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Comment by dpatru | Hacker News Reader

This is like complaining of unequal vehicles at an airport: A relatively few can fly very fast and hold hundreds of passengers, but most are earthbound-bound and can carry only a few passengers. Of course Silicon Valley has inequality: it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth. Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor, just like crippling airliners will not improve the cars in airports parking lots.

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One person is an airline, another person is a car...

Not a very good comparison considering the basic needs of all people are practically the same: food, water, and shelter

It's like you're saying that "impactful people" "need" the Atherton mansions they live in to the same degree that the homeless need housing

Or in vehicle terms you're saying that one car needs a hangar as much as another car needs a parking spot (because the first one is driven to "more important" places)

I have seen poverty in a lot of places, and huge contrasts of wealth, but never the disparity I saw in SF. I’m talking about a Lamborghini parked next to a person lying on the floor, with no shoes, marred in their own excrements. It is crazy.

> Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor

There’s no one left to “hobble”.

Go to a developing country and its worse, way worse.

Not to say it isnt worth trying to fix.

I have spent a lot of time in GCC countries (Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Oman). It’s worse there in the sense that more people are dirt poor, but SF is worse in terms of more people being rich.

What I mean is, in UAE/Saudi, the poor people are just as bad as the poor people in SF. But there are very, very few rich people. There’s also a lot of not dirt poor people (still poor).

SF had so many many rich people and there or there are just as bad as the poor elsewhere.

Come to Asia. You'll see people far richer than those in Silicon Valley next to people who parasites and diseases the Western world eliminated 100 years ago.

Sure, but the rich won't be 15% of citizens of the city. It will be like 0.2-2%.

I'm confused. How is there being more people with less a better thing?

I have been to several developing countries. There was definitely more poor people there.

However, even if SF beggars might end up having more dollars in their pockets at the end of a day than someone in a developing country, the quality of life that they get is not so different. No shoes, spending the day sitting on a street, begging, sleeping on a cardboard box somewhere. SF weather is more benign than other what most developing countries have, granted.

My point is: I expected more from the wealthiest nation in the world. They have more than enough to dress, feed and shelter every one of their citizens, many times. Developing countries simply don’t. The fact that you are putting them together in the same phrase kind of makes my point. “Better than a developing nation” is an incredibly low bar to apply to the US.

Where is our resident homeless/hopefully formerly homeless HN resident? I hope she’s doing well.

I don’t think enough people realize that once you fall below a certain threshold, it’s virtually impossible to get back out without a lot of assistance.

> Hobbling these people

What does that mean exactly?

Subjecting them to even the smallest, mildest mote of criticism.

Getting rid of homeless people will do nothing to techbros other than give them a fewer thing to complain about.

What a bizarre comparison.

That's a very weak criticism. I think his analogy was fairly clear in what it was saying. "Bizarre" seems to mean "I don't like what it implied." But why bother to tell us that? Tell us why you don't like it. Better, give us a reason why you think it's wrong.

This is one of the most disgusting things I've read in a long, long time.

> it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth.

It's home to some of the most entitled jerkoffs on earth. This website needs to call out this rhetoric, because it's riddled with self-congratulatory garbage.

Go ahead and flag me or downvote my comment, but I really can't believe what I'm reading here sometimes.

You are on a website focused on tech startups. The people who succeed at tech startups become absurdly rich. I’m in agreement with the parent commenter that hobbling the superstars to give more to poor people is the wrong move. I’m disgusted that people disagree with me, but I also understand why most people remain poor.

If only they had invested early into scam internet tokens like you did, they wouldn’t have these problems

Saying monero is a scam token, shows how much you know about crypto.

This is what everyone says about their scam token.

Monero has proven at scale some cryptography that can be used to change everything. I recommend reading the codebases of projects before you write everything off as a scam. Monero is a legitimate project with enormous value, and active research on problems that matter; it is the primary private / anonymous digital cryptocurrency.

I dont know. Im pretty well off thanks to these “jerkoffs” not only in terms of access to technology but also lucrative employment.

Please don't fulminate or post in the flamewar style to HN. It's against the rules because, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it leads to shitty threads. We're trying for better than that here, and you can make your substantive points without it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Note this one also: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

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