisis — now several decades old — has led to the establishment of semi-permanent homeless camps on public lands, including a notable camp on the banks of Coyote Creek, on Santa Clara County Water District land.
Continue reading “Residents of Silicon Valley homeless camp clear 48,000 Lbs of garbage from creek, ask for housing”
Silicon Valley banks offer tech giants’ new hires 100% mortgages on 24 hours’ notice
What to do if you’ve just signed up to work in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, with almost all of your net worth tied up in illiquid shares in your employer’s company? Just ask a Silicon Valley bank for a 100% mortgage, which they’ll cheerfully supply on 24 hours’ notice, with all the “white-glove service” trappings you could ask for.
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Silicon Valley job fair for people who want jobs in India
This weekend, Silicon Valley’s premier convention venue is hosting a job fair — for people who want to work in India:
A job fair at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend is focused on helping companies recruit Indian workers who may in the U.S. on a visa by informing them about the professional and economic opportunities back home.
Organizers also stressed that the job fair is also open to anyone who is interested in working in India.
Among the companies involved in the job fair are: Flipkart, an Indian online shopping company; consulting firm Accenture; and Amazon.com, which runs development centers in Indian cities.
Others include: McAfee, which is now part of Intel; SmartPlay Technologies, an Indian semiconductor firm; InfoTech Enterprises, an Indian engineering design firm; Indian manufacturing firm Jindal Steel & Power; Tata Motors; San Jose-based Synapse Design; and UST Global, an IT services firm.
Looking for work? Here’s a job fair touting tech openings in India
Rightscon: a human rights/technology conference in Silicon Valley
Next week marks the inaugural Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (AKA Rightscon) in San Francisco. This event will explore the role that technology plays in the expansion — or elimination — of human rights and the ways that technologists and high-tech firms can either help or harm humanity. In an age when American companies supply “deep packet inspection” technology to the Iranian government so that Iran’s secret police can figure out whom to brutally murder (to cite just one example among many), this is an important question.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dispatching several staffers to speak at the event, and they’ve provided a helpful guide to the more interesting sessions to keep an eye on.
Google, a Rightscon sponsor and participating organization, as well as a member of GNI, is just one example of a company that has done a lot of thinking on human rights: its YouTube platform has been instrumental in getting news out of Syria, thanks to a policy that allows violent content to remain available if intended for documentary or educational purposes. And just this week, Google expanded its use of encryption technology to default to SSL search on Google searches.
Twitter, whose General Counsel Alex MacGillivray will be among the keynote speakers at Rightscon, is another company that has taken human rights under consideration when designing its policies, particularly when it comes to free expression. Another rights-thinking company is Mozilla, whom the EFF has praised for its stance on privacy.
On the lists of attendees and sponsors, EFF also sees several companies about which we have grave concerns. A prime example is AT&T, which famously acted in tandem with the NSA to illegally spy on American citizens. Also amongst the participating companies is Comcast, against which the FCC issued an order (crediting EFF research) in 2008 to stop blocking peer-to-peer traffic. Skype is also on our list of companies of concern due to its surveillance capabilities. Skype is also one of several companies in attendance that has been ranked in EFF’s Who Has Your Back? campaign (so far, the company has zero stars).
Notably absent from the list are the myriad Silicon Valley companies that provide censorship and surveillance capabilities to authoritarian regimes, among them Boeing’s Narus, Cisco (sign our petition here), McAfee/Intel’s SmartFilter, and H-P.
