Interesting piece at New Geography about the Silicon Valley oligarchy.
Couple of notes, offhand:
Google, for example, employs 50,000 people; Facebook, 4,600; Twitter, less than a thousand, while GM employs 200,000; Ford, 164,000; and Exxon, more than 100,000.
I presume these are direct-employee numbers. All these enterprises depend on large numbers of suppliers, subcontractors, and so on. Thing is: the suppliers and subcontractors of GM, Ford, and Exxon are companies with large numbers of paid employees. The "suppliers and subcontractors" on which Google, Facebook, and Twitter rely are largely (apart from purveyors of server hardware, bandwidth, and office supplies) unpaid individuals who produce the content.
After losing more than 108,000 high-tech jobs from 2000-08, there has been a net gain of no more than 20,000 to 30,000 positions since 2007.
Meanwhile, there's a huge boom in construction of both large office buildings and $750K high-density condos to house the office workers.
Addendum: from this article at Listverse:
Unless we’re totally psychotic, most of us are aware that no one would be homeless out of choice.
Apparently that depends on your definition of "choice." I learned a couple of years ago that a long-vacant house in my neighborhood belongs to some character who owns several such properties around the South Bay, but who prefers to live under a bridge. Since he's legally sane, nothing can be done about him nor the blighted properties he owns. Though I guess he's not, strictly, speaking, "homeless", even if his preferred lifestyle does give that impression.
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