Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Sunday Globe Special: Homeless in Silicon Valley

"Homeless in Silicon Valley’s shadow" by Martha Mendoza | Associated Press   July 06, 2014

SAN JOSE, Calif. — She is a disheveled woman, upper teeth gone, heavy bags slung over her shoulders as she nervously urges on two friends shoving her overloaded shopping cart up a dirt slope. Maria Esther Salazar has been either homeless, in jail, or squatting at someone else’s house for 30 years.

But today, she’s getting her first apartment. ‘‘Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I’d get a house,’’ said Salazar. It was overwhelming. ‘‘I don’t know anyone there.’’

In the Jungle — believed to be the nation’s largest homeless encampment — Salazar’s shelter is a gathering place where friends smoke pot, doze, swap stories, argue. Outside, they squat by her cooking fire frying pancakes or warming soup, handouts from church groups.

Yeah, but the pre$cription pill and opiate crowd is deserving of all the sympathy because it is a government operation to basically benefit banks and destroy society. Gotta shift through your $hit when it comes to the demon weed for sick people who are suffering, though.

It is easy to forget that the Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are making millions just miles away.

Is it?

Salazar and as many as 350 others live in tents, makeshift shacks, caves, and tree houses along Coyote Creek.

Related: The Boston Globe is No Longer Home 

What's your mortgage amongst all that $lo$h?

Salazar’s journey out began on a cool morning four months in February, when she limped out of her fenced compound and waved a broken cane at a passing homeless support team making their weekly rounds.

‘‘You’re supposed to be helping me,’’ she shouted, her voice gravelly beyond her 50 years.

When the social worker returned to her desk, she found that in a county with a seven-year, 20,000-person waiting list, Salazar had finally qualified for housing support: a new locally funded, $1,295 monthly subsidy aimed at ending chronic homelessness awaited her.

I'm shocked. Banks get instant bailouts for devising bad mortgage-backed securities and issuing fraudulent foreclosures that put a lot of these people in the camps.

Now Maria Esther Salazar, a woman with a criminal record, no phone, and no identification papers had to find an apartment in one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, or the subsidy could disappear.

San Jose, the 10th largest city in the nation, is at the heart of the Silicon Valley. But as tech has boomed after the recession, housing costs have soared.

An average home sells for $1 million, and two bedroom apartments rent for $2,000.

Jennifer Loving, executive director of the nonprofit housing agency Destination:Home, is spearheading a new, concerted effort in San Jose to house people and keep them housed, not just out of compassion, but to save money.

Is that a real person?

A homeless person can cost an estimated $60,000 a year, including trips to the emergency room and jail. The cost of housing someone can be just $16,000 a year.

Then why were the banks allowed to fraudulently foreclose on people? 

Maybe we should just kill all the homeless, huh? Problem $olved.

In a 24-month pilot, they’ve housed 630 people, 76 percent of whom were still in their home a year after moving in.

New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta have seen similar success with Housing First initiatives.

--more--" 


Living in an outhouse will do that to you.

Also see: The Great AmeriKan Workplace 

Only fooling. 

Speaking of those tech jobs....

NEXT DAY UPDATE: 

Talk about an offen$ive mixed me$$age following right up on the heels. This kind of incessant in$ult hurts.

"Hefty pay, perks lure teen interns to Silicon Valley" by Sarah Frier | Bloomberg News   July 09, 2014

That will help explain the fawning tone of this piece.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook rolled out the red carpet for Michael Sayman when the social network hired him for a job that started last month, including flying him out to meet chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

No global warming concerns?

Sayman brought his mom along. The position Facebook recruited him for: summer intern.

See: School's Out For The Summer!

‘‘When I got the e-mail saying — oh my god — Mark Zuckerberg wants to meet you, I had to make sure nobody was playing a prank on me,’’ said Sayman, 17, who wears braces and recently graduated from high school in Miami. ‘‘It was just incredible to be able to meet him.’’

Stars in his eyes!

Landing top talent is getting so tough in Silicon Valley that technology companies are trying anything for an edge, including hiring interns out of high school and boosting new recruits’ perks.

When they are not contracting out for cheaper foreign workers from India via Infosys. 

This looks like giving jobs to privileged kids and having it be promoted in their pre$$.

Facebook said it just started wooing interns before their freshman year of college, while LinkedIn opened its summer program to high schoolers two years ago. Startups have nabbed interns as young as 13.

Aren't there labor laws?

For the companies, it’s all about keeping up with Silicon Valley’s youth-oriented culture, especially as the young and technically inclined are sometimes encouraged to create their own startups instead of joining large organizations.

Meaning it is all about indoctrinating young minds, and I'm shuddering at this.

Early Facebook investor Peter Thiel pays people under 20 $100,000 to quit school to pursue their passions.

And just who would Peter Thiel be? 

Time to get real, folks; it's all a staged and scripted controlled-opposition mirage when it comes to the propaganda pre$$ and anything they promote

Others aspire to follow the path of Summly’s founder, Nick D’Aloisio, who became a millionaire at 17 last year when Yahoo acquired his mobile application.

The importance of young hires is recognized at the top.

*****************

The drive for youth is being spurred by more people getting into technology at a younger age.

Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good.

With online coding tutorials and Web communities for collaborating on software, high schoolers don’t have to get a computer science degree before producing their own mobile apps. Many find their way to events such as hackathons and contests to find bugs in software, which attract whoever has the skills to compete.

It's all a lot of fun.

James Anderson got his internship at the Web startup Planet Argon last year through just this route. At 13, he went to a conference focused on Ruby on Rails, a programming language, and met Planet Argon’s founders on a company hike. He later asked for — and got — a summer internship before starting high school.

‘‘I felt like age shouldn’t hold me back as long as I can code,’’ said Anderson, now 15 and a soon-to-be sophomore at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada, Calif., who taught himself several programming languages and built apps based on online tutorials.

And you can be put out as a patsy, too, kid, remember that. This government will turn on you and frame you in an instant if it advances the cau$e.

Summer interns are getting treated better, too.

It’s become standard for engineering interns to snag free housing, transportation, and salaries of more than $6,000 a month, according to the job-search site Glassdoor. That compares with the $4,280 average monthly income for US households in 2012, according to the Census Bureau. Of the top 10 companies paying the most for interns, all are technology companies except for Exxon Mobil, Glassdoor said.

And that is average. Means a whole lot of wealth balances it out. That means many, many Americans living way below the average.

Other perks abound. Microsoft puts on a free concert for summer interns, last year booking Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Deadmau5. Dropbox pays for interns’ parents to fly to San Francisco and learn about the company. Google provides standard workplace benefits to interns, including on-site massages and laundry service.

Again, no global warming concerns. 

Planes, let's face it, are the providence of the rich these days. 

I'm not saying I want the plane that regular people are on to be a piece of crap; I'm just saying the whole experience -- like our whole $ociety now -- is geared toward a certain cla$$ and percentage of people. The rest of us are just slave labor and ATM machines for them.

Yet young interns can sometimes present hurdles.

Oh, I don't want to hear it after 80% of the article has been a $hiny piece of $hit.

Consider the extra paperwork Airbnb, the San Francisco-based online room-rental service, had last year when recruiters stumbled upon the Twitter profile of Conrad Kramer, who was 16.

‘‘We actually had to get a work permit for him,’’ said Bern Coh, Airbnb’s head of intern recruiting, to comply with California law that requires permits for workers under 18.

Kramer interned last summer, she said, and since then the company has ‘‘been keeping in touch with him various ways.’’  

They even found him an apartment.

Not all companies want younger interns. Google requires them to be at least college freshmen and encourages them to finish their degrees.

--more--"

I guess Bloomberg can't $ee the homeless for the gla$$, proving the Globe really is not for me and it is really for someone else, but I'm not complaining. I know what I'm reading, and they are only $erving their reader$hip.

FLASHBACK: 

"For Tech interns, monthly pay tops $7k, before perks" by Martha Mendoza | Associated Press   June 09, 2014

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Sitting in a kitchen stocked with free food, a handful of twentysomething Google summer interns weigh their favorite perks, but where to begin? With bikes, buses, massages, swimming pools, dance classes, nap pods, parties, and access to their tech heroes, it’s a very long list.

‘‘Unlimited sparkling water?’’ someone says.

In the end, however, the budding Googlers are most excited about the work.

‘‘The project I’m working on is super-high-impact, and I’m looking for ways to make my mark,’’ said Rita DeRaedt, 20, who is studying visual communication technology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She admitted to being a bit star-struck after she was assigned to a team headed by a designer she’s long admired.

With summer’s arrival comes an influx of thousands of Silicon Valley interns. Well paid and perked, young up-and-comers from around the world who successfully navigate the competitive application process are assigned big-time responsibility at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Twitter.

Silicon Valley tech companies pay their interns more than any other sector in the United States, according to a Top 25 list of 2014 intern pay by the career website Glassdoor.

Some interns do not get paid at all.

Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto cybersecurity firm, topped the list with $7,012 average monthly base pay.

So the good internships are with the CIA, huh?

Related: 

CIA Has Venture Capital Wing

The Great AmeriKan Workplace 

NSA Unlocking Your Secrets

Hacker Helped FBI

I'm sorry, readers, but I no longer feel at home with the Bo$ton Globe. 

Tell me again it is not a war paper and war economy.

Also on the list: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, eBay, Google, and Apple, all of which pay more than $5,000 a month, or $60,000 annually if these were full time jobs.

And that’s not counting the perks, which at Facebook even include housing in this high-rent region.

Related: How the NSA & FBI Made Facebook The Perfect Mass Surveillance Tool

Executives hope that a fun and stimulating summer will motivate them to come back after graduation to launch careers. It’s money well spent in a field fighting for talent, said Keck Graduate Institute professor Joel West in Claremont, who hired interns when he ran his own software company and now helps place students in internships.

‘‘When you’re an employer, interns are a win-win, because you get relatively cheap labor and you get a first look at talented and ambitious people,’’ he said. ‘‘You get first dibs on them.’’

Indeed, many internships turn into careers....

Or not -- unless you are cheap foreign labor being imported.

--more--"

UPDATE:

"There are up to 1 million unpaid internships offered in the United States every year, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. He said the number of internships has grown as the economy tumbled and he blamed them for exploiting young workers and driving down wages. ‘‘The return on a college investment has fallen, students are facing higher and higher debt burdens, and the reaction of employers is to make matters worse for them by hiring more and more people without paying them,’’ Eisenbrey said."

They get their cut yet?

How could that happen in an economy that is recovering, and does it have anything to do with concentration of wealth in the 1%?


Time to get out of there

Hey, there is always babysitting to fall back on. 


Yes, the billionaires are so generous as they accumulate even va$ter $ums of wealth and inequality in states, nations, and the planet $oars. They have been in control for so long one has to really wonder why the world is such a $hit hole for most, doesn't it? And why are they the ones looked to for solutions? Never mind the $elf-$erving charities, sexual or otherwise. 

Sorry to say, folks, but with the U.N. sex rings, the U.K. revelations, the Franklin scandal cover-up, and all the other salacious scandals regarding sex that dribble out from time to time, one can only draw a singular conclusion: those that rule us all ares a bunch of sick sobs enabled my the ma$$ media they control. 

Luxury Rolls-Royce car sales soar worldwide

I'm glad the 1% of the world is growing and $wimming in wealth. 

I planned on bringing those to you in a later post, but with all that is going on in the world on such a fast track, who knows? I may no longer have time.