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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, great article. But it should get to the point.

The reason you need to physically remove yourself is because of the insane lunatics that blast trash music and do a dance while aggressively panhandling or screaming at you for trying to commute quitely on the train to work. A hallmark of daily life when I worked in SF and in NYC.

A great way to fix the fake problem would be to aggressively enforce the existing laws, starting with tickets, and if that doesn't work, incarceration. Apparently it's not politically correct to do that though so I guess we are all second class citizens who need to live in a low trust society where people are increasingly isolated.

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Coming back to the states after traveling abroad is always astonishing. For all our wealth, it genuinely feels worse than somewhere like Brazil in many of our big cities

The Brazilian government keeps the crime contained to specific areas, where it gets extremely bad. In the US, a generalized lack of enforcement means small amounts of nuisance crime spread around.

uhh, could it be perhaps you've just been living in the "specific areas" where crime is "contained" in the US.

If you mean “cities” then yes. Google the word “favela” if you want to see how things work in Brazil.

It has nothing to do with wealth. It’s just policy.

There is a difference between being a tourist somewhere and actually living there.

Being a tourist in SF is probably way worse than being a resident that knows what to avoid doing and where to avoid going.

This reply is perfect. The anger encapsulated in it captures the exact crux of the post. The point, of course, is that advances in personal technology have coincided with a cultural shift where people feel entitled to personal isolation in public spaces.

When I moved to NYC 30 years ago, one of the things that made me fall in love with the city was the way that living in such close proximity to so many others seemed to create so much more empathy. The same effect, I now see working in reverse, minimizing contact with others with by disappearing into technology has the effect of making people less empathetic. Instead of reaching into their pocket for a subway performance, or a homeless person, people might prefer to see them arrested for the crime of violating their all important personal barriers.

I don't feel entitled to personal isolation from people who might want to strike up a conversation. If I'm not in the mood, I'll just say so.

I feel entitled to personal isolation from schizophrenics, who have a good chance of assaulting me if I look at them wrong. (And did you think screaming and playing loud music was disruptive just to quiet, and not to the aforementioned conversation too?)

You are the problem, not the person you're replying to. When you say 'you must exhibit infinite tolerance of antisocial disruption', the easy response is 'or I could always just leave'.

My home is now a place where people are mortified by the homeless, and literally give them things off of themselves, or offer ways to existentially assist, on-sight.

Maybe it’s the crushing disproportionate volume and nature of the poverty that each effective individual is confronted with that’s to blame - I still believe people are inherently good, but they do give up pretty easily if you make it socially acceptable to ignore.

I will no longer choose to live in places it’s socially acceptable to ignore.

While commuting can be chaotic, I don't think what you're calling out is the central point of the article.

Spaces that are less chaotic - coffee shops, gyms, even elevators - are places that people used to be able to strike up random short conversations with each other. Sometimes these would become longer. Sometimes they even turned into friendships.

It still happens of course, but I, like the author, am saddened that casual socialization seems to be on the decline.

I like to say Hi to people in elevators. Some reciprocate. Some find it awkward. But I don't even bother saying Hi to those wearing AirPods since that would be rude, interrupting them. Could an interaction have brightened our mutual days? Could we have become friends? Who knows, AirPods preempted it from the start.

People can’t understand you can’t have both protecting the poor and not enforcing laws against the poor at the same time

You can be poor and obey the law. You can protect the poor and enforce the law.

It is the weird identity politics is what gets in the way.

There's a easier solution by crime caused by poor people: they stop being poor. The fact that nobody tried is the thing that should be studied instead.

There's abundant evidence against this belief:

  * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
  * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
  * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/
  * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/

Indenting that triggered monospace code formatting, which is preventing those from becoming links.

I'm hearing this high pitched sound, does anyone else hear that?

I clicked and scrolled through several of those studies, and those snippets are incredibly misleading. I would recommend not using these in debates, unless you want to come across as a poor researcher acting in bad faith.

The very last one says nothing about genetics at all, that's saying the justice system is biased.

The second to last is part of a much more nuanced section talking about environmental impacts and the role that can play in biological expression. It literally says:

> Thus, just as biological mechanisms can influence environmental responses, environmental stressors can affect biological expressions.

I stopped reading at that point.

I grew up poor and that was never an inducement to commit crime. I took plenty of "food I didn't want" off my friends' hands at lunch in middle and high school, but never even thought of crime.

Although my parents weren't rich they still tried to teach right from wrong, respect for others and all the rest.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there's plenty of examples of rich assholes who act as if money makes them immune from justice.

The poor are impacted by lawlessness far more than the rich. No private security or fancy neighbourhoods. Cutting down on actually harmful bad behaviour (and by this I mean dealers and muggers, not broken taillights) is the best thing you can do for poor people.

This is nonsense. You absolutely can have both -- typically by building systems to eliminate poverty and reduce income inequality.

I’ll add onto this the PA system & noise from the trains themselves. BART isn’t exactly a quiet train system, and MUNI is far too comfortable blasting announcements & propaganda through its PA system telling you not to commit crimes.

Those speakers by the way are an ADA requirement, and the only information that should be coming out of them are the stop announcements & any comms from the driver that may be necessary. Anything else in four different languages is not required, including the track telling you not to stand too close to the doors on the bus.

I’ve been in the Baltic countries for a few weeks. I do not see any of the behaviors you mentioned, but all the behaviors mentioned in the article.

I don’t think this is a bad music problems

You also see the behavior in the middle of the woods on a hike, or as the article mentions at upscale cafes. The whole point of the article is the near universality of wearing airpods. So a comment dwelling on US urban subways tells you more about the comment-writer's preoccupations then any sociological insight. And a top comment tells you mainly something about the preoccupations/demographics of the site.

Pretty sure my commute of 12 years had exactly zero aggressive panhandling (or unaggressive panhandling), yet just about every single person on it was wearing some flavour of them.

I've also just been in Japan, where nobody's commute has panhandling of any kind, and guess what, everyone there is tuning the world out with their headphones, too. Despite it being kind of verbotten to make noise on the subway, and the few conversations that were happening on it were very quiet.

I wasn't wearing mine during that trip. Because a relatively quiet space was actually pleasant for me to be in. American cities are so fucking noisy, and as a consequence, even people respectful of their surroundings tend to be loud.

I’d say it’s the opposite. We get non enforcement and anti enforcement because lots of people aren’t directly affected.

Different neighborhoods, work from home, private transportation to work, or—admittedly to a lesser degree—AirPod insulation.

If we were really all this together quality of life in our cities would be taken far more seriously.

No, it’s because city politics in the US are dominated by naive bleeding-heart type leftists who are willing to overlook any and all forms of antisocial behavior if it’s committed by a poor and/minority individual.

Considering that's where all the people and money are in this country, it's clearly not a problem for most folk. You're entitled to your outlier opinion, of course.

Eh I don't think so. Commutes are as clean and peaceful as they can be in the Netherlands or Switzerland and people are no less buried in their phones with noise-cancelling earbuds on.

Why is this downvoted? This is correct.

People like blaming everything that is wrong in their life on lack of law enforcement against the undesirables.

It's a tale as old as time.

Can confirm. Traveling via public transport in Switzerland is remarkably uneventful. It's a stark contrast to my Eastern European home country, where it is a gamble due to a certain demographic's anti-social behavior.

I commute every day in Switzerland, and we have people blasting music, shouting, putting feet on seats, taking 3 seats etc, including in 1st. I actually stopped traveling in 1st, it could be more noisy and chaotic than 2nd and the price difference wasn't worth it.

The Netherlands has plenty of crazies using public transport. Every other window on the train has the emergency number on it for a reason. I refuse to travel in second class, hate being close to people that blast music, use drugs, puke or eat a broodje pindakaas.

The Netherlands even has segregated busses for asylum seekers because there was too much violence. Dutch people have their own busses and asylum seekers are required to use a separate bus with extra security. Upside is that asylum seekers don’t have to pay for a ticket.

You make it sound like it's an absolute warzone (your demographic certainly likes to push that narrative even in the most uneventful of places!). Yes I've taken trains back home from nights out at 4:30 in the morning where there were drunk girls talking loudly and (gasp!) trash on the floor. There's certainly no-one "blasting loud music" in the average train and definitely not "doing drugs".

Ofc there's a non-zero number of crazies, violent people, sexual harassers, etc. That's a certainty in a system with 400 million trips a year! But then please don't leave your home, there can be an ax murderer lying in wait at any corner!

I would see people doing drugs about twice a week during my commute pre-Covid

I haven't seen showtime on the subway here in NYC in a long time. And even when it happened more often, they generally would dance for all of one stop before moving to the next train car. So, what, like ~3 minutes of your commute?

Much more annoying to me these days are all the people that have decided it's acceptable to stare at their phone and zombie walk out of the train and up the stairs, completely oblivious to the world around them. They're not even making noise, just walking straight into other humans in a busy station while scrolling tiktok.

Incarceration would be nuts.

For what exactly? And unstable homeless person threatening people on the street?

Harassing people and living on the street is already crime. Camping in public, public nuisance, loitering, obstructing sidewalk, etc.

I have come to the conclusion that until I am part of the landed gentry, the erratic homeless are a positive impact on my life. They may be a nuisance and cost me a stolen package here and there but when the “let them eat cake” types move into the neighborhood is when I get priced out. That is to say like inflammation is a symptom of something being wrong in the body, their plight is emblematic of the struggle that affects everybody but the upper crusts of society. You can try to treat the symptom in either case but there are much deeper structural problems.

Do you also think we should get rid of sealed sewers and keeping the roads intact in order to bring down property prices?

Maybe this is a sign of deeper structural issues and we shouldn't regress as a civilization but rather fix what the actual problems are.

I’m not saying that we need to regress further as a society. I was merely providing a counterpoint to the argument that the homeless need to have their agency stripped because they’re a negative value to “productive” society.

Their negative value isn't to productivity, but to your personal safety and quality of life, and frankly their safety and quality of life too. Accepting that people who cannot look after themselves need to be looked after by the community rather than left outside to die, I personally feel, should not be a controversial position.

While that does happen occasionally in SF, it's <5% of my commutes.

It's been 0% of my commutes in Seattle. Yet the NC headphones are also everywhere, including on my head.

TBF seattle is particularly bad - it's famously unfriendly compared to other cities.

Wildly unfriendly and standoffish, but also extremely unaccepting of dinguses blasting music without headphones on trains and buses. You win some, you lose some. I’ll embrace the silence and make my friends outside of transit and elevators, I think. (Bias disclaimer: PNW dweller for the past 9 years)

Oh lord not the laws and especially not the tickets

This is why they cane people in Singapore for nuisance crime. Incarceration is expensive and fines don’t have the right effect.

> The reason you need to physically remove yourself is because of the insane lunatics that blast trash music and do a dance while aggressively panhandling or screaming at you for trying to commute quitely on the train to work.

I've lived (and commuted on public transit) for years in many metros including SF, NYC, Boston and DC and can't recall even a single such interaction.

I'm sure it happens, I'm also sure it happens far less often than your competing anecdote suggests.

It’s a mixture of naivety and foreign influence campaigns.

What's interesting is how the culture of the homeless people seems to differ across SF. Civic Center to 6th & Market is consistently the worst in my experience in terms of volatile people.

Tenderloin these days is relatively peaceful (plenty of people on the streets but they're just getting high with their friends).

Mission is chaotic, extra poop on the sidewalk, sometimes masses of people 50+ deep. But also the people on the street seem to mostly know and take care of each other. Higher density of people selling stolen goods. If I take Muni bus 14 home at 3AM it's a bunch of people shuttling to shelters but being polite (although not always lucid), exchanging cans of soda, etc. However I've heard quite a few stories from 38 with people being threatening or worse.

> if that doesn't work, incarceration.

Sure, let’s “solve” a minor problem in the grand scheme of things with a much larger evil.

incarceration is going too far, all you need is a few enforcers with shock wands like in Demolition Man

Maniac has responded with a scornful remark!

Wont someone please think of the unstable homeless person threatening people on the street.

Incarceration is more humane for everyone than letting sick people live on the street.

Threatening to revoke the rights and freedoms of your fellow citizens and put them in a hellhole is pretty antisocial and sociopathic behavior, my dude. That makes me suuuuper uncomfortable.

Oh no, better throw you in jail so I don't have to think about you. Don't mind the moldy bugs in your food, that's just extra protein.

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