The Street Kids of San Francisco

"Our initial hypothesis was that life on Haight Street would be a grim, Dickensian hellhole. Instead, we discovered a world of misunderstood, modern-day nomads, blithely toeing the line between poverty, drug dealing, and hippy nirvana."

We had to interview homeless people in DC as part of a college project, and found something similar. I think the common perception is that homeless people are just people like you and I who hit hard times, but almost everyone we talked to was homeless by choice (and some probably had mental illness). Talk to homeless people sometime, it may change your ideas.

>That's why I get irked when people talk about housewives becoming "braindead" from being outside of the economy.

Every housewife I know has some kind of mentally stimulating hobby, and most of them make some amount of income from it (photography, crafts etc...). In fact most of them shouldn't really be called "housewives" any more than male remote programmers should be called "househusbands".

I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and I've hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail. I've been in jail and won the prize for Best Undergraduate Research at my university.

I fell out of touch with the anarchopunkier half of my friends when I got serious about artificial intelligence and computer science - I love these things and they're very important to me, and in the coffeeshops we always talked about how to get rid of tyrants and inequality. I have always believed in technology. OLPC, Ubuntu, Khan Academy, Coursera, solar panels, cell networks - the list goes on.

Startup folks and street punks have a lot of similar ideas about what we want, but really different aesthetics. The punks I've known are much more well-read and just as bright as the grad students I spend time with now. On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Both groups have a lot to learn from each other, if only they can look over the other's smarminess/smelliness.

Anybody remember the article a few days ago with the author complaining about the Google bus and the invasion of tech folks into the Bay Area and how they weren't improving the community?

And how a lot of people were like "Hey, well, it's putting wealth into helping San Francisco!".

Well, how's this fit into that calculus?

It's fascinating that these kids are the opposite of the usual drug dealer stereotype. Based on my limited knowledge, drugs (in particular marijuana) trace back to either small individual growers, medical marijuana patients, or a gang or cartel. (As far as I know, LSD is very difficult to produce because of its highly regulated precursors. Only a few people in the world produce LSD, and they probably sell it to gangs to distribute.) Individual growers and patients aren't so bad, but for areas of the country where this is rare, gangs probably supply most of the marijuana. Gangs/cartels are known for having basically the opposite of the values of these "street kids." I wonder if these two demographics often come into contact for business purposes, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels"-style.

Does anyone have any better, more specific information about the distribution chains for marijuana or LSD?

EDIT: clarifying first sentence