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I just don't understand how a city that has so many millionaires and billionaires can let this happen. Silicon valley has been shamelessly monopolising the medi

I just don't understand how a city that has so many millionaires and billionaires can let this happen. Silicon valley has been shamelessly monopolising the media and presenting itself as a meritocracy in order to attract desperate people to work there... But the promise almost always falls short. VCs and executives of SV companies have been conspiring to attract as many people as possible to SV, filtering out all the 'bad ones' and then dumping them onto the streets like garbage. What's ironic is that the people who are causing the problem are often the ones who like to think of themselves as being morally irreproachable. I was surprised when I realized that a lot of people in SV believe that capitalism is some sort of moral code in itself; one in which profit is a quantifiable manifestation of societal improvement. To me, profit has always been about being in the right place at the right time and then finding some shady way to squeeze yourself between various counterparties. Middlemen are catalysts for the system; they speed things up in the short term but you end up with something of lower quality in the end.

thatswrong0 9y ago
Let this happen? You’re acting like it’s some easy problem to fix when it’s not. Many of the homeless here are suffering from mental illnesses.. what should a millionaire walking down the street do for them? What about drug addicts? Speaking from first hand experience, even people with the resources to deal with it struggle to properly help friends and family with drug addictions. The people of San Francisco pay a lot in taxes, and a lot of those tax dollars are used in an effort to curb homelessness, yet it feels like the problem is only getting worse, not better. How do we know our taxes are being used fruitfully? Should every millionaire go into the streets and inspect how homeless shelters and kitchens are being run? Do you expect every millionaire to make it their life’s work to address the issue? Do you expect them to give up their current interests and ambitions and try to setup new rehab clinics for all of the addicts and mental health clinics for those who aren’t well mentally? Because I really don’t understand what you’re asking of them.

thatswrong0 9y ago

Let this happen? You’re acting like it’s some easy problem to fix when it’s not. Many of the homeless here are suffering from mental illnesses.. what should a millionaire walking down the street do for them? What about drug addicts? Speaking from first hand experience, even people with the resources to deal with it struggle to properly help friends and family with drug addictions. The people of San Francisco pay a lot in taxes, and a lot of those tax dollars are used in an effort to curb homelessness, yet it feels like the problem is only getting worse, not better. How do we know our taxes are being used fruitfully? Should every millionaire go into the streets and inspect how homeless shelters and kitchens are being run? Do you expect every millionaire to make it their life’s work to address the issue? Do you expect them to give up their current interests and ambitions and try to setup new rehab clinics for all of the addicts and mental health clinics for those who aren’t well mentally? Because I really don’t understand what you’re asking of them.