I feel like HN should ban discussion of homelessness, due to the extreme ignorance and prejudice of the comments.
A bunch of people who don't know the first thing about it jumping to conclusions. The quality of the comments here is so so poor.
A bunch of people who don't know the first thing about it jumping to conclusions. The quality of the comments here is so so poor.
You're advocating for making red-backs less visible?
Consider Meta-borg, it's their own comment history that may damn them in the multiplying deliberate child manipulation trials as common people clearly see how they think.
I just wish the people who value critical thinking so highly when we are talking about the js ecosystem or llms, didn't turn into Victorians when we talk about poverty
Red backs are an Australian spider that has a painful, potentially fatal, bite - you want to know what they are when dealing with them (often just moving them away from people you love, sometimes straight up the vacuum tube).
Meta - formerly Facebook, is facing an increasing number of trials across the US and other countries related to their internally discussed in emails handling of children. attracting them, hooking them, and grooming them to be adult units of income, etc - regardless of detrimental effects.
This is open forum, let people voice their ideas even if you strongly oppose them. At least then folks don't live in illusion how rest of society has similar opinions on it as they do. I strongly oppose apple or meta for example, but asking for bans on this topic here would be ridiculous and put me into crank territory, right.
You don't like the discussion? Close that tab and move on into something more productive is the best advice I can give you
Its nothing to do with not liking the discussion. People who have no idea about the research done in to homelessness, have not spoken to hundreds of homeless people or worked in support services to actually genuinely know about the situation are just causing more issues and hindering progress. Rough sleeping has been a thing as long as humans have been on the earth, and uninformed people just seem to think its a money issue or there is some other simple solution that lazy governments aren't doing. If the solution was a simple one of money in the right place it would have been solved years ago. The situation is infinitely more complex than that. Every persons story, reasons, and attitude to help are completely different.
Feel free to have your open forum discussion, but as proven thousands of times before this uninformed discussion does nothing other than to cause arguments through unnecessary tension and hostility. This is a problem for very experienced people to work on, not for common people with no real life experience to throw comments on a public forum about.
Your attitude towards them being a nuisance is what needs to change. For example you could easily go out today and invite a rough sleeper to come back and stay at your place for a few nights. That would get one of them off the streets immediately.
One thing that I continue to wonder about is why is sympathy always directed at the person who is visibly in rough sorts - these people are definitely suffering from mental illness and substance addictions, but there are rarely calls for sympathy directed towards those who have to suffer annoyance, harassment, and sometimes abuse at the hands of these individuals. Not to mention the mental toll it takes on people seeing their communities and favorite haunts slowly degrade over time.
People don't want to live in depressing conditions, so I think some sympathy should be directed at them who have near zero ability to improve their surroundings while academics and NGOs wring their hands about the "homelessness problem" without actually making these communities better in any meaningful sense.