I think one aspect of this is that San Francisco is somewhat of a safe-haven for the homeless and transient. While they do provide some context for the economic disparity between the poor and the rich, most of my homeless/transient buddies prefer living homeless/transient lifestyles in San Francisco to living homeless/transient lifestyles anywhere else.
> Thing is, those in poorer situations flock here, because they can get healthcare, support, and help, but other times it just feels like a passive aggressive fuck-you-got-mine. if you don’t tip, it isn’t so much a snub, it’s saying “i don’t think you deserve healthcare”. Alternatively for those with healthcare provided, it locks them into their job.
How is leaving SF any different? You're doing the same thing but at a greater step of remove. Instead of the homeless people being down the block, they're safely away from you in a distant country.
As for your local area, I suppose either there are no homeless or poor people, or you are just constantly thinking about them, unlike those hard-hearted Californians. Come on.
The guy's Scottish, he thinks it's about San Fran specifically, it's really about AMERICA. Maybe San Fran puts it even more in your face. But compared to most any other country even half as rich as America, the lack of social safety net in the U.S. is kind of shocking. People in Europe don't really realize the extent of it.
The wealth disparity is probably more evident in SF.
For example, Honolulu has a huge homeless population despite the huge tourism industry. The city just pushes homeless towards parts of the island where tourists don't visit and thus aren't aware of the problem.
Toronto has way more of a handle on homelessness than other parts of Canada in my experience. It's much worse in the neighbouring provincial capitals, Montreal and Winnipeg.
I've always been somewhat confused by the homeless out in the street in Canada. I thought we had a social safety net, shelters, etc. Everyone of these people can't be drug users and people with severe mental health issues, right?
I'm French living in Jersey. I have been to San Francisco, even though it's blatant when you walk here, everywhere in the US I have that feeling that the poor are really forgotten. And they live in third-world country conditions. In France, the average rich is not as rich, and it's probably a lot harder to become successful and wealthy than here; but the poor are not left behind as much. It feels more like a society where you take a significant chunk from the rich to make sure the poor can get by. Sure there are abuses, high taxes and whatnot, but the old and the poor can afford to go to the dentist, and retire when the time comes.
The way I see it, European countries have a kind of nation-wide health insurance, vs individual insurance here. We have a nation-wide student loan, versus individual student loans. That helps controlling the costs and profits, and helps making sure that everybody who needs care or education can get it.
But whether it is related or not, America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.
Put simply, it's better to be born poor in Europe than in the US, and better to be born rich in the US than in Europe.
Even a porta potty cleaned infrequently is more sanitary than the conditions in the third world. There won't be a cholera outbreak. Food is available and nobody is going to starve to death.
Heck, a simple clean water fountain in some third world countries can improve the lives of an entire village. Even in the most horrible cities in america there are dozens of sources of free water.
> There won't be a cholera outbreak. Food is available and nobody is going to starve to death.
None of these really reflect how poor communities in the US are. Food insecurity is a real thing that affects a good number of households and individuals. Access to adequate medical care, including vaccinations, is difficult. Health and water conditions can vary greatly and may be unsanitary.
I agree that saying the US is like a third world is overblown, but we aren't exactly a shining beacon of care for all of the people that exist in our society.
There certainly is a very real cholera risk in the poorest communities in the US.
Take, for example, the colonias in southwestern Texas, where ~400k people live in informal housing without access to basic infrastructure or services, and where diseases like cholera and dengue fever have far higher rates of incidence. These aren't all illegal immigrants or anything, either -- the Texas secretary of state reports 64.4% of Texan colonias residents are US citizens[1].
It's easy to assume there's no poverty that deep in this country when, by and large, our standard of living is better than most of the world, but unfortunately there really are places in the US to which the descriptor "third world" is applicable.
> America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.
This seems a little contradictory. Being daring and exciting as a country and an economy would be more like how America used to be, where the upside of having people dying in the street was that if you came here and you had drive and talent, you were much more likely to become wealthy and successful. This is in contrast to the way much of Europe functioned at the time, where a more entrenched and institutionalized class system meant that your position in life (by and large) was set at birth.
As it stands now (I believe over the last couple of decades), America performs _worse_ than every comparable developed country but Great Britain when it comes to income mobility[1].
"it's probably a lot harder to become successful and wealthy than here"
One thing that is often forgotten is that in Europe it's generally much easier (or less burdening) to become successful in something that doesn't necessarily make a lot of money in the beginning or ever. It can also be a lot easier to feel rich. If you make three times the average income on consulting, you can pretty much take half the year of and still increase your living standard quite a bit if you wanted to.
I tend to think a lot of the social programs that do exist in this city (and there are many – healthy san francisco, housing subsidies, dozens of shelters, and even more food programs) don't really address the root problem that causes such a disparity. For instance, I've a number of friends who work in the tenderloin with some of those same social programs, and they're perspective is that the housing subsidies that bring people to the tenderloin only exacerbate the issues that plague it.
It's not just warm weather that draws people to SF, but a plethora of social programs that are often poorly executed, underfunded, and addressed at superficial issues and not their core causes (education, for example).
I live 4 blocks from Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and I feel exactly the same way. US-style homeless shelters just seem to concentrate the homeless in a geographic area, without providing them with anything they need (what most of them seem to need is access to mental health services and medications). I've heard multiple formerly incarcerated people say that staying in homeless shelters is worse than prison.
The end result seems to be a sort of outdoor insane asylum, with a bunch of privileged hipsters like me and my friends wandering from our high-end loft conversions to the latest trendy bars and restaurants.
I also feel that in many ways the property development companies are drawn to these dilapidated downtown areas with large homeless populations because it's "edgy" and the developments themselves are high-margin.
I'm Scottish and while I've not quite experienced it myself, I'm happy living in Europe where m taxes are spent on health care as opposed to bombs. It's not so much shocking as it is just really sad. :(
It's almost all the result of the extra administrative overhead from our fragmented insurance market, profits to the for-profit hospitals and insurance companies and the extremely expensive ineffective end-of-life care that is incentivized by that incredibly messed up system.
Yeah but that'd all seem to be from private individuals, which seems to fit with my idea of a US that is more than happy to collectivly suffer, as long as folks don't feel anyone is getting a free ride.
It's a stupidly short sighted game of russian roulette but nowhere near as hilarious as if the Government itself really does pay out more per capitita than anywhere else in the world.
True. Not only does the US as a nation spend more on healthcare than almost anyone else, US citizens also spend more on healthcare than citizens of almost any other country. So the govt. and the citizens are paying boat-loads--that's inefficiency.
And, it doesn't help anything that we're one of the most unhealthy nations.
And the rest of the Western world, like it or not, is able to spend less on defense precisely because -- thanks to some unique events in the 20th century -- the US is effectively providing a defense subsidy for all of its allies.
I'm not advocating, just saying. Perhaps European countries would have to spend more if the US did not concern itself with the rest of the world? Food for thought.
> Obviously. Every country in the world spend money in defense, the difference is the percentage of the GDP spent.
Kind of like healthcare.
Where, germane to other arguments made in the thread, the US also spends a larger share of its GDP than other developed countries, so, no, other developed countries aren't able to provide universal healthcare through public spending because of a "security subsidy" from the US; there able to do so because their mostly-public healthcare systems are more efficient than the US system which splits costs between public and private systems nearly evenly (with a slight private bias.)
This may have been true in the Cold War, but that war has long been over. To say that US defense spending now is benefiting anyone in any way now is laughable, except for maybe South Korea and Taiwan. If anything, our meddling has raised security concerns for all our European allies due to the displacement and disruption of life by our actions in the Middle East.
The US is in fact providing a defense subsidy to it's allies AND to it's enemies.
EVERYONE gets their weaponry from the US (they bought it back when they were allies, now their enemies), and/or gets weaponry developed with US military R&D.
It's certainly good for the US defense industry. You've got to buy more better weapons cause your enemy has bought more better weapons, and both sides buy em from the US defense industry.
When the US gives another country military aid (or actually most any kind of aid), 100% of the funds 'donated' need to be used buying military goods from US companies. So military aid goes right to US defense companies too. (I think Israel is the one special exception, who for some reason only have to spend 50% of their military aid on US goods, and can spend the other half on Israeli-made goods).
The US spends more on the military than every other country _combined_.
So, yeah, I'm not sure this state of affairs could really be described as the US keeping the planet _safe_ by spending so much on military. But it is true that the US equips the entire rest of the world militarily.
You're mistaking what I mean by subsidy. I'm talking game theory, not short term shuffling of monies.
You are correct in that there are transfers of money and arms, the individual value and long term wisdom of which are always debatable. What I am talking about is a de facto subsidy, based on the fact that many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States because they know that the US would step in for any existential crisis caused by mutual enemies.
Think of it this way. It costs billions to construct a single aircraft carrier. Many seafaring nations currently build smaller navies than they would if the United States were not filling a large portion of this role for them. When buying aircraft, ships, tanks, missiles, etc, an allied country only has to build those assets marginally necessary to create a comfortable excess over and above the security already seen as inevitably provided by the US. That constitutes an indirect subsidy.
> many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States
If any country had defense centered on such silly premise I think it migrated away from this since release of US cables that clearly show that US only cares about US and treats other countries not as venerable allies but as monkeys in their circus.
US is not doing any defense charity. It's present in Europe only because US commanders think it's in the best interest of US. Europe spends on its military half of what US does.
I don't believe that Europe would spend significantly more on military. Europeans after carrying two world wars on their soil seem little bit resilient to threats of war and to actual violence. When it comes to Americans it seems that goat fart spontaneously combusting on the other side of the planet constitutes experimental discharge of pyrochemical weapon potentially of mass destruction that ought to be carefully monitored by swiftly dispatched fleet of surveillance drones.
I live in San Diego now, but I just moved back here from San Francisco. I've lived elsewhere in America. I never felt the disparity as much as I did in SF. I walked around being intensely aware of my privilege and it was uncomfortable.
San Fran's housing policy and strict land-use regulations have prevented the creation of large-scale housing units (both public and private) that address this problem elsewhere. The homeless population isn't an accident; it's the creation of government regulation and middle-class fear of high-density housing.
We're very well aware of the extent of the situation in the US. It's been a long time since Europeans lined up to emigrate to America.
Also, ironically enough, most Northern Europeans would already consider the circumstances of the underprivileged in Scotland unacceptable... The bad parts of Glasgow are considered the most horrible places in Western Europe. And the people there have housing, healthcare and access to education.
I dunno. Feel like that's not the case for a lot of very talented Europeans, many of whom I've met in my multiple trips there and unanimously want to emigrate to the US. They certainly aren't the "give us your tired, your poor" immigrants anymore, but I get the sense there's a real sense of economic stagnation there. I've only been to Europe about 25 times, but you get a sense of it pretty well. But you seem to be European, what do you think?
As a person with severe social anxiety, I felt truly anonymous in my visit to San Francisco last summer. I was not worried or threatened like my wife. I knew all things come and go in SF. The inherent risks of SF seemed easier to evaluate due to the larger population. To me, it was bliss. The divide between rich and poor was no different than anywhere I have visited in the USA. A visit to Mississippi can open eyes to the evil dividing lines of human behaviors.
> Stepping over the homeless, weaving between the street corner schizophrenics
Imagine having a chronic disease simultaneously with an absolutely intolerable fear of doctors, hospitals, institutions and the social safety net. That's a hard problem.
I can't tell exactly the point you're trying to make. Obviously there are specific cases ("schizophrenics" here, I guess) who are going to be very hard to treat in any safety net, and the US has no monopoly on them.
But the point was broader, that relative to the rest of the industrial world the US has far more people at the "bottom" , falling out of the net. Walking around cities in Europe, you generally don't find people sleeping on park benches or camping under highway interchanges, etc... In most US cities, that's fairly routine. And many of us consider that a bad thing.
Note that none of that excuses the poorly informed and counterproductive moralizing in the linked article. The author is a jerk. But the problem is real.
Now, I'm sure this is a difficult thing to measure, and there's lots of room for legitimate argument. Nonetheless Wikipedia tells me that 248 Londoners "sleep rough each night", where 3-5000 of San Francisco's homeless population "refuse shelter". That's a full order of magnitude difference even ignoring the fact that London's population is several times that of SF.
And again, it gets to the safety net argument. It's not that the english are accepting shelter where the americans are not, it's that the english don't need to "accept" the homeless shelters in the first place because they are sleeping at home.
248? In Helsinki I think I saw more than that passed out on a single tram ride. Helsinki had far more homeless than any big US city I've ever been to(at the very least they were far more visible). I also had more negative experiences with aggressive homeless there than I have had here. I forget the tram line, but it was the one that goes from University of Helsinki to Tooloo.
I've never been to Helsinki. But perhaps the lesson there is that Finland too has much to learn from the UK safety net, and not that the US doesn't have a problem.
"A mixture of street counts and estimates indicated 557 people slept rough on any one night in London
5,678 different people slept rough over a year in London (April 1 2011-March 31 2012)"
"According to SFGov, the total number of homeless individuals and families in San Francisco for 2011 was 6,455."
There are definitely more homeless as percentage of population in San Francisco though.
But in any case, my point is about the chronic homeless and http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentall... suggests that most chronically homeless are mentally ill in some fashion. How society should properly care for its mentally ill is an extremely hard problem. Strait jackets and padded cells? Forced drug treatments? Or let them camp under bridge overpasses?
Not everyone can create, whether it's a website or designing the next iPhone. Very few people can. Those people that do are rewarded very well.
Besides, if we were all trying to cure hunger or house the homeless who would be creating all the fancy computers we use every day?
And why blame 'programmers', there are plenty of doctors, lawyers, and financial workers in SF that have to 'step over' the homeless every day on their way to work as well.
"Besides, if we were all trying to cure hunger or house the homeless who would be creating all the fancy computers we use every day?"
You're right, it is hard to imagine how we would survive without Yet Another SocialMobilePhotoSharing Application.
Remember the Dark Days, my friends? When to share a photo you actually had to be around people, and talk to them? Ugh. I shudder to think upon it. We lived like savages, back then; filthy, stinking savages.
Curing hunger and housing the homeless doesn't, the last time I checked, require creativity or programming talent. Growing food and constructing buildings are what we geeks like to call "mature technology", and thus not something we concern ourselves with except at the margins where changes in efficiency have economic impact.
"Last night, someone told me “In California, there isn’t a conflict between being a Capitalist, and a Liberal”, with a wry grin on his face."
Of course there isn't. Liberalism in its purest form (as espoused by Hayek, say) is, in effect, free market capitalism with a light but universally applicable (no "special cases", as those lead to totalitarianism) set of regulations to prevent bad actors (e.g. hey, let's put heroin in baby formula so it's really more-ish).
There's this odd commingling of the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the general populace's minds, for some reason. The two could not be more antithetical.
As to the rest of it - the US is neither capitalist nor liberal. It's corporatist, with a distinct socialist bent, but not where people usually point the finger. "Obamacare" is not socialist, it's liberal, as a core concept of liberalism is that the state should fund things that people cannot or will not fund for themselves, like roads and healthcare. Protectionist policies to keep the banks, agribusinesses and other without-legislation-to-protect them unprofitable enterprises ARE socialist, as they centralise control of industrial and economic output into government, and allow businesses that would not survive in a true free market to prosper.
In a recent timescale, there was a multi-billion dollar bailout of failed institutions. It was pretty big news. Most of the banking sector would have gone bust without it, which would, as happened in Iceland, have left verdant territory for a new breed to spring up in.
In a more general scale, the entire banking sector is propped up by protectionist policies that allow:
> Fractional lending (this is called reserve banking) on a minimal reserve. It's pretty odd that banks can do this, but, say, you, can't.
> Setting of core econometric KPIs by people who stand to benefit directly from those KPIs. LIBOR and EURIBOR are recent examples of this, but market fixing has been going on since forever, and is endorsed passively through a lack of legislation to do anything about it, and a lack of will to prosecute.
> No other banks to exist, without jumping through serious hoops, and tying themselves in a death-grip to one of the "special" banks.
> Immunity to prosecution for bad actors. Corporate personhood is applied with amazing selectivity. If you're a juggernaut, no worries. If you're a small guy, enjoy federal prison.
> Indiscriminate money laundering and funding of illegal activities overseas. HSBC just got busted for proactively helping out the cartels in Latin America, and got a slap on the wrist. They're not alone in this kind of thing - look at Brown Brothers Harriman. They funded Nazi Germany. Prosecution? Nah. Wild profits that span generations.
I could go on and on and on, but the moment that you treat any particular person or entity "specially", you're on the road to hell, as you've just interfered with a self-regulating system, as free (but blanket regulated) markets are, and you'll need to interfere more, and more, and more, and suddenly you're telling factories that they should only make size seven shoes for the next two years to fulfil their quota.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd have rather taken Iceland's approach and let them fail... their assets would have been redistributed and bought out, and things would have probably recovered much faster, though a harder short term. Which may well have been better than what seems to be a long drawn out recovery.
I'm also against a lot of the subsidies that are out there.. if we really want available food for the poor, then those expenses directed at the farmers directly are the wrong place. I mean we have food stamp programs, and school lunch programs that could be expanded to cover more people, or even everyone domestically.
I'm against the expanded protectionisms in copyright and patents as well. I think they are important to have, but the terms are far to broad and lopsided. Corporate personhood is a directly related problem... I'd much rather see corporations far more limited, including requirements on distributing profits to shareholders, and not being able to make corporate donations to charities (especially politically driven ones) or for that matter employ lobbyists. If an investor wants to directly employ a lobbyist more power to them, the protection of a corporate vail is definitely abused.
I believe personal freedom and ensured competition are key to advancement of society, and protectionist corporatism is just as bad as outright communism, or extreme/fascist socialism for that matter. Then again, people often confuse what it means to be pragmatic, or a libertarian for that matter.
Oh man, agricultural subsidies. Farm bills in the US, CAP in the EU. They're criminal, and socialist in form and nature. They're designed to protect the livelihood of farmers who wouldn't be otherwise economically productive and would fail in the face of labour from other regions which are cheaper, in other countries. This not only impedes development, but results in people selling subsidies to one another, buying agricultural land en masse in order to claim vast subsidies to grow nothing (see Tate & Lyle in the UK - over £1bn a year), and vast amounts of food being burned and buried because it exceeds quota. This is positively insane, even though the rationale (price control - equally insane) makes sense in an obtuse protectionist sort of fashion. Some farmers will fail. Others will prosper. Food won't magically disappear overnight and leave us all starving.
Competition is essential, but so is cooperation. Again, though, you need the rule of law to set universal finite bounds on both phenomena, otherwise you end up with cancer in your soda and PMCs in your back yard, even more than already happens in the US.
I suppose that at least we live in interesting times.
I'm not saying we should eliminate regulation, or outright allow crap in our food (which to a large extent we do), only that we should really limit out spending/subsidies and gear our regulations toward increased competition, not less.
"There's this odd commingling of the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the general populace's minds, for some reason. The two could not be more antithetical."
The reasons for this are historical. What you call the "socialist" elements result from the idea that part of being truly "free" (i.e, liberty) requires that people be treated equally, thus liberals in this sense have a focus on social justice. (See this on "positive liberty": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty .) You can get good summary of differences between meanings of "liberal" in other Wikipedia articles:
Because of the way the word's meaning has developed historically, you really need to be aware of the context where it's being used. But there are nevertheless strands connecting all the meanings, namely focus on "freedom" and "equality".
Indeed - perfectly familiar, have read my share of Tocqueville, Hayek, Hobbes and all the rest, but the fundamental point that divides socialism and liberalism is that of freedom of people, vs. freedom of the people - i.e. individualism vs. socialism.
Liberalism has always been about social justice, and the idea that each and every human should be free to run or ruin their own lives (Positive vs. Negative freedom), with a slant towards the positive through regulation and the rule of law.
Socialism is a set of collectivist policies desired or in force while a capitalist society is being consumed (i.e., distribution of goods and services by society's collective dictates).
Capitalism "solves the problem" of production by producing what returns profit (in a market of demands and supplies). Once profit is stamped out, production is unguided except by "society" commanding it (i.e., a command "economy"). Even if this guidance were democratic, it would still be subject to the tyranny of the majority (the bulk of the collective).
Couldn't agree more. However I would also add that from a truly liberal perspective the logic behind government intervention is market-driven as opposed to primarily humanitarian. Recognising that markets have failures is a key part of capitalist liberalism, and it is that failure of recognition that makes libertarianism such an unstable and unworkable political philosophy.
Classical liberalism (what you call "true" liberalism) focused on negative freedom. Modern liberalism (what you call "socialism" although it's not: modern liberals are still in favor of regulated but mostly free markets) focuses on ensuring positive freedom. Again, no big deal as long as we understand what each person means when they're talking about being a "liberal". In contemporary world, however, calling yourself a "liberal" in sense of classical liberalism tends to indicate you're that you're an academic, a libertarian, or some variety of free-market capitalist. In contemporary world, the usual meaning when someone says they're a "liberal" is that they're socially liberal, focus on equality and positive liberty. And the usual meaning is entirely correct, even though you apparently want to restrict use of the world to its meaning in classical liberalism.
"Obamacare" is not socialist, it's liberal, as a core concept of liberalism is that the state should fund things that people cannot or will not fund for themselves, like roads and healthcare.
"More doubtfully compatible with the liberal conception of equality is another measure which also gained wide support in liberal circles, namely the use of progressive taxation as a means to effect a redistribution of income in favour of the poorer classes. Since no criterion can be found by which such progression can be made to correspond to a rule which may be said to be the same for all, or which would limit the degree of extra burden on the more wealthy, it would seem that a generally progressive taxation is in conflict with the principle of equality before the law and it was in general so regarded by liberals in the nineteenth century."
Why are you conflating Obamacare with progressive taxation? Incredibly misleading. Hayek was clearly fine with social insurance programs.
"Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom." -- The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
It's probably because he forgot what he was arguing about and defaulted to attacking transfer payments. Isn't that what they (the Hayek quoters)all do - when all else fails, go after 'handouts' because it can always be framed as a moral issue?
Because Obamacare is funded by progressive taxation, as are most programs in the U.S., and the benefits of Obamacare are not equally distributed - an example of the very inequality Hayek was admonishing against in the first quote I posted.
Honestly, who cares what it's called and how it falls into other categories? I think by fighting over what terms to use, we're missing the forest for the trees.
In living in the SV sandbox/bubble, it seems we forget about some of our global compassion. Nobody says we need to be 100% charitable in our actions, or follow some strict socialist regimen, but I think it's useful to acknowledge that we do overlook some of the problems at our doorstep. If we cared, we could definitely create solutions to some of them, and some of those solutions might even be profitable.
Yeah, housing. It's the big issue of the day here, and you can see how much it affects our culture.
Basically we created a mortgage system that only works as long as property values continue to rise, which created a lot of political will behind "improvement" measures like eliminating public housing, like we did in the early 80s.
I'm doing some experiments with cooperative housing and income-sharing right now, which slightly mitigates my contribution to gentrification, but something else is needed, and I'm not sure what.
If you're interested in cooperative housing and income sharing, you might be interested in this idea - raising money from well-paid engineers for the San Francisco Public Land Trust, in order to create permanent affordable housing (with the added bonus of not depending on the government to manage it) and home-ownership options for low-income families.
I actually think we created a mortgage system that will keep most people working (income earning) for the majority of their lives (30yrs). Now that our life span is increasing, will the norm be 40yrs?
You can get a 40 year mortgage at many banks now. I doubt 40 year mortgages will ever catch on. The banks generally charge a higher interest rate for the longer term so the payments aren't much cheaper than a 30 year loan.
I make a point of maintaining a clean separation between my work and my social life for exactly the reasons this author describes. The biggest problem San Francisco has right now is a bunch of people who came here for money, with no interest in being part of its social fabric. Many of whom loudly complain about how much San Francisco sucks, and how it should change to meet their needs.
You either need to start actually being a part of this city, or move your ass down the peninsula. Or better yet, move your company somewhere else. I hear they've got lower taxes and cheaper engineers pretty much everywhere else.
Same here. I've been in SF for 20 years, during most of which I have worked for my own companies.
My routine: wake up around 8, or whenever I wake up (no alarm clock), work straight through until about 6pm. Walk downhill to the neighborhood/sports bar to grab dinner, watch the ballgame (no discussion of work as none of the people there do tech work). Get a pleasant buzz on, hang out with friends. Go home, sleep, rinse, repeat. Works well for me.
Every city is the way it is because of the people that come into it. Now different people are coming in and things are changing.
San Francisco is a place that people historically migrate to when looking for gold. The aspects of the culture that creates, the ones you like, anyway, are unpredictable and subject to change.
You could also say that "San Francisco is a place that people historically migrate to to subjugate native populations and force them to adopt a new culture and religion". Does that make it ethically defensible? Or did we not learn anything from the last few hundred years?
I should also point out that the reason companies started coming to San Francisco in the first place was because of the culture that is currently being displaced, largely by people who don't care about the culture at all.
I think you're smearing missionaries a bit - they haven't ALL engaged in forcible conversion of natives. Quite often it is a voluntary decision.
But anyway, my point is that culture changes, and you can't stop it. Think of it as a culture free market. You can try to put up protectionist barriers to stop it, but you won't succeed. Not even the Amish are totally successful at it.
I grew up in Redmond, WA in the 70s and I don't recognize the place anymore when I visit. It makes me a bit sad, but that's life. Someday miles-high glaciers will form and scrub the Rocky Mountains away, too.
>I think you're smearing missionaries a bit - they haven't ALL engaged in forcible conversion of natives. Quite often it is a voluntary decision.
I would disagree on this point, Sure not all were "forced." There are invisible points that cause native nations to collapse. The missionaries didn't have to force them to come, there presence alone had enough effect on the region to force them to move to the missions. Especially in the Bay Area: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Little-Choice-Disintegration-Anth...
I think that when people say "hard problems" they mean "problems that almost certainly have solutions if you are willing to put in the effort". Poverty on the other hand is a much, much harder problem than that. In fact, no one quite knows how to solve it in a general way (there are things that seem to work in certain contexts but not in others, many special case half-solutions). And on top of that, there probably isn't a clear path between solving the poverty problem and wealth the way there is between solving the {photo sharing, social media, web search, ...} problem and wealth.
The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM! No more poverty, except in self-inflicted cases (drug addiction, for example), or things like severe and very expensive illness (which are covered by other means). This can be paid for in large part by the abolition of welfare systems, unemployment, Social Security, etc.
The stock criticism is that people wouldn't work, because they wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't want such poorly motivated people working anyway, because they're not productive. And anyone who wants more than barely-poverty will get a job or start a business.
Another nice feature is that this supports people who want to do something productive but not financially valuable - charity work, ministry, art.
But then wouldn't businesses who sell a lot of goods to people on the minimum income just put their prices up to force the gov to increase the minimum income at above inflation rates every year?
You also still have the problem of people like drug addicts who spend all of their minimum income on drugs/drink/gambling and are still left homeless.
I would imagine the smartest way to implement such a thing would be to index the amount of money to a basket of goods, much like the way in which inflation is calculated.
I think the problem would be with relatively inelastic things like housing. A landlord could easily just set their rates to 70% of minimum income and as other properties would be out of reach to those on minimum income there would be little competition. At that point you would get strong pressure to increase the minimum income or implement price controls.
We have had similar problems in the UK with private landlords renting out very poor quality housing at high prices to those on welfare. In the past we solving this by building lots of social housing.
I think a more sustainable way, if you want to implement a basic income, would be to have a low flat tax (say 10%) on all types of income, than divide the tax revenue across all citizens. That way everybody will cheer on the capitalists.
> The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM!
You left out the part where the money comes from. Your idea is fine and dandy, but I doubt you are currently implementing it yourself by spending your own money. The idea depends on everybody being forced to pay.
Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort. I disagree with your premise that people who work for rewards are unmotivated.
Those who think this is a good idea can go ahead and spread their wealth as they see fit, but I do have a problem with forcing others to do the same.
Those same arguments could be made against welfare to an extent. The advantage of this system is that it would be simpler and therefor cheaper to administer and possibly harder to game.
The fundamental problem is separating the cheaters from those who really deserve help.
In a system where the individual can decide where to put the money, everybody can decide who is deserving of help.
If you mandate wealth redistribution, you need to create a complex ruleset that decides who is eligible. The rules are established by the ineffective and opaque processes of politics and government.
The resulting system is more complex, more expensive and easier to game.
With a basic income guarantee everyone would get money, and the same amount. There is no need to divine who needs it because everyone does. No matter the income.
What we are talking about are the basic necessities to a life in dignity. A roof over your head and enough to eat and clothe yourself, as well as enough to at least participate in society in some way (e.g. enough money to afford some sort of information gathering thingie, be it a newspaper subscription, TV or phone). The bare minimum.
I happen to believe that no one has the right to deny that anyone. It’s a basic human right. Every human deserves a life in dignity and there is no way to lose that. (And, I know, implementing that world wide right now is practically impossible. That, just like, e.g. any sort of restrictions of freedom of movement, labor, capital and goods, is a travesty but for the near future I’m hopeless about anything changing in that regard. It’s sad and unacceptable.)
Within that understanding of the world (and also the understanding that we won’t have work for everyone as time goes on) something like a guaranteed basic income seems at least like something worth trying out to me. (Many of the current welfare schemes seems broken to me, too focused on tight paranoid control and stigmatizing people.)
But then again, I’m European. (Also, not the person you were originally responding to.)
> There is no redistribution. Everyone is entitled to the same benefit, just like they are entitled to fire protection.
This type of thing (even when it involves fire protection) is redistribution. One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit -- even if it is the same set of people the distribution of the tax and the benefit aren't the same, and the difference is redistribution.
Note that I am not saying this is undesirable, merely that it clearly is redistribution.
>One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit
Ah, no. ALL people pay for things. How that payment occurs is a product of a progressive tax system in most cases, but there is no requirement that such a system exists to run service.
You wouldn't call a private security service employed by a gated community "wealth redistribution", would you? Although if they had an income driven progressive fee structure it would be.
Yes, but I also figure that anyone smart enough to effectively game the welfare system is smart enough to do substantially better than what even gamed welfare can provide.
Trust me, in the UK at least, you really don't need much to game the welfare system.
While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.
The other side of the coin is what do you do when there actually aren't jobs available in the region and there are too many people to effectively set up in self-employment? Making people jump through hoops and then frowning at their failings is fine when isolated to an individual, but at a demographic level it breaks down.
I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.
To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?
>Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort.
This is a poor understanding of the concept. The idea behind a Basic Income Guarantee is that it is received equally by every citizen in the country. It's an idea linked to Negative Income Tax and other like proposals, and shares support of many with a more libertarian/economically conservative bent.
In most areas of North America where Basic Income experiments have occurred, the overall workforce does decline, but in very specific ways: mainly with single mothers and teenagers. Mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, and teenagers graduating high school are more positive impacts on the society at large than the greater retention of wealth by the highly motivated.
Wealth can only be created in societies, and therefore the overall health of a society should be of paramount concern to those interested in creating wealth. While I do not advocate for many socialist principles, a certain baseline ensures the society remains sustainable in the long term, thus allowing its members to grow wealth.
Both too much (Communism, socialist Europe) and too little (Argentina, Venezuala, the US) will lead to inevitable social collapse and the reduction of wealth (or the ability to create more) for all.
I apologise if a simple search should find this and I just such at searching, but I'm intrigued after your comment. There seems to be little information about the Manitoba experiment and what Alaska calls "Basic Income" doesn't seem consistent with what is being discussed. Where else in North America have people experimented with this?
So why should I want to subsidize single mothers? Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
I agree that there are some people who deserve financial support, but it should be up to the individual to decide who that is and how much they should receive.
>So why should I want to subsidize single mothers?
You aren't subsidizing anything. You are allowing the mother to raise their child with more options available to them. At the very least, it increases the chances of the child's success, and overall the chances that you are not paying for programs, prisons, social services in the future.
> Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
Because they are "gaining that experience" instead of completing their schooling in many occurrences. I don't need to explain why it's a good idea to have as many people as possible stay in school, do I?
This sort of economic blind spot is shockingly common, and presumably stems from the belief that economics is zero-sum. The idea behind subsidizing single mothers and keeping teens in school (which is the case that your parent comment was describing) is that the cost of this subsidy is theoretically lower than the expected cost of losing productive members of society or even worse, losing them to gang activity, which has further costs (single-parent households and high school dropouts are both _strongly_ linked to gang activity).
You may as well be saying "Why should I be paying taxes to put out a fire at the house down the street"? Well, if/when the fire spreads, you're going to be paying for it like it or not, so it seems like common sense to address the problem before the total cost is far higher.
The relationship between gang activity and dropout rates is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but given that "stopping gang activity" is damn near impossible through enforcement alone (this is basically the tactic we've been trying), it's strange that our culture is such that attacking the problem from the other side is anathema.
Don't forget the moral hazard. Women could choose to get a child instead of working. I personally don't think that it is a good idea to grow up in a family where no adult is gainfully employed.
These are complex issues and should be evaluated by each individual. You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy. If I was interested in reducing US crime and poverty, I'd donate to http://www.projectprevention.org/
>Women could choose to get a child instead of working.
This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.
What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.
> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy
Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.
run4yourlives: Well stated. Warren Buffet, I believe, has often emphasized the fact that the growing wealth disparity is not good for long-term economic growth in U.S.
You need to educate yourself on the monetary system. Taxes do not necessarily fund government at the local level. Non-convertable floating fx monetary regimes are self-funding. Its kind of like saying where does the score-keeper at the basketball game get points to put on the score board ? Can he run out ?
Inflation is the constraint, not solvency. We need to find the right number between 0 and 10^10 but we are not trying to do that and so we're becoming like Japan.
While I like the idea of a Basic Income, and have actually come to support it heartily, (if you don't, take a look at some of the economists who have, and why they do) you are being naive to think that "self-inflicted cases" are somehow anything other than a vast majority.
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
correction: Nearly all chronic homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse; the chronic homeless make up only about 1/8 of the homeless at any given time.
Unless you have a citation that says otherwise, anything I've seen seems to suggest that there is little difference in the high percentage of mentally ill/substance abusers between chronic/non-chronic homeless.
Just about every article I can find talking about substance abuse and mental illness in homeless specifically focuses on the chronic homeless so I inferred from that. A bit of googling turned up this non-scholarly article though that compares the overall rate of mental illness among homeless to that of the chronically homeless and found ~3x difference
41% of the population will experience a diagnosable mental illness, and 26% have one in any given year. Clearly there is more to the issue than just blaming mental illness or there would be far more homeless people than there are right now.
Discovering what support structures work and making those more easily accessible seems like a great place for a disruptive start up, except that health care is so incredibly messed up no one wants to touch it with a ten foot poll.
You need to be careful when talking about the demographics of mental illness. Much mental illness leaves you still able to function and contribute socially to a fair degree.
> You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
Not true. You know how you can solve homelessness without solving mental illness and addiction EVEN IF (let's accept for the sake of argument) most homelessness is caused by mental illness and addiction?
It's really quite simple. You just give housing to mentally ill and addicted people. They are still mentally ill and/or addicted, but now they're not homeless, because you gave them a place to live.
Wouldn't this cause inflation? The price of food, shelter, and basic needs is determined by peoples' ability to pay. I'd expect the price to rise until a percentage of people were unable to pay, again.
It would only cause monetary inflation if an equal amount of currency were not removed at the same time (through e.g. progressive taxation). Even if it did cause monetary inflation, that wouldn't necessarily lead to price inflation (depending e.g. on the slack in the economy). Even if there was price inflation it would likely not be uniform across goods and services.
In short, while it would be possible to design a self defeating basic income program it is not inevitable. That said, I prefer the employer of last resort scheme being pushed by the Australian MMT crowd.
The Job Guarantee or Employer of Last Resort (JG or ELR) program is a better solution.
1) Immediately moves the economy to full employment. All but eliminates social ills associated with unemployment.
2) Puts a floor on labor standards. That is in order to hire somebody out of labor pool, private business has to offer a better package. Health insurance should be automatic. (My Gosh prisoners get free health care!)
3) Counter-cyclical/Auto-Stabilizer/Buffer stock effect on macro economy. As economy improves people leave the JG program. As economy weakens, people shift into JG.
4) JG labor force can be put to work at local government levels to boost services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
Poverty on the other hand is a much, much harder problem than that. In fact, no one quite knows how to solve it in a general way (there are things that seem to work in certain contexts but not in others, many special case half-solutions).
Everyone keeps saying that, as if there were only two alternatives: 1) completely fix poverty in a general way or 2) keep the status quo (and allow it to get worse).
There has to be some way to get from the current wealth inequality [1] to something more humane.
There is nothing intrinsically morally wrong with high levels of wealth inequality. If wealth distribution were to stay as unequal as they are now, but total per-capita wealth increased at a steady rate, that would be a wonderful outcome for everyone.
The issue is that the high levels of wealth inequality are used to capture nearly all of the wealth that is created, thus increasing the wealth inequality even more. That is a clearly unsustainable system.
Only if 'relativism' is reduced to 'different relative to my own' due to solipsism. There remains the possibility that there's an absolute morality intrinsic to the universe that your own personal models fail to describe accurately.
i.e. just because you cover up your eyes doesn't mean that I can't see you.
You said it depended on "your" (which I took to mean "ones own" rather than specifically referring to "me") ethical system. If there is an absolute morality, then the morality of any given action is not dependent upon the morality subscribed to by the actor.
[edit]
Furthermore any statement about an action being moral or immoral that doesn't explicitly reference a moral system is implicitly assuming a moral system. I find "It is my belief that X is moral" to be stylistically inferior to "X is moral" and clearly the former is a factual statement, while the later is a statement of opinion. HN is a discussion forum in which stating opinions is acceptable, so I use the terser, stronger statement of opinion preferably to the more verbose factual statement.
I was commenting on your assertion that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with high levels of wealth equality. The degree to which that is true, assuming an intrinsic morality, is the degree to which "your" (which I intend to mean you, the person posting as aidenn0) moral system corresponds to that intrinsic morality.
As there was no argument pertaining to the actual existence of an absolute morality, all we are discussing is your model. All that we can gleam from that model is that steady per-capita income increases imply a good outcome for everyone, and that a good outcome for everyone implies that economic disparities that exist along with that outcome are not morally wrong. Therefore, there's no need to assume that moral relativism is a valid outlook, only that there's no proffered evidence that your assertion represents an aspect of that hypothetical intrinsic morality.
If there were one, evidence that a particular condition compels a particular conclusion in one's model would only imply a particular condition within a moral universe would depend on the correspondence of one's model to the reality of that universe.
Homelessness isn't primarily (if at all) a (financial) poverty problem. Mental disorders and drug addiction are large factors, and neither are fixable with cash.
Of course they are. Mental disorders can be fixed by paying for the treatment of people with mental disorders, and drug addiction can be fixed by paying for the treatment (rather than the imprisonment) of people who are addicted to drugs.
There's nothing making drug addicts homeless other than the fact that we drive up a thousandfold the prices of substances that cost pennies to produce.
I strongly disagree with his apparent assumption that you can't "push down on the top" without wrecking things up. Sweden and Finland are proof that this isn't true, both have competitive economies that outscore the US in many important metrics for success (among these is general happiness).
You can let people become wealthy, and therefore give people incentive to invest and create, without creating the kind of insane inequality we currently have in the US.
His rant gets ridiculous, though, when he starts talking about doing away with the link between money and power... "We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." That might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen a smart person say. Money is power. pg probably has someone mow his lawn. I can't do that. Why? Because pg is rich and can pay someone to do it, I am not, therefore I can't.
But that's not Power with a capital "P", you say. But it is. That's what power is, the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. If you have money, in a capitalist society, you have power, by definition. Whether you abuse that power, or use it for things that people consider to be bad (like buying off members of Congress) is a totally different story.
What implications does this have? Well, one of them is that money is, to many, a worthless thing to have if you strip away the power that comes along with it. Severing the connection between money and power would demotivate people the same way taxes do because, ultimately, they are the same thing: you used to have X, now you have X-Z.
In an ideal society, it would not be illegal to be rich. It would be illegal to buy off members of Congress, pay people to vote for you or your cronies, own media outlets and using them to get (and keep) yourself elected into office, or in any way use that wealth to subvert the democratic process. We don't have ideal societies, but that's obviously a direction worth going.
That doesn't mean you totally eliminate any power or privilege that wealth brings. Trying to eradicate malaria using your billions of dollars is an exercise in power, albeit not one that subverts the democratic process.
If I understand you, you're saying that wealth brings broad powers, and it's only a small subset of those (like political corruption) that are bad.
The rest, which are essentially power over the natural world (curing diseases, sending people to Mars, protecting ancient forests, resurrecting extinct animals) are good.
Well, duh. More importantly is whether you see that as morally fair or as stealing. Usually when people say this line, they're implying that the rich will have all their money stolen until they have the same amount of money as everyone else - and of course this isn't actually advocated anywhere outside of communist societies.
That particular quoted line reminds me of a friend, who when she got a $10k raise, could do nothing but bitch about how 'half of it was going straight to the government' (despite it actually being only about 30%). If you define how wealthy you are by how much is taken from you, you should probably re-examine your priorities.
Can you provide citations that aren't garbage linkbait that pops up with a passive-aggressive "I believe in equality blah blah blah" that you have to click through before seeing nothing but a six minute flash video with no other useful content? Because I'm not going to watch it. I can read, thanks. I'm literate. Please don't insult my intelligence.
This speaks to a larger problem: The world simply doesn't need many of the people born into it. Parents in the US have children for recreational purposes - child birth rates do not fluctuate with the demand for labor. These kids grow up, and many of them wind up sleeping on the streets of their chosen city or more commonly just barely living paycheck-to-paycheck, because there is no societal need for them. This bears itself out in statistics: 25% of households have a net worth of zero or less (negative net worth). 22% of children in the US live in homes below the poverty line.
In our world, the needs of many can be met by the work of a few. Only those few will prosper, while the rest languish. The harsh reality is that prospective parents that don't have anything to pass onto their children need to take a hard look at whether they should be having children, given that going forward there may very well be no way for those children to earn a living.
You need a great number of many to create a pool large enough to get those precious few that can advance humanity enough to do all of that providing by the few.
Humanity could be two people living in a grass hut finding just enough berries to eat each day, but it wouldn't be much fun.
FYI whomever is downvoting this - you can downvote it all you want. It doesn't make it any less true. I'll take the hit on my karma points on the off chance it makes someone think, even for a second, about not perpetrating the selfish act of cruelty that is bringing a child into an impoverished existence.
The question is how we want to shape our societies and reality. Is it acceptable to have few lucky ones with huge incomes that are far beyond the necassary amount for living a fullfilled live and have the rest die on the streets?
Or would it be more beneficial for the society at large if all have the possibility to live free from existential dangers such as homelessness, disease and hunger.
Robots, computers and automatisation are great tools. At the moment the profit that these tools generate is not shared among all people. It's time to socialise the profits that are gained through automatisation in order to be able to live in peaceful societies.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
OP is offering a possible partial solution to exactly the problem you present here. With fewer children born into poverty, some degree of abatement is likely. I'm not sure why you dismiss the notion out of hand, refuse to engage the actual idea, and then immediately mischaracterize the original position to be some absurd straw-man in which the OP is adjudicating the "worthless[ness]" of various people.
It's almost as if people on the internet don't know how to properly argue the actual ideas presented, and instead prefer to just make shit up.
How is he being barbaric by proposing that prospective parents should reconsider having children if they don't think their children will be able to have a happy life?
I've saw the post in the context of homelessness that is discussed in the article. I also don't share his woldview maybe I understood it in a wrong way but "The world simply doesn't need many of the people born into it." came across as justification for letting these people living miserable lives and deny them basic rights, like shelter and health care.
The problem with such thinking is that it's often not up to us to decide if we are needed in this world or not. And it is also more often than not up to us if we have the energy and power to earn a wage that allows us sustaining our existence.
My impression is that there is a general consensus that every human beeing has some basic rights (U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) and that we as a society should work to provide these rights for everyone even if we have to sacrify some personal profit for it. Because it can also happen to us.
Op's post came across as If he does not share this views. I'd say if you deny basic human rights I can call you barbaric.
There is a difference between saying it's not a good idea to get children if you are in a bad economic situation or saying that it's correct that these children suffer homelessness because their parents made a bad decision or are somehow not fit enough to procreate. If you start to talk about fitness (here indirectly measured as ability to earn money) as an indication who should procreate you have a form of social darwinism. And there are a lot of problems with such a thinking.
For the record, I was not justifying the miserable lives of many people. To the extent that society has the will and the means to provide basic "rights" as you describe, I have no objection to participating in that. But society's means and will to provide these things also seem to be running very thin. That leads to miserable lives for children that did not ask to be here in the first place.
Coincidentally, many of the twenty and thirty somethings in Japan who didn't manage to score a stable, well paying corporate job (due to the economic downturns of the 90s and 2008-current period) -- which is at times said to be upwards of 30% of the male population in said age group [1] -- have been expressing their despair at their financial situation and grim economic outlook for their country and collapsing social security systems and have exclaimed, "Why would I want to have my hypothetical child suffer an even more grim fate than I have?"
A tragic mixture of having perspective, intelligence, and (relative) poverty.
[1] I say "male", because even in this day and age, female unemployment is much more socially acceptable than its male counterpart.
The U.S. has the same problem. Now that people have lost faith in the "middle class society" and we realize that 99% of us are poors at the mercy of bosses and health insurance, the IQ 120+ set is deferring childcare until they "make it", the odds of which are very low and most people won't because even at 140+ most people get screwed. So smart people are self-selecting out of the gene pool, not with that intention but by deferral. It's a nasty boiled-frog problem. One day we will wake up and the world will be terminally stupid.
Now that the individual's economic future is so uncertain, and it's that way for everyone, people who don't think about the future are breeding at a much faster rate than people who do, and it's terrifying.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why healthcare (which has long-term effects on peoples' intelligence levels, since a lot of that's not genetic) isn't a no-brainer, but also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
The only countries whose education systems I'm familiar with are the US, Japan, and England. In Japan, public universities are of higher quality than their private counterparts, and their tuition is much cheaper. You do get the effect of smart kids studying their butts off to get into a public (national) university like Tokyo U. or Kyoto U. because they can't afford a private college tuition (though annual rates are in the range of $10-15k, much more reasonable than the US). Iirc England is somewhat similar, with reasonable rates for the best universities (Oxbridge, for instance)
Take a peek at the meaning of "the Plague", something which happened in Europe way long ago. Those people were much worse than any of us and any homeless you can think of. They are quite probably ancestors of yours if you are a "standard" American.
You are probably right that impoverished parents are going to have a hard time raising children, but you are also advocating a form of social Darwinism.
I agree that fewer people should procreate but disagree with measuring the necessity of a person by net worth. The vast majority of wealth being accumulated by a few persons surely skews the demand for labor as we have many Fords but not many laborers paid enough to buy Ford's cars.
I said I think fewer children would be good, I just don't know which group of people should stop having children. I guess all of them should tone it down.
People like me who have no desire to have them perhaps? I think that's the best place to start. Also more people will probably choose not to have kids when there is more social acceptance of the choice and we are honest with ourselves about the realities of bringing more human life into this world. I like kids and want every measure of support we can provide to people who have chosen to have them - we just need to be clear on the realities and I think much of the rest will take care of itself.
"Parents in the US have children for recreational purposes"
Really?!? I don't know a single parent who would list or even hint that they needed "recreation" when deciding to have a child. Let's assume you were half-joking, I still don't see having kids as something anyone takes lightly no matter what country you are born in.
"child birth rates do not fluctuate with the demand for labor"
Another horrible reason to have kids. I hope this isn't your metric for deciding upon your prior statement about recreation. Just because the US doesn't need the labor, does not mean parents are having kids "recreational". Kids are not a tool of society that should be effected by labor output.
Also the numbers on net worth most likely take into account home values that have recently fallen off a cliff. While it's still accurate to say that most people have a zero or negative net worth you can't assume the value of the home/amount owed on the mortgage will always be static.
When I say "recreational" I mean that there is no need for parents to have children, other than the fact that they are biologically motivated to. We have more people than resources in this world. That is a problem, and the only way to fix it is to encourage people to be realistic about the potential for their children to have happy, productive lives in a society that almost certainly has no use for them.
Overpopulation is a myth. Actually in the first world underpopulation is greater risk, most European countries have a lower fertility rate than the 2.1 children replacement rate. Even at a global level the world population will reach a plateau somewhere around the middle of the century.
It is not a given that "the rest" need to languish. If survival was not based on winning the metaphoric lottery, the rest could engage in creative work and experimentation, leading to a renaissance in entrepreneurship and the arts. Everyone could have more luxury time; perhaps eventually 15 hours a week of paid work will be sufficient.
To instead overwork those who are employed and leave the rest to language is a conscious decision.
Are we creating the right kind of "WEALTH"?
This should be a question people (who are doing startups) should ask themselves.
IMHO, that is why socialist Governments providing education, healthcare, roads and security sound popular to some people. All these are part of wealth that are provided to citizens at low prices.
But in a capitalistic economy, it is left to individuals (entrepreneurs) to provide this services at competitive prices.
One way of looking to solve the problems of the poor and deprived people would be to provide them services of education, healthcare, housing etc. at ultra-competitive prices.
I know it is easier said than done. But it is something worth doing.
When the poor have no money they can't pay entrepreneurs.
When the super-rich have all the money, the super-rich drive up the cost of living. The middle class then must directly serve the interests of the rich in order to get enough profit to afford the higher cost of living.
It quickly becomes uneconomical to sell anything to poor people.
It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention. Rich families just get richer, driving up cost of living, cornering markets to destroy the free market, and making the poor families poorer in comparison.
When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
> When the super-rich have all the money, the super-rich drive up the cost of living.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do? It increases the demand for food, clothing, housing , etc. in the area. This is _not_ a bad thing. This means businesses in the area, if they are allowed to, will grow and new businesses can come into existence. For a real world example, look at Apple, for example. Apple employs 13,000 in Cupertino. However, Apple also indirectly creates 70,000 additional service jobs in the area through their direct employment. Are you saying this is a bad thing? This is much better multiplier than manufacturing.
The only issue we run into here is housing. If the area can't accommodate the increase in demand, housing prices will increase. This means owning a business will be more expensive, meaning the costs of everything will increase. This is what we're seeing in areas like SF.
But the thing is, this doesn't just have to be the super-rich who cause this. If you see an increase in demand for living in a specific area for any reason, a similar thing will happen as if a bunch of super-rich move into the area.
Further, the super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities, so they'll contribute far less to the increases in the cost of living than previously assumed.
So this entire argument of yours really doesn't make sense to me.
> It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention
And this is a completely different topic and again I don't understand for what you're arguing. The government has had a monopoly on education for a long time and has gone to great lengths, in both primary and secondary schooling, to intervene. In many ways, this has driven up the cost of education and driven down the quality. But this is mostly a tangent.
> When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
I wouldn't call the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, a Randian dystopia. The amount of regulations and taxes one must deal with in this area is astounding. You even brought up the sad state of public education. How is this Randian in any way imaginable? You're on the wrong end of the spectrum.
> For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do?
Like it or not, changes in wealth for the super-rich seem to have effects on the non-super-rich too. As the richest gain more wealth, the less rich feel even less rich. As they see bigger and nicer houses going up, more expensive cars driving around, etc., the relative quality of theirs is going down. In an attempt to keep up, they spend more, and so on down the socioeconomic ladder. This effect has been called "trickle-down consumption" in a recent study detailed here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/t....
The result is is exactly what you acknowledge later, which is a bit contradictory to your opening assumption: "[T]he super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities..."
People in lower income brackets are spending more money while saving less, and this is in part due to the rising displays of opulence from the upper income earners.
> let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.).
This is equivalent to saying "let's assume 2+2=5, so you see that 0=1". You need to revise basic economics.
Welcome to a very individualistic and, by consequence, antisocial society. As an American that's never stepped foot in California, this sounds surprisingly familiar, albeit with the unique addition of free food and free beer at work.
Why do people commute 45+ minutes each way to work... To live in a Suburb where the dont interaxt with any neighbors. a place with no public transport, no major retailers, and no place for "malcontents" to flock within 10 miles that's not private property. Even my small city has no "public space" or public transportation after business hours. We have lots of small parks designed to deter "being homeless" there.
Everything about American Rural and Suburb culture drives out those who Rent, and don't want to own full-size autos with all the "rat-race" keeping up with payments and insurance and taxes... Right up until people retire and realize they can't keep up.
In my case: good schools for my kids. I looked at several options nearer to the downtown area, and in every case, the schools were rated at the middle or near the bottom of the rankings. The schools where I ended up are near the top.
There is a disparity between rich and poor in this country, sure, but come on. Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.
By "offer", do you mean for free? Well, duh. What the GP most likely meant is that some people prefer to be homeless rather than having to get and hold down a job to afford a place to live.
I've watched several friends spend two or three years doing nothing but hunt for a job, and they were lucky enough to have friends with couches to crash on, enough money for interview clothes and a computer to access job ads on. You act like that's a trivial step: it's not.
Besides the challenge of actually finding a job, a minimum wage job won't cover rent in SF and certainly not with money left over for things like food, transportation or phone service. Have you seen the installation art piece about the minimum wage? It's a box with a crank on it that spits out a penny every 4.97 seconds: http://disinfo.com/2012/12/the-mininum-wage-machine/ That's what working is like to most people, except often more dangerous and demeaning.
There are exceptions that prove the rule. But "most" is an excuse.
As Paul Graham said on a different thread yesterday, if you have a choice between two explanations and one justifies you being lazy, choose the other one.
Seriously. Comments like that are the reason I try to frequent HN less often. I grew up in the mission in SF, but that was when it was still a 'ghetto' that nobody wanted to set foot in (I still have a lot of friends that are paranoid about it), and as you might assume from that, my family wasn't ever that financially well off either. So seeing things like this just makes me cringe at how disconnected and insensitive this newer wave of (for the lack of a better term) 'more fortunate' people are.
Being able to simultaneously look at the absurd rent prices in SF, and then interpret the homelessness problem as a 'choice' is some serious obliviousness, if not an all-out exercise in orwellian double-think. I know it's a bit of a popular 'thing' amongst a certain subculture in the Haight (hell some of my friends have done that), but that's been around for ages, and I'd hardly call that culture a majority...
The original article pretty much got it right: people here like living in bubbles.
You need a citation to prove that homeless people don't want to be homeless?
Silicon Valley has peaked.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
So your second hand anecdotes trump literally thousands of statisticians, economists, social workers, and other social scientists who spend their entire lives understanding these issues?
You're so fucking right wing. If academia was politically empowered to implement the scientifically proven methods we could eliminate poverty and homelessness tomorrow, and cut mental illness by 90%.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
We really need to push these corporate/private-equity assholes out of our industry. We had a good thing for a while, but they came in and stole it. We have to take it back from those pieces of shit.
Having worked both in finance and in VC-funded "tech" I can only say that the people in finance are a lot better and much more ethical. It seems that technology management (at least in the VC-funded space, where the investors agree that only "their kind" is actually fit to manage) is an Argentina for people who get flushed out of banking because they're too unethical even for Wall Street.
"Most street kids we spoke to came from one of two backgrounds: either they had job prospects (whether good or dead-end) but preferred the freedom of homelessness, or were transient homeless who fell in love with the street kid community...Street kids defied our expectations of living on the street as a last resort; instead they seem to be drawn to the Haight."
The article focuses on a very specific demographic of homeless people in a specific area of SF. These people do not represent a complete picture of homelessness. For example, most of the people interviewed in the article are white, but other races (esp. black folks) are several times more likely to be homeless or occupying shelter spaces.
> There is a disparity between rich and poor in this country, sure, but come on. Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
This is ludicrous. By almost every metric being homeless sucks: access to work is harder to find and keep, medical care isn't as available, physical safety is harder to keep, you are more likely to be arrested, you are more likely to be assaulted, etc. This mindset is straight out of the Victorian era.
> So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
> If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Homelessness is a systemic issue that can't just be solved only with individual people's time and/or money.
> Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
That is because the issues that go with homelessness are not simply done once someone gets shelter. Also, public housing in most places in the US is at capacity and cannot accommodate any more people until someone dies or moves out. Some locales also put qualifications on public housing that will, by definition, keep people homeless or dependent on that public housing indefinitely.
They don't choose to be on the streets, specifically. Instead, they make terrible choices that lead to being on the streets due to things like addiction and mental illness.
> They don't choose to be on the streets, specifically. Instead, they make terrible choices that lead to being on the streets due to things like addiction and mental illness.
Except perhaps in the case of trauma-induced mental illness resulting from a trauma that is a forseeable consequence of a choice made prior to the existence of the illness (and even in that case it may be a problematic position), I am having trouble seeing even a remote argument that "being on the streets due to [...] mental illness" as the result of "terrible choices".
The same is true for Los Angeles. I've been in an office building while people were discussing six-figure sums like they were nothing, when outside in the alley below there were literally homeless people in a knife fight over a candy bar.
Lack of healthcare and mental illness are closely linked.
Lack of housing and mental illness are correlated.
Lack of employment opportunities and mental illness are correlated.
You talk like an evil person from the 19th century. Mental illness is not a character defect, it's an illness. It has external causes. Psychologists have found that one way to increase the level of mental illness in society is to raise unemployment through austerity measures and other stupid economic policies that are opposed by most economists yet implemented by neoliberal governments.
Another way to increase general mental illness levels is to stigmatize the mentally ill and treat them as if they have character or moral defects. This causes people with mild depressions, for instance, to sink into major depressions.
Another cause of mental illness is a lack of housing. Putting people on the street causes mental illness.
They aren't poor because they're mentally ill. Just as often, they are mentally ill because they're poor. If they could AFFORD treatment, they could be CURED of their illness.
The issue is poverty straight up. You're a terrible person for implicitly blaming the victims.
One thing that I think is missing from these discussions about the homeless in SF is: many of these people do not want to be rent-paying members of society and even if there was housing for them, some might still prefer their current lifestyle. Many people still view that lifestyle choice as unacceptable because it challenges the typical goals of someone working hard for a 'better' life. I don't think the question should be 'how do we get these people to participate in society?' but 'why don't they want to participate and how can we accommodate these alternative life choices?' Otherwise any progress made would benefit those who want to see the streets cleaned up and not necessarily those living out there.
I don't think anyone actually PREFERS to be homeless, except for a few exotics. Most of the homeless in America are that way due to either a: unfortunate economic circumstances, or b: mental illness that precludes normal social functioning.
I think many people choose being homeless over giving into the pressures of our society like having to sustain a job in order to pay rent and go out for dinner etc... and all that stuff that 'normal' people desire. I've met homeless people that split their time between SF and some hills near Santa Cruz and only come into the city to sell some hash or hang out ith friends for a couple of days... but yes there are also many people on the streets who don't want to be there too.
Are you aware that we live in a period of peak unemployment?
There are literally millions of people who want jobs. The jobs were all made obsolete by Silicon Valley. The safety net was shredded by Silicon Valley-style neoliberal ethics based on Ayn Rand.
Yeah I am aware of that, but that doesn't mean that there aren't also people who don't want to work. I would love to not work and just enjoy life while I can, but I can't because I have bought into this idea that having extra money for shelter, food and other junk makes life more enjoyable... some people haven't bought into this that are struggling to enjoy their lives outside of the crazy whirlwind of packaged desires.
If someone offered them a rat race job and they had the appropriate education, cultural norms, social skills, and were mentally healthy, they would take it.
People don't choose to be homeless. It may be the best option available to them, but that doens't mean they chose it, it means they have very very few options. Their opportunity is limited by the rich people pushing austerity and gutting basic humanitarian services.
About 20 years ago I ran across a study of homeless people in NYC. It turned out that a lot had lead comfortable middle class lives, and like most of us with the resources to handle one economic setback. Then two things went wrong. The first drained their reserves, the second put them on the street.
A particularly common combination was a health problem followed by foreclosure.
It has been 20 years, but I have seen no reason to doubt that the same pattern would be largely true today.
This is a very reasonable and logical arguments over this sensitive issue.
It's not about if someone wants to be homeless, if there is a simple choice between shelter and homeless, people will always prefer shelter. But if the choice is between working hard with a shelter, and live carefree and homeless, the answer will not be so clear.
I was in SF in march, and when I commented about this to someone, he said that a friend of his, who worked in an organization that works on helping the homeless, told him that other states actually give the homeless a one-way ticket to SF so its no longer their problem.
I was shocked with this, asked a couple more people if they had heard about that, and they had.
My conclusion was that maybe everyone (or most people) was expecting someone else, or the government, to help the homeless, and there comes the vicious cycle.
i worked at uber and twilio in the city. I was so bothered by the homeless people I saw everyday that it seriously impeded my work performance. i'd walk by them and feel terrible for not being able to help, for having an easy time making money, and feel afraid that my bipolar disorder would get worse and i'd end up like them. it was hard to function properly at work when I'd start my day feeling guilty, powerless and afraid.
How old are you? I used to have the same existential feelings as well when I moved in SF, but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally.
One thing you realize is that a lot of the people on the streets have major mental conditions (usually schizophrenia, and major drug addictions or chronic alcoholism), and there is almost no way to just rehab them, and put them in a place that they can take care of themselves. Some of them are beyond the point of return and some need so much care, then only loving family can provide. Externally, you can't do much.
Other countries have both better mental care provided from the state, and especially a social net. Usually family will take care of their ill.
Be happy with what you got, do a good job, and make sure to be close to your family and have close friends. You will realize that is part of life, and once and a while you will have a need for support from closed ones, but as long as you an handle yourself well most of the time and try to live a good life you wont have to worry.
i'm 27 now - this was when i was 25. i've since moved to the south bay to work at google, and things have improved significantly after a lot of meditation. i honestly have a more 'adversarial' mindset towards the homeless - i think a lot of the people in sf begging for change simply don't want to work, and because they can make a living preying on the guilt of people like me, they do so.
as for the schizophrenics out there, i am honestly still a little afraid of being one of them, but i'm lucky enough to have a huge support network.
The kids on Haight street just want to bum around – there was that article* that found they could make almost as much money begging as they could at a minimum wage job.
Other parts of the city I think have more people that really are drug-addicted or borderline insane
One of the reasons things are probably better for you is that you take a shuttle no doubt, and are isolated from the day to day reality of life here. True? http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
"It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally."
I think the point of the article is that that's fucked up, and not how the world should be. And what I suspect the author realized is that it isn't the way he or she wants to be.
> I think the point of the article is that that's fucked up, and not how the world should be.
That's the maturation process though: understanding that the world has been that way for all time. Look at nature, around you, some animals within any given group always do better than others. It's fine to be bothered by it, and want to do something to change it, but it's naive to think that a) you are the first person to notice and b) you can fix it completely.
(I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I know) many traditional/"primitive" societies have much less problems with homelessness and mental disorders because of stronger family support. (Of course, they have other problems that we don't have.)
One calls it maturation, another calls it desensitization. I think it's same thing because what people call maturation is just nervous system getting more numb as it gets older and worn out.
The point is it's not better to accept it. It's not more grown up and responsive to stop caring about this. World is not the same as it used to be. It constantly get's more and more humane. I recomend watching http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
If you accept homeless population in SF you are just closing your eyes to places that are much better to live than SF even with much less money in circulation.
"but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally."
This is depressing.
"This is part of life." feels like a common cop-out and downplays the fact that, if some of us put our minds to it, we could successfully make it not so much a part of life (I'm not saying we'd have some utopian equality, but it could be so much better).
I love the optimism inherent in this reply. But when you read about this type of behavior http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary , you realize that the tech world has a long way to go. I've seen too many people who just don't seem to care about, well, other people. We have become a selfish, entitled lot, and these kinds of developments tend to result in people going to the barricades.
Twitter negotiated to pay less than its share of the employee tax in SF. More and more startups are doing the same. Yet those shuttle buses run on city streets, park at city bus stops, and pay no additional fees to do so.
Many people here won't stay, won't volunteer in the community, won't get involved with the city and fight for better Muni and safer streets. Donations at charities are way down. Newly minted millionaires aren't donating to the arts or to charity, they're throwing lavish parties and buying over priced real estate. With people like Peter Thiel insisting that Libertarianism is the way all tech people should believe, precious few actually seem to get that we are all interconnected, and that a social safety net makes the world a better, safer place.
When I made my first money in this town, and it wasn't a lot, but it was enough to change my life, I wept, because I knew at its heart it was violently unfair that I should be safe and the people on the street not. I haven't stopped feeling that way. I hope you don't, either. It was nice to see someone actually care.
I hope that everyone here can show as much faith and heart as you do and insist on voting for taxes, policies, and politicians who will work to change things, for real.
You've mistaken cynicism and a lack of empathy for maturity.
Not everyone has a family, and even if they do we should be pushing for institutional changes so that the family isn't forced to make a choice between eventual bankruptcy or turning their family out on the street.
> It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally
That realization is indeed part of the maturation process.
What you are talking about is both this and desensitization. The former is unquestionably necessary and a "good thing", the latter is a self defence mechanism humans have to being exposed to emotionally troubling things.
You/we could absolutely do a lot to alleviate this, it would just be a lot of work. You couldn't single-handedly solve the problem obviously, but that's a different question. I'm not even saying people have a moral obligation to act, but if you are going to decide not to then at least be honest about the reasons. It avoids a lot of painful cognitive dissonance at the very least.
It's definitely emotionally helpful to believe you can't do anything about it, but it's pretty definitively not true. Seems especially weird to suggest that here, in a community of self described "disruptors".
How old are you? I used to have the same existential feelings as well when I moved in SF, but over time you just get used to it and don't care anymore. It is part of the maturation process and realize that the world is not a fair place, and no not everybody is equal and will live equally.
I am appalled that you actually believe this. I mean, ok, the world is not by default a fair place, but the notion of simply ignoring the moral duty to make it so... Ick.
I found his post interesting, because I have found that as I have matured I find myself much more in tune with exactly how unfair the world really is.
And, to put a point on it, how unfair it is to people who are unlike me. Some members of my family express confusion as to why I find this troubling--after all, "I've got mine."
What do you mean by not being able to help? I really encourage you to volunteer at a shelter if you haven't. Not only will you feel amazing by doing it, but you'll also hear so many good life stories, which I think will help you get over your phobias of the homeless. We tend to make up stories in our head to prop up our own just-world hypotheses, but the reality is that there are a lot reasons why people are homeless.
Sure, you'll hear from the guy who got hooked on drugs and pissed away his money, but you'll also hear about people who had work in construction and industry whose jobs dried up during one of many economic downturns while at the same time dealing with rising rent costs. Getting back into the game isn't easy either without clean clothes, a place to shower, or even a phone to be reached at for an interview. A lot of what we take for granted (like wearing $300-1500 outfits for interviews) simply isn't available to homeless people.
Not too far north along the west coast, the homelessness situation is mirrored in Vancouver, Canada. I have friends who have volunteered with non-for-profit agencies that support homeless people in identifying their needs and allocating resources to them if possible, such as social housing. My friends have told me that the people she has interviewed from the streets nearly 75% are mentally or physically handicapped or have fell into drug abuse and would never be able to function as a normal tax paying citizen again. There are cases where she has met people who where once normal people with normal jobs but because of a couple bad choices or traumatic situations, have gone into debt or turned to drugs and alcohol. One man was once a lawyer who lost his family over night and couldn't handle the stress and turned to gambling, drugs, and alcohol and probably suffered from PTSD and then sooner or later ended up on the streets.
In Canada, homeless/unemployed receive around $300/month from the government and if you have a psychical or mental disability, I believe you receive a little more financial assistance. Some homeless people just stay on the assistance instead of trying to get employment.
However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out. There is a privately funded organization called UGM that has a men's shelter and rehab program in the core of the homelessness district (equivalent to Tenderloin here) and are working on opening a women's and children's rehabilitation program. I volunteered there once and was taken aback on how well put together the program is. It's costly though, to build the building and support the program costs millions. They take in about 40 homeless people and puts them through a 6 month program. There are strict rules and guidelines in the program but in return they receive bedding, food, clean clothes and clean environment to live in, classes to help you finish your high school diploma, computer lessons, emotional and spiritual support, and career counselling, etc. It's still a newer program but they've seen a pretty high success rate, with many graduates becoming outreach works in the community.
> However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out.
Indeed:
"A change in public policy saw the mass discharge of Riverview Hospital's patients as an effort to integrate them into the community while the province considered the land for development. However, this caused a large influx of mentally ill into the DTES as poor follow-up support failed to reach a majority of these individuals."
The government may have good intentions but are too short-term in thinking. Homelessness, particularly mentally disabled homeless persons are costing the government a lot more in the long run than putting in rehabilitation infrastructure for homeless people. I strongly believe that in markets like US/Canada, privately funded projects is the way to go in order to make any real change. It's also disturbing when the city takes the piss at homeless people by fining them http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/16/vancouver-homeless-f...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 361 ms ] thread> Thing is, those in poorer situations flock here, because they can get healthcare, support, and help, but other times it just feels like a passive aggressive fuck-you-got-mine. if you don’t tip, it isn’t so much a snub, it’s saying “i don’t think you deserve healthcare”. Alternatively for those with healthcare provided, it locks them into their job.
As for your local area, I suppose either there are no homeless or poor people, or you are just constantly thinking about them, unlike those hard-hearted Californians. Come on.
For example, Honolulu has a huge homeless population despite the huge tourism industry. The city just pushes homeless towards parts of the island where tourists don't visit and thus aren't aware of the problem.
At least in SF a homeless person won't die from exposure in the wintertime.
The way I see it, European countries have a kind of nation-wide health insurance, vs individual insurance here. We have a nation-wide student loan, versus individual student loans. That helps controlling the costs and profits, and helps making sure that everybody who needs care or education can get it.
But whether it is related or not, America is more daring, more exciting, and there are more opportunities when you have the right cards to do something. But if you had a bad hand to start with, then you're royally screwed.
Put simply, it's better to be born poor in Europe than in the US, and better to be born rich in the US than in Europe.
No.
Even a porta potty cleaned infrequently is more sanitary than the conditions in the third world. There won't be a cholera outbreak. Food is available and nobody is going to starve to death.
Heck, a simple clean water fountain in some third world countries can improve the lives of an entire village. Even in the most horrible cities in america there are dozens of sources of free water.
None of these really reflect how poor communities in the US are. Food insecurity is a real thing that affects a good number of households and individuals. Access to adequate medical care, including vaccinations, is difficult. Health and water conditions can vary greatly and may be unsanitary.
I agree that saying the US is like a third world is overblown, but we aren't exactly a shining beacon of care for all of the people that exist in our society.
And many parts of China, India, Western Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, and parts of South America...
Take, for example, the colonias in southwestern Texas, where ~400k people live in informal housing without access to basic infrastructure or services, and where diseases like cholera and dengue fever have far higher rates of incidence. These aren't all illegal immigrants or anything, either -- the Texas secretary of state reports 64.4% of Texan colonias residents are US citizens[1].
It's easy to assume there's no poverty that deep in this country when, by and large, our standard of living is better than most of the world, but unfortunately there really are places in the US to which the descriptor "third world" is applicable.
NYT has some good coverage of the conditions in the colonias, if you want to read more. Here's a start: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/us/10tthealth.html?_r=0
[1] http://www.sos.state.tx.us/border/colonias/faqs.shtml
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...
Absolutely fantastic comment.
This seems a little contradictory. Being daring and exciting as a country and an economy would be more like how America used to be, where the upside of having people dying in the street was that if you came here and you had drive and talent, you were much more likely to become wealthy and successful. This is in contrast to the way much of Europe functioned at the time, where a more entrenched and institutionalized class system meant that your position in life (by and large) was set at birth.
As it stands now (I believe over the last couple of decades), America performs _worse_ than every comparable developed country but Great Britain when it comes to income mobility[1].
[1] From a study done by the London School of Economics: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/intergenerationalmobility.pd...
One thing that is often forgotten is that in Europe it's generally much easier (or less burdening) to become successful in something that doesn't necessarily make a lot of money in the beginning or ever. It can also be a lot easier to feel rich. If you make three times the average income on consulting, you can pretty much take half the year of and still increase your living standard quite a bit if you wanted to.
It's not just warm weather that draws people to SF, but a plethora of social programs that are often poorly executed, underfunded, and addressed at superficial issues and not their core causes (education, for example).
The end result seems to be a sort of outdoor insane asylum, with a bunch of privileged hipsters like me and my friends wandering from our high-end loft conversions to the latest trendy bars and restaurants.
I also feel that in many ways the property development companies are drawn to these dilapidated downtown areas with large homeless populations because it's "edgy" and the developments themselves are high-margin.
It's a stupidly short sighted game of russian roulette but nowhere near as hilarious as if the Government itself really does pay out more per capitita than anywhere else in the world.
http://flipchartfairytales.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/healt...
When limited only to public spending, Norway and Luxembourg spend more per capita, but that's it
And, it doesn't help anything that we're one of the most unhealthy nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...
I'm not advocating, just saying. Perhaps European countries would have to spend more if the US did not concern itself with the rest of the world? Food for thought.
Not to mention the defense industry.
Kind of like healthcare.
Where, germane to other arguments made in the thread, the US also spends a larger share of its GDP than other developed countries, so, no, other developed countries aren't able to provide universal healthcare through public spending because of a "security subsidy" from the US; there able to do so because their mostly-public healthcare systems are more efficient than the US system which splits costs between public and private systems nearly evenly (with a slight private bias.)
EVERYONE gets their weaponry from the US (they bought it back when they were allies, now their enemies), and/or gets weaponry developed with US military R&D.
It's certainly good for the US defense industry. You've got to buy more better weapons cause your enemy has bought more better weapons, and both sides buy em from the US defense industry.
When the US gives another country military aid (or actually most any kind of aid), 100% of the funds 'donated' need to be used buying military goods from US companies. So military aid goes right to US defense companies too. (I think Israel is the one special exception, who for some reason only have to spend 50% of their military aid on US goods, and can spend the other half on Israeli-made goods).
The US spends more on the military than every other country _combined_.
So, yeah, I'm not sure this state of affairs could really be described as the US keeping the planet _safe_ by spending so much on military. But it is true that the US equips the entire rest of the world militarily.
You are correct in that there are transfers of money and arms, the individual value and long term wisdom of which are always debatable. What I am talking about is a de facto subsidy, based on the fact that many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States because they know that the US would step in for any existential crisis caused by mutual enemies.
Think of it this way. It costs billions to construct a single aircraft carrier. Many seafaring nations currently build smaller navies than they would if the United States were not filling a large portion of this role for them. When buying aircraft, ships, tanks, missiles, etc, an allied country only has to build those assets marginally necessary to create a comfortable excess over and above the security already seen as inevitably provided by the US. That constitutes an indirect subsidy.
If any country had defense centered on such silly premise I think it migrated away from this since release of US cables that clearly show that US only cares about US and treats other countries not as venerable allies but as monkeys in their circus.
I don't believe that Europe would spend significantly more on military. Europeans after carrying two world wars on their soil seem little bit resilient to threats of war and to actual violence. When it comes to Americans it seems that goat fart spontaneously combusting on the other side of the planet constitutes experimental discharge of pyrochemical weapon potentially of mass destruction that ought to be carefully monitored by swiftly dispatched fleet of surveillance drones.
Also, ironically enough, most Northern Europeans would already consider the circumstances of the underprivileged in Scotland unacceptable... The bad parts of Glasgow are considered the most horrible places in Western Europe. And the people there have housing, healthcare and access to education.
Imagine having a chronic disease simultaneously with an absolutely intolerable fear of doctors, hospitals, institutions and the social safety net. That's a hard problem.
But the point was broader, that relative to the rest of the industrial world the US has far more people at the "bottom" , falling out of the net. Walking around cities in Europe, you generally don't find people sleeping on park benches or camping under highway interchanges, etc... In most US cities, that's fairly routine. And many of us consider that a bad thing.
Note that none of that excuses the poorly informed and counterproductive moralizing in the linked article. The author is a jerk. But the problem is real.
And again, it gets to the safety net argument. It's not that the english are accepting shelter where the americans are not, it's that the english don't need to "accept" the homeless shelters in the first place because they are sleeping at home.
"A mixture of street counts and estimates indicated 557 people slept rough on any one night in London 5,678 different people slept rough over a year in London (April 1 2011-March 31 2012)"
"According to SFGov, the total number of homeless individuals and families in San Francisco for 2011 was 6,455."
There are definitely more homeless as percentage of population in San Francisco though.
Is that really true? http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statist... puts Europe, US and UK at very roughly 3-5 homeless per 1000.
But in any case, my point is about the chronic homeless and http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentall... suggests that most chronically homeless are mentally ill in some fashion. How society should properly care for its mentally ill is an extremely hard problem. Strait jackets and padded cells? Forced drug treatments? Or let them camp under bridge overpasses?
Besides, if we were all trying to cure hunger or house the homeless who would be creating all the fancy computers we use every day?
And why blame 'programmers', there are plenty of doctors, lawyers, and financial workers in SF that have to 'step over' the homeless every day on their way to work as well.
You're right, it is hard to imagine how we would survive without Yet Another SocialMobilePhotoSharing Application.
Remember the Dark Days, my friends? When to share a photo you actually had to be around people, and talk to them? Ugh. I shudder to think upon it. We lived like savages, back then; filthy, stinking savages.
Motivating the self-absorbed, indolent masses to legislate away homelessness is the problem.
Of course there isn't. Liberalism in its purest form (as espoused by Hayek, say) is, in effect, free market capitalism with a light but universally applicable (no "special cases", as those lead to totalitarianism) set of regulations to prevent bad actors (e.g. hey, let's put heroin in baby formula so it's really more-ish).
There's this odd commingling of the concepts of socialism and liberalism in the general populace's minds, for some reason. The two could not be more antithetical.
As to the rest of it - the US is neither capitalist nor liberal. It's corporatist, with a distinct socialist bent, but not where people usually point the finger. "Obamacare" is not socialist, it's liberal, as a core concept of liberalism is that the state should fund things that people cannot or will not fund for themselves, like roads and healthcare. Protectionist policies to keep the banks, agribusinesses and other without-legislation-to-protect them unprofitable enterprises ARE socialist, as they centralise control of industrial and economic output into government, and allow businesses that would not survive in a true free market to prosper.
Rant over.
EDIT: I should say "unprofitable without legislation"
In a more general scale, the entire banking sector is propped up by protectionist policies that allow:
> Fractional lending (this is called reserve banking) on a minimal reserve. It's pretty odd that banks can do this, but, say, you, can't.
> Setting of core econometric KPIs by people who stand to benefit directly from those KPIs. LIBOR and EURIBOR are recent examples of this, but market fixing has been going on since forever, and is endorsed passively through a lack of legislation to do anything about it, and a lack of will to prosecute.
> No other banks to exist, without jumping through serious hoops, and tying themselves in a death-grip to one of the "special" banks.
> Immunity to prosecution for bad actors. Corporate personhood is applied with amazing selectivity. If you're a juggernaut, no worries. If you're a small guy, enjoy federal prison.
> Indiscriminate money laundering and funding of illegal activities overseas. HSBC just got busted for proactively helping out the cartels in Latin America, and got a slap on the wrist. They're not alone in this kind of thing - look at Brown Brothers Harriman. They funded Nazi Germany. Prosecution? Nah. Wild profits that span generations.
I could go on and on and on, but the moment that you treat any particular person or entity "specially", you're on the road to hell, as you've just interfered with a self-regulating system, as free (but blanket regulated) markets are, and you'll need to interfere more, and more, and more, and suddenly you're telling factories that they should only make size seven shoes for the next two years to fulfil their quota.
I'm also against a lot of the subsidies that are out there.. if we really want available food for the poor, then those expenses directed at the farmers directly are the wrong place. I mean we have food stamp programs, and school lunch programs that could be expanded to cover more people, or even everyone domestically.
I'm against the expanded protectionisms in copyright and patents as well. I think they are important to have, but the terms are far to broad and lopsided. Corporate personhood is a directly related problem... I'd much rather see corporations far more limited, including requirements on distributing profits to shareholders, and not being able to make corporate donations to charities (especially politically driven ones) or for that matter employ lobbyists. If an investor wants to directly employ a lobbyist more power to them, the protection of a corporate vail is definitely abused.
I believe personal freedom and ensured competition are key to advancement of society, and protectionist corporatism is just as bad as outright communism, or extreme/fascist socialism for that matter. Then again, people often confuse what it means to be pragmatic, or a libertarian for that matter.
Competition is essential, but so is cooperation. Again, though, you need the rule of law to set universal finite bounds on both phenomena, otherwise you end up with cancer in your soda and PMCs in your back yard, even more than already happens in the US.
I suppose that at least we live in interesting times.
The reasons for this are historical. What you call the "socialist" elements result from the idea that part of being truly "free" (i.e, liberty) requires that people be treated equally, thus liberals in this sense have a focus on social justice. (See this on "positive liberty": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty .) You can get good summary of differences between meanings of "liberal" in other Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism#Classical_and_modern
Because of the way the word's meaning has developed historically, you really need to be aware of the context where it's being used. But there are nevertheless strands connecting all the meanings, namely focus on "freedom" and "equality".
Liberalism has always been about social justice, and the idea that each and every human should be free to run or ruin their own lives (Positive vs. Negative freedom), with a slant towards the positive through regulation and the rule of law.
Socialism is a set of collectivist policies desired or in force while a capitalist society is being consumed (i.e., distribution of goods and services by society's collective dictates).
Capitalism "solves the problem" of production by producing what returns profit (in a market of demands and supplies). Once profit is stamped out, production is unguided except by "society" commanding it (i.e., a command "economy"). Even if this guidance were democratic, it would still be subject to the tyranny of the majority (the bulk of the collective).
Agree that the tyranny of the majority still applies in the case of democracy - see the UK EU in-out referendum impending mess.
Alas, individualism will never be a mass movement!
"More doubtfully compatible with the liberal conception of equality is another measure which also gained wide support in liberal circles, namely the use of progressive taxation as a means to effect a redistribution of income in favour of the poorer classes. Since no criterion can be found by which such progression can be made to correspond to a rule which may be said to be the same for all, or which would limit the degree of extra burden on the more wealthy, it would seem that a generally progressive taxation is in conflict with the principle of equality before the law and it was in general so regarded by liberals in the nineteenth century."
- Liberalism, F. A. Hayek
"Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom." -- The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
In living in the SV sandbox/bubble, it seems we forget about some of our global compassion. Nobody says we need to be 100% charitable in our actions, or follow some strict socialist regimen, but I think it's useful to acknowledge that we do overlook some of the problems at our doorstep. If we cared, we could definitely create solutions to some of them, and some of those solutions might even be profitable.
Corporatism isn't a nation with a lot of powerful business corporations, it was a proto-fascist ideological movement in the syndicalist tradition.
Ref: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/138442/corporatism
just wait until you get the disillusionment from going down to "Hollywood"
Basically we created a mortgage system that only works as long as property values continue to rise, which created a lot of political will behind "improvement" measures like eliminating public housing, like we did in the early 80s.
(see http://www.wraphome.org/downloads/without_housing.pdf [pdf] for a fascinating study on the origins of modern homelessness)
I'm doing some experiments with cooperative housing and income-sharing right now, which slightly mitigates my contribution to gentrification, but something else is needed, and I'm not sure what.
Email is in my profile if you want to chat.
You either need to start actually being a part of this city, or move your ass down the peninsula. Or better yet, move your company somewhere else. I hear they've got lower taxes and cheaper engineers pretty much everywhere else.
My routine: wake up around 8, or whenever I wake up (no alarm clock), work straight through until about 6pm. Walk downhill to the neighborhood/sports bar to grab dinner, watch the ballgame (no discussion of work as none of the people there do tech work). Get a pleasant buzz on, hang out with friends. Go home, sleep, rinse, repeat. Works well for me.
San Francisco is a place that people historically migrate to when looking for gold. The aspects of the culture that creates, the ones you like, anyway, are unpredictable and subject to change.
I should also point out that the reason companies started coming to San Francisco in the first place was because of the culture that is currently being displaced, largely by people who don't care about the culture at all.
But anyway, my point is that culture changes, and you can't stop it. Think of it as a culture free market. You can try to put up protectionist barriers to stop it, but you won't succeed. Not even the Amish are totally successful at it.
I grew up in Redmond, WA in the 70s and I don't recognize the place anymore when I visit. It makes me a bit sad, but that's life. Someday miles-high glaciers will form and scrub the Rocky Mountains away, too.
I would disagree on this point, Sure not all were "forced." There are invisible points that cause native nations to collapse. The missionaries didn't have to force them to come, there presence alone had enough effect on the region to force them to move to the missions. Especially in the Bay Area: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Little-Choice-Disintegration-Anth...
The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM! No more poverty, except in self-inflicted cases (drug addiction, for example), or things like severe and very expensive illness (which are covered by other means). This can be paid for in large part by the abolition of welfare systems, unemployment, Social Security, etc.
The stock criticism is that people wouldn't work, because they wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't want such poorly motivated people working anyway, because they're not productive. And anyone who wants more than barely-poverty will get a job or start a business.
Another nice feature is that this supports people who want to do something productive but not financially valuable - charity work, ministry, art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
You also still have the problem of people like drug addicts who spend all of their minimum income on drugs/drink/gambling and are still left homeless.
We have had similar problems in the UK with private landlords renting out very poor quality housing at high prices to those on welfare. In the past we solving this by building lots of social housing.
And yes, there would still be people who blew their GMI money on drugs and wound up homeless. And there would still be charities to help them.
You left out the part where the money comes from. Your idea is fine and dandy, but I doubt you are currently implementing it yourself by spending your own money. The idea depends on everybody being forced to pay.
Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort. I disagree with your premise that people who work for rewards are unmotivated.
Those who think this is a good idea can go ahead and spread their wealth as they see fit, but I do have a problem with forcing others to do the same.
In a system where the individual can decide where to put the money, everybody can decide who is deserving of help.
If you mandate wealth redistribution, you need to create a complex ruleset that decides who is eligible. The rules are established by the ineffective and opaque processes of politics and government.
The resulting system is more complex, more expensive and easier to game.
Basic income still has the problem that people get my money who do not deserve it in my opinion.
I happen to believe that no one has the right to deny that anyone. It’s a basic human right. Every human deserves a life in dignity and there is no way to lose that. (And, I know, implementing that world wide right now is practically impossible. That, just like, e.g. any sort of restrictions of freedom of movement, labor, capital and goods, is a travesty but for the near future I’m hopeless about anything changing in that regard. It’s sad and unacceptable.)
Within that understanding of the world (and also the understanding that we won’t have work for everyone as time goes on) something like a guaranteed basic income seems at least like something worth trying out to me. (Many of the current welfare schemes seems broken to me, too focused on tight paranoid control and stigmatizing people.)
But then again, I’m European. (Also, not the person you were originally responding to.)
Over a certain amount of income earned however, the benefit becomes negligible.
This type of thing (even when it involves fire protection) is redistribution. One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit -- even if it is the same set of people the distribution of the tax and the benefit aren't the same, and the difference is redistribution.
Note that I am not saying this is undesirable, merely that it clearly is redistribution.
Ah, no. ALL people pay for things. How that payment occurs is a product of a progressive tax system in most cases, but there is no requirement that such a system exists to run service.
You wouldn't call a private security service employed by a gated community "wealth redistribution", would you? Although if they had an income driven progressive fee structure it would be.
While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.
I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.
To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?
This is a poor understanding of the concept. The idea behind a Basic Income Guarantee is that it is received equally by every citizen in the country. It's an idea linked to Negative Income Tax and other like proposals, and shares support of many with a more libertarian/economically conservative bent.
In most areas of North America where Basic Income experiments have occurred, the overall workforce does decline, but in very specific ways: mainly with single mothers and teenagers. Mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, and teenagers graduating high school are more positive impacts on the society at large than the greater retention of wealth by the highly motivated.
Wealth can only be created in societies, and therefore the overall health of a society should be of paramount concern to those interested in creating wealth. While I do not advocate for many socialist principles, a certain baseline ensures the society remains sustainable in the long term, thus allowing its members to grow wealth.
Both too much (Communism, socialist Europe) and too little (Argentina, Venezuala, the US) will lead to inevitable social collapse and the reduction of wealth (or the ability to create more) for all.
You do not live in a self created bubble.
This is also interesting: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-new-approach-to-...
I agree that there are some people who deserve financial support, but it should be up to the individual to decide who that is and how much they should receive.
You aren't subsidizing anything. You are allowing the mother to raise their child with more options available to them. At the very least, it increases the chances of the child's success, and overall the chances that you are not paying for programs, prisons, social services in the future.
> Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
Because they are "gaining that experience" instead of completing their schooling in many occurrences. I don't need to explain why it's a good idea to have as many people as possible stay in school, do I?
You may as well be saying "Why should I be paying taxes to put out a fire at the house down the street"? Well, if/when the fire spreads, you're going to be paying for it like it or not, so it seems like common sense to address the problem before the total cost is far higher.
The relationship between gang activity and dropout rates is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but given that "stopping gang activity" is damn near impossible through enforcement alone (this is basically the tactic we've been trying), it's strange that our culture is such that attacking the problem from the other side is anathema.
These are complex issues and should be evaluated by each individual. You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy. If I was interested in reducing US crime and poverty, I'd donate to http://www.projectprevention.org/
This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.
What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.
> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy
Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.
That just means that others decide what happens to my money.
> However, considering that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large
This is just a false assertion. My wealth is derived from my work.
> That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.
You also force everybody else to do the same. Those altruistic managers then spend the money on foreign wars and bailouts.
Inflation is the constraint, not solvency. We need to find the right number between 0 and 10^10 but we are not trying to do that and so we're becoming like Japan.
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...
Discovering what support structures work and making those more easily accessible seems like a great place for a disruptive start up, except that health care is so incredibly messed up no one wants to touch it with a ten foot poll.
Not true. You know how you can solve homelessness without solving mental illness and addiction EVEN IF (let's accept for the sake of argument) most homelessness is caused by mental illness and addiction?
It's really quite simple. You just give housing to mentally ill and addicted people. They are still mentally ill and/or addicted, but now they're not homeless, because you gave them a place to live.
In short, while it would be possible to design a self defeating basic income program it is not inevitable. That said, I prefer the employer of last resort scheme being pushed by the Australian MMT crowd.
Everyone keeps saying that, as if there were only two alternatives: 1) completely fix poverty in a general way or 2) keep the status quo (and allow it to get worse).
There has to be some way to get from the current wealth inequality [1] to something more humane.
[1]: http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely...
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...
The issue is that the high levels of wealth inequality are used to capture nearly all of the wealth that is created, thus increasing the wealth inequality even more. That is a clearly unsustainable system.
That would depend on your moral system, wouldn't it?
i.e. just because you cover up your eyes doesn't mean that I can't see you.
[edit] Furthermore any statement about an action being moral or immoral that doesn't explicitly reference a moral system is implicitly assuming a moral system. I find "It is my belief that X is moral" to be stylistically inferior to "X is moral" and clearly the former is a factual statement, while the later is a statement of opinion. HN is a discussion forum in which stating opinions is acceptable, so I use the terser, stronger statement of opinion preferably to the more verbose factual statement.
As there was no argument pertaining to the actual existence of an absolute morality, all we are discussing is your model. All that we can gleam from that model is that steady per-capita income increases imply a good outcome for everyone, and that a good outcome for everyone implies that economic disparities that exist along with that outcome are not morally wrong. Therefore, there's no need to assume that moral relativism is a valid outlook, only that there's no proffered evidence that your assertion represents an aspect of that hypothetical intrinsic morality.
If there were one, evidence that a particular condition compels a particular conclusion in one's model would only imply a particular condition within a moral universe would depend on the correspondence of one's model to the reality of that universe.
Also, blah, blah, blah, blah-de-blah
There's nothing making drug addicts homeless other than the fact that we drive up a thousandfold the prices of substances that cost pennies to produce.
http://www.frontlineclub.com/the-inequality-debate/
http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
"So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means. It is identical with taking money from the rich."
You can let people become wealthy, and therefore give people incentive to invest and create, without creating the kind of insane inequality we currently have in the US.
His rant gets ridiculous, though, when he starts talking about doing away with the link between money and power... "We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." That might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen a smart person say. Money is power. pg probably has someone mow his lawn. I can't do that. Why? Because pg is rich and can pay someone to do it, I am not, therefore I can't.
But that's not Power with a capital "P", you say. But it is. That's what power is, the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. If you have money, in a capitalist society, you have power, by definition. Whether you abuse that power, or use it for things that people consider to be bad (like buying off members of Congress) is a totally different story.
What implications does this have? Well, one of them is that money is, to many, a worthless thing to have if you strip away the power that comes along with it. Severing the connection between money and power would demotivate people the same way taxes do because, ultimately, they are the same thing: you used to have X, now you have X-Z.
That doesn't mean you totally eliminate any power or privilege that wealth brings. Trying to eradicate malaria using your billions of dollars is an exercise in power, albeit not one that subverts the democratic process.
If I understand you, you're saying that wealth brings broad powers, and it's only a small subset of those (like political corruption) that are bad.
The rest, which are essentially power over the natural world (curing diseases, sending people to Mars, protecting ancient forests, resurrecting extinct animals) are good.
I'm going to remember that explanation.
That particular quoted line reminds me of a friend, who when she got a $10k raise, could do nothing but bitch about how 'half of it was going straight to the government' (despite it actually being only about 30%). If you define how wealthy you are by how much is taken from you, you should probably re-examine your priorities.
In our world, the needs of many can be met by the work of a few. Only those few will prosper, while the rest languish. The harsh reality is that prospective parents that don't have anything to pass onto their children need to take a hard look at whether they should be having children, given that going forward there may very well be no way for those children to earn a living.
Humanity could be two people living in a grass hut finding just enough berries to eat each day, but it wouldn't be much fun.
Broken families and lack of family planning lie at the heart of crime and poverty.
(I can already see the "eugenictler" strawman being put up in the distance)
So your argument is?
Your argument is?
Ironic on HN, because http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Empathy and social justice are crucial for any society that wants to be respected. You are proposing barbary. Social Darwinism.
The question is how we want to shape our societies and reality. Is it acceptable to have few lucky ones with huge incomes that are far beyond the necassary amount for living a fullfilled live and have the rest die on the streets?
Or would it be more beneficial for the society at large if all have the possibility to live free from existential dangers such as homelessness, disease and hunger.
Robots, computers and automatisation are great tools. At the moment the profit that these tools generate is not shared among all people. It's time to socialise the profits that are gained through automatisation in order to be able to live in peaceful societies.
If you discard huge parts of the population as worthless you'll have to invest even more in your security. You will have slums, riots, terrorism and violence and walled gardens.
That is not the reality I want to live in.
OP is offering a possible partial solution to exactly the problem you present here. With fewer children born into poverty, some degree of abatement is likely. I'm not sure why you dismiss the notion out of hand, refuse to engage the actual idea, and then immediately mischaracterize the original position to be some absurd straw-man in which the OP is adjudicating the "worthless[ness]" of various people.
It's almost as if people on the internet don't know how to properly argue the actual ideas presented, and instead prefer to just make shit up.
The problem with such thinking is that it's often not up to us to decide if we are needed in this world or not. And it is also more often than not up to us if we have the energy and power to earn a wage that allows us sustaining our existence.
My impression is that there is a general consensus that every human beeing has some basic rights (U.N. Declaration of Human Rights) and that we as a society should work to provide these rights for everyone even if we have to sacrify some personal profit for it. Because it can also happen to us.
Op's post came across as If he does not share this views. I'd say if you deny basic human rights I can call you barbaric.
There is a difference between saying it's not a good idea to get children if you are in a bad economic situation or saying that it's correct that these children suffer homelessness because their parents made a bad decision or are somehow not fit enough to procreate. If you start to talk about fitness (here indirectly measured as ability to earn money) as an indication who should procreate you have a form of social darwinism. And there are a lot of problems with such a thinking.
A tragic mixture of having perspective, intelligence, and (relative) poverty.
[1] I say "male", because even in this day and age, female unemployment is much more socially acceptable than its male counterpart.
Now that the individual's economic future is so uncertain, and it's that way for everyone, people who don't think about the future are breeding at a much faster rate than people who do, and it's terrifying.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why healthcare (which has long-term effects on peoples' intelligence levels, since a lot of that's not genetic) isn't a no-brainer, but also education. Free higher education is the absolute best eugenic program ever devised-- if your kids are smart, society will invest limitless resources in making them succeed-- because it hurts absolutely no one; it's pure carrot. Instead of getting soaked on tuition, parents whose kids get into top schools should get paid.
The only countries whose education systems I'm familiar with are the US, Japan, and England. In Japan, public universities are of higher quality than their private counterparts, and their tuition is much cheaper. You do get the effect of smart kids studying their butts off to get into a public (national) university like Tokyo U. or Kyoto U. because they can't afford a private college tuition (though annual rates are in the range of $10-15k, much more reasonable than the US). Iirc England is somewhat similar, with reasonable rates for the best universities (Oxbridge, for instance)
You are judging them all as bad. It seems funny.
So let them be.
I agree that fewer people should procreate but disagree with measuring the necessity of a person by net worth. The vast majority of wealth being accumulated by a few persons surely skews the demand for labor as we have many Fords but not many laborers paid enough to buy Ford's cars.
I said I think fewer children would be good, I just don't know which group of people should stop having children. I guess all of them should tone it down.
Also the numbers on net worth most likely take into account home values that have recently fallen off a cliff. While it's still accurate to say that most people have a zero or negative net worth you can't assume the value of the home/amount owed on the mortgage will always be static.
Your friends are not a representative sample of the population of the united states.
Those who choose to have children are responsible for providing for them, not their neighbors.
People who can't take care of their children should be discouraged from procreating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
To instead overwork those who are employed and leave the rest to language is a conscious decision.
IMHO, that is why socialist Governments providing education, healthcare, roads and security sound popular to some people. All these are part of wealth that are provided to citizens at low prices.
But in a capitalistic economy, it is left to individuals (entrepreneurs) to provide this services at competitive prices.
One way of looking to solve the problems of the poor and deprived people would be to provide them services of education, healthcare, housing etc. at ultra-competitive prices.
I know it is easier said than done. But it is something worth doing.
I guess in most countries governments contract out road construction to private companies anyways.
But my primary point was we as entrepreneurs and visionaries need to work on the hard problems.
When the super-rich have all the money, the super-rich drive up the cost of living. The middle class then must directly serve the interests of the rich in order to get enough profit to afford the higher cost of living.
It quickly becomes uneconomical to sell anything to poor people.
It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention. Rich families just get richer, driving up cost of living, cornering markets to destroy the free market, and making the poor families poorer in comparison.
When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food, more clothing, more housing, etc.). What does this do? It increases the demand for food, clothing, housing , etc. in the area. This is _not_ a bad thing. This means businesses in the area, if they are allowed to, will grow and new businesses can come into existence. For a real world example, look at Apple, for example. Apple employs 13,000 in Cupertino. However, Apple also indirectly creates 70,000 additional service jobs in the area through their direct employment. Are you saying this is a bad thing? This is much better multiplier than manufacturing.
The only issue we run into here is housing. If the area can't accommodate the increase in demand, housing prices will increase. This means owning a business will be more expensive, meaning the costs of everything will increase. This is what we're seeing in areas like SF.
But the thing is, this doesn't just have to be the super-rich who cause this. If you see an increase in demand for living in a specific area for any reason, a similar thing will happen as if a bunch of super-rich move into the area.
Further, the super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities, so they'll contribute far less to the increases in the cost of living than previously assumed.
So this entire argument of yours really doesn't make sense to me.
> It's a poverty spiral. Uneducated families just get more uneducated without state intervention
And this is a completely different topic and again I don't understand for what you're arguing. The government has had a monopoly on education for a long time and has gone to great lengths, in both primary and secondary schooling, to intervene. In many ways, this has driven up the cost of education and driven down the quality. But this is mostly a tangent.
> When are we going to wake up from this Randian dystopia we're creating??
I wouldn't call the Bay Area, in California, in the United States, a Randian dystopia. The amount of regulations and taxes one must deal with in this area is astounding. You even brought up the sad state of public education. How is this Randian in any way imaginable? You're on the wrong end of the spectrum.
Like it or not, changes in wealth for the super-rich seem to have effects on the non-super-rich too. As the richest gain more wealth, the less rich feel even less rich. As they see bigger and nicer houses going up, more expensive cars driving around, etc., the relative quality of theirs is going down. In an attempt to keep up, they spend more, and so on down the socioeconomic ladder. This effect has been called "trickle-down consumption" in a recent study detailed here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/t....
The result is is exactly what you acknowledge later, which is a bit contradictory to your opening assumption: "[T]he super-rich don't actually spend their money in the same way poor people do. They invest a good chunk of their money and they don't spend in the same proportion of their income on necessities..."
People in lower income brackets are spending more money while saving less, and this is in part due to the rising displays of opulence from the upper income earners.
This is equivalent to saying "let's assume 2+2=5, so you see that 0=1". You need to revise basic economics.
Everything about American Rural and Suburb culture drives out those who Rent, and don't want to own full-size autos with all the "rat-race" keeping up with payments and insurance and taxes... Right up until people retire and realize they can't keep up.
So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.
I'll agree, "most" is probably way off. It is greater than 0, but it could well be a negligible amount.
By "offer", do you mean for free? Well, duh. What the GP most likely meant is that some people prefer to be homeless rather than having to get and hold down a job to afford a place to live.
Besides the challenge of actually finding a job, a minimum wage job won't cover rent in SF and certainly not with money left over for things like food, transportation or phone service. Have you seen the installation art piece about the minimum wage? It's a box with a crank on it that spits out a penny every 4.97 seconds: http://disinfo.com/2012/12/the-mininum-wage-machine/ That's what working is like to most people, except often more dangerous and demeaning.
As Paul Graham said on a different thread yesterday, if you have a choice between two explanations and one justifies you being lazy, choose the other one.
Being able to simultaneously look at the absurd rent prices in SF, and then interpret the homelessness problem as a 'choice' is some serious obliviousness, if not an all-out exercise in orwellian double-think. I know it's a bit of a popular 'thing' amongst a certain subculture in the Haight (hell some of my friends have done that), but that's been around for ages, and I'd hardly call that culture a majority...
The original article pretty much got it right: people here like living in bubbles.
Yes, there are a few people who prefer to be homeless. They're very rare. The idea that they're "most" is laughable.
I have heard this from many americans, for some reason my european mindset cannot get why someone would not want shelter or food.. a reliable manner.
Most of these people have not had the opportunity to do any better. It is not their fault.
The homeless people who remain homeless are usually in these categories and it can be hard to help them.
{{Citation needed}}
Silicon Valley has peaked.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
You're so fucking right wing. If academia was politically empowered to implement the scientifically proven methods we could eliminate poverty and homelessness tomorrow, and cut mental illness by 90%.
Idealistic, social-conscience-having nerds take note:
This is what happens when you let neoliberalism, Randroidism, and corporate psychopathy infect your tech community.
Technology is supposed to be used to create a Star Trek future. Not to spy on everyone as we make their jobs obsolete, drive up their rental costs, and put them on the street. Then demonstrate zero compassion for the victims that Silicon Valley has created.
You, sir, win the Indignation for May 14, 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s
We really need to push these corporate/private-equity assholes out of our industry. We had a good thing for a while, but they came in and stole it. We have to take it back from those pieces of shit.
Having worked both in finance and in VC-funded "tech" I can only say that the people in finance are a lot better and much more ethical. It seems that technology management (at least in the VC-funded space, where the investors agree that only "their kind" is actually fit to manage) is an Argentina for people who get flushed out of banking because they're too unethical even for Wall Street.
To those surprised by this sentence, jarjoura might be influenced by this recent Priceonomics blog post: http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kid...
"Most street kids we spoke to came from one of two backgrounds: either they had job prospects (whether good or dead-end) but preferred the freedom of homelessness, or were transient homeless who fell in love with the street kid community...Street kids defied our expectations of living on the street as a last resort; instead they seem to be drawn to the Haight."
I don't think anyone can say (with a straight face) that most people who live in poverty have chosen that lifestyle.
This is ludicrous. By almost every metric being homeless sucks: access to work is harder to find and keep, medical care isn't as available, physical safety is harder to keep, you are more likely to be arrested, you are more likely to be assaulted, etc. This mindset is straight out of the Victorian era.
> So many of them are young and it used to make me sad but I have just learned to accept it. I always make a point to package up leftovers and hand them out. I'll even reach into my wallet and hand out a few dollars too.
> If there were more I could do though, I would be more than happy to donate some of my time, as I'm sure many in this city would too.
Homelessness is a systemic issue that can't just be solved only with individual people's time and/or money.
> Also, is more public housing the answer? Not sure about that one. They all look like government buildings with horrible fluorescent off-green lighting filled with junkies and drug addicts far from being cured.
That is because the issues that go with homelessness are not simply done once someone gets shelter. Also, public housing in most places in the US is at capacity and cannot accommodate any more people until someone dies or moves out. Some locales also put qualifications on public housing that will, by definition, keep people homeless or dependent on that public housing indefinitely.
Except perhaps in the case of trauma-induced mental illness resulting from a trauma that is a forseeable consequence of a choice made prior to the existence of the illness (and even in that case it may be a problematic position), I am having trouble seeing even a remote argument that "being on the streets due to [...] mental illness" as the result of "terrible choices".
Lack of healthcare and mental illness are closely linked.
Lack of housing and mental illness are correlated.
Lack of employment opportunities and mental illness are correlated.
You talk like an evil person from the 19th century. Mental illness is not a character defect, it's an illness. It has external causes. Psychologists have found that one way to increase the level of mental illness in society is to raise unemployment through austerity measures and other stupid economic policies that are opposed by most economists yet implemented by neoliberal governments.
Another way to increase general mental illness levels is to stigmatize the mentally ill and treat them as if they have character or moral defects. This causes people with mild depressions, for instance, to sink into major depressions.
Another cause of mental illness is a lack of housing. Putting people on the street causes mental illness.
They aren't poor because they're mentally ill. Just as often, they are mentally ill because they're poor. If they could AFFORD treatment, they could be CURED of their illness.
The issue is poverty straight up. You're a terrible person for implicitly blaming the victims.
There are literally millions of people who want jobs. The jobs were all made obsolete by Silicon Valley. The safety net was shredded by Silicon Valley-style neoliberal ethics based on Ayn Rand.
If someone offered them a rat race job and they had the appropriate education, cultural norms, social skills, and were mentally healthy, they would take it.
People don't choose to be homeless. It may be the best option available to them, but that doens't mean they chose it, it means they have very very few options. Their opportunity is limited by the rich people pushing austerity and gutting basic humanitarian services.
A particularly common combination was a health problem followed by foreclosure.
It has been 20 years, but I have seen no reason to doubt that the same pattern would be largely true today.
It's not about if someone wants to be homeless, if there is a simple choice between shelter and homeless, people will always prefer shelter. But if the choice is between working hard with a shelter, and live carefree and homeless, the answer will not be so clear.
I was shocked with this, asked a couple more people if they had heard about that, and they had.
My conclusion was that maybe everyone (or most people) was expecting someone else, or the government, to help the homeless, and there comes the vicious cycle.
One thing you realize is that a lot of the people on the streets have major mental conditions (usually schizophrenia, and major drug addictions or chronic alcoholism), and there is almost no way to just rehab them, and put them in a place that they can take care of themselves. Some of them are beyond the point of return and some need so much care, then only loving family can provide. Externally, you can't do much.
Other countries have both better mental care provided from the state, and especially a social net. Usually family will take care of their ill.
Be happy with what you got, do a good job, and make sure to be close to your family and have close friends. You will realize that is part of life, and once and a while you will have a need for support from closed ones, but as long as you an handle yourself well most of the time and try to live a good life you wont have to worry.
as for the schizophrenics out there, i am honestly still a little afraid of being one of them, but i'm lucky enough to have a huge support network.
Other parts of the city I think have more people that really are drug-addicted or borderline insane
* http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/43085729257/the-street-kid...
I think the point of the article is that that's fucked up, and not how the world should be. And what I suspect the author realized is that it isn't the way he or she wants to be.
That's the maturation process though: understanding that the world has been that way for all time. Look at nature, around you, some animals within any given group always do better than others. It's fine to be bothered by it, and want to do something to change it, but it's naive to think that a) you are the first person to notice and b) you can fix it completely.
(I'm not an expert on this, but as far as I know) many traditional/"primitive" societies have much less problems with homelessness and mental disorders because of stronger family support. (Of course, they have other problems that we don't have.)
The point is it's not better to accept it. It's not more grown up and responsive to stop caring about this. World is not the same as it used to be. It constantly get's more and more humane. I recomend watching http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
If you accept homeless population in SF you are just closing your eyes to places that are much better to live than SF even with much less money in circulation.
This is depressing.
"This is part of life." feels like a common cop-out and downplays the fact that, if some of us put our minds to it, we could successfully make it not so much a part of life (I'm not saying we'd have some utopian equality, but it could be so much better).
Twitter negotiated to pay less than its share of the employee tax in SF. More and more startups are doing the same. Yet those shuttle buses run on city streets, park at city bus stops, and pay no additional fees to do so.
Many people here won't stay, won't volunteer in the community, won't get involved with the city and fight for better Muni and safer streets. Donations at charities are way down. Newly minted millionaires aren't donating to the arts or to charity, they're throwing lavish parties and buying over priced real estate. With people like Peter Thiel insisting that Libertarianism is the way all tech people should believe, precious few actually seem to get that we are all interconnected, and that a social safety net makes the world a better, safer place.
When I made my first money in this town, and it wasn't a lot, but it was enough to change my life, I wept, because I knew at its heart it was violently unfair that I should be safe and the people on the street not. I haven't stopped feeling that way. I hope you don't, either. It was nice to see someone actually care.
I hope that everyone here can show as much faith and heart as you do and insist on voting for taxes, policies, and politicians who will work to change things, for real.
Not everyone has a family, and even if they do we should be pushing for institutional changes so that the family isn't forced to make a choice between eventual bankruptcy or turning their family out on the street.
That realization is indeed part of the maturation process.
What you are talking about is both this and desensitization. The former is unquestionably necessary and a "good thing", the latter is a self defence mechanism humans have to being exposed to emotionally troubling things.
You/we could absolutely do a lot to alleviate this, it would just be a lot of work. You couldn't single-handedly solve the problem obviously, but that's a different question. I'm not even saying people have a moral obligation to act, but if you are going to decide not to then at least be honest about the reasons. It avoids a lot of painful cognitive dissonance at the very least.
It's definitely emotionally helpful to believe you can't do anything about it, but it's pretty definitively not true. Seems especially weird to suggest that here, in a community of self described "disruptors".
I am appalled that you actually believe this. I mean, ok, the world is not by default a fair place, but the notion of simply ignoring the moral duty to make it so... Ick.
And, to put a point on it, how unfair it is to people who are unlike me. Some members of my family express confusion as to why I find this troubling--after all, "I've got mine."
Sure, you'll hear from the guy who got hooked on drugs and pissed away his money, but you'll also hear about people who had work in construction and industry whose jobs dried up during one of many economic downturns while at the same time dealing with rising rent costs. Getting back into the game isn't easy either without clean clothes, a place to shower, or even a phone to be reached at for an interview. A lot of what we take for granted (like wearing $300-1500 outfits for interviews) simply isn't available to homeless people.
http://sfcourts.org/modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=198...
In Canada, homeless/unemployed receive around $300/month from the government and if you have a psychical or mental disability, I believe you receive a little more financial assistance. Some homeless people just stay on the assistance instead of trying to get employment.
However, there is hope but we cannot rely on the government to sort it out. There is a privately funded organization called UGM that has a men's shelter and rehab program in the core of the homelessness district (equivalent to Tenderloin here) and are working on opening a women's and children's rehabilitation program. I volunteered there once and was taken aback on how well put together the program is. It's costly though, to build the building and support the program costs millions. They take in about 40 homeless people and puts them through a 6 month program. There are strict rules and guidelines in the program but in return they receive bedding, food, clean clothes and clean environment to live in, classes to help you finish your high school diploma, computer lessons, emotional and spiritual support, and career counselling, etc. It's still a newer program but they've seen a pretty high success rate, with many graduates becoming outreach works in the community.
Indeed:
"A change in public policy saw the mass discharge of Riverview Hospital's patients as an effort to integrate them into the community while the province considered the land for development. However, this caused a large influx of mentally ill into the DTES as poor follow-up support failed to reach a majority of these individuals."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside#Mental_Illnes...