This post seems a little naive to me, and certainly couldn't apply to every single person who no longer has a home in California. We've developed technology and built homes so that we didn't have to deal with living in the outside world - to keep the outside from coming in, so to speak - and it gives us choice and stability, if we are able to maintain our possession of it without too much stress and trouble. That it is still hard to keep a home in a lot of places should be a real concern - things like that are not good for anybody. Homelessness can hurt people and hurt communities. I'd want to see some real investigation rather than conjecture about whether these specific people are doing it out of choice, or whether they are capably dealing with the extremely difficult and unpredictable circumstances that often accompany homelessness. The perspective you are arguing from kind of seems sheltered to me. There have been many more people protesting across the U.S. in the last few years than have been living the idyllic and romantic hobo life, free from stress and want.
Your mother does not seem like much of an unassailable source of wisdom when it comes to the realities of poverty - maybe you should argue from a more personal or sourced perspective about what it is like to be poor or homeless and what kind of conditions folks in such a position experience?
The way you make the unfavorable comparisons worse is by taking them seriously. I wouldn't suggest taking those co-workers too seriously either - it probably won't help.
Ellen Pao wasn't awful, but all-in-all, it's probably a good thing she stepped down. Hopefully, next time there's a huge community changeover or staff change in reddit, everyone will talk through it and about it reasonably, and everyone will be able to bat away the easily-led and the gleeful and/or bored shit-stirrers.
Industrial processes are not necessarily bad. So, too, do many methods exist outside of them that end in a unique product. Know the process and science of your food, and how it relates to the greater system in which you live. The failures and successes of food culture, and its influential place in civilization, can be traced back to our understanding of them and which intentions we have to affect them.
so, google is forced to reveal how it affects and processes search results, at least to the french government (this part was unclear to me). i don't really see what's wrong with that. if google has to approach the market so as to encourage more competition from france, i dont see whats wrong with that either. i dont see why any european company would want to be dependent on an american-based search or really any type of data-handling company at this juncture in international politics. at the very least, reducing google's control on french markets is not a bad thing, and is something google could overcome if it played ball well. if it's not possible to do something fairly, legally, and respectfully, its not worth doing at all.
I think it's really a long, grueling process of dialogue, explanation of practicals, co-operation of all possible interests, and work. It's a systemic change kind of thing, I think. That kind of stuff isn't easy, and if one is aiming for easiness and some approximation of perfection, it requires a lot of friction between global and local changes.