13 ms·

The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

151 points by subpar 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago
This seems to explain at least some of the UBI-love tech founders have. They live as billionaires in a community, that despite all their money and highfalutin ideas doesn't actually take care of its own, unless you have millions if not billions of dollars. Of course to them the only solution is more money, that's the only solution they seem to know. They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire. Sorry if it's whiny, it's just that the contrast between words and actions is stark.
- NiklasMort 9y ago
  But you gotta understand, they have no time, they have to make the world a better place with Snapchat&co...
  - brailsafe 9y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
- rddemmer 9y ago
  As long as these people are paying extremely high rent (and as a result need assistance in terms of food stamps) it means the trade off is worth it to them. That's what people don't understand about high rent: if you are paying high rent you are agreeing to it. It means it's still worth it to you. If you disagree with the high rent, don't pay it.
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    Sure, but that's not really an interesting or useful observation. You can choose to live in a bad situation and still desire, either personally or at a policy level, to make it better. The alternative, at least in the profiles I've read of people living in RV's along El Camino Real, is to be unemployed in Stockton. People will take their chances with a job.
  - xg15 9y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920864
- throwaway31231 9y ago
  It's more than that. Money's value depends on everyone's collective attachment to it. The winners of a game remain so, only as long as a significant number of people are playing. Ditto with USD, ditto with BTC. UBI is one way to keep people playing; but I'm extremely wary of this idea. UBI without some sort of communal/anarchist/kibbutz-ian distributed structure binds society in yet another way. 'You're free as long as you do what I want', is not something we as a society should want, yet it is almost universally true. The US wants nations to be 'free' so that they do what it wants; it's only natural that this extends all the way down to the individual.
  - kazagistar 9y ago
    We already have conditional UBI for certain classes of people and situations. UBI is an incremental step of progress, and holding it up based on worries about not being perfectly utopic seems counterproductive.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      The heads of almost every major industrial giant are sounding the alarm about the coming need for UBI. If they are right, and we come to a point where only a relatively small number of us are doing most of the productive work, and the rest are just collecting checks, the remaining producers are going to have a tremendous amount of leverage. So much leverage that I doubt there is a political arrangement capable of containing it long-term. More than a mere imperfection...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Kurtz79 9y ago
    I like the idea of UBI in theory, but I cannot imagine it won't have any impact on the cost of living. At the very least, it would force companies contracting minimum/low wage workers to raise wages substantially (because why work on a shitty job if I can have the same money for free ?), which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices, which in turn would make UBI money not enough to survive for most people relying exclusively on it, and we are back at square one. UBI seems to me the classic "easy solution for a complex problem", that in practice would create even more problems than the actual system.
- sax0n 9y ago
  I've never been to the US, so forgive me if I'm ignorant, but if the problem is poverty, surely the solution is more money? What's wrong with a UBI or some other mechanism to deliver that?
  - danboarder 9y ago
    You're confusing poverty with lack of money. Poverty is measured more accurately by looking at social capital (community connections that lead to jobs, family stability, etc). The world bank measures poverty in terms of health/capacity to work, life expectancy, and other factors beyond access to money alone.
  - alexanderdmitri 9y ago
    As a US citizen, I see just handing out cash as a terrible way to fix this poverty. With the way our society operates, I'd put my money that whatever UBI is distributed, most of it will be leveraged upwards in creative and manipulative ways without very many productive gains. Poverty is a complex issue because there are so many different causes behind it and they are often intertwined. A few reasons off the top of my head: systemic oppression and social prejudices, mental health, desperation, poor self-perception, lack of opportunity, irresponsible handling of money, ineffective upbringing, bad set of cards, medical problems (and the often accompanying debt), terrible education, malnutrition, a system that largely blames the impoverished for being so, rich people who get to set their own definition of charity for financial gain, and the list goes on and on ... It'll never happen, but I think a much better solution would be defining a set of basic needs where more money != better quality: healthcare, food, education, housing. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially that last one.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    The problem isn't poverty, it's exorbitantly high rent, caused in turn by huge demand for housing and huge incomes from the tech companies that all decided to settle down there. The solution is to increase wages for the people that work there but can't make a living there. And for the tech companies to do their societal duties and spread work (and wealth) across the country instead of focusing it in that area.
  - 9y ago
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Fix their neighborhoods how? If you don't want to use income, I guess you need to rezone the housing? That's also extremely impersonal. There's not much you can do as an individual, unless you want billionaires to pick random neighborhoods to sponsor. And that does very little to fix the overall situation. They could move their companies elsewhere but even if that helps the neighborhoods it's a lot closer to abandonment than fixing.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire. How? I'm serious about that - I think most of the tech billionaires who care enough to seriously support UBI are trying to fix their communities. Lots of people think their ideas like deregulation or more technology-focused schooling are counterproductive, but they seem largely well-meant. (The deregulation stuff in particular looks like a matter of principle; we have long-standing examples of what it looks like to push that selfishly.) But all they have is money, really. The push for expanded housing has been choked by zoning boards and courts since Day 1. The tech industry has surprisingly little political influence because California is so large, and so entrenched with old-school Democrats. And "it came from tech" is basically enough to sink any kind of community initiative among anti-gentrification forces: low-cost annual bike shares were designed as a community good accessible to the poor, and the response was still to destroy all of the bikes as gentrification. "Throw money to people" is pretty much what's left to them, and UBI is a more stable approach to that than charity; even tech billionaires can't cover SF's housing costs alone. I'm not even trying to defend tech billionaires here, particularly. I just don't want us to make all other change contingent on fixing San Francisco neighborhoods - because it seems like no one actually has an answer to that.
mjfl 9y ago
Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right? I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession. However, I find whenever I suggest that, people act like if they move there they will be lynched - as if the place is a primitive wasteland inhabited by backwards rednecks carrying pitchforks. In reality, it is a modestly wealthy area filled with dentists, insurance providers, accountants, and other mid-level white collar workers. You're more likely to die of boredom, but isn't that better than food stamps, and isn't boredom good if you want to raise a family? The people that read and write these articles don't seem to consider things like this.
- mprev 9y ago
  Even if you take that stance, it’s hard to square it with the fact that Silicon Valley needs more than VCs and startup founders to function.
  - mjfl 9y ago
    That is economically illiterate. If it got to the point where there was not enough people to fill necessary jobs around the city the wages would rise to attract more people. Right now the opposite is happening: there are too many people.
    - d--b 9y ago
      Too many people? Are you serious? San Francisco + Silicon valley has 3 million people. That's less than half of New York City. The amount of money the region makes is more than enough to support that population over that area...
      - nbtdev 9y ago
        There are 7 million in the 9- county Bay Area, and having lived there for ten years, that is the stat that matters. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ Cost of living on the peninsula has already pushed many people to the east and south and even then you don't get much of a break. Land use restrictions mean there is very little new land on which to build and having to jump through eleventy different legal hurdles to do so means that when built, it's already more expensive than many of those in need can afford. I moved away after being there ten years as a software developer because the cost of living, level of congestion and crowding was obnoxious, and I have no intention of returning. But then, I had that option.
d--b 9y ago
It's a culture problem: with so many people being so rich in the valley, you need to be ruthless to be part of the rich people's club. It means that if you're at the helm of a successful company, you'd rather become a billionaire yourself than letting the poorer people you employ become wealthy. Another factor is that a good chunk of the tech's business was about making things cheaper rather than making new stuff. Amazon is cheaper than bookstores, Uber is cheaper than regular taxi, and so on. Even if the tech helps make the costs lowers, it also often translates into lower worker wages, and doesn't create more value overall that what existed before.
jhoechtl 9y ago
Why is this called a paradox? It's a greed and winner-takes-it-all culture. What are the mechanism in place which would guarantee at least a mild version of wealth redistribution?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  This is a bit of a tangent but... "Redistribution" is in itself a frame. Generally in modern discourse it means post earnings income redistribution. UBI, dole, income taxes, pensiins.. There is (just in terms of all options) also the distribution of earnings, the distribution/redistribution of wealth, and the distribution of wealth accumulation. All these affect the disparities and their trends. There are very few policies acting on these. Income taxes, not wealth taxes. Income support, not wealth building. There was some very controversial talk of pay caps or limits to ceo-janitor pay ratios... But this is outside of the main avenues of normal policies. Most of what we (wealthy liberal democracies) "do" in this regard directly to affect disparities is post earnings redistribution and (substantially) distribution of consumption (public services like schools and health services). ..no concluding point... :)
- Veelox 9y ago
  The paradox is that Silicon Valley is one of he wealthiest parts of the country and yet >25% of the population is food insecure.
  - danharaj 9y ago
    That's the 'paradox' of capitalism. But it's only a paradox if you take bourgeois conceptions of wealth and prosperity at face value.
junkscience2017 9y ago
Why is this a surprise? California is the #1 poverty state[1], spends almost the least on education etc etc. State tax receipts mostly just rewards CalPERs members. 1 http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/ http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...
epistasis 9y ago
Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here. It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.
- gaius 9y ago
  people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here Well that cuts to the very heart of democracy doesn't it? Why would the government of territory X not answer to the taxpayer-voter of X, over people who merely want to live there? There are reasons why they might of course, enumerate those reasons and the real dynamic will come to light.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    There is a fine line between democracy and mob rule. The Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently stable democratic system is for 49.9% of the electorate to be treated as subhuman. Democracy inevitably becomes tyrannical if civil institutions fail to defend the interests of the minority against the interests of the majority.
  - akgerber 9y ago
    A big part of the issue is what level the decisions are made— in Japan, zoning is largely set by the national government, and in Ontario, at provincial level. In Silicon Valley (and most of the US), the decisions are made at the level of small suburbs consisting mostly of single-family homes, even though such decisions have can have huge impacts on the national economy.
  - epistasis 9y ago
    It also cuts to the core of property rights. If somebody is building something according to local laws, why should neighbors be allowed to stop that legal construction? That is what happens now, and it drives up construction costs dramatically, further driving up costs of the very very little new housing that gets built. What rights go along with property? Does it include the right to stop your neighbor from changing and improving their property?
theoh 9y ago
There's a book from 2002 called "The Silicon Valley of Dreams" that seems never to have been mentioned on HN. https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/ https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/ It's about the environmental conditions around electronics manufacturing, and their disproportionate impact on immigrants and minorities. Maybe a bit too hardcore for the optimists here (I'd include myself), but it covers similar issues to this Guardian article and is worth being aware of.
bitL 9y ago
Most of SW jobs in Silicon Valley can be done remotely. Frankly, it's about time our industry embraces this instead of reversing the trend and adding insane "open office" spaces everywhere, killing productivity and happiness.
newshorts 9y ago
Hyper local meritocratic neoliberalism
frk1206 9y ago
This is so so incredibly sad. I see people on this thread saying stuff like "this is how life is" and "suck it up and move" but the core of the problem is that we have literally institutionalized slavery by calling it a market force. This woman isn't a market operator, shes basically a modern day slave. Crucial to the functioning of the system (or Facebook doesn't have food) but somehow also expendable. This is not just a American but a worldwide issue. Whatever the market forces are it just doesn't make any sense that a cook is unable to make a living.
lacker 9y ago
"Food insecure" is a very strange way of describing this situation. The people described are spending far more money on rent than they are on food. The real problem is that the rent is too damn high.
taurath 9y ago
Its kind of ironic and interesting to juxtapose this article with the post where Chamath Palihapitiya the former Facebook exec says "I want the fucking money" to increase his influence. The economic output in sheer profit terms of Silicon Valley companies is probably enough to feed the continent. There are probably scores of individuals living there that could create a food program with 1/4 of their net worth that could prevent all hunger. This kind of makes the point to me that the skillset to get somebody a lot of money is the exact opposite skillset necessary to care for their neighbors.

151 points by subpar 9y ago

This seems to explain at least some of the UBI-love tech founders have. They live as billionaires in a community, that despite all their money and highfalutin ideas doesn't actually take care of its own, unless you have millions if not billions of dollars. Of course to them the only solution is more money, that's the only solution they seem to know. They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire. Sorry if it's whiny, it's just that the contrast between words and actions is stark.

NiklasMort 9y ago
But you gotta understand, they have no time, they have to make the world a better place with Snapchat&co...
- brailsafe 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
rddemmer 9y ago
As long as these people are paying extremely high rent (and as a result need assistance in terms of food stamps) it means the trade off is worth it to them. That's what people don't understand about high rent: if you are paying high rent you are agreeing to it. It means it's still worth it to you. If you disagree with the high rent, don't pay it.
- kevinburke 9y ago
  Sure, but that's not really an interesting or useful observation. You can choose to live in a bad situation and still desire, either personally or at a policy level, to make it better. The alternative, at least in the profiles I've read of people living in RV's along El Camino Real, is to be unemployed in Stockton. People will take their chances with a job.
- xg15 9y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15920864
throwaway31231 9y ago
It's more than that. Money's value depends on everyone's collective attachment to it. The winners of a game remain so, only as long as a significant number of people are playing. Ditto with USD, ditto with BTC. UBI is one way to keep people playing; but I'm extremely wary of this idea. UBI without some sort of communal/anarchist/kibbutz-ian distributed structure binds society in yet another way. 'You're free as long as you do what I want', is not something we as a society should want, yet it is almost universally true. The US wants nations to be 'free' so that they do what it wants; it's only natural that this extends all the way down to the individual.
- kazagistar 9y ago
  We already have conditional UBI for certain classes of people and situations. UBI is an incremental step of progress, and holding it up based on worries about not being perfectly utopic seems counterproductive.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    The heads of almost every major industrial giant are sounding the alarm about the coming need for UBI. If they are right, and we come to a point where only a relatively small number of us are doing most of the productive work, and the rest are just collecting checks, the remaining producers are going to have a tremendous amount of leverage. So much leverage that I doubt there is a political arrangement capable of containing it long-term. More than a mere imperfection...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Kurtz79 9y ago
  I like the idea of UBI in theory, but I cannot imagine it won't have any impact on the cost of living. At the very least, it would force companies contracting minimum/low wage workers to raise wages substantially (because why work on a shitty job if I can have the same money for free ?), which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices, which in turn would make UBI money not enough to survive for most people relying exclusively on it, and we are back at square one. UBI seems to me the classic "easy solution for a complex problem", that in practice would create even more problems than the actual system.
sax0n 9y ago
I've never been to the US, so forgive me if I'm ignorant, but if the problem is poverty, surely the solution is more money? What's wrong with a UBI or some other mechanism to deliver that?
- danboarder 9y ago
  You're confusing poverty with lack of money. Poverty is measured more accurately by looking at social capital (community connections that lead to jobs, family stability, etc). The world bank measures poverty in terms of health/capacity to work, life expectancy, and other factors beyond access to money alone.
- alexanderdmitri 9y ago
  As a US citizen, I see just handing out cash as a terrible way to fix this poverty. With the way our society operates, I'd put my money that whatever UBI is distributed, most of it will be leveraged upwards in creative and manipulative ways without very many productive gains. Poverty is a complex issue because there are so many different causes behind it and they are often intertwined. A few reasons off the top of my head: systemic oppression and social prejudices, mental health, desperation, poor self-perception, lack of opportunity, irresponsible handling of money, ineffective upbringing, bad set of cards, medical problems (and the often accompanying debt), terrible education, malnutrition, a system that largely blames the impoverished for being so, rich people who get to set their own definition of charity for financial gain, and the list goes on and on ... It'll never happen, but I think a much better solution would be defining a set of basic needs where more money != better quality: healthcare, food, education, housing. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially that last one.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The problem isn't poverty, it's exorbitantly high rent, caused in turn by huge demand for housing and huge incomes from the tech companies that all decided to settle down there. The solution is to increase wages for the people that work there but can't make a living there. And for the tech companies to do their societal duties and spread work (and wealth) across the country instead of focusing it in that area.
- 9y ago
Dylan16807 9y ago
Fix their neighborhoods how? If you don't want to use income, I guess you need to rezone the housing? That's also extremely impersonal. There's not much you can do as an individual, unless you want billionaires to pick random neighborhoods to sponsor. And that does very little to fix the overall situation. They could move their companies elsewhere but even if that helps the neighborhoods it's a lot closer to abandonment than fixing.
Bartweiss 9y ago
> They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire. How? I'm serious about that - I think most of the tech billionaires who care enough to seriously support UBI are trying to fix their communities. Lots of people think their ideas like deregulation or more technology-focused schooling are counterproductive, but they seem largely well-meant. (The deregulation stuff in particular looks like a matter of principle; we have long-standing examples of what it looks like to push that selfishly.) But all they have is money, really. The push for expanded housing has been choked by zoning boards and courts since Day 1. The tech industry has surprisingly little political influence because California is so large, and so entrenched with old-school Democrats. And "it came from tech" is basically enough to sink any kind of community initiative among anti-gentrification forces: low-cost annual bike shares were designed as a community good accessible to the poor, and the response was still to destroy all of the bikes as gentrification. "Throw money to people" is pretty much what's left to them, and UBI is a more stable approach to that than charity; even tech billionaires can't cover SF's housing costs alone. I'm not even trying to defend tech billionaires here, particularly. I just don't want us to make all other change contingent on fixing San Francisco neighborhoods - because it seems like no one actually has an answer to that.

mjfl 9y ago

Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right? I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession. However, I find whenever I suggest that, people act like if they move there they will be lynched - as if the place is a primitive wasteland inhabited by backwards rednecks carrying pitchforks. In reality, it is a modestly wealthy area filled with dentists, insurance providers, accountants, and other mid-level white collar workers. You're more likely to die of boredom, but isn't that better than food stamps, and isn't boredom good if you want to raise a family? The people that read and write these articles don't seem to consider things like this.

mprev 9y ago
Even if you take that stance, it’s hard to square it with the fact that Silicon Valley needs more than VCs and startup founders to function.
- mjfl 9y ago
  That is economically illiterate. If it got to the point where there was not enough people to fill necessary jobs around the city the wages would rise to attract more people. Right now the opposite is happening: there are too many people.
  - d--b 9y ago
    Too many people? Are you serious? San Francisco + Silicon valley has 3 million people. That's less than half of New York City. The amount of money the region makes is more than enough to support that population over that area...
    - nbtdev 9y ago
      There are 7 million in the 9- county Bay Area, and having lived there for ten years, that is the stat that matters. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/ Cost of living on the peninsula has already pushed many people to the east and south and even then you don't get much of a break. Land use restrictions mean there is very little new land on which to build and having to jump through eleventy different legal hurdles to do so means that when built, it's already more expensive than many of those in need can afford. I moved away after being there ten years as a software developer because the cost of living, level of congestion and crowding was obnoxious, and I have no intention of returning. But then, I had that option.

d--b 9y ago

It's a culture problem: with so many people being so rich in the valley, you need to be ruthless to be part of the rich people's club. It means that if you're at the helm of a successful company, you'd rather become a billionaire yourself than letting the poorer people you employ become wealthy. Another factor is that a good chunk of the tech's business was about making things cheaper rather than making new stuff. Amazon is cheaper than bookstores, Uber is cheaper than regular taxi, and so on. Even if the tech helps make the costs lowers, it also often translates into lower worker wages, and doesn't create more value overall that what existed before.

jhoechtl 9y ago

Why is this called a paradox? It's a greed and winner-takes-it-all culture. What are the mechanism in place which would guarantee at least a mild version of wealth redistribution?

dalbasal 9y ago
This is a bit of a tangent but... "Redistribution" is in itself a frame. Generally in modern discourse it means post earnings income redistribution. UBI, dole, income taxes, pensiins.. There is (just in terms of all options) also the distribution of earnings, the distribution/redistribution of wealth, and the distribution of wealth accumulation. All these affect the disparities and their trends. There are very few policies acting on these. Income taxes, not wealth taxes. Income support, not wealth building. There was some very controversial talk of pay caps or limits to ceo-janitor pay ratios... But this is outside of the main avenues of normal policies. Most of what we (wealthy liberal democracies) "do" in this regard directly to affect disparities is post earnings redistribution and (substantially) distribution of consumption (public services like schools and health services). ..no concluding point... :)
Veelox 9y ago
The paradox is that Silicon Valley is one of he wealthiest parts of the country and yet >25% of the population is food insecure.
- danharaj 9y ago
  That's the 'paradox' of capitalism. But it's only a paradox if you take bourgeois conceptions of wealth and prosperity at face value.

junkscience2017 9y ago

Why is this a surprise? California is the #1 poverty state[1], spends almost the least on education etc etc. State tax receipts mostly just rewards CalPERs members. 1 http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/ http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...

epistasis 9y ago

Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here. It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.

gaius 9y ago
people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here Well that cuts to the very heart of democracy doesn't it? Why would the government of territory X not answer to the taxpayer-voter of X, over people who merely want to live there? There are reasons why they might of course, enumerate those reasons and the real dynamic will come to light.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  There is a fine line between democracy and mob rule. The Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently stable democratic system is for 49.9% of the electorate to be treated as subhuman. Democracy inevitably becomes tyrannical if civil institutions fail to defend the interests of the minority against the interests of the majority.
- akgerber 9y ago
  A big part of the issue is what level the decisions are made— in Japan, zoning is largely set by the national government, and in Ontario, at provincial level. In Silicon Valley (and most of the US), the decisions are made at the level of small suburbs consisting mostly of single-family homes, even though such decisions have can have huge impacts on the national economy.
- epistasis 9y ago
  It also cuts to the core of property rights. If somebody is building something according to local laws, why should neighbors be allowed to stop that legal construction? That is what happens now, and it drives up construction costs dramatically, further driving up costs of the very very little new housing that gets built. What rights go along with property? Does it include the right to stop your neighbor from changing and improving their property?

theoh 9y ago

There's a book from 2002 called "The Silicon Valley of Dreams" that seems never to have been mentioned on HN. https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/ https://nyupress.org/books/9780814767092/ It's about the environmental conditions around electronics manufacturing, and their disproportionate impact on immigrants and minorities. Maybe a bit too hardcore for the optimists here (I'd include myself), but it covers similar issues to this Guardian article and is worth being aware of.

bitL 9y ago

Most of SW jobs in Silicon Valley can be done remotely. Frankly, it's about time our industry embraces this instead of reversing the trend and adding insane "open office" spaces everywhere, killing productivity and happiness.

newshorts 9y ago

Hyper local meritocratic neoliberalism

frk1206 9y ago

This is so so incredibly sad. I see people on this thread saying stuff like "this is how life is" and "suck it up and move" but the core of the problem is that we have literally institutionalized slavery by calling it a market force. This woman isn't a market operator, shes basically a modern day slave. Crucial to the functioning of the system (or Facebook doesn't have food) but somehow also expendable. This is not just a American but a worldwide issue. Whatever the market forces are it just doesn't make any sense that a cook is unable to make a living.

lacker 9y ago

"Food insecure" is a very strange way of describing this situation. The people described are spending far more money on rent than they are on food. The real problem is that the rent is too damn high.

taurath 9y ago

Its kind of ironic and interesting to juxtapose this article with the post where Chamath Palihapitiya the former Facebook exec says "I want the fucking money" to increase his influence. The economic output in sheer profit terms of Silicon Valley companies is probably enough to feed the continent. There are probably scores of individuals living there that could create a food program with 1/4 of their net worth that could prevent all hunger. This kind of makes the point to me that the skillset to get somebody a lot of money is the exact opposite skillset necessary to care for their neighbors.