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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>On the flip side, the government is powerless to address chronic mental health issues without a paper trail. We all know that poverty and mental health issues are deeply entwined.

Only in the absence of a civilized public welfare system.

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I'm arguing for one of those, actually. But even though I'd like to see more resources focused on these problems, we can't just spend our way into good mental health care. When people are in danger or harming others, care and treatment sometimes has to be compelled. People have a right to their day in court, so some amount of evidence has to be gathered so judges can objectively rule on the relevant questions.

I don’t think camping and sleeping under bridges are dangerous or harming others. I’m confused how this example shows your point, since your point is about dangerous people, and I’m not sure if people who sleep under bridges are necessarily dangerous.

Camping and sleeping under bridges harms everyone because of all the waste that ends up in watersheds. I've helped out with cleaning up riverbanks a couple times after illegal encampments were removed. Those places were like disaster areas and toxic waste dumps.

There's no trash removal for these people, and they're shut out of all public bathrooms. What do we really expect?

i-5 in Seattle is absolutely trashed from Northgate to Downtown because Jenny Durkan and previous mayors have raided homeless encampments out of view, away from other homes, spending millions of dollars to displace them instead of just giving them garbage cans and a few porta potties. They end up on i5 and in tent camps downtown and it looks like a dump.

I'm not familiar with the situation in Seattle, but in areas where homeless shelters have open beds then I really expect people to use them instead of wrecking ecologically sensitive areas. And in the cleanups I helped with, there were multiple public garbage cans within a couple blocks.

https://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166666265/why-some-homeless-c...

If we did a profiling we'd see that companies (from factories to hotels) do 99% of the pollution of rivers.

Humans have been living camping-like near rivers for millennia. It's not as homeless people shit is toxic...

Yes, it's not the camping, it's the lack of services that is toxic.

I live in Michigan, where PFAS are being found in water supplies all over the state. Companies did and still do dump poisonous chemicals into the environment, and day by day certain alphabet soup agencies give them more and more license to do so. We can talk about some garbage along a river bank after we prosecute large companies for knowingly poisoning entire swaths of land and bodies of water for decades, considering the scale on which they can harm people and the resources they have to avoid doing so.

But its only poor peoples' communities that get the brunt of the pollution. That's because their local governments can't fight against it, whereas richer communities can delay, fight, and stop.

Do poor communities deserve this?

Missing the point? My point is that a little trash on a riverbank pales in comparison to the large-scale environment destruction being committed every day by giant companies. Provide the homeless with food and shelter instead of worrying about some minimal pollution.

My point is about helping sick people. Some of them are dangerous and should get extra attention for that reason. Many are just too sick to pay bills, show up to work reliably, get hired, etc. The government could decriminalize lots of things, but it's hard to show that someone is a danger to themselves if the government refuses to keep certain kinds of records for reasons of privacy and compassion.

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