Comment by strangesmells06 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strangesmells06 | Hacker News Reader

strangesmells06

California and San Francisco by proxy have some of the most compassionate policies to help people down on their luck.

The California social safety net has helped me out of homelessness before because I have no family to fall back on.

But what sucks is that all the focus of California's policies goes on the shitheads who take advantage of it and turn San Francisco streets to shit...when in reality it's helped quite a few people.

I purchased a sailboat recently and and finding out that rules have had to be made by coastal cities all over the country in the past decade or so because squatters exploited anchoring out in harbors and just let their boats go to shit causing the city to have to clean up dangerous wrecks in the harbor. so it's not easy nowadays to find an long-term anchorage.

Same thing with van life. Theres a lot of upscale hardworking people in van life who are educated and friendly and polite and don't trash out neighborhoods but the scumbags ruin it.

I kind of look at capitalism and communism the same way. Both beautiful systems that get ruined by scumbags.

how do we stop good systems from being ruined by scumbags without getting rid of the system itself?

Part of the issue is that people do not see the same problem, even thought the same phenomena is being observed. Probably the first step is for everyone to agree on what the problem is to begin with. In places like SF, the problem is the system, which creates homelessness. In other conservative cities, the problem is people breaking the law (in other words, personal accountability).

Just like any hypothesis it can be tested, and we can see results. For more than a decade now the system hypothesis has been tested in SF and anyone that can honestly reflect on the problem can see that the hypothesis has failed. The more SF has done to fix the problem, the larger the problem has become. I can even predict this will not be solved and the problem will just keep getting worse. It will not change until the leadership of the city admits they got it wrong and they need to reframe the entire situation.

No, it’s the compassionate policies that shitheads from all over the country migrate to.

I disagree. The problem is not the system. The system helps many people. This part gets ignored by you and many others.

The problem is this shit heads who take advantage of the system.

It's really the problem with any system created for and by human beings.

That's what needs to be focused on... get rid of the shit heads not the system overall.

being fanatic about throwing the baby out with the bath water is not it in my opinion.

I'm saying SF tried the system hypothesis and is failing. Also not just SF but most large cities. So yes, they need to factor in the human component which is incentives and intentions.

How can we find the actual "expected value" of the rules in SF? They seem to be a mixed bag, even if we discount people abusing them. I hear about roughly the same number of good, well intended but silly, and evil / gaming the numbers. (like forced removal of camps or just making it someone else's problem https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...)

It seems like the system can help some people, but the same system is really broken too. If we just compare it to other cities it doesn't seem like the expected value is very high. (unless we somehow show that SF has a high ratio of abusers of the system)

This is a really good question.

Why isn't there data showing the quiet groups of people that are being helped by the system and not highly visible shooting heroin in the street.

Why aren't the politicians of California and San Francisco championing their social safety net with actual data and statistics?

> communism the same way. Both beautiful systems

I’m not sure what can be be beautiful about it on a non extremely superficial level.

I guess the same could be said about capitalism, too. The vision of a society that achieved minimizing exploitation of its members and turned it into a much more cooperative system is quite beautiful, I would say.

The historical reality of both systems is anything but.

Capitalism doesn’t really attempt to be a coherent ideology with some set of predefined dogmas.

> The historical reality of both systems is anything but.

To what do you attribute the massive improvements in life expectancy, medicine, overall QOL and other things over the last ~200 years or so?

> To what do you attribute the massive improvements in life expectancy, medicine, overall QOL and other things over the last ~200 years or so?

not capitalism but technology

Louis Pasteur was from France which was a monarchy and had just come out of a Napoleonic dictatorship and big government stimulated economy...when he discovered germ theory.

Einstein was a patent clerk he didn't get any venture capital funding.

The internet is a result of government funding.

Government and private industry BOTH have funded tons of successful scientific breakthroughs.

Capitalism is not responsible for QOL improvements...technology is.

Capitalism has actually jacked up the cost of health care in America to the highest of any country in the world with the worse outcomes than many countries.

capitalism is leading to monopolistic conditions in many areas of the country.

it's clear that government's and capitalism need each other and unchecked unregulated versions of either lead to dysfunctional systems.

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