Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#231

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #175

mav3rick wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen open drug trade and violence unprosecuted. A lot of police officers complain that the DA lets most cases go.

And we just elected a new DA whose promise is to reduce inequality in the system, presumably by ignoring yet more crime. It's a combination of it being too expensive to hire police officers with the cost of living here, part of the citizenry thinking that "equity" and disincentivizing police from doing their jobs properly = good, and the divide between rich and poor insulating some people from seeing what their decis…

Conductors not enforcing laws is mostly a manner of safety and liability. Conductors are not trained police officers, so them trying to enforce laws will probably end up poorly for them, most likely severely injured or killed. And then Caltrain would have to deal with an injured/dead employee and also whatever the perpetrator was doing in the first place.

Requiring police training for a conductor position would probably just make the job impossible to hire for.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#232

Post by raincom » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #91

dividedbyzero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put homeless people in jails? For being homeless?

Reminds me of Belarus. You have to pay fines for being homeless. Honestly, I hope some homeless people shit in the mailbox of people suggesting such "solutions".

What if the homeless can't afford fines?

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#233

Post by raxxorrax » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

raincom wrote: post #232

raxxorrax wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Belarus. You have to pay fines for being homeless. Honestly, I hope some homeless people shit in the mailbox of people suggesting such "solutions".

What if the homeless can't afford fines?

It will be put on a tab that makes sure you will never find a way out of homelessness again.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#234

Post by catalogia » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #222

supernova87a wrote: post #164

I echo the point that this is merely a symptom of SF's inability to be a little bit more hardnosed and solve its problems. As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop in broad daylight on a Saturday in downtown (and blocking the sidewalk, and creating piles of junk). The operator said that she would report this to the "neighborhood outreach / management team" or somet…

> As an example: I called 311/911 to report a trio of homeless guys, operating a bike chop shop First of all, I hope you called 311 and not 911 for this. It's obviously not a life-threatening emergency. > I asked, incredulous, "isn't this a police matter that you should pursue right now? How will they still be here in 3 days?" She gave some unsatisfactory answer of course. As (hopefully) established above, this is no…

In most of the country, if you call any number other than 911 to report any crime you'll be told to call 911 next time. When I called in my smashed car window, they told me to use 911 next time. I've heard similar from others.

Anyway, reporting a crime that is in progress certainly warrants 911. There is no ambiguity there.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#235

Post by rcoveson » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 11:48 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #227

rcoveson wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we're calling out answers that are really easy to come up with but impossible to implement, I'd like to offer a few: * For mass shootings: Un-invent guns * For poop in the streets: Devise a zero-waste diet that obviates defecation * For both problems: Simply make all the bad people act like the good people

Without arguing about what factors cause it, it's undeniable that 1. Non US rich countries have much less mass shootings. 2. Non SF major US cities have much less street poop. This shows that neither problem is unavoidable.

I don't think you got my point. I recognize that neither problem is unavoidable. We agree that both can be solved, and even that we should look to others who don't have such problems to find solutions. However, calling "simple" the process of getting one country to broadly "be" like another country is just absurd and unhelpful. One could go around throwing that out as a solution to literally any unique problem had by any country. It's the nation-scale equivalent of telling a depressed child to just be happy like the other kids.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#236

Post by BurningFrog » Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 12:46 AM UTC

rcoveson wrote: post #235

BurningFrog wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without arguing about what factors cause it, it's undeniable that 1. Non US rich countries have much less mass shootings. 2. Non SF major US cities have much less street poop. This shows that neither problem is unavoidable.

I don't think you got my point. I recognize that neither problem is unavoidable. We agree that both can be solved, and even that we should look to others who don't have such problems to find solutions. However, calling "simple" the process of getting one country to broadly "be" like another country is just absurd and unhelpful. One could go around throwing that out as a solution to literally any unique problem had by…

I actually agree. I didn't and wouldn't use the word "simple". My point was more that it's "possible".

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#237

Post by supernova87a » Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #231

supernova87a wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we just elected a new DA whose promise is to reduce inequality in the system, presumably by ignoring yet more crime. It's a combination of it being too expensive to hire police officers with the cost of living here, part of the citizenry thinking that "equity" and disincentivizing police from doing their jobs properly = good, and the divide between rich and poor insulating some people from seeing what their decis…

Conductors not enforcing laws is mostly a manner of safety and liability. Conductors are not trained police officers, so them trying to enforce laws will probably end up poorly for them, most likely severely injured or killed. And then Caltrain would have to deal with an injured/dead employee and also whatever the perpetrator was doing in the first place. Requiring police training for a conductor position would proba…

Your relative sense of what's possible and proper contributes to the lack of impetus to enforce rules and have real consequences .

Cities on the East Coast, cities in Europe, Asia, conductors are always checking tickets, and in some cases have police powers. In New York, not having a ticket can get you arrested. Same in many other cities.

Here, on Caltrain, all they can do is make you get off at the next stop. You don't even have to show your ID if you don't want to. Tell me what that incentivizes for people cheating the system?

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#238

Post by 11235813213455 » Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 1:44 AM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #178

gojomo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't "remember" what happened last time "we" culled cats, so what happened? (If you're alluding to the idea that the "black death" plagues were worsened by cat culls, that's an oft-repeated story but somewhat dubious with regard to verifiable facts. Cats themselves can carry the plague bacteria & transmit it to humans – eg https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/08/us/house-cats-spread-huma... – and even regions where cat…

lol no first of all you have to control prey population because pests will balloon with the increased safety and consume resources, strangling the prey population. secondly if you can't control the whole area Predator population will follow the pest increase, often resulting in larger problems or an out of control spiral of environmental issues you don't have to go back to pre scientific anecdotes like the stories ar…

I also don't follow your explanation

Talking about Australia and cats, they have a major issue https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/26/asia/feral-cats-australia..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_in_Australia

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#239

Post by 11235813213455 » Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 2:28 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #89

11235813213455 wrote: post #82

The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..) My prop…

"The animal parts used for pet food may include damaged carcass parts, bones, and cheek meat, and organs such as intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, udders, spleen, and stomach tissue"[1]. These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution in…

> Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved

Seriously, just the fact of making their food, the food containers/packages (aluminium, plastics or whatever, not talking about the further recycling environmental costs), end-to-end delivery/transport, all of this has a massive impact, e.g. pets industry in US is $75b/year [1], those pet products and services are generating "a great deal of pollution"

Saying pets are environmental-friendly is dangerously wrong, above all in our current state

Pets are like a virtual human extra-population (1 billion in order of magnitude), given they are not wild animals participating in the ecosystem (when they are feral, they disrupt it [2]), nor farm animals. Their footprint is probably somewhere between 3% and 10% of the average person, that's still significant

You're definitely right about human having to reduce their meat consumption, their consumerism in general, pets included. That's the key to environment problems

[1]: https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp

[2]: pets/'feral' pets impact on ecosystem https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-dog-is...

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#240

Post by triceratops » Sun, Nov 24, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

11235813213455 wrote: post #215

triceratops wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The animal parts used for pet food may include damaged carcass parts, bones, and cheek meat, and organs such as intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, udders, spleen, and stomach tissue"[1]. These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution in…

I know that argument, but the more there are markets dependent on meat production (like pets food), the more meat production will be hard to reduce It's like saying "I just give my throwaway to my dogs", this means you'll more or less consciously get more food because you know you need enough throwaway Or it's also somewhat like saying, "I bought this mango at the supermarket, which came in plane, from another contin…

Cool, so what are you going to do with all the hundreds of millions of pet animals that already exist?

> Similar reasoning, the idea is to cut down the downstream demand so we're able to cut down the upstream one

That's an inaccurate, backwards analogy. The accurate analogy would be "my pet eats only mango cores, so I'm going to buy the mango even though its from another continent". Which is patently untrue. Pet food demand doesn't drive human meat demand - human meat demand makes pet food cheap and plentiful. Cutting human meat demand would drive up the price of pet food (because there are fewer castoff materials available) and lead to people re-evaluating how many pets they can/should have. Alternatively, it may also lead to investments in healthy animal-free pet foods, similar to fake meat for humans.

Since you're so concerned about the environmental impact of pets, consider also that for many people, their pets are surrogate children. Presumably if they couldn't have pets they might have actual children, which is far more destructive to the environment.