Google "Evicted" the Berlin Wall From Property It Bought 59
theodp writes Sunday marks the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which Google commemorates in today's Doodle. "Seeking inspiration for this doodle," notes the Google Doodle Team, "we took a short bike ride from our Mountain View, California headquarters to our local public library to study an actual piece of the Berlin Wall" (the Berlin Wall segments are featured in the Doodle). Interestingly, the post doesn't mention Google's connection to how the two sections of the Berlin Wall wound up at the library. After Google bought the Bayside Business Plaza in 2012, where the 12-foot-tall remnants had been kept for decades by German-born businessman Frank Golzen before his death, it reportedly gave the Golzen family until summer 2013 to get the Berlin Wall off its lawn. "Although the donating family has until next summer to remove the installation from the current location," reads a 2012 City of Mountain View Staff Report, "their preference (and the preference of the new owner of the property) is to remove it sooner." A recommendation to relocate the seven ton concrete slabs to remote Charleston Park, adjacent to the Googleplex, was nixed by the City Council, who voted instead to move the Berlin Wall sections to its current home in front of a downtown public library.
donor wanted it in a public place, not Google priv (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says:
The Golzen family believes the display will live up to Frank’s original goal of making the site available to the public.
Re:donor wanted it in a public place, not Google p (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure what the word "Evicted" is doing in the headline... looks like the city council ordered the move.
Re:donor wanted it in a public place, not Google p (Score:4, Informative)
And it wasn't evicted by anybody, in addition to the action being by somebody other than google. It sounds like they sold the property, not including the wall segments, and had asked for some time to move them before the buyer (google) took over.
samzenpus must still be beta-testing his or her nerdiness.
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Re:donor wanted it in a public place, not Google p (Score:4, Informative)
just another DICEy post
Check the submitter.
TheoDP often posts such material, complete with copious links, but weak on premise.
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This. It was the Mountain View city council effectively evicted them by not wanting them on city land because they were "ugly".
Councilwoman/Mayor Ronit Bryant shows herself as a typical bureaucratic toadie without a wit of self-awareness or conscience and utterly ignorant of history by claiming the wall pieces were "just some ugly concrete". I have NO DOUBT that Bryant thinks the US Constitution is "just a piece of tattered paper" as well.
What a worthless piece of shit she is.
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Do no evil. Scummy, sure. "it's just busines"
Yep, nothing to see here, just another Slashdot Scroogling in progress.
Microsoft and Apple's pet "editors" are earning their Xmas bonuses by painting Google in negative light with their buzzword loaded flamebait headlines. This new advertorial based Slashdot is both banal and sickening.
Good grief... (Score:5, Funny)
So, Google bought a building and gosh wanted something that didn't come with the purchase removed from the building? HORRORS! Just more evidence of megalomania by the Google twins Larry and Sergey... Same, shame, shame...
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Why not explain the point that i missed too?
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Sounds like you put a lot of thought into that.
I'm not sure which is worse- that you are capabble of imagining my in granny panties while masturbating or that you spent so much time doing it that you have all the details like the panties belonging to a sister all worked out. And yet you somehow finding this fantasy of yours more constructive than explaining a missed point is telling a lot more about you.
Lets do some psyc 101 on this. Describe your relationship with your mother. Did she hug you enough? Not e
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"Something" in this case isn't an old Camaro on blocks, it's a piece of historical construction with the blood of citizens on it. Maybe you don't care. Some do.
Re:Good grief... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Something" in this case isn't an old Camaro on blocks, it's a piece of historical construction with the blood of citizens on it.
None the less, it didn't come with the purchase of the building. Thus, Google is correct in asserting that a proper home not in Google's building is appropriate.
This has exactly nothing to do with if or not Google has, as a company, any opinion about this valuable and note-worthy artifact.
By the way, I own a "vintage" and pristine Trabant (really!) ... May I store it in your garage for an undetermined amount of time rent free? You don't really need that space, right?
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By the way, I own a [...] Trabant
I think you have bigger problems than having a bloody bit of concrete. You've got a functional deathtrap.
doors made of Duroplast. Duroplast was a hard plastic (similar to Bakelite) made of recycled materials: cotton waste from the Soviet Union and phenol resins from the East German dye industry
Because the car lacked a fuel pump, the fuel tank had to be placed above the motor in the engine compartment so that fuel could be fed to the carburetor by gravity
the smoky exhaust and the pollution it produced – nine times the hydrocarbons and five times the carbon monoxide emissions of the average European car of 2007
And, last, but not least:
The Trabant was the result of a planning process that had originally intended to design a three-wheeled motorcycle.
No wonder. They couldn't even get the number of wheels right!
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It's a two stroke from the 50s. Not sure how that reflects on communism (apart from them making them mostly unchanged for 40 years..). A DKW from the other side of the wall had just as brutal emissions.
The fact that it is only nine fold is pretty impressive, really.
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I think the lack of progress is the point. East and West Germany both started at the same level at the end of World War II. 40 years later Germany had VWs, Opels, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, and Audi. East Germany had Trabant.
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The fact that it is only nine fold is pretty impressive, really.
Agreed! The fact that a 1950's two stroke without emissions controls is only 9x higher on VOCs than an average 2007 highly engineered engine with ~$2000 worth of emissions control equipment and another $1000 or so worth of electronics to minimize emissions production is pretty amazing.
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A properly tuned 1950s (or even a 1930s) engine has similar emissions to a current engine. The issue is that they don't stay in tune for very long because all the controls are mechanical and the emissions only stay low over a narrow speed/power band.
All the extra gubbins on auto engines are because they have to operate at a stupidly wide range of power and speed settings. A properly-specified constant-speed, constant-power engine (ie, driving a generator) can dispense with a lot of that stuff and still be m
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Also, they didn't ask to leave it there, so it doesn't seem it was ever even discussed to leave it there. They sold the property not including the wall for the express purpose of keeping the wall and moving it to a public location. It isn't surprising or notable that they would want extra time, as it is a large installation, and nor is it surprising or notable that the people taking over the property would prefer it moved sooner.
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I don't live in California.
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And if the Camaro was 69 zl-1 with matching numbers or a pre 1970 Z/28 I would take it in a heart beat.
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Which might mean something, if its location at the time had anything to do with its history; it did not; the wall never divided Silicon Valley.
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That's a little silly. The wall never divided south London, either, but a huge piece stands in front of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth.
Also the wall never divided Burbank from Toluca Lake, but a piece of it was mounted right on the Warner Bros. lot, right across the street from the Starbucks and the Steve Ross memorial, where every employee on the lot will see i
Obligatory (Score:2)
Get off my lawn!
Missing quote (Score:5, Funny)
"Mr Golzen, please relocate this wall."
This seems a missed opportunity (Score:1)
Google is breaking down walls on how people connect to the world around them every day. Having this piece of history "on the lawn" seems like it'd be a good mission statement even Google isn't too dense to pass up.
I bet there is something to the story not being told, probably that the owners of said wall wanted Google to pay a yearly fee of some kind to keep it and Google simply said no, and you have until XXXX date to remove it now.
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Probably afraid it will remind their users of the Stasi. With Google's political connections growing strong and their spying becoming more and more like East Germany, they are becoming a danger to freedom in the US. While Google is still smaller (55k vs 91k employees) than the Stasi in 1989, they can be even more effective because of technology.
And that's why I use Bing!. Bing! is easy, fun, and Bing! respects your privacy. Bing! may not be able to find its ass with both hands, but that makes it kid safe!
definition of bing: a heaping pile (Score:2)
The word "bing" means a heaping pile. I'd like to ask Microsoft "your search engine is a heaping pile of, exactly? "
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Based on other comments:
Google bought the building, but the owners did NOT want to sell the wall pieces to Google. The owners WANTED to move them to a more public place.
However, since moving gigantic slabs of concrete and finding a proper place for them is difficult, the owners asked for time to move the items in question after the sale.
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This is news for nerds, not news for trailer trash that hide in their nuclear bunkers every night because the reds are coming.
After years of reading the comments on this site I'm not so sure that those two groupings are distinct.
Should Google store someone else's property? (Score:2)
Google hate. Again. (Score:3, Informative)
Yet another piece of Google hate gets posted on /. *Sigh*
Disregarding the accusatory tone of the article, let's look at the facts:
- Private company bought property in history-rich city.
- Said property contained ruins of that city's history.
- New owner didn't want the ruins in the property (because it didn't want the responsibility of taking care of it, or simply because it didn't like it).
- New owner offered to allow said ruins to remain for a period of time until a safe removal could be performed (to preserve said ruin's historical value) bus asked that it be expedited.
I don't see anything wrong. It's not like there are only 3 original pieces of the Berlin wall left, or that it's the first time they've been moved. Hell, there's a piece of it in front of the American consulate in Munich.
In case you're not aware, the "Berlin wall" nowadays is actually few scattered concrete slabs: http://content.answcdn.com/mai... [answcdn.com]
There are only a few places in Berlin where it actually still looks like a wall, but everywhere else has been removed and replaced with a line marking the original location.
I guess Americans can be excused for not understanding this, but in Europe there's so much history that if you were to treat every single ruin as some sort of sacred cow society would just grind to a halt.
Instead, what we do is to strike a compromise between preserving our legacy and develop towards the future. In that sense, moving a slab of concrete to a new location is a completely acceptable solution.
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Also, if I am understanding various things I've read correctly:
Owners of the slabs did NOT want to sell the slabs to Google (Google was fine with this)
Owners of the slabs WANTED to move the slabs to a more public place (Google was fine with this)
Owners of the slabs asked Google for some time to figure out how to move/where to move two gigantic concrete slabs (Google gave them this time)
What I'm not sure of is whether the owners took longer than expected to move the slabs than Google originally agreed to, le
Google to Golzen (Score:1)