Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Demonstrators Smash Google Bus Piñata in San Francisco

San Francisco’s corporate shuttle buses — the enormous buildings-on-wheels that ferry workers between popular neighborhoods and technology companies south of the City — are easy to hate for local residents who are pissed about skyrocketing rent and snooty coffeeshop infestations.

While the shuttle buses might take cars off the road, they’ve become a grating symbol of cushy excess for everyone else sharing the neighborhood.

So a piñata in the shape of a Google shuttle bus was the object on which some protesters exerted their aggressions this weekend at an “anti-gentrification block party” in the Mission District (actually, from the pictures, it looks like there were multiple piñatas).

But anger against shuttle buses wasn’t exactly a huge draw; as you can see in the video below, posted on local blog SFist, the police presence was total overkill for the actual demonstration:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik