Google got unanimous approval from Mountain View’s city council to build a new 153-acre…
Oh boy company towns are back! Now if they would just pay me in Google Play gift cards
This is the opening premise to the book Parable of the Sower - a dystopian novel that in the sequel, many observers have seen greater similarities to the U.S. in 2017-2023 than in The Handmaids Tale - except it was described more like a neighborhood next to something like what we would call an Amazon warehouse.
Kinda hilarious that Butler thought everyone would lose their homes to drugged up pyromaniacs rather than the reality: the homes will still exist just no one will be able to afford to live in them. Maybe she figured that this would be too unbelievable for readers to engage with.
I suspect the US’s path might be like Parable, with a big spoonful of The Water Knife and a dash of Ministry of the Future.
This seems to confirm the motivations behind why the company is pushing more for requiring WFH. For a company with global impact and global offices they have kept doubling down on keeping their engineering siloed in Mountain View. It is funny how much better MTV traffic is when Google has Sundar days (days off granted by the CEO). Everybody hates the traffic but it is self-inflicted. The answer is remote, but the behemoth will need to justify it’s decisions made 6 years ago