> People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards. This is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.
In my city, the local government stopped arrests for crimes like theft, property damage, and open drug use. For crimes involving assault, they would maybe do an arrest, keep the person locked up overnight, and then let them go.
The local politicians argued this was right and moral, because these people only commit crime because they come from poverty or generally don’t have “privilege”.
Well… it’s no longer a desirable place to live. The streets are littered with trash, there’s a problem of used drug syringes in public parks and other public spaces, and there are homicides just about every day in the news, or stories of some homeless person assaulting some pedestrian. Just the other week, some old Asian woman got sucker punched. I think a few weeks before that, some drug addict beat a woman with a bat at a public transit stop.
I’m a fairly progressive person, overall. But I look around, and I’m not sure what country I’m in at times.
And I’m writing this on HN because I think the tech industry is part of the problem. When I was at Amazon, we had essentially stopped hiring any demographic in engineering roles except for Indian nationals. We’d bring them in at slightly below market pay (still respectable salaries), but these folks often had 30 days to leave the country if they quit Amazon’s grueling corporate environment. Meanwhile, we didn’t give them the right to vote, effectively shutting down out from the political process. And, for the most part, these folks were willing to work with a toxic work culture, since the alternative meant having to uproot their families and leave the country, perhaps hoping for permanent residency in Canada.
In retrospect, we decided to not hire people born in this country. But we also didn’t want to give the full rights to the people we brought in to substitute them. We knew full and well that if it becomes easy for them to switch jobs, we wont be able to extract the same work hours from them.
Meanwhile, America’s poor are completely forgotten and lost.