The Weird Redemption of SF’s Most Reviled Tech Bro | Hacker News Reader

The Weird Redemption of SF’s Most Reviled Tech Bro

backchannel.com

59 pointsrmason77 comments

The most thought-provoking sentence comes near the end:

> Even if Gopman was in it for Gopman, self interest — no matter how imbued with hubris — isn’t mutually exclusive with doing good.

Absolutely true. The consequences of action are what matters.

That said, Gopman never stops sounding like a shithead.

There is a reason people care about motives. Once he achieves "redemption", how much will his future actions and motives align with doing good. In fact, the only reason he appears to continue to work on homelessness is to win back his reputation.

So is it great that he is working with the homeless? Yes.

Would I trust a "redeemed" Greg Gopman. Nope.

That isn't to say that he cannot change, but this article shows that he is not there yet. Until the reason for the work shifts, there is no reason to believe that any company or cause he joins is for the cause and not selfish motives.

Sometimes good things come of selfishness, but in the long term it is good to know where someone's priorities lie.

(Sorry, out of context)

> Would I trust a "redeemed" Greg Gopman. Nope.

Which is exactly the same reason why I will never trust Microsoft: even if current actions are okayish, what they did in the past has disqualified them for life.

That is not a good analogy. A company is not a person; the people in change of companies change, and in the case of Microsoft, very significantly over the years.

A person is also not a constant thing, but anyway past actions have a lot of weight.

I do not trust them because what they did, how they did it, worked for them. They'll try again (they try still now, with a lower profile) whenever they feel they'll get benefit out of it. Any company can do this, but they are the ones who have already done it, repeatedly.

And I will never trust them for basically what you could call "revenge": I think they have significantly altered the path of progress on IT, and have basically destroyed an option which was open for a while at the end of the 90s. The world is very much for the worse because of them, and that crime can never be corrected, since the option is not open anymore, and will never be.

Corporations are people, my friend.

Corporate personhood is a convenient legal fiction but it's a myth that corporations hold all the same rights and responsibilities as an actual person. There are limits.

Can I ask you something - do you work in a homeless shelter or spend all of your time being selfless for other people? Or do you spend more than 50% of your time on personal gain like most of us?

Because otherwise, I really don't think you have a right to say that you question Gopman's future intentions. When someone says something bad against someone else and then works tirelessly for a year or two to actually do something to fix it like Gopman has, I think they deserve at least their shot at redemption. You seem to basically agree with that I think?

This makes me think though. Humanity is really good at holding grudges. But did the government of SF move ahead by just outright rejecting Gopman's later proposals instead of considering them completely, seeing if they would maybe potentially work, then rejecting them? Instead this is a binary, either someone and their ideas are 100% bad or 100% good according to their viewpoint based on track record. A few of them heard him out but then gossip and human nature got the best of us once again. And so he says fuck it and goes to South East Asia because even when you recognize you've done something wrong and try a few different ways to make it better, apparently nobody wants to hear it. Good works are good works if you ask me, regardless of intention.

If our race vilifies someone or claims that they are absolutely bad for the rest of their life/have bad intentions for something they said when they seem to be trying in earnest to make up for it as best they can in the now, that just sucks. Then nobody has a shot at redemption and more importantly, the good works that could be done based on that shot are lost.

I wanted to close by saying that I am also skeptical of Gopman and I think the initial words he said were pretty gross and definitely messed up. But I also think it's upsetting that we can't recognize the things he's done are a net positive, even if we can never 100% forgive him. And I also think holding grudges just isn't very positive, it just doesn't help much overall except make us like we're somehow 100x morally better than the other person.

Honestly you and I probably see eye to eye on most of this but I just thought your comment half matched my thoughts and half didn't! Peace

I work about 90 hours a week building software for local governments (http://seneca.systems). If I only cared about personal gain, I would have either a) stayed at Gusto (where the stock I left on the table is now worth ~$2m) or b) started an ad-network. You won't here about us in TechCrunch because what we do is not sexy or about our personal brands. I have never had so much fun as I do now, empowering public servants.[1]

I agree he deserves a shot at redemption, but my point is that he doesn't seem to have gotten there yet.

I'm not saying he is a bad person forever because of his original comments. Those do not really bother me—he fucked up, said some stupid things, and got vilified on the internet. But the why and how he goes about his future work absolutely matters to me because it indicates where he is going in the future.

Let's say you're interviewing two candidates for a marketing position, both of whom have identical backgrounds, skills, etc. (impossible, but this is a hypothetical.) One says they want to do marketing for you because they love your customers, believe in your mission, and care about the impact they can have by spreading the word. The other one says they want to do marketing for you because they think you are attacking a huge market opportunity and can make a lot of money.

Which do you hire? Would you say it doesn't matter because outcomes are the only important thing? I wouldn't, because part of trusting someone to act independently is understanding their motivations. If either of these candidates fuck up, they will do so in very different ways. Candidate 1 will err too much on the side of the customer and the mission, while Candidate 2 will err on the side of making money.

I would take Candidate 1 11/10 times.

[1]: Which, by the way, is probably irrelevant. You brought up good points regardless of who you are or what you do. Challenging the pedigree or credentials of the commentors only serves to distract. Unless I was making the point that I was better than him (which is not what I was trying to imply, so forgive me if it came off that way), then who I am is not relevant.

> They met on the roof of Soma Grand while Parker explained the web of nonprofits and city departments that spends $241 million a year on the city’s more than 6,000 homeless residents, a population count that has stayed nearly unchanged for 25 years.

That line stuns me. How can you spend $40k+ per homeless person each year and have the absolute number unchanged? How much is actually going to help the people versus going into line items that don't?

Are they helping people move up and out of homelessness and more people keep coming?

Or are the efforts relatively fruitless and they just keep throwing money at it?

I have a sinking suspicion that for every homeless person helped, more people are getting evicted and becoming newly homeless.

That's it.

Easy: as people get out of homelessness, new ones become homeless. $40k for the transition is not crazy given that it includes police and medical.

It doesn't work because homelessness is a structural feature of our economy. Until we decide to return to the level and type of wealth redistribution we had before the 1980s, it's going to remain about the same.

Anybody downvoting this comment should spend some time looking at how street homelessness emerged as a major problem in the 1980s, following massive reduction in federal public housing funding. This is well understood among people who have spent any amount of time working with homeless people, not so much by the general public.

Please post the relevant links, so the rest of us can be enlightened. I want to see a government program that had a massive reduction in funding.

From Googling "federal public housing funding 1980s", the very first link states:

"In his first year in office Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 to about $17.5 billion. And for the next few years he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether."

From the Wikipedia article entitled "Public housing in the United States", which has a section specifically about the period of time in question:

"Under the Reagan administration, household contribution towards Section 8 rents was increased to 30% of household income and fair market rents were lowered. Public assistance for housing efforts was reduced as part of a package of across the board cuts."

I am not an American and don't know the history of American federal program funding, but I do have access to things that let me search for things. You should try it.

This was enlightening, I copy-pasted that person's comment about funding in the 1980s and got three decent hits on the matter, one of which included actual stats (32B-6.9B):

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa127.html

#Edit. Reading the article further, it seems the Cato institute dismisses/rebukes most of the points regarding federal housing being the cause of homelessness in the 1980's.

Imagine that.

From the link:

Like the shift from 40-year mortgage subsidies to 15- year housing certificates, the shift from the certificates to 5-year vouchers enabled Congress to reduce HUD's budget authorizations. Such reductions have created the mistaken impression that federal housing assistance has been cut. In fact, annual outlays increased from $5.7 billion in 1980 to $13.8 billion in 1988. The number of families being served by HUD housing programs rose from 3.1 million in 1980 to 4.2 million in 1988. Moreover, a housing voucher costs the government only about $4,500 a year, whereas a new unit of public housing costs it $9,000 a year.

I guess mistaken impressions are still common on the internet.

Have you ever met anybody who's tried to actually use a Section 8 voucher? I'm going to bet you haven't and neither has the author of the linked paper.

I rather think it wasn't a result of decreased public housing but rather of the closing of the asylums.

You're operating under a couple of misunderstandings.

1) most homeless people do not have a mental illness. MI is over-represented in the homeless population, but only one fifth of rough sleepers have a mental illness.

If you look at the chronically homeless (people homeless for over a year) you see that a third of them have a severe mental illness

If four fifths of the homeless population or two thirds of the chronic homeless population are not mentally ill it's hard to see how mental health hospitals would have made much difference.

2) that people with a mental illness must have a hospital bed and nothing else will do. The UK also closed many large hospitals - currently only about 8% of the people accessing specialist mental health services need a bed. Most people need treatment in the community. It's safer, more effective, and cheaper.

Intervention services (police, emergency rooms, temporary housing) tend to be very expensive. $40K per person per year is likely not dedicated to getting people out of homelessness but instead to keeping them safe and alive.

I can think of three reasons other than outright waste and poor organization:

* It's not the same 6000 every year. The number of people who are homeless in SF for any part of any given year could easily be several times that.

* There are a few individuals who cost way, way more than that. The ones that SFFD refers to as their "regulars". The drug addicts and mentally ill who go on ambulance rides every week or more. I'm not saying they're the majority, but they certainly exist, and like any industry it only takes a few whales to add up.

* Land to put shelters on is really, really expensive.

> The drug addicts and mentally ill who go on ambulance rides every week or more.

These people are abusing their freedom and abusing free services. At what point do we either restrict their freedom or retract their free services? 'You get to do whatever you like, with no consequences' isn't a long-term plan for social success.

Bottom line is, you don't. A modern society can bear the small burden this tiny slice of humanity represents; it's just immoral ones that decide they don't want to.

If you're determined that there must be consequences for individuals abusing their - then prioritize the weak after you've dealt with the corruption of rich, powerful individuals, whose cost to society is far greater.

Of course, the weakest are utterly powerless to prevent YOU from trying to ensure they suffer whatever meets your desire for "consequences", while there's little YOU can do about the truly powerful. This is why so many prefer to turn a blind eye to abuse of power, and focus instead on letting the powerless suffer. It doesn't make anybody's life better in the slightest. But some people seem to take comfort in it.

Im not the author of above post. Whether I agree with that post is irrelevant. Ive been reding HN since at least 2010. This is what ive got to say: Wow, the fucking downvotes are out of hand lately Ive seen so many inoffensive posts grayed out lately Don't downvote just because you disagree

Please, make downvoting cost at least 10 karma (The downvoter pays, obviously)

Please

The rest of the united states dumps their homeless problem on CA.

viz nevada busing homeless people to sf and dumping them here

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tenta...

edit: here's a better link

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...

   “Over the past five years, the state of Nevada has transferred to other 
   states approximately 1,500 patients discharged from its state-run 
   Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, including 500 patients that Nevada sent by 
   Greyhound bus to cities and counties in California,” said the lawsuit filed 
   September 2013 by Herrera in San Francisco Superior Court. The revelations 
   led to the loss of the hospital’s accreditation. It has since been 
   reaccredited.
   
   The patients, many of whom were mentally ill indigent and not California 
   residents, were sent to various destinations with no arrangements for when 
   they arrived, according to the lawsuit.

Even when homeless aren't bused to CA, it beats most of the country: generous public services plus weather rarely below freezing. So people migrate here from all over, yet we alone pay for the services people need.

My SO had someone chase her around a car attempting to stab her with a screwdriver. SF police, typically useless, didn't arrive until he was long gone. People aren't exaggerating when they say big pieces of the city are unsafe.

"The rest of the united states dumps their homeless problem on CA."

Hahaha, so because someone else gave us the problem we don't have to solve it anymore.

SORRY GUYS NOTHING WE CAN DO. EVEN WITH INFINITY TAX DOLLARS NOTHING WILL HELP BECAUSE NEVADA BUSSED IN SOME CRAZY PEOPLE. GUESS WE ALL HAVE TO LIVE WITH FILTH AND SHIT EVERYWHERE.

hahahahahahah

The money gets spent on rough sleepers. It doesn't get spent of services that would prevent people falling into the category of rough sleeper.

Spending money on the psycho-social stuff - drug addiction, alcohol addiction, debt advice, housing support, MH treatment, employment support - would prevent a bunch of people losing their homes, and would turn the huge numbers of people who are vulnerably homed into people who are less vulnerable.

Sadly society pretty much says "Fuck You" to people are rough sleeping where the needs are easiest to see. It's going to be harder to get society to stump up the cash for prevention, even though the "spend to save" figures are remarkable.

>How can you spend $40k+ per homeless person each year

They don't. Figure in all the staff in the system earning $35K+, operational costs and what's left over goes towards helping people.

I find the nonprofits here print brochures, answer phones and refer you to other nonprofits who print brochures, answer phones and refer you to other nonprofits... in an endless loop.

To paraphrase a quote I read a long time ago: you can't make a man understand something, if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

The City spends $240M/year on homelessness (and that doesn't include the money hospitals spend on ER visits by the homeless). There's a whole bureaucracy built around "solving" the homelessness problem; and this bureaucracy would be out of a job if the number of homeless people shrank dramatically. And that is why this problem may never be solved.

The "solutions" proposed involve so much money that it makes you question the sanity of the proposer. Example: building 6,000 housing units for the homeless. Really?!? How have the dense urban housing projects turned out in other cities? And where will the billions of dollars come from? And who will maintain these units? etc. etc. Of course, these proposals are outrageous simply because the more outrageous the proposal, the more money your non-profit gets, it seems.

Have you ever spent any time working for, or even around, any of these nonprofits that you so brilliantly deduce must only be in it to preserve their own jobs? I'll bet you haven't. You sould try it.

Building housing for homeless people has worked great in other cities[1], and is significantly cheaper than the current alternative, which is housing them in jails or hospitals.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...

SF does have a moderate number of city-funded "supportive housing" units.[1] These are typically old SRO hotels now run by nonprofits, paid by the city. This sort of works. In addition to the visible homeless, there are even more "near homeless" in such facilities. It costs the city $20K - $40K per person per year in such facilities. This is called "Care Not Cash" in SF. Most of those facilities are pretty bad to live in, mostly because of the other tenants. Some people prefer living in a tent over living with crazies and druggies. "Hell is other people" applies.

Until forty years ago, states ran big mental hospitals which warehoused the bewildered. The "Agnews Developmental Center", once called "The Great Asylum for the Insane", in Santa Clara was such a place. It's now an Oracle facility. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in O'Connor v. Donaldson, that the Government does not have the power to confine people who are not dangerous, even if they are not sane. This began the shutdown of the big mental institutions. This is why homeless people can no longer be forcibly shipped to some big institution in the country and hidden away.

This change, plus the decline of low-skill jobs and the rise in the cost of housing, created homelessness as a problem. Cuts in welfare didn't help.

Estimates are that about half of SF's homeless are on drugs. Others are just broke. Some have skills, but the wrong ones. Printers, longshoremen - SF once had many of those. Not any more. There's no easy answer.

[1] http://dishsf.org/ http://www.ecs-sf.org/programs/housing.html [2] http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/152/notsosupportive.html

> Estimates are that about half of SF's homeless are on drugs. Others are just broke. Some have skills, but the wrong ones. Printers, longshoremen - SF once had many of those. Not any more. There's no easy answer.

Hahahahahahah

"There’s no easy answer!" I guess arresting people breaking federal drug laws is right out the window.

NOTHING WE CAN DO, GUYS. TEE HEE.

The man you paraphrase, Upton Sinclair (He said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"), was a socialist and would probably retort that it is your salary, your luck and privileged position, that prevents you from understanding.

UPDATE: I did a little digging, and the quote is from I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked, a book whose motivation was to grow support for Sinclair's End Poverty plan, which started out as his End Poverty in California Plan, the core of his platform when he ran for governor.

That the quote has a certain context doesn't mean it can't apply in different contexts.

"I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day."

That sentence is 100% correct - we shouldn't have to see that around us.

The tragic thing about the blog post that was so reviled, is that it should have been a call to action for the community.

The thousands of homeless people in major urban centers and the lack of progress in doing anything about it is an indictment of our society.

And what has been the response of local government in the Bay Area?

Nearly every city on the peninsula has passed laws against sleeping in your car, making the homeless even more miserable.

The reality is that we haven't even started to address the problem, and most people are just fine with that - as long as the homeless are not in their neighborhood.

When you want to cast someone in technology as an antagonist up front with prejudice you use the epithet "tech bro" (or, tech sis, some day). The article made some good points but the exhausting insistence on using the overwrought tech bro takes away from some insight.

Two people, a homeless person and a person of means. Both people, both can be equally mean but we insist the person of means is more "civilized" and thus we implicitly demand more from them while simultaneously demanding less from those who have achieved less. Take those two people and imagine both going off on incoherent booze induced bigoted rants, who do we "expect to know better". They are both people under "the influence" yet we presume one should be able to be "more human" than the other, to be less grotesque.

It's not that we expect more, it's that we have more empathy for those without. With good reason, hardship is easier for those with means to fix it.

It's like the difference between a generally angry guy who lashes out equally at his boss, his friends and his kids and ends up jobless, homeless and alone because of it, and a manipulative abuser who is perfectly capable of being a friendly, patient colleague at work and a great friend but goes home and tells his wife that he can't help hitting her. People who fail to hold it together in many ways are considered to be incapable of doing so, people who only lose it in very specific ways are considered to be choosing to do so.

> If Gopman has any hope of winning you over, it’s IRL. Watching him work a room is witnessing a guy who’s put in his 10,000 hours of mastery; every person — man or woman, nerd or preppie — usually comes away beaming. “You could drop him off in a desert and he’ll find friends somehow,” his friend tells me. He approached Mark Cuban cold in a cafe — and finagled a coffee date later that week. When he spotted Mayor Lee out on a mid-Market walkabout months after The Rant, Gopman talked his way into an impromptu meet-and-greet with the mayor.

To me, this was the most interesting part of the article. That Gopman has charisma. I'm curious why they talk about the "10,000 hours of mastery". When I see my very few friends who can work the room do this (e.g. go up to complete strangers and make friends, go away, make more friends elsewhere, come back and continue), it's quite like magic to me.

Who do you know is like this? Have they always been that way?

When the pitch forks were burning in Valleywag, there was no indication about this part of Gopman. So much of gossip is just echo chamber stuff, even in niche areas like technology.

The 10000 hrs is something put out by Gladwell. Lots of people take it as gospel.

I've met Greg at Upload -- and yes, he's charismatic. Kind of an easy confidence, and friendly. I've known some very charismatic people in my day, and I'd say it's more a talent than a skill. The 10,000 hours thing is a canard.

There are some techniques you can work on mastering to be comfortable around people, but real charisma is more fundamental, like a personality trait. And it's damned useful when you're trying to hustle; I'm not claiming it myself, but I've seen it work wonders when deployed by others. (Or when desperately missing, seeing its lack....)

It's hard for some people to have empathy for those who are less advantaged then them. People don't see all the things that went right for them, and so they imagine that everyone is equally fortunate, and thus anyone who isn't doing as well is the victim of their own mistakes. The truth is we are a product of our opportunities and circumstances in ways that are scary to contemplate.

I don't know that this guy will ever be redeemed in the public's eye, but at least he looks at homeless people as individuals and people worth talking to, instead of as human garbage to be hidden away, unworthy of kindness and decency, as some do. And he helped get some wifi into homeless shelters. It makes me think about what I can do.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Sidewalk-t...

>“I could have a job, be living in an apartment and all that crap,” he said cheerfully, “but I’m not ready. Right now I just like getting high.”

>Fikes, who says he moved here last month because he heard San Francisco had excellent homeless services, said a church group comes by from time to time with free tents

There is no solution here. City leaders are pressing for solutions while many homeless are just waiting for another handout.

But the popular image is that of a hardworking man who got evicted by some Google-bus-taking tech bro and lost his job!

Ask any longtime resident, and they'll tell you that most homeless, basically, can't be helped. They have severe substance abuse problems and no desire to settle down.

Actually most homeless people can be helped. The chronically homeless only make up about 15% of the homeless population.

The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for months not years, and the many programs to aid them in finding housing and preventing homelessness in the first place have a significant measurable effect on the average number of homeless shelter entries and length of stay.

This may be true nationally, but it is not true in SF.

Nope, it's still true. From: http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San%...

The number of chronically homeless individuals and families in San Francisco continues to decline. In 2015, 25% of survey respondents were chronically homeless, compared to 31% in 2013. Based on Point-in-Time Count data, it was estimated there were 1,745 chronically homeless individuals and 18 chronically homeless families living in San Francisco on January 29, 2015.

Don't bring facts into this!

I went through that survey too. But self-reported surveys run a huge risk of bias. The respondents sometimes say what they think you want them to say.

Homelessness should be a federal issue. Services should be rendered at the jurisdiction they've spent the most time in the last X-years (decade?) so you don't get clumping and for it to remain dispersed, rather than concentrated. Trying to address this locally has an inherent conflict of interest. If you give great service, you attract others from distant places seeking these services but still funded by the same base population and you become both a magnet and you exhaust your resources.

"I can quit anytime I want to, I just don't want to."

Sounds like addiction to me.

How much time have you spent actually talking to homeless people, learning about their lives, their histories, or their motives for doing what they do? Are you just basing your opinion on the quotes from one widely disputed article? Maybe you should start with the most recent official data on the subject[1].

[1] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San...

Great job reducing a whole population to two people in order to perpetuate your biases. I bet people love living on the streets and begging for handouts. I don't understand why they can't get jobs like normal people?

My point was that there is currently no viable solutions to homelessness in SF. The city and the homeless are trapped in a cycle of enabling and being enabled, it's been this way for decades.

I say this in a general sense. The majority of homeless are on the streets due to mental illness and/or addiction.

Okay that's a much more reasonable thread of thought and I actually do agree that there isn't a viable solution present, especially because current solutions aren't effective at solving the issue. You choice of quotes just made it sound like you were putting all the blame on homeless people who want "handouts" and portraying it as some sort of glamorous lifestyle where they are tended to.

Whilst every fibre of my being is revolted by the comments this guy made, the fact that Valleywag made it so controversial is just as bad.

The Valleywags of this world are ridiculous and a blight on any society.

Honestly, I don't see any redemption here. Rather than looking inward and questioning his beliefs and place in everything, it just seems like he was desperate to do anything to salvage his image—which was all his doing in the first place. (He even says "apparently, this wrong I’ve done to the city.") So not only does this show him to be a hypocrite, it also shows a complete lack of introspection or change. His advice to Keller is "Don’t apologize" and "instead, put your words in context". While I can respect his attempts—it does show that he put effort in—I disagree that "self-interest ... isn’t mutually exclusive with doing good". This is a guy who wanted to make a profit off of homeless people. His solutions include making them work for Uber, which requires a drivers license and a car (I doubt they'll be able to finance), or as a last resort, rent out their domes on airbnb, putting them in potential legal trouble even if they had any takers. Maybe I'm one of those haters, but I think he should keep his "disruption" and NIH-syndrome in tech startups.

The rationale for having a for-profit organization that helps people is that it is not economically sustainable, it wouldn't depend on continuous outside finding.

Re cars, consider that the homeless person mentioned in the article had his rent increases to 4200$ - it seems in San Francisco lower middle class can become homeless. And even lower class people have cars. In San Francisco, you don't have to be on poverty to become homeless, although it will probably make you poor once you are.

Fair points, especially the car part. It just feels exploitative to me though, making money off people who are already desperate for any they can get. Looking more closely at the article, it looks like they wanted to profit off things like referral fees or something like: "pay $300 a month in rent or work 15 hours a week on crowdfunded community service project". This does seem pretty ethical, though I don't know profitable.

I think it's funny we're saying someone who can't afford $50k/year in rent is 'lower middle class.' If you keep your housing costs below 25% of gross income (a common recommendation), then anyone earning less than $200k annually is lower middle class.

To be fair, the article says Darcel Jackson had also lost his job due to a medical condition; so it's not just the rent increase... but a professional welder (his profession before a stroke) should pay high five figures to low six figures.

So yeah... a city where welders, teachers [1], and other professionals and tradeworkers can't afford to live is doing something wrong.

[1]from Redfin research: https://www.redfin.com/blog/2014/02/california-home-affordab...

I don't think the idea of a for-profit company for the public benefit is so outlandish.

This guy is still a jerk. The whole article is written as a gross sympathy piece for him. He worked for a year on homelessness and didn't solve it? Very smart, passionate (I.e., don't care about homelessness only because they got caught saying something horrible) have spent decades on it. This guy seriously thought he could solve the whole issue and make everything go away in a year? Really?

Also, I love how the author non-chalantly mentions that homeless people with mental illnesses would be banned from his planned camps. That's absolutely ridiculous, horrible, and blatantly illegal.

Most people will never in their life spend a year on fixing homelessness.

Most people, therefore, have a basically neutral effect on homelessness. I'd argue this guy had a completely negative effect.

Most people don't have a self entitled attitude they make so blatantly public either.

I like to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public, both online with accounts tied to my real identity and with friends, coworkers, etc. This is a dangerous game and I'm sure someday it will get me in more serious trouble than the occasional hurt feeling. If someone is motivated enough, they can take offense with every little thing you say. I'm not commenting on any aspect of what Greg said or did. But kudos to anyone anywhere who says something that isn't 100% politically correct.

If someone is motivated enough, they can take offense with every little thing you say.

You seem to understand that you're actually hurting people's feelings, but the problem is supposedly other people who are "motivated" to take offense? Please examine your own motivations (beyond "I like to do this").

Also, the phrase "push the boundaries" means he knows that what he is saying is potentially offensive.

I've been seeing a interesting trend lately with people conflating "not being a jerk" with "political correctness". If you're aware its a dangerous game and that its hurting people's feelings, why are you still doing it? Maybe you actually are to blame for being offensive rather than a group of people just looking to take offense with everything. Just because you can say something, doesn't mean you should and it doesn't suddenly become oppression of free speech.

The term "politically correct" means following and believing a view that is in the majority of your area. I disagree with political dogma from both ends of the spectrum, and people hold various beliefs without ever really thinking of why they have them.

In relation to the article, I agree that America is capitalist, and I don't have any issue with gentrification and forcing out poor people from an area that becomes expensive. What drives me nuts is that people accept that they need to move to SF, NYC, Boston, etc. in order to get the job they want, but you are morally obligated to feel bad about doing it, and pay lip service to the people you forced out. If you really agreed with this, you wouldn't have moved in! I think it's the hypocrisy that drives me bananas.

There's another sense where "Politically Correct" means speech that conforms to a set of rules about what is ok to say, regardless of the truth of such speech. It means censoring yourself and maybe using a special limited vocabulary instead of existing words that describe the situation better.

Guys if you haven’t read a study about homelessness you are constitutionally obligated to be delighted by their presence and you can’t be annoyed that you live in the highest taxed area of the United States and no one has fucking fixed the God damned problem or is even trying.

In fact we should all team up and go around the city bronzing all the turds they leave on the fucking sidewalk.

I think it's okay to be disgusted by the outcomes of homelessness -- that's a natural reaction, and I imagine it takes a lot of empathy for those who work with the homeless to be able to see past it, to the people they're trying to help.

But I don't think it's okay to make halfway thought through, vaguely libertarian, unhelpful statements that fail to engage with the actual problem, then act like you've delivered some brilliant nugget of wisdom.

Look, this is a hard problem (something the article sort of glosses over). Smart, caring, good people work hard on this, and have for a long time. It's maybe not amenable to easy answers. And you know what? It's part of San Francisco. So you can either engage with the reality, acknowledge it's complex and difficult, or you can maybe defer to those who have done the reading.

Option three, I think, is moving to a lower-taxed area with fewer homeless people. Based on your comment, I vote for option 3.

Ewww. This guy. This author could put a positive spin on Donald Trump.

But could he do it for Hillary? That would be a real challenge.

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