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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."
They are paying around $36,000 in property taxes a year in Silicon Valley.
Caution: Contents under pressure
I know it may come as a shock to you but a lot of people are skeptical when you come out of the woodwork on the eve of an election and make claims with forged or no proof of some illicit activity decades ago. Some people might not believe you. Imagine that.
Silicon Valley has some of the most draconian development regulations in the US (part of it is a field used for grazing cows). And when you can't develop, you can't build houses and apartments to build up the existing housing stock, and people end up living in cars and garages. Silicon Valley won't become exactly affordable, but at least people will have more places to live at lower rents and prices.
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Considering what it costs to rent, based on me (I cook, don't eat out, don't eat frozen food), if they are spending more than 10% of their monthly outgo on food they're idiots.
The real headline should be "1 in 4 are at risk of being homeless".
Telecommuting would solve a lot of this problem because then people could live where it's affordable and not where it's convenient for the employer.
Odd how the people who talk like this are the first scream and complain about losing their jobs to overseas IT outsourcing.
Just sayin'
The rental in the Silicon Valley area are ridiculously high, and one reason being there are way too many people competing for the housing
Nonsense. This is exactly backwards. The problem is supply not demand. The rich liberals want to protect their property values with artificial scarcity by electing city governments and zoning boards that issue nearly zero permits for housing construction.
So the rich get richer, renters get screwed, the poor get squeezed out, and there isn't a Republican in a 50 mile radius to blame.
Silicon Valley is the center of the technocratic arm of the plutocracy. Rule by wealth means poverty is its main weapon. Society is being programmed into a sorting algorithm to serve its current owners.
We need to bust them up or we are going to be sorted below AI/machines.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
"At risk of hunger" would suggest only that these people are living in poverty... that while not necessarily severely undernourished, they do not make enough each month to make ends meet, and that means they are not eating well.
Living in a cheaper neighborhood could save them a lot of money each month, but then they could easily end up paying more than whatever they save on the increased commute requirements that they create for themselves by doing so.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
These are nice suburban areas. Suburbs beat the squalor of the inner city any day. The snag is that the population boomed very quickly, faster than anyone could plan for. And as well it's not an area with easy access in and out of and no room for more housing without ripping and those suburbs and putting in high rises (nice for those raised in cities but bleak for those don't like density). The few high rises that do exist are extremely expensive anyway, yuppie magnets.
The vast majority of this is the fault of shit hole city planning and false liberals. Everything within a half hour drive of google or apple headquarters should be 20+ story buildings and largly would be if zoned appropriately. It's the "perserving" of the old communities that has created a completely unsustainable environment for working class people. Far to many "liberals" are happy to maintain backwards city planning that leaves the working class impoverished so they maintain their own property values and quaint downtowns at the expense of any type of livable environment for those who sell them their food.
I live in the Northbay of California (an hourish drive from SF) and we're experiencing the same thing up here (to a lesser degree of course). Tons of "liberals" who demonstratably don't give a rats ass about anyone earning less than 50k.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Itâ(TM)s not a liberal thing, itâ(TM)s a rich thing. People who are rich tend to want to stay rich and tend to want other rich people to be their neighbors.
may your kindness and compassion be returned 100-fold.
That the Moore signing in the yearbook was forged was fake news that Fox put out and they retracted the story after they had spread it around. Breitbart and other news kept their copies of the stories even after Fox retracted the source story.
http://thehill.com/homenews/me...
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
I find it twisted that Republicans are the ones who complain about fake news the most, except the news they watch and read puts out much more fake news than most mainstream media. I guess it's the same as Trump having called Clinton a liar, when he's Mr. 5 public lies a day.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
What do you expect when the richest 1% in USA owns more than bottom 90%? At this point, I think it's time to define US corporatism as "communism" for the 1%er.
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
It means your income to mandatory expenditure ratio is so bad that a single event can leave you unable to afford food. Car breaks down, you get ill etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You help build a city and then you are forced to leave? It doesnâ(TM)t seem right a society that does or allows that. We should be finding ways to help our neighbors not ways to get rid of them.
I'm living in a garage. I'm here right now as I type, what of it? I've lived in far worse place before.
All true democracies limit majority rule to protect the rights of minorities. For example, it is not possible to enact regulations so people of a given race are not allowed to live in a given area. Likewise, it should not be possible to vote a law imposing an artificial income barrier that is well above to whatever the forces of the market dictate in order to prevent "undesirables" from moving to the neighborhood. And yet that is what most zoning regulations are for. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Just because you can eat ramen for just $150/year doesn't mean it will meet your body's nutritional requirements.
I'm not sure I follow. The people are hungry because the cost of living is too high due to the overabundance of high-paying jobs. If they were mere factory jobs, the workers wouldn't have so much money to drive up the cost of rent for all the other low-paid workers.
dom
I don't necessarily believe that, but I think that if we had a UBI they could just move to wherever housing was cheaper. But even if that were the case, that creates another problem. With security guards, teachers, retail workers, etc. leaving, what will happen to everything that depends on them?
Also, The US as a whole tends to look down on the poor and the unemployed. See comment. I think we as a whole will require a change in mindset in order to fix many of our problems.
Not even merit. Equality of opportunity.
A lot of "people problems," however, don't reduce easily. Insufficient data, poor algorithms, and a failure to account for humanity conspire against reductionism.
People are machines. Complex, biological, but still just machines that act according to a predetermined set of rules. You can't predict the outcome 100% of the time, but you can definitely do better than 50%. Just look at what happens during an election. A couple of negative stories come out for a candidate, and 9/10 times their poll results tank. This is why you hear so many allegations of sexual harassment right around election time. A court would never accept a case for which there are no evidence and had happened a decade ago, but Joe Public is easily influenced.
In Silicon Valley, the problem is that there are too many people and they're driving up living costs. The solution is simple. Stop more people from coming and move some of the people already here away. The good news is that you don't need to do anything to make it happen. As living costs rise and wages couldn't keep up, it becomes more and more difficult for people to continue living here. Eventually, some of them will be forced to move. And as news of this gets out, and fewer people consider moving here in the first place.
The only thing is, welfare actually makes the problem worse. Because you can be very poor and still live in the area on food stamps and low-income housing, you're incentivized to not move. Moving is always a risk, and people in general are irrationally afraid of things they don't know. They'd rather be in a bad but familiar situation than a better, but unfamiliar one. If you take away the welfare though, you basically force that decision. If they were literally starving to death or sleeping under a bridge, they'd be looking for a way out as soon as possible. So from a government perspective, it would be better to give them a small loan, maybe $3000, with a condition that they use the money to move elsewhere, than to try and keep them fed.
Unfortunately, that's not a very intuitive option, which means most people won't understand why it would be better for both the poor and everyone else, making it a political non-starter. So we're left with the other solution, which is waiting for them to suffer enough to get out on their own.
You know all of San Francisco is in the liquefaction zone right? That means the ground isn't really ground but more like water when there is an earthquake. That's why zoning policy limits development on that tiny peninsula.
This is a load of horsepucky. Tokyo is way more earthquake prone than SF, and they have 54 story skyscrapers. In 2011, they rocked to a 9.0 earthquake. Number of skyscrapers that fell down: 0.
SF has 60 story skyscrapers. The danger is far worse with OLD buildings than tall buildings. They can tear down old low rise structures in SOMA and replace them with much taller and safer buildings that can provide far more housing, and boost the local economy ... but they would also put competition into the housing market, so rich property owners vote it down.
It has nothing to do with "earthquakes".
"Poor people stay poor because the government is hampering us rich people", Atlas said, as he shrugged.
That's really credible, oh, yeah.
Disgusting.
Fuck ... just reading the title of this article I got the muchies. Damn it, now I need to go downstairs and figure out which fridge I hid that cheesecake in the back of and if I've left it in there so long that it's gone bad...
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
Perhaps the people that can't afford food should move to Gilroy and save $1000 per month in rent (per bedroom).
And because their diet would be nothing but garlic, you wouldn't have a big concentration of homeless in one place.
Spotted the Green!
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 mean some are more equal than others?
sudo ergo sum
"The economy is getting better".
But that doesn't mean it's getting better for everyone. And the wealthiest don't notice, because no one's really poor any more, are they? Well, no one important, anyway.
It's not exactly rocket science it?
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
It means they do not have enough money to pay for the basics in life, which are usually considered shelter, food, and health.
Of course they may prioritise other "modern conveniences", such as mobile phone, laptop, internet etc. But it is difficult to imagine how you could lead a life and job without those "conveniences".
Some may just be bad a spending money, or at cooking, or lazy. It is hard to know the full story, and it is hard to generalize.
Few have become incredibly wealthy in the global Ponzi scheme known as real estate. Those that need help are probably in rental or mortgage limbo....need work, canâ(TM)t move further away to cheaper places due to excessive travel time...with so few becoming rich by buying houses cheap, selling high, the 85% on more normal incomes suffer! If 60% of your wages go on servicing rent then somethingâ(TM)s wrong
What does it even mean to be "at risk" of hunger?
TFA defines it thus:
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.
Oh, I never checked how far away the earthquake was from Tokyo, but from Fukushima it was 450 miles.
If you belive an building can withstand a 9.0 mag earth quake, you are not very smart.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It doesn't even suggest that.
You can be "at risk of hunger" if you missed a meal last month. Which puts me "at risk of hunger". Mind you, having no pancreas makes missing a meal slightly more serious than for the population at large, but it's still not worth worrying about unless I make a habit of it....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
1. Elect a new gov.
2. Build big buildings. Demand 30% of the building is reserved for poor people. No permission to build unless poor people are given 30% for free.
3. Fill the vertical slums with poor people.
4.
5. Reflect back to when regulations kept the area nice.
6. Smart new money quickly moves to a gated community.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I've seen, but cannot find now, that the US Department of Agriculture defined being "at risk of hunger" when the particular food you wanted was not immediately on hand. Best I could find was ranges of "food insecurity"
Specifically:
Food Security
High food security (old label=Food security): no reported indications of food-access problems or limitations.
Marginal food security (old label=Food security): one or two reported indications—typically of anxiety over food sufficiency or shortage of food in the house. Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.
Food Insecurity
Low food security (old label=Food insecurity without hunger): reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
Very low food security (old label=Food insecurity with hunger): Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.
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
> "As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people."
By "better" he probably means a rising GDP or Dow Jones Industrial Average, but the average isn't the only measure. The distribution matters too, and it's hard to argue that a growing gap between the rich and poor is an improvement.
Owning regulations serve many purposes-- managing the character of a place, managing traffic, ensuring public open space and access to it, etc.
Where I live, multi-unit buildings are being demolished to make way for mansions that are occupied a few weeks per year; the only artificial zoning requirement is maximum building height, which is done for collective benefit (views). When the land is worth over $2,250 per square foot you just aren't going to be able to create middle-income homes.
The issue though is the failure to limit sprawl. Sprawl creates traffic problems and does force unnatural barriers on medium and high density development. When these things are done right, they make a positive impact on a community.
A pure liberal market solution (and I'm using "liberal" here in its correct sense, not in the sense that far too many American think) would fix this.
OK, so janitors, restaurant workers, nurses, generally what you might term service sector workers, can't afford the rents in a certain area because their wages are too low.
Those people remove themselves from the labour market: they move away.
Businesses that provide services find themselves without staff.
What to do? Go out of business? Or offer higher wages, and pass on the charge to the customers, i.e. the highly paid employees of the Silicon Valley tech industries.
The problem is partly in the "stickiness" of people. They are reluctant to move away. Maybe they have family, or a spouse in a job whose income they can't afford to lose. It's one thing to be single and have no family, and be able to move a thousand miles away to another town where housing is affordable and jobs are plentiful (please inform me, if you know of such a place). It's quite another to forgo a spouse's salary and to forgo the help of your retired parents as short-notice (and free) child-care providers.
Really, so the yearbook has been analyzed by independent experts already? Interesting. Oh wait, no it hasn't. Moreover, now that the election's over it never will be and Nelson will quickly fade back into obscurity. It was quite a masterful snow job
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.
While I expect you are Fox News level trolling.
However if you are living in poverty people may choose different actions to do with their their food stamps and welfare money... Also they may have different levels of support from family and their community.
You can buy yourself a $10 steak once a week, however you may choose to not get yourself something else or buy some cheaper versions of products to make up the difference.
People in poverty should still be allowed a degree of freedom and dignity, to make choices on what they can do with their life, even with our hard earned money that we pay in taxes. We should make sure people in poverty have decent quality of life enough so they can get past normal survival and enough to thrive and have a path to get out of poverty.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Give Lister some slack, he posted it early in the morning. Probably with his phone, half asleep. So grogginess+auto correct = odd words.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think it means a missed meal because they couldn't afford such a meal. Vs. skipping a meal because you are trying to diet, or was just really busy and you forgot to eat. Normally these categories are used to help classify a group, vs an actual health definition of hunger.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yeah, because people living in their cars have refrigerators and access to a wall socket at all times.. I can see it now, a bunch of semi-homeless hipsters each with a laptop and a crockpot taking up a table at the local Starbucks.
Ah yes, the USA, the richest country in the world. That Janitor should just live 40 miles from his job, bike to work, and live off lentils and splitpeas.
I'm not saying we should give everything to everyone for nothing, but when you have 0.01% of the population with as much wealth as the bottom 90%, placing the problem at the feet of our poorest citizens seems to be missing the mark.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a runaway problem with the way our system is currently setup that is allowing the richest of the rich to consolidate large amounts of wealth, damaging an otherwise healthy market economy. I'm sure that top weighted market is infinitely sustainable, we certainly don't need a strong middle class to drive our economy. And obviously those poor people are lazy and entitled. They have plenty of beans to eat. Ungrateful beggars.
Having took training classes to be foster parents. They covered that food security is a big issues. Foster Kids may horde food, even at a risk of it spoiling and being unhealthy to eat, because their living conditions caused them to have food security issues. The main suggestion is to have an open fridge polity where kids can get food whenever they want, even if it seems a bit odd. Where most families tend to have some sort of scheduled eating times and portion management, but for these kids their idea of normal is so out of wack, that normal family social graces will need to be set aside just for basic trust that their survival needs are in place.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What percentage of them are running around with a smart phone? The cheapest data plan per month will buy a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, and some beans. You can live on that. I have to believe some of this is a matter of priorities
This is 2017, you need a phone to work. Especially in a techie wonderland like San Francisco. So no, the phone isn't optional. Also, we're talking about people living in cars and garages without stoves/refrigerators, wtf good is a sack of flour and some beans going to do them?
Whether they are "liberals" or not really isn't relevant here. What is relevant is the bad housing policies that you described. The reality is that we get these types of policies in relatively wealthy areas regardless of political leaning. And that's because as people accumulate more wealth they have more time and resources and can be more politically active. Of course just about all of the densely populated areas of California are "liberal." There's no reason to run comments about human nature through the Rush Limbaugh filter.
In this part of California, it's a pretty good guess
In order to manage in today's society, a smart phone is a good investment, IT can replace a TV, Computer, and a LAN-Line in one square glass box. Communication is an important aspect for survival. Especially when in poverty conditions keeping contacts with your friends and relatives is very important, as they will be able to help you out. Also you can use this device for job hunting, and communication between potential employers.
If the point of welfare is just raw survival then it will be nearly impossible for anyone to get out of it, because they will never save enough or be strong enough to get out.
Do they need the iPhone X or a Google Pixel 2? No, but they can get a used iPhone or a used Galaxy that is still fairly recent for a lot less. Or they could get one of the cheaper Android phones new. So they may still look like the normal one of us with a fancy phone, but they are suffering, however without it, they may be near dead.
As most people now have a phone, the culture and the infrastructure of the area is now built around people having wireless access, so payphones, and other support services may not be available anymore.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think that if we had a UBI they could just move to wherever housing was cheaper.
UBI wouldn't make a significant difference in this situation, the issue is a lack of housing, not a lack of affordable housing. The basis of the paradox is that the vast majority of the people discussed in this piece are gainfully employed, making decent or better incomes, but there is a lack of housing. Handing these workers a bit more money ($12-18K/yr in UBI) won't suddenly cause apartment buildings to spring up in Atherton.
Ken
You don't need a fridge for bean storage, and some how people found ways to eat before the discovery of electricity.
Cooking simple food at home can save money over eating out (obviously), and TFA does not say that 1:4 valley residents is homeless, AKA living in a van down by the river, just that they struggle to afford food.
Ken
The paradox in this story isn't that people earning minimum wage are unable to survive in Silicon Valley, it's that engineers/professionals earning $50K+ are unable to survive in Silicon Valley. The vast majority of the "food insecure" residents are gainfully employed at wages that would secure a comfortable lifestyle almost anywhere else in America, but in Silicon Valley it comes up short.
Ken
Your statement, apart from being incredibly racist (you regurgitate the Nazi concept of Lebensraum), is not even true. Affluent people frequently move to lower income neighborhoods displacing poorer families (usually minorities) that used to live there for generations. It's called "gentrification". There are also anti-gentrification regulations which are essentially the same thing as exclusionary zoning, but working on the opposite direction: artificial barriers preventing people with high income from living in a given area.
What does it even mean to be "at risk" of hunger?
The same way having less than some contrived amount of income in the bank means one is "at risk of being homeless" despite having a stable job, paying all your bills, and renting/paying mortgage payment on-time for years. The argument goes "if they lost their job, they don't have sufficient funds in the bank to cover 2,4, 6 whatever arbitrary number of weeks of living expenses". Of course, with the vast majority of Americans having effectively no savings and negative net worth, that isn't so surprising.
Ken
The rental in the Silicon Valley area are ridiculously high, and one reason being there are way too many people competing for the housing
Nonsense. This is exactly backwards. The problem is supply not demand. The rich liberals want to protect their property values with artificial scarcity by electing city governments and zoning boards that issue nearly zero permits for housing construction.
Trying to understand the distinction you're trying to make - the OP said there are "way too many people competing for the housing" and you said "The problem is supply, not demand."
Supply and Demand are two sides of the same coin.
Ken
They had to admit part of the Yearbook script was forged because it was so damn obvious. But the other part was real, trust us we only lied on part of it! LOL!
I hope someday someone makes such an accusation against you and you end up having your life destroyed. Karma is a great and wonderful thing.
While what you say might be true for your area, it doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. For example, many cities in the San Francisco Peninsula have zoning regulations which greatly restrict density within blocks of transit infrastructure, like Caltrain, receiving millions from state and federal programs. It is very hard to justify those zoning regulations as being enacted for the collective benefit.
What percentage of them are running around with a smart phone? The cheapest data plan per month will buy a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, and some beans. You can live on that. I have to believe some of this is a matter of priorities
I love how some people think that if the lower class isn't living in the 1800's they aren't trying hard enough. Sure they live in a country with marvelous, empowering technology, but they should be satisfied with eating beans and rice instead. They probably even have electricity! What a luxury! People survived for hundreds of thousands of years without electricity, so they could do it too. But no, they waste their money on frivolous luxuries so they deserve what they get.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Living near NYC means I certainly shouldn't throw stones about expensive housing. But California real estate is completely out to lunch. If you don't already own a house, you're either paying over a million for the cheapest places that aren't a 2-hour commute to work, or thousands and thousands a month in rent. Outside of Manhattan and gentrified parts of Queens and Brooklyn, I haven't seen anywhere else in the country where everyone wants to live in the exact same location so badly and are willing to saddle themselves with huge mortgages or rents to do it.
I've often wondered how people with ordinary jobs and incomes live in bubble areas like this. Metro NYC is a good example, and there's a lot of stratification in the suburban towns because of it....some places are just "working class towns" while the next town over is a wealthy enclave. But what do you do when real estate is expensive everywhere you turn? How can a Starbucks barista making $12-15 an hour survive in an area where rents start in the thousands per month? No one is going to drive an hour to serve coffee. Same goes for other bubble areas...the rich parts of LA like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, Miami Beach, etc. Anywhere you see people driving Lambos to the supermarket is probably not offering affordable rents.
I've been to SV/SF on business, and the weather is nice. It would also be nice to be able to just give the boss the middle finger if I got upset and walk across the street for a 20% raise while the bubble lasts. But, I don't understand the draw beyond that...it's a huge crowded sprawling suburb with obnoxious rich tech bros. There are so many more affordable places to start up a business!
The rental in the Silicon Valley area are ridiculously high, and one reason being there are way too many people competing for the housing
Nonsense. This is exactly backwards. The problem is supply not demand. The rich liberals want to protect their property values with artificial scarcity by electing city governments and zoning boards that issue nearly zero permits for housing construction.
So the rich get richer, renters get screwed, the poor get squeezed out, and there isn't a Republican in a 50 mile radius to blame.
Wealthy people want to protect their wealth and the luxuries it provides. It's got nothing to do with political ideology. Both parties serve the wealthy. One is just more blatant about it.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
No it is my general diagnosed dyslexia, that I need to struggle with on a daily basis.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> rich liberals want to protect their property values with artificial scarcity by electing city governments and zoning boards that issue nearly zero permits for housing construction
Problem is not that the rich have too much power but that the poor have too little power.
Why?
Machines are taking the power away? This is the mechanics but not the cause.
The cause is that the people are not taking the power back. People just keep doing the same thing that they did traditionally, thinking that things have been designed or evolved for the greater good. Silicon Valley is a small microcosm of empowering people, but the world does not catch on to the scale of the self effort they have to go through.
I recently did a lot of self study where I gained tremendous amounts of practical knowledge. I can tell you this was incredibly difficult and appeared abnormal to many people. But some of these people are now seeing that normal doesn't cut it if they want to achieve the same things.
This is not to say I am safe from the machines. I just learned something about self improvement.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
There was a time where we actually waited for a court to determine the innocence or guilt of an accused person.
I agree. What happened to Al Franken was disgraceful.
But hey, this is 2017, and to your average idiot liberal the three branches of government are the legislature, the executive and CNN.
Imagine my contempt for them.
We don't have to imagine it. It comes through quite clearly in your posts.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
> ... Your child molesting senate candidate was banned from shopping malls for harassing young girls ...
Telling lies will never transform you into a good person
https://www.snopes.com/2017/11/17/roy-moore-banned-mall-harassing-teen-girls/
Your link only says that the mall does not have records going back that far, and thus cannot say for sure that he was banned. Telling lies will never transform you into a good person.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Rationalism is fucking GONE. These people are going to attack this president no matter what. They will say anything. Do anything and run fast and loose with the facts until the day he leaves office. While I deeply loathe Chump I really hope he gets a full eight year term just so that these crazy left wing nutters suffer for eight years.
Hey, Rip Van Winkle, were you around for the Obama administration? Do you remember the bullshit being slung at him for those 8 years? Or do you think Obama was really a secret-Muslim Kenyan Socialist who gave free phones to black people? Seems to me attacking the other side is what politicians do, regardless of party.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
Oh, there's a tweet, and it didn't take long.
The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
The Bay Area has become much less affordable than New York City:
.......... $99,151 .... $171,331 ......... $216,181
Salary needed to buy median priced home - 3Q2017
___________________________
New York
San Francisco
San Jose
www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-cities.html
First question on USDA questionaire:
Which of these statements best describes the food eaten in your household in the last 12
months: —enough of the kinds of food (I/we) want to eat; —enough, but not always the
kinds of food (I/we) want; —sometimes not enough to eat; or, —often not enough to eat?
[1] Enough of the kinds of food we want to eat
[2] Enough but not always the kinds of food we want
[3] Sometimes not enough to eat
[4] Often not enough to eat
[ ] DK or Refused
Most of the questions that follow include some sort of "because there wasn't enough money for food?" or " but you just couldn't afford more food?"
Of course, the questionnaire never questions WHY there wasn't enough money for food, so it is impossible to distinguish the "deserving poor" from the meth addicts who blew all their money on meth. Or for that matter, from people who simply spend some portion of their income on cigarettes, beer, tattoos, TVs, lottery tickets...people who could afford food for their families if they made food a priority over minor vices and entertainment.
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.
The San Francisco Bay Area is absolutely beautiful, though not what it was 20-30 years ago (imho). The weather is rarely too hot, or too cold. You almost never see anything close to a tornado, and definitely do not find hurricanes in that cold pacific water. The skies are blue, it rarely rains during the times of year that people want to be outside enjoying life. There is practically no humidity to deal with. It is one of the most beautiful and ideal places to live on the planet. No amount of government intervention would prevent people from wanting to live there. The only thing that could make that happen is for some sort of change upon the landscape that made habitation impossible.
Is it really that bad in the US? My phone cost £100 in 2013 and I spend about £1/month on average on a pre-pay SIM-only deal. Amortised, that works out at about £3/month for the phone plus connection (dropping for each year that I keep it). It's not an amazing phone, but it does everything I need it to and with LineageOS is still getting regular security updates. If you can live for £3/month (about $4/month) in the valley, I'd be very surprised.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Current examples of salaries needed to buy median priced homes in the NYC and Silicon Valley metro areas.
The latter are already around twice as high.
Even more amazing is their constant desire to call something a blatant conspiracy. "I don't know what risk of hunger means in the context of this article, so it can't be a problem".
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If you trust your legal system, then there are no down sides to voting for him. If you don't, you'll almost certainly get a Senator from the other party. If you do, and he's guilty, then you'll get a Senator from your party, but not the one who ran.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In Sendai (less than a hundred miles away), it wasn't the earthquake that did the most damage. Most of the buildings in this video look decent after the quake. The tsunami is what did most of the damage.
Very true. I noticed this when I was recently looking at home prices in 3 BRAND NEW subdivisions.
They were all being done by the same builder. They all had the same model of houses, however it would specifically list:
Model 1 in Neighborhood A is $140,000
Model 1 in Neighborhood B is $180,000
Model 1 in Neighborhood C is $240,000
Same house, and the neighborhoods aren't even established yet, but they've already decided that the neighborhoods will have a hierarchy where the houses all just cost more so that they know everyone in THAT neighborhood is financially better off.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It is very relevant here. What you choose to avoid saying is that your supposedly "caring liberals" are anything but - indeed, they are money grubbing NIMBYs who will see people starve rather than ruin their pristine neighborhoods with riff-raff.
Perhaps the people that can't afford food should move to Gilroy and save $1000 per month in rent (per bedroom).
Perhaps you should look at housing prices in Gilroy again. Nowadays you need to look at Hollister, Salinas or even Los Banos to find anything remotely affordable for the non-tech employed. A security guard that I talked to at my current job told me he leaves his home at 2:45AM to be at work at 6AM.
Can you imagine crossing that stinking 152 every day to get to your shitty job making slightly above minimum wage?
At my daughter's school in Morgan Hill, in a neighborhood where most single family homes go upward of a million dollars, there are a lot of kids from households that are less fortunate. In fact, the entire school is a 'Title 1" school, meaning that it gets extra federal funds to support the underserved children.
In Silicon Valley. Seriously?
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I presume you'd rather see him use Breitbart or Infowars?
Thru history all empires fall, it was well noted by Gore Vidal in his book
"The decline and fall of the American Empire"
https://books.google.com/books...
The book isn't perfect, but it makes some key points that are absolute gold.
I am not on blue team or red team as believe both are political theater.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
That would have left a Senate ethics investigation as the only way to remove Roy Moore. The ethics committee could recommend expulsion after which you would need a 2./3 majority to proceed with the explusion. The GOP would have had to think long and hard about removing a Senator that was elected with his constituents being fully aware of his alleged behavior thou, as that would have more then likely caused a backlash from Alabama GOP voters and cost them dearly in subsequent elections. Despite loosing a seat in a already tiny majority (with the vice-president as the tie breaker it is now effectively 52-49), it is likely the GOP leadership is breathing a sigh of relief having dodged a political hand grande
All true democracies limit majority rule to protect the rights of minorities. For example, it is not possible to enact regulations so people of a given race are not allowed to live in a given area.
Technically, limits that prevent such racist laws are what make modern developed countries not "true" (i.e. pure) democracies. In a pure democracy, everything is simple majority rule, no matter how oppressive to the minority the rule would be. That's why we have constitutional democracies instead of pure democracies.
</pedant>
The San Francisco Bay Area is absolutely beautiful, though not what it was 20-30 years ago (imho). The weather is rarely too hot, or too cold. You almost never see anything close to a tornado, and definitely do not find hurricanes in that cold pacific water. The skies are blue, it rarely rains during the times of year that people want to be outside enjoying life. There is practically no humidity to deal with. It is one of the most beautiful and ideal places to live on the planet.
Obviously that can't be the reason. The area is all tech companies, and tech workers don't go outside if they don't have to.
So why is all that wasted on tech people?
Fortunately the people of Alabama agreed that our public officials should be held to a higher moral standard than the Criminal Justice system which sets a very high bar for proving criminal culpability. Not even the trifecta of Trump, FOX news and Breitbart were enough to convince them otherwise
FYI a Presidental term is 4 years. He needs to earn that second term and if Trump's disapproval ratings are any indication he has about the same chances as a snowball in Texas
That diet will certainly kill you long term, actually not even that long term.
Cheap storage VM.
This is what you get when you have a near-stagnant economy for 8 years and simultaneously import ~1 million low skill/no skill workers through chain migration, immigration lotteries, and God only knows how many through illegal immigrant catch-and-release and the like. These immigrants (legal and illegal) create a glut of low skilled workers, driving down wages for everyone.
The average economy growth rate under Obama was 1.5% or thereabouts. For reference, growth under Regan and Clinton both were north of 3.5% per year (meaning the economy grew far faster than under Obama, since these numbers are compounding year over year). https://www.hudson.org/researc... The growth rate so far under Trump looks to be ~3%, or 2x that of Obama's tenure.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Moving to cheaper location
1. Use Craigslist/census data/google to browse the employment/job market in a cheaper town/county/city/state/country.
2. Choose an ideal location based off of the information gathered in step (1) and apply online for the jobs with resume tailored to the position applied, with a nice cover letter explaining your commitment and willingness to move.
3. Sell any possession you have that is not worth humping on your back.
4. Move.
I've used this formula multiple times. While I don't have a drug addiction, or mental problems, I do have dependents, and high expectations.
I have zero sympathy for people who make the very personal choice to live in extremely high cost of living areas without the requisite employment. If your willing to put up with the hardship in return for whatever it is that's keeping you there, then society is not obligated to float you.
These problems would mostly solve themselves if people had a little damn common sense.
Drug addiction and mental issues are a different matter.
This is not some secret formula, and if it was, it's out now.
Your welcome.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Are the subdivisions in the same location geographically ?
Most of what you pay for buying a house is the location/land/lot and isn't the building.
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
In my area the public schools provide free breakfast and lunch for all children and there are assistance programs like SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) and WIC (women with infants and children). There is also a Summer Meals program that provides free lunch to all people up to the age of 18.
With all of these public programs, how is food insecurity an issue?
So let's see if I've got this right. In you're eyes, lack of evidence presumes guilt? Wow. Fascist much? You're ideas honestly terrify me. I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter, and I fear for free societies everywhere if anybody does.
LOL, I haven't even told you my ideas! You just made assumptions and got all scared about it.
I honestly don't know the veracity of all of the accusations against Moore. The women seem credible to me, but who knows. I do know that Moore is a major asshole, what with his defying higher courts and the Constitution, and his far-right views. I'm glad he was defeated, regardless of the creeper stuff.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Because tech people spend all their working lives inside when they do go out for leisure they want the weather to be perfect. They dont have the time to wait out bad spells of weather.
**Life is too short to be serious**
These people are social liberals but economic conservatives in other words - Libertarians. The Bay Area is the most Libertarian area. Out here the myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps actually works because of the network effects . People are willing to work in IT for megacorps and live in almost poverty in the hopes that they run into a VC at a coffee shop who funds their startup. Its the same model that New York has for starving artists and LA has for starving actors. Its a winner take all scheme and most people get burnt but the hope of being the next Zuckerberg sustains the folks with PhDs leading lifestyles worse than what Janitors lead in Texas.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Relatively. Obviously they can't occupy literally the same space but they're all within the same general vicinity.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Somewhat moot now that Moore lost. Although still relevant that the RNC funded a credibly accused child molester.
It was analyzed by "Arthur T. Anthony, a court-certified document examiner in Georgia." They just ignore that because they claim the expert was hired by her attorney.
"Nelson is willing to submit the yearbook for independent examination, but only in the context of a formal proceeding, such as a Senate investigation, in which both Nelson and Moore can be called to testify under oath." No, she wasn't willing to hand the yearbook over to Moore, but do you blame her? "Oops", I lost it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
This is a fundamentally flawed idea for multiple reasons, but I'll focus on the most apparent one explained through the concept of the veil of ignorance by the American philosopher John Rawls.
Thing is, none of us get to choose the conditions we're born into. We don't choose our parents or the community we're born to. The point of the veil of ignorance is to highlight that in light of this fact societal systems should be designed with that in mind. Ie. what kind of a society would you desire if you had no idea who you're going to be, whether you were going to be born healthy, sick, to a rich family, a poor one, an orphan, etc. From that perspective charity by private instances has a major flaw: it's not guaranteed.
For the sake of argument I'll grant you that my parents may have been better off themselves without socialism (although I disagree and your figures on taxation are way off btw but that's irrelevant for this argument). Let's assume the best case scenario and say that in your hypothetical Randian libertarian utopia my parents would've had way more money and success and were able to pay for all of the things I needed and still had an equal or better standard of living than they now do, which is massively unlikely because they'd have to be making several times more money for that to be the case, but let's assume that. Well great, that would work for me. But what if I had worse parents? What If me or someone like me was born to say, a single mother or unemployed parents, or something like that, so that they absolutely did not have the means to provide the things I needed to get where I am now. I'd need charity. However, is there any mechanism to make sure some charity or charities would provide the things for me? No. Charity's voluntary, which means charitable organizations only have as much resources to spread as people voluntarily give them, which means even if there were plenty of organizations around willing to help, there's no way to guarantee that those organisations have the resources to do so. So it'd be a gamble wherein the parents unable to help their own child would petition different charities for help, some would get it, some would get a part of what they need but not everything, while others would get nothing. This is already apparent in the States, wherein there simply don't exist enough charities to provide health care for people who can't afford it or are uninsured, and that's even though you have a limited form of public insurance. If the public insurances were removed, the amount of people in need of charity would skyrocket
Here's where your fundamental assumption goes wrong: what you're saying is that with little to no taxation all wealthy people would suddenly turn into grade A altruists who'd make sure that they'd donate collectively enough money to take care of everyone that needs taking care off. However these people, like you, oppose taxation precisely because they do not want to pay for 'someone else's stuff' that, in their opinion, is none of their concern and they should get to keep all their money to pass onto their children and their families. So it is de facto guaranteed that the elimination of taxes would not result in a massive uptake of altruism but instead the opposite wherein the wealthy and their offspring would be even better off than they're now, and the poor would be doing massively worse.
Now if you want a society wherein people are not penalized if they happen to be born sick and/or to shitty parents and everyone's capable to engage in the pursuit of happiness regardless of their starting point in life, that cannot be guaranteed with a private charity model for these reasons. Socialist systems address this issue because welfare systems like the ones in here are charities that are non-optional. We as a people have come together, and following the principles of the veil
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Are the three houses in different school districts? People will pay a lot to have their kids go to a good (public) school. For some, it's either that or send them to a private school.
That's no excuse for atrocious spelling. Please don't post anywhere if you cannot re-read before hitting 'submit'.