61–70 of 150 posts
The interesting thing about this article, to me, is what it shows about how much demand there is for this idea.
Is the relation really all that surprising to people? We programmers tend to be a fairly self-reliant bunch. Ever told someone "RTFM"? Many of us are self-motivated, and probably self-taught to at least a certain degree. You think "It's just so easy, anyone can do it if they put in the work" and as a result you see unsuccessful, downtrodden people and think they just didn't want to put in their 10.000 hours like the…
Conservatism? Reagan? Utter nonsense. Around the time of Reagan, the Soviet Empire was still shipping people like that to the gulags. North Korea still does, so Pyongyang can be pristine. It's "progressives", not right-wingers, who are the problem here.
I suppose the elephant in the room is whether or not 'techies' are repulsed by the homeless because accusations like "...[they] spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy..." have a basis in reality. I don't live in SF, so I can only go off what I hear (from the accused 'techies', so I'm only getting one side of the propaganda here..), but what I have heard is that 1) the homeless really seem to love SF, preferr…
> In the Puritan model of charity, the rich have an obligation to do good for the poor—but the poor also have an obligation to the rich, to try to be a useful part of the same society. The article's author not only disagrees, but considers this model so obviously erroneous that she doesn't see any need to explain what's wrong with it. I find this unhelpful, because it fails to explain why subsidizing people who contr…
That's not to say that the former group are saints, but 1) they have systematic disadvantages that actually prevent any current legal implementations of a free market from providing for them and 2) once incarcerated, they actually end up costing society in a far more permanent way (up to $167k/yr in NYC).
So, even if you disregarded how totally wrongheaded your argument on a sociopolitical level, it also shows a pretty flimsy lack of substance on a quantitative level. You WILL pay for poverty one way or another. You can't magically incentivize it out of existence with a free market, so don't whine about it by thinking about it as subsidization. Think of it more as insurance, at the very least.
> In the Puritan model of charity, the rich have an obligation to do good for the poor—but the poor also have an obligation to the rich, to try to be a useful part of the same society. The article's author not only disagrees, but considers this model so obviously erroneous that she doesn't see any need to explain what's wrong with it. I find this unhelpful, because it fails to explain why subsidizing people who contr…
There's the problem of lock-out: how do you contribute usefully to society without some baseline to work from, and where your day-to-day activities are forced to be about the most basic level of survival?
Isn't the purpose of so-called "subsidization" to avoid this? (Not that it necessarily works in practice.)
I suppose the elephant in the room is whether or not 'techies' are repulsed by the homeless because accusations like "...[they] spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy..." have a basis in reality. I don't live in SF, so I can only go off what I hear (from the accused 'techies', so I'm only getting one side of the propaganda here..), but what I have heard is that 1) the homeless really seem to love SF, preferr…
I live in Seattle, not San Francisco. This is not my experience whatsoever in Seattle. Perhaps this is the experience in San Francisco, however. In that case, to what do you ascribe that behavior? And What is the appropriate response to it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't compassion for others and the desire to end others' suffering enough of a reason without any other incentive? If in a hypothetical conversation, someone said to me "They contribute nothing; they should all just die & starve or just get out of the way." ... my response would be that it's us, the people with wealth(or at least not living paycheck2paycheck) who have the most power to change society and allow it to…
I cannot end my brother's suffering. Only he can do that. The most I can do is offer help, if he'll have it. On that point: Regarding someone as worthless, that is, not only unable to contribute but unable to become able to contribute, strikes me as rather less compassionate than contemptuous. I concede I once thought as you do, but only until, through sheer good fortune, I learned what I could accomplish and, in so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's not fair, in principle. However, we must mention that the quality of education in the U.S. implies that a non-negligible population is at least underinformed*. We should not ignore the historical and political context here: Democracy as implemented by the U.S., given the motivations of market capitalism, has not been working; and this discussion may very well be the result of that failure.
I'm not sure how the quality of education relates. A large portion of the population is underinformed about technology, sure, but I don't think this is what we're talking about? Your original post mentioned that we must consciously add humanism to what we do, and non-technologists fear that we have lost our humanity. My point is that this fear is not unjustified, considering how so many of us (evidently, based on dis…
What are stereotypes ?
I suppose the elephant in the room is whether or not 'techies' are repulsed by the homeless because accusations like "...[they] spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy..." have a basis in reality. I don't live in SF, so I can only go off what I hear (from the accused 'techies', so I'm only getting one side of the propaganda here..), but what I have heard is that 1) the homeless really seem to love SF, preferr…
Sure some subset of the homeless population spits, urinates, taunts, sells drugs and gets rowdy, but so do a lot of rowdy bar hoppers on Polk St every Saturday night.
Homelessness is a complex subject with many causes and effects -- I don't claim to understand it; in fact, I'd like to learn more, but episodes like this don't seem to engender that kind of discussion, unfortunately.