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The culture they created has “distortions that are very analogous to the industrial revolution,” said Cary McClelland, author of the new book Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. The Zuckerbergs and Musks are today’s Carnegies and Rockefellers. And the low-wage drivers at Lyft and Uber are the factory workers “who worked unprotected, from dawn to dusk

Half the world’s tech billionaires live in Silicon Valley

“This area may have the greatest concentration of wealth in human history,” said Lenny Siegel, the former mayor of Mountain View, whose house is valued at $2.5m. He purchased it 40 years ago for $112,000.

Facebook, Microsoft and Uber have announced plans to reopen offices on a limited basis, as the spread of the coronavirus pandemic continues to slow. Microsoft and Uber say their headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and San Francisco respectively will welcome employees on March 29.

The software giant has already begun to accommodate some additional workers in offices around the globe at its 21 locations and reopening offices in the Northwest by taking a hybrid approach is the next step, the company said in a statement.

Uber is moving up a back-to-the-office plan from Sept. 13 to next Monday, the company said in an emailed statement, stressing that it is on a voluntary basis. In line with local guidelines, the ride-share company said only up 20% of employees can opt to work from the office.

Pandemics fade. Racism does not. And when a president like Donald Trump unfairly blames an entire ethnic group for the coronavirus pandemic crisis, it can embolden discrimination and violence.

On a recent January morning, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old from Thailand, was walking in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the police say, a 19-year-old man slammed into Mr. Vicha, knocking him down. He died two days later in the hospital.

“The rhetoric spurred by the previous administration when the pandemic started — using ‘China virus,’ ‘kung flu’ and all that kind of stuff — has made Asian-Americans a target to basically people who are racist,” Daniel Wu, star of the television series “Into the Badlands,” told me in a recent interview. Mr. Wu was born in Berkeley, Calif., worked as an actor in Hong Kong for many years and is now active in the campaign to prevent attacks against Asian-Americans.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that he would send an envoy to meet with administration officials and discuss ways to address the issue together

the state was mobilizing 100 camping trailers to shelter some of the state’s more than 150,000 homeless people

Nearly half of all unsheltered people in the United States live in California.

Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.

a 64-year-old grandmother was assaulted and robbed of cash she'd just withdrawn from an ATM for Lunar New Year gifts.

a 91-year-old man in Oakland's Chinatown, who was hospitalized with serious injuries after being shoved to the ground by a man who walked up behind him.

The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.

Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.

Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year

A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has accused the technology giant of a “culture of lawlessness,” including stealing content from rival platforms Snapchat and Instagram in its early years, and called the company a “useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.

The claims were part of a wrongful dismissal suit filed on Friday by Yintao Yu, who was the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018. The complaint, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, says Mr. Yu was fired because he raised concerns about a “worldwide scheme” to steal and profit from other companies’ intellectual property.

Among the most striking claims in Mr. Yu’s lawsuit is that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members sometimes referred to as the Committee, which monitored the company’s apps, “guided how the company advanced core Communist values” and possessed a “death switch” that could turn off the Chinese apps entirely.

June 2024 Issue

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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.

The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.

Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.

Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business,

On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Obama’s team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question is: Which side is winning?

Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.

They’ve been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.

Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.

An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered

Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims with declarations like, "You have the Chinese Virus, go back to China!" and assaulting them and spitting on them.

The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.

Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter's motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.

Californians braced for power cuts and a “potentially historic” wind event on Saturday as a growing wildfire prompted fresh evacuations for 50,000 people in the northern Bay Area.

Another blaze that forced evacuations of 50,000 residents in suburbs north of Los Angeles grew to 4,615 acres overnight. The Tick fire, which started on Thursday, has destroyed nine homes and businesses while threatening 10,000 more, according to firefighters.

The Sonoma county sheriff’s office said it is expected to be the biggest evacuation in the county in more than 25 years.

People of color in some of America’s wealthiest cities are significantly more likely to live in houses without indoor plumbing essential for running water, new research reveals.

. Yet access to running water is not universal in the United States, ostensibly the richest country in the world.

Nationwide, almost half a million homes do not have piped water, with the majority – 73% – located in urban areas. In fact, almost half the houses without plumbing are located in the country’s top 50 cities.

A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.

But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.

In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as “matters requiring attention” and “matters requiring immediate attention,” flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble.

But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions

It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.