7 ms·

Slightly OT but pertains to "Children of Men" The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music

by w-ll 10y ago

Slightly OT but pertains to "Children of Men" The scenes where main character Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is on the really nice buses, and there is classical music playing in the background, while outside the window there is so much poverty really resonated with me. I've lived in SF going on 6 years now. My apt complex has private buses that run from here to FDi in the morning and evening. The route sometimes changes but a lot of the time we would go thru the heart of the TL. I'd be half asleep comfortably siting on this Bauer's bus, usually listening to something like Aphex Twin's Select Ambient Works, so not the classic music, but still I would sit there in this amazingly privileged situation and look out the window to all this poverty and despair. It constantly reminded me of this movie. I worked at Apple for a while, and the same thing, yet instead of my apt complex, it was dozens of Apple buses, shuttling 1000s of people for all over the bay area, and again on the way i'd see so much that really made me think about the current affairs of lots of things that's going crazy in our small little part of the world. I've since left Apple and joined to a small startup near Union Square/FDi area. I still live in the same apt complex, and they still have the buses running every 15-20 min in the morning, but i don't ride them any more. I walk the 2 miles everyday to and back from work, and I love it. For so many reasons I love it. One big reason is I don't want to be shielded or sheltered from the real world going on around us. I don't want to deal with the shit on the sidewalk or the craziness that exists in between my spot and my work, but i also don't want to pretend it doesn't exist and try and ignore it. Sometimes it can be very annoying, hell even scary. But also, A few times it's been amazing rewarding to help someone for 5 minutes. All sorts of little things, I've helped people that can't get their wheelchair from the street onto the sidewalk, or helping the elderly man trying to pick up a heavy box of fruit delivery for his corner store I walk past. I've had to explain this to some friends that live in apt complex. They take the bus daily and asked why I don't ride it any more, and again it all comes back to the bus scene from Children Of Men.

icelancer 10y ago
I worked in a gated, enclosed, guarded community in a Central American country with a bunch of expats - British, Canadian, American - and saw nothing but abject poverty outside of our small enclosure. Everything was delivered. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, local food, drinks, newspapers, groceries... We had transportation to the local office and I saw much the same as you, but in way worse conditions. It affected me just the same as you. I didn't last very long before taking a remote assignment and going back home.
- _coldfire 10y ago
  Had similar experience in SE Asia, you either blind yourself to the rampant inequality or it slowly eats away at you.
lacampbell 10y ago
I am curious, have you experienced poverty? I mean "first world poverty", like the kind you bus drives through? I have, and I want nothing to do with it. I certainly wouldn't choose to walk through it again. Have you stopped to consider you're being a bit of a slum tourist, or maybe you have a saviour complex?
- skrebbel 10y ago
  I'm not the answer, but I'm curious. I have never experienced poverty. I can relate that you want nothing to do with it anymore, but there's a hidden connotation that the poor want nothing to do with the non-poor. That that grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because the helper happens to be better off. Can you explain that emotion to me? Why is walking through a relatively poor district and generally being a decent neighbour "saviour complex" just because the person doing it is richer?
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    It's a way of teaching helplessness, while inflating your own ego. That grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because he is an able-bodied man. Doing this for him is belittling him, saying he's not an able-bodied man. It's like receiving unrequested advice or assistance on a project. Having grown up in poverty, been homeless for a summer, walked home past homeless people every day for years, and now a well-paid engineer in a nice city, I understand the questioning rage, wishing there was someone there to ease your burden. But I also recognize that direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution, or even just having the dignity of knowing they've done the best they can for themselves. In a sea of inequality, there is no peace, only calms between the storms. Making everyone equal is a laudable goal, but a more realistic goal is simply ensuring everyone has a rewarding and fulfilling life, and we still have a long way to go with that one.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      > direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution What about something like this instead? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08/11/this-republican-mayor-has-an-incredibly-simple-idea-to-help-the-homeless-and-it-seems-to-be-working/?utm_term=.02fce737048e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08...
jodrellblank 10y ago
From Maciej Ceglowski Second, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish. The old adage has it that if you are given ten minutes to cut down a tree, you should spend the first five sharpening your axe. We are used to the idea of bootstrapping ourselves into a position of maximum leverage before tackling a problem. In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people. - http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm and if you visit San Francisco, [the poverty] is something you're likely to find unsettling. You'll see people living in the streets, many of them mentally ill, yelling and cursing at imaginary foes. You'll find every public space designed to make it difficult and uncomfortable to sit down or sleep, and that people sit down and sleep anyway. You'll see human excrement on the sidewalks, and a homeless encampment across from the city hall. You'll find you can walk for miles and not come across a public toilet or water fountain. If you stay in the city for any length of time, you'll start to notice other things. Lines outside every food pantry and employment office. Racially segregated neighborhoods where poverty gets hidden away, even in the richest parts of Silicon Valley. A city bureaucracy where everything is still done on paper, slowly. A stream of constant petty crime by the destitute. Public schools that no one sends their kids to if they can find an alternative. Fundraisers for notionally public services. You can't even get a decent Internet connection in San Francisco. The tech industry is not responsible for any of these problems. But it's revealing that through forty years of unimaginable growth, and eleven years of the greatest boom times we've ever seen, we've done nothing to fix them. I say without exaggeration that the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 did more for San Francisco than Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of the tech companies that have put down roots in the city since. Despite being at the center of the technology revolution, the Bay Area has somehow failed to capture its benefits. It's not that the city's social problems are invisible to the programming class. But in some way, they're not important enough to bother with. Why solve homelessness in one place when you can solve it everywhere? Why fix anything locally, if the solutions can scale? And so we end up making life easier for tech workers, assuming that anything we do to free up their time will make them more productive at fixing the world for the rest of humanity. This is trickle-down economics of the worst kind. In the process, we've turned our city into a a residential theme park, with a whole parallel world of services for the rich. There are luxury commuter buses to take us to work, private taxis, valet parking, laundry and housecleaning startups that abstract human servants behind a web interface. We have a service sector that ensures instant delivery of any conceivable consumer good, along with some pretty inconceivable ones. There are no fewer than seven luxury mattress startups. There's a startup to pay your neighbor to watch your packages for you. My favorite is a startup you can pay to move your trash bins, once a week, three meters to the curb. If at the height of boom times we can look around and not address the human crisis of our city, then when are we ever going to do it? And if we're not going to contribute to our own neighborhoods, to making the places we live in and move through every day convenient and comfortable, then what are we going to do for the places we don't ever see? You wouldn't hire someone who couldn't make themselves a sandwich to be the head chef in your restaurant. You wouldn't hire a gardener whose houseplants were all dead. But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable. - http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....
transitorykris 10y ago
Zizek's short analysis of Children of Men echoes this. "The true focus of the film is there in the background". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE

by w-ll 10y ago

icelancer 10y ago

I worked in a gated, enclosed, guarded community in a Central American country with a bunch of expats - British, Canadian, American - and saw nothing but abject poverty outside of our small enclosure. Everything was delivered. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, local food, drinks, newspapers, groceries... We had transportation to the local office and I saw much the same as you, but in way worse conditions. It affected me just the same as you. I didn't last very long before taking a remote assignment and going back home.

_coldfire 10y ago
Had similar experience in SE Asia, you either blind yourself to the rampant inequality or it slowly eats away at you.

lacampbell 10y ago

I am curious, have you experienced poverty? I mean "first world poverty", like the kind you bus drives through? I have, and I want nothing to do with it. I certainly wouldn't choose to walk through it again. Have you stopped to consider you're being a bit of a slum tourist, or maybe you have a saviour complex?

skrebbel 10y ago
I'm not the answer, but I'm curious. I have never experienced poverty. I can relate that you want nothing to do with it anymore, but there's a hidden connotation that the poor want nothing to do with the non-poor. That that grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because the helper happens to be better off. Can you explain that emotion to me? Why is walking through a relatively poor district and generally being a decent neighbour "saviour complex" just because the person doing it is richer?
- stephengillie 10y ago
  It's a way of teaching helplessness, while inflating your own ego. That grocery store owner wouldn't want help with picking up the heavy box, because he is an able-bodied man. Doing this for him is belittling him, saying he's not an able-bodied man. It's like receiving unrequested advice or assistance on a project. Having grown up in poverty, been homeless for a summer, walked home past homeless people every day for years, and now a well-paid engineer in a nice city, I understand the questioning rage, wishing there was someone there to ease your burden. But I also recognize that direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution, or even just having the dignity of knowing they've done the best they can for themselves. In a sea of inequality, there is no peace, only calms between the storms. Making everyone equal is a laudable goal, but a more realistic goal is simply ensuring everyone has a rewarding and fulfilling life, and we still have a long way to go with that one.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    > direct charity prevents or delays people from finding a better solution What about something like this instead? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08/11/this-republican-mayor-has-an-incredibly-simple-idea-to-help-the-homeless-and-it-seems-to-be-working/?utm_term=.02fce737048e https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/08...

jodrellblank 10y ago

From Maciej Ceglowski Second, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish. The old adage has it that if you are given ten minutes to cut down a tree, you should spend the first five sharpening your axe. We are used to the idea of bootstrapping ourselves into a position of maximum leverage before tackling a problem. In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people. - http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm and if you visit San Francisco, [the poverty] is something you're likely to find unsettling. You'll see people living in the streets, many of them mentally ill, yelling and cursing at imaginary foes. You'll find every public space designed to make it difficult and uncomfortable to sit down or sleep, and that people sit down and sleep anyway. You'll see human excrement on the sidewalks, and a homeless encampment across from the city hall. You'll find you can walk for miles and not come across a public toilet or water fountain. If you stay in the city for any length of time, you'll start to notice other things. Lines outside every food pantry and employment office. Racially segregated neighborhoods where poverty gets hidden away, even in the richest parts of Silicon Valley. A city bureaucracy where everything is still done on paper, slowly. A stream of constant petty crime by the destitute. Public schools that no one sends their kids to if they can find an alternative. Fundraisers for notionally public services. You can't even get a decent Internet connection in San Francisco. The tech industry is not responsible for any of these problems. But it's revealing that through forty years of unimaginable growth, and eleven years of the greatest boom times we've ever seen, we've done nothing to fix them. I say without exaggeration that the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 did more for San Francisco than Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of the tech companies that have put down roots in the city since. Despite being at the center of the technology revolution, the Bay Area has somehow failed to capture its benefits. It's not that the city's social problems are invisible to the programming class. But in some way, they're not important enough to bother with. Why solve homelessness in one place when you can solve it everywhere? Why fix anything locally, if the solutions can scale? And so we end up making life easier for tech workers, assuming that anything we do to free up their time will make them more productive at fixing the world for the rest of humanity. This is trickle-down economics of the worst kind. In the process, we've turned our city into a a residential theme park, with a whole parallel world of services for the rich. There are luxury commuter buses to take us to work, private taxis, valet parking, laundry and housecleaning startups that abstract human servants behind a web interface. We have a service sector that ensures instant delivery of any conceivable consumer good, along with some pretty inconceivable ones. There are no fewer than seven luxury mattress startups. There's a startup to pay your neighbor to watch your packages for you. My favorite is a startup you can pay to move your trash bins, once a week, three meters to the curb. If at the height of boom times we can look around and not address the human crisis of our city, then when are we ever going to do it? And if we're not going to contribute to our own neighborhoods, to making the places we live in and move through every day convenient and comfortable, then what are we going to do for the places we don't ever see? You wouldn't hire someone who couldn't make themselves a sandwich to be the head chef in your restaurant. You wouldn't hire a gardener whose houseplants were all dead. But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable. - http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....

transitorykris 10y ago

Zizek's short analysis of Children of Men echoes this. "The true focus of the film is there in the background". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE