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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."
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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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.
"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'
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.
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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.
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.
Taxes don't matter because the money goes to government worker pensions.
Pensions don't build or repair roads.
Pensions don't teach schoolchildren.
Pensions don't put out fires.
Pensions don't solve crimes or keep the peace.
Pensions don't feed the poor or provide for the needy.
Pensions don't keep the air and water clean.
They do feed the poor. What do you think retired civil servants will be if they don't have pensions? Many of them worked below-market-wage jobs for decades, which means they won't have nearly as much saved up for retirement as their private sector peers. Compound interest means even a small difference in income adds up to a huge difference in the size of the retirement fund.
Not to mention what a dick move it would be to promise pensions then take it away when it's inconvenient.
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 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".
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?
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
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.
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.
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.