Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Employees Living in a Garage Hope Zuckerberg Will Learn What's Happening in His Own City (cnbc.com)
At the beginning of the year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set a goal to visit every state in the U.S. so he could learn more about the millions of people who use the social network every day. But two of his employees tell The Guardian that they wonder when the billionaire is going to get to know his own community. From a report: The employees, a married couple named Nicole and Victor, are both contract workers in the cafeteria at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. And they wish they, and the problems closer to home, could also get a share of Zuckerberg's attention. "He should learn what's happening in this city," Nicole tells The Guardian. The couple says they can barely make ends meet. Together with their three children, Nicole and Victor share a two-car garage adjacent to Victor's parents' home. They borrow money from friends and family to stay afloat and occasionally resort to payday loans. Although they earn too much to qualify for state benefits, they don't earn enough to afford Facebook's health care plan.
Well there is your first problem....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Google spends millions to provide WiFi to "refugee" camps in the EU as if there aren't poor people in the US that could use help. It's virtue signalling with political overtones and nothing else.
This is simple. FB needs to relocate the staff in their unit to some rural site in in North Dakota where those FB employees could no doubt afford palatial houses.
What you don't want to live there, you want to live in a CA area with insanely high real estate prices? That's not Zukerberg's problem, it's yours.
Zuckerberg is still partying on the collective dimes of investors who don't understand how facebook works - or why it still doesn't make money.
I believe you are completely uninformed sir. Facebook has been making consistent profit since IPO: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Do you Gentoo!?
These people don't work for Facebook. They work for a contractor.
our resources are stretched so thin we can't even afford adequate maths for everybody.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Relocate and prosper.
Why do you assume that people who can't make ends meet on a monthly basis have the thousands of dollars it costs to move a family?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
This is the chronic issue. They work full time at Facebook, but Facebook outsourced this labor to a sub-contractor for cheap rates. They skirt employment laws by outsourcing labor. Then the employees are paid far below a living wage. It happens in all tiers of employment. The is very dominant in IT. Large companies outsource their IT labor to contractors and those contractors get a sub-standard wage and no health benefits. The company get's a good financial outlook on paper while large portions of their workforce are shafted. What needs to happen is a change in law, that which if you work full time for a company you must be paid by that company at least a living wage and health benefits. All this sub-contracting to skirt decent wages and benefits needs to end.
The root of the problem is a lack of affordable places to live that aren't several hours' commute from places where people work. I live in the NY metro area, and even 60 miles away house prices are high in good school districts. Northern California is way worse -- you're starting at a million for ownership of any kind of home, which means you need a job that pays an outsized salary just to have a massive mortgage payment.
This problem is repeated in cities all over the US to lesser degrees. Atlanta has very affordable housing if you're willing to put up with hours of driving, and Georgia has almost no property taxes...but in my opinion sitting on the road for another 10 or 15 hours a week isn't worth it.
One fix I could see is to make retirement stability easier to maintain. So many people in our area have little saved for retirement and are banking on selling their high-priced house and moving to North Carolina or similar. It's their only retirement asset, and in the current environment it's in everyone's best interest to keep these mini housing bubbles inflated until they can cash out.
Kids are expensive. Ultra expensive if you give them a chance to go to college. They are a major drain on finances. Like it or. Ot their own decisions have put them in the situation.
Statements like this make me queasy. You're telling me that we now have a society where we have decided that it's ok that raising the next generation is too expensive for ordinary people to do. There has to be something wrong with a society that considers raising the next generation to be something ordinary people can't participate in.
My wife and I make 300k combined in Atlanta. We are talking about 1 kid. Figuring out how we will budget for daycare, college, food, clothes, etc. plus any life emergencies and our retirement. Three kids would not only break us but be unfair to them.
YOW! $300K and it's not enough to raise children?
Really, you are telling me that there is something very, very wrong with our society.
There is more to this story here. Health insurance can't cost more that 10% of your income: Thanks Obama. So how can they not afford FB's own health plan?
They are staying in a garage adjacent to their parents house. I assume therefore this is in fact their parents garage. Mom and Dad can't give them a little break on the rent long enough for them to get some savings?
I mean seriously if my kid had nowhere else to go with his family, and was apparently this broke. I think I'd say "Shit son, I'll back the cars out and you can stay in the garage, rent free as long as you need; if you'll clean any bird crap off the paint when you come home from work each day."
I suspect there is more going here. Somebody has an insane pile of student loan or credit card debt would be my first two guesses. Spend every dime on some get rich stock scam that fell apart would be my third.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's easy to blame vices for everything wrong in society. If only people weren't having so much irresponsible sex. If only people weren't so greedy.
But since the beginning of time, humans felt compelled to take actions based on their emotions -- so if these things do make society a worse place, it should be a pretty steady drag on how "awesome" it would be otherwise. None of this is new enough to explain any perceived recent problems.
I reject the claim that the OP made, too, that our need for an ever-expanding economy requires a constant increase in our population (and our failure to do that is causing our economic woes today). The need for economic growth is increasingly decoupled from the number of available laborers! Automation and robotics are displacing workers already in jobs like cashiers, bank tellers and even security guards. Self-driving vehicles will displace MANY more. But growth in these industries won't slow or stop because of that!
IMO, greed is a human emotion that isn't inherently good or bad. It depends on how you direct it. Is it bad to get angry? Depends on if the anger compels you to do something constructive or not, really. Same with greed.