4 ms·

You clearly have no idea what is going on here, and you should find out before you casually slander everyone that lives here. The people that live in SV are VE

You clearly have no idea what is going on here, and you should find out before you casually slander everyone that lives here. The people that live in SV are VERY generous. The consequence is, we have a huge population of homeless people that moved here because the weather is mild and the people are generous, making being homeless here far less terrible than, say, New York or Chicago or Cleveland or Phoenix or even LA. It's really easy to accuse a large and varying group of people of living purely for avarice, especially when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Making snide comments on HN that scapegoat other people. References: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-20/national/41427596_1_northern-california-rawson-neal-psychiatric-hospital-patients http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-20/national/41427... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5221311 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5221311 http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Homeless-problem-lingers-as-S-F-spends-millions-3173290.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Homeless-p... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-astonishing-decline-of-homelessness-in-america/279050/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-asto...

bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Last time I looked, SV was located inside the US. (For the record, my original comment wasn't intended as a snide remark. This however is.) And your comments about homelessness make me want to throw up. As if being discarded as worthless human thrash is in anyway less horrible when "the weather is mild and the people are generous". How on earth do you manage to twist this so that it's the affluent denizens or Silicon Valley that are the victims here? I'm sorry I'm not being constructive, this attitude just pisses me off. Like I said, I don't consider myself morally superior, far from it, I'm a selfish dick 95% of the time, but even I have limits. I couldn't live there and cheerfully ignore the problem. Children are growing up homeless in one richest areas of one of the richest countries in the world. There's no nuance here, no deeper meaning that requires further research before one has the right to formulate an opinion. There are many gray areas in life. Hell, at my age, almost everything turns out to be a grey area. But this isn't one of them.
- justin_vanw 13y ago
  In that case, I have the solution. I'm going to go to each homeless person I find, and buy them a ticket to your city, and give them directions to your house. Then, when you wake up one morning, you'll have 500 homeless people living on your lawn. Then I'm going to post to HN saying that you are a terrible person for letting the homelessness problem get so out of control at your house. "Don't you even care about them? How dare you throw them out like trash!?!"
  - wturner 13y ago
    In a more Silicon Vally context I think it would be more appropriate to do it to Mark Zuckerbergs house instead. Out of his 3 billion I'm sure it would be a drop in the bucket to help get those people on their feet.
    - justin_vanw 13y ago
      Get them back on their feet?? Do you think they are homeless because they ran into some temporary setback? What do you think of these people that you think they are perfectly capable of living a normal life, but they hit some speedbump along the way and now they are too, what? How pathetic would they have to be if some accident of life left them permanently on the street? How little you must think of them! Drug addiction and crippling mental illness effect over 95% of chronically homeless people. These are people struggling with things you and I can't even imagine coping with. I mean that, you and I can't fathom in any meaningful way what it means for our perceptions and judgments about the world to be completely unreliable. It's pretty much not possible to cope with hearing voices or having visual hallucinations or crippling addiction. You can't 'get them back on their feet', because they are not healthy enough to stand on their own, and we don't know (I mean the royal we, all of the medical and psychiatric expertise in the world is more or less helpless in the face of what they are suffering from) any way to make it better. In fact you can't merely offer them help, because they very often aren't mentally stable enough or responsible enough to accept it. The best thing we can offer them is long term support. We can give them food and warm/clean clothing, offer medical care, and respond when they have an emergency. We can offer them safe shelter and mental health care, that is, when they are in a mental state such that they will accept it. We can scrape them off the sidewalk when they OD, and we can temporarily put them in a hospital when they are so unstable that they are very likely to cause injury to themselves or others. Of course, there is a fine line in such paternal actions, at some point we are violating their humanity when we give them involuntary help. Sometimes the best systems we can create to do so end up being worse on the whole than doing nothing (institutionalization of the mentally ill for example). That is the state of the art. Someday we, as a society and civilization, will be able to tend to the least fortunate in more effective ways, but what I described is literally the best we know how to do right now. Of course everyone, even us greedy Silicon Valley types, have a strong desire to make this better, but unfortunately nobody knows how to do it. We are spending HUGE amounts of money, and besides reducing suffering a little, we aren't able to achieve much more.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Last time I looked, SV was located inside the US. (For the record, my original comment wasn't intended as a snide remark. This however is.) And your comments about homelessness make me want to throw up. As if being discarded as worthless human thrash is in anyway less horrible when "the weather is mild and the people are generous". How on earth do you manage to twist this so that it's the affluent denizens or Silicon Valley that are the victims here? I'm sorry I'm not being constructive, this attitude just pisses me off. Like I said, I don't consider myself morally superior, far from it, I'm a selfish dick 95% of the time, but even I have limits. I couldn't live there and cheerfully ignore the problem. Children are growing up homeless in one richest areas of one of the richest countries in the world. There's no nuance here, no deeper meaning that requires further research before one has the right to formulate an opinion. There are many gray areas in life. Hell, at my age, almost everything turns out to be a grey area. But this isn't one of them.

justin_vanw 13y ago
In that case, I have the solution. I'm going to go to each homeless person I find, and buy them a ticket to your city, and give them directions to your house. Then, when you wake up one morning, you'll have 500 homeless people living on your lawn. Then I'm going to post to HN saying that you are a terrible person for letting the homelessness problem get so out of control at your house. "Don't you even care about them? How dare you throw them out like trash!?!"
- wturner 13y ago
  In a more Silicon Vally context I think it would be more appropriate to do it to Mark Zuckerbergs house instead. Out of his 3 billion I'm sure it would be a drop in the bucket to help get those people on their feet.
  - justin_vanw 13y ago
    Get them back on their feet?? Do you think they are homeless because they ran into some temporary setback? What do you think of these people that you think they are perfectly capable of living a normal life, but they hit some speedbump along the way and now they are too, what? How pathetic would they have to be if some accident of life left them permanently on the street? How little you must think of them! Drug addiction and crippling mental illness effect over 95% of chronically homeless people. These are people struggling with things you and I can't even imagine coping with. I mean that, you and I can't fathom in any meaningful way what it means for our perceptions and judgments about the world to be completely unreliable. It's pretty much not possible to cope with hearing voices or having visual hallucinations or crippling addiction. You can't 'get them back on their feet', because they are not healthy enough to stand on their own, and we don't know (I mean the royal we, all of the medical and psychiatric expertise in the world is more or less helpless in the face of what they are suffering from) any way to make it better. In fact you can't merely offer them help, because they very often aren't mentally stable enough or responsible enough to accept it. The best thing we can offer them is long term support. We can give them food and warm/clean clothing, offer medical care, and respond when they have an emergency. We can offer them safe shelter and mental health care, that is, when they are in a mental state such that they will accept it. We can scrape them off the sidewalk when they OD, and we can temporarily put them in a hospital when they are so unstable that they are very likely to cause injury to themselves or others. Of course, there is a fine line in such paternal actions, at some point we are violating their humanity when we give them involuntary help. Sometimes the best systems we can create to do so end up being worse on the whole than doing nothing (institutionalization of the mentally ill for example). That is the state of the art. Someday we, as a society and civilization, will be able to tend to the least fortunate in more effective ways, but what I described is literally the best we know how to do right now. Of course everyone, even us greedy Silicon Valley types, have a strong desire to make this better, but unfortunately nobody knows how to do it. We are spending HUGE amounts of money, and besides reducing suffering a little, we aren't able to achieve much more.