Xi Jinping really will be remembered as the Toilet King, he did issue a few decrees early on, and now in every Tier-88 rural Chinese village road you can find a modern toilet (yes, squat), clean, with water. Paper is hit and miss still though. Cross to Hong Kong and it's the same, but paper is reliable. Hong Kong is definitely richer.

Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm...

And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.

One thing that perplexed me endlessly during my youth living in Sweden was seeing drunk teenagers go around vandalize things for... Fun. Breaking the glass at the buss station (designed to shatter in to million pieces so you don't hurt yourself), friends enjoying graffiti, littering, throwing beer bottles on the street for fun....

During public school lunch (I only heard my friends doing it) they had "meatball war" throwing meatball at each other for fun. Justification was that school lunch taste shit so it's ok to throw food. Mind you all this was in the district with highest median earning in the entire country, not a ghetto.

Same for toilet. Just why did you need to rip off that toilet lid?

Collective ownership and responsibility is taught. In most Asian countries kids are often tasked to clean their own classroom. If someone then just destroys things for fun everyone suffers. EU/US just think that's dumb thing to teach because "eww collectivism" and even the weird conservative people going on about rules usually don't even want that.

So you have a society where race to the bottom is inevitable when it comes to caring for public utilities. "privatized profit(fun) , socialized loss" teaching starts even before economics class

In the US in slow motion we could see a world in which you could go to a big chain pharmacy and retrieve your own toothpaste and shampoo. Now it's considered entirely normal to put these behind plexiglass, and to hire a security guard to stand by the door, but the guard isn't legally allowed to stop anyone or engage in any physical altercation. Because homelessness, because mental illness, because drug addiction, etc are not to be 'criminalized.'

In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.

Yet here we're discussing comparisons with Asian cultures and how they are more respectful of public space.

So, my friends, is it a cultural difference, a legal enforcement difference, or an inevitable consequence of injustice? I'm dying to understand because it's at the crux of the political divide, and I'm seeing cities getting worse in front of my eyes.

The thing is that European cities have always been kinda dirty and crime infested, and it has little to do with American culture war. I do not have an explanation for this, because you will need dig deep into history for that, but the good news is that things are overall improving. Overall crime is overall trending down. For example, the inner city of Amsterdam used to be full of junkies and now that has been almost completely cleaned up. And football Hooligans used to be a much bigger problem than they are now.

Internal impetus cannot be cultivated if the youth do not want or desire to be taught cultivation.

Edit: This plays into something I observe in most "data-driven" organizations. Having a statistic available about recovery costs makes it easy to shift the conversation toward that statistic, when you actually ought to be asking questions about (in this case) the causal impact of that intervention on the subway's overall profitability, the need for easily available public transit and whether there ought to be a fare in the first place, the public good (or maybe harm -- the point is that we ought to be discussing it one way or the other) done by using fare-jumping collections as a mechanism for training people to be less antisocial in other aspects of their lives, or whether that obscene cost of fare collection is actually a reasonable baseline and should be improved. Your statistic, while interesting, is almost useless when trying to figure out what we should do next, at least by itself, and when paired with human psychology it can be actively harmful.

It does shovel a lot of dollars at law enforcement and let the Adams administration pretend to be tough on crime despite engaging in a lot of it, which was the actual intent.

This is the same reason that getting rid of fare-checking is bad - the sorts of people who are kept off the transit system by enforcing a fare, are not people you want to be in an enclosed space with.

Similarly stores with loss prevention guards are probably losing money, but I'd much rather that than having to click a button to unlock items, etc.

Nevermind that the economics of your argument are completely blind to the fact that the funding sources of the MTA and the NYPD are completely different.

More crazy is the downstream effects of putting up your hands and letting crimes go.

All this for what ? Social justice? Here's my counter to that - the subway is a public good, For the People a socialist would say.

So you encourage stealing from The People.

This is false. In California the guard can use non-deadly force to detain a suspected shoplifter. Retailers may have a company policy telling guards and employees not to physically confront shoplifters, because that introduces escalation risk, litigation risk, and risk of injury. It’s simply cheaper to let the item go, in many cases. I’ve read that Target will strategically do this until a person steals enough that it becomes a felony, and then release the hounds.

> In NYC a decree stopped the police from issuing summonses for not paying the subway fare. Because it was said to be racist. Today, tons of people, especially normal professionals - happily do not pay the fare, while the system is said to be in financial deficit.

I’m not sure where you get your information from, but I suggest you reconsider your sources, because this is also false (not the deficit, but a decree stopping police from issuing summons): https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/excel/analysis_and...

I assume you are referring to a 2018 policy reform. Your concerns are debunked here: https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Fare-...

"back in my time" in what used to be yugoslavia, it was perfectly acceptable for an adult to slap/hit a kid who caused problem or was destroying stuff, if a dad had to come to school because the kid did something bad, that was a horrible punishment, plus no leaving the room after, no toys, no bike, no outside play, no nothing for some time.

Now? Parents protect their idiot vandal kids, threathen the school with lawyers, even if cops bring home a kid selling like weed and vomiting red wine, the parents will blame everything else except their little sunshine.

Even academically, kids can't read anymore, and we just push them on, no repeating and losing years, no nothing, here's a "2" (passing grade), go to next year, and after a few more pushes, you'll be someone elses problem, illiterate or not.

I have similar stories from our local neighborhoods where another parent might yell at you but the tales of your exploits made it home before you did. And there consequences waiting for you.

It’s a matter of timeline, not country.

By the late 1990s, I started to see said teachers pushing kids along as to 1) not deal with them again, and 2) pressure from district/state to not have as many failing students a.k.a. optimizing for the metric.

In 1994 my public HS had ONE boys bathroom with no stall doors across from the lunchroom where a public school guard sat and watched. The girls had one on every floor. Had to take a dump? pray no one was in one of three stalls and put your book bag on your lap. My brother went to Brooklyn Tech and had the same missing stall door issue though had more bathrooms.

I went to public high school in the same era in the northern VA suburbs and we had bathrooms available. With doors even. In our 3-building campus, there were at least 6 full sets of bathrooms that I remember (so there were probably more), plus two sets of locker rooms which had toilets.

But hey, it's walkable!

Finally Vandalism is the worst part of it, but mind you it's named after the Vandals a German tribe after they sacked and looted Rome their oppressors captial.

They say young animals learn survival through playful fights. Maybe western youth learns about freedom through throwing meatballs.

I really don't know but would love to read more about this topic.

you answer your own perplexity by yourself in the same sentence; they do it for fun. I know this because I was a shithead vandal teenager, and I did it for two reasons , 1) fun at the moment and 2) to impress my peers and sex partners.

I think the frustrations of youth are undersold here, and I think the expectation of "You're born, now conform to being a cog in this machine that you had nothing to do with or necessarily any interest in." is also somewhat fundamentally flawed, even if the kids have nice bathrooms due to their own efforts to shit in.

a society that repairs itself and allows a certain level of vandalism is better, I think. It allows for the rebellious youth to get through these psychological phases without much possibility of a misstep that allows them to throw themselves into incarceration for life, it offers leeway for personal growth, and it doesn't pin them into programs that they hate and wouldn't integrate into, anyway.

Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?

answer: they love it. They don't have to work. Asia hasn't solved the bullying thing yet even with their perceived perfect unitary social one-ness.

They just showed their delinquency very differently. Some weird form of "honor among thieves/不良/yakuza" deal, which mostly meant they were aggressive, hanged out late (loitering around convenience store asian squatting with a cigarette in their hand) and driving around in loud bikes and fight each other. Breaking public things was a rare overstep.

So I still don't get it no. There are many ways to have "delinquent fun" so to say, so why at one place the same need is put out on public things vs the other place it is taken out on... Each other(?) is a mystery to me.

>Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?

This is the most predictable counter argument I get when the public responsibility in school in Asia is brought up, and it sounds fair on the surface on it but it is a red herring; bullying exist independent of collectivism or individualism nor collective responsibility or not, and neither address it, and neither is anyone claiming it addresses bullying.

And no bully don't usually love it. Because there's something called a teacher that checks in if everyone is doing their part and if a malicious actor is not, they get reprimanded. This is ofc not perfect and doesn't solve "teachers pet/favoritism" issue, but it does its job of teaching the students that "if everyone collaborate, one can circumvent race to the bottom Nash equilibrium when no one cleans the room." which I would say is a much better systemic approach than "idk individualism, things are shit because we are too lazy to think about responsibilities nor systemic way to uphold some trust in social settings"

"If your system is built on the assumption of every actor acting ideally, that's a broken system."

What a bizarre extrapolation. They just don't see why smashing up bus stops is fun. Maybe you can answer, what's fun about it? I don't get it either. I was a teenager once, I don't see why destroying things that are useful for everyone (including you) would be fun.

If you want to change something, understanding it is a very good first step. Usually it means you're on the path toward finding a cure rather than simply treating symptoms.

My feeling about this is very simple. I think the position "I want to smash up public infrastructure to impress my sexual partners" is destructive and immoral. I don't see any reason we should allow it to happen. If someone wants to do that, I think we should punish them. I am not sympathetic to that position at all. Why do you think I should be? That's all I'm asking.

I feel like society kinda ran out of rebelliousness with kid rock and then rap culture (late 2000s Jay-Z, Chris Brown). It seems to have dried up. Modern lookmaxxing and gym rat culture, travel vlog, influencers are now the cool kids, van-life and nomadic travel are the new stick-it-to-the-man.

Young people are going to look at Ukraine and realize that flower power and stick-it-to-the-man are utterly bizarre. Who in Ukraine is doing the John Lennon routine? John Lennon's message is totally bizarre now.

While I'm sure The Youth as a group were never terribly respectful in these countries, social media clout (and the influencer's rise as the only apparently secure profession and for teens the only symbol of a social leadership caste) totally changed the equation regarding motivations. This culminated in the 2021-2022 school year "Devious Licks Challenge", a bathroom destruction tiktok trend which is straight out of Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist.

It's interesting to me to call out conservatives here as they are typically the ones touting community responsibilities through social norms. Despite the socialism (non-derogotarily) lean of the left, I would still consider them more individualistic, socially.

The two groups differ in their enforcement of collectivism (socially or legally) not their aversion/inclination to it. We are a social species, after all.

I think you'd find less graffiti in a rural bathroom than a large city bathroom.

Hmmm…remind me again why I should trust ‘team blue’ with running my city?

IMHO that's purely due to differences in population density.

Kids vandalize shit in the US for the hell of it.

You'll even see graffiti in really hard to reach places where forget the danger of it, it's hard to even understand how they hell they got up there and could still make something legible (like really tall bridges with nothing to stand on underneath).

But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound

What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.

In Europe it's frequently teenagers (even those whom parents provide good lives), football fans, drunk people, etc.

Some people are antisocial and destroy public stuff just for laughs, not because they feel resentment towards society.

This is how an empire dies. One toilet/park/swing at a time.

  About a half a dozen who were nearby when the bridge collapsed, and, of those, only two actually missed seeing it happen. *Everyone* heard it, though: a great roaring waterfall of concrete and steel that echoed across the derelict plains for minutes and miles. The local folk would have told you that it was the river flooding a month earlier what had done it; that, and the heat of that summer havign roasted the old tarmac to pieces. But that wouldn't have been the truth; not entirely. Their hindsight failed to reach past a few preceding seasons, the road's slow degradation after years of use and somewhat fewer years of maintenance as far beyond the horizon as the sea. The columns that supported the span, plunging deep into the river below it, had had great, sweeping cracks for as long as the youth who periodically swam out to tag them could remember. The chain link fence that ran along the bridge's sides had rusted through to a twisted ragged heap even before then.

  The river the bridge had spanned was the _____, and the bridge itself - part of an interstate, from back when there had been states - had linked the northern and southern portions of Jefferson County (which still existed). Thankfully, no one was on it when it finally gave up the ghost. (For a few days, the Hughes of just south of the old rails were worried for their son, Kurt, who had failed to return home that evening; but he eventually turned up a week later, having spent the time with his girlfriend.)

  The loss of the ancient connector meant 50 miles extra travel for anyone who wanted to get from Dodge to Shelley, already a 70-mile trek. With gas so hard to come by, that was no small thing. Rebuilding it would have been ideal, but the fact was that there was no one around who could possibly manage such a project; most of that expertise was locked up in Atlanta, New York-Jersey, Charlotte, and St. Louis, and not one of the territories so mentioned was on good terms with small, flyover, Sep-sympathizing Jefferson County. Besides that, there were scant funds for construction equipment and materials anyway; the curse of Jefferson's self-sufficiency knocking unwelcome on the doors of Jeffersonian hearts more often than any stranger. The bridge would not be rebuilt. So, after the commotion of the actual collapse had died down, and the locals had ceased stopping by to gaze at the ruins and shake their heads and scowl, the structure, half-submerged stone monolith, lay placid and abandoned.

  None of this is really important, except for the part about the 50-mile detour. That... that is actually very important.

  The Biker learned of the bridge's collapse well before reaching Jefferson County. For all that had broken down from neglect or sabotage or accident in this land over the years, it seemed that the grapevine was as resilient as ever. The proprietor of a public house - the one he'd stopped in at when it came time to transfer some of his precious fuel from an emergency tank to the hot rod proper - was the bearer of the bad news. He'd thanked her, pulled out the Handspring loaded with a bootleg map app, and started searching for a new route. This one wouldn't do, it was likely to be more of a still-glowing crater than a road; and that one, that one ran right through hardcore Sep territory. And this one... No, he'd definitely run out of fuel. ...Maybe the second, again? If he could be quick, go at the right time of day... Too risky, his common sense told him. Nonsense, said the impulsive part that had gotten him out of (and, admittedly, into) many a hairy situation. T could outrun any trouble he might find. And he wouldn't find any, because he would be very, very careful. 'You don't got a choice, bub. Gas isn't cheap OR plentiful.' 

  "Shit."

  He hit the Handspring's power button and gingerly slid it back into his leather side saddle, and delayed his oncoming foolishness by taking the moment to glance around like he was looking for someone who was looking for him. Other than the pub, a converted vinyl-sided colonial, there was nothing but the coiled curves of cracked suburban roads and sidewalks; the mounded plots that lay along them, where the foundations of dozens of long-dismantled domiciles had once stood; and each building's replacements, bunches of grass and scrub, waving occasionally in the odd and rare breeze, which were staking out their own homesteads.

I can pass along some of the inspiration, at least:

https://playlists.at/youtube/embed/?playlist=FdW1CjbCNxw%2CS...

SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money

We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?

Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.

People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.

Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward.

There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.

This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?

That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.

Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.

surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered

One more thing:

> something as simple as lowering rent prices

Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.

The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that.

But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.

Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"?

> Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month

Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work."

The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc).

A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do.

So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there.

(All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.)

Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)

This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.

After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.

In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.

People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.

The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.

https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/

The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.

https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living...

In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat...

tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.

How do you suggest that would work? Obviously you can’t just buy hope, so could you provide some specific ideas?

I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)

https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/did-ronald-reagan-...

The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.

I had cousin who was homeless in San Diego. Over the years she came into money a couple times, either from family members or through inheritance. Instead of getting a place to live she figured drugs were a better use for that money. We tried everything to get her off the street, and nothing worked. She wouldn't even stay at a shelter. Because she had no intention of giving up the drugs.

Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.

Unless you mean to say that you don't care either way if they do.

(If your value system places zero value on that, then my value system places positive value on spending your money on things you very explicitly don't value.)

The social net prevents homelessness.

We don't get broke because of medical bills.

Labor laws prevent being fired without prévenance.

Being fired grants you employment benefits.

People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.

We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.

The problem with severe schizophrenics is that they don’t like and won’t take their meds if left to their own devices [EDIT: regardless of how much social support you provide, even though we certainly didn’t provide enough]. Institutions are in no way perfect, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a documentary.

Most homeless shelters are run by religious charities. The majority of them treat homelessness as a sin, either by intentional policy or accidents of attitude. These "charities" often require a lot of work to keep being allowed to use their housing at their shelter from regular job hunting to regularly attending worship sessions to "zero tolerance" policies on everything from curse words to keeping private possessions to having pets to sometimes taking/keeping necessary medication. It's hard to keep your mental health in good shape when the groups that are housing you in the worst weather are berating you for being terrible sinners and treating you like prisoners.

Outside of shelters the most common interactions between homeless people and the cities around them are interactions with cops, who very rarely have mental health training or social work experience, and treat homeless people like criminals because their job is sometimes to treat everybody as would be criminals.

You ever really talk to a homeless person? The ones that really survive become very organized. They have a list of shelters memorized, which months they prefer to be at each one, what things they need to fake about themselves they need to do to survive in that shelter for a few weeks, how much "rent" they need to raise before they get there (some shelters often cost pennies per day just to show that the homeless person is "working" somehow; some homeless panhandle just to afford shelters), and exactly how long they can stay before they inevitably get kicked out (most shelters are "short term", intentionally). Just listening to all the rules and regulations and requirements makes me think I would go schizophrenic dealing with that world. It sounds like being stuck in a middle school that never ends, if that middle school's "classrooms" were all in entirely different parts of a city and all had deeply different rules. I can easily see why homelessness often causes mental illness in the US.

Institutions are close to the right answer, but for an entirely different reason than you assert. We do need better secular institutions (in the endowed place of learning sense, not the mental hospital sense) with mental health as one goal among several such as long-term support in charge of dealing with the homeless. The numbers keep showing that the greatest fix we've found for homelessness is making sure that everyone has a home where they feel safe and private and don't have to do anything to "earn" much less keep that home.

If you were given strange meds that you don't understand anything about by someone who wasn't your personal doctor in a situation that feels like a prison out of your control, would you take them?

That's equally a straw man question, but a useful one to maybe establish empathy for the situation that homeless "guy" might have found himself in.

That's also assuming that is the correct proximate cause. As far as I know science has not yet found exactly a "don't use excrement as spray paint" drug. There are people that will do that which don't need meds and there are people that will do that even on most anti-psychotic meds.

But let's talk about some of the root cause of it all: If you find yourself in a world that you cannot control, that won't let you use any bathroom without buying a coffee/being a customer, that doesn't want you to exist, that says you are only as valuable as the property that you own but then won't allow you any longer to own any property due to some bad luck or misfortune, at that point "the only spray paint I have to send a message about how much this world sucks" might seem pretty clear.

I find it easy to have sympathy with that sort of (straw) man, because there is a logic to it. It's not necessarily a psychotic break. At least, not necessarily at first a psychotic break.

What would I personally do to prevent that? I'd try to prevent people from being homeless in the first place. I'd try to get people mental health resources sooner ahead of crises rather than trying it do it in the middle of a different one (bankruptcy/homelessness). Which is the same as I suggested statistically seems to be the only thing that works: give people private houses with locks and keys and help them feel safe and secure in them, with a sense of ownership and privacy, and with no need to "earn" it or "rent" to keep it. Maybe it doesn't stop the person from covering "their own" walls in feces until they feel safe and secure enough (and that's still a public health problem in the meantime) to try an antipsychotic med that they need to take. But as far as I'm aware no one wants to take or trust an antipsychotic medication if they don't at first feel like they live in a safe enough or secure enough place.

Which again also circles back to "institutions are almost the correct approach, but for the wrong reasons" I mentioned before. A place with mental health resources seems to be an important part of that, still, but I don't think you can address mental health problems in a prison, especially in a society that values private property and private spaces, without first addressing the problems around homeless not having access to private property and private spaces.

But yeah, that's mostly just my opinion on the subject based on statistics and studies that I've read. You don't have to take my word on it. One archived secondary source (with additional links): https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/SocProb...

Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.

They just don’t deserve to destroy our public places.

In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.

Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.

Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for

I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.

This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.

(It was news because the old building's stairs couldn't support the weight of the SWAT team and collapsed, injuring many of them.)

The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.

Very good conversation on the general topic: https://youtu.be/6gMwh3jkWy0?is=MiTI5N1wdEpd_izP

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.

Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.

It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670398

Of course people will come out and scream Gestapo! And talk about their freedoms, but are the only two choices in life complete anarchy and a police state? Can't we live somewhere in the middle like a reasonable society? It's really just slippery slope fallacies all the time like either we don't police at all or do north korea style surveillance.

Also the demonization of police, the need is to have better police, not no police! It's just absurd what people come up with, it's so unreasonable yet these ideas gain such a large following.

my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.

The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.

I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.

I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.

The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.

Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?

The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)

YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.

That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.

Which, like, y'know, that's fair.

It is not like that where I live.

The first generation of immigrants have trouble, natural enough. But are very keen that their children do better.

As for racism: Most racism here is systemic, from the state. There is casual ignorant racism, of course, but little hate.

What a mess has been made of your country. You should work to fix it.

It took us a lot of work to get here, and we have a long way to go. But I cannot imagine living in a society such as you describe.

I think identity rootlessness is an underestimated factor in immigration woes. Youth of all kinds can often be exploited into adopting a destructive self-identity, but some groups are more vulnerable. One notorious Swedish gang actively recruits from the foster care system.

It's wild to see how this flipped completely around in such a short time and now some markers of integration seem to go backwards and at the same time some consider it biggoted to demand/expect assimilation.

I agree with your analysis of the Trump family who have been detrimental for US society.

Unless Sweden in majority is prepared to broom out all that they have accepted in, then this how it is, a mix of cultures having to find common directions and minimise friction over the next generation and a half.

Native Americans are not related to Romans.

Slaves brought by force from Africa neither.

Influences related to migration have overwhelmed whatever support systems there are to tackle this.

The idea that we are soft on crime is insane.

Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.

Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.

> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane

Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.

The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.

Because putting people in prison for weed does not stop people smoking weed.

When you see statistics about people incarcerated on marijuana charges, what they normally obscure is either that's not the only charge or they pled down from something more serious.

There isn't a single person in federal custody there for marijuana possession and only that.

what’s the difference here?

Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.

No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.

It isn't a particular drug: if it isn't Fentanyl or meth it will be something else, whatever is available. In the UK it is a mixed bag, but for many the problem substance is alcohol which isn't controllable the way other drugs are because of it being legal and so commonly used in a non (or at least less) problematic manner.

The problem hits from two directions: many homeless people start the path to addiction by needing an escape and that escape method spirals and takes control, and a lot (not the majority by any means, but a sizable segment) end up destitute because of spiralling substance problems to start with.

Of course many homeless do not have a substance problem, or at least not one that would be insurmountable on its own. Financial issues (that wouldn't go away if you strip the cost of the illicit substances out, accommodation is not cheap and suitable jobs are not readily available, etc) and mental illness (separating this from drug issues is complex: "self medication" is of course a major complicating matter) are probably far more common.

> curious how other countries dealt with it

Not well, for the most part. From an outsiders PoV (sat in my small but comfortable flat with the paid mortgage and no drug issues, though the mental health thing needs work) it doesn't seem to be a bad as it has been in the past (maybe in part due to efforts to make it less visible rather than fixing the issues?) but is growing again and I suspect will do so more rapidly if AI does what it promises to the job market.

You can get a life sentence there for first offense import or manufacture of narcotics. Beyond that, your family will suffer socially.

It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.

Try to be charitable in your interpretation.

Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.

From Google:

> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).

Often times, these "sweeps" just trash everything. Imagine if you were trying to put your life back together. You got an Obamaphone so you can call state assistance programs and email job prospects. You have some basic clothes, maybe some food, maybe some few possessions you have saved from your past life.

Then the cops come and take all of it and throw it away.

Gee, I wonder why it's so hard for people to escape homelessness in the US?

Imagine trying to live any life in a world that rejected your right to property?

At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.

I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.

Where is your office located? What are the national origins of your co-workers?

> What are the national origins of your co-workers?

Probably Indian or South Asian.

Look at how dirty they behave in their own community (Sunnyvale, California)

Meanwhile bathrooms and in nearby Cupertino, Mountain View and even San Jose are much cleaner.

Are you complaining no one cleaned it up, including you? Or are you complaining that the company didn't get cleaning services?

"So, Inspector Lestrade, ..."

People are asses. Don’t assume you know everybody’s history.

Maybe the guy is one legged and has to jump on the toilet seat to keep his balance.

I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior.

Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>?

Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...