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posted by martyb on Sunday April 07 2019, @12:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the garbage-in-garbage^W-money-out? dept.

In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor's Trash

Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg's $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.

There's a child's pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg's house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg's bin.

A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.

One Zuck's trash is another man's "like new".


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @01:48PM (#825773)

    That's precisely the problem.

    In America, if you're working class, you can go off and put your life on the line for the interests of the billionaire class. Maybe you'll get free college out of the deal. If you get a limb blown off, get PTSD, get any number of things that happen in war, when you come home, the billionaires, as a thank-you for defending their imperialist interests, will tell you to FOAD. They don't care if you go homeless. They don't care if you're starving. They don't care if your PTSD goes untreated and is a significant barrier to entry to a McJob.

    The billionaire class contributes nothing of value to society, and yet they believe they are entitled to the vast majority of the wealth the working class creates.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Gaaark on Sunday April 07 2019, @09:37PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday April 07 2019, @09:37PM (#825946) Journal

    A. Men.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---