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Comment by Convolutional | Hacker News Reader

After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 ) about the homeless, need for more law enforcement (although the US already incarcerates more of its population than any industrialized country) etc.

I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".

Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.

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I saw a reply to a thread on twitter where a woman said to one of his friends, something like, “sorry to burst your bubble but bob was a champion of ‘diversity’” and if that isn’t saying that quiet part out loud, hoof.

Jeez, their racist comment aged incredibly badly.

> people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity

There’s a tiny possibility that feckless bureaucrats, billions of dollars spent with no oversight, mental illness, and drug addiction share just a sliver of the responsibility

Sure, though if we're talking about crime, inequality is probably the strongest correlation to crime rates.[0]

"In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust."

0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8

Very HN that your comment is down voted.

What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Funny how questions like this were completely ignored in the previous conversation where people were shitting on the homeless, but suddenly are important now that the homeless aren't the target anymore.

The cognitive dissonance here is becoming farcical quickly. Careful, people really don't like it when you point it out!

I was really hoping the grandparent was being tongue-in-cheek but, the lie-to-myself kind of hope.

I'm confused, what's your point? It's a "win" that this killing was by a certain person?

Has nothing to do with shit on the streets, etc. etc.

No, it's a win that poor people (most of whom are not violent criminals) are not being unfairly proxy-blamed for this murder any more.

I may have missed that one or didn't think of the question yet.

There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram.

More than you'd think. You're more likely to be murdered by someone you know than a stranger. iirc it's something like ~55% chance of someone you know, ~25% chance of a family member, ~45% chance of a stranger (which could be anything from drug deals gone bad to serial killers).

You can delve into the data but but the format isn't the same for every year so it might be some work to normalize: https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-an...

Yeah, this is something that frustrates me in every discussion about crime. People take a murder rate of X per hundred people and use that to argue that you have an X% chance of being murdered walking down the street. Except that's not true, because like you point out, your odds of being murdered by a rando are way lower than the murder rate as a whole!

This is exactly why the reactionary push for police in response to the murder spike in 2020 and 2021 made no sense. The issue wasn't that people were going out and murdering more — it was that they were locked down in their homes with the people most likely to murder them. You can't fix that by adding more beat cops.

That statistic could only possibly exist for solved murders. Only ~50% of murders are solved and it's much easier to solve if the victim knows the killer. This sounds like a "looking for your keys under the street lights" scenario.

Using that same logic: since you don’t know whether victims of unsolved murders knew the killer, how could you know which is easier to solve?

The person you are replying to is making a rational argument, not an empirical one. The premise that may be understated is "cases are more likely to be solved when the victim is known to the killer, because the amount of people who know a person is far smaller and more easily investigable than the entire general public."

Oh, I understand the premise. But one premise does not a good argument make. Maybe witnesses are less likely to cooperate if they know the murderer! Maybe this type of murder tends to happen inside homes, where there’s less likely to be evidence such as surveillance footage! Maybe it is easier but only by one or two percentage points! etc etc

What percentage of what?

If you mean "What percentage of crimes are committed by," it's probably the second population. Probably. I'm actually pretty weak on that narrative right now.

If you mean "What percentage of the population described is committing violent crimes that should result in jail time," I'm even weaker on it. Because the homeless population is way, way larger than the tech-entrepreneur population, so by percentage of population I think it's a toss-up without hard numbers.

It doesn't take many dead executives on a yacht or strangled estranged wives to tilt the numbers when the population is small.

Umm. Lots of entrepreneurs have both mental health problems and use drugs. Especially use drugs.

Use the drugs that make you violent or so in need that they need to rob to get their next fix? Or the ones that make you think a lot and eat lots of tacos?

Nah it’s more of a “it’s easy to find a stick if you want to beat a dog” situation - drugs don’t make you do much of anything, aside from provide an excuse to do the thing you were too scared to do while sober. Drugs are the excuse, not the reason.

I’m not a violent guy, and I’ve never had a drug encourage me to act violently. Yes, even ‘those’ drugs.

I am however a lazy guy, and I’ve often had drugs encourage me to indulge my laziness.

Drugs can and do easily exacerbate pre-existing conditions. Especially mental health problems which would otherwise be controlled without intervention.

Many “crimes of passion” have had inebriation as a root cause of the lashing out.

Good to remember that alcohol is a mood-altering drug. However, its popularity is not limited to tech bros.

I think a lot and eat lots of tacos with zero illicit drug use. I’m pretty sure that makes me an overachiever

If you want to get all numerical. Let's say an extremely generous 1% of SF population are tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of every 12 murders in SF this year was committed by a tech entrepreneur.

This would imply that Tech entrepreneurs were 12 times more likely to kill you than any other SF local, an astonishing 1100% higher murder likelihood than average!

Given that this is a forum frequented by a lot of SF Tech entrepreneurs, the FBI should monitor this forum or perhaps shut it down all together.

That's funny, but what if you look at the past 20 or 30 years so you have a larger sample?

> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Not for nothing, the mentally ill and/or drug addicts are no more likely to commit violent crime than you, i.e. the general population. It's amazing how with every suspect of violent crime, the first thing everyone wonders is about their mental health. Here's something to consider: everyone is mentally ill, and the majority of everyone is addicted to something or other. Let's stop demonizing mental illness and drug addiction, which are both medical conditions; stop looking for explanations there, and focus on one thing: the actual crime, the actual behavior, what happened, not what they where thinking and not if they were high. And fuck all else, especially the Goddamn bigotry. If you want a reason for violent crime, money's usually got everything to do with it. Use money as a lens, not personal biases. Because in my experience, the greatest individuals that have ever lived, that have contributed the most to humanity, were severely mentally ill, and the greatest artists, that contributed the most and most amazing pieces, paintings, music, film, that have survived the test of time, were drug addicts.

A reasonable question, but barely relevant to the emotional reaction to this specific tragedy, which involved a single victim and presumably a single killer and is unlikely to have much effect on the overall percentages.

> What percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?

Never really met anyone that described themselves as an 'entrepreneur' that actually was one though. Lots of people that wanted to desperately identify as one and they'd spend all their time telling anyone who'd listen that's what they were.

In contrast, the actual entrepreneurs are too busy actually going out there and building things. I think it's a label that only makes sense when it's applied by someone else.

Meh, several my friends and I did. Each of us were very successful but we all had slightly nerdy jobs that were a bit hard to explain to muggles.

read your comment as "what percentage of entrepreneurs are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?" which actually is a really interesting question.

>After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this[...]

>I had to read scores of tech bros [...]

Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.

Yeah, ignoring the problem does a lot to make it go away for you.

It doesn't help to make it stop being a problem though. This is basically the definition of privilege.

You're not solving anything by reading comments you dislike either, what's your point.

The value of discussing things publicly like here is to change minds, to challenge consciousness. That is the value of the discussion.

It was obvious that commenters on HN were wilding out about this specific case—but even though the outpouring of rage about homelessness/Chesa Boudin/race/etc was clearly out of proportion with this single incident, it was useful to read people's thoughts. Just because people think differently than I do, doesn't make me less inclined to want to hear them or understand them. In this case, it was illuminating to see that there were so many people who were primed to perpetuate that narrative.

I can get why people blamed the SF politics but not why people blamed the homeless. Both in my experience and by statistics, homeless are not particularly aggressive or violent. It's unfortunately enough that they became homeless, and violent or aggressive people wouldn't stay homeless for long.

That doesn’t change the facts (some of which stated in the post you linked) about the well known problems with homeless in SF.

I don't think anyone is claiming it does. But what's your point, really? It sounds like a conversation that goes like this:

"Wow, Lee was likely killed by someone who knew him, another tech entrepreneur."

"Yeah, and San Francisco sure has a lot of problems with homeless people."

Huh? Discussions about SF's homeless problem are pretty irrelevant to the case at hand. And it's really showing of people's biases that, when we first heard of Lee's death, the evidence-free, go-to narrative was that he obviously was killed by a random mentally-ill homeless person.

This is not bias. You don’t know in advance what the cause of an event is for sure. People mentioned a probable cause (violent homeless) and it happened to be a less probable one (a tech co-worker), although we still don’t know for sure yet. In particular, the influence of drugs and mental illness among the homeless were thought to explain the event.

It’s like predicting the price of a stock that didn’t come true. Not every incorrect prediction is due to selection bias.

Being killed by someone you know is far more probable than being randomly stabbed by a homeless person.

> This is not bias

Now a textbook case of bias is not bias!! The world is crazy?

"Well known problems" - really? how well known? Unless you can provide good sources you are simply showing selection bias.

That also doesn't the change the facts about the well known problems with the cold in SF during spring time and the very frequent fogs.

I had my comment on my family's experience of not experiencing any crime in the bay area in 10+ years downvoted. I was also called a boiling frog.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35451394

Another reply - "I'll have you know, my ivory tower is devoid of any riffraff!"

I'm personally not into incarcerating mass amounts of people, as it only centralizes a prison industrial complex. Rather, one glaring issue is dangerous drugs showing up on our streets & the conditions that lead to this usage. In the comment you linked to, I noted Kensington Ave in Philadelphia, where there are videos of many people on hard drugs stooped over. Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets. Note that the reason why drugs are showing up on the streets are not random acts of mere petty criminals but involve people in domestic government & foreign governments. Rick Ross & the crack epidemic detail the history of how intelligence agencies create the conditions of mass addiction.

While some, including me, think this drug problem is an example of the hypocrisy of NeoLiberalism...I also think it's a centuries old playbook of wreaking havoc on whole populations of people by introducing vices such as drugs. The Opium Wars & what lead to the Opium Wars is an example.

Side note, I would like there to be a graph based form of communication that can better express the context of statements. It's too easy to take a couple of sentences on a forum out of context.

> Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets.

I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who fell into drug use and homelessness who had happy lives. I think people who are homeless and or addicted to drugs are addicted to drugs because there lives are not good. If you improve economic and social conditions for people, drug abuse becomes less of a problem because people do not need to cope with difficulty in their life in the same way.

I suspect a lot of our problems are caused by high-functioning addicts who are unhappy/dysfunctional and use addictions of all kinds to compensate - and who also happen to hold positions of real power and influence.

That sounds unlikely to me. Instead, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by sociopaths in positions of power. People like Putin and Trump didn't become the monsters they are because of additions or drugs, they were born that way.

I dont know of any people who are happier addicted to hard drugs than not addicted to hard drugs. If the supply of hard & tainted drugs increases, then people with addictions are more likely to increase their consumption of these drugs.

The problem & solution space involves more than just enforcement. A root cause is the ineffectiveness & corruption in social safety net programs including housing, drug treatment, & other domains. Not saying we should not have any programs but the ineffectiveness with increasing budgets speaks for itself. Effective & efficient programs should be rewarded while ineffective & inefficient programs should be discontinued.

Government agencies which engage in harmful activities such as drug trafficking should be reformed or disbanded. I don't expect the status quo to change, as we didn't get into this mess with rational institutions, but its worthwhile to have a sober view of root causes to at least put pressure on the institutions to be more rational.

How does neoliberalism cause people to get addicted to drugs?

The increased supply of hard drugs & the apparent lack of enforcement against the supply chains of hard drugs.

What does that have to do with neoliberalism? Also, you'll have to say which presidents you see as being responsible. Wikipedia says Trump was neoliberal, I've seen it applied to other presidents. Trump was impactful on the world because he was so ineffectual in general. But I think every president in living memory wanted to reduce drug use and the supply of drugs coming into the us. In a free society it's hard to stop people from doing what they want, even if they take drugs that hurt them, kill them, or might not do anything bad (like pot), large numbers of people can supply enough demand to overcome the impact of law enforcement.

Of course fentanyl is a society destroying thing, the impact of that and things like heroin lead to me not knowing what to do personally to stop this. Media reports claim fentanyl components are coming from China. So now what?

First, I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to politics or anything remotely related to politics.

All I'm saying is that the results speak for themselves. The drugs come from somewhere. The drugs are allowed in somehow. Repeat violent criminals are somehow let out of prison.

Also, there is a history of collusion of governments, government agencies, NGOs, & drug trafficking. This spans over hundreds of years & there are recent cases. Watch a documentary of how Compton, CA was once a working class neighborhood with industrious people, then the CIA trafficked drugs in that neighborhood (note Freeway Rick Ross), & it quickly devolved into violent gang warfare. Now the land is being bought on the cheap. Note Sofi Statium, which is built on the ground of what were once homes.

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