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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Good.

The more visibility the US's failure to house and assist those in need the better. Shame this nation into oblivion until it changes its ways.

People use drugs across all social classes. Those living on the streets just use them where it's visible for lack of alternatives. At least we have strong laws protecting filming/photographing any public activity where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, so we can shine light on these societal failures until resources are allocated appropriately.

What's happening in this country's city streets should be embarrassing to all citizens. Through this particular lens the US looks like a failed state, such a dereliction of duties for a first-world nation.

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This is basically my position. Yeah it feels kinda gross that people are blatantly doing this kind of recording for views, but the far larger crime is that the situation exists in the first place.

The US is a monumentally rich country where people are left to basically rot on the streets if they're currently unable to care for themselves. There's some support institutions of course, and I applaud those that work there, but so much more needs to be done.

How do you dig yourself out of being a low-trust society?

Unfortunately the answer is (limited) authoritarianism. See Singapore as the quintessential example of this. I think they may in fact be the highest trust society on earth as a result of it.

Folks would take seats at hawker stands by leaving their 4000 USD macbooks and keys/wallet as markers. No one even bats an eye.

Why can't America strictly enforce laws like in Singapore?

Because you lose a lot of ‘freedom’. You cannot enforce as strictly as Singapore (where spiting gum on the street is illegal and such) without a lot of enforcement and that goes against the US constitution; to protect the state, Singapore for instance has gun laws that will get you fined, jailed and lashes if you have a gun or bullets or both. Singapore has free speech in the constitution but it’s not quite that free, again to make sure the state can have full control. These things are currently not compatible with the values of the US.

It’s mostly not about punishment, it’s about the chance of being caught. Plenty of crimes in the U.S. aren’t even enforced, so it doesn’t matter how harsh the punishment is. On the other hand, the U.S. is the most imprisoned country on the planet, so strictness isn’t the issue.

Because Singapore is a city-state, it is covered in cameras. Crimes are much more rare because criminals know they will be caught.

You can do that outside of cities in many countries though, but yes, in Singapore (also in HK and large swats of bangkok or Tokyo) you can do that in the city. In HK I often left my bag in the seat of the coffee place (including outside) to pick up someone from the MTR; people don’t touch it.

Singapore is a city-state made up of two+ etnicities, what worked for them probably wouldnt scale to something more complex as a big & diverse nation like U.S.A

How long are we going to rely on this as a catch all excuse?

The USA, the most unique country on earth. Solutions that work all over the world can't possibly work here because we're big, or diverse, or X, or Y or Z?

Whether it's healthcare in general, mental health, mass transit, polarization of politics (I think about growing up in Australia where you could be on differing sides of the spectrum and have discussion or debate and still go for a drink together. Moving to the US, I see regularly "I'd rather be dead than be caught having a liberal as a friend" or similar), internet access, or any other thing, the whole "The US is just too different from the rest of the world for any solution to work here that we don't invent ourselves (and won't because we hate upsetting the status quo)."

These sound like excuses for not trying. Plenty of US cities are smaller and don’t have anywhere close to the handle on major social problems that Singapore does.

If Singapore were in the U.S. it would be the second largest city by population.

Singapore has four national languages. It is very diverse.

To take homelessness as an example, police in Singapore can force you to go to a shelter, which is one reason why you don’t see homeless people everywhere. But they also have shelters with space. Many US cities don’t have space for their homeless population. The waiting list is years long.

Isn't the phrase for "taking attention away from the cause of the issue to focus on the symptoms" "misinformation"?

Curious how you see anything good coming from focusing the attention of the public away from the systemic issues that lead to this and towards shock content about how disgusting the people that are in this situation are.

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