And this perfectly highlights the problem with having the two tiered economy we have now. Just because you are rich doesn't mean you get to get rid of people you don't like from public spaces. If you don't like how they smell or act, give them a place to live and bathe, and educate them. Give them the ability to work toward an income. This guy makes me sick. He is exactly what is wrong with this current situation. He thinks he is better than other people. He thinks he is entitled to more.
He has a job, an education, isn't addicted to drugs, isn't violent and is generally a well-adjusted and contributing (more or less) member of society. All of that takes a lot of work, and merits some appreciation. How is that not "being better" than drug addicts, drug dealers, muggers or single moms on welfare, or even people who just watch reality TV all day? Many normal people put in a lot of work into being self-sufficient and productive, instead of relying on free money from others.
That you would put single mothers on welfare in a group with drug dealers and muggers, and claim that what this guy does is a lot of work, merits appreciation, and makes him better, is disgusting. I'm going to stop there because I don't want to regret what I'd say if I didn't.
> That you would put single mothers on welfare in a group with drug dealers and muggers
Single mothers are, in many cases, that way because of making bad life choices. When you're poor and in a bad relationship (or in some cases not even in a relationship), kids aren't such a good idea (or at least that's how it seems to me). No one forces them to have kids (unless they've been raped, in which case I'm more sympathetic to them; how often is that the case?)
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Condoms break. Relationships end. Men abandon their children. Husbands become alcoholics and start hitting people. A million things can lead to a woman being single with child, and needing public assistance. That's what it's there for. Raising a child in these circumstances is one of the hardest things a person can do. If you think running hackathons makes someone better than a woman raising a child alone, you have a seriously backward set of priorities.
How about girls and young women in places where there's no sex education, and no access to contraception or abortion? Is that her fault, too?
Maybe people being stuck in shitty situations is a consequence of things beyond their control more often than your willingness to apportion blame is willing to admit.
Just want to point out... that from a completely conservative point of view, having single mothers on welfare is better than the alternatives.
One possible alternative is to deny them welfare, thus endangering the health of the children they care for, thus forcing the state to take the children into custody.
Financially that puts a burden on the state that now has to employ someone to take care of the children, whereas it was getting that for 'free' via the mother.
Also, being a better person should be a moral judgment not a judgement on their financial state.
A citation for what, exactly? That they shouldn't have kids when poor, or that they aren't physically forced to have kids? The former seems like common sense, but I could try and find a citation for the latter (that very few pregnancies are caused by rapes).
Could you give some good examples of why a woman would have kids then wind up on welfare? IMHO the only 2 reasonable examples are raped women and widows.
Human reproduction doesn't occur asexually, but you wouldn't know that from reading your comment. Why does the responsibility for this decision rest entirely upon the mother in your conception?
Man this kind of attitude pisses me off to no end. This privileged way of thinking that anyone who is less well off must have a flaw in their character or their morality.
If you took the time to talk to "those people" you would likely find that more often than not they are victims of circumstance out of their control, plain and simple.
Just as much as the supposed "wizards" of new tech startups are in reality about 90% lucky and 10% self determined.
> If you took the time to talk to "those people" you would likely find that more often than not they are victims of circumstance out of their control, plain and simple.
I have talked to "those people" (I'm from a far less privileged background than you think) and, while I do admit there are some good people who drew the short stick, I have also seen a lot of assholes. Not everyone who is poor is that way because they're "unfortunate", many of them actually have bad habits and work ethic.
I know tons of people who are more well off who are assholes and/or have a poor work ethic. But since they get lucky in life and got dealt a good hand (say, upper class parents and private school, for example), then they count as contributing members of society in your eyes, while those who grew up poor are useless. To me, that says a lot more about the effect of society on people's situation than on their own personal merit or lack thereof.
That completely misses the point. Are those well-off assholes you talk about actually contributing something to society (like art, science, leadership, labor, money, anything at all)? If so, then good for them, they are contributing members of society; if not, they're parasites. Context (for example, poverty) isn't relevant, what matters are an individual's achievements and contributions (plenty of poor people have achieved great things in life, as well as plenty of rich people).
I wonder how you would have turned out as the child of a single parent mentally ill drug addict? I'm assuming that the 5 year old you would have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps (instead of being beaten with them), and you would have succeeded in registering and paying for yourself to get an education, right?
I'm from a family where people think it's OK to smoke while pregnant, my parents divorced when I was 7, and I grew up in a formerly communist country (which is still doing pretty badly 20 years later). I got pretty far on hard work and brains, and I stand for what I wrote earlier.
EDIT: My point is that there are people from crappy families who still manage to get very far in life. There is such a thing as individual responsibility.
My point is not that there are no lazy people who don't take responsibility for themselves. Nor does it sound like your situation is even close to my example of a mentally ill drug addicted single parent who beats his child. I do recognize that there are lazy assholes out there.
My point is that in between those two extremes exists the majority of homeless people who are mentally ill and who got to that place because of circumstances beyond their control. If you believe that the majority of homeless people fall into the lazy asshole category, then I'm sorry but you're delusional. We as a society should expend energy and resources fixing this problem at its root, and not just brushing it away into a new neighbourhood each time it becomes gentrified.
> We as a society should expend energy and resources fixing this problem at its root
This raises an interesting question: what is the root (I'm genuinely asking)? It seems like a hard question along the lines of "what makes people mentally ill?". While I'm against permanent welfare, I wouldn't mind if my taxes went to curing these people and making sure they become functioning, productive members of society. I don't really know how or if we can do that.
Maybe he is contributing. Maybe he's just burning though millions of his investors dollars and will have nothing to show for it when the music stops. Those investors ultimately being pension funds, university endowments, charity trusts...
I take it you have never been to SF. I have no problem helping any child, no matter the circumstances, and there are a lot of homeless with mental illness, but there is also a large cadre of professional vagabonds. Guiliani should run for mayor of SF.
There ought to be some basic ground rules that are enforced in public spaces, even if it takes horrible Guiliani-style police state tactics. Whether you're homeless or a well-off tech dweeb, you shouldn't be allowed to poop on the street, run around screaming at people, obstruct traffic, openly deal drugs or stolen goods. If you're doing any of these things, you should be instantly and forcefully removed, regardless of your circumstances. You can be pro-civility without being anti-homeless.
Whether you're homeless or a well-off tech dweeb, you shouldn't be allowed to poop on the street, run around screaming at people, obstruct traffic, openly deal drugs or stolen goods.
None of which requires police-state tactics to bring into check. But the fact that so many people from well-to-do half of the city seem ready to clamour for such tactics says, well, lots of things.
The sleeping outside (and the actual homelessness) is a separate and unfortunate problem that needs to be solved. Fixing the broken shelter system would be a start. Many of the people exhibiting the behavior I described may, in fact, have homes!
Aside from that, if we're supposed to condone people in our public places making them unsafe and unsanitary, what's the point of having them/paying for them at all?
His name is "Giulani." Reasonably good character acting skills at certain moments (like after the 9/11 attacks) but outside of that, a notorious windbag and cronyist.
That some in the tech aristocracy in SF might consider him a viable candidate wouldn't surprise me in the least. And if you can enough people to join you at the polls, well, you more than deserve to have him.
You don't mean this because you don't know what it means to have the police force we have here. Also, we have street people too. So it turns out, 'your problems' doesn't just magically disappear when you get different mayor in office.
I have seen tech companies move into a grungy area, which they get a discount on taxes and then go on thinking they are going to help the area, but instead push the problem elsewhere. I am sure some intelligent people in SF are actually trying to figure out a way to helping these people that have gotten into ruts or bad situations. Mainly my point is that if you don't like the city as is with all the craziness then find another city. These people more than likely have been here longer than most of the young techie people.
The notion of two tiered economy is overly simplified. It allows people to believe that they might be on or close to the upper side of the divide. Wealth and money (richness) distributions seem to follow power laws.
He moved to SF in 2011 and maybe has a few million dollars from a founding few startups. That sure seems like a lot to people below him. That is peanuts to the people above him who run the city.
The simplistic two tier breakdown is a hindrance to understanding unless it is understood as the divisive control structure it is.
Total linkbait. Just google: SF homeless problem. And see how many articles come up, from so many people. Singling this guy out is completely arbitrary. It's also unoriginal, in the general sense.[1] [edit: also, this problem is 40-50 years old, so its not fundamentally new.]
The homeless problem? Spot on, again. Perhaps - just maybe - the city of San Francisco should dedicate some of that time it spends trying to pass inane legislation (circumcision ban, I'm looking at you!) to trying to REALISTICALLY address the homeless problem. This might blow most of your minds, I know - but I've lived in Chicago, DC, NYC, and LA - and there are more homeless people here than those cities combined.
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And about why there are so many homeless… first of all, who cares, because having such destitution in the streets only serves to bring down the mood of the place… but if you must, have you ever considered that the explosion of homeless in SF resulted to the city’s expansion of homeless programs and shelters? In other words, your getting the cause and effect confused. The city attracted, and created by way of its hippy drug happy culture, a slew of schizo drugged out homeless people… and all the soup kitchens are just a responsive measure to all that.
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San Francisco. If there were an official city scent, it would be hobo piss. That's because hobos are everywhere, and piss is what they do for a living. Well, not just piss, obviously. They also drop so much excrement on the escalators in the city's train stations that they're sometimes rendered inoperable from the sheer volume of poo gumming up the works. How bad can it be, you ask? Well, the city had to call in a hazmat team to clean up one recent mess. There was just that much poop. On the escalator. The public escalator.
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[1] EG, "Tech Founder Complains About the Shithole City He's Forced to Make His Millions In". I won't link to it out of principle, but google will send you there. That was a different person, though. Surprise surprise.
The comments in the original FB post that trigged this whole thread were of a rather different sort than you are quoting above:
The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it's a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that's okay.
…
You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It's a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I'd consider thinking different …
'cept that it wasn't a random comment, it was a well thought-out tirade. And it wasn't posted on YT, but rather on his FB page (equivalent to tweet or a blogpost, more or less).
Which is to say: who the speaker is, who he works for and what his position is matters, as does the venue in which his original rant was posted.
Whatever happened to “to whom much is given, much will be required”?
I've seen it written that a great many successful business leaders have sociopathic tendencies; I find it very hard to relate to the kind of person who would say such a thing from their position.
I can imagine the thinking behind someone who has nothing or very little and wants someone to blame, but this coming from someone who has so much? What could possibly be the motive?
"Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue."
It's a valid question. If there were crazy homeless drug dealing drop-out trash hanging out in front of my office building, begging for money every time I passed by on they way to my car, it'd be unsettling.
No, the valid question is, "What can we do as a society to reduce the amount of homeless in the city?"
Asking about why a given location is the correct place to put them is not a valid question. Unless of course you're a sociopath who doesn't actually care about the well being of anyone other than yourself...
"Unless of course you're a sociopath who doesn't actually care about the well being of anyone other than yourself" IMO is at the top of the list of what's wrong. People don't have time to stop to think about why these people got themselves there. They are too busy trying to make their bosses/investors happy so they don't end up on the street, as well (I am in the same boat). I don't think we are all that far from a situation they are in. One accident could cause you to become disable and no longer able to work. Then when you ask someone for help they look at you like scum because you don't have clean clothes or a place to live. Some have the support that will help them to never be in this situation. Support is the key.
He moved to SF in late 2011. I'm guessing he moved to or was in the cheaper hipper places, which is exactly where the crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash hang out. They were there before he was. How long has the Tenderloin been the way it has been, specifically how many decades?
This is a rather standard gentrification wedge issue rhetoric being regurgitated without understanding the background. At least the PR people got to him this morning to start working on fixing the damage.
What is AngelHack, what is it for, how does it make the world a better place? When the tech bubble bursts, this schmuck will find himself in the lower part of society...
I so wish karma was a real thing when I see comments like this from people who, when it really comes down to it, contribute nothing of meaningful or lasting value to society and blithely ignore all the blind luck that got them where they are.
The same luck that, flipped the other way, probably accounts for a great many of the homeless people that they bitch about.
I don't quite get how "working class" got into the mix. I see that there must have been some cohesion to his original rant since it was linked to income disparity, but what does that have to do with homeless beggars exactly?
To me a discussion about the homeless doesn't entail a discussion about the "working class" or vice versa.
he was comparing the working class (i.e. the people who live off the sale of their labour) to unemployed and homeless people (what Marx would have called the lumpenproletariat).
I guess your confusion stems from the fact that working class typically means manual labourers rather than intellectual labourers in common parlance. In this vein, one would see software developers as middle class, due to their relatively high income. However, this income is more a function of a temporary shortage of developers, rather than anything intrinsic about software developers.
I think he is right to use the term working class, but completely wrong in everything else he says.
Funny enough, manual labour in my area is a fairly high paying occupation. So much so, that everyone I know who went into construction is married with fully paid off condos before the age of 30.
It may not be glamorous, but it puts them firmly in the middle class.
Developers are upper middle class like doctors and lawyers, and hiring shows the same tendencies to networking: wherein its not what you know, but who you know to get work. Look at all the people on HN who brag that they don't apply for jobs.
It's interesting, if you consider the wealth disparity of SF to something like Cape Town I imagine it's something similar. As such it's hardly surprising that they've both got a problem with beggars and such. I can imagine it'd be vastly more profitable to be a beggar in a relatively rich city than a poor city. It's a similar case for drug dealing
