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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way?

If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped.

SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.

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Every company I have worked for has a certain number of people that are not capable, or willing, to leave the sanitary facilities in an acceptable state.

From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them...

From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us.

For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.

Japan is a strange counterexample. Not sure how they do it without identification.

They actively teach the value of collectivism vs. individualism. When I visited a few years ago I read an article in a local paper that asked high school kids what the biggest danger to Japan was. They replied "individualism".

This is why I do not support multiculturalism. This is contentious today for a number of reasons. Moreso because the research is so divided. There are plenty of studies which find in both directions. However, having lived in highly multicultural societies and more culturally homogenous societies, I firmly believe that it damages the social contract. When neighbours hold different and often incompatible values, not only are they less inclined to help each other as part of that unspoken social agreement, but they're more likely to vote for their own interests ahead of those of society at large.

A nation needs a unified direction with unified values. Eating different food is fine. Disagreeing about core tenets of society like free speech, equal rights, and law and justice, is not.

Why have you chosen to inject 'multiculturalism' into a topic about conceptually 'winning' in society? Do you think maybe there is a common economic system underlying everything that enables the concept 'winning'?

Yeah, Money is the system. The more you have of it, the more you've won. It can be measured in terms of dollars or when you compare countries it's GDP or GDP per capita.

You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.

The economic system as the root doesn’t make sense. Why is the decay so sudden despite capitalism dominating western markets for nearly half a thousand years? Why are there so many capitalist economies like Japan or Norway without these issues (almost at all)?

Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.

>Why are there so many capitalist economies like Japan or Norway without these issues (almost at all)?

These economies lean towards socialism more then capitalism. In fact you can even call them socialist governments.

You're wrong about homeless people in SF. There's a huge liberal movement here.

Homeless people are coddled and taken care of. Free syringes so they don't get HIV. Homeless people aren't beaten. If you're homeless SF is paradise.

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