70% of San Francisco residents say quality of life has declined: poll
kron4.com
kron4.com
It’s a tough situation. At the end of the day, mental health shouldn’t fall to any one city to be responsible for, but we have to start somewhere. I hope for the best and that SF can come up with an effective way to help people off the streets.
I don't know what the solution is, but calling these petty/non-violent feels like an unfair take.
A victim is often traumatized about this kind of experiences, but that is never taken into account.
I feel San Francisco is such a screwed up place. But many would disagree with me.
I don't live there anymore, but it seems people there like restorative justice, and outsiders should help cheer for that to see whether it will work. We need this kind of experiments anyway.
Whether it works or not, it will be a great experience to learn for outsiders... So... Go Chesa Boudin! Fighto! We support you 200%!
I wouldn't intervene if my stuff isn't like 1M USD or something.
Spending time going to court justifying whether you use the exact appropriate amount of force to stop the incident (who would have time to think that through??) is just really wasteful and psychologically damaging.
He's more of the same SF lawyer we had for decades , but on steroids? What is expected to change exactly?
10y ago, this wasn't an issue, so it was okay.
Now it is an issue.. but we double down on this same approach, which makes it even worse.
Sociological problem like this is tricky to solve. SF residents believe that restorative justice will eventually win in the end, so we should cheer for them to follow through with this experiment.
Whether it will work or not, we will all get to learn. For an outsider, we will get to learn without investing much.
I don't think it will work, but I'm not an expert here, and I would love to know the result of the experiment.
Doesn't restorative justice usually involve restoration, though? As in, making victims "whole" by paying them fair compensation for the harm they've incurred? How often does that happen in SF?
It won't take long.
extraordinary
For example, the Walgreen robbing incident is a non-violent crime because nobody confronted the thieves.
I have no idea if breaking car window is considered a violent crime.
All these crimes have victims.
I would feel very unsafe if I was at the Wallgreens when that happened. The people in the video certainly felt unsafe as well.
> because nobody confronted the thieves
Not really because of this, but rather because there was no assault to addition to the property crime. Its not absolutely impossible for that robber with bicycle from the Walgreen's video to repent when guard lazily tried to stop him.
BTW, it appears what SanFran's sanctuary status pays off – there is steadily growing number of open defecation cases
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/City-plans-to-power-was...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/City-lamp-post-falls-...
>“We believe there was some contribution of dog or human urine on the base of the pole,” PUC spokesman Tyrone Jue said. “It has actually been an issue for us in the past. We encourage people and dogs alike to do their business in other places, like a proper restroom or one of our fire hydrants, which are stronger and made out of cast iron.” Urine accelerates the corrosion of the metal base of street poles, he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/derbyshire/293874...
>The six month monitoring survey is costing Derbyshire County Council £75,000. It was commissioned after a report found that years of exposure to the highly acidic urine from dogs can cause the base of the posts to crumple away.
>It is part of a national campaign after someone died when a light collapsed.
Human Waste Shuts Down BART Escalators
"When work crews pulled open a broken BART escalator at San Francisco's Civic Center Station last month, they found so much human excrement in its works they had to call a hazardous-materials team."
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-dow...
My logic is 'crossing the road is completely reasonable, doesn't harm anyone, people should be allowed to get to the other side of the road'. That logic doesn't follow to speeding, which is dangerous and selfish.
Do you realise it's not a crime in other countries? It's not in the UK and yet we have a lower road-death rate than the US. What are jaywalking laws for anyway?
Putting oneself in the path of a multi-ton vehicle that doesn't expect you to be there and placing the onus on them to avoid committing vehicular manslaughter when you could use a space explicitly designated for pedestrians is, in fact, dangerous and selfish.
The higher road-death rate in the US might be the reason these laws exist, rather than a symptom of the laws - or are you suggesting that making jaywalking a crime increases road deaths?
I’d say it’s because the roads are obviously designed to accommodate automobile traffic. Virtually all modern roads are absolutely designed car-first and it’s apparent that people on-foot aren’t meant to travel on them, except on the sidewalk.
Additionally, a “road” that is only for people and bicycles is typically just called a trail or a path. At least that’s the case where I live. If it’s surrounded by buildings then they call it a plaza.
The deciding factor should be if the law contributes to civil order, or reduces injury.
But you want to ban the pedestrians from the road - you don’t want ‘just as much right’ to the road - you want more right to it. You want the entire length of a block and think pedestrians should just have tiny crossing points.
> The deciding factor should be if the law contributes to civil order, or reduces injury.
But it doesn’t - we do fine without it in the UK.
I’m just against the framing of this as cars vs. people.
I guess traveling safely is unpopular on HN, just like in SF.
The UK has a much smaller population with more public transit, and the cities like London are so densely packed with slow-moving traffic that it's unlikely to lead to deaths. Comparing metrics without context isn't much of an argument against stopping unsafe crossings.
A human being walking around and crossing with some basic looking both ways is not a danger to anyone.
Cars are driven by people, so it's humans in cars vs humans on foot. Both can create danger to each other. Just because you can safely do something doesn't override the reason and spirit of the law.
Jaywalking is a tiny niche of a massive amount of rules that govern how we interact with each other safely. You're really not going to have a problem jaywalking unless you do it unsafely in the first place, and if you do then there's liability and enforcement ready to apply.
No.
> Both can create danger to each other.
Absolute nonsense.
The person on foot is no danger to anyone. For example, two people on foot are no danger to each other. It's only when you add a car that there's any danger at all. The entire cause of any danger whatsoever is the car. Therefore it's the car's responsibility to keep things safe and to keep out of people's way.
(Of course if the car isn't given reasonable opportunity to stop then that's the pedestrian's fault - there's always a reasonableness test.)
Basically if a human being wants to cross then of course cars should stop for them, no matter if there's a crossing or not.
If you want to argue that its about cross-modalities then why have train crossings? Just let cars drive across the tracks if they think its safe. Now surely you can see why that might be an issue?
The whole point of these laws is to create safety by reducing unpredictable events. Again, it doesn't mean you can't safely ignore the laws (even most of the time), but that's not what the law is for. It's ironic that you mention reasonableness and yet have a completely unreasonable understanding of the rules.
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
But yet UK prohibits pedestrians on highways and some other zones and also Occupied Northern Ireland has an offense of «pedestrian through his own negligence on a road endangers his own safety» with obscure «level 3» punishment.
The problem is people with options leave. They might be willing to help but not at the cost of their own children.
The thing 2020 taught me is 90% of the population considers me an acceptable sacrifice. I’m going to have to live with that now and act accordingly.
Whose theory is this?
Also, why do you think fighting homelessness is just a function of funding? What if activists and the solutions they propose actually exacerbate the problem.
[0] I tend to agree with another poster that the threat of violence is still violent even if the victim acquiesces to avoid violence (by not confronting, fighting back, intervening, either from direct threat of retaliation by criminal or punishment from state/society for daring to be intolerant of antisocial behavior).
They know exactly what they are doing, who it impacts, and who it doesn’t.
what?
The homelessness problem has been growing for the last 15 years (I mean, before that too, but I remember never being shocked in the early 2000s like I always am today), whereas the "Defund" thing is only in the last year.
The homelessness crisis is not caused by a lack of police enforcement.
From my experience, homelessness is not affected by police presence/enforcement other than to force them into other areas. An unhoused person has to go somewhere, so using police to approach that simply pushes them in larger numbers into other areas, making it someone else's problem. That seems like a huge waste of resources.
There’s a sick irony that the very same people who are fighting “for” the police against the defund crowd also demand police officers perform tons of unnecessary grueling work the police themselves willingly admit they aren’t trained to handle.
I think for many people “Support the Police” really means only support their budget; not support them as human beings or public servants.
So much of what you said is, honestly, what a lot of homeless people need to do, just to survive. When you don't have safe, ready access to bathrooms, you go outside. When you don't have a job and can't get money, you steal to eat. When you are subject to this misery for long enough, you stop caring about what polite society cares about.
Police presence sure does deter this behaviour, but only where police are present. It doesn't _stop_ this behaviour, because it can't. Cops can't fix homelessness, they can only move it along somewhere else, turn it into some other neighborhood's problem.
If you really want to fix the problem, look at you and me. We don't crap outside, we don't steal, we're not making neighborhoods scary and dangerous (I assume). And why? Because our basic needs are met. We have food, water, shelter, sanitation, entertainment, employment. If you really want to fix the problem, THAT'S the problem you fix. Sadly, social programs for the homeless ("handouts") aren't nearly so politically popular as spending that money on policing, the legal system, and the prison system, despite being many orders more efficient.
It's these people that need the strong hand of law enforcement to whip them into shape. It's for their own good, honestly, which bothers me as a big proponent of personal liberty and personal responsibility. But their options are either shape up, or slowly decline to a tragic death. A puppy who is not trained not to bite toddlers very well may end up getting euthanized. Sometimes strict enforcement is the morally just choice.
edit: my point is that both are needed. The options for the self motivated, and the guiding hand of arrest for those who cannot save themselves.
It's the fact that you see an issue like homelessness and think "this is what we pay the police for", that blinds you to the actual grievances of the protestors. Instead of actually addressing issue, most Americans have developed the crutch of just calling the police who have just opted to either move the issue or throw the homeless in jail. It's sort of frustrating that on Hacker News people haven't done anymore than surface level research into the grievances behind "defund the police". A lot of their argument seems to stem to the fact that many problems they face are relegated to police (who have the funding) when things like housing and mental health services should be funded instead.
San Francisco's problem (and, I'd argue the "true" motivation behind the restorative justice) is that the city can no longer afford to in-prison more people for basic offenses. The housing problem has now extended to prisons and I believe COVID exasperated that issue as people wanted to avoid having overcrowded prisons. That plus the massively reduced city traffic has had homeless people claim a lot of open spaces. At this point I don't think funding more police departments would put a dent in the issue.
There are other crimes that aren’t even considered criminal nor even enforced. For example wage theft. You cannot get your boss arrested for clocking you out before you leave. Yet your boss can have you arrested for taking from the till.
Point is, most crimes are because of society structure. Lying on a sidewalk? Setting up a tent somewhere? Living in a car or rv?
In a better structured society there would be better support than calling the police. That’s the essence of “defund the police”.
For many people with well resourced families, allowing a child or family member to live in the street because they lost their job just wouldn’t happen. Generally most people get support from their families (and friends) in this way. But what about those that don’t have those resources? Well apparently “call the cops on them” is the American solution. Great.
We should really be focusing on the underlying mental health issues rather than resorting to a base desire to crack skulls. One such example is opening up (humane) mental health institutions. For people who are out of their gourd but aren't your typical criminal case, these mental health institutions would exist for these people to go if they consistently prove to be a danger to themselves and/or others.
Allowing criminals and homeless to run rampant will lead to the rapid increases in both we have seen in SF. Then there still will be an inevitable backlash, and that will involve the cracking of far more skulls than would have happened by doing it early. If a city never enforces its laws, the criminals will crack far more innocent skulls.
You can't escape the cracking of skulls, you just choose who does the cracking and how many get hurt.
https://i.imgur.com/8xlOIW9.png
The whole point of defunding the police is to get the funding back to where it belongs.
https://citymonitor.ai/government/the-reality-of-us-city-bud... - The reality of US city budgets: Police funding eclipses most other agencies’
The whole point of the cartoon is that tackling the underlying causes of such issues might make them easier to fix.
That it'd take a while to make significant progress isn't a reason not to start.
Sure, just like no one actually knows what "critical race theory" actually means. A concerted effort to encourage these misunderstandings hardly helps.
EDIT: While there's many factors that drive crime, crime was lower before the defund movements.
> crime was lower before the defund movements
Remind me, did anything else happen in 2020 that might have had an impact on crime?
A global pandemic is a shitty excuse for these hyper-local phenomena. It's not covid; it's the voting public of San Francisco (and two or three other west coast cities) and the disastrous politicians they elect.
https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surg...
Affordable housing is a notable case of the last one, it's very very expensive to build in SF and nobody actually wants it. The reason people dislike "luxury housing" is that it actually exists, so they want "affordable housing" because they know it won't happen. When it actually shows up, they oppose it too.
It does demonstrate that anything presented in cartoon form is probably false, because the people drawing cartoons are not specialists in whatever the topic is. Basically Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Evidence does not support your claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/19/alexandria-k...
Social workers, in conjunction with police, have resulted in a drop of repeat calls and cost less than hiring another officer.
If you want to hire social workers, which is a good idea, say that instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
> "Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources.
"Education" is a trick because the same taxes don't fund police (cities) and education (school districts). Making one go down wouldn't cause the other to go up, or even increase voter support for it.
Other things, like education, are actually unrelated because they're literally different tax districts (eg property vs sales tax) applied to different people. In that case you can't vote on defund + fund at the same time. But also, some people just don't like taxes, so if you put the defund one first they'll take it but not use it to fund anything new.
And many people think homeless people ended up there by doing too many drugs or other moral failures, but it's more like being homeless is really bad for your mental health and there's nothing else to do.
Then Reform the Police would have been a better marketing slogan compared to Defund the police.
Equating police reform with being anti-police plays right into propaganda.
The people who started "defund the police" literally do not want there to be police. Sometimes they want to become the police, except they want to be called community violence activists, or therapists, or something.
That was fine as a fringe position, but then a lot of other people took up the slogan and just declared that no, actually, it means totally different thing X but we're going to keep saying it.
…Anyway, nobody is actually trying to do this, except Republicans in congress when they tried to block state funding in the CARES Act, so it doesn't matter.
https://twitter.com/BlackVisionsMN/status/126614972305388339...
https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1279148959139758080
It actually makes more sense this way, the confusion is when people who don't want to abolish the police still want to defund them.
I don't think it helps anyone else's goals though. So I think they're mistaken to take it up. Also, it's easy to fight against (because your opponents can point to the abolitionists) and it makes you look bad to normal people (most people in the US like the police, including minorities, who are actually more socially conservative than white people).
To stop misconduct a better message would be to define those people as "not the police" by, like, making it possible to fire them.
Personally, I assume people actually mean what they say, so I think it's more likely they just want to be "radical" and haven't thought things through at all (as OP pointed out).
Great idea, let's call the CEO of a grass roots protest and have their marketing department update the website copy. Do you realize what you are saying?
>Personally, I assume people actually mean what they say, so I think it's more likely they just want to be "radical" and haven't thought things through at all (as OP pointed out).
I think a very useful skill in life is being able to read past slogans and actually understand what people are asking for. Kaepernick was trying to create a message about police reform for 5 years now, and no one cared about that - only the kneeling bit. "Defund the police" is the only message that has stuck. If extremist messaging is what gets people talking about the problem then so be it. There is no CEO of protests that develops a finely tuned marketing message for what is essentially a populist movement.
I think a very useful skill in life is accurately communicating what you actually want to say so that the receiver understands your message. The responsibility of communicating is on the protestor--they are the ones trying to change things.
I don't think that the extremist language had anything to do with getting people talking about the problem. George Floyd's death is what got people talking about it. Seems to me the more radical people are advocating "defund the police" as a solution. If they really want police reform, why not just say that? They wouldn't alienate everyone who thinks that is a silly idea. So tactically it is a major blunder because they've needlessly lost support. Why would someone who disagrees with "defund the police" as a solution risk working with them--what if they actually believe what they say?
> If extremist messaging is what gets people talking about the problem then so be it.
This cuts both ways. Can I assume that you're good with the right wingers' extremism, too? And how are you going to keep it from escalating? They still aren't listening, better make the statement louder, maybe in blood this time? Extremism begets extremism.
I am pretty opposed to extremism, and I think a large part of the problem in the US is that the only voices are the extreme ones shouting really loud. A group of friends driven by loud, extreme voices is dysfunctional, and larger groups are no different.
Besides, reacting to a problem with extremes doesn't solve the problem, it only changes what problem you have. Historically it usually changes for the worst.
Protests have always been extreme and riots has been historically the best vehivle of change for the proletariat. People on the ground are rarely going to be amazing orators in explaining what they need and for a underprivileged group, being reasonable has never worked. You have WSPU escalating to violence for Women's Suffrage in the UK. You have the troubles in Ireland. You have the underbelly of the violent race riots in MLK's marches.
And how do you keep it from escalating? By solving the underlying grievances people have. Most people don't turn to white supremacy through a pure ideological belief that the "white race" is superior. They start with system problems - increasing health costs, increasing housing costs and lack of upwards mobility, and in their search of their solutions they find someone who tells them what they want to hear.
At the end of the day when you have people rioting in the streets the time for "rational" discourse has long passed. The people who are most loudly chanting defund the police have been trying to reform for almost _10 years_.
Even slogans must be taken at face value, e.g. the Jews in Europe who could have escaped Nazism in the early phase, but waited too long because “they can’t be serious…just read past the slogans, it will all pass.” Godwin’s “law” notwithstanding…just one egregious example among many.
Not suggesting SF is at this stage, but a blasé attitude to what is actually being said in these situations has had severe consequences in the recent past. If you say “defund the police”, you better mean “defund the police” because any mature adult excepting your parents (maybe your grandparents) are going to interpret it as abolishing/crowdsourcing(?) the police. If you don’t mean that, then don’t say that. If it’s just unclear, than stop saying it and say something clearer. It’s the responsible thing to do.
Late in Timothy Leary’s life he was giving his standard spiel and he was surrounded by the usual burnouts and psychedelic enthusiasts who were being unusually silly, naive and annoying. A friend commented to him “Does it ever seem to you that all the neurons you killed off over the years have reincarnated into these people?” You wonder about the homeless being the karmic hair shirt some older SF folks wear to repent for their misspent youth/adulthood or accidentally winning the housing lottery. There but for the grace of tech dollars and Daddy’s money go I.
PS: Doesn’t it seem the cities most bought into these political fads are also those with the most self-indulgent parenting styles? Might be worth a study.
As I was leaving SF, I watched a homeless man with no teeth pick a morsel of food out of the gutter and eat it.
I am not sure if it's a case of boiling the frog, but trust me when I say that SF has an absolutely shameful inability to solve it's problems and that a city that was no more than a crater 70 years ago absolutely shines in comparison. I would not believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.
Elsewhere in the city, I saw pushy begging exactly once when entering the Old Town. There were about 6 rough sleepers under one of the Vistula bridges with neatly folded sleeping bags and they are being guarded by a police van.
If there's a homeless tent city of heroin addicts around here, do tell.
Example 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TyHe7b0SY
Example 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWUmdTvtSJo
An example of people living under the bridges:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Homx6vJ3R0
Some charities distribute sleeping bags and mattresses at the end of the summer so that people don't freeze - no shelters allow drunk people.
If you sleep in parks or elsewhere, the police are going to remove you from there to a drunk tank.
SF is a fantastic reminder that we cannot trust our gut instinct and logic on how to deal with the problems of society.
I look forward to the peer reviewed article explaining why this is just bias and misconception of the status quo. I used to enjoy my memories of playing ultimate frisbee barefoot in Delores park, as a young teenager, with no concern over safety taking public transit. But I must remember that my memories are subject to fallacies of their own. Likewise, those un-scooped poops I used to see were probably human, like they are now, I just didn't realize it then, because I was so naive.
The neo-liberal politics of finding, or creating the studies that support the policies that "feel good" and not the ones that actually tackle problems are making the problem worse. And like a snowdrift growing on a ledge, it will continue growing, until it collapses into an avalanche. The longer we let it grow, the more casualties we will see when the correction arrives.
I have family that's now leaving the city. Chesa Boudin and his policies was their personal tipping point
By today's standards? Yeah, it probably is. I don't even care anymore though. Homogenous societies have fewer problems of inequality, less crime, more social cohesion. We've known this since Aristotle in Greece, since Marcus Aurelias in Rome, and probably with some other writers I can't think of in between then and now.
It's not a statement of any one group being better than another.
It's not a statement that I don't enjoy many aspects of our diverse society.
It's merely a rebuttal to your argument.
Cancel me as you see fit.
If you are coming clean, then please continue, what groups are you talking about? And what attribute are you declaring causes a 'lack of homogeny'?
Any divide you wish to draw, I'm not drawing them. SF is more diverse than Krakow when you account for race, place of birth, religion, sexuality/gender identity.
>And what attribute are you declaring causes a 'lack of homogeny'?
A diverse population has less homogeneity.
Keep fishing, but get better bait.
This continued assault of trying to find bigotry behind any minor statements that don't completely align with the progressive globalism agenda only undermines your collective stances.
"My defining characteristic" is something you can't justifiably claim, something I never said or alluded to. Y'all are too much sometimes.
Immigrant policy is mostly based on humanitarian grounds. But I'd still be surprised if it's actually a major driver of crime. Violent crime in higher nationwide than every developed nation by a huge margin. Our lack of healthcare, for-profit opioid sales and the endless flow of firearms are the things I'd point to.
The city has a "rapid response" hotline you can call if you see any ICE agents in the city. I'm not sure what their response is. But they definitely don't work with the agency
They absolutely will enforce warrants for serious crimes. Nor will they prevent federal agents from operating in the city. The rapid response hotline is a private non-profit and not run by the city.
I suggest not relying on conservative propaganda outlets like Daily Caller for your information.
>Namely, his department will not honor immigration detainers lodged by federal agents. If an illegal alien in San Francisco is placed into local custody for an unrelated crime, and ICE asks that the individual be transferred into the agency’s custody, that request will simply be ignored.
I am saying they will not deport violent criminals who are also here illegally. The article supports my statement. Combined with SF's lenient catch and release programs, this by default means they're allowing violent criminals to stay in the area, even when they have the federal resources to make the population safer.
If you can refute the contents of the article with something more tangible than disliking the founder, I'll give it a fair read. I think if this were outright lies, there would be some pushback from the city. You're making big claims here.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That being said, the most upsetting thing has been the loss of my friends who have left SF over the last year and a half to move other places. Losing your friends and community is much worse than losing a coffee shop. This is, to me, the biggest downside of SF: it's a temporary stopover for most people, and your roots will always be lain in thin soil.
Everyone wants someone else to make the problem go away for them, that they shouldn't have to play any part in that because they pay taxes, and all the while they're also lobbying the city to keep housing density low out of some absurd privileged need to preserve a broken status quo of what they think an idyllic neighborhood ought to be.
It's incredibly ironic how in America we've recreated the very thing that Americans were trying to escape from in Europe -a landed aristocracy.
I’m unclear what policies they’d bring except more bashing in homeless skulls?
When you have no ability/intention to pay rent, the whole cost of living deterrent vanishes.
So it seems rather obvious to me you'd have a higher rate of homelessness in the most desirable (most expensive) cities. Not without interventions creating costs or inconveniences actually relevant to the homeless as a proportional deterrent. I'm not sure if that's even possible without being cruel though.
It's not clear how SF can escape the situation, but there are a few things that are absolutely certain, and one of them is that more money is not going to fix the problem. We need a different approach.
Why do you say it is a myth?
"63% of Non-Citizen Households Access Welfare Programs Compared to 35% of native households"
https://cis.org/Report/63-NonCitizen-Households-Access-Welfa...
"The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is an anti-immigration think tank. It favors far lower immigration numbers, and produces analyses to further those views. The CIS was founded by historian Otis L. Graham and eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton."
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies
Do you have another source? I am not so convinced by this source.
There is a link to the SIPP in the endnotes of the page. The SIPP is from the Census Bureau.
If you care about free markets or a smaller state, but not the free movement of labor at the same time, you are holding hypocritical beliefs.
Every nation on Earth has border restrictions of some kind. Though recent in human history, such restrictions clearly have utility and value in the modern world.
if you spread out the homeless proportionately to the population of the country it becomes a much more manageable problem
I also wonder if it is legal to put checkpoints in the entrance to states so that if a bus arrives, they need to be subject to inspections. This stuff sounds cruel but the cities are not fighting for their tax paying residents. Its unbelievable how much of a scam this country is in favor of typically rural white people.
1) Red states typically get out more than 1$ of every tax dollar they put back in.
Source: https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxe...
2) Red states get an additional subsidy in the form of sending their homeless to the blue cities. This allows them to reduce their tax burden while increasing the tax burden of an already highly taxed blue electorate. The decreased tax burden directly translates into more renovations to the towns and better quality of life for their citizens(ie more services) while directly reducing the quality of life for the left leaning counties.
3) Red states are overrepresented due to gerrymandering, the electoral college, (and because the Dems never fight), now the supreme court so the mechanisms to change this system are all blocked for the left wing population.
We don't have a Democratic party that fights for us. I'm convinced that they are actually on the same side as the Right but only pretend to actually care about the people in the left states and stop all opposition using cancel culture.
They of course cater to their wealthy constituents but everyone else that makes up the Democratic party: minorities and the poor are in this hellish limbo where they have no real say in governance yet at the same time are paying and suffering the consequences. Its the modern day slavery.
We are starting to see minorities run for congress and challenge the status quo. We also see them get co-opted by the Democratic party and muted or aggressively fought against so that they have to work 10 times as hard to get a chance
(ie. AOC's initial opponent outspent her 10 to 1, endorsed by the entire party, baseless accusations of being associated with less that favorable figures)
(ex2. Ilhan Omar being blasted whenever she opens her mouth).
It sounds like it's going to take a whole generation of effort to finally break this cursed situation that so many people in this country are born into.
Sorry for the rant, its just that as a minority living in a left state, it grinds me endlessly that I am paying for these Red state jerks while my quality of life continues on a downward trajectory and at the same time no one will fight for me. Not AOC, not anyone in the Dems for sure. What is the way out?
Straw man fallacy. Why do you jump to the conclusion that the problem is financial. SF is among the top 5 richest cities in US.
You really have to prove that the problem is financing, before you make the argument you made.
If you ask people whether or not they some ostensibly good policy should be implemented, the majority will agree. When you ask taxpayers to actually cough up and pay for the services, though, the majority will get extremely upset.
A more interesting survey question would be how much people are prepared to sacrifice to make these problems go away.
It depends on how the question is phrased.
Few people want to pay more taxes.
Most people want a better society, not just for themselves, for everyone, since we are all connected.
The art of good government is asking the question in a way that shines a light to where 51% of people will dare to go, that many of the remainder will tolerat.
San Francisco residents deserve to reap the fruits of their Prophet.
There were occasions when I went to SF for business snd never came out of the car, becauee of how dirty the city is.
This is absolutely understandable!
San Francisco has really lovely weather most of the year. It has highly desirable weather if you are homeless: Not much rain and mild temperatures year round.[3]
I think California is currently the dumping ground for a lot of America's homeless. I have heard that homelessness is down in other states and up in California.
I think part of what happens is people go there because the weather is very homeless-friendly and then get stuck in part because housing costs are so high in California. I think California will not really solve its homeless problem until the entire US decides to resolve our lack of affordable housing.[4]
I spent nearly six years homeless, most of it in California. I left the state to get back into housing. I have six years of college and yadda, so what I was able to pull off may not be what most homeless people can do for themselves in the face of a broken system.
(Edit: years before I was ever homeless, I took a college class from SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy. The above paragraph was intended to suggest I'm somewhat knowledgeable about the topic.)
I am still dirt poor and trying to establish an adequate income while being told it's somehow my fault that my poverty is intractable and no amount of rebutting the myriad explanations for how it is somehow my fault ever seems to really change the situation.
I've been repeating a lot of this for years on HN, seemingly to no avail. I'm frankly amazingly exhausted at this point.
[1] Contrary to what internet strangers like to tell me, cost of housing and homelessness are related. https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
[3] https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...
[4] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
People in SF have to either kick the tech companies out, or allow a massive amount of high density housing in.
https://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housi...
In Seattle, these policies were spurred on by motivated progressive activists who aggressively shouted down all dissent in protests, council meetings, and in social media. The rush of transplants from outside Washington state changed local politics significantly over the last decade, importing a lot of SF's policies as the voting constituency changed. As a result, Seattle experiences all the same blight SF does, but with a time delay of a few years. There have been a couple great documentaries about the deterioration in Seattle such as "Seattle is Dying" (https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" (https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw) that provide a great overview of the issues. The business community also wrote two comprehensive reports about the failure of restorative justice policies as well, called "System Failure" (https://downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/system-failure-pr...) and "System Failure 2" (https://downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/System-Failure-Pa...).
The response from city leadership? Gaslighting, denial, and absolute arrogance (https://www.seattle.gov/cityattorney/news/seattle-isnt-dying) as they continue to ignore the needs of tax-paying law-abiding residents in favor of vocal activists and criminals. I don't think long-time residents have any confidence that Seattle will return to the peaceful, beautiful city it once was given how things have changed and how they continue to get worse. It's gotten to the point where even businesses have just given up and don't report crimes (https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...), which results in skewed crime figures that don't tell the real story. And just like SF, now businesses have begun closing stores due to unchecked criminality (https://komonews.com/news/local/bartell-drugs-closing-in-dow...).
More recently, we've seen these policies and political attitudes spread to bigger cities like LA and NYC. LA's district attorney George Gascon now faces a recall (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/george-gascon.html). In NYC, residents and businesses are furious because the DAs dropped charges against hundreds of looters without any charges (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9705219/Fury-New-Yo...). As for Chesa Boudin of SF, although he faces a recall, I am not confident it will succeed due to how much support he has from progressives, and because of the money pouring in to defend him from outside of SF (see https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/These-charts-show-...).
I was recently on holiday in Europe. We did a boat tour and there were some Americans on the boat, from LA and New York. At lunch their discussion turned more or less immediately to violent crime, their fear of it and the sudden increase in it. What caught my attention the most though was their explanation: it was, we were told, due to insufficient funding for prisons causing prisoners to be released early.
I was quite surprised by this because of threads I'd seen on HN like this one, and because I'd read about the Portland riots, but didn't say anything. Afterwards I found the articles talking about the recall of the LA DA. No mention of prison funding levels was to be found.
The table didn't talk politics explicitly, but I wonder if those people were sufficiently left wing that they'd voted for these policies and were now trying to explain the results as having different causes.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
Therefore hard stats like "homicide rate" or soft stats like "perceived crime" are the only ones that matters.