For those who want to read an expose on the nomadic and way underpaid, I'd suggest checking out Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. (actually, anything she writes is phenomenal). This whole living in your car and being nomadic is hardly new to America. I saw it when I was traveling the USA from 2001 to 2007 or so.<p>As I tell anyone, the only reason Los Angeles can have so many gyms is because the working homeless needs to take a shower too.<p>On the one hand, I'm glad that this topic is getting more attention, but I'm uncomfortable with the thought that Amazon is the poster child for this, when they are one of the few companies that has low wage workers working full time, which is very rare in this day of required health care.
Amazon seems to almost always be the target of these articles, how about highlighting someone else for a change. For example, drive along El Camino Real next to Stanford University and you will see a long line of campers parked along the road. Many of the people living there work either directly or indirectly for the University. Stanford has literally thousands of acres of empty land where they could build housing for their temporary and low income employees, yet they chose not to. They could at least provide a campground with proper facilities and hookups (so sewage doesn't go down storm drains, for instance). Of course the real solution, which is to pay ALL your employees a living wage, that apparently is crazy talk in The Valley.
There is no concept of 'society' and 'community' in the country. As long as things are good there is no problem, but when things start falling apart you need robust social and community structures and these simply don't exist.<p>Because people who are down need more than just tokenism, they need real human structures that can provide psychological human support, that sense of family, and then social and community structures that show the society is human and has empathy for its fellow members to get them back on their feet.<p>People who are wealthy already have this. People who are not need to think about down times, not just for themselves, but their family, friends, community and children down the line. If everyone thinks they are strictly individuals on the verge of becoming rich and these silly things don't matter you are going to have serious social problems.
This will only become more common once vehicles are self-driving. People will live in their vehicles and have them either drive around all night or find a place to park many hours away from their jobs (assuming there any jobs left).<p>The fantasy many folks seem to have about self-driving vehicles causing car ownership to disappear in favor of automated Ubers/Lyfts/whatevers on demand might come to pass for one class of people, but there will be large numbers of people for whom the opposite happens: they give up their homes (by choice or not) and live in a self-driving vehicle that is the only dwelling they own.
The most famous one is probably the google employee who lived in a truck: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truc...</a><p>There are actually a lot of other software engineers / freelancers on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/top/?sort=top&t=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/top/?sort=top&t=all</a>.
Like this engineer from Tesla: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employee-lived-out-of-van-2015-11/#-7" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employee-lived-out-of-v...</a><p>I find the modding be really cool. But the stories of people getting killed/robbed at night like this Palo Alto tech worker scares me: <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/man-killed-in-gym-parking-lot-in-wrong-place-at-wrong-time/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/man-kill...</a><p>(Google campus would be a pretty ideal place to do this though)
Federal minimum wage, times 2000 hours (if you can get it,) is not enough to sustain a living, much less a family. If we want people to work for a living, we'd support significant increases there.
This is terrible, but that dude, Don Wheeler, absolutely should not have had that much assets in assets like stocks at such an advanced age. As you get older your asset mix should shift towards more low gain and high stability investments, like bonds, T-bonds, and other stable fixed-income asset classes.<p>Or, so I understand.
People have to live in car .. while working in amazon.. but why in earth we should use amazon ??
Do we support rich getting richer only.. ?<p>Please, lets start to respect our self and forgot these mega companies
Let's not fool ourselves into thinking these people are <i>forced</i> into living this way due to rising housing and apartment costs. There is always a choice. These people could live in crappy apartments in crappy city-jobs if they so chose. But they don't want to, because part of them romanticizes life on the road.