How San Francisco Hazed a Tech Bro (backchannel.com) 653
An anonymous reader writes: In December 2013 San Francisco's tension with its surging tech class reached a breaking point. Protesters swarmed Google buses. They stood in front of Twitter carrying a coffin labeled "Affordable Housing." Google glassholes were on the rise. In the midst of this, the CEO and founder of AngelHack posted a rant about the homeless. "In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city," Greg Gopman wrote. He thought he was becoming a thought leader. Instead, the entire city turned against him. Reviled and suddenly unemployable, Gopman spent a quixotic year spinning up businesses to solve homelessness. His journey is weirdly emblematic of today's startup-fueled San Francisco.
God forbid anyone be responsible for themselves... (Score:5, Funny)
This is what's wrong with society - you can't point out the elephant in the room without the elephant feigning offense and everyone hating you until you buy it peanuts.
I say we shoot the elephant.
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I say we take off and nuke the room from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
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You shouldn't jail us for killing our parents! We're orphans!"
Slashdot (Score:3)
Stuff Those Matters!
As a tourist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a tourist... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to live in a curated life, move to Disney Land, buy the clothes they tell you to wear, work the job they tell you to work.
Rest of us will be dealing with real life. You won't be missed.
Re:As a tourist... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't like the "curated" life so much, stop taking all my money to distribute among those the government has decided is more worthy.
Re:As a tourist... (Score:5, Insightful)
San Francisco isn't "real life". It's an ultra-wealthy enclave that has chosen to turn itself into a filthy dystopia. It is San Francisco that is a "curated life", albeit the curators are doing a piss poor job. In real life, cities are neither as filthy as San Francisco, nor as wealthy.
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If you want to live in a curated life, move to Disney Land, buy the clothes they tell you to wear, work the job they tell you to work.
Rest of us will be dealing with real life. You won't be missed.
Typical SJW asshole argument...
Re: Do you piss and shit on the sidewalk? (Score:2)
I was in SF last year and within 24 hours had to flee with a group from a bus stop after a homeless tweaker went ape shit smashing everything in sight with a skateboard. Had a homeless man throw a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on my girlfriend as we walked by and had a guy take 3 full trash cans full of garbage and just empty them into a gutter.
Same time of year, this year, there were homeless but maybe I lucked out but the mentally ill and the tweakers seem to have been gotten the help they needed or the
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I have local friend and family who say they actually put a shit-ton of them in jail and (highly illegal - or so I understand, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure it is) they arrested them (or took them into custody) and put them either in vans or on the bus. I've been told both vans and buses by different people. I'm also told that there's a bit of a cover-up for this but I have absolutely no way of knowing BUT I've been told this by three different people during the run-up to the game.
I think I might have
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There's a difference between "demanding improvement" and feeling that improvement is rounding them up and pushing them out of sight of their betters. Generally using words like "filth", "degenerates" or "animals" tells us which side of the argument you're on.
Re:As a tourist... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, Market St takes you right between the Tenderloin and the 6th & Market area, which locals knows to avoid. Clueless tourists however, don't.
Second, everyone in SF knows it looks like shit there, no one's pretending it doesn't. But about a third or maybe even half of the homeless people there are mentally ill. It's fucked up that as a society, we'd leave sick people out there to die, and demand that they "beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way". We don't do that with people with cancer, or physical disabilities, and we shouldn't for the mentally ill either. You can look down on "SJW"s all you want, but the guy was acting like a cunt, and he got treated the way he deserved.
Re:As a tourist... (Score:5, Insightful)
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libtards
You know I wasn't entirely convinced by the nuances of your reasoning, but you finally won me over with that decisive argument.
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It was the left that pushed to clear out the mental hospitals. You cannot be held against your will for long if you haven't done anything wrong. To be fair there were people held against their will when they posed no danger and were just odd or embarrassing for their family. There needs to be something in between. Maybe need a jury trial every year or so to see if the person can stay committed or something similar.
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There needs to be something in between. Maybe need a jury trial every year or so to see if the person can stay committed or something similar.
Or say a qualified doctor who does a professional diagnosis? Of course that doctor would have to funded by the state, which means someone somewhere will have to pay taxes to fund it, so that'll never happen...
Re:As a tourist... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was Regan.
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Re:As a tourist... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly I'm forced to agree. As an occasional business traveler I no longer feel safe in SFO. Go the wrong couple of blocks from the Moscone Center and you're in a very bad part of town.
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Go the wrong couple of blocks from the Moscone Center and you're in a very bad part of town.
Especially that intersection with Starbucks on three of the four corners.
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Homeless, and a dozen other names (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not really.
Previously when the mentally ill were wards of the state, there was massive abuse, no means to really rectify it, and people thought One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was reality, and the ill were just free spirits who were really just misunderstood.
They've never seen a man smear himself in shit or bash his face into broken glass because it seemed like the right thing to do.
And so now we are here, where besides mental illness, we also have the results of a drug war that has failed miserably, an eco
He forgot the rule #1 of dealing with millenials (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk PC, act sociopathic.
Not exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
What they do not want, it seems, is to pay for all that. See, it's not as easy as "Just move out of San Fransico". When your poor you live where you're born. You don't just move to where the work is, and if you try you're taking a huge risk. You have no savings because you're never paid enough for savings.
What we have is servant class asking members of the merchant class to pay for their services. I don't see a problem with that.
But hey, bashing people over the head with the "PC" moniker never gets old, right? So go ahead. I suppose it's a hell of a lot easier than facing the unpleasant consequences of a modern service economy.
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Re:He forgot the rule #1 of dealing with millenial (Score:4, Insightful)
So wait, this guy flew his asshole flag high, suffered some serious consequences, yet it's other people who need a lesson in what you laughably call "real life".
So yeah fuck those liberal progrssive commienazi millenials, they should be *forced* to associate with people they don't like because real life.
The situation in SF... (Score:5, Informative)
The situation in SF really is, pretty bad.
I'm not even sure what the solution is anymore now that I lived here for a while and see it every day first hand.
I've lived in large Australian and New Zealand cities, but the homeless epidemic here is just on a level you couldn't believe or imagine without being here and seeing it for yourself.
Prices and rents won't ever go down again imo, and the homeless refuse to leave and only increase in number every ear... shit will get to a real breaking point before long.
Not sure I want to be here when that happens.
I'm just gonna throw this out here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I'm just gonna throw this out here (Score:5, Interesting)
No, because someone who is barely aware of their surroundings doesn't need a home they won't realize is theirs, they need to be institutionalized and forced into treatment. My friend's family's greatest fear when he had a mental break was that they wouldn't get a court order before he just ran out into the street never to be seen again. He's now on medication, engaged and living a perfect normal happy life, but when he thought he could fly and was barely aware of his surroundings he had no desire to stay or even consciousness of what wad real let alone what was best.
Re:I'm just gonna throw this out here (Score:5, Informative)
It's been tried in SF. If my memory is correct, the city spends around $60,000 per homeless person per year trying to help them (the current year's homeless budget is $241 million http://www.sfchronicle.com/bay... [sfchronicle.com]). In many cases, when they were simply given homes they then proceeded to trash them and make them uninhabitable (ie condemned). They were then back on the street again, and more money had to be spent making the home liveable again.
The issue is that the homeless in SF are either mentally ill, addicts, or both. You can give them homes, but if you don't treat the underlying issue you're just throwing the money (and homes) away. But when treatment is a requirement for housing, they walk away and go back to living on the street. So what's the solution?
Many of the people simply don't want help and would rather live on the street. Just the other week, one homeless guy who camps in the doorway of my building drank all day until he passed out. An ambulance was called, he fought them, but they ended up restraining him and taking him to the hospital. Two days later he was back again. The following day he was again passed out and unresponsive in the street, and the ambulance came again. Repeat a few days later. It happens a few times a week with several people, and this is just in front of my building across the bridge in the Oakland/Berkeley area. San Francisco is worse. I can't count the number of times I've seen people shooting up. So do you force these people into rehab? Arrest them? What's the solution? Simply giving them a home won't work.
Re:I'm just gonna throw this out here (Score:5, Informative)
vote with your feet (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to live in San Francisco, and it used to be tolerant, interesting, welcoming, and a live-and-let-live kind of place. These days, it's a dirty dump, full of intolerant people and massive social problems. Of course, the homeless and drug addicts in the street aren't the cause, they are merely the symptom of a broken political culture and corrupt political class and machinery, a toxic mix of nouveau riche techies, public sector unions, retirees, and "social justice" activists. San Francisco demographics are against it: SF has largely destroyed its middle class, leaving the city to young party goers and retirees, neither of which are the kind of people who care about the long term health of their community. Having left SF, I just hope I don't have to bail these people out with my tax dollars, because SF will get a lot worse before it gets better. So, my recommendation: don't try to fix SF, just leave it. Unless you are a 20-something who likes to party, in which case put up with the stink and dirt for a few more years and have fun before leaving.
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We have the riff-raff, but for some reason it seems to be less of an issue than in SF. Maybe it's the weather that is less conducive to street homelessness, maybe a greater diversity of residents and commerce make homelessness seem like a smaller issue, maybe it's the police sweeping all of it under the carpet, maybe it's less publicly reported, or maybe (probably unlikely) we're doing something right politically. But overall, day-to-day living in NYC does not have the same level of problems w
"Degenerates" is a bit much (Score:2)
"Degenerates" is over the line, but there is a problem here. Like any social problem the question of who contributes what share of the blame is in dispute.
But I'll just leave this here: Human waste shuts down BART escalators [sfgate.com]. Clearly something is horribly horribly wrong.
I read this and I find myself screaming BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole article reads like a package dropped from a PR firm with the sole purpose of rehabbing this guys rep.
Call me when it runs in the Sacramento Bee or any paper that actually verifies what they print.
SF is filled with idiots (Score:2, Informative)
They block new housing development, so there is a shortage. Then they throw a fit because rent keeps going up. Even if there wasn't a tech boom, this is the expected result when you strangle the supply. Have they stopped teaching basic economics in our schools?
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They block new housing development, so there is a shortage. Then they throw a fit because rent keeps going up. Even if there wasn't a tech boom, this is the expected result when you strangle the supply. Have they stopped teaching basic economics in our schools?
"Politics is the mindkiller." There are a lot of bright people here, but the politics is left-wing to the point of idiocy. We also finance what local wags call the "homeless-industrial complex" to the tune of $150-$200 million a year, and wonder why the problem never seems to get any better.
Don't haze me bro (Score:5, Funny)
Drunk posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Gopman's first post "my love affair with SF dies a little" seemed ok (although his having "no clue" about why the homeless were there does smack of techie-arrogance). It was the drunk one after that that that did for him.
In times gone by it would've just been shouting in a bar. Afterwards he could've apologised, laughed it off, and put it down to too many beers. Now - it's affected his whole life. For those living their lives online, every utterance is juggling dynamite. It seems to me that this encourages rather a strict, lockstep approach to discourse. No room to blow off a little steam, everything you ever say will be "googled" for evermore. It's a terrifying prospect, in my view.
He’d always wanted to be a thought leader (Score:5, Insightful)
"image", "startups", "city tax break", "hackathon host and startup incubator", "photos on Facebook of cash", "Valleywag", "Huffington Post", "the flavor of disruption", "crowdfunding", "Burning Man"
I'm afraid that if you insist on living inside your own virtual reality you're eventually going to be confronted by the fact that the rest of the world neither cares about this parallel universe whose inflation is powered almost entirely by self-aggrandisement. Nor do they believe that warehousing your homeless in instagram-friendly workfare "decadomes" is a solution to the housing problem : it's simply a product of a mind that does not understand the lives of people in the real world and believes the answer is to sweep them under an attractive carpet.
I've no idea who this guy is, nor do I particulalry care about his fate, but the unquestioning belief in the article that the narcissism of the internet should naturally just carry over into real life is breathtakingly insane.
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Hmmm so 'liberals' are responsible for urban decay.. has nothing to do with conservative 'job creators' creating all those jobs in China that used to be here..
Not to mention when I think of hellholes these days it's Kansas, Mississippi.. conservative led and falling apart because surprise surprise you can't cut taxes to nothing AND afford even minimal government. Let's not even talk about how they destroy their teachers.
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Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
I also notice that when the conservative led state governments cut all the budgets, those cities crumble.
Except for a couple of small short term dips (in 1992, 2002, and 2009), the number of jobs in America has been steadily going up, from 90 million in 1980 to 145 million in 2015. So the idea that there "used to be jobs here" that are now in China is delusional.
Yet our middle class is vanishing. Perhaps because the well paid manufacturing jobs that were shifted out to China were replaced with part time Wal-Mart jobs and public assistance.
Kansas is doing a lot better in terms of education than, say, California. And the high cost of living in places like California means that people tend be a lot better off elsewhere. For example, Alabama, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia come out ahead of California in terms of average salary once you adjust for cost of living.
Kansas is bleeding teachers. They've had so many teachers move out of the state they can only keep schools open by hiring unlicensed teachers to fill the gaps. The Kansas Supreme Court found the state's funding of schools to be unconstitutional. If that's your metric for "pretty good", don't bother replying, you have nothing worth saying.
Conservative economic voodoo policies have created the greatest wealth disparity this country has seen in it's entire history. Welcome to the Oligarchy you conservatives sold us into, but hey as long as we have cops doing genital checks outside public restrooms it was worth it for you I guess.
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If that is true, it is because progressive state governments force rural communities to subsidize cities. It is a good thing to put a stop to that.
The middle income group has shifted from about 61% in 1970 to about 50% of US ho
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:5, Insightful)
No, my metric for "pretty good" is actual student performance, dropout rates, test scores, and graduation rates. That's the metric that matters.
Hello from the UK. The last Labour government tried that. Actually they were obsessed with measurable metrics and installed them everywhere with severe penalties in terms of funding for failing. Sounds good, right? No it sucked, because the simplistic metrics that you and they proposed don't actually match the real world, and of course large-scale gaming went on.
So, no, those matrics you propose suck. And here's why:
1. Test scores ignore how hard the test is. An A-level in sociology is not the same as an A-level in further maths. An A-level from the "easy" exam board (this is what happens if you apply the free market to exams) is worth more to the school (better grades) but is worth less to the person that matters (the pupil). It is in the school's financial interest to direct the pupils to stuf that is bad for the pupils in order to optimize the school's metrics. That happened a lot.
2. Even if you can do proper scores, absolute scores are not the correct thing to optimize, because externalities dominate the results, not the schools themselves. The schools can make a difference but only so far. Definding all the "bad" inner city schools as punishment and giving the money to the successful suburban schools actually makes things worse even though you're diverting money from poorly performing places to better performing ones.
So, no, the world is vastly, vastly more complex than your excessively simplistic metrics. You think you have the solution, but trust me, you do not. It's been tried before and it failed. The only thing you want to improve is "quality of education". You cannot measure that easily. Any proxy measure is subject to gaming.
So now you need to change your metrics to "test scores on good subject with sufficiently informative tests". Suddenly you've gone from something simple, easy and wrong to something much much harder to measure. And you've still not corrected for external factors.
I also think your post is deeply foolish because you're trying to distill a complex and nuanced problem into one with simplistic solutions with an emphasis on "progressives" versus "conservatives". The world is so very much more complex than that.
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The GPP is correct though, metrics used by the American political left are deranged.
No idea what metrics are proposed by the so-called "left". I was however claiming that this post's GGP's metrics were also deranged, or, if not deranged then demonstrably useless.
Lets keep cutting.
That's also deranged. What is it with people proposing simplistic, one dimensional solutions to incredibly complex problems?
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Yes. You may notice that cities are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
I also notice that when the conservative led state governments cut all the budgets, those cities crumble.
At least, they don't put children in debt at birth over the next few generations...
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Yes they do. They always cut taxes faster then cutting spending, thus creating debt on the theory that if we're far enough in debt then the idea of spending money doing something about that hobo shitting on the street will be unthinkable. Of course they honestly seem to believe that hobo is there due to gods will or something and he deserves to be at a point where he doesn't understand why we don't shit on the streets.
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The President does not control the budget, Congress does.
Yes that is how its supposed to work but King Obama decided he did not like that, and if he could not get the debt ceiling raised so that Congress could fund his insane programs where to bad for the country then. Face it Congress and the President played a game of chicken and Obama won. That isn't virtuous behavior.
Before the Constitution was enacted there was real fear from the rural public that the stronger federal government was going to be able to use its taxing and money raising capabilities to abuse
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The way you think the debt ceiling works is completely backwards. Congress sets the amount of taxes, the amount of spending, and the debt ceiling. The President spends the money, collects the taxes, and borrows if the latter is less than the former. If the country is at the debt ceiling when it comes time to borrow, the government can either default or choose to raise it. Congress was playing chicken with arithmetic, but arithmetic doesn't flinch. Congress creates the crisis, the President just informs them
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:5, Interesting)
Having lived in both San Francisco and now back in my hometown of Wichita, KS, I always enjoy when I can talk about both places within the same topic.
As far as urban decay, guess where you'll find it? You'll find it in urban areas 100% of the time, per the very definition of "urban decay". To claim that local phenomenon are a direct result of local political leanings is to play very fast and loose with cause and effect. I can think of ten other hypotheses off the top of my head about the cause of urban decay, many of which don't factor politics in at all, and some of which actually involve inverting the cause-and-effect relationship of your own hypothesis that liberal politics cause it (maybe urban decay causes liberal politics?). To put it generously, it's utterly obtuse to say, "urban environments often include blighted environments, urban environments often have liberal-leaning voters, thus liberal politics cause urban decay, case closed."
I should also mention that these same urban areas do not consist completely of blighted, impoverished neighborhoods. Every city has it's good parts and its bad parts. But I'm sure the devoted partisan will find some way to assign a city's bad aspects to whichever wing of politics they don't like while simultaneously claiming that the good parts are actually somehow proof of the correctness of their preferred politics.
So on to Kansas. Right now in Kansas, yes the cost of living is very low, but the lower average income from what I see does not at all work out to the advantage of most people. The only people who can really take advantage of the low cost of living are the few people here such as myself who can work remotely and thus take advantage of the sorts of incomes offered by industries which don't even tend to locate here. Here in Wichita alone, in the midst of Governor Brownback's conservative libertarian "business friendly" policies in full swing, Boeing just up and packed its bags and left the state entirely, leaving huge swaths of longtime residents suddenly jobless. Where did those jobs go? Many places, including the supposedly anti-business liberal hellhole of Seattle. So it seems your simplistic reasoning falls apart at the slightest examination.
Kansas is a fairly deep red state, and right now Governor Brownback has a lower approval rating here than President Obama. That takes a lot of fucking up to achieve. Even my grandma and my great aunt are posting to Facebook with calls for his resignation at this point, and they both tend to espouse strong conservatism both socially and economically.
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You're missing the point and thinking in false dichotomies. Democrats and progressives say that higher taxes, more spending, and more progressive policies improve the lives of people. Yet, they are in charge of large numbers of cities and sta
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Every city has it's good parts and its bad parts.
I agree with your comments, but wanted to point out that Finnish cities don't have bad parts. I guess it may have something to do with us being socialists over here.
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:4, Informative)
Kansas is in a state of total collapse, including their education system. The entire state is in a freefall into the shitter, and it's been entirely run by conservative Republicans.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelli... [nymag.com]
https://www.salon.com/2015/06/... [salon.com]
http://www.politicususa.com/20... [politicususa.com]
http://www.rollingstone.com/po... [rollingstone.com]
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As a non-republican conservative, I read these with interest. There are two sides to every story - and prior to reading these, I knew neither side. Now I know one, but am curious about the other. I hope you understand that with credentials like, "Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg" - these articles paint a venomous picture of conservatives. If a governor has failed -
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I don't know why Brownback is liked or not liked, and fiscal conservatism isn't necessarily politically popular because it causes short term pain even if it helps long term growth. Statistically, Kansas does better in terms of educational outcomes and fiscal situation. In terms of happiness, economic growth, and per capita GDP, they also seem comparable. I suggest looking up the statistics.
Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:5, Insightful)
California is really at a disadvantage compared to Kansas. Everyone wants to live in California due to its climate while people live in Kansas because they do. Someone in Kansas who is mentally ill and homeless is going to have a tendency to move to California, more Liberal and a better climate. Someone in California who is down and out will not move to Kansas. Kansas ends up with a more mentally stable population that is not so demanding on services.
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Are you not paying attention?
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol... [theatlantic.com]
By "statistically", do you mean over the course of modern history? That's ridiculous and you know it. California is an economic powerhouse. Do you mean over the course of the past five years? That's nonsense and the article cites why.
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Unlike Kansas, California really is at some risk of collapse, with its dire fiscal situation and failing education system.
Unlike Kansas, California has been running a budget surplus for 4 years straight now. It now has a healthy "rainy day" fund and its financial situation is pretty much assured for the next 10 years or so.
Oh, and even California teachers are better than no teachers in Kansas.
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Daemonik gave Kansas as an example of a failing education system. I simply pointed out that in terms of student outcomes, Kansas is doing better than California and many other Democratic states. And I would respond to you that Kansas is also fiscally in much better condition than California. [mercatus.org]
Furthermore, pointing out that Democrat
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The state of many cities and some states, however, is not a combination of both liberal and conservative policies, since they have been in the hands of Democrats and progressives for decades. So we can look at places like San Francisco and California to see what the long term effect of Democratic progressive government is. And what we find is that these governments simply fail to deliver on their promises.
This is just an il
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I'm pretty damned left on the political spectrum but let's try to be honest here. The jobs moving overseas were touted as the whole "rising tide raising all ships" thing by the Left. I know - I was there when they started talking about it at length in the late 1980s and getting progressively more public about the benefits to the poor and impoverished people (of Indochina, for one) who were living on just a dollar a day.
To be fair, the jackasses on the Right, those who happened to be business owners (quite a
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God Bless your confused little conservative heart!
In case you're wondering, yes that was said in the voice reserved for 'omg this retard is eating his own shit again' but nice.
It's always about taxes TAXES!! with conservatives. If it was taxes, then why are Mississippi and Kansas going bankrupt? They've lowered their tax rates to the point they don't exist (if you're rich already). Why didn't all those jobs gravitate to them instead of all the way over to China?
If only Americans weren't so privileged, wh
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Those statements easily apply to both sides of the aisle. Zealots at either end of the spectrum are idiots. In fact, zealots on any subject are idiots. The Law of Diminishing Returns plays no favorites.
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When you concentrate money into a small area, you tend to attract some not so nice elements.
During the Gold Rush era people were complaining about Native Americans.
Peter Burnett, California's first governor, declared that California was a battleground between the races and that there were only two options towards California Indians, extinction or removal. The State of California directly paid out $25,000 in bounties for Indian scalps with varying prices for adult male, adult female, and child sizes. It also provided the basis for the enslavement and trafficking of Native American labor, particularly that of young women and children, which was carried on as a legal business enterprise. Miners, loggers, and settlers formed vigilante groups and local militias to hunt the Natives, regularly raiding villages to supply the demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush [wikipedia.org]
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Just some additional information... Many of those Natives would have been what we'd call Hispanics today. There are a few really good documentaries on the subject.
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The homeless problem is really a mental health problem. We need to open a new generation of mental hospitals to give them the treatment they need.
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We need to open a new generation of mental hospitals to give them the treatment they need.
California voters will elect another Ronald Reagan for governor and close the mental hospitals again because it's socialism to provide for the less fortunate.
Re: Screw San Fran (Score:2, Informative)
No, you fucking liar.
The liberals felt that mental institutions were cruel, and set an entire generation of lunatics loose, who promptly became homeless.
You're an ignorant piece of shit rewriting history because the truth doesn't align with your agenda.
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was the film that did it. [wikipedia.org]
There was only one de facto media back then, not the heterogeneity we have today.
Re: Screw San Fran (Score:4, Insightful)
They're kind of correct. What I can suggest is that you start here and work your way out:
https://www.aclu.org/aclu-hist... [aclu.org]
Look for unbiased sources and actual documents. The Left wanted (and keep in mind the political spectrum was a bit messier at that point with lots of Southern Democrats and Compassionate Republicans at the time) to, you know, stop fucking abusing the mentally ill. It's a just idea.
Except, the States were pretty broke. They couldn't really afford to house all of them AND give them the treatment they deserved. So, they kinda, sorta, basically let anyone go who was able to say they wanted to be free and showed they understood the concept of freedom. It really wasn't much more precise than that unless they were an obvious danger to themselves and the community and they sometimes let them go too.
This kept going until a bunch of suits throughout the 80s and even into the very early 1990s.
And yeah, you need to keep in mind that the spectrum was a bit more muddled then. When I was younger we had Democrats, elected ones, on television saying that the niggers didn't need belong in school with the whites. (I'm part black.) And, to make it more salient, the citizenry was largely cheering them on. No, it really wasn't the majority who were wanting equal rights, that's another myth. It was a very vocal minority who were tearing shit up and making the white people look bad. It should be noted that some of that minority (that was tearing things up) was also white.
I was not born a full-class citizen of your country.
Re:Screw San Fran (Score:4, Informative)
You do realize that the reason for closing them in the first place was because the ACLU went to bat and won a case for a patient of one of those hospitals. This is the same case that only allows people to be hospitalized against their will if they are a threat to themselves or others. Once people could check themselves out and the courts called it unlawful detainment, there was little left to do other than stop the spending.
People act like this hasn't already been hashed out. You cannot open a mental hospital and just put people in it. You cannot declare someone mentally ill and force them to get treatment. You cannot even force people getting treatment to take their medications. People act like this never happened because they have some boogeyman to blame and think all will be magically different if we spend money again.
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I really do not care if you harm yourself. In fact, I think the world might be better off if you did. It was the courts in the 60s and 70s that decided it was enough to detain you against your will. Evidently they still do because you can be detained for 72 hours under that condition.
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"California voters will elect another Ronald Reagan for governor and close the mental hospitals again because it's socialism to provide for the less fortunate."
Alternatively, as indicated below, the villain was a guy names Milo Forman. They both hit California at the same time. Hence, the homeless problem.
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The U.S. Supreme Court closed all the hospitals.
I could only find one Supreme Court citation. That case restricted the states from locking up a non-dangerous person for no good reason. That's not the same as the Supreme Court ruling to close down the hospitals.
O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975), was a landmark decision in mental health law. The United States Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends. Since the trial court jury found, upon ample evidence, that petitioner did so confine respondent, the Supreme Court upheld the trial court's conclusion that petitioner had violated respondent's right to liberty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Connor_v._Donaldson [wikipedia.org]
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Best thing could happen to that "sanctuary" city would be "the big one" that would drop it into the ocean.
I've been told two things over the last 30 years: the BIG ONE is coming and BART is coming to Silicon Valley. Of the two, BART is going to happen first. As for the BIG ONE, scientists are still predicting in the next 30 years.
Re: Screw San Fran (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop voting the loons into office?
Re: Screw San Fran (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that has much to do with cities. Quite a few presidential candidates raise some eyebrows and I don't see Hillary being declared persona non grata.
I'm starting to think Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho would be a better alternative here.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to blame our collective bowing to our one god (the economy) far more than any political side anywhere. "Wesayso knows best" does not lead to a healthy population. Now there's a kids' show many an adult could learn from.
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Well Harper did leave the treasury empty after 8 or 9 years of mismanaging the countries finances. Wasn't one of his first acts to blow the surplus that he inherited from the Liberals and then borrow $65 Billion?
If the country was a car, the Conservatives attitude was to sell the snow tires, never do an oil change, little well flush the anti-freeze or do a tune-up and then when someone else had to borrow money to spend on the car, scream about wasting money. The Cons did buy some nice dingle balls for that
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Overlords provide control. Larvae provide production. Zergling rushes provide QQ.
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Bullshit... You've got places in France that the cops won't even go into, for one example. I need only one to nullify your statement but I can come up with more. Hell, there are whole countries that are, at least as average, worse that SF. Hungary, Romania, etc...
But nah, keep up with the silliness while it all crumbles and you argue over meaningless things rather than working towards improving things.
Shit, my home state has a lower rate of violent crime, homelessness, and quite possibly even gun-crime than
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And yes, there are parts of Europe that are pretty bad. Yes, they include people shitting on the street. Err... Quite a bit worse, depending on where are - they can get pretty bad. Try not going to a tourist trap and actually seeing what's behind the curtain. Humans are humans, all the world around. Some have better circumstances than others but, for the most part, we're largely the same.
This is very much true for the countries below the Baltic Sea. Nordic Countries (and Estonia) are the best of Europe and among the best, Sweden is the worst with its 100% immigrant housing estates (mistakes were made in the 70's and 80's by Palme...) France is probably the worst among Western European countries with its (literally) no-go zones run by immigrant gangs.
Eastern Europe has its problems, but they're quite different from the rest of Europe. There's human trafficking and organized crime, but a lot
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You sure that wasn't my last staff party?
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Re:Seattle has the same issue (Score:5, Informative)
Send them to the middle of nowhere 100 miles east where they won't be bothering anyone.
Send them back to Las Vegas!
For years, the Las Vegas Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, Nevada's primary state mental facility, gave discharged patients a bus ticket out of town. Poor and mentally ill, they ended up homeless in cities around the country—especially in California, where more than 500 psychiatric patients were sent over a five year period.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/10/nevada-settles-busing-homeless-lawsuit-san-francisco/ [motherjones.com]
Re: Seattle has the same issue (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a relatively common left-wing urban myth. The ACLU is still proud of ensuring the involuntarily committed were released out of the "institutions" [aclu.org]. That was in the 60s and 70s, before Reagan was President. You can't blame him for being governor of CA, either, as the number of patients in State mental hospitals went from 37,500 to 22,000 in the years before he took office [nytimes.com].
So go complain to the left-wing ACLU and the academic psychiatrists who influenced the courts and the bureaucracy in the 60s and 70s to get them all out of mental hospitals, rather than simply assigning blame to people you don't like something they weren't responsible for.
Next you'll be telling us about how the right-wing is governing San Francisco into the group, despite Democrat-led City, County, State and Federal administrations....
Re: Seattle has the same issue (Score:5, Insightful)
And is rightfully so.
See, you can actually run a mental health program without practically jailing people as it is evident in many places in the world.
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