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I was trying to be nice. Let me put it in terms that Gene Roddenberry would have explained. He emphasized it in his work. You might have heard about it. Star T

I was trying to be nice. Let me put it in terms that Gene Roddenberry would have explained. He emphasized it in his work. You might have heard about it. Star Trek. "The needs of the many, out way the needs of a few, or the one." When you're more interested in the humanity, and dignity of those afflicted (the few) than those not afflicted (the many) then you're going to continue to generate more afflicted. You have to stop the problem at the source. That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise. You only care about those that are on those streets. You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society. Jobs are not the problem. There are jobs everywhere. In one of my businesses, I needed truck drivers. I can't find them because hardly anyone can pass a drug test. I will pay for them to get their CDL, if they're drug free. It's not happening. I sponsored 3 people from India to drive trucks for me. They work 6 hour days, make $35 an hour, with route bonuses, and benefits. I have a software company (or had), where we did DoD projects. It is next to impossible to find anyone that can pass a background check for a security clearance with the FBI. Why? Drugs. I had another software company that was in the Casino Gaming space. It was difficult to get people licensed. Why? Drugs. There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street. Then people like you and I have coddled these people, and give them enough to get by, so they don't want to return to being a functioning members of society. Anything else, they steal or commit another crime to get more drugs. I have spoken to many of these people. Your presumption shows your character. I have donated more money to this problem than you will make in your life. Money is not fixing the issue. I have stopped supporting many alcoves. We keep creating more, and more that end up needing help. The majority of the problem revolves around drugs. Drugs cause mental issues. This is a fact. People don't want to work. They want drugs. So, I will not be returning to SF. I will not fund the business I was there to invest in. Keep going with your idealism. The universes own laws will eventually catch up with you, as history shows us every time.

anotherhue 3y ago
For the life of me I cannot understand why we tolerate antisocial behaviour in our public spaces. The difference in experience between Market Street and most streets in Berlin or Kyoto is astounding. Forced relocation to care communities (which would need to be built) is the only move I see. Food, Shelter, Waste disposal, etc. The idea of a group of homeless people being able to set up a camp wherever they want, when everything else in society needs to go through planning permission is insane.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bbor 3y ago
[flagged]
- RobertRies 3y ago
  "You honestly, really think all those people just sat down one day and decided to be homesless Because they’d be coddled?!" Strictly speaking this is simply a straw man via oversimplification (as is nearly the entirety of this post and the others I've seen from bbor in this thread)... But I've seen this _variety_ of straw man so often that I want to break it out into a specific fallacy on its own. Not sure what to call it but the "Oh, so you think X decided one day just Y?" "Oh so you think Elizabeth Holmes just sat down one day and decided _I'm going to scam billions out of investors and risk lives and pretend I made a blood testing machine_"? "Who sees this advertisement for Tide and just decides _I'm going to buy Tide because I saw this advertisement?" "Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women?" "Oh, so you think I'm going to do heroin one time and suddenly I'm going to be homeless and addicted?" No. We're the culmination of dozens, hundreds, thousands of behaviors (with genetic and environmental influences) that create a trend. So, err, I'll entertain your bad-faith rhetorical question and answer: no, nobody thinks anyone "sat down one day and decided to be homesless [sic] because they'd be coddled." San Francisco (on behalf of the voters, you and I) have created thousands of tiny incentive structures that maximizes the pain people experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, while simultaneously maximizing the negative impact to the housed, because you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults, burglaries and all the other fun because they aren't supporting your policies. Let me guess: housing-first? Certainly their drug addictions and mental illnesses will instantly vanish with a free house in the most expensive real-estate in the country? Anything short of this, well, they can stay on the street and find comfort in stealing things to fund their heroin/fentanyl self-medication.
  - bbor 3y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to read and respond :) Always appreciate a dialogue. the others I've seen from bbor in this thread I think we can both agree that using the word "bbor" in the context of this conversation is kinda funny. fallacy "Figure of speech" Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women? Probably? thousands of tiny incentive structures Like... feeding them? Giving them shelter so they're less likely to die of exposure, and because people hate when they sleep within sight? you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults... because they aren't supporting your policies. You literally spent the last 75% of your comment talking about the Strawman Fallacy and then... To be explicit here: Ok, you win, no one decides to be homeless in literally one single moment, all of life is the culmination of decisions and life events, totally agree with you. The rest of my comment was about how fucking awful it is to be homeless. Which you would agree, no? I cited some insane statistic elsewhere here about them being almost 20 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, and 9 times more likely to be sexually assaulted. I guess you don't have to work if you live on the streets, but I can't believe anyone would argue that they're "coddled". The only reason people would prefer homelessness is if they've been beaten down by the system to ridiculous degree, e.g. felons; what are they supposed to do after serving their time, considering it's way harder to find housing or employment in an economy that's already brutally hard? [1][2][3][4][5] From there, consider people who have suffered abuse, drug addiction, mental health issues, and just plain shit luck. Do they deserve whatever psychotic/violent shit "be tougher on the homeless" implies? This is really the gist of it: what should we do? Yes, my plan is housing first, on top of fixing our insane, unprecedented level of inequality (except for the Gilded Age, which hopefully we agree was a Very Very Bad Time). I think the idea expressed above that we just need to... beat them up more..? and that will fix the problem is heartless beyond belief. Curious to hear your thoughts! 1. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-household-debt/ https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-household-d... Average revolving credit card balance, 2022 $5,910 Average personal loan debt, 2022 $18,255 2. Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ 3. Home prices are rising faster than wages: https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages 4. 42% of Gen Z Diagnosed with a mental health condition: https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/survey-42-of-gen-z-diagnosed-with-a-mental-health-condition/ https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/survey-42-of-gen-z-diagnos... 5. Wealth inequality in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... Reich states that 95% of economic gains following the economic recovery which began in 2009 went to the top 1% of Americans During the COVID-19 pandemic, the wealth held by billionaires in the U.S. increased by 70%... "the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record." As of late 2022... 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). *The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion*.
simoncion 3y ago
> That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise. Speaking about presumptions that show one's character... > Money is not fixing the issue. ... You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society. ... Jobs are not the problem. On this we agree, very, very, very strongly. Jobs are not the problem. A lack of money for homeless assistance (and "assistance") programs is not the problem. (In fact, there's certainly way too much money thrown at those sorts of programs.) Based on what I've observed over the years here in San Francisco, for the situation in San Francisco, lack of housing is the problem. As I said upthread: > Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do. When you can't find housing because there is no housing to be had, and when it's tough as shit to hold down a job because you don't have a solid place to sleep, to clean your clothes, to safely store your alarm clock that's gonna wake you up for tomorrow's shift, etc, etc, then you have one of those "self-perpetuating cycles" that leaves you jobless and homeless. > That means: Cutting off the drug supply. That's effectively impossible. We can't even do this inside our prisons. If their child is determined, parents usually cannot do this inside their own homes. I guarantee you that even Singapore has drugs and drug use within its borders. > Enforcing laws. Yep. We're a nation of laws, and all laws should be enforced at all times. I very strongly believe this... to an extreme degree. However, you do need to think about a few key points: 1) You can't extract money from someone who doesn't have an income to garnish or assets to confiscate. This renders fines and other monetary penalties largely ineffective. 2) The obvious alternative to fines is prison time. Because our prisons aren't built to rehabilitate, if you're tossing folks back into the very same situation they came out from, once released from prison they're going to be right back in prison in short order... because nothing about their life changed, except for the fact that they got an unpleasant roof over their head and three square meals for a little while. 2a) In practice, that boils down to "We have decided to house the homeless in prisons, rather than in houses.". Most (all?) of the time, that's _way_ more expensive than, like, housing folks in houses and hooking them up with a rehabilitation program so that it's -as you said- "harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society". 2b) Our prisons have finite space, and are typically substantially overfull. It's better to have free space for new violent offenders (and other substantial threats to public safety) than to cram them 110% full by cramming in nearly every homeless person. > There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street. Bad decisions, but also bad luck. Sometimes bad shit happens to decent folks, and sometimes something comes along and absolutely wrecks you... wrecks you so bad that if you don't have really solid friends (or generations of accumulated wealth) to help you out, you're absolutely going to lose everything you have because you're rendered totally useless for a very, very long time. > [I can't find truckers, or TS/SCI-ready employees because "everyone's" smoking weed and the regulations haven't caught up with the fact that weed is legal now in 75% of the US.] I mean, this is self-explanatory. Not too long ago, it was the case that you couldn't get TS/SCI if you were openly homosexual. The requirements for high-end clearance tend to lag substantially behind what's acceptable in the wider world. It's also a goddamn shame that weed stays in one's system for so very long after its psychoactive effects are gone. It makes testing for "Was this guy doing hazardous work while under the influence?" very tough... so tough that absolute prohibition is the easiest way to deal with it. It'd be super cool if we could build more sensitive tests, but that probably won't happen until FedGov drops the charade and de-schedules weed.

anotherhue 3y ago

For the life of me I cannot understand why we tolerate antisocial behaviour in our public spaces. The difference in experience between Market Street and most streets in Berlin or Kyoto is astounding. Forced relocation to care communities (which would need to be built) is the only move I see. Food, Shelter, Waste disposal, etc. The idea of a group of homeless people being able to set up a camp wherever they want, when everything else in society needs to go through planning permission is insane.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bbor 3y ago

[flagged]

RobertRies 3y ago
"You honestly, really think all those people just sat down one day and decided to be homesless Because they’d be coddled?!" Strictly speaking this is simply a straw man via oversimplification (as is nearly the entirety of this post and the others I've seen from bbor in this thread)... But I've seen this _variety_ of straw man so often that I want to break it out into a specific fallacy on its own. Not sure what to call it but the "Oh, so you think X decided one day just Y?" "Oh so you think Elizabeth Holmes just sat down one day and decided _I'm going to scam billions out of investors and risk lives and pretend I made a blood testing machine_"? "Who sees this advertisement for Tide and just decides _I'm going to buy Tide because I saw this advertisement?" "Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women?" "Oh, so you think I'm going to do heroin one time and suddenly I'm going to be homeless and addicted?" No. We're the culmination of dozens, hundreds, thousands of behaviors (with genetic and environmental influences) that create a trend. So, err, I'll entertain your bad-faith rhetorical question and answer: no, nobody thinks anyone "sat down one day and decided to be homesless [sic] because they'd be coddled." San Francisco (on behalf of the voters, you and I) have created thousands of tiny incentive structures that maximizes the pain people experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, while simultaneously maximizing the negative impact to the housed, because you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults, burglaries and all the other fun because they aren't supporting your policies. Let me guess: housing-first? Certainly their drug addictions and mental illnesses will instantly vanish with a free house in the most expensive real-estate in the country? Anything short of this, well, they can stay on the street and find comfort in stealing things to fund their heroin/fentanyl self-medication.
- bbor 3y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to read and respond :) Always appreciate a dialogue. the others I've seen from bbor in this thread I think we can both agree that using the word "bbor" in the context of this conversation is kinda funny. fallacy "Figure of speech" Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women? Probably? thousands of tiny incentive structures Like... feeding them? Giving them shelter so they're less likely to die of exposure, and because people hate when they sleep within sight? you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults... because they aren't supporting your policies. You literally spent the last 75% of your comment talking about the Strawman Fallacy and then... To be explicit here: Ok, you win, no one decides to be homeless in literally one single moment, all of life is the culmination of decisions and life events, totally agree with you. The rest of my comment was about how fucking awful it is to be homeless. Which you would agree, no? I cited some insane statistic elsewhere here about them being almost 20 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, and 9 times more likely to be sexually assaulted. I guess you don't have to work if you live on the streets, but I can't believe anyone would argue that they're "coddled". The only reason people would prefer homelessness is if they've been beaten down by the system to ridiculous degree, e.g. felons; what are they supposed to do after serving their time, considering it's way harder to find housing or employment in an economy that's already brutally hard? [1][2][3][4][5] From there, consider people who have suffered abuse, drug addiction, mental health issues, and just plain shit luck. Do they deserve whatever psychotic/violent shit "be tougher on the homeless" implies? This is really the gist of it: what should we do? Yes, my plan is housing first, on top of fixing our insane, unprecedented level of inequality (except for the Gilded Age, which hopefully we agree was a Very Very Bad Time). I think the idea expressed above that we just need to... beat them up more..? and that will fix the problem is heartless beyond belief. Curious to hear your thoughts! 1. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-household-debt/ https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-household-d... Average revolving credit card balance, 2022 $5,910 Average personal loan debt, 2022 $18,255 2. Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ 3. Home prices are rising faster than wages: https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages 4. 42% of Gen Z Diagnosed with a mental health condition: https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/survey-42-of-gen-z-diagnosed-with-a-mental-health-condition/ https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/survey-42-of-gen-z-diagnos... 5. Wealth inequality in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite... Reich states that 95% of economic gains following the economic recovery which began in 2009 went to the top 1% of Americans During the COVID-19 pandemic, the wealth held by billionaires in the U.S. increased by 70%... "the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record." As of late 2022... 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). *The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion*.

simoncion 3y ago

> That means: Cutting off the drug supply. Enforcing laws. Everything you most likely despise. Speaking about presumptions that show one's character... > Money is not fixing the issue. ... You have to make it harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society. ... Jobs are not the problem. On this we agree, very, very, very strongly. Jobs are not the problem. A lack of money for homeless assistance (and "assistance") programs is not the problem. (In fact, there's certainly way too much money thrown at those sorts of programs.) Based on what I've observed over the years here in San Francisco, for the situation in San Francisco, lack of housing is the problem. As I said upthread: > Housing the homeless and providing the medical and psychological care they need is the humane thing to do. When you can't find housing because there is no housing to be had, and when it's tough as shit to hold down a job because you don't have a solid place to sleep, to clean your clothes, to safely store your alarm clock that's gonna wake you up for tomorrow's shift, etc, etc, then you have one of those "self-perpetuating cycles" that leaves you jobless and homeless. > That means: Cutting off the drug supply. That's effectively impossible. We can't even do this inside our prisons. If their child is determined, parents usually cannot do this inside their own homes. I guarantee you that even Singapore has drugs and drug use within its borders. > Enforcing laws. Yep. We're a nation of laws, and all laws should be enforced at all times. I very strongly believe this... to an extreme degree. However, you do need to think about a few key points: 1) You can't extract money from someone who doesn't have an income to garnish or assets to confiscate. This renders fines and other monetary penalties largely ineffective. 2) The obvious alternative to fines is prison time. Because our prisons aren't built to rehabilitate, if you're tossing folks back into the very same situation they came out from, once released from prison they're going to be right back in prison in short order... because nothing about their life changed, except for the fact that they got an unpleasant roof over their head and three square meals for a little while. 2a) In practice, that boils down to "We have decided to house the homeless in prisons, rather than in houses.". Most (all?) of the time, that's _way_ more expensive than, like, housing folks in houses and hooking them up with a rehabilitation program so that it's -as you said- "harder to become homeless, than it is to be a successful functioning member of society". 2b) Our prisons have finite space, and are typically substantially overfull. It's better to have free space for new violent offenders (and other substantial threats to public safety) than to cram them 110% full by cramming in nearly every homeless person. > There is opportunity for everyone, bad decisions put you in the street. Bad decisions, but also bad luck. Sometimes bad shit happens to decent folks, and sometimes something comes along and absolutely wrecks you... wrecks you so bad that if you don't have really solid friends (or generations of accumulated wealth) to help you out, you're absolutely going to lose everything you have because you're rendered totally useless for a very, very long time. > [I can't find truckers, or TS/SCI-ready employees because "everyone's" smoking weed and the regulations haven't caught up with the fact that weed is legal now in 75% of the US.] I mean, this is self-explanatory. Not too long ago, it was the case that you couldn't get TS/SCI if you were openly homosexual. The requirements for high-end clearance tend to lag substantially behind what's acceptable in the wider world. It's also a goddamn shame that weed stays in one's system for so very long after its psychoactive effects are gone. It makes testing for "Was this guy doing hazardous work while under the influence?" very tough... so tough that absolute prohibition is the easiest way to deal with it. It'd be super cool if we could build more sensitive tests, but that probably won't happen until FedGov drops the charade and de-schedules weed.