Silicon Valley's hunger problems grow during a time of record profits

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/silicon-valley-s-hunger-problems-grow-during-time-record-profits-n1251760

by malloreon • 6 years ago

27 31 6 years ago

IIRC : Silicon Valley gives generously to homelessness, food banks, and job training for people who can’t afford to live there, eat, and clothe their children. Right?

ch4s3• 6 years ago

I have no special knowledge about SF, but in NYC and other places I’ve lived that spending is through a patchwork of disjointed services. Along the way a lot of the money is lost in overhead and captured by contractors.

linseed_213• 6 years ago

It's a very complex issue -

1. The current amount of charity is not enough, and there's a growing population of underserved people in these areas. There wasn't enough before COVID exacerbated it, so the demand increased by multiples and supply did not.

2. Many companies receive tax incentives to be where they are (which are often projected to be rosier than reality - see SF Mid-Market), so people expect the companies to "pay it back" in some way. This is ambiguous, doesn't really happen, or it's paltry sums relative to the lost tax revenue.

3. Several well-funded initiatives were stopped by NIMBYs (e.g. homeless shelters for SF should always be in someone else's neighborhood - so liberals will sue to protect their property value, more housing should be anywhere away from them and not block their bay views, more than 3 stories is offensive, or preventing meals for the homeless at a church in a nice neighborhood because people the same people who donated would prefer it doesn't happen near them). Turns out people can be altruistic and selfish simultaneously, which is how you end up with SF. Liberal when it's an idea, conservative once it might affect you.

Most would argue it's not the corporations' responsibility, and communities shouldn't be at the whims of a profit maximizing corporation's generosity (nor their employees). However, people are trying to find help anywhere. The federal government decided it's not their problem, so people are looking to the corporate world to help. Seeing Apple's $57B in profits while food banks are empty a few miles away is Hunger Games-esque, and makes them an easy scapegoat.

Some would say a lesson is that you shouldn't depend on individual or corporate generosity in a crisis, but GoFundMe is the preferred way to pay for medical bills for at least 70m people in the US, so who the fuck knows.

underseacables2• 6 years ago

This was the kind of response I had hoped for. What influence do you think silicon valley has California government on this issue?

ericbarrett• 6 years ago

so liberals will sue to protect their property value

I see this repeated all the time. I’m sure there are hypocrites aplenty but I doubt San Francisco owners are anywhere near as liberal as the city population overall.

ampdepolymerase• 6 years ago

In terms of affordability of land adjusted by weather, Texas is the best place to address homelessness. Trying to fix the situation in SF is difficult due to the lack of low cost land.

umeshunni• 6 years ago

Tldr version: Bay Areas's shitty governance continues to be shitty during the pandemic.

tetrisgm• 6 years ago

I identify as a leftist. I believe the government, and more generally a nation, has a duty to ensure quality of life for its citizens.

That said, I think this article is grounded in a false dichotomy: "As Silicon Valley has had one of its most profitable years in history, thousands of people who live in walking distance from the headquarters of the world's best-known tech giants are going hungry."

How does distance to the hungry matter? Companies are already donating. They have no duty to. The failure isn't on their end. I'd also extrapolate that the failure isn't on the system currently in place: if they're getting funded and people are still hungry: why are they hungry?

There isn't enough access to jobs, there is too much financial duress, and there isn't a layer of support to help these people. That's entirely on the government to sort. Blaming businesses for not sorting this problem is simply moving the goalposts.

omgwtfbyobbq• 6 years ago

Blaming businesses is moving the goalposts. I agree that it's a national problem, and I think that businesses, government, and individuals should together sort everything out. If any group abrogates that responsibility, they make it much harder to be addressed effectively.

runawaybottle• 6 years ago

I’ve been making parallels to Southeast Asia all week lately. I need you to take a trip to one of those cities there and book a hotel room in a 5 star place. Outside of it, there will be slums (right out your window). A five minute drive, you’ll see people bathing in the ponds (not vacation bathing, brushing their teeth, taking a shit, morning routine bathing). Think through what the end result of this line of thinking actually creates, the case studies are all over the world. You can afford this, book a trip today and just get the perspective. You will not need to imagine what your theoretical thinking leads to, you can be your own ghost of Christmas future and literally see it.

It’s a disaster, we are tech people, just scale up or scale down, use the inductive step to complete the proof. If we are not proactive with these things, we won’t have quality of life.

You would not want to be in a society like that. Once you neglect and let the situation deteriorate, the only way you can achieve an environment that matches your identity is via a dystopia, where the best and the best congregate in the best gate kept part of the world. A shining city, a 5 star hotel, encapsulated from it’s neglect.

rmrfstar3• 6 years ago

The failure isn't on their end.

So Apple et al. are able to successfully monetize massive public investment in technology, book all their profit in tax havens using outlandish schemes like "Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich", and we're supposed to pretend like that's a totally normal thing?

The thing with free-riding is it doesn't work if everyone does it. That's what we're starting to see.

jonny_eh3• 6 years ago

All those loopholes can easily be closed, but they're not.

goldenManatee• 6 years ago

This is a classic argument for doing nothing, which is a stance promoting existing systems of inequality. Ask government to solve it, they propose paying for services that help lessen inequality with tax strategies that target those most able to - large corporations and the wealthiest - then people get upset that government is too big, sucking dry the wealthiest, and they start moving to Texas lol. So what’s the game plan?

edmundsauto• 6 years ago

But these companies aren’t doing nothing, they’re investing significant resources in their local communities, frequently with an emphasis on underserved.

threwawaysoff• 6 years ago

The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many homeless people living on freeway on-ramp embankments.

Case in point: I remember a hackerspace had a large winter food donation barrel that was sitting out for weeks returned with 1 can in it. 1. One. That says "F U" to hungry people.

Also consider how many churches in the SF Bay Area don't do meaningful community outreach and just show up on Sundays.

I just hope none of the comfortable and privileged ever end up poor and hungry, because they'd be in for a shock.

Throwaway17712• 6 years ago

The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many homeless people living on freeway on-ramp embankments.

Wow, people in Africa and India must be the blindest of them all!

Or...maybe it's not as simple as throwing money out of a helicopter?

runamok• 6 years ago

I call BS on this. You can read just the home page of the Second Harvest Silicon Valley homepage that demand has doubled and people have stepped up to fill the gap.

https://www.shfb.org/

SF spends something like 40k per homeless person per year: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

It's a hard problem to solve.

Example (not necessarily the valley) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-charity/ameri...

In conclusion you can find ample evidence that no one cares or you can find a way to make some tiny impact and attempt to influence others to do the same.

PhantomGremlin• 6 years ago

The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves.

Perhaps people should voluntarily give to charity. But let's not be quick to call them stingy if they don't.

Take a $200,000 Bay Area salary, and the taxes paid on it. All numbers crude, my point remains w/o exact amounts:

    8% social security/medicare
    9% state income tax
   25% federal income tax
   ---
   42% that's just in direct taxes

and further:

   8% sales tax
   direct property tax if own house
   indirect property tax if renting
   gas tax
   income tax on stock options

The list is almost endless.

A better question is: where the fuck does all the money already being paid go to?

amanaplanacanal• 6 years ago

Well, the military budget seems to be doing just fine.

Silicon Valley's hunger problems grow during a time of record profits

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