Slashdot Mirror
The Silicon Valley Paradox: One In Four People Are At Risk of Hunger (theguardian.com)
Zorro shares a report from The Guardian: One in four people in Silicon Valley are at risk of hunger, researchers at the Second Harvest food bank have found. Using hundreds of community interviews and data modeling, a new study suggests that 26.8% of the population -- almost 720,000 people -- qualify as "food insecure" based on risk factors such as missing meals, relying on food banks or food stamps, borrowing money for food, or neglecting bills and rent in order to buy groceries. Nearly a quarter are families with children. "We call it the Silicon Valley paradox," says Steve Brennan, the food bank's marketing director. "As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people." Since the recession, Second Harvest has seen demand spike by 46%. The bank is at the center of the Silicon Valley boom -- both literally and figuratively. It sits just half a mile from Cisco's headquarters and counts Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg among its major donors. But the need it serves is exacerbated by this industry's wealth; as high-paying tech firms move in, the cost of living rises for everyone else.
The scale of the problem becomes apparent on a visit to Second Harvest, the only food bank serving Silicon Valley and one of the largest in the country. In any given month it provides meals for 257,000 people -- 66m pounds of food last year. Because poverty is often shrouded in shame, their clients' situations can come as a surprise. "Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person," Brennan said. "But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."
The scale of the problem becomes apparent on a visit to Second Harvest, the only food bank serving Silicon Valley and one of the largest in the country. In any given month it provides meals for 257,000 people -- 66m pounds of food last year. Because poverty is often shrouded in shame, their clients' situations can come as a surprise. "Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person," Brennan said. "But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."
While it is hurtful to society that there are places like SF where their irresponsible radical liberal views hold people down
What on earth are you talking about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tu be fair he is a shitty individual in many other ways too, that more than justify not voting for him.
Anyway, it's done now. Let's see how long it takes Trump to turn on him. I haven't checked but there's probably already a tweet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Even if you build up, you'll still end up with the same problem. Look at New York. There's tons of skyscrapers there, but the price is just as high. Large cities have lot's of positive feedback loops that attract more and more people and businesses to it, and unless living costs rise enough to exclude some, they'll just keep coming. Eventually, you'll run into physical limitations on how high you can build.
Liberal and Conservative are just bullshit labels that the 1% uses to divide us. It's no accident either, this has been going on for a century with right wing radicals such as William Randolph Hearst controlling the media, rabid anti-socialist Fred C. Koch with his hand on industry, Thomas Mellon and sons running much of the banking in the new industries and many more.
I was in Tokyo back in March 2011 for the big one. The epicenter was out to sea so it wasn't a 9.0 in Tokyo itself, but still pretty powerful.
The thing is, they have plans for when a big one does hit Tokyo. A few million homeless are being provisioned for. The large buildings will be fine, but lots of smaller ones maybe not, and even if they are the people inside them could be injured.
They only build there because they have to. America is big and lots of it is sparsely populated. You should build new cities in better locations. I think the real problem is that because of the way states and the federal system work, and a general dislike of government planning and infrastructure projects, there is no ability to make sensible decisions like that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
that all of the companies there that cause inequality there, ie. successful ones attracting highly paid employees are internet based businesses. The internet is a thing that allows remote collaboration and global reach to whatever, be it markets or talent.
It's shocking that as the internet grows, it's being eclipsed by the growth of Silicon Valley as its driver, a single-node dependency.
Corps that happen to have significant production offices elsewhere also seem to drink the "work in person" cool-aid.
So in effect, a global network enabling remote collaboration spawned companies whose job posts are all "ah you must come to the office, share bathrooms, smell others' food, showcase piercings and tattoos, do a useless standup ritual every morning though we get work done on git repos, slack etc. because we're building out this global collaborative network!"
Google, Facebook, ... why aren't you dogfooding?
You do realize people are born into widely different circumstances and those circumstances, both biological, social and economic have a huge impact on their capabilities to function in a modern society, right? I was born with cerebral palsy and the initial estimate of the doctors was that I'd likely never learn to read or write, yet I now do so fluently in 2 languages and less fluently in 2 others. Is this all because I'm some kind of a superman who beat all the odds with sheer willpower and managed to lift myself up by my own bootstraps? Well, yes and no. You see, my parents decided they weren't going to just give up on me and decided to try and put me into a normal elementary school, where I needed an assistant to help me. The first couple of years were hard and I took a lot longer than most people to master reading/writing, and almost gave up a couple times, but the encouraging support from my family as well as my then doctor kept me going. I also had to have several surgeries performed to hone out major physiological issues that were making my movement really hard, received physical therapy 2-3 times a week (still do) and had to spend quite a while learning basic motor skills with the help of a therapist. This all obviously took motivation and desire to progress from me, which I did have because as soon as I learned to read it became clear to me that the only way of getting on par with the rest of the people out there is to educate myself. However, it also took insane amounts of resources. The amount of money poured into me at an early age is staggering when you factor in the surgeries, the therapy, the costs for the assistant at school, my wheelchairs, mobility scooters, medication (I had to be injected with synthetic growth hormone because my body proiduced almost none of it naturally and synthetic human growth hormone costs a ton) and so on.
Lucky me for being born into a wealthy family right? No. My parents are firmly middle-class, so while we're never dirt poor, I have 2 other brothers so money was often tight, and there's no way my parents could have afforded all these things for me had it been up to them. Luckily I happened to have been born into a country (Finland) in which the constitution guarantees people certain rights, one of which is the right to social security and health care. This means that in fact the state paid for all of these things. All of them. Later on when I graduated high school, at that point having become quite good at studying once my biology was no longer in the way, I managed to get myself into a university here on my second attempt, and that too was paid for by the state as it is for everyone here, for education is also universal here and is a constitutional right, so I eventually graduated with 0 student debt. During my final year at the uni I happened to land an office job working for the health care sector which I stayed on after graduation for a while until a position opened up on the IT side and I moved there. Finally, with a steady income and no existing debt I was able to get a mortgage and buy myself an apartment and move out on my own. Now, at the age of 27 I live by myself still, but I have an assistant who comes by a few times a week to help with cleaning and other laborious tasks that are difficult for me to do, again paid for by state (as is my still continuing physical therapy that's a requirement for me staying functional physically) which is good because although I make enough money to pay my own expenses, I don't have the kind of excess income that would allow me to hire those people on my own dime. Last year I also started a small startup with a couple of friends from the uni that currently is still a part time thing as we've all got our day jobs but the hope is to one day be working for ourselves.
Now I agree w
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
It wasn't confirmed to be forged, this is true. That's because the bint outright refuses to let independent experts analyze the handwriting. It takes maybe a week at most to analyze something like that from past samples. The claims that it was fake/doctored came out a month ago. She ran out the clock till the last fucking minute to admit that she futzed with the document. If it was actually written by Moore she could have made giant fucking production out of it when Moore claimed it was fake and nailed his ass. She didn't because it's not real.
You're not taking into account the different kind of jobs and how many people are hired to do them. Even your own source says the difference is about $3k more in the public sector at the low end, vs $30k less at the high end. Maybe the government just hires more people in the higher-paid professions than the private sector. I mean, Walmart is the biggest employer in several states.