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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
8% sales tax
direct property tax if own house
indirect property tax if renting
gas tax
income tax on stock options
A better question is: where the fuck does all the money already being paid go to?
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?
How can we expect figureheads elected in elections conducted in an environment of unlimited corporate propaganda to be moral if the actual ruling class of capitalist society, the capitalists acting directly and through their employees—e.g., via corporations—won’t?
Well, ya. It's their job to not be corrupt.