Anyway, I'll be back in SF in a week or two. Please organize a group to address these poverty issues, post the time and place, and I'll donate some time.
That requires ensuring everybody that wants a job has one unless exempted by age or infirmity.
Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option.
And if there is one thing business hates, it's having to compete - particularly for workers.
A society that cannot work out that healthcare should be based upon need, not ability to pay, is already moribund and dying on the inside.
Businesses would never let this happen though, they would just lobby the government to let them bring in more workers from other countries until they have the upper hand again. The third world has virtually an endless supply.
I'd also mention that interacting with some homeless people can be dangerous and deadly. I've been attacked a few times while living in SF because I used to have a rule of engaging the homeless as normal people if they approached me, back when I had naive principles; I don't do that anymore, after being assaulted twice, once with a knife. While only a small percentage of the homeless are dangerous, that small percentage really do kill people (3 murders via homeless-on-local violence within a block of my place over the past few years), so anyone can go fuck themselves if you think I'm being heartless for not engaging anymore. Self preservation trumps compassion.
Most of the homeless aren't intelligent enough to code. Since no profit can be made from them, it's not a priority.
This is what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Profit is the largest priority in the world.
Not by making it seem special or different and accommodating.
Make it cool --make young girls as excited about working in STEM as they are about working in TV or Hollywood, being a Pharmacist or Lawyer.
Trying to fix things after that is not as productive and is more interventionist.
While saying that, don't dissuade boys from it. Just keep on trying to persuade girls more. Offer more classes to accommodate everyone interested.
I mean, if the soviets could mobilize their women to be top notch scientists by creating a pipeline from elementary school on, so can we.
lol
That you're sick of hearing something because you don't want it to happen doesn't mean that others are obsessed with it. It only means you're oversensitive to the topic.
ftfy
Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help.
In the richest country in the world, at the very heart of the tech industry...let me repeat this again, we have scores of people living in abject poverty...exactly like animals.
After multiple viewings of this situation, I stopped looking at the homeless people and I started noticing the people walking past these individuals: Staring down at their phones, the residents of Silicon Valley have trained themselves to wear blinders to the abject, deplorable poverty of their fellow men. They are Tweeting, Facebooking, Instagramming, SnapChatting their lunch.
Solving easy problems. Making easy statements. Liking the right comments and the right posts, retweeting the appropriate social messages. So simple and easy! Click! Like! Done!
As I stood in line at one bodega, I noted the professional and skilled manner in which a white collar worker like myself standing in line completely failed to look at, respond to or acknowledge the presence of a drug addict who was begging him for change.
What a wonderful technique, I thought to myself. I had been doing it all wrong previously by even remotely acknowledging the homeless whenever they hassled me on the street. After observing this man's behavior, I adopted it. I learned: Just pretend they don't exist and they will go away.
So back to my main point:
Silicon Valley is a corrupt, horrible place that has decided it's #1 problem to be solved is the gender imbalance in software engineering. Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them, the entire tech industry has collectively jammed it's head deep, far into it's own anal cavity and decided that the optimal use of all of it's social justice time should be on ensuring that highly privileged women who have attended universities and received educations which fairly guarantee that they will achieve salaries that only .01% of the entire globe will ever achieve are the most pressing concern of the moment.
Every single day I see nothing but a relentless circular pounding on this topic. Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code! Women must learn to code!
The other half of the issue is just as fun: Our #1 issue as an industry is that women who are in the very upper 0.5% of the world must earn slightly more money. About 3%-5% more money. Yes, THAT is the issue we must harp on constantly all day, every single day online.
And the people living like animals on the streets we are ignoring? Yeah, fuck them, lets teach girls to code.