The Real Story of the Homeless Coder - and

[jtuck004]

This story (not this video that I can find) has been on DU.

The video:

News Story:
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2013/12/04/erin-pkg-weir-homeless-computers.cnn&video_referrer=

The App:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.treesforcars.treesforcars

The Story:
Basically a coder (programmer), hired out of college, looking for his "next big thing" for 5 months walks by this homeless guy.

He sees the guy bench-pressing some old heavy boat chains with rocks on them, trying to stay in shape, and one day decides his next big thing is to offer the fella $100 cash, or a laptop, 3 books, and free coding lessons in Java script.

The homeless guy takes him up on the coding offer. Coder guy (Patrick McConlogue) brings him a laptop and three books and they star, lessons and coding 1 hour a day. Sometimes on a table by the water, sometimes on some sandbags near a warehouse.

McConlogue thinks he is gonna get the guy a job and a place. The homeless guy (Leo Grand) has other ideas, and wants to build an app which will help people get or offer rides in a carpool. He calls it "Trees for Cars".

There are bumps along the way. It got really cold outside, and typing was hard. Patrick approached his boss not expecting a positive response, but his boss said "Sure, he could use a desk if he was quiet". So as winter moved in, he would code during the day, and go find a place (train stations when it was cold, a bundle of blankets. Shelters weren't his thing (and if you have ever slept in a "shelter" you could understand why - dangerous, sometimes odd management, get your stuff (laptop?) stolen).

Then, one night he is sleeping and is arrested for sleeping on a bench. The police take his laptop for evidence. (Evidence of sleeping on a bench? That he is black? That he is black and homeless and is probably still smarter and can code better than they can?) He's black, no credit card. 'Course, if he had a credit card he could get arrested at Macy's...

When he wrote about that on his blog, an employee from Google saw it and flew across country, brought him a new laptop. He went back to work.

His app has been released and is for sale, 99 cents like many of them.

___________________

Just an aside:
This is only tangential to the specifics of Leo's story, (Becky Blanton, no longer homeless, given a laptop by Yahoo and is now working and winning awards - this is her talk at TED - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/becky_blanton_the_year_i_was_homeless.html

____________________

My suggestion - The Fed says they want to taper the $85 billion they are paying bankers to profit from every month, money they say they are paying out to improve our economy. Yet our "economy", since it is mostly based on consumer demand, which has been considerably less than it should be with 317 million people, is mostly getting better, and in some cases much better, because the banks aren't spending that $85 billion a month.

We are about to cut unemployment benefits for a number of people which will decrease the money people have to spend, and negatively impact the economy. On the other hand, if you have that money to people who would spend it almost immediately you get a quick boost. If they spend it and learn something in the process, and there are enough of them, it could...?

If you add up the people who are listed in the BLS report as unemployed, long-term unemployed, part-time but need full time work, and considered no longer in the work force but want work, you get about 25 or so million people, listed as U6 on the BLS report. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) says we only have about 3.9 million jobs available as of their last quarterly report, (which is about where they have been for a while).

Take part of the money that would have gone to the bankers in January and give everyone who is unemployed, U6 number, them a voucher for a laptop that runs Linux, or maybe a Chromebook, and Internet Access of some kind. $1000, limited to the computer and a limited alternative if they cannot get Internet access easily. Like we did with broadcast TV "Set Top Boxes". They can get their wireless Internet access for 1 year from anyone who will provide it. Wireless public company, a neighbor who will guarantee their use of a connection to their wireless router, a public or private school that will put an antenna up on their roof for public access, a business person who will donate a desk if they provide their own transportation, a jack on the wall or wireless at Walmart 0 whatever. If they can find, and they can use $200 for transportation if they must. They will be offered courses in web site creation, in how to create an App, and a short course in html 5, css, Python or Ruby, Java script.

They can create an app, a website that connects them all together, whatever. They have one year, and can keep the laptop, as long as they produce something - web site, program, app, - either on their own or with someone else. They can do the graphics on a page someone else creates, whatever, but it must result in some output with their name attached. No penalties if not, but that's easy. Even if they don't do anything otherwise, they could do some social media stuff for site, (blog postings, twitter, etc) and they get listed.

We should provision another $1 billion for repairs, support, loss, etc.

That takes $26 billion off the top of the money we are paying the bankers who brought us the financial crisis, and we pay them the balance of the $85 billion

If we did that, what could happen?