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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Its a real bummer with SF, but the problems are totally self inflicted. If the politics were of a different breed I could see it being one of the best cities to live in the US, let alone the world. Having worked there for close to a decade the stuff I have seen was really depressing. I visited my cousin who works at Ouster nearby for lunch one day and was wondering what all these white casings were littering the ground, he said they were from junkie's needles. While on our walk a man was screaming inside a car with all the windows smashed in, and there were huge piles of shit due to junkies "unloading" on the sidewalk.

I went to the local walgreens in SF and was trying to buy a tube of toothpaste, apparently the theft is so bad I had to have a person who works there open the case, and while I was waiting in line to buy it a homeless person ran out with merchandise.

There are thousands and thousands of similar stories from others but until residents in SF start voting different I see things getting even worse than they are now. I know that may be hard to believe but we have been experiencing a boom economy, once that changes and things go south expect crime to surge to levels unimaginable.

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I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35454781 and moved it to the top level (just for technical reasons - the first page of the thread is currently too comment-heavy).

How do you know the politics of the city are the cause of the crime?

Confusing politics and policy is a tell-tale sign of political ideology failing at the most basic and fundamental level.

Politics and policies are intertwined

"Ugh it's the woke"

I will fill in the vagueness of your "vote different" statement with specifics of my own: progressive, redistributive policies that radically reduce inequality and that gives a controlling portion of the influence that currently sits with capital owners to the general public. Tax rich people, use the money to steamroll their NIMBYism, and build dense housing and public infrastructure that supports a healthy and sustainable economy, in opposition to the status quo which incentivizes people to steal and behave antisocially because there is no hope of "making it." This does indeed involve kicking much of the moderate Democratic establishment out.

"What if we took money from the people that have provably used it to create more value and instead gave it to drug addicts who shit on the sidewalk?

I know SF already spends 100k/yr per homeless resident, but we really need to push that up."

This whole line of thought is absurd, you're in a bubble.

"Value."

I’m sure all those ads have made my life better, somehow.

You are literally reading and posting on an ad for Y Combinator. Everything that you use every day that you don't pay for is a direct result of ads.

Yes, they definitely have made your life better.

No no no! Ads are terrible! Marketing is lying!

If there were no ads, people would judge based on the quality of products, instead of being manipulated to buy things.

I obviously block ads. I understand that lots of things would cost money that currently are free, but many things would still be free. The old internet consisted mainly of free things and was not infested with ads.

Please, tell me one positive effect that ads have on society as a whole. (So not for you personally, because I know they make money)

Again, this is your bubble talking. Look around you, and compare your life to any human 50 years ago, or anyone outside a first world country today. You are outrageously privileged entirely because of that very real value generated.

The vast majority of the net value present in my life compared to a like individual from 50 years ago is attributable to 1) gay and black civil rights advocates, 2) university researchers, and 3) Japanese and Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers, in that order. I can also confirm that there are millions of Chinese and Indians living better than me, if only because their countries have a functional (if corrupt) college-placement-test-score-to-comfortable-employment pipeline.

As for bubbles, I would hazard that your accusation is a confession.

Your evaluation of yourself and your position in the world is apparently solely informed by what Twitter tells you to think and the availability of gadgets around you. And clearly not informed by ever actually having visited China or India, or having formed any significant friendships with people there.

To think the 3rd most significant source of value in your life is cheap microcontrollers is.. wild.

Indoor plumbing? Refrigeration? A health department that ensures you aren't eating food fried in gutter oil?

You are taking these entirely for granted, because everyone has those, right? This is a great example of what privilege actually is.

Let's make this simpler for you.

Your original proposal is that, of course, the wealthy (read: anyone that makes more than you) have too much, the homeless have too little. So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.

SF spends $100,000 per year, per homeless resident, on 'fixing homelessness'. Exactly how much more should they be spending, and why would that change anything?

Good luck, this kind of logic doesn't seem to work too much with people who don't think too far ahead about the economics or don't want to think too much about it. Throwing more money at things usually doesn't solve it and taking it from others for reasons(?) doesn't either.

Had someone like this tell me Venezuelans should be supporting Democratic candidates...like what. A country whose people are so poor a lot of them wonder what they're going to eat next should be focusing on another country's politicians?

they should stop spending it on bullshit bandaid solutions and just give people permanent housing. there are a lot of countervailing forces that make that difficult, but conceptually the solution is pretty simple.

Ok, everyone gets permanent housing. You've now just fired 2 million people, just in the immediate vicinity of the real estate and mortgage markets. The US homeless population is only a quarter of that, but, let's not actually think about numbers or anything.

Next will be the inevitable fallout of destroying ~45 trillion in wealth. The consequences of which, bluntly, I can't even really fathom at the moment.

I'm assuming you'll be planning to tax more to give the effected some sort of UBI? Please confirm and I'll explain how that will also blow up in your face.

> conceptually the solution is pretty simple

It is if you don't actually think about it. At all.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

unhoused people were never prospective clients of the real estate industry, but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.

your arrogance is surpassed only by your foolishness.

Their point is that those landlords now have something they invested in where they aren't getting the returns they expected...but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.

> unhoused people were never prospective clients of the real estate industry

See, this is what I mean. This sort of 'solution' is advocated by people that have never bothered to contemplate the second order effects.

Try to imagine what would happen if we implemented this. Anyone that is homeless gets permanent, free housing. You pat yourself on the back.

Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?

Because if you do, you have now created the economic catastrophe that I described.

And if you don't, because I don't deserve it on the basis of XYZ, you've just recreated section 8.

> Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?

yes. it probably won't be as nice as something you, a wealthy person, could afford to buy, and it probably won't be exactly where you want to live, but everyone could be guaranteed safe and stable housing without complicated means testing.

> you've just recreated Section 8.

Section 8 disqualifies people for all kinds of "character" issues associated with drug use, mental illness, etc. That's a big reason there are so many homeless on the street. I am against means testing, but even that system could be a lot better than it is now.

You could say the same about the US healthcare industry as it currently exists. Or the illegal drug trade. Or slavery, as it used to. Perhaps the costs of allowing a deleterious institution to continue existing dwarf the costs of reforming them, on occasion. Family formation is down, bankruptcy is up, and somehow I imagine that you have not figured in the trillions in lost value from these and the like realities that are extant because the 3rd most basic human need is unaffordable in this country.

Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?

> You could say the same about the US healthcare industry as it currently exists.

No, because despite the mixed-bag that a single payer system would bring, it is not actually destroying healthcare. Unless you intend to force them to provide their services for no pay.

> Perhaps the costs of allowing a deleterious institution to continue existing dwarf the costs of reforming them, on occasion.

Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.

> Family formation is down, bankruptcy is up, and somehow I imagine that you have not figured in the trillions in lost value from these and the like realities that are extant because the 3rd most basic human need is unaffordable in this country.

It is substantially less than destroying the entire real market, unquestionably. That doesn't mean that it's not a problem that should be addressed. But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.

> Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?

I'm not. I've got no problem at all paying my taxes. I have no interest in those taxes being wasted.

> I have no interest in those taxes being wasted.

Welfare spending is the least of your concerns, then.

>it is not actually destroying healthcare.

I didn't say it would. "Healthcare" is not the same as "the healthcare industry as it currently exists".

>Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.

Ironically: despite the mixed bag that crashing the value of real estate by implementing a housing guarantee (or even simply increasing construction velocity) would bring, it would not actually destroy the concept of "private property", legally or otherwise.

>But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.

Again, that's not what I said. You seem to have a problem with this. It would be interesting to see you actually argue against something other than a strawman. Are you capable of that?

EDIT: Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.

> Again, that's not what I said. You seem to have a problem with this. It would be interesting to see you actually argue against something other than a strawman. Are you capable of that?

Yep. In fact, I specifically asked you for your proposal, and you chose to rant about identity politics instead of policy. Which is on brand, I guess.

> Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.

Nope. The current system for performing real estate transactions is wildly inefficient, rent-seeking, insecure, and I'd love to see it destroyed.

You asked me to compare my life to any human in 1973. I chose someone like me. Same identity, same geographic location, different time. Less than 5 years after the assassination of MLK and the Stonewall riots, that person would have been significantly more at risk than me of depression, destitution, or death from deficits in access to basic rights and resources - including, for all practical purposes, indoor plumbing (absent from my ancestral homestead in North Carolina), refrigeration (same), and a functional health department (same, particularly for gay men) - because of their race and sexuality. Nothing coming out of San Francisco office towers other than Harvey Milk was involved in changing those circumstances between then and now. I know this because I actually received an education in the humanities (which, informally, included working with Chinese and Indian legal professionals on a day-to-day basis). Did you?

As for the gadgets which you alluded to as contemporary society's savior just a few replies ago, I tend to attribute their existence to the basic research and, yes, cheap microcontrollers that made them possible, rather than the glorified middlemen who repackaged them as high-margin luxuries and sold them with spyware.

> So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.

Also, like a concerned and informed adult, but yes.

>Exactly how much more should they be spending,

However much it would cost to house them permanently (and reduce housing insecurity in general), bounded by tax revenues, of course.

>and why would that change anything?

Well, generally-speaking, when a homeless person has housing, they cease to be homeless.

>Let's make this simpler for you.

I'd like you to stop projecting your own insecurities on me.

How much of that "real value" correlates with currently held value? By your metric Bell Labs should be worth more than any other company in existence.

Having loads of money isn't just about generating value. It's about extracting value.

> How much of that "real value" correlates with currently held value?

It might lag a bit, but almost exactly. That's the whole idea. Real household incomes in the US from 1950 to 2000 very nearly doubled, and purchasing power increased even more. The 'rich get richer' is irrelevant if everyone else is, too.

> By your metric Bell Labs should be worth more than any other company in existence.

The fact that they aren't means that no, they shouldn't be. It's the capitalism equivalent of "the guy with a great idea for an app". If you aren't actually delivering that value to people that need it, you aren't getting paid for it.

> Having loads of money isn't just about generating value. It's about extracting value.

Generating and extracting value are the same thing, ignoring the connotation.

If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button? You haven't actually created any value. You haven't done anything.

The argument here feels like only tangible things are actually valuable. Without the transistor, none of these other increases in value would exist. How much would the world agree to pay if some genie came out of a lamp and someone could wish us back to 1946 and prevent the invention of the transistor forever?

> If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button?

What if you create such a device and decide to publicly share the design, with no plans to monopolize it? You'd probably be the lose financially, but did you not create the most value?

Have Linux or Git created no real value except for the companies that can build service models around them?

Extracting it from where?

advertisers, mostly, displacing the print media who used to do that

If I can pay your company $5 to get a customer with an LTV of $10, that's a deal I will take all day. I am not being exploited.

From any and every place where they gain or lose money. If Amazon gave 10% coupons on every single product and raised their minimum wage by $10, they wouldn't become negative profit and would arguably be creating more "real value" by paying workers more and allowing people to buy more. But the overall company profits would decrease.

"The patient is not improving. Let's keep doubling the chemo until we see improvement."

Law enforcement is underfunded (compared to the prevalence of crime) and mismanaged (low standards, low accountability, etc).

Even if you solve housing (NIMBYism, slow permitting process, low-density zoning) crime won't solve itself. (Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)

>(Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)

This is an interesting wrinkle. I would hope that addressing the corruption that enables NIMBYism would also affect the viability of organized crime.

I disagree that law enforcement is underfunded. Public services which would reduce the prevalence of crime are absolutely underfunded; law enforcement is not one of those services, as it currently receives enough funding (and more) to carry out its part in crime-lowering efforts. Fixing its mismanagement means funding separate institutions dedicated to oversight, for example.

Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there's a long way to go with immigration reform. (Undocumented immigrants are a very vulnerable and lucrative victim group. From human trafficking to no-contract cash-only jobs, the classic sweatshop model, and more.)

At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality.

It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same reasons.

Acknowledging the sophistication of your argument, I just want to point out that it can be summarized as, "This is hard because we'd have to correct our mistakes and do the right thing." I suppose my holding wasn't necessarily that any of this would be easy, but that the path was clear and evident. And we seem to agree on that.

Care to provide an example of where this policy has worked?

> until residents in SF start voting different

The author here confesses his disconnect with the majority of people in San Francisco. This assessment is correct - the author and his views are disconnected from those of the majority of working people in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the wealth disparity in San Francisco is almost hard to comprehend. Many in this thread have advocated militarizing the city, and cleaning it out of poor people so that it can be some kind of elite utopia for tech bros and VCs. The people of San Francisco do not share this view. That they do not share this view is not in my opinion (although it is) - but in the opinion of the parent poster. As those from more equitable European cities have said in this thread - Europeans don't have these kinds of problems where they live.

European nations can be even more inequitable than the US without the same issues. The Netherlands have even more wealth disparity, and is much safer without these kinds of problems. I have no doubt wealth inequality can exacerbate the issue, but I don’t think it’s the cause. It’s ultimately one of culture, and American culture is violent and borderline sociopathic, certainly more so than that of many of the European and Asian nations people point to as examples to emulate. Those countries also don’t have issues prosecuting people who commit crime for fear of being prejudicial.

> Those countries also don’t have issues prosecuting people who commit crime for fear of being prejudicial.

The US already has one and a half million people incarcerated, which does not count all those on probation or parole. It has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, although I think Rwanda has more, no large or industrialized country has a higher incarceration rate. Not sure increasing the incarceration rate even more is the solution.

Then you could say it has the highest % of criminals in society as compared to the rest of the world.

Indeed. A massive country open to everybody and with civil freedoms not even comprehensible in most other countries is going to be a magnet for bad people no matter what. 500k incarcerated is actually not that much in this scenario.

Name another country just as free and open with fewer incarcerated. Not Switzerland for sure.

I don't even know how to respond to someone talking about how the US has one of the highest rates of incarcerating its people by saying how it is one of the most free countries in the world.

Also the incarcerated population is 1500k not 500k.

By saying that US is one of the most free countries I meant in terms of freedom of expression and relatively better opportunities to pursue different careers and lifestyles, freedom to have almost any kind of hobby, freedom to not be bound by traditional cultural norms and freedom to go to and join any kind of party. Most prisoners in US are not in there for "insulting a government official", "insulting a royal subject", "blasphemy", "membership in an undesirable organization", being an Uighur, and so on.

You take those 1500k and put them into some other country and have them do the same thing they did that got them incarcerated in US prison, and unless they are friends with somebody important in the government there they'll get incarcerated there too. Furthermore, in lots of countries selling / smuggling drugs is an executable offense. Furthermore, many of these 1500k would not even be admitted to enter many Euro countries with the low incarceration rates that you envy.

The magnitude of wealth disparity is high throughout the country... it is not just the Bay Area. High wealth disparity doesn't justify, nor should it explain violent crime, or any crime for that matter.

Umm... European cities do have high wealth disparity. Checkout an ethnic ghetto the next time you're in Manchester or Paris, for example... there are areas of these cities that get scary AF after dark.

Homelessness is not a crime... but the homeless and drug addicted commit a lot of crimes. And they (particularly the drug addicted) frequently have very little to lose and very severe motivators to rob, mug, etc. As others have said, not policing crime is recipe for disaster, chaos, and tragedy. And it is a human tragedy: for the people who are suffering homelessness, drug addiction; the people within those domains who are victims of violent crime, and for society at large.

A lot of homeless people in CA were not born in CA... and a lot of them didn't hit the street in CA... they migrated to the west coast. Drug addicted homeless people flock to SF and LA because (1) the weather is better than many places in the country, (2) the extremely lax policing, (3) availability of drugs, and (4) the social support system: food, shelter, clothes, money. Indulging depravity is not a solution.

SF needs to double/triple police presence, prosecute crime, and significantly increase drug and mental health services.

I was born in SF, lived there off and on for many years, and have family who still live in the Bay Area... parts of SF are just disgusting now (human feces and trash all over place)... parts of Oakland and Berkeley are no better. Parts of Oakland have so much broken safety glass on the street it's a glass/gravel road.

I used walk around SF late at night as little as 10 years ago; now, there are so many places in SF that I would not walk around in after dark unless I had no other choice. This is coming from a white dude who used to play basketball at playgrounds in South Central LA on saturday nights in the late 90's (because the pick-up basketball was that good).

Until you live somewhere else, you may not understand just how bad and crazy the situation in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles really is. Where I live now, I can leave thousands of dollars of stuff in my car in pain sight and nothing gets stolen... ever. My neighbors' kids leave their bikes on their front lawn overnight and they are still there days later.

I once saw a person break into a Telsa on Piedmont Ave. in Oakland at 2pm on Saturday in front of about 50 people to snatch a backpack. WTF?

Re Tesla, now that I think about it, I think I witnessed a very mean nasty dude stealing a bike near Mission & 3rd. He did it so leisurely that I assumed he was just taking his own bike.

nobody is advocating getting rid of poor people - the chief complaint is about crime going unpunished, and even rewarded.

Lots of places have poverty, not all of them have the level of crime that SF has

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