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Comment by threwawaysoff | Hacker News Reader

The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many homeless people living on freeway on-ramp embankments.

Case in point: I remember a hackerspace had a large winter food donation barrel that was sitting out for weeks returned with 1 can in it. 1. One. That says "F U" to hungry people.

Also consider how many churches in the SF Bay Area don't do meaningful community outreach and just show up on Sundays.

I just hope none of the comfortable and privileged ever end up poor and hungry, because they'd be in for a shock.

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I call BS on this. You can read just the home page of the Second Harvest Silicon Valley homepage that demand has doubled and people have stepped up to fill the gap.

https://www.shfb.org/

SF spends something like 40k per homeless person per year: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...

It's a hard problem to solve.

Example (not necessarily the valley) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-charity/ameri...

In conclusion you can find ample evidence that no one cares or you can find a way to make some tiny impact and attempt to influence others to do the same.

The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves.

Perhaps people should voluntarily give to charity. But let's not be quick to call them stingy if they don't.

Take a $200,000 Bay Area salary, and the taxes paid on it. All numbers crude, my point remains w/o exact amounts:

    8% social security/medicare
    9% state income tax
   25% federal income tax
   ---
   42% that's just in direct taxes

and further:

   8% sales tax
   direct property tax if own house
   indirect property tax if renting
   gas tax
   income tax on stock options

The list is almost endless.

A better question is: where the fuck does all the money already being paid go to?

Well, the military budget seems to be doing just fine.

52% of total, last I checked.

> The problem is nearly all white-collar people in the SF Bay Area are stingy and blind to the plights of anyone else besides themselves. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many homeless people living on freeway on-ramp embankments.

Wow, people in Africa and India must be the blindest of them all!

Or...maybe it's not as simple as throwing money out of a helicopter?

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