Lol ok, how would you characterize “it’s overreaching leftism which is a boogeyman that feels like home for rich liberals” then? Using “rich liberal” as a pejorative isn’t an attack on the character of anyone who voted to recall the DA? It isn’t dismissing out of hand any real concerns that people who actually still live in the city might have?
I knew this would go exactly like this and I knew it would be mostly goofy I’d be arguing with. And I’m ok with that. I felt like it was important to say.
But now I’m going to mute the thread for a few days, at least.
I’m definitely impacted by it and it’s been a fkn god damn living nightmare the last 3 months
TLDR i live near one of the worst motel drug/prostitution dens (plus several other neighboring ones) in the heart of a downtown area. my street connects two major ones - the south entrance has the bad motel, the north entrance on the other major street has another bad one.
when I first moved in - it was fine, upscale condos were under construction on the south entrance and it became a cul-de-sac with 24/7 armed security. sweet. then a few months ago some nutjob reopened that entrance and we have a constant flow of riffraff shuttling between the two motels all day and all night. someone beat down my entire fence a few months ago and ripped off all my screens. my screens go away as fast as I can replace them. i gave up on one part of my fence, it keeps getting kicked in. car’s been broken into twice now. my mail is stolen so often I just gave up and now have a PO box.
it SUCKS. I dont think many people here can appreciate not feeling safe in your home. it isn’t comfortable.
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I mean everyone likely agrees that it sucks to have drug addicts and homeless people around but capitalism needs those people to provide the visible stick to the carrot of wages so they are always going to exist. They are there to prevent the workers on the edge from getting too uppity. So the question is given were always going to have these people around they are a supporting pillar of modern capitalism are we going to treat them like utter dogshit or just treat them quite badly but slightly like actual people.
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Eh, letting them do both shoplifting and crack in public doesn’t seem to be helping anyone.
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It helps the people who need crack and don’t have the money to pay for it. What are you gonna do put them in drug treatment programs lol. That socialism.
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Locally here it’s meth/fentanyl.
So goofy posted about security. I dont know how simular it is to Canada, but it seems pretty similar from what’s been posted. Here, retail companies contract everything out to security companies. The people working security are just basically all entry level jobs and nearly everyone I’ve seen is a recent immigrant as it has a low barrier to entry. They are not trained much. Like every other entry level job, some are good hard workers, others are slackers. Now, the entry level security guards are basically not allowed to do much. To be able to physically confront anyone they need to take LPO courses. These people become shift supervisors quickly as there is large turnover.
Most of the retail theft we see is from addicts who can’t pay for their stuff anymore so the dealers send them in to steal as much product as possible to resell on the same corners theyre selling product. It sucks for everyone! If you’re working retail you don’t want to be watching out for thieves all night. You don’t want to be naturally suspicious of people. But that guy who has $800 worth of steaks, lobster and baby formula in their cart? Yeah, that’s not being paid for.
Wanting to detain someone and actually doing so are two different things though. I’ve seen security guards get maced in the face before. If they are there because they are addicted to drugs and you are what is stopping them from accessing more drugs, they might be violent. Few security guards, never mind normal store owners/workers will want to put themselves in a possibly violent situation. And my only experience is Canada where guns are very rare compared to the USA as a whole.
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Serious question, how much is shoplifting baked into the price of retail goods in San Francisco? Inflation is at 8.6 percent right now, so that sucks as a baseline. Are we talking about literally pennies on hundreds of dollars worth of goods, or something more substantial? I can see it sucking if you’re struggling to make ends meet and you think that the person shoplifting is making your shit more expensive.
She’s a one trick pony as the patron saint of cancelation so she lives or dies based on if someone can scrounge up someone that could be considered canceled. Greenwald’s more versatile.
Yeah I don’t think it makes cities a hellhole or its the DAs fault. Locally, I wonder if the legalization of pot has turned some people towards harder drugs and that has exacerbated the issue. No data on this but at times it has seemed worse than it used to be.
It just sucks to be “hurt” by the “bad areas” of a city. My fiance is a teacher where the majority of her kids are from 0 income households. Just not easy solutions.
I’d say basically zero. Your chain grocery store in a higher end area won’t have higher prices than one in the worse part of town. They want to have consistent prices. The other store will just be much less profitable and might even be close to a loss leader but they just want a footprint in that area because of competition.
One thing is for sure there needs to be somewhere for people who have fallen through the cracks of capitalism to go besides prison or a street corner. It’s a moral outrage obviously, and it’s also incredibly inefficient.
The whole reason we have homelessness and incarceration is so that the poors keep waking up to that alarm and punching into their minimum wage job because there’s something worse, but more and more people are falling through the cracks every year as the inequality ratchets up… and it’s becoming more of an outrageously expensive disaster by the hour.
Never go full boomer fellas
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This feels a little “no way to stop this. Says only developed nation that cant figure it out”
Like many things. This problem has been basically solved by social democracies.
Fund drug treatment and mental health care, together with decriminalization of drugs and provision of shooting galleries.
The social sciences are full of data and publications proving this out.
Also like many things. Implementing the answer in the US might not be possible, but that’s because you are living in a failed state sliding into fascism, not because the policies are bad.
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This is something that is probably harder to convince middle class people of than the rich. Rich would be cool with giving homeless people a place to live…as long as they are elsewhere.
However, I’ve had convos with people with something between $50K to $100K of income who can’t stand the thought of it. In their minds the homeless are getting something for free (i.e. rent) that they struggle to pay for. Why should the government give them free rent? Why don’t I get anything?
Even if you explain to them that giving them a place to live costs X while incarcerating them costs 2X, they see no problem with incarceration, but giving them a place to live is a bridge too far. It’s just not fair.
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Looks like that chart came from reddit and is flagged as misleading:
I tried to link to the Reddit thread but can’t.
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Different definitions for each country, and different years. Here’s the source source
Right, I was going to post the same thing. But it’s possible that the answer to a number of these things - mass shootings, fascist law enforcement, homelessness - is in part “have a different culture”, which can happen (see 1960s, The) but can’t be engineered overnight with technocratic solutions.
Like geewhysee posted above that seeing the fate of the poor and abject on the streets is necessary to “capitalism” which is a take lifted from Chapo except that I’m pretty sure they’re just saying it’s necessary in America. Japan, Korea and Singapore are all highly capitalist countries and that’s not how it works there; people are kept in line by social expectation. And I’m not endorsing the social structure of any of those places, I’m just using them as counterexamples for ascribing these ills to “capitalism”.
I think the real problem is more the hyper-individualistic view of the world. The American definition of “freedom” is precisely freedom from any obligation towards others. It’s true that capitalism tends to act to move society in this direction, but it’s also true for example that governments are inherently prone to corruption. It doesn’t mean all efforts to oppose those tendencies are hopeless, it means you have to be vigilant against them. But it’s for sure a problem if a society looks at the atomisation of individuals, dissolving social bonds, extreme inequality etc and is like “that’s good, actually, because it’s freedom”.
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This, but I don’t think it’s sortable