When dealing with unhinged users, white lies are often helpful…

You need to log off, call a doctor, and get a script for antipsychotic meds ASAP, my dude. Like, my first instinct is to say something snide about how pathetic Reddit jannies are, but this is unhinged schizoposting. The FBI could not care less about your jannie drama. You don’t have contacts with the FBI. You almost certainly hallucinated these conversations. These are delusions of grandeur. You’re a Reddit moderator, anything but dogwalking is above your paygrade. If you had contacts with the FBI, and this was an active investigation into a semi-famous multimillionaire engineer, they would’ve told you in no uncertain terms to keep your mouth shut. You wouldn’t be spamming the Internet with your baseless conspiracy theories. Either you’re lying, or you’re completely detached from reality.

No one cares if someone’s creating sockpuppets on Reddit. Reddit’s TOS is useless except as toilet paper. Unless the sockpuppets are recruiting terrorists for ISIS, the Feds don’t care. Any cop would’ve told you to turn off the computer and go for a walk or something. You want protection? From what?! Jesus Christ, man. No one’s out to get you. You’re a Reddit mod. You’re the epitome of an NPC.

I can assure you, Wayne Westerman doesn’t even know you exist. He doesn’t know your name, he doesn’t know your Reddit username(s), and unless he has Google alerts setup for his name, he doesn’t know that some random shut-in is schizoposting about him on forums. How could he have the time to? Quick internet search on him: he’s in his 50s, he started a successful company that got acquired by Apple, he’s been name-dropped in the NYT, he has a PhD, his startup exit made him rich-rich. Unlike Reddit mods, I’m sure he has much better things to do with his time than to waste hours every day on pointless internet arguments.

Please get help, before your delusions escalate into stalking this random stranger or something horrible… I don’t respect Reddit mods, clearly, but everyone goes through some rough patches in life, you’re redeemable. Whatever you’re going through will pass, you just have to ask for help. There’s a hotline now: just dial 988. I’m serious.

This is solely designed to make their immigrant workers more reliant on the company than they already are

Tell me you know nothing about the H1-B program without telling me… If Google terminates an H1-B worker, they get at most 60 days to find a new sponsor or they get deported. It’s already an extremely exploitative situation.

Housing precarity is the norm for every renter in that area, unfortunately. This is not moving the needle at all. Hell, I’ll take it a step further: not being stuck in a lease is actually a good thing in this situation. They were living in a furnished hotel room, probably literally out of a suitcase. They have minimal things to pack. They can find a cheap short term rental in the Central Valley. They don’t need to be paying $4k a month for a 1br apartment in Mountain View while job hunting 12 hours a day. All that’s doing is digging them a deeper hole. They also don’t have to pay thousands of dollars (that they might not have) to break a lease if they find an employer to sponsor them in NY or TX.

All these comments comparing this to company scrip are profoundly ignorant, and are downright insulting to the victims of robber barons and capitalism in Appalachia. Google pays salaries in USD. They don’t pay a worker 10 GoogleBucks per ton. Google doesn’t force their workers to live at Google tenements or stay at Google hotels. Hell, they don’t even force you to go into a Google office. All they’ll do is make a note on your “permanent record” at performance review time if you were in the office less than 60% of the time. In coal country, if you showed up at a picket line instead of the mine, they’d send in Pinkerton goons to murder you, and the mayor too.

Call me a bootlicker, I don’t care, but I actually think this is brilliant on Google’s part. Median rent in Mountain View for a 1br is $3600/mo. They’re renting rooms to their high-paid employees for ~15% less than market rent, right on campus, avoiding them from pricing out another local family if all they need is a place to sleep. Sillycon Valley is a terrible place to live. It’s a place to go for a couple years, make a bunch of money, live worse than a broke student, and GTFO as soon as possible. It’s like working on an offshore oil rig, with the gender ratio to match…

Unlike the coal towns’ usurious pricing to a captive market (another day older and deeper in debt), Google is almost certainly losing money on this hotel. They don’t care. They shell out twice as much for a temporary apartment with every corporate relocation package they give to new hires.

Google would like to build more market rate housing to meet demand. Unfortunately, building any new housing is illegal because the real estate cartel runs City Council, so Google takes over an existing hotel and prices it like an apartment. It’s the reverse Airbnb. You love to see it. It’s not a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets when the cartel cornered the local housing market 15 years ago, but every little bit to undermine their stranglehold on power helps. FDR and Stalin were natural enemies, and yet they both recognized in that moment, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Same goes here. Critical support for Google.