i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?
You are interpreting the comment in the most negative way possible. The system needs to change, and we need to help these people in a different way.
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
put in the paragraph
"The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive."
and see what the sentiment score is
The quote is matter of fact, as far as I can read.
>expensive enough
>exploiting
the tone is clearly judgmental
At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.
you could pay more in taxes so that these people could have section 8 housing and food stamps so that they don't have to dig in the trash in order to survive.
edit: i see i'm getting downvoted. it boggles the mind. people are starving literally in his driveway (not in another state, not in another country, not abstractly) and he's complaining about the noise of their death rattle. like how do you square that? i'd love someone to actually respond/answer rather than downvote in indignation. are you upset at the politics of the suggestion that the solution to the problem is not getting rid of their sole means to survive but to actually help them? is it divisive because i invoked the hob goblin of hn (higher taxes)? just truly what is the appropriate response here? is it really "fuck em let die so i can sleep blissfully unaware"?
When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it.
Also let’s say you could and this person got housed and they also decided they would not rummage thru trash. Someone else will take up the slack and rummage.
For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it.
Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
I don't know where you're from, but in California, we regularly vote on ballot propositions to levy taxes earmarked for specific purposes. For example, in the most recent election cycle, Proposition C was on the SF ballot, which raised $300 million in taxes to address homelessness. Due to our fondness for direct democracy, any interested citizen can write a ballot proposition for everyone else to vote on. So yes, you certainly can earmark taxes. You can push for propositions to reduce homelessness, and you can vote for them, and encourage your friends and family and coworkers to vote for them.
> For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
That's false. SF spends only about $3.8k/year per homeless person: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
At any rate, even if SF were spending an inordinate amount trying to house the homeless, it would only make sense to, given how damn high the rents are.
> Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
Yeah, I don't believe you, because the people who get into working with the homeless don't do it because they like money. I'm a software developer. I certainly don't do it because I need the money. It's not even sexy work, as far as non-profits go. Assuming that the same incentives that work on the military apply to do-gooders doing thankless work is just lazy.
There is also the small problem wherein if the org I volunteer with on occasion, Food not Bombs, were cut out, homeless people would literally starve. So yes, I _would_ be very opposed to that, unless the city took it upon itself to feed the homeless instead.
The biggest obstacle to solving homelessness, as with many other problems, is not the people who care about the homeless, but the people who don't: the NIMBYs. The SF NIMBYs recently put $250k and a lawsuit into the effort to defeat the Embarcadero Navigation Center, which has only 200 beds. Thankfully, it has failed, but there are only seven centers, and a homeless population of 7-8k, so it's not going to make much of a dent.
When every attempt to build a good homeless shelter meets this much opposition, it's just deeply wrongheaded, and, dare I say, callous, to blame the people helping a population who so many hate.
Yes, people are often negative towards suggestions that don't use any existing knowledge, experience or infrastructure. To jump from that to "there's a conspiracy to keep this in place!" is ludicrous.
Every time homelessness comes up on hacker news there are people who leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy. This behavior never seems helpful.
>leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy
i do not understand what the issue with that response is. we should shun the unempathetic.
In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash.
Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.
I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.
In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.