AT&T said Louisville Metro does not have the authority to permit a third party like Google Fiber to remove, alter or move AT&T’s equipment on utility poles
Whether or not the authority is there, I can understand, why AT&T is pissed — they did have to comply with the "legacy bureaucratic speed bumps" themselves, but now a major competitor comes in and the city lays down the red carpet.
Chances are, AT&T didn't have to comply with them, because they were one of the first couple of utilities on the pole. Thus, there was no need for them to move anybody else's equipment before stringing their lines.
Also, AT&T is seriously distorting the truth there. Google is allowed to move AT&T's cables only if they can do so without causing any service disruptions, which means they most certainly are not allowed to "remove or alter" AT&T's equipment, just move it.
And, if your car happens to be hanging over the center line, allowing him to move it over slightly, provided that doing so is not expected to cause any damage to your car, but requiring him to give you thirty days notice if doing so would even temporarily cause your vehicle to stop working.
Wouldnt it be more like allowing bill gates to move your car a few inches because you double parked and prevented him from parking where he is legally allowed, and needs to park?
No, it's more like allowing Bill Gates to park his car in the unused parking space in your driveway because you built that driveway on top of a public right of way.
Wow, I'm just floored by the lack of understanding I see here. Look, a Linux kernel module is just a chunk of memory saved on disk along with some information needed to fix up the bytes that need to change in order to run it at some particular place in memory. To load it, Linux just copies the contents of the module from and does the necessary fixups. There is no question whatsoever that the result of that is a single binary. That's just basic computer science. Very very basic. Very very very basic.
Technically, yes, but legally speaking, that's not actually the case. When we talk about a single binary, we're talking about a single binary in non-ephemeral form. At least in the U.S., copyright law[1] grants a very broad exemption for ephemeral copies of software that exist solely in memory, and solely for the purpose of executing code. Under U.S. law, executing a program is not legally considered making a copy, so that ephemeral copy is not a copy, which means that the single binary does not exist, for legal purposes.
As a result, merely linking a kernel module does not cause it to be a derivative work of the kernel. More to the point, a kernel module is not a derivative work unless it contains some significant portion of kernel source code above and beyond any data types and function names contained in the headers. Galoob v. Nintendo made this pretty clear.
For further reading, I would suggest this article from the software pluralism site on University of Washington School of Law's website. After you read it, I think you'll come to the same conclusion—that a filesystem that exists on other platforms cannot possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a derivative work of the Linux kernel, and thus cannot be tainted by the kernel's GPL license in any way, shape, or form. As a result, the Software Freedom Conservancy's conclusions are likely in error.
And most of these same people were whining eight years ago that it was unfair when the Democrats pulled this same crap with circuit court nominees. The Democrats caved, and George W. Bush put four circuit court justices on the bench between April and July of his last year.
The Democrats were wrong to try this eight years ago, and the Republicans were right to call it unfair. But that makes the Republican leadership a bunch of hypocritical opportunists for turning right around eight years later and acting like spoiled children.
If it had been in favor of Apple, I'd probably suggest that the real numbers are even more in favor of Apple than the poll results implied.
The Pew study is 51-41 with a margin of error of 3% (1000 people sampled). If you add up the margin of error and the whopping 8% of people who apparently said "none of the above" or declined to answer, these numbers are virtually indistinguishable from a coin flip. This at least suggests that the public doesn't understand the issue and doesn't care about it, and are voting based on a gut reaction, which you'd expect to be about 50-50.
Contrast this with web-based polls on tech journalism sites, which seem to consistently show an overwhelming majority siding with Apple. Those polls aren't done by random sampling, which means that they are heavily biased towards people who A. actually have read enough to understand the topic, and B. read about technology on the Internet. What this tells us is that if and when the public ever becomes informed on the subject, you're likely to see only single-digit people siding with the FBI's position.
Either way, the fact that the people who refuse to answer telemarketer calls are automatically excluded from these sorts of polls is going to skew the numbers no matter how you try to scale the results afterwards. There's no getting around that. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter. On technology issues, it almost certainly does.
One big problem with Pew studies is how they are conducted. They're often done using random telephone calling, and the people who are most educated on technology issues are also the ones least likely to pick up the phone.
Response rates are only something like 10%, and they're likely to be skewed towards the elderly. Take a look at the Snowden studies, where people over about 40 were highly skewed towards believing the government, whereas people under 40 were highly skewed towards believing Snowden, and you now understand why this poll should be taken with a grain of salt.
Have you ever lived in or near San Francisco? It is common to not be able to afford a car. I have known numerous people who lived in that situation who could not afford a car.
Depends on what you mean by "near". I live in Sunnyvale (South Bay). I would not be able to function down here without a car. I would have to buy a grocery basket, because public transit doesn't get you significantly closer than walking. It's a question of whether you walk for half an hour or forty-five minutes while carrying all your groceries.
If you're actually in San Francisco, public transit works well. You don't have to go very far outside the city center before it completely breaks down. By contrast, I absolutely refuse to drive in San Francisco proper because my experience has been that the roads are a living nightmare of poorly market lane changes and turns, one-way streets, cab/bus-only streets, etc. It is to the grid system what the Centre Pompidou is to architecture. If I have to go up to "the city", I drive several miles to the Caltrain station and take that up. It is possible to do it without driving, but only if I leave San Francisco no later than the 8:40 Caltrain. Otherwise, you'll get stuck at either the Mountain View station and will have to either take a cab or wait until 5:00 when the buses and trains start running again. I suppose you could pay extra to return to Sunnyvale Caltrain, assuming you realize that the light rail has already left before you step off the train....
There is a faulty assumption in your argument, that a basic standard of living involves not having roommates.
That's not the assumption at all. The assumption is that a basic standard of living requires it to be possible to survive without having paying roommates. If you have a shared apartment, there's always the possibility of one person losing his/her job, and when that happens, the person making minimum wage should be making enough money to at least avoid becoming homeless.
And there's always the possibility of being unable to find a roommate, as this girl found out.
For evidence on layoffs, look what's happening in Seattle - as there minimum wage goes up (beyond what the market used to support), unemployment is going up. That's right - while the national and even regional unemployment numbers are approaching record lows, unemployment in Seattle is increasing.
No, it isn't. In Dec. 2015 (the last month for which info is available), the unemployment rate was 4.2%. In Dec. 2014, it took a brief one-month dip to 3.8%, with 4.1% and 4.3% on either side of it. In Dec. 2013, it was 4.1%. The long-term average is 5.54%. Source: ycharts
There's no plausible reason why raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment from an economics perspective. If every business's wages go up equally, then they have to raise prices to compensate, and with few exceptions (things that Amazon also sells), you basically have a captive market. People aren't going to stop eating because prices go up. And people aren't realistically going to stop eating out. The people who are likely to balk at the high prices suddenly have more income to match, and nobody making a decent living cares about the difference between a $5 combo meal in Tennessee and a $7 combo meal in California, so why would they care about the difference between $7 and $8?
It's all supply and demand. If more workers can now afford the $1600 rent, there will be a shortage of apartments and owners will charge more.
With the potential for more people being able to afford apartments and the elimination of the mandatory low-rent units, it will be significantly more profitable to build housing, so more housing will get built, thus counterbalancing the increased demand. And with more housing getting built, that will also mean less space for businesses, which will help fix the current ridiculous imbalance where there are more businesses in SF than can be supported by the available housing, which will further lower demand over time.
There are, indeed, much deeper problems, and the problems are that the minimum wage is still less than half what it should be, given the cost of living. San Francisco's minimum wage isn't even close to being a living wage. The proposed $15/hr minimum wage is barely enough in the South Bay, much less in SF. To illustrate, let me use Tennessee for comparison purposes. I'll show both rural and urban versions of Tennessee for maximum impact.
TN minimum wage: $7.25/hr, $290.00/wk.
After taxes: $239.72/wk.
Minimal apartment (rural): $300/month, $75/wk
Average commute: 7.5 miles each way, 15 miles round trip @ 25 MPG average = 0.6 gallons * $1.49/gal = 89.4 cents per day, $4.47/week
Remaining money: $160.25/wk
If you go with a city location in Tennessee, the apartment jumps to about $800/month,or $200/week. Remaining money is down to $35.25/week, which is just barely enough to survive, but it is possible to survive on minimum wage in Tennessee cities without sharing an apartment.
Now contrast that with the Bay Area:
CA minimum wage: $12.25/hr, $490/week
After taxes: $381.41/week
Minimal apartment: $1600/month, $400/week (unless you get really lucky and manage to find one of the tiny number of rent-controlled apartments out there)
Average commute: 25 miles per day @ 25 MPG average = 1 gallon * $2.09/gal = $2.09 per day, $10.45/week
Remaining money: -$29.04/wk
So people making minimum wage in San Francisco, even with its $12.25 minimum wage have a substantially lower quality of life than people making $7.25 in Tennessee; it is actually plausible to have your own small apartment in rural Tennessee on minimum wage. It isn't even possible to pay for a basic studio apartment on minimum wage in San Francisco (again, unless you get lucky and find something under rent control with income restrictions, and these are few and far between).
Worse, even if you double up in that Bay Area apartment, you still have only $170.96/week after taxes, shared apartment, and commuting. In an area where everything from food to electricity costs at least 20% more than in TN (and for electricity, up to 5x as much as in TN), you're in serious trouble if you're making only 7% more than somebody in TN making minimum wage.
To calculate the minimum living wage, which I define as the level in which a Bay Area resident has the same standard of living as someone in Tennessee making the federal living wage, we can reverse that math. Assuming the average cost of goods is 20% more in California, you would need $192.30 ($160.25 * 1.2) per week after paying for a single apartment rent plus your typical commute cost to have a similar standard of living. $192.30 + $10.45 + $400 = $602.75 per week after taxes, which is a whopping $807.88 before taxes, or $20.20 per hour! So $12.25 per hour is nowhere close to a living wage. It is abject poverty.
Basically, we need to bite the bullet, acknowledge that rent control doesn't work, and simultaneously eliminate rent control and raise the minimum wage for the entire Bay Area to at least $25/hour, adjusted annually for inflation. Not the $15 that has been proposed. $25. This will fix a lot of problems.
She should have turned down the job cold. But like many new college grads, she knew what field she wanted to work in, and she took the only job she could find for a company that operated within that field, under the assumption that it would be easier to transfer internally to a job that wasn't beneath her skill level when one became available. That trick used to work well forty years ago. Nowadays, it is almost invariably a mistake. Unfortunately, schools don't teach that, because the people who teach in schools mostly haven't worked in industry for decades.
So basically you're saying that she should be forced to sell the car that she presumably already owned so that Yelp can pay their CSRs $9 per hour less than the Bay Area average for CSRs? I just want to make sure I understand you correctly....
IMO, her biggest mistake was taking a job that was significantly below her level of education. (And no, a degree in English, even English Lit, is not "worth less than the paper it is written on". That and a tech writing credential will get you a halfway decent job around here.)
No David, she wasn't. She was working for $17/hour. That what the position was advertised at for the San Francisco office on Indeed.com.
Based on the biweekly pay she lists in her letter, she actually made $9.17 after taxes, which is about $12.25 before taxes. So unless she is lying about her paycheck amount, she is not making $17 per hour, nor anywhere close to that.
Which tells us that either she is lying about making $8.25 after taxes or they're paying half again more for new hires than they did six months ago when they hired her. My guess is that they didn't have many takers at minimum wage, so they had to raise their salary. And even at $17 per hour, that's still four or five bucks an hour below the Bay Area average for a customer service rep. They're pretty much looking for slave labor.
Starting wages for her position at Yelp are nearly $10/hour over minimum wage. Assuming she worked a full 40 hour week, she was making a minimum of $35,360/year.
According to her letter, she was making $8.15 per hour after taxes, which comes to about ten bucks before taxes. Another article said that it was actually $12.25 per hour, which is the SF minimum wage, not $10 above it. Either way, unless those numbers are just outright fabrications, she was not making $10 per hour over minimum wage.
Accept her "80% goes for rent" number as fact. That yields:
$21527.168 / year
= $1793.93 / month
This is a quite high rent, and implies she's living alone, with no roommates. We'll get back to that.
Her letter also gives her actual rent at $1245 per month. You started from a wrong assumption, and all your math from there on down is wrong proportionally.
A ForRent.com search (not the best site, but representative) shows 6 apartments in Emeryville -- a nice area, near Berkeley, but across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, for less than $800/month. All of them near public transportation; 2 of them have pools.
I see nothing under $1600/month in Emeryville. I do see two in Oakland in that price range. Either way, I'm assuming she got a two-bedroom apartment with the intent to find a roommate, but then was unable to find one because everybody else on her team was living with a parent. That's certainly what the letter implied. And the problem is, once you've signed a lease, you're kind of stuck with it. And at $12.25 per hour, you can't exactly stay in a hotel until you can find a place, because even the worst rathole of a hotel in the Bay Area is likely to cost more than $330 per week.
To be fair, the letter doesn't say that her dad actually lives within practical commuting distance, just that he is "close". That could just as easily mean Sacramento as Oakland. But yeah, she probably should have.
Then again, she probably should have said "no" when asked to take a job at minimum wage in the first place just to "gain experience". Unfortunately, this sort of shady hiring practice is common in media-related fields, and to me, it ranks right up there with musicians being asked to play gigs "for exposure" in terms of how offensive I find this practice. It just shouldn't be done, and if everyone said "h***, no" when the recruiter gave them the dollar figure, there would be a lot less of this sort of abuse in the world today.
She was complaining that she wasn't allowed to take company food home.
She was also complaining that she wasn't being paid enough to buy food. In that context, that's not an unreasonable complaint.
She posted a sexual joke in response to Yelp's official Twitter account.
That was clearly in poor taste. It might even have risen to the level of being actionable once it became clear that the account in question was held by a Yelp employee. It doesn't negate the message, though.
And, to play devil's advocate here, that's precisely the sort of acting out that I'd expect from someone who was being paid minimum wage for a job that in the Bay Area should have paid considerably more than that. If you don't treat your employees with respect, why should they respect you? Where I come, respect is earned. If you're paying people McDonald's wages (and they were), you should expect no better than burger-flipper levels of decorum.
She posted photos of herself with alcohol on the job.
With an unopened bottle of alcohol. In every tech company I've ever worked for, they've had beer bashes where people actually drank alcohol while ostensibly on the job. The only thing potentially career-limiting about it was the caption, which could be interpreted to mean that nobody was surprised by having alcohol at work because you needed it to make it through the day. Or it could be a genuine statement of surprise from someone who moved here from an area where beer bashes aren't part of the culture, and where having alcohol at work would actually be unusual. If this had anything to do with her dismissal, then somebody has unrealistic standards.
She complained about not being able to make ends meet but didn't have a roommate and didn't live with her parents, despite them being in the area.
Source?
She complained about the cost of public transportation while also having a private car.
And then you pay for parking in San Francisco. Unless Yelp has some special deal, that's going to cost you a minimum of $15 per day, which is four bucks per day more than she was paying for round-trip BART fare, by my math. And that's before factoring in gasoline, wear and tear on the vehicle, the years of your life that you lose to stress while sitting in Bay Area traffic, etc. I wouldn't work in San Francisco for a quarter million per year, much less $12.25 an hour.
Why is anyone making barely above minimum wage trying to live in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. without even getting a roommate to split the rent?
If you had read the original blog post, you'd know that she did try, and she found out that all of her coworkers were living with their parents because they couldn't afford rent even when splitting it. BTW, she wasn't making above minimum wage. According to the original article, she was making $12.25, which is San Francisco's minimum wage as of 2016.
Yelp's only solution to this sounds like to move out of San Francisco, or indeed, CA.
They would have to move farther than that. There's nowhere in the U.S. where $12.25 per hour is an acceptable salary for a customer service rep. The national average is over $16 per hour.
I agree, but problem is that she couldn't keep THIS particular job in most places: Yelp ain't a franchise. If she was making $8.15/hr working at Burger King, she could do that in San Francisco, or Moscow, ID or Columbus, GA and your argument would be valid.
She was working at Yelp for minimum wage in the hopes that it would get her foot in the door for a real job. Unfortunately, the reality is that this technique almost never works. She might as well be working at Burger King. The job would have been easier, and because of her college degree, she probably would have been able to quickly move up to a shift lead job, which would have paid her more than she was making at Yelp....
Not even close. The original article says that she made $12.25 before taxes. Remember that people at the bottom of the pay scale pay much less in taxes (proportionally) than people making in the six figures because of the progressive income tax system.
This sounds like a number of startups in the Bay Area that prey on out-of-state people who don't know how high the cost of living is out here, hoping that they'll manage to squeeze at least a few months' work out of them before they quit and go to work somewhere that pays better... like McDonald's. $12.25 is, in fact, minimum wage in San Francisco. You can literally make that flipping burgers with no skill at all. And this is what they're paying people with college degrees, doing customer support work (which is usually at least a couple of tiers above minimum wage).
Now to put that in perspective, the average salary for a customer service rep in the Bay Area is $22.05 per hour. That means that Yelp is paying barely over half the regional average. And when people complained, rather than fixing the sweatshop-level conditions, they are moving the jobs to Phoenix. The only problem is that the average salary for a customer service rep in Phoenix is still $16.10. So that $12.25 would still be massively underpaid, given the job category, even in Phoenix. And yet somehow they're paying that wage in San Francisco!
I would like to make three suggestions to the CEO of Yelp:
Compile a list of all the managers who approved those appallingly substandard wages.
Fire all of them with cause for creating an appallingly abusive work environment and damaging Yelp's corporate image.
Hire this girl to replace one of them.
You should reward people who have the courage to speak truth to authority, not punish them. If you don't, you'll end up with a company of "yes men" who will agree your entire company right down the toilet and into the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are, AT&T didn't have to comply with them, because they were one of the first couple of utilities on the pole. Thus, there was no need for them to move anybody else's equipment before stringing their lines.
Also, AT&T is seriously distorting the truth there. Google is allowed to move AT&T's cables only if they can do so without causing any service disruptions, which means they most certainly are not allowed to "remove or alter" AT&T's equipment, just move it.
And, if your car happens to be hanging over the center line, allowing him to move it over slightly, provided that doing so is not expected to cause any damage to your car, but requiring him to give you thirty days notice if doing so would even temporarily cause your vehicle to stop working.
No, it's more like allowing Bill Gates to park his car in the unused parking space in your driveway because you built that driveway on top of a public right of way.
Technically, yes, but legally speaking, that's not actually the case. When we talk about a single binary, we're talking about a single binary in non-ephemeral form. At least in the U.S., copyright law[1] grants a very broad exemption for ephemeral copies of software that exist solely in memory, and solely for the purpose of executing code. Under U.S. law, executing a program is not legally considered making a copy, so that ephemeral copy is not a copy, which means that the single binary does not exist, for legal purposes.
As a result, merely linking a kernel module does not cause it to be a derivative work of the kernel. More to the point, a kernel module is not a derivative work unless it contains some significant portion of kernel source code above and beyond any data types and function names contained in the headers. Galoob v. Nintendo made this pretty clear.
For further reading, I would suggest this article from the software pluralism site on University of Washington School of Law's website. After you read it, I think you'll come to the same conclusion—that a filesystem that exists on other platforms cannot possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a derivative work of the Linux kernel, and thus cannot be tainted by the kernel's GPL license in any way, shape, or form. As a result, the Software Freedom Conservancy's conclusions are likely in error.
[1] Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117a(1)
And most of these same people were whining eight years ago that it was unfair when the Democrats pulled this same crap with circuit court nominees. The Democrats caved, and George W. Bush put four circuit court justices on the bench between April and July of his last year.
The Democrats were wrong to try this eight years ago, and the Republicans were right to call it unfair. But that makes the Republican leadership a bunch of hypocritical opportunists for turning right around eight years later and acting like spoiled children.
If it had been in favor of Apple, I'd probably suggest that the real numbers are even more in favor of Apple than the poll results implied.
The Pew study is 51-41 with a margin of error of 3% (1000 people sampled). If you add up the margin of error and the whopping 8% of people who apparently said "none of the above" or declined to answer, these numbers are virtually indistinguishable from a coin flip. This at least suggests that the public doesn't understand the issue and doesn't care about it, and are voting based on a gut reaction, which you'd expect to be about 50-50.
Contrast this with web-based polls on tech journalism sites, which seem to consistently show an overwhelming majority siding with Apple. Those polls aren't done by random sampling, which means that they are heavily biased towards people who A. actually have read enough to understand the topic, and B. read about technology on the Internet. What this tells us is that if and when the public ever becomes informed on the subject, you're likely to see only single-digit people siding with the FBI's position.
Either way, the fact that the people who refuse to answer telemarketer calls are automatically excluded from these sorts of polls is going to skew the numbers no matter how you try to scale the results afterwards. There's no getting around that. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter. On technology issues, it almost certainly does.
One big problem with Pew studies is how they are conducted. They're often done using random telephone calling, and the people who are most educated on technology issues are also the ones least likely to pick up the phone.
Response rates are only something like 10%, and they're likely to be skewed towards the elderly. Take a look at the Snowden studies, where people over about 40 were highly skewed towards believing the government, whereas people under 40 were highly skewed towards believing Snowden, and you now understand why this poll should be taken with a grain of salt.
Depends on what you mean by "near". I live in Sunnyvale (South Bay). I would not be able to function down here without a car. I would have to buy a grocery basket, because public transit doesn't get you significantly closer than walking. It's a question of whether you walk for half an hour or forty-five minutes while carrying all your groceries.
If you're actually in San Francisco, public transit works well. You don't have to go very far outside the city center before it completely breaks down. By contrast, I absolutely refuse to drive in San Francisco proper because my experience has been that the roads are a living nightmare of poorly market lane changes and turns, one-way streets, cab/bus-only streets, etc. It is to the grid system what the Centre Pompidou is to architecture. If I have to go up to "the city", I drive several miles to the Caltrain station and take that up. It is possible to do it without driving, but only if I leave San Francisco no later than the 8:40 Caltrain. Otherwise, you'll get stuck at either the Mountain View station and will have to either take a cab or wait until 5:00 when the buses and trains start running again. I suppose you could pay extra to return to Sunnyvale Caltrain, assuming you realize that the light rail has already left before you step off the train....
That's not the assumption at all. The assumption is that a basic standard of living requires it to be possible to survive without having paying roommates. If you have a shared apartment, there's always the possibility of one person losing his/her job, and when that happens, the person making minimum wage should be making enough money to at least avoid becoming homeless.
And there's always the possibility of being unable to find a roommate, as this girl found out.
No, it isn't. In Dec. 2015 (the last month for which info is available), the unemployment rate was 4.2%. In Dec. 2014, it took a brief one-month dip to 3.8%, with 4.1% and 4.3% on either side of it. In Dec. 2013, it was 4.1%. The long-term average is 5.54%. Source: ycharts
There's no plausible reason why raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment from an economics perspective. If every business's wages go up equally, then they have to raise prices to compensate, and with few exceptions (things that Amazon also sells), you basically have a captive market. People aren't going to stop eating because prices go up. And people aren't realistically going to stop eating out. The people who are likely to balk at the high prices suddenly have more income to match, and nobody making a decent living cares about the difference between a $5 combo meal in Tennessee and a $7 combo meal in California, so why would they care about the difference between $7 and $8?
With the potential for more people being able to afford apartments and the elimination of the mandatory low-rent units, it will be significantly more profitable to build housing, so more housing will get built, thus counterbalancing the increased demand. And with more housing getting built, that will also mean less space for businesses, which will help fix the current ridiculous imbalance where there are more businesses in SF than can be supported by the available housing, which will further lower demand over time.
There are, indeed, much deeper problems, and the problems are that the minimum wage is still less than half what it should be, given the cost of living. San Francisco's minimum wage isn't even close to being a living wage. The proposed $15/hr minimum wage is barely enough in the South Bay, much less in SF. To illustrate, let me use Tennessee for comparison purposes. I'll show both rural and urban versions of Tennessee for maximum impact.
TN minimum wage: $7.25/hr, $290.00/wk.
After taxes: $239.72/wk.
Minimal apartment (rural): $300/month, $75/wk
Average commute: 7.5 miles each way, 15 miles round trip @ 25 MPG average = 0.6 gallons * $1.49/gal = 89.4 cents per day, $4.47/week
Remaining money: $160.25/wk
If you go with a city location in Tennessee, the apartment jumps to about $800/month,or $200/week. Remaining money is down to $35.25/week, which is just barely enough to survive, but it is possible to survive on minimum wage in Tennessee cities without sharing an apartment.
Now contrast that with the Bay Area:
CA minimum wage: $12.25/hr, $490/week
After taxes: $381.41/week
Minimal apartment: $1600/month, $400/week (unless you get really lucky and manage to find one of the tiny number of rent-controlled apartments out there)
Average commute: 25 miles per day @ 25 MPG average = 1 gallon * $2.09/gal = $2.09 per day, $10.45/week
Remaining money: -$29.04/wk
So people making minimum wage in San Francisco, even with its $12.25 minimum wage have a substantially lower quality of life than people making $7.25 in Tennessee; it is actually plausible to have your own small apartment in rural Tennessee on minimum wage. It isn't even possible to pay for a basic studio apartment on minimum wage in San Francisco (again, unless you get lucky and find something under rent control with income restrictions, and these are few and far between).
Worse, even if you double up in that Bay Area apartment, you still have only $170.96/week after taxes, shared apartment, and commuting. In an area where everything from food to electricity costs at least 20% more than in TN (and for electricity, up to 5x as much as in TN), you're in serious trouble if you're making only 7% more than somebody in TN making minimum wage.
To calculate the minimum living wage, which I define as the level in which a Bay Area resident has the same standard of living as someone in Tennessee making the federal living wage, we can reverse that math. Assuming the average cost of goods is 20% more in California, you would need $192.30 ($160.25 * 1.2) per week after paying for a single apartment rent plus your typical commute cost to have a similar standard of living. $192.30 + $10.45 + $400 = $602.75 per week after taxes, which is a whopping $807.88 before taxes, or $20.20 per hour! So $12.25 per hour is nowhere close to a living wage. It is abject poverty.
Basically, we need to bite the bullet, acknowledge that rent control doesn't work, and simultaneously eliminate rent control and raise the minimum wage for the entire Bay Area to at least $25/hour, adjusted annually for inflation. Not the $15 that has been proposed. $25. This will fix a lot of problems.
She should have turned down the job cold. But like many new college grads, she knew what field she wanted to work in, and she took the only job she could find for a company that operated within that field, under the assumption that it would be easier to transfer internally to a job that wasn't beneath her skill level when one became available. That trick used to work well forty years ago. Nowadays, it is almost invariably a mistake. Unfortunately, schools don't teach that, because the people who teach in schools mostly haven't worked in industry for decades.
So basically you're saying that she should be forced to sell the car that she presumably already owned so that Yelp can pay their CSRs $9 per hour less than the Bay Area average for CSRs? I just want to make sure I understand you correctly....
IMO, her biggest mistake was taking a job that was significantly below her level of education. (And no, a degree in English, even English Lit, is not "worth less than the paper it is written on". That and a tech writing credential will get you a halfway decent job around here.)
A small shop doesn't have a customer service rep. It has a cashier. You can dress it up in a fancy name, but it isn't really the same job. :-)
Based on the biweekly pay she lists in her letter, she actually made $9.17 after taxes, which is about $12.25 before taxes. So unless she is lying about her paycheck amount, she is not making $17 per hour, nor anywhere close to that.
Which tells us that either she is lying about making $8.25 after taxes or they're paying half again more for new hires than they did six months ago when they hired her. My guess is that they didn't have many takers at minimum wage, so they had to raise their salary. And even at $17 per hour, that's still four or five bucks an hour below the Bay Area average for a customer service rep. They're pretty much looking for slave labor.
You forgot that San Francisco requires all companies with more than 50 employees to pay for health insurance for their employees.
According to her letter, she was making $8.15 per hour after taxes, which comes to about ten bucks before taxes. Another article said that it was actually $12.25 per hour, which is the SF minimum wage, not $10 above it. Either way, unless those numbers are just outright fabrications, she was not making $10 per hour over minimum wage.
Her letter also gives her actual rent at $1245 per month. You started from a wrong assumption, and all your math from there on down is wrong proportionally.
I see nothing under $1600/month in Emeryville. I do see two in Oakland in that price range. Either way, I'm assuming she got a two-bedroom apartment with the intent to find a roommate, but then was unable to find one because everybody else on her team was living with a parent. That's certainly what the letter implied. And the problem is, once you've signed a lease, you're kind of stuck with it. And at $12.25 per hour, you can't exactly stay in a hotel until you can find a place, because even the worst rathole of a hotel in the Bay Area is likely to cost more than $330 per week.
To be fair, the letter doesn't say that her dad actually lives within practical commuting distance, just that he is "close". That could just as easily mean Sacramento as Oakland. But yeah, she probably should have.
Then again, she probably should have said "no" when asked to take a job at minimum wage in the first place just to "gain experience". Unfortunately, this sort of shady hiring practice is common in media-related fields, and to me, it ranks right up there with musicians being asked to play gigs "for exposure" in terms of how offensive I find this practice. It just shouldn't be done, and if everyone said "h***, no" when the recruiter gave them the dollar figure, there would be a lot less of this sort of abuse in the world today.
She was also complaining that she wasn't being paid enough to buy food. In that context, that's not an unreasonable complaint.
That was clearly in poor taste. It might even have risen to the level of being actionable once it became clear that the account in question was held by a Yelp employee. It doesn't negate the message, though.
And, to play devil's advocate here, that's precisely the sort of acting out that I'd expect from someone who was being paid minimum wage for a job that in the Bay Area should have paid considerably more than that. If you don't treat your employees with respect, why should they respect you? Where I come, respect is earned. If you're paying people McDonald's wages (and they were), you should expect no better than burger-flipper levels of decorum.
With an unopened bottle of alcohol. In every tech company I've ever worked for, they've had beer bashes where people actually drank alcohol while ostensibly on the job. The only thing potentially career-limiting about it was the caption, which could be interpreted to mean that nobody was surprised by having alcohol at work because you needed it to make it through the day. Or it could be a genuine statement of surprise from someone who moved here from an area where beer bashes aren't part of the culture, and where having alcohol at work would actually be unusual. If this had anything to do with her dismissal, then somebody has unrealistic standards.
Source?
And then you pay for parking in San Francisco. Unless Yelp has some special deal, that's going to cost you a minimum of $15 per day, which is four bucks per day more than she was paying for round-trip BART fare, by my math. And that's before factoring in gasoline, wear and tear on the vehicle, the years of your life that you lose to stress while sitting in Bay Area traffic, etc. I wouldn't work in San Francisco for a quarter million per year, much less $12.25 an hour.
If you had read the original blog post, you'd know that she did try, and she found out that all of her coworkers were living with their parents because they couldn't afford rent even when splitting it. BTW, she wasn't making above minimum wage. According to the original article, she was making $12.25, which is San Francisco's minimum wage as of 2016.
But minimum wage in San Francisco is $12.25. She was making exactly minimum wage.
They would have to move farther than that. There's nowhere in the U.S. where $12.25 per hour is an acceptable salary for a customer service rep. The national average is over $16 per hour.
She was working at Yelp for minimum wage in the hopes that it would get her foot in the door for a real job. Unfortunately, the reality is that this technique almost never works. She might as well be working at Burger King. The job would have been easier, and because of her college degree, she probably would have been able to quickly move up to a shift lead job, which would have paid her more than she was making at Yelp....
Not even close. The original article says that she made $12.25 before taxes. Remember that people at the bottom of the pay scale pay much less in taxes (proportionally) than people making in the six figures because of the progressive income tax system.
This sounds like a number of startups in the Bay Area that prey on out-of-state people who don't know how high the cost of living is out here, hoping that they'll manage to squeeze at least a few months' work out of them before they quit and go to work somewhere that pays better... like McDonald's. $12.25 is, in fact, minimum wage in San Francisco. You can literally make that flipping burgers with no skill at all. And this is what they're paying people with college degrees, doing customer support work (which is usually at least a couple of tiers above minimum wage).
Now to put that in perspective, the average salary for a customer service rep in the Bay Area is $22.05 per hour. That means that Yelp is paying barely over half the regional average. And when people complained, rather than fixing the sweatshop-level conditions, they are moving the jobs to Phoenix. The only problem is that the average salary for a customer service rep in Phoenix is still $16.10. So that $12.25 would still be massively underpaid, given the job category, even in Phoenix. And yet somehow they're paying that wage in San Francisco!
I would like to make three suggestions to the CEO of Yelp:
You should reward people who have the courage to speak truth to authority, not punish them. If you don't, you'll end up with a company of "yes men" who will agree your entire company right down the toilet and into the ground.