6 ms·

Seattle is a city that has made a lot of bad decisions. It is suffering from rampant drug abuse, property crime, and gross mismanagement under the current city

Seattle is a city that has made a lot of bad decisions. It is suffering from rampant drug abuse, property crime, and gross mismanagement under the current city council, which seems obsessed with following an ideologically-motivated progressive agenda instead of common-sense good governance. The policy of not enforcing laws, not prosecuting (either certain crimes or certain cohorts of offenders) has caused the city's problems. There are two sets of laws - one is for law-abiding tax-paying residents who are just trying to live their lives without disruption, and the other is for everyone else, who somehow are seen as victims through a twisted social-justice lens, instead of malicious actors. The law-abiding tax-paying residents should not have to give up their public spaces, safety, property, or contribute more taxes in order to accommodate the huge rise of permanently-homeless service-refusing people that want nomadic or drug-centric lifestyles. Those people do not contribute to society and are making society worse for those who do want to contribute. And yes, there has to be a consequence for that, in order to deter such behavior and lifestyles and not attract an influx of them into the city. This article does not make real the frustration experienced by most residents of Seattle, as it has deteriorated towards SF 2.0 in these last 4 years.

deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
contra-rian 7y ago
Dirty, smelly, dimwitted hippies are pretty annoying. Especially the kind so enamoured with drugs. They swear to some kind of spirituality that the things they dose on are so important, and that everyone should be doing as they do. I don't really like freight train hobos, burning man nomads, dead heads and phish fans. Ravers, molly popping teeny boppers, all of them kind of fucking suck. Their low-level venal scoff law mentality gets tiresome, but at least they're usually not violent, and they often lack the mental capacity for higher order criminality. They often aren't total sociopaths, even if they operate with some undeserved egotism. Criticism aside, I take issue with the concept of "contributing to society" as a maxim for defining whether or not a participant's world view holds merit. I get that lawless city limits become a whirlpool for losers looking to lean on public infrastructure, and stress it until full collapse. But law abiding tax paying citizens are not admirable, especially when there's no accounting for the realities they enable, as they hold down day jobs. This is not some warped "social justice" world view that I hold. I'm pretty disinterested in counter-productive virtue signaling for the sake of seizing moral highground to score points in a game of internet arguing. If you have a city full of head down, nose the the grindstone, hard working people who have jobs, pay taxes and retain possessions, so what? There's no rational basis for respecting that. More often than not, it's the path of least resistance, and absolute minimum reward. Don't be surprised when you get nothing for it. Society has no incentive to pay that back because it's merely life on a hamster wheel, taking up space. People treading water, paycheck to paycheck are taking up space as they wait to die. I do have sympathy for the fact that most lack any capacity to move freely and change anything, but the truth is regular people do nothing for anyone but themselves, and they receive nothing in return. I've lived in maybe 10 different neighborhoods, of varying mixes of people, and the story is the same everywhere. No one is friendly. No one likes you. Everyone is boring and inauthentic. Conversations are intended to one-up and display status. Good natured courtesy is sacharine and tinged with paranoia of strangers, not legitimate humanism. The nomads, the freaks, the bums, the schizo derelicts... They all check out of the real world for a reason. They suffer burn out, not just of the occupational kind, where their college degree failed to unlock a career that doesn't feel like work. But the kind where, employed or not, there's just no light at the end of the tunnel. Ejected from high school into a college major or some sort of vocational training, even armed with a paycheck and a place to go every day, the people they become surrounded by are no longer worth the effort required to socialize. Everyone's dead inside, and the artifice of a modern lifestyle simply isn't paying off, for all the restraint invested in acquiring clothes, room and board and transportation. The reason there are so many untethered and aimless weirdos, is because there's nowhere worth being and nothing to bother taking aim at.
imperialdrive 7y ago
In response to the 'dead' reply, you make some points that stick. I'm curious what kind of solution could exist to address the issue(s) you describe. Hoping to hear more thoughts.
- dead_again 7y ago
  You're asking me how one might fix the sorts of problems I describe which motivate individuals to quit attempting to lead normal lives, resulting in some cities experiencing an invasion of freegan transients and related hobo shanty towns? I think there's quite a bit of time and distance between the platonic incident where one person quits, and the later outcome where thousands of similar quitters congregate in a place conducive to their accumulation. You're probably interested in preventing the quitter's mentality though, more than the semi-hostile freeloader invasion. (count the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves, so to speak) There's probably no single answer to that, and the drop outs all look the same on the other side, because basic human needs have cut people down to size, reducing everyone to caveman essentials. But still, even if there are differences, maybe there's a common thread, in that many stumble and land in a similar place... How to go about preventing a sort of modern civilian's burnout on being a productive busy bee with responsibilities? Partly, that idea gets painted into a corner, because if you're owed nothing for maintaining a well-groomed exterior, and looking presentable is to be considered its own reward, then the choice to behave as such or to defect to the hobo shanty town is a neutral outcome in the grand scheme of things. But there are competing interests at play, in that one side is fed up with all the superfluous artifice and extra effort, and the other finds the noise and the smell and the mess unsavory. Yet neither really matters more than the other. In fact, the responsible tax payer is as much the loitering warm body as transient, all the while, sucking up more resources. The reason this perspective holds up all relates back to the idea that there is no accounting for what the tax payer enables, by holding down their day job. Most regular people 9-to-5 occupations are cookie cutter careers that loop back and forth, each contributing to the net positive of modern living in the name of convenience, but upon this trampoline of social fabric rests other layers that never touch the ground. There's no way for one person with a day job to know whether their efforts streamline the ease of daily routine for someone admirable or dispicable. A paying customer is treated the same as any other. No one gets to pick and exclude one customer over another, within the bounds of law. And when locked into a job for years on end, an accumulated sensation of fairness builds up. A question arises in the mind: Did I get what everyone else gets, for all the steps I took to get to where I am? Did others get more with less effort? Would everyone get the same as me, if they made similar choices? Are some of us just lucky? Is there something beyond luck affecting outcomes? Are outcomes rational and grounded by predictable principles? Basically, social contract theory, in short. Except outcomes are NOT rational. Not lately. With drastic changes unfolding, in addition to simply not caring about social artifice, there are huge differences in how to conduct a livlihood and get by, when compared to a few decades ago. While there are new option available, other keystone choices have disappeared or seem laughable. This adds to the number lost at sea. There's a sweet spot of balancing one's position between new challenges and attainable outcomes, and not everyone focuses on staying in that zone, while choosing new interests that should prove practical. In some respects, there's no good way to predict the future, and intuit what is likely to prove practical anyway. To complicate matters, technological implementation of new practices has demanded some truly complex new skills. Printed circuit boards, soldering and 3D printing isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's like asking ordinary hikers to free solo what appears to be Mt. St. Helens. There a disparity between what the future looks like, and the internalized imaginations of less technical folk, and how they see themselves. What's the alternative for them? Side hustle being a demeaning little task rabbit? But that's not even what freegan transients are on about. That's the HN oeuvre for what technocratic VC startups might cut out for them. Pitch in for the big win, why not? There's a fiverr in it for ya, kid! When you've grazed among the cavemen, you begin to see that being dirty, smelly and obnoxious during someone else's morning commute isn't the sin you perceived it to be, when you were the one hiding in your earbuds. Life without the flatscreen TV and the text messages isn't so bad, if you can keep warm and tend to basic nutrition. If the climate is reasonable, you just need to sidestep the sore throats and the pink eye, if you skip a few haircuts and grow slovenly and out of shape, well, so what. Pushing forty, the exciting prt of your dating career was long gone. Owning a home? That ship has sailed. So what's to motivate anyone to to climb back on the bandwagon after jumping off? What's to convince passengers to stay on the bandwagon in the first place? From a technical perspective, part of it is thread execution isolation. People feel like it's too easy for others to fuck up their otherwise reasonable momentum for unfair reasons. And they're right. By contrast, the goldilocks factor is that isolated people who don't depend on one another have no rational basis for ensuring anyone's success. I don't care about the career options laid out for a Starbucks barrista. And the barrista doesn't care if I can come up with five bucks for my coffee tomorrow morning, because all customers are a faceless blur at a shit job. But I want my coffee, free of spit and loogies, and barrista needs maybe a couple of hundred bucks a week. We mutually hate each other on some level. The coffee's too expensive and the job is pathetic. We're both on the brink of abandoning this economic ruse at any moment. Do we build society so that each participant in this client/server scenario is more grateful at the presence of the other? It doesn't seem particularly realistic. The truth is that the forces that created this brittle interplay of apathy originated decades ago, and it has refines and perfected the brink of apathy on razor thin margins ever since. Everything is middle-manned into shelf stable products insulated by preservatives, and we get our peer groups and family units destroyed the summer after high school graduation. To undo this apparatus is no simple task. And like centuries-old glass warped by amorphous change, and flakes of lead paint accumulating on the window sill, it's all taking itself apart, and we'll need to remodel soon. Hope the house doesn't burn down because the electrician goofed on some new wiring...
m463 7y ago
I can't help but remember when mexico decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs, it was to stop corruption.
voxl 7y ago
The only thing I've learned from this thread is that there is a vocal group of regressive, probably rich (software developers), complaining about homeless people not being jailed.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

contra-rian 7y ago

Dirty, smelly, dimwitted hippies are pretty annoying. Especially the kind so enamoured with drugs. They swear to some kind of spirituality that the things they dose on are so important, and that everyone should be doing as they do. I don't really like freight train hobos, burning man nomads, dead heads and phish fans. Ravers, molly popping teeny boppers, all of them kind of fucking suck. Their low-level venal scoff law mentality gets tiresome, but at least they're usually not violent, and they often lack the mental capacity for higher order criminality. They often aren't total sociopaths, even if they operate with some undeserved egotism. Criticism aside, I take issue with the concept of "contributing to society" as a maxim for defining whether or not a participant's world view holds merit. I get that lawless city limits become a whirlpool for losers looking to lean on public infrastructure, and stress it until full collapse. But law abiding tax paying citizens are not admirable, especially when there's no accounting for the realities they enable, as they hold down day jobs. This is not some warped "social justice" world view that I hold. I'm pretty disinterested in counter-productive virtue signaling for the sake of seizing moral highground to score points in a game of internet arguing. If you have a city full of head down, nose the the grindstone, hard working people who have jobs, pay taxes and retain possessions, so what? There's no rational basis for respecting that. More often than not, it's the path of least resistance, and absolute minimum reward. Don't be surprised when you get nothing for it. Society has no incentive to pay that back because it's merely life on a hamster wheel, taking up space. People treading water, paycheck to paycheck are taking up space as they wait to die. I do have sympathy for the fact that most lack any capacity to move freely and change anything, but the truth is regular people do nothing for anyone but themselves, and they receive nothing in return. I've lived in maybe 10 different neighborhoods, of varying mixes of people, and the story is the same everywhere. No one is friendly. No one likes you. Everyone is boring and inauthentic. Conversations are intended to one-up and display status. Good natured courtesy is sacharine and tinged with paranoia of strangers, not legitimate humanism. The nomads, the freaks, the bums, the schizo derelicts... They all check out of the real world for a reason. They suffer burn out, not just of the occupational kind, where their college degree failed to unlock a career that doesn't feel like work. But the kind where, employed or not, there's just no light at the end of the tunnel. Ejected from high school into a college major or some sort of vocational training, even armed with a paycheck and a place to go every day, the people they become surrounded by are no longer worth the effort required to socialize. Everyone's dead inside, and the artifice of a modern lifestyle simply isn't paying off, for all the restraint invested in acquiring clothes, room and board and transportation. The reason there are so many untethered and aimless weirdos, is because there's nowhere worth being and nothing to bother taking aim at.

imperialdrive 7y ago

In response to the 'dead' reply, you make some points that stick. I'm curious what kind of solution could exist to address the issue(s) you describe. Hoping to hear more thoughts.

dead_again 7y ago
You're asking me how one might fix the sorts of problems I describe which motivate individuals to quit attempting to lead normal lives, resulting in some cities experiencing an invasion of freegan transients and related hobo shanty towns? I think there's quite a bit of time and distance between the platonic incident where one person quits, and the later outcome where thousands of similar quitters congregate in a place conducive to their accumulation. You're probably interested in preventing the quitter's mentality though, more than the semi-hostile freeloader invasion. (count the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves, so to speak) There's probably no single answer to that, and the drop outs all look the same on the other side, because basic human needs have cut people down to size, reducing everyone to caveman essentials. But still, even if there are differences, maybe there's a common thread, in that many stumble and land in a similar place... How to go about preventing a sort of modern civilian's burnout on being a productive busy bee with responsibilities? Partly, that idea gets painted into a corner, because if you're owed nothing for maintaining a well-groomed exterior, and looking presentable is to be considered its own reward, then the choice to behave as such or to defect to the hobo shanty town is a neutral outcome in the grand scheme of things. But there are competing interests at play, in that one side is fed up with all the superfluous artifice and extra effort, and the other finds the noise and the smell and the mess unsavory. Yet neither really matters more than the other. In fact, the responsible tax payer is as much the loitering warm body as transient, all the while, sucking up more resources. The reason this perspective holds up all relates back to the idea that there is no accounting for what the tax payer enables, by holding down their day job. Most regular people 9-to-5 occupations are cookie cutter careers that loop back and forth, each contributing to the net positive of modern living in the name of convenience, but upon this trampoline of social fabric rests other layers that never touch the ground. There's no way for one person with a day job to know whether their efforts streamline the ease of daily routine for someone admirable or dispicable. A paying customer is treated the same as any other. No one gets to pick and exclude one customer over another, within the bounds of law. And when locked into a job for years on end, an accumulated sensation of fairness builds up. A question arises in the mind: Did I get what everyone else gets, for all the steps I took to get to where I am? Did others get more with less effort? Would everyone get the same as me, if they made similar choices? Are some of us just lucky? Is there something beyond luck affecting outcomes? Are outcomes rational and grounded by predictable principles? Basically, social contract theory, in short. Except outcomes are NOT rational. Not lately. With drastic changes unfolding, in addition to simply not caring about social artifice, there are huge differences in how to conduct a livlihood and get by, when compared to a few decades ago. While there are new option available, other keystone choices have disappeared or seem laughable. This adds to the number lost at sea. There's a sweet spot of balancing one's position between new challenges and attainable outcomes, and not everyone focuses on staying in that zone, while choosing new interests that should prove practical. In some respects, there's no good way to predict the future, and intuit what is likely to prove practical anyway. To complicate matters, technological implementation of new practices has demanded some truly complex new skills. Printed circuit boards, soldering and 3D printing isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's like asking ordinary hikers to free solo what appears to be Mt. St. Helens. There a disparity between what the future looks like, and the internalized imaginations of less technical folk, and how they see themselves. What's the alternative for them? Side hustle being a demeaning little task rabbit? But that's not even what freegan transients are on about. That's the HN oeuvre for what technocratic VC startups might cut out for them. Pitch in for the big win, why not? There's a fiverr in it for ya, kid! When you've grazed among the cavemen, you begin to see that being dirty, smelly and obnoxious during someone else's morning commute isn't the sin you perceived it to be, when you were the one hiding in your earbuds. Life without the flatscreen TV and the text messages isn't so bad, if you can keep warm and tend to basic nutrition. If the climate is reasonable, you just need to sidestep the sore throats and the pink eye, if you skip a few haircuts and grow slovenly and out of shape, well, so what. Pushing forty, the exciting prt of your dating career was long gone. Owning a home? That ship has sailed. So what's to motivate anyone to to climb back on the bandwagon after jumping off? What's to convince passengers to stay on the bandwagon in the first place? From a technical perspective, part of it is thread execution isolation. People feel like it's too easy for others to fuck up their otherwise reasonable momentum for unfair reasons. And they're right. By contrast, the goldilocks factor is that isolated people who don't depend on one another have no rational basis for ensuring anyone's success. I don't care about the career options laid out for a Starbucks barrista. And the barrista doesn't care if I can come up with five bucks for my coffee tomorrow morning, because all customers are a faceless blur at a shit job. But I want my coffee, free of spit and loogies, and barrista needs maybe a couple of hundred bucks a week. We mutually hate each other on some level. The coffee's too expensive and the job is pathetic. We're both on the brink of abandoning this economic ruse at any moment. Do we build society so that each participant in this client/server scenario is more grateful at the presence of the other? It doesn't seem particularly realistic. The truth is that the forces that created this brittle interplay of apathy originated decades ago, and it has refines and perfected the brink of apathy on razor thin margins ever since. Everything is middle-manned into shelf stable products insulated by preservatives, and we get our peer groups and family units destroyed the summer after high school graduation. To undo this apparatus is no simple task. And like centuries-old glass warped by amorphous change, and flakes of lead paint accumulating on the window sill, it's all taking itself apart, and we'll need to remodel soon. Hope the house doesn't burn down because the electrician goofed on some new wiring...

m463 7y ago

I can't help but remember when mexico decriminalized possession of small quantities of drugs, it was to stop corruption.

voxl 7y ago

The only thing I've learned from this thread is that there is a vocal group of regressive, probably rich (software developers), complaining about homeless people not being jailed.