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Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opfxYLn0J:www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom

Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opfxYLn0J:www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by myself. Then the economy just went to hell and the company threw me to the wolves." This is interesting because it sounds like what I've come to think of as the "salaryman" mentality: the idea that there is a contract between employee and company help each other, forever. I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly, but more like a weird view of reality. Why do people think being a "good citizen" who "does everything you're supposed to do" means nothing will ever screw them? Or is this just rhetoric that people use to make themselves sound victimized? I think this is a generational gap (in America, anyway). I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy.

beering 12y ago
These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times. Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......
- delluminatus 12y ago
  Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans. edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.
- sp332 12y ago
  What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?
  - warfangle 12y ago
    No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)
  - cozuya 12y ago
    Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?
    - sp332 12y ago
      No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine. Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?
- buzzcut 12y ago
  At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.
mmagin 12y ago
My impression is that most of the mandatory phase of education in the US teaches this lesson. It was well into my 20s that I really realized that I was taught wrong.
sp332 12y ago
Of course there's a social contract. We also have laws against burglary even if you leave your front door unlocked. There's a limit to how much people are allowed to screw you. If someone takes an action that results in you losing your house, that person is an asshole even if they're not technically a criminal.
subdane 12y ago
Because this view of reality was the American dream promised (literally and figuratively) by politicians, companies, churches, schools, families and advertisements in the 20th century.
sosborn 12y ago
>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. I have heard these words coming from a millennial. The thought process isn't related to age, it is related to the mindset that karma is real: if I do good things then good things will happen to me. People eat it up because nobody likes to see bad things happen to good people.
DanBC 12y ago
There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.
- bequanna 12y ago
  It does happen to some people. There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible. If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  Absolutely, it can happen to anyone, whether you're a "good citizen" or not. Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).
pessimizer 12y ago
>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy. Or maybe the world used to be different, and the millennials are being released into a world of unemployment and a largely dismantled safety net. The generation gap has narrowed for them, largely because they're still living with their parents after college.
ankurpatel 12y ago
To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.
- zippergz 12y ago
  People can and do get laid off in the US with no severance.
- ReadyCollective 12y ago
  First, from the article, he looked for a job for 18 months with solid experience but without success. Second, having been there, if you think going from a couple K a month while supporting a child instantly down to a couple hundred a week is simples, you haven't been there.
jonnathanson 12y ago
"I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial." Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it. I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely. "I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..." That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person. Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.
- tptacek 12y ago
  This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability. Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history. Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.
rayiner 12y ago
As a millennial, your attitude doesn't help you one bit. You're still unemployed, or slaving away at short term jobs with no upward mobility--you've just never known any better. Maybe his attitude smacks of "entitlement" (what a dirty word!) but at least he had the opportunity to work in an America where companies had to care at least a little about their employees (because outsourcing and automation had yet to destroy opportunities for ordinary people). So who exactly is the sucker?
zippergz 12y ago
You might not hear those words from a millenial, but I’ve heard many millenials complaining that their philosophy degree didn’t get them a well-paying job, or that it’s unfair for employers to expect them to already know how to do a job before hiring them. It feels like a similar mentality, just under different circumstances. (I don’t really buy into the whole “if only they’d worked harder/been smarter/prepared themselves better, they wouldn’t be in this situation” story line, but I also believe that thinking of yourself as a victim is counterproductive.)
aphelion 12y ago
You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.

beering 12y ago

These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times. Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......

delluminatus 12y ago
Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans. edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.
sp332 12y ago
What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?
- warfangle 12y ago
  No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)
- cozuya 12y ago
  Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?
  - sp332 12y ago
    No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine. Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?
buzzcut 12y ago
At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.

mmagin 12y ago

My impression is that most of the mandatory phase of education in the US teaches this lesson. It was well into my 20s that I really realized that I was taught wrong.

sp332 12y ago

Of course there's a social contract. We also have laws against burglary even if you leave your front door unlocked. There's a limit to how much people are allowed to screw you. If someone takes an action that results in you losing your house, that person is an asshole even if they're not technically a criminal.

subdane 12y ago

Because this view of reality was the American dream promised (literally and figuratively) by politicians, companies, churches, schools, families and advertisements in the 20th century.

sosborn 12y ago

>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. I have heard these words coming from a millennial. The thought process isn't related to age, it is related to the mindset that karma is real: if I do good things then good things will happen to me. People eat it up because nobody likes to see bad things happen to good people.

DanBC 12y ago

There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.

bequanna 12y ago
It does happen to some people. There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible. If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.
delluminatus 12y ago
Absolutely, it can happen to anyone, whether you're a "good citizen" or not. Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).

pessimizer 12y ago

>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy. Or maybe the world used to be different, and the millennials are being released into a world of unemployment and a largely dismantled safety net. The generation gap has narrowed for them, largely because they're still living with their parents after college.

ankurpatel 12y ago

To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.

zippergz 12y ago
People can and do get laid off in the US with no severance.
ReadyCollective 12y ago
First, from the article, he looked for a job for 18 months with solid experience but without success. Second, having been there, if you think going from a couple K a month while supporting a child instantly down to a couple hundred a week is simples, you haven't been there.

jonnathanson 12y ago

"I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial." Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it. I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely. "I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..." That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person. Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.

tptacek 12y ago
This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability. Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history. Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.

rayiner 12y ago

As a millennial, your attitude doesn't help you one bit. You're still unemployed, or slaving away at short term jobs with no upward mobility--you've just never known any better. Maybe his attitude smacks of "entitlement" (what a dirty word!) but at least he had the opportunity to work in an America where companies had to care at least a little about their employees (because outsourcing and automation had yet to destroy opportunities for ordinary people). So who exactly is the sucker?

zippergz 12y ago

You might not hear those words from a millenial, but I’ve heard many millenials complaining that their philosophy degree didn’t get them a well-paying job, or that it’s unfair for employers to expect them to already know how to do a job before hiring them. It feels like a similar mentality, just under different circumstances. (I don’t really buy into the whole “if only they’d worked harder/been smarter/prepared themselves better, they wouldn’t be in this situation” story line, but I also believe that thinking of yourself as a victim is counterproductive.)

aphelion 12y ago

You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.