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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

This is very hit-piece and I'm someone generally wary of Google.

Titan has owned and operated all of the city's remaining phonebooths for near 20 years. And I believe the MTA bus stop and subway advertising too. This is something they've already been doing.

Control Group developed those info kiosks you may have seen on subway platforms. They're good people that have got some cool tech. They even post in Who's Hiring here frequently (Hi, Ben!).

If this is something that the city wants, I don't see that there's another way that they would get it. The real problem that I have with LinkNYC though, especially in midtown where I live, is that all the terminals have become 24/7 campgrounds for the city's homeless. They charge their phones and browse the web there. There is no way that I would use one of these things now.

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>They charge their phones and browse the web there.

What exactly is the problem with that?

With charging phones? Nothing.

But the reality is that one person is sat camped out with a chair in front of the thing for the entire day. Nobody else can use it. I've seen folks get in fights over these things already.

I spent part of my life homeless. I still see a major problem with how these things are being used right now. We shouldn't be encouraging people to be out on the street all day -- it doesn't solve anything.

What do you propose as an alternative? Charge them 25c for an hour of use?

I find it hard to blame the homeless (as you are) for taking advantage of a free perk, when it should be the cities and companies being held accountable for returning some portion of the profit back to those whom they are profiting from. Alphabet wants the information -- do you think they would have turned down a request to say that some nominal percentage of the revenue goes back to city social service programs?

Alphabet is paying the city money here.

The city should be kicking some of this money into infrastructure/services to help the homeless. Instead right now they're doing massive cuts and leaving people to the streets.

Aren't these kiosks an infrastructure/service to help anyone, including homeless?

Imagine some homeless spends a day at the kiosk and gets a remote job that requires an hour or so a day of online presence. And he/she can _actually_ perform this job thanks to this infrastructure. A couple of months later he/she spends another day at the kiosk and finds an affordable apartment (most likely not in NY). And Voila, we have -1 homeless.

Imagine all the homeless that can't be helped because the one angry violent guy you know that is HIV+ and likes to fist-fight is camped out there all day.

This is a real concern when you're homeless. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-homeless-prefer-stre...

Also, I'm talking about a real guy. He's frequently camped out at the LinkNYC terminals on my corners. (55th & 8th and 56th & 8th).

Of course this is HN where everyone is a self-made success and it's easier to pretend we care about the poor than actually care about the poor. I've been down this road here before.

I agree, and I forgot about the "half billion over 12 years" line in the article. But why throw shade at the homeless due to a failing of the city?

I'm not throwing shade at the homeless. Homeless people should not be encouraged to be out on the street all day. It causes problems for them and it causes problems for everyone else too. Speaking from both experience and research here (see above where I mention about being homeless).

Also, if the city is going to provide a service here (which it has, by outsourcing to Intersection), it needs to make it "Available to Everyone", not just "Available". Right now because people can and do camp out there all day it's the latter.

These systems have cameras and the city and Intersection absolutely should be using those cameras to rate-limit peoples' use to make it "Available to Everyone". Except the cameras are facing the wrong way.

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