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After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 ) abo
by Convolutional 3y ago
After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35456168 )
about the homeless, need for more law enforcement (although the US already incarcerates more of its population than any industrialized country) etc.
I had to read scores of tech bros in the professional-managerial class whinge about the poor, about black lives matter and how this was due to "progressivism".
Turns out the suspected murderer is a guy who describes himself as an "entrepreneur" on Linkedin and has a Crunchbase listing where he is described as being in executive management. Maybe we should have law enforcement target entrepreneurs as opposed to people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity on display in San Francisco.
- briantakita 3y agoI'm personally not into incarcerating mass amounts of people, as it only centralizes a prison industrial complex. Rather, one glaring issue is dangerous drugs showing up on our streets & the conditions that lead to this usage. In the comment you linked to, I noted Kensington Ave in Philadelphia, where there are videos of many people on hard drugs stooped over. Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets. Note that the reason why drugs are showing up on the streets are not random acts of mere petty criminals but involve people in domestic government & foreign governments. Rick Ross & the crack epidemic detail the history of how intelligence agencies create the conditions of mass addiction. While some, including me, think this drug problem is an example of the hypocrisy of NeoLiberalism...I also think it's a centuries old playbook of wreaking havoc on whole populations of people by introducing vices such as drugs. The Opium Wars & what lead to the Opium Wars is an example. Side note, I would like there to be a graph based form of communication that can better express the context of statements. It's too easy to take a couple of sentences on a forum out of context.
- thethethethe 3y ago> Many people, who would otherwise have happier lives are now dealing with addiction & living on the streets. I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who fell into drug use and homelessness who had happy lives. I think people who are homeless and or addicted to drugs are addicted to drugs because there lives are not good. If you improve economic and social conditions for people, drug abuse becomes less of a problem because people do not need to cope with difficulty in their life in the same way.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoI suspect a lot of our problems are caused by high-functioning addicts who are unhappy/dysfunctional and use addictions of all kinds to compensate - and who also happen to hold positions of real power and influence.
- midoridensha 3y agoThat sounds unlikely to me. Instead, I think a lot of society's problems are caused by sociopaths in positions of power. People like Putin and Trump didn't become the monsters they are because of additions or drugs, they were born that way.
- briantakita 3y agoI dont know of any people who are happier addicted to hard drugs than not addicted to hard drugs. If the supply of hard & tainted drugs increases, then people with addictions are more likely to increase their consumption of these drugs. The problem & solution space involves more than just enforcement. A root cause is the ineffectiveness & corruption in social safety net programs including housing, drug treatment, & other domains. Not saying we should not have any programs but the ineffectiveness with increasing budgets speaks for itself. Effective & efficient programs should be rewarded while ineffective & inefficient programs should be discontinued. Government agencies which engage in harmful activities such as drug trafficking should be reformed or disbanded. I don't expect the status quo to change, as we didn't get into this mess with rational institutions, but its worthwhile to have a sober view of root causes to at least put pressure on the institutions to be more rational.
- rnk 3y agoHow does neoliberalism cause people to get addicted to drugs?
- briantakita 3y agoThe increased supply of hard drugs & the apparent lack of enforcement against the supply chains of hard drugs.
- rnk 3y agoWhat does that have to do with neoliberalism? Also, you'll have to say which presidents you see as being responsible. Wikipedia says Trump was neoliberal, I've seen it applied to other presidents. Trump was impactful on the world because he was so ineffectual in general. But I think every president in living memory wanted to reduce drug use and the supply of drugs coming into the us. In a free society it's hard to stop people from doing what they want, even if they take drugs that hurt them, kill them, or might not do anything bad (like pot), large numbers of people can supply enough demand to overcome the impact of law enforcement. Of course fentanyl is a society destroying thing, the impact of that and things like heroin lead to me not knowing what to do personally to stop this. Media reports claim fentanyl components are coming from China. So now what?
- briantakita 3y agoFirst, I take Wikipedia with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to politics or anything remotely related to politics. All I'm saying is that the results speak for themselves. The drugs come from somewhere. The drugs are allowed in somehow. Repeat violent criminals are somehow let out of prison. Also, there is a history of collusion of governments, government agencies, NGOs, & drug trafficking. This spans over hundreds of years & there are recent cases. Watch a documentary of how Compton, CA was once a working class neighborhood with industrious people, then the CIA trafficked drugs in that neighborhood (note Freeway Rick Ross), & it quickly devolved into violent gang warfare. Now the land is being bought on the cheap. Note Sofi Statium, which is built on the ground of what were once homes.
- misssocrates 3y agoWhat percentage are entrepreneurs and what percentage are people with mental health problems and or drug addiction?
- tedivm 3y agoFunny how questions like this were completely ignored in the previous conversation where people were shitting on the homeless, but suddenly are important now that the homeless aren't the target anymore.
- soundsabout 3y agoThe cognitive dissonance here is becoming farcical quickly. Careful, people really don't like it when you point it out! I was really hoping the grandparent was being tongue-in-cheek but, the lie-to-myself kind of hope.
- __pache__ 3y agoI'm confused, what's your point? It's a "win" that this killing was by a certain person? Has nothing to do with shit on the streets, etc. etc.
- aborsy 3y agoThat doesn’t change the facts (some of which stated in the post you linked) about the well known problems with homeless in SF.
- kelnos 3y agoI don't think anyone is claiming it does. But what's your point, really? It sounds like a conversation that goes like this: "Wow, Lee was likely killed by someone who knew him, another tech entrepreneur." "Yeah, and San Francisco sure has a lot of problems with homeless people." Huh? Discussions about SF's homeless problem are pretty irrelevant to the case at hand. And it's really showing of people's biases that, when we first heard of Lee's death, the evidence-free, go-to narrative was that he obviously was killed by a random mentally-ill homeless person.
- aborsy 3y agoThis is not bias. You don’t know in advance what the cause of an event is for sure. People mentioned a probable cause (violent homeless) and it happened to be a less probable one (a tech co-worker), although we still don’t know for sure yet. In particular, the influence of drugs and mental illness among the homeless were thought to explain the event. It’s like predicting the price of a stock that didn’t come true. Not every incorrect prediction is due to selection bias.
- ryanbrunner 3y agoBeing killed by someone you know is far more probable than being randomly stabbed by a homeless person.
- random314 3y ago> This is not bias Now a textbook case of bias is not bias!! The world is crazy?
- tonymillion 3y ago"Well known problems" - really? how well known? Unless you can provide good sources you are simply showing selection bias.
- palijer 3y ago>After the murder, I had to read scores of comments like this[...] >I had to read scores of tech bros [...] Did you though? I can't recommend enough cutting out reading people's comments that you don't want to read. If other people's comments stress you out and make you angry, there are typically actions you can take to expose yourself less to them.
- ikiris 3y agoYeah, ignoring the problem does a lot to make it go away for you. It doesn't help to make it stop being a problem though. This is basically the definition of privilege.
- fghsqwads 3y ago[flagged]
- nerdix 3y agoComments on the internet reflect public attitudes and public attitudes shape policy. For people who maybe affected by the resulting policy, it's a lot more than just "comments on the internet".
- bryananderson 3y agoThe problem is that these reality-deficient narratives spill out into the real world where they have real consequences. For example, the pitchforks came out to recall the "soft on crime" DA and replace him with a "tough on crime" one. Why didn't that fix anything? And why was the DA ever the problem when crime was actually down during his tenure, but had simply shifted neighborhoods as a result of covid emptying out the previous high-property-crime areas (downtown and fisherman's wharf)? People in other neighborhoods had every right to be upset that crime shifted to their area, but alleged city-wide policy changes never made any sense as an explanation for that. Every time there's a crime panic, a bunch of "no more mr. nice guy" politicians throw a few thousand more people in prison for minor crimes in this country, which already imprisons more people per capita than any other country except this very short list of places: El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba. Think we can beat them?
- justizin 3y agoI saw a reply to a thread on twitter where a woman said to one of his friends, something like, “sorry to burst your bubble but bob was a champion of ‘diversity’” and if that isn’t saying that quiet part out loud, hoof.
- stuaxo 3y agoJeez, their racist comment aged incredibly badly.
- random314 3y agoI had my comment on my family's experience of not experiencing any crime in the bay area in 10+ years downvoted. I was also called a boiling frog. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35451394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35451394 Another reply - "I'll have you know, my ivory tower is devoid of any riffraff!"
- randomdata 3y ago[flagged]
- hintymad 3y agoI can get why people blamed the SF politics but not why people blamed the homeless. Both in my experience and by statistics, homeless are not particularly aggressive or violent. It's unfortunately enough that they became homeless, and violent or aggressive people wouldn't stay homeless for long.
- tomcam 3y ago> people made homeless by the enormous wealth disparity There’s a tiny possibility that feckless bureaucrats, billions of dollars spent with no oversight, mental illness, and drug addiction share just a sliver of the responsibility
- jwestbury 3y agoSure, though if we're talking about crime, inequality is probably the strongest correlation to crime rates.[0] "In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust." 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
- stuaxo 3y agoVery HN that your comment is down voted.