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Comment by rfwhyte | Hacker News Reader

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Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Flamewar in general is not ok either.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Lol no. The insane city government is why SF is a mess. It’s been this way my entire life. When I visited SF as a child, before any tech was there, it was a hot mess. Now, 30 years later it’s still a hot mess. (Though America’s healthcare and Fentanyl crises make it worse).

You have to understand that the entire SF housing situation is rigged, for the benefit not of the wealthy but of those who got there first. I know a guy who rents two apartments in Nob Hill, one for himself and one for his unemployed son. The guys job? A part-time substitute teacher at a public school. He’ll be retired soon and live there for another 20 years as he can’t possibly afford to move anywhere else. That’s rent control for you.

Meanwhile me and my wife both have tech salaries and don’t live in SF as we can’t afford it. No wonder the city has more dogs than children.

Anyway the root issue in this specific tragic incident is not housing - but the lack of treatment for the mentally ill, the ready availability of fentanyl and the willingness of the city government to roll out the red carpet of enablement with millions of dollars funnelled into city programs (that pay for their “jobs”) which amount to nothing more than an open-air mass suicide. It’s as tragic as it is despicable.

I see this mentioned often when people move to SF or other large cities and then complain about a lack of culture.

The people who brought culture into a city and were part of the city for a while end up leaving due to prices being driven high because of the tech industry (or really anything that causes huge price spikes).

Cities become known for their people and their culture. If nothing is done to keep those people in the city, then no wonder this complaint pops up.

This is the idealist and ignorant perspective that created the problem. The woke mind virus.

Meritocracy is critical. Someone has to do the actual work.

Having less inequality does not contradict meritocracy. Studies show that a fair society does not spread welfare equally [1]: a fair society still rewards merit, work, and contributions, but not to the exaggerated extent as we do nowadays most likely due to the herding and random effect of advertisements [2]. The U.S. and California lead the pack. Hopefully we will learn and adjust, but most likely it's going to be a very slow and unfortunately painful process...

[1] Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., & Bloom, P. (2017). Why people prefer unequal societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(4), 0082. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0082

[2] Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5762), 854–856. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066

I don’t disagree that the person you are replying to has an idealistic perspective on this… but turning around and blaming the situation on the “woke mind virus” is _even more_ idealistic.

> The ONLY thing that's ever really going to fix most of the problems in the world today is MASSIVE global reduction in wealth / income inequality

That's just happening. One robbery at a time... All these robberies happening at once are called revolution...

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