There is very good research to indicate that when housing costs a lot, versus geos where housing costs a little, homelessness clearly is lower. while this is not causation, the correlation is extremely clear. I think that Gregg Colburn, The University of Washington has done a good job arguing for this correlation and it's difficult to argue against it. What's nice about his research is it's not reliant on self-reported surveys to dig out these trends.
So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.
But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.
When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.
Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:
- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week.
- 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.
For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week.
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.
We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.
However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.
In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.
As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.
> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).
I already have in my prior comment:
>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
In other words, your logic is:
Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home
Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:
* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?
* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?
* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?
* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?
* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?
With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.
Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.
If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:
Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.
Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.
Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.
In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.
Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.
There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.
Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.
You may be confusing jameslk with me - I'm actually the one who linked the CASPEH exec summary. Your underemployment math is interesting, but I'd note the study also reports 34% have limitations in daily activities, 22% mobility limitations, 70% haven't worked 20+ hours weekly in 2+ years. When asked why, participants cited disability, age, transportation, and lack of housing itself as barriers. So the causation may be more circular than "fix jobs first" as the same factors driving underemployment are driving housing instability, and being unsheltered makes holding a job harder.
But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).
It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."
It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.
This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.
This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.
"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.
Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."
Peter Drucker popularized the phrase "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."
Being a credibly efficient at doing the wrong things, turns out to be a massive issue inside of most companies. What's interesting is I do think that AI gives opportunity to be massively more effective because if you have the right LLM, that's trained right, you can explore a variety of scenarios much faster than what you can do by yourself. However, we hear very little about this as a central thrust of how to utilize AI into the work space.
In my experience plenty of places are quite inefficient at doing the wrong things as well. You might think this reduces the number of wrong things done, but somehow it doesn't.
It's almost comical isn't it, but it actually turns out that this is a big foundation behind behavioral economics. In essence you can get trapped in an upper level heuristic and never stop for a moment and thinks things through.
Another one of my favorite examples is that there is some research out of Harvard that basically suggested that if people would take and spend 15 minutes a day reviewing what they had done and what was important, they increased their productivity 22%. Now you would think that this is so obvious and so dramatic you would have variety of Fortune 500 companies saying "oh my goodness we want all of our workers to be 22% more productive" and so they would simply send out a memo or an email or some sort of process to force people to do some reflecting.
I would also suggest that Microsoft had a unique advantage based out of the idea that people should have their own enclosed workspace to do coding. This was deeply entrenched when Bill was running the company day-to-day. And I'm sure as somebody that was a coding phenomenon, it simply made sense to him. But academically, it also makes sense.
Microsoft has reversed this policy, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have anything to do with the research. It has to do with statements about working together efficiently. or AI productivity. If there's real research then it's great.
My problem is it just doesn't appear to be any real research behind it. Yet I'm sure many managers at Microsoft thinks that it's very efficient. Of course, if you do know anybody at Microsoft that codes, they have their own opinion, and rather than me repeating hearsay, it would be fantastic to have somebody anonymously post what's really going on here. I'll betcha a nickel that 90% of them are not reporting that they feel a lot more effective.
At the time of the FAA making up this framework, I would venture more than half of commercial pilots had some military aviation background. It is so close to Boyd's model, I would think that a research might find that it was highly inspired if not a direct descendant of Boyd's work.
However, Body was real time combat, and I think the FAA is supposed to be beyond a cockpit crisis, and maybe another framework is Demings PDCA framework, which looks like you could roughly match the pieces.
Throw in confirmation bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias and you have a lot of inertia from changing. Not only do they not have the right info, but because they have invested in the ongoing solution, it is difficult to get any change going because humans tend to simply see everything as supporting their current viewpoint.
The challenge is that we have a rapidly evolving GLP/GIP/Other landscape being developed. In other words, you take a risk that the government buys the wrong thing. However, I think with a little push, you could have a highly competitive field to lower the federal cost, and the ROI should be easy to plot.
Actually, you don't need to do everybody all at once. Target the biggest (no pun intended) opportunities first.
I forget all the details of my tweaks, but I remember that I had better throughput on my version.
I know the OP talked about wanting it local, but thomasmol/whisper-diarization on replicate is fast and cheap. Here's a hacked front end to parse teh JSON: https://github.com/Sanborn-Young/MP3_2transcript
While I love the Hacker News purity, takes me back to Usenet, it makes me wonder if a little AI could take a repost and auto insert previous postings to allow people to see previous discussions.
Externally, it was universally praised. I was selling PC gray market at the time, and it was highly effective. The only people that I knew that had a problem with it was certain IBMers that felt it didn't rep the Blue Channel (corporate sales) and our corporate PCs. However, as the IBM sales took off, I met anybody inside of IBM when I eventually got there that said, "Well that stupid campaign we had...."
I completely understand that if you were there in the culture how this can hopeless outdated. So, I completely understand how this would be a massive flop today. However, at the time, it was extremely well regarded as effective and universally praised. It was just "grind it out" marketing, and maybe you would need to understand Ries and Trout to get it. But is was good by any measurement that was being run. However, it feels like a polyester jumpsuit.
I would argue things like the 1984 ad from Apple were bizarre, and while it makes the mark, it wasn't pivotable in terms of actually being effective. It appealed to Apples core, but wasn't effective in terms of ad dollars.
What was mind blowing is when Jobs came back to Apple, and Chiat/Day launched "Think Different." This was not grind it out. It was not "weird Apple" stuff.
It was awe-inspiring branding that changed the nature of technology marketing. It was beautify and emotive. I think it holds up well today, and may well hold together for many generations to come.
The subsequent "Get a Mac / PC vs Mac" ads were beyond brilliant in being able to pivot away from just emotion to an informed sense of humor.
I like the iPod ads, but we started to lose the edge.
I see none of the raw brilliance today that was a part of the previous years. However, I think they still do a great job of grind it out marketing, and they have continued to understand their brand. Maybe this is okay for where they are at.
In the end neither Think Different or PC vs Mac had much of an effect on getting them any decent market share really. Those were the years when they were barely holding on.
Yes the iMac had big success, but mainly because it was an attractive piece of furniture.
iPad and then especially iPhone is what changed the formula completely. And with it they switched from focusing on a kind of "Think Different" model where they emphasized their oddity and uniqueness to being a luxury lifestyle brand instead.
They even dropped their historical "user friendly" mottos ("It Just Works" and "Computer for the rest of us") because those definitely didn't sound like slogans that high end luxury (or luxury wannabe) consumers would be attracted to.
I don't think you probably have the history to frame this correctly.
Apple was dying. Somehow Steve got his foot in the door at the beginning of '97, and kicked out Gil in around 7 months. It was insane. Steve then immediately launched the Think Different, and personally narrated the ads. He then kills around 70% of the SKUs, killed the Newton, and got out the iMac in '98.
The reason why it was brilliant is because Steve said that we "lost our core." If there was a criticism about the think different campaign is that Steve was retreating to "the core groupees" therefore indicating that Apple was about the niche and not the mainstream. To Steve this was idiotic observation. You build from the devoted first. The campaign was brilliant as it wasn't about market growth, it was about stemming the blood loss and reclaiming the core. Then the MSFT deal was booed when announced. But it was classic Steve at his best.
To call the iMac "a piece of furniture" and the reason for its success is not to understanding how to deliver products and how to drive sales. Steve had an incredible aesthetic sense, and understood that he needs to segment his market an move away from the beige box. If you were in the market, you admired and were shocked at what he did.
But do you understand why suddenly there was an "i" in front? This wasn't about a piece of furniture, it was about portraying a device as your access to the outside world.
Then somehow you believe that the iPad and iPhone changed the formula, but I don't think you understand the iMac was the original example of how to apply the formula of being a product company that delivers a brand promise.
While Steve started as a PC person with Woz, he came back as a product person that had lived the glorious life of NeXT and Pixar. I think his banishment was helpful not hurtful. He understood that iMac was a product and not a PC.
He started asking "what products and what markets will Apple play in." The change was not iPhone or iPad. If you want to ask "when did the formula get copied outside of iMac?"
It was the iPod. It was iTunes. It was owning your own music. However, it was seen as a natural product extension from the iMac. Local storage of music was key.
Once they had a culture of products, then were able to build toward iPhone (iPad is a simple extension and has a much smaller impact on revenue.) However, it wasn't a pivot. It was a build.
While I don't want to dismiss your living through something, nor your wife's work history, by 2002, a lot of this had transitioned.
I have a weird career where I was inside the door of Apple supplying tech in the early 90s, then worked in the PC industry, then returned to spend time inside of Apple as a supplier. I never had personal interactions with Steve, but the people I would interact with would say things like "Steve made the decision."
In this time, I had responsibility for both marketing communications and engineering. (I know weird.) In my Marcom role, we looked at market data on advertising, and worked with figures like Larry Light--who is well known specifically for branding, and we asked him to help us in branding for the PC industry.
I am not going to say that all my observations are right, but I will tell you that this is a field that I specifically worked in, and I have time inside the walls of One Infinite Loop.
1. Get out from the blue tax
2. Have and alternative procurement path
3. Set up a channel where we might not cannibalize ourselves.
4. Free outselves from some of our rigorous engineering processes
It was basically a fail fast experiment, which is popular today. It was set up with the thought process that we wanted it more virtual and not to disrupt the core business. It became obvious pretty quick that it brought its own set of risks, and so we moved into Aptiva. It is good to try and fail and get out.
Actually, the Lenovo acquisition was a bit of a war. There was some visionary leadership from the most senior level of Lenovo that saw the core USA as extremely valuable, and allowed them to win arguments. While their long term goal was to move the core to China, they were careful to make sure they kept a lot of the USA team engaged, and many key USA individuals did move or travel constantly to China.
However, I wasn't a part of the company when it was sold, so most of this is top level feedback from my friends that did go.
Thanks for chiming in. I vaguely remember the press trolling IBM for Aptiva too.
Where were the Ambra machines sourced? Were they special clones like Compaq (where the BIOS was different), decent commodity clones like Dell or were they generic clones like everything off-brand?
I never understood what the value proposition was. Was it a bit like a supermarket own brand where the customer kind-of guesses that the brand leader makes them, much like how Americans know CostCo Kirkland diapers are made by Huggies?
The value prop is that we could launch a Dell (Gateway) channel by offering leading edge systems, and look for unique features, and live in the other guys holes. The team wasn't stupid, and they had a matrix of where they felt that they could put some products into the ecosystem that could occupy some space that Dell (Gateway) didn't have clear products. If I remember correctly, there was also some thought that we could cut off Dell in EMEA. (Europe.) Dell was far stronger in the USA at the time.
Being this is 30 years ago, I can't remember an exact matrix on some that wasn't my core product. But they had a strategy.
This was early in my career, but I happened to be in a pivotable position that got me access above my pay grade. (I have this weird background in both marketing and engineering, and as somebody that can speak both, I turned into basically a language translator in many meetings, then I was sent out as PR person to the magazines.) I did not work for the Ambra team, but they had an impact on my work, so I got to be involved a enough to see the edges.
I'm not going to have the exact numbers, but I remember that we stated that we were going to have no more than 8 IBMers involved with the thing. The Taiwanese clone market was just starting to take off, and we were starting to outsource to Taiwan. If I remember correctly, it was the Phoenix BIOS, who we had already done a deal with for our Consumer PC line. (Actually, it was co-development.)
As I already wrote, the final bit is that the guys had done some anonymous bid work, and had gotten some very aggressive bids--better than what we were getting. So, they had the impression that they could take a lot of cost out of the system. Also, we wanted to take out Dell and Gateway, but not impact the core IBM brand. Compaq was considered the real comp. HP second. Dell was this annoying "can't stop them because they always win the bids" company. Gateway was on the fringe, and more of a threat to our consumer brand, which was small at the time. But it was free TAM.
So, there was an impression if we followed the Dell/Gateway model, leading tech, very competitive pricing, and full page ads, with some systems that lived in the space, we could start to cannibalize the their TAM.
Now, you don't want to read back into history. The Dell then is not the Dell of now. But, buying behavior was stronger with Dell than the group anticipated. It just was tough to get the velocity growth they wanted. I think we launched in EMEA first, maybe because that is where the VP that ran the thing was from, and then it was rolled out in the USA. However, it just did not see the growth, and I remember there were some quality issues that the small group couldn't handle, but this is pretty foggy.
I will also state that the Round Rock team (and even Gateway), was incredibly tough competition in this arena. I would say that the team did not appreciate this.
However, it was never a massive corporate push for RTP--the home of the PC and PC Server. It was a "let's try this and see if we can learn something." I do remember most of us in the core PC team to NOT get involved as it wasn't pitched as being our core business. If I remember correctly, we did help share some information on parts that we procured to help them.
Its not Costco as the models are so different. As I have run a distribution business before, and Costco is really a marvel to me. My disti business was to the VAR channel, but my sister group used Costco and Walmart. Costco is absolute maniac about delivering value to their customers with quality. Really, it blows me away. They had a bunch of brands, and Sinegal said they could combine them all under Kirkland, turn it into a quality brand to drag up the entire Costco brand. He is so freaking brilliant, and I would argue unique to a company that had a distribution business that wanted to position themselves in the consumer's mind. I would argue that Costco never used their branding to indicate a "secret way" to get a better brand. I think that Costco is keen on making sure that Kirkland IS the brand, which is different than Ambra.
Thanks for asking. I don't think we ever did this type of post mortem at the time, and thinking through events always seems to generate learning for myself as I type it down.
At the time, customers had no idea that this was why these tech companies were operating out of Ireland. All they knew was that you got a lot for your money, and, more importantly, the latest tech. However, you might have to wait 28 days for delivery. It was important to the business model that Dell had not one single employee in the UK or other EU countries apart from Ireland, so it was call centre for everything before the web came along.
There may have been more to the Dell business model of customisation. In the UK, if you order a bespoke product, then you don't have the normal rights to just return it if you don't like it, you are stuck with it, and at the mercy of customer service.
I don't know if Dell played this card because they always had that refurbished gig going, where you could get good kit with a few dents and scratches. Nonetheless, there was very little manufacturing going on, it was just a screwdriver operation, final assembly of what amounted to knock-down kits. You did get the latest and greatest though,
Regardless, compare with the original IBM model where they made PCs in Greenock, Scotland. Undoubtedly you know more about this than I do. However, as I understand it, the original Scottish factory made typewriters before the PC came along, and IBM were incentivised to choose Scotland in the post war years, when the British government were quite serious about bringing industry to Scotland. Shipbuilding had gone on the Clyde, and with it steel and the outfitting and everything else that goes with shipbuilding. There was also an emotional reason for Greenock, Watson had Scottish ancestry.
The product that came out of Greenock was really good. To this day people want those keyboards that came out of there. The Trinitron monitors came from Sony's plant in Bridgend Wales, which they originally opened in the 1970s to make TVs, again with the usual government incentives. Sony also supplied Dell and Gateway 2000. Now all that has gone, RIP Trinitron, we loved you...
I am sure there was more to the supply chain, since, in period, semiconductors were made in Silicon Glen. However, these tended to be things like DRAM chips, where vast fortunes would be spent building a fab for it to be pretty much stillborn.
I am curious as to how 'vertically integrated' the IBM operation was, since hard disks were also made by IBM in Scotland. The IBM PC story is told as 'using commodity off the shelf parts', but IBM PCs were not a product of a screwdriver operation.
It is shocking that the UK have done so badly at tech. However, how was IBM supposed to compete against those tax fiddlers operating out of Dublin? Why did the EU allow Ireland in the UK when they were not taxing the big corporations? The Irish shot themselves in the foot with this as they ended up with house price inflation and very high personal taxation.
The UK also had a lot of tech in the M4 corridor, this being the motorway out of London that goes all the way to (drumroll...) Bridgend. Reading was the prime spot with Compaq, SGI, Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase and plenty of others setting up shop there.
In Reading there was an industrial estate that housed most of them, with their own private motorway. If you were on the train going past you imagined this as being a full on mini-Silicon-Valley, however, not a lot was going on in those impressive headquarter buildings. I am sure Sybase was just a couple of guys hassling the few customers they had for whatever license fees they could get from them, as for Microsoft, there was nobody writing code there, you just had product managers for things such as Microsoft Golf. Same with SGI, just a very big building with nobody in there. It all looked impressive from the train, however, it was just a Potemkin Village.
I am in genuine disbelief regarding how the UK messed up with tech given the advantages of a reasonably educated population, a reasonably high standard of English, access to the EU market, access to the former colonies, an army of 8-bit coders (from the BBC Micro project) and access to capital (London).
I've done both marketing and engineering. I managed a group at RTP responsible for a part of the engineering for PC, Thinkpads, and the Server group. While I had people go to Greenock, I never went personally. So, in some sense, I don't feel like I can give an adequate impression and background.
I will tell you that our team out of Greenock had a big impact on manufacturing, and some real live wires. I remember being at home on the weekend, and have a VP of manufacturing hunt me down to say words that normally IBMer wouldn't say in that I was bringing down his line. It really was the stereotypical Scottish Soccer fan type interaction. In this case, it turned out that it wasn't my group. After I left IBM, I ended up supplying tech to all my IBM competitors. I observed what I thought was basically all of IBM processes in their processes. Similar terminology that I know started at IBM. While we did see some people move, a big part of this was the supplier base.
We did do a lot of work with outside resources. For example, we "qualified" power supplies, but we basically did co-engineering. Part of our problem in that we would significantly change everybody's product, then they would sell it to Dell or Gateway. This was a very quick path to get your processes into the comp as the suppliers would "suggest" things that they had learned at IBM.
The hard drive issue is a bit more subtle. IBM was not the original supplier to our own PCs--and they had a melt down with a massive recall. I don't remember us making hard drives in Scotland. I remember Mainz, Rochester MN, San Jose, and Fujisawa. The PC client group took almost exclusively Fujisawa products. The server group worked to take San Jose/Rochester server products. Rochester was the 5.25 and then 3.5" lines for AS/400, so they were at first leading with the PC server group. I will relate that I think HDDs were always the #1 reason for Quality No Ship (QNS), mainly due to shock specs, which got better over time.
As to the delivery of tech in the UK. I would state that it is similar inside of the USA. Try as many want, tech seems to be focused in the New York, Bay Area and in Puget Sound. While I was in RPT, and this state killed themselves to get tech (including 3 incredible Universities right next door), for some reason it never turned into a tech hub. Without research, I would state that there is also an element of chance or luck that gets a region going, and can't be planned for. However, maybe your just pointing out that UK never even gave themselves any chance, which I am just not close enough to understand.
So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.
But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.
When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.
Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:
- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week. - 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.
For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week. - 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.
We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
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