Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin_vanw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm not as positive about it. I think volunteering is often subsidizing something that we should be fighting against. Most of the people in line for free soup can be found just hours later purchasing alcohol or drugs.

If you have a famine or a war or serious poverty, or it is effecting young children, then I think we should put everything else aside and give and volunteer until it hurts.

If on the other hand we have some nasty person who lives on your front porch drinking himself unconscious every afternoon, I don't want them to be fed or clothed. I want life to be as painful as we can make it for them so that they either change their behavior or die more quickly. It's harsh, but I don't see why someone has the right to degrade the lives of everyone around them and have those very people feed and clothe them. If we can offer people help that is effective, we should offer it, even if it is expensive, but otherwise we shouldn't feel guilty about trying to keep nasty people away from our families and ourselves.

I don't wish for this to be confrontational, but I think you may be underestimating how deeply debilitating substance abuse problems can be. I firmly believe that it is a disease and should be treated as such. It also isn't a self inflicted disease like some like to make it out to be. I have friends who grew up in such horrible conditions that it's almost miraculous that they have come out of such an environment and made it to adulthood, although not all of them have.

I grew up poor but from a generally stable family and through both my own poor decisions and some circumstances outside of my control I ended up homeless. I never suffered from addiction or mental health issues and I still ended up on the streets, so I can sympathize with how hard it must be to tackle those issues simultaneously.

I'll agree with you that we should do much more to tackle these issues early on before they turn into more chronic problems later in life. The initial cost would be expensive but it wouldn't surprise me if it ended up being cheaper in the long run.

Just to be clear, if there is any effective thing we can do, we should do it, even if the cost is extremely high.

However, if there is nothing effective we can do to help, we should accept that and move on to a strategy of preventing homeless people from making all the rest of our lives worse.

I would further argue that making something easier will lead to more of it, and making it harder will lead to less of it. However, even if displacing or containing homelessness away from the rest of us doesn't reduce it, it will improve the quality of life for everyone in the city.

Consider housing the person before murdering them via starvation or whatever you had in mind.

Can't you see, their condition is a manifestation of your thinking. What if instead, we took the view that they ought to be guaranteed housing, schooling, healthcare and food. And all this at minor inconvenience to you, some money. Maybe you and your boss already have more than enough money and looking for a way to improve your quality of life and incidentally help someone else too?

It's not a 'minor inconvenience' to have random mentally ill people constantly near my children and to have to be hyper vigilant all the time.

I'm not suggesting anyone be murdered. I'm suggesting that if someone is given $5 and they haven't eaten in 3 days, and they choose to buy heroin or gin with it, they are going to die pretty soon. The alternative world where you stop that death, fix them up and send them right back out to destroy themselves just the same, with the same conclusion, but with a much longer timeline, isn't a better or more compassionate world, it's a morally lazy world where people make believe that they are doing something 'good' by delaying a death while doing nothing to improve that very life, and simply prolong a horrible life. In the meantime that miserable existence makes everyone else worse off, and the city unlivable.

I'm certainly not calling for anyone to be murdered or anyone's rights to be violated in any way, I am very much for not subsidizing the behavior by delivering sandwiches to people so they don't have to take a break from their drinking.

Maybe there is a misunderstanding. I said it's a minor inconvenience to pony up for shelter. Nor do I see where you figured I wouldn't try to improve their life.

For your sake, just hope the robots don't feel the same as you when they takeover. "Oh, he'll never figure out the system, let's let him die."

You're acting like 'housing them' isn't something people have tried over and over. It's super obvious. It doesn't work.

Well, it does work, I mean it does provide protection from the weather. However, you can't trust random people with access to something without supervision, because many will completely destroy it. You can't provide personal supervision to each person so that they can have a private space, because that would cost an incredible amount of money. Finally you can offer some kind of barracks/homeless shelter environment where you have an open space that is easy to supervise to the level of preventing arson and other overt destructive acts. HOWEVER, this means bringing together a bunch of homeless people in one space, and you can't provide enough supervision to prevent them from victimizing each other. Read up on the topic, time and time again homeless people will say that the most dangerous thing about being homeless is you have no protection from the other homeless people.

So on a more personal level, do you really think that super, super obvious ideas haven't been thought of before, and the world just needs someone like you to swoop in and say 'give them shelter!'?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com