Techies Are the New Puritans
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
There's a persistent belief in common with the wealthy that we have earned, solely through our hard work and perseverance, our position in society. Never mind the advantages we had along the way.
But to my actual point.
Upvotes or downvotes on HN vary from the time of day to the way the headline is written (which will attract different groups of "techies" or whatever) and possibly the age group of the people who decide to take notice. Not to mention that there are non techies who read HN and so forth.
I don't think you can make a statement, as is often done, trying to characterize a typical HN reader or poster. Because nobody is taking a poll of the entire group only the group at a snapshot in time and only then based on something that attracted that particular group to make comments and/or vote.
A lot of people forget how much support they've had to get where they are. When you really take a good hard look at why many poor people are in the situations they're in, you see a total absence of a support network around them.
Working hard to get somewhere without any support around me is the single most frustrating thing I've had to deal with. It's easy to fail and often I have.
I have cousins with trust funds and millions of dollars to back up the pursuit of their dreams. I'm not really envious, but I know that I would be much further along towards my goals if I didn't have to work my ass off to get to somewhere in life where I can even afford to take a risk. Then it can take years to recover from failure.
Phrases I never expected to become part of my vocabulary like "class struggle" are starting to. I grew up in a poor, but conservative family!
At least not all of us think in the way you described, but a significant number sure do.
It saddens me that the concept of "class struggle" was sullied by its connection with a certain well-known failed attempt to solve the problem. Just because our rivals failed doesn't mean we have succeeded!
I'm really glad that my brief flirtation with libertarian ideas didn't even last into my 20s. It was more like an unfortunate stepping stone from growing up in a Limbaugh household to being the radical lefty I am today. Though I try not to identify with any of that either.
At least I can understand where libertarians are coming from. It's really the objectivism and the worship of Ayn Rand in privileged and powerful economic/political circles that makes me worry about the future.
Things are going well when there's a reasonably fair balance between rich/powerful and poor/powerless, especially with respect to rule of law. There won't always be justice but there needs to be a reasonable idea of it. It feels like lately that is slipping away and that such a state of affairs is more common historically -- the culture of (potential) prosperity that our society worked hard for after WWII is gone.
Be honest. How much Ayn Rand have you actually read? It's a very common strawman to pretend that Ayn Rand was promoting social darwinism. If you truly are just worried about objectivism, what is it that you have a problem with? People being shunned for harming instead of contributing?
I cannot launch an in-depth criticism of, say, Finnish politics because I have not studied Finnish politics in any detail.
I can give a limited criticism of Robert Greene, because I have studied a selection of his writings.
As far as I'm concerned, her entire argument falls apart when she starts to argue that altruism is immoral. Once you remove altruism as being a virtue and argue for a society where everyone accomplishes everything solely based on their own ability, I don't see how it can be argued that you're advocating anything but social darwinism (just with a different approach).
That's not to say that there weren't some useful things that were said, but in my life it offers very little value and none of the juicy parts are original.
As for why it makes me worry: the ones who often cite her as an influence and publicly sing her praises are very often the ones who are so off the mark in understanding what she actually said.
It's worth mentioning that the only libertarian I know who has been able to argue with me to my satisfaction remarkably agrees with me on "what needs to be done." I suspect political philosophy is somewhat like religion: any sufficiently dedicated person can use any sufficiently developed philosophy to support any sufficiently developed plan. Here's my list. What's yours?
1. Campaign finance reform. Turn the bribing policy from "mandatory bribes" to "optional bribes." Going to "no bribes" is probably too difficult (how to close the "cushy job upon retirement" loophole?)
2. Legislative and judicial policy focused on creating competitive markets, not placating business (#1 necessary for #2)
3. Single-payer healthcare
4. Basic income (Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM )
1. Campaign finance reform. I actually would like to see some steps towards a return to the older party boss systems. Think Tammany Hall. These systems were incredibly corrupt but very efficient. Moreover, the base of each party wasn't the radical fringe. This isn't ideal, but at times it worked reasonably well.
2. Electoral reform. I would like to see instant-runoff voting. I say this with the caveat that there really needs to be more than 2 major competitive parties, so I'm lumping that into this bullet point as well.
3. Patent and copyright reform.
4. Single-payer healthcare
5. Prison reform. Rehabilitation instead of Punishment. Abolition of private prisons and an overhaul of the criminal code. Could add points onto this topic for hours.
6. Tax reform. Specifically a single tax system using Land Value Tax.
I don't live in SF, so I can only go off what I hear (from the accused 'techies', so I'm only getting one side of the propaganda here..), but what I have heard is that 1) the homeless really seem to love SF, preferring it to perhaps any other city, and 2) there is at least a segment of the homeless population that engages in extremely anti-social behavior (specifically I have heard stories of BART escalators regularly being shut down because the homeless shit on them).
(For background: most of my experience with the homeless comes from my interactions with them while working at a soup kitchen in a small city in Pennsylvania (those interactions were universally pleasant), and my interactions with them in Philadelphia (where an aversion to the homeless and an aversion to being mugged have a very close relationship...))
I can't speak to whether these sort of incidents get an exaggerated or unfair amount of coverage, or if these really are common problems. Of course either way, these sort of incidents/articles surely shape public perception; I don't think we can make this as simple as "Techies are nouveau riche who like to kick 'em when they're down".
Oh and I did see a guy yell at and punch a window on the BART train once for no apparent reason. It was late at night so not many people on the train but the few passengers were definitely freaked out. Window didn't even crack and he punched it HARD.
As to your first point, I gather San Francisco very rarely has weather so inhospitable as to render living outdoors dangerous or even particularly unpleasant. As to your second, I forget who characterized man as "where the falling angel meets the rising ape", but it's an apt enough metaphor, and we fail to encourage the former at peril of encouraging the latter.
In that case, to what do you ascribe that behavior?
And
What is the appropriate response to it?
If there really is a stark difference in behavior, I don't know what to ascribe that to.
Sounds like a stereotype of students as much as of the homeless.
In a nutshell, the city doesn't have enough money to install public toilets which are deemed appropriate for use by the homeless etc. Not sure what the exact requirements were, but that's the nub of it.
Of course, the city is giving payroll tax breaks to Twitter and other tech companies because they threatened to leave the city (to Australia at one point!) if they didn't get it.
There's a link there somewhere...
Anyway, end result is that Twitter employees are going to have to cycle in shit, walk in shit, and stand on BART escalator shit. Karma is beautiful.
Sure some subset of the homeless population spits, urinates, taunts, sells drugs and gets rowdy, but so do a lot of rowdy bar hoppers on Polk St every Saturday night.
Homelessness is a complex subject with many causes and effects -- I don't claim to understand it; in fact, I'd like to learn more, but episodes like this don't seem to engender that kind of discussion, unfortunately.
The legitimate complaints about the homeless in SF seem to always revolve around criminal acts: Assault and vandalism, mostly. (The less legitimate complaints are usually a variant on "I shouldn't have to look at poor people.")
Not all homeless people commit these sorts of crimes. Those who do are just disproportionately visible. This provides fodder for the false narrative that the homeless are criminals who are undeserving of compassion and responsible for their own criminality.
So how can we discuss this issue without wrongly demonizing a whole demographic? Here's how. If you live in SF and you're bothered by street crime, complain about street crime. Advocate for community policing that a) keeps a lid on assault, vandalism, and other such crimes, and b) treats the public (including the homeless) as valued customers.
It's fine to say that street crime in downtown SF bothers you. That's a completely understandable sentiment. I think most everyone feels the same way about the neighborhoods they inhabit. What's not fine is heaping overbroad blame on an already marginalized group.
Still, if we want to know why the general public is displeased with college students in some hypothetical town, we should ask ourselves if there really is a problem with bored college students lobbing beer bottles through windows for fun. The hypothesis "The general public is frustrated with the local college kids because a highly visible minority of them wreck up the place" should probably be examined before we jump on board with less... direct.. hypotheses.
Yes, I know it's a counterfactual, but I can never resist the opportunity to toss out that old chestnut, because just about every time I do so, it meets two or three people who not only have never heard of it, but never imagined it possible.
Clearly not all 'mob grievances' are legitimate.
Anyway, even if we take the 'techies' grievances with the homeless as not legitimate, I think it is important to remain honest with ourselves as to what those (not legitimate) grievances are. The author is proposing a theory of the origin of those grievances that I think discards the seemingly obvious origin.
So for example, I assume the issue the residents of Kent had with the college students was somewhere along the lines of "they were a bunch of unpatriotic smelly hippies who didn't spend enough time in class". Both of us agree that would not be a legitimate grievance. What I think is relatively unsupported and usefulness is an alternative theory that the residents of Kent thought that all the college students were "Pretentious educated snobs who, on their shoestring college student budgets, contributed little to local businesses", asserting that the hippy stuff was just a convenient excuse. I mean, that could be the case, but I would want to see a pretty solid refutation of the obvious theory before I accept that less direct one.
While the residents of Kent were obviously being hateful monsters, they were probably being straightforward and honest with their complaints.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes what the mob claims their grievance is (legitimate or not) really is what they think their grievance is.
Now I have to come clean: I gave you a trick question, asking you to define a function which in fact is trivial. Do you know Lisp? Never mind, it's simple enough, not least because we can cheat by assuming the definition of 'legitimacy' -- here, I'll give it to you in Lisp, thus:
(defun mob-legitimate-p (&rest args)
nil)
Now, leave aside the question of whether you've given me cause for grievance, which you'll note was nowhere mentioned in your homework assignment. While I'm aiming that shotgun at your chest, how legitimate do you think you'll regard my grievance? How does it affect your consideration that I find it meet to back my demand for redress with violence and the threat of more violence? Regardless of how I might make or you might evaluate my case in the abstract, what effect do you consider my actions to have on the legitimacy of my claim?
And, finally: Can you define in rigorous terms why it should be in any way more moral, or less deleterious to the good order and conduct of any society, for many people to engage in actions analogous to those I've just laid out? It's not right or just or meet or permissible for me to act in that fashion, but the common theory seems to be that, if I go out and round up five hundred more who're pissed off just like me and we all come back with shotguns, or Molotovs, or what-have-you, the very same actions are somehow ennobled thereby. I've heard a goodly number of arguments for why that is, but none has managed to convince me; perhaps you'll be the first! In any case, I hope you'll attempt so to do, and look forward to studying the result.
Part of my point was that the legitimacy of the grievance is a distraction. Due to its subjective nature, it cannot be computed (most reasonable people will often find each other in agreement, but this is still a distraction (and itself depends on the subjective. What is "reasonable"?))
Furthermore, actions taken by either party are again a distraction. We can talk about appropriate ways to resolve disputes, (I would argue, and I think you would agree, that threatening me with a shotgun is an appropriate response to an exceptionally narrow range of situations) but that is not what this discussion is about. The article is not about how to resolve the tension between the homeless and the 'techies'.
What the article is about is classifying the nature of the grievance techies have with the homeless. The article asserts the grievance stems from a form of Puritanism; Puritan-esque ideas about the intrinsic value of labor and the forms that contribution to society must take. The author implies that this grievance would be "not legitimate", and in fact I agree with the author. Still, the 'legitimacy' of that grievance is a distraction in the context of this conversation.
I am not arguing that the authors judgement call on the legitimacy of this grievance is incorrect. Rather, I am arguing that the author has dismissed the possibility that the grievance techies have with the homeless is much simpler (which does not* mean 'correct', 'legitimate', or 'moral'.)*
I cannot fulfill your request (in the final paragraph of your above comment), because I do not believe that a grievance is legitimized by the size of the mob. Furthermore, I believe the 'moral legitimacy' of the a grievance is not relevant to ascertaining what grievances a mob has. In fact, we cannot even begin to discuss that until we have agreed upon exactly what that grievance is. Agreeing what the grievance is must be a prerequisite for discussing the merits of the grievance.
tl;dr: The mob is techies. Noreen Malone believes that the mob has been riled up by some form of neopuritanism. I consider that possible, but I do not consider it the simplest explanation, nor the most likely explanation.
I really don't know what you're trying to get at with your comment. It seems to consist mostly of straw-man arguments and a lack of interest in confronting a real problem.
Together we can put petition Ed Lee and SFPD for effective non-political policing. Let's start by upholding the law in Dolores Park on the week-ends.
Er, hello, anybody there? Nobody interested anymore? Hmmm.
I think cost and availablility of housing might have something more to do with it, seeing as rich folks doing drugs doesn't lead to homelessness nearly as much.
Across the country, the homeless are routinely prosecuted for relieving themselves in public, yet in many cases they're offered no places to lawfully do so. (I don't know about downtown SF; I'm saying if there aren't bathrooms available to the homeless, you can't fairly prosecute them for going in public.)
Similarly, it's unfair to prosecute someone for shouting at passers-by if that person suffers from a serious mental illness, and has been denied treatment, as is so often the case. Indeed, our country has been defunding mental health and bolstering prisons, with the result that many would-be psychiatric patients are now being warehoused in prison.
> I really don't know what you're trying to get at with your comment. It seems to consist mostly of straw-man arguments
The article quote an SF startup CEO who seems to be calling all homeless people "degenerates." So it's hardly a straw man I'm arguing against. In case it wasn't clear, I'll be quite explicit: My argument is directed against the attitude espoused by the startup CEO in the second and third paragraphs of the article.
> a lack of interest in confronting a real problem.
Considering I explicitly agreed there was a problem and proposed an admittedly partial solution[1], I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. What is the problem I'm uninterested in confronting? The problem of homelessness? The problem of tech workers having to encounter the homeless?
[1] I proposed better community policing as a way of addressing legitimate complaints about street crime. I should have also discussed the dire need to address the root issue, which is homelessness itself. For those interested, "housing-first" is a promising model.
There is a homeless problem in SF, with as much money as the city spends on programs to help them I'm not sure why it's so much worse then other big cities, but it is.
They didn't merely stop the Muni/BART escalators. Those huge machines were clogged with so much shit that they failed. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...
The elephant in the room is the fact that tech companies and startups have been setting up shop in the very parts of the city where homelessness, crime and the behavior described have long been problems.
That doesn't mean that these issues shouldn't be addressed, but I cannot for the life of me understand why "techies" have been flocking to areas of San Francisco where the average person would likely not feel safe the minute the sun goes down.
As an example: I once went to an event at a venture-backed startup that chose to locate itself in an unsightly part of town in what was previously an auto body shop. It was literally right next door to an adult entertainment shop. Who in their right mind does this and doesn't expect to encounter unseemly behavior?
I don't think that it is fair to frame the situation as a problem of people not respecting some sort of informal 'urban decay quarantines'. That seems uncomfortably close to victim blaming to me (yes, the situation is not that simple as clearly the more impoverished are victims, but the well-off are nevertheless also victimized by criminal portion of the impoverished population. This is a difficult topic to discuss without appearing to lack compassion or be tone deaf)
If doing what I can to protect the physical and mental well-being of my employees requires that I make a judgement call to avoid certain areas of a city, I would make that judgement call every single time because it's simply the right thing to do.
If you are certain that location of employment is essential to this discussion, consider that not everybody who commutes through dangerous or vandalized neighborhoods works in those sort of neighborhoods. Some of them instead live in those neighborhoods. A company may choose to locate itself in a clean and affluent neighborhood, but that does not resolve the problems their employees may face.
Because the rent's cheap there! -- in a city where office space averages $500 per square foot per month [1], renting an ex-body-shop next to a porn store's going to be a lot easier on the ol' shoestring, don't you think?
[1] http://www.loopnet.com/San-Francisco_California_Market-Trend...
But the key here is understanding the root cause and showing compassion towards the misguided.
...not constructing an us vs. them mentality, like Greg.
SF actually has relatively great care for homeless people compared to the majority of the US. Therefore a lot more homeless end up there.
The homeless problem is striking because it's almost entirely artificial. If SF didn't care for it's homeless, and didn't rent control areas to allow affordable housing it would probably be like midtown manhattan. That's boring to a lot of residents and unfortunate for the homeless, but where's the tax money coming from to allow the status quo to continue?
No one seems to be debating the value of social programs, but what's the advantage of the tenderloin? It's been a decaying mess for generations when it could be a profitable, vibrant part of the city which would be beneficial for wealthy and poor alike.
The same is not true of countries.
^ It's easily the most accurate, holistic, and honest piece on the Tenderloin I've ever come across.
I've seen a lot of people suggesting that learning to code is a solution, which feels like a very disconnected kind of response. If you're trying to stay warm and survive from day to day, buying a computer is surely the lowest priority. Another solution is raising awareness via the web. In the social media era though, this has the negative of making people feel like they've done something by sharing a link or upvoting a story without actually making an actual difference, so I don't feel like this, by itself, is a great solution.
The disparity between people in the technology industry and the homeless is so huge, and noticeable, in areas like San Francisco that I feel it is our responsibility to give back and try and make a difference somehow. What are some ways that this could be achieved?
This has not yet been the case. I prefer to reward civility with civility.
Crazy antisocial people often become homeless and are the visible side of it, but the vast majority of homeless people are not antisocial or crazy.
[1] hmm, since I last checked this account has become less active. https://twitter.com/homelessdating
There are likely many, many ways we can leverage our abilities and talents to contribute to a solution, but many are non-obvious until you're on the inside and start ascertaining the size, scope, and nature of the problems.
Go find local shelters, soup kitchens, and other humanitarian services. Take the most rank and file (but front-facing) opportunity you can get. Work. Talk to people - the hopelessly homeless, the temporarily homeless, the people who work with them. Learn about these problems up close instead of speculating from the comfort of an armchair like most of the world.
Don't expect to be welcomed with open arms. Expect some measure of hostility. The homeless are all too familiar with being paraded around like animals in a zoo. Many of the people you will be volunteering with are presumptuous people with savior complexes, who will be patronizing to the people they're trying to help. Many people you work with will initially assume you're one of them also.
You're not going to write a world-changing piece of code having never written code before. You're definitely not going to turn homelessness upside down with no inside experience.
This isn't true for every bum or homeless person you see, of course. But it is true for some of them. And then, the problem becomes yours (or mine).. I want everyone to have to make the same sacrifices and play by the same rules I do. I had to spend my youth studying, I had to impress someone with the power to give me a job, and work to keep them happy, etc.
I believe thats the fundamental conflict we face and why homelessness will never be solved.
Move the political will in a direction that strives to provide affordable places to live, reduce commute times, access to child care, etc. This seems to be totally the opposite of the voting will in SF these days. Everyone is concerned with their real estate value and preventing adequate property development and criminalizing peoples' innovative (and dignified) solutions to community problems (I'm talking about people living in RVs/campers).
The Puritans are closer to the do-gooders than the general population. Puritans left Europe to form the perfect society, which they defined around their religious practice. They had all the answers and were building the city on the hill. The system worked, as long as you were an adherent.
The way you solve these problems is by acting at a higher level to address root causes. Advocating for someone's "right" to shit their pants and disrupt public spaces is ridiculous, but it's also easy to do -- offering pity is always easy to do. It's not as easy to get treatment for mental health issues or to fund drug programs or to address the more systemic issues that result in a screaming maniac running around in the street.
Techie or not, I have a right to use public spaces that should be preserved. My son should be able to work in a public library. My family should be able to walk down the street without fear.
I think we need to be extremely cautious when we think things like this. I'm not sure everyone's fear is well-founded. It seems like we can't eliminate risk, so we need to have this reasonable debate about what we'll tolerate.
I don't believe in removing these people, but let's have anyone in the area behaving some fair rules. No physical assault sounds good. Sounds like maybe we agree? I just haven't had that physical assault problem, so to me it seems like I can walk down the street without fear.
When my sister worked at this hospital, it was very intimidating to have to run through a gauntlet of these people, it was really scary to be running a gauntlet of deranged drunks.
For a very special meaning of "self-reliant". The majority of programmers I know could not produce their own food, make their own clothes, build their own shelter, treat their own illnesses. These are the fundamentals of life; how "self-reliant" can someone claim to be without being able to do these (I can't do these either, but I'm not claiming self-reliance)?
We can play into an illusion of "self-reliance" only because these foundations and so much more have been made so pervasive and efficient.
The truth is, we are all just standing on the shoulders of giants. One cannot truly claim to be purely a product of one's own hard-work and effort, because others helped you get there, but the idea that you can figure out anything be reading the manual, the source, by rubber-ducking, and so on relates very well to the Puritanical notion that one's place in life is earned through hard-work and thus just.
Self-reliance is when you can contribute enough to society on your own to get the things required to live in return without hand-outs.
I think you've mistaken "not in debt" for "self-reliant".
The poster seems to express an affinity towards Objectivist thinking based on some other comments (I wouldn't assume an ideology they haven't overtly claimed.), but has a very narrow definition of what altruism is. I would argue that this is a problem, because objectivism and its usefulness to society depends almost entirely on how you think of altruism.
Proponents of the viewpoint in general are very dismissive of things like paying for the care of the diseased, even when there's a strong and perfectly reasonable objectivist argument that you should do so purely out of self-interest because of how diseases live and are spread.
The article's author not only disagrees, but considers this model so obviously erroneous that she doesn't see any need to explain what's wrong with it. I find this unhelpful, because it fails to explain why subsidizing people who contribute nothing to society, in such fashion as to provide an incentive to continue contributing nothing to society, is in any way a good idea.
The problem is that in addition to having let our infrastructure decay, we've let our social infrastructure decay.
Isn't the purpose of so-called "subsidization" to avoid this? (Not that it necessarily works in practice.)
Many of them (eg, food stamps) cut benefits when you're unemployed homeless, and focus instead on at-risk employed people.
Many kitchens require that you show up every day and spend large amounts of time on travel to-and-from, as well as waiting in line.
That is the price of having a social safety net. You are not just subsidizing people who contribute nothing. Some day you might be in need of some help despite all your productivity.
But, since you bring personalities into it: No one can eat pride, of course, and if I'm in a tight enough spot, I don't kid myself other than that I'll do what's needful to stay alive, and wait to earn back my self-respect until I can afford it again. But on the day I beg for succor, I hope I have the good fortune so to do from someone who respects me highly enough to let me work for what I need, instead of offering mere unearned largess by means of which to enhance his own opinion of himself at the cost of my humiliation.
If in a hypothetical conversation, someone said to me "They contribute nothing; they should all just die & starve or just get out of the way." ... my response would be that it's us, the people with wealth(or at least not living paycheck2paycheck) who have the most power to change society and allow it to support them somehow. I don't really know how exactly, but the first experiment I'd vote for is basic-income and see how that pans out.
That's not to say that the former group are saints, but 1) they have systematic disadvantages that actually prevent any current legal implementations of a free market from providing for them and 2) once incarcerated, they actually end up costing society in a far more permanent way (up to $167k/yr in NYC).
So, even if you disregarded how totally wrongheaded your argument on a sociopolitical level, it also shows a pretty flimsy lack of substance on a quantitative level. You WILL pay for poverty one way or another. You can't magically incentivize it out of existence with a free market, so don't whine about it by thinking about it as subsidization. Think of it more as insurance, at the very least.
I have a friend who recently got a job at a company that works to deport immigrants who have committed some sort of crime. On the face of things they try to give them hope, but they mostly give false hope, don't provide the information they need, and make holding a job impossible.
Once a month they will visit home "sometime next week" - and the person must be at home, which means an indeterminate amount of time off - maybe a week, maybe two. They ask them to come into their offices at 9am and don't see them until 6pm, if at all - maybe they ask them to come back tomorrow.
He's in the process of finding a new job, as the job is misadvertised as helping immigrants. Especially as an immigrant himself, he hates working there.
Barbaric, you say? Do you then contend that the actions, which render such punishment meet, are any less barbaric? Which is worse, then? -- to lay open a man's back in answer to his crimes, and stretch his neck should he prove obdurate? Or to leave him grind his fellow men into the dust by trickery and deceit, and grow fat on the proceeds of their suffering? Or shall we handle him with kid gloves? -- as others here have rightly noted, a rich man rarely fears prison, and imprisonment itself carries great cost -- but let him once see his fellow criminal hauled down from the post with his back in bloody tatters, and you give him mightily to consider how best to save himself from a similar fate!
One would think that with the enormous resources devoted to the poor, we could at least expect not to have to step on shit. But one would be wrong, due to the incredible inefficiency and corruption of our one party state.
The interesting thing about this article, to me, is what it shows about how much demand there is for this idea.
Maybe, but the reaction on Twitter and in this thread is proof that a lot of techies have this puritan attitude toward homeless. The blog was being sensational to expose this.
> Silicon Valley's ugly treatment of homeless people has a long history.
And the only "history" I see is:
> Greg Gopman, who is the CEO of a startup that organizes hackathons, wrote this on his Facebook page
Let's pretend there were a dozen such ugly comments in the past year from people who happen to live in Silicon Valley. What does that say about tech being the new Puritans? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
Don't get me wrong, I think the quoted techie sounds quite disagreeable. And yes, I'm sure there are many more techies who think like him. But I don't see this as a "techie" problem. I see it as a above-average-income mindset that is more impacted by the amount of money and privilege you have rather than what industry you acquired such things in.
America doesn't need "new puritans", it is already full of religious extremists who think that their personal moral code must be implemented in law for everyone to follow. The Puritans founded pre-USA America, and they haven't gone anywhere.
[1] I'm not saying what they said wasn't wrong; it was. I'm just saying it isn't "puritanism".
Guess what, most of these people have struggles that we can't begin to understand. A lot are dealing with mental health issues that are more debilitating than anything you or I will ever have to deal with. I live on Market St., and I'm as guilty as anyone of becoming numb to the homeless living there. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that anyone can grab a Rails tutorial and become a six-figure engineer within a few years just because we've seen it done.
Urinating in public is a classic sign of people being drunk in public. Most of those people have the money to spend on drinks in bars so I doubt they are homeless.
As for taunting, that sounds like mental illness to me. And the same goes if someone is spitting at other people.
Now I will admit that it is a common side effect of mental illness to be homeless, but unless you actually know that someone is homeless for a fact, you are likely lumping multiple groups of people together and basically saying "This city needs to do something about all the people on the streets who are not like me".
Seems to me like better support for the mentally ill would go a long way to solve the problem, and for those who just want to sweep the problem away by moving the mentally ill somewhere else, that might be a good idea. Bringing people closer to nature in a country setting and giving them responsibility to care for farm animals, and gardens, are all known ways to heal mental illness. Sounds like these people need to put their money where there mouth is. Start an Indiegogo project to help mentally ill people in a country setting and donate your money to that rather than complaining.
Having a degree and/or a job in demand doesn't give them the right to look down upon the unfortunates. I believe there are a huge population of veteran homeless too. It's not like all them chose to be homeless.
They're just assholes that are sitting around bitching. They're not the ones that are going to try to solve the homeless problem they're the ones that try to hide the problem. They're worst, they have no solution to this problem and not willing to do anything.
I find it weird that they used religious allegory but their religious figures such as Jesus would have help those in need not whine about it.
For all of history this has been a problem too big for charity to solve.
There is no question that disrespectful attitudes toward the poor and homeless in any city betrays a shocking lack of empathy about the struggles that they encounter.
The flip side is that there are real problems facing workers (tech and otherwise) in these neighborhoods and just labeling anyone who complains about them as some kind of bigot neither cures that person of any perceived bigotry, it also does not solve the core problems that people who live in those neighborhoods are facing: extreme poverty, mental illnesses, rising rent costs and more.
One of my co-workers is a woman and she is harassed daily as she walks into our office, to the point that we are moving offices as a result. The comments she endures are sickening and I've witnessed it myself. Interestingly, it happens much less when I walk down Market Street with her. But what I've noticed is that it's not the homeless who make those comments.
There are multiple groups all clustered together and it combines to create an unsettling experience for people who walk through the neighborhood. There are the homeless, who generally seem to keep to themselves and are preoccupied with staying warm, begging for food / money, etc.
Then there are the apparently mentally ill, who are likely also homeless, who can be found screaming in the street, disrobing and more. There are also obvious drug addicts - I watched a man lick a needle and inject it into an open sore on his leg in broad daylight. Then there are the loiterers, dealers and gamblers on the street. These dudes actually are the most abusive toward women. They are the ones who make inappropriate comments toward my co-worker and other women I see walking down the street. They yell at people, threaten them, and attack one another.
Combine all this with the smell of feces, urine and trash littered all over the street and you do genuinely wonder why it's so bad. I can't think of a single other city in America that I've visited that has this many problems.
Some of the core causes appear to be an impenetrable and growing wealth gap, lack of available services for those in need, lack of proactive police coverage (but please, no military-wannabe cops need apply) and ongoing gentrification. In the Tenderloin, I would almost characterize it as an active rebellion against gentrification, where long-time residents feel the need to intimidate the tech workers moving in to set up new offices, coffee shops, etc. Call it the Scooby Doo strategy.
It's a difficult situation because on the one hand I completely sympathize with those who are seeing their ability to afford living in older neighborhoods vanish before their eyes. On the other hand, tech workers are often portrayed as entitled tech hipster bros who just want a clean street to walk down on their way to the new Blue Bottle cafe.
The reality is that the actual "tech workers" who are trying to make a living also includes women, men and women with families and new immigrants to the US. Because of the money some of these folks earn, it's easy enough to demonize them when one jackass makes inappropriate comments on Facebook. But the same Valleywag bloggers who demonize the tech hipster bros also can't be seen actually doing anything to make a difference on their own and probably share the same thoughts as they walk toward a new cafe to work on their next piece, this one already forgotten.
Here's an article on it. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-struggles-to-help-e...
Do you think technology is going to take over the world?
Non-technologists fear that technologists have lost their humanity, and thus incur an air of arrogance. That's the point here.
Most of them do not want (1) welfare from the tech hierarchy, and some of them do not want to participate in this arbitrary hierarchy (2) because of their aesthetic views on technology overall or (3) because of their lack of education regarding the subject.
From the general views commonly espoused on this forum and elsewhere, this seems like a legitimate fear. I do not believe it's fair to color these people as luddites or uninformed.
We should not ignore the historical and political context here: Democracy as implemented by the U.S., given the motivations of market capitalism, has not been working; and this discussion may very well be the result of that failure.
Your original post mentioned that we must consciously add humanism to what we do, and non-technologists fear that we have lost our humanity.
My point is that this fear is not unjustified, considering how so many of us (evidently, based on discussions that happen around here) look down upon non-technologists and will readily throw them to the wolves.
Regardless of one's fear of technology (whether for good reason or for lack of it), the fear of technologists is IMO rational based on my own observations of people in the industry.
tl;dr: From watching HN discussions, some of us are fucking scary. I fear them.
What are stereotypes ?