If people want to lay around doing clean heroin, watching TV and hanging out with other addicts, give them a safe space to do so with minimal drain on the rest of society. Attach a minimum wage wavier so manufacturers could set up low skill jobs within, and addicts can save up for when they want to leave. Concentrate drug treatment, health, social and educational programs for economies of scale. Tie dose dispensation to biometric data to prevent people from receiving OD-levels of drugs, but allow them to slowly ratchet up if they wish to do so as tolerance builds. I'd imagine this could achieve a net-savings in cost of anti-drug programs and policing, and could be funded by cities which want to export their derelict addicts.
It would be an ugly business, but I think with proper considerations it could be more empathetic than current drug policy.
Similarly, do safe injection sites encourage drug use? No, because drug use is going to happen regardless of the presence of safe injection sites. It does, however, make it much easier to transition drug addicts into programs that can help them. The data is there.
So bottom line; if you don't like having dirty needles about and open drug use, support safe injection sites. Likewise, if you don't like teenagers getting pregnant or getting STDs, then support access to sex ed and condoms.
Ideally we'd have no-one who becomes addicted to drugs.
But the existence of substance misuse disorders means we will always have addicts, and by definition addicts take drugs even when they know they are being harmed by those drugs. These people are not encouraged by safe injection spaces, because they were always going to be taking drugs.
How are those harms caused? How can we minimise those harms?
Some of those harms are caused by people not being able to access treatment to get off drugs; they cannot access drugs affordably so need to turn to crime to get money for drugs; they have to inject unsafely because safe injection places are not available.
A safe injection space means people are not sharing needles. People are helped to find better injection sites. Any infections can get medical attention before limbs need to be amputated. People can have drugs tested for purity. Ideally we'd be providing medical grade heroin so people aren't injecting contaminated drugs. People can be reminded about evidence-based drug rehabilitation (mostly substitution and therapy. For some reason the US has an over-reliance on abstinence retreats and 12 steps, which has little evidence of effectiveness).
Knowing that there is a safe place to go and treatment for it might reduce some inhibitions about it, but I doubt that many, if any at all, would actually start doing such hard drugs because of places like this.
More likely, if someone is in a position where they would consider doing it in the first place, they would do it anyway.
An adult has the inalienable right to do what they want with their own body.
I don't know if anyone would describe being thrown in an American prison 'rescued'.
https://www.ottawapublichealth.ca/en/public-health-topics/ha...
edit:
> "oh gee they sure are nice not to arrest me for dealing drugs and smashing car windows. To thank them I will not poop in the street."
This is terribly reductionist, and apathy is not at all the same as actually providing help.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/lessons-from-the-heroin-...
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 something similar I've forgotten the name of. And she said they would likely be dispatched to resolve it within 2-3 days.
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.
Any other rational city, and the police would be cuffing these guys and hauling them in for questioning about clearly stolen bikes. But here in SF, it's "too inequitable" to be targeting homeless people for actively and visibly engaging in criminal behavior. This is to the point that car break-ins are considered minor acceptable crime.
This city has lost its senses, in the name of thinking it's some post-modern utopia that has to treat everyone equally and naively, and ignore the obvious bullshit going on right in front of our noses.
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 decisions cause.
I was not surprised at all at the stabbing / murder on Bart last week. In my travels in Bay Area, I have not seen 1 officer on a Bart train in my entire 10 years here. Even on Caltrain, the conductors have no authority to do anything.
It's like we actively try not to enforce laws here.
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 not an emergency, so I don't understand why you'd expect a squad of detectives to race out there right away. From your description, it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger. Sorry, but the police are not bellhops that you can just summon when you feel irritated about something that's happening outside.
Anyway, reporting a crime that is in progress certainly warrants 911. There is no ambiguity there.
The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.
My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..
[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503376/all-meat-pet-food..., https://www.treehugger.com/pets/cats-dogs-meat-environmental...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29... [2] https://portlandloo.com/
I really don't get it.
SF already has massive taxes and too many overpaid workers, and the city is still a mess. There is no accountability. Throwing more money at it is not going to help.
> San Francisco’s budget totals an astounding $9.6 billion this year — more than the budgets of 13 states and scores of countries around the world [2]
> By far the biggest chunk goes to pay city employees. Almost half — $4.7 billion — is spent on the salaries and benefits of 30,626 city employees.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/how-one-bay-area-janitor-mad...
[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Billions-of-doll...
for that you really need to have the toilets to begin with. SF, and in general American cities, have no public toilets ( i mean the number they have is just a noise around 0).
No, it was definitely a problem then. I was working in mid-market around then and we definitely noticed when the mechanical sidewalk sweepers missed a shift. Impressively it's gotten worse.
Are you not looking then? SF isn't even the only place in the Bay Area I've seen shit on the sidewalk.
Anyway, the fact that this is even a question people wonder about should be proof enough there's a problem. I lived in Philadelphia for many years and it's generally a filthy city. People who live there know it too. All kinds of liter all over the place, rats running around in plain sight. Trash cans getting deliberately turned over and emptied onto the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Vomit and the piss of drunks are common in alleyways. There is no shortage of abject poverty and homelessness. But shit on the streets? Not in Philly; not in this century anyway. This is one respect in which Philly is definitely cleaner.
This discrepancy is something that I've never seen satisfactorily explained. I've heard all kinds of comments about poverty and access to public bathrooms and all those other explanations. But I've never been able to figure out why this impacts San Francisco so much more than a city like Philly. Poverty, homelessness, mental illness, income inequality, and businesses with no public restrooms are not uniquely SF problems.
Edit for clarification:
North and West Philly are filthy. North of Spring Garden or west of 40th or so. And Kensington is a festering wound. The alleys in downtown are filthy too, though the sidewalks of the major streets are generally cleaner. Maybe they've cleaned it up since I lived there; I moved away about 10 years ago. I last visited about 2 years ago and it didn't really seem like anything had changed.
I moved from SF to Philadelphia 2 years ago and have no idea what you're talking about.
None of the things you described are things I've seen more than maybe once in the 2 years I've lived here, and I walk everywhere just like I did in SF.
Granted, all of those things I saw repeatedly when living in SF for 4 years beforehand. The one time I smelled urine in a street in Philly, my brain went "whoa, am I back in SoMa?"
Compare with Australia's National Public Toilet Map: https://toiletmap.gov.au/Find/20547
Is the San Francisco Shtuation Out of Control? Originally posted on November 18, 2019 9:30 am
It continued:
We may be the "parking hell" of San Francisco, but at least we're predictable about it. Just like how we've been screaming for a protected bike lane all across the city, and it still can't be found. Well, we're not going to have a protected bike lane in 9 months because.. well.. UberHittingTaxis is totally derailing it and killing the entire project . That alone has me so pissy and pissed off
I tried GPT-2 again:
We will be celebrating both Thanksgiving and the 200th anniversary of Thanksgiving by receiving, reviving and celebrating the san francisco shtuation. Very few people know that the birth of frederic Felspike on the last day of 1847, resulted in the birth of a San Franciscan most certainly from all over. He was a true founding member of San Francisco history, at least a half of the San Franciscans who were still
I tried GPT-2 a third time:
by Edmund Kemper Now you can: - Save and share news and news stories from around the Bay Area - Mention SF Asks Now for special news updates when you're posting comments - Choose from many popular templates to create one of your own The San Francisco Sh*tuation ® began in early 2002 as a group of passionate Bay Area residents, many of whom had the same frustration with local politics, media, and society. Our mission is to provide a space
I'm not sure what these GPT-2 results say about the news media or the society the humans have built. At least it didn't immediately infer that the article was going to be about people pooping on the sidewalks.
(I, too, had serious responsivity problems with the article in Firefox.)
You need to the Open311 API and not just the DataSF 311 case dump to see this unfortunately. But SF311 closes a large number of tickets with "duplicate of SR #<....>"
So without this data it's unclear if the poop is increasing, or if it's just that SF311 usage is way up and duplicate reports are increasing.
I honestly thought she was having some sort of episode. But then I looked down and saw I'd stepped in it. She tried to warn me.
With sequencing getting so cheap, this might be an cheap data source for Hooli and the likes.
In my experience the east side of town, especially the financial district, businesses start being cagey about letting you use the bathroom.
Going westward, when you get to the Lower Haight or so, I can start naming many coffee shops with decent bathrooms and no lock on the door. And decent park bathrooms too.
This will be a factor in my decision to take the job or not.
(there's gotta be a word for that effect)
It's a homeless crisis.
Remembers me of mid-nineties Germany (where I've grown up) – in Munich (yes, Oktoberfest), Kindergarten teachers did rounds in the morning to clean up the fenced-in Kindergarten playground, remove the syringes the junkies left. In one of the better neighborhoods, too. Whole squares right in the city where hundreds of homeless did drugs with helpless police standing by. I remember being chased away from a playground in a well-off part of Bremen by an approaching mob of violent homeless junkies. Lots of refugees from the Balkan war, often in an absolutely desolate psychological state. That, too, was an amalgamation of lots of crises – reunification, economy doing poorly, a society built by the rules of Cold War, falling apart, war in the Balkans, huge reluctance to change the tiniest thing.
But Germany really turned things around. A lot of targeted action, lots of reforms, lots of small changes to how the social security net functions, a big invest in robust police services, somehow mostly without the Police violence issues the US have. There are some corner cases where the social services still fail to help, other than that, it's become relatively hard to stay homeless for long. In Munich, you really have to know where to look to find any homeless at all (Hofgarten at dusk; one particular river bridge.) Being poor isn't fun, and it's comparatively harder to get out of poverty (though the US seem to be catching up there.) It's easy and cost-neutral (i.E. part of mandatory insurance or covered by social security) to get help with mental health issues – no doubt that contributed. No opiate crisis to speak of (got lucky there).
A lot of money has been (and is being) spent on it though. It'll be interesting to see whether the US will do likewise, or find a way to make it work on a smaller budget, or simply fail to get things to improve.
e.g. "Pete Buttigieg has a AA voter problem" vs. his actually having that problem (which is not conclusive)
The solution to this is usually some overwhelming action to not only mitigate but change the momentum of discussion.
Which is to say SF's problems are definitely a result of SF policies! For housing specifically, only SF is responsible for making construction in SF near impossible.
The problems of the nation and state are of course also present there, but that doesn't change that SF is unique.
Sincere question: Why does San Francisco seem to be the only one with those news stories (not NYC, LA, Chicago, Miami, etc.)?
Some cities have been better at patching these issues than San Francisco has - e.g Austin, TX is forcibly removing homeless encampments from their streets. Seattle have revised zoning and is building new housing to offset housing shortages even though the local NIMBYs oppose muh gentrification.
San Francisco has the right combination of growth, politics and local sentiment that prevents these problems from being solved.
EDIT: RE downvotes, shame on me for not being familiar with SF politics, I guess. It is, after all, the center of the universe. (◔_◔)
The truth is well-paying (i.e. middle class) jobs are coalescing in a small number of cities which have failed to adapt to the growth. As a software engineer this means I can either make great money in one of the aforementioned cities or a fraction of it in an "off-brand" city. Lucky for me I can afford to pay out the nose for my apartment but this causes incredible pressure on the housing supply, especially for those less well-off.
The root cause is prop 13 disincentivizes moving around keeping the supply illiquid, and encourages ninbyism preventing new construction, as you’re basically locked in whenever you currently live.
Compassion for homeless sure, but what about people who are victimized by the homeless, who have done nothing wrong?
Honestly, I hope some homeless people shit in the mailbox of people suggesting such "solutions".
Sane policing, treatment programs, and massive development is the solution.
There's tons of empty space in the US, it seems reasonable to move people who are breaking the law, causing chaos and public health hazards out of highly populated areas.
"Outside city limits" would be because of the prohibitively high cost of real estate and regulations in San Francisco.
Allowing people to commit crimes with impunity is not a solution. It is effectively punishing law-abiding people.
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 involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.
Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.
1. http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Pet-Food.html#ixzz662tVEXrH
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...
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 continent. But what am I doing wrong? if I don't buy it, it'll be discarded/wasted". Similar reasoning, the idea is to cut down the downstream demand so we're able to cut down the upstream one
> that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved.
That's not necessarily true, there may some efficient ways to compost/bury/recycle organic material, I don't know how precisely for this case. But compared to the amount of energy for making and transporting dog food to each final consumer? The latter is certainly more polluting
> Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice
Yes, right, well the vast majority people have the choice to not have pets, for those who need a companion, they can try with a plant, it's less talkative but not less sensible
People don't eat liver where you're from?
remember last time we culled cats 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 cats are superstitiously cherished suffered repeated plague outbreaks.)
There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!
That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...
Edit: E.g this one https://sf311.org/track-case?ref=11716075&email=
My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.
He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.
beyond being a nuisance, dog poop is actually more of a threat to dogs than to people (cross-species pathogens/infections are relatively rare).
what i don't get are the folks who who go through the trouble of bagging the poop and then dropping the bag on the ground.
There's someone I know that worked as a caregiver for a man that had dementia, and instead of keeping him inside all day decided to take him to the park. Well his adult diaper needed changed, so he went to the bathroom to do that, and a park ranger started banging on the door accusing them of smoking weed wanting them to open the door now! Banging on it, then while finishing up changing the state park ranger started accusing them of being homosexuals.
This was somewhere in California, but I know he moved across the country after his patient passed away and decided to go on a different career path. So kinda interesting how people can see one little thing and then start assuming a bunch of stuff. But apparently the ranger realized he was in the wrong and apologize. Sounded like there could of even been a lawsuit out of it, but he didn't want to go that far and just wanted to move on. Probably embarrassing to deal with. This was back I guess before everyone carried cell phones with them though also.
Look, minor concerns like "efficacy" are no matter when the goal is shaming the homeless.
That is SF. Drug deals are done in broad daylight.
Meanwhile there was that video going around of BART police arresting a guy for eating a sandwich on the platform.
Like in most cities, in the US atleast.
I'm aware that stomachs are used in haggis, or intestines in sausage. That doesn't represent the majority of human meat consumption though.
Used to be you could sell your house for more than you paid and have 2 years to roll it into buying a new house for the same or more money. Now the difference is taxable capital gains regardless of what your new living situation becomes.
IIRC this changed about 20 years ago.
> 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.
add to this their packaging fabrication (often in plastics), what it takes later to recycle them, their storage, all the logistics (IT, ..)
Edit: since other commenters are still questioning this, I've put a question mark on that bit.
The obscure backwater of Seattle.
911 is not exclusively for life-threatening emergencies as you are suggesting. It's for emergencies more generally, and that generally includes crime reports. Particularly reports of crimes that are in progress. The crime I was reporting (the burglarizing of my car) was not in progress which is why I didn't call 911 (and consequently received a brief lecture about using 911 in the future.) But had I witnessed the crime in progress, I wouldn't have hesitated to call 911 and nor should anybody else.
Here is the advice of Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management: https://abc7news.com/when-to-call-911-vs-311/5300051/
When to call 911:
* Is there danger to life, property or the environment?
* Is a crime in progress?
* Is there a medical emergency / need for immediate help?
* Is there a fire?
So, to reiterate, when it comes to crimes that are in progress there is really no ambiguity.
I know even here there's a huge heroin problem. Seen recently that the county sheriff and city police joined together kicking out a bunch of homeless in the woods, and then everytime you go to the supermarket people with signs. Sad, but I know there's been cases of people faking homeless to panhandle so don't know who's real or not. It seems like we have so many resources, and one of the richest nations yet we still have homelessness.
I know in some cities it's illegal to even sit on the sidewalk, what if someone is older or disabled needing to take a break and no benches to sit? Then some cities it's illegal to sleep in your car even if legally parked, but I know there's been challences over that. Some area even put spikes to prevent people from sitting down too. Just seems like instead of dealing with it, they rather want them to move along.
I didn't say that. They're just not as bad as you make them out to be.
> Pets are like a virtual human extra-population (1 billion in order of magnitude)...Their footprint is probably somewhere between 3% and 10% of the average person,
So like 30-100 million additional humans? You also didn't specify what country the "average person" is from, whose footprint you're comparing a pet to. Either way, it's not that big - barely 1.5% of the human population in terms of impact.
I can only think of two reasons why anyone would suggest "eliminate all the pets" as a serious solution for environmental problems:
1. They already hate pets. Which is a valid (if unpopular) personal opinion, but not a basis to formulate any sort of policy on.
2. They want to alienate people who might otherwise be on board with environmentalism. Because that's what will happen if you suggest to people they have to put Fido to sleep right now to save the planet.
speaking for "First-world" countries mostly. I live in France, there is as many pets as inhabitants roughly (63M-66M), figures say 21M of cats+dogs, other European countries are comparable. I compare pets footprint to their owners' basically, and a 10% larger footprint in developed countries is a problem, even 3%, even 1% is something to work on, there is always a start if we want to clean up the planet
About your 1. and 2.
Not specially, I could argue the exact opposite points in return, I'm just pragmatic about it. I'd also want to address the cigarette smoking problem more seriously (my mom died from that), to ban a bunch of cosmetics, all of insecticides, plastic wrappings... Pets seem like an easy lever to deal with, 'seem' because I understand your reaction, people get attached to them, they react with passion more than reason about it, but they must understand the consequences: ecosystem and pollution damages, neutering/spaying doesn't seem enforced in Brasil like showed my previous 'impact on ecosystem' link. Of course, we really can't put every pet owner in the same bag, I'm mostly targeting the way pets become a trend, a norm, e;g. the Shiba trend, the way pets have become so "normal", so present everywhere, internet, TV, young generation are kinda educated with that.. I mean, they wouldn't really question their existence later or their environment footprint, so I'm just here trying to have a critical, in a positive sense, view
"if you suggest to people they have to put Fido to sleep right now to save the planet."
I didn't say that either, I said "cut down"
You were right about arguing against my initial argument about "pets eating one fifth of the world's meat and fish" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#Impact] but I hope you understand all the other "invisible" pollution cost for processing, delivering those food, and all the other pets services pollution costs (vet, beauty, ...). So my point stands with their significant environmental impact, even if pets were fed insect-based food like they suggest in the wikipedia link, there would still be a significant background environmental impact
Yesterday I submitted one of bloody handprints smeared all over a building on Mission St. Pretty sure those weren't dog handprints. I called it graffiti since I didn't see anything more suited towards "blood smeared all over someone's building".
http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11720974
This was voluminous enough that I think it was probably human:
http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11019074
Out in the western neighborhoods this size was more common (and I'd assume was dog sourced):
I'm not sure how accurate size is as an indicator of species for feces, given that some dogs are quite large with large feces (and some many humans have small feces for dietary reasons), but it's not like the original commenter explained in much detail how they classified the feces either (other than indicating it was through images for many).
Edit: Regarding your second link, I have a pair of 65 pound dogs, and their poop is generally about 1/3 to 3/4 that size. I assume it could be a ~100 lb dog, but agree it's more likely from a person.
Requiring police training for a conductor position would probably just make the job impossible to hire for.
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?
Tickets are not checked on the bus and subway. Fare enforcement is done by NYPD, the local police department consisting of police officers.
Tickets are checked on the commuter rail, but conductors only really are empowered to ask people to pay the onboard fare, which is higher than purchasing a ticket at a machine or at an office outside the train. Conductors can call police, but are not able to make arrests or use physical force to remove farebeaters from trains.
Hope springs eternal.
I'm not saying SF is blameless, but what works in Japan or Norway isn't guaranteed to work in SF.
You say the trains run on time in Japan, and people don't respond by researching transit infrastructure in Japan to figure out why that is. They respond by throwing their hands in the air and staying it's impossible, unfundable, politically untenable, whatever fluff reason that's indicative of an unwillingness to think analytically about the problem.
The underlying cause is that there is no thought or scholarship in local government, just electoral risk assessment.
As it is, drug deals happen in broad daylight on Market St anyway because nobody’s gonna stop them.
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 around the pest, just check the Australia history with cats and rabbits
here's a substantial population study with ferrets in UK https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-011-9965-2
mainland control is only worse
Which "prey" have to be controlled, or else which "pests" will balloon?
Is the capitalization of 'Predator' significant, indicating some sort of sovereignty on a scale matching that of your only other capitalized entities, 'Australia' and 'UK'?
I also linked a uk study, but this works the same everywhere they tried, including wolves in italy etc
> Which "prey" have to be controlled, or else which "pests" will balloon?
the food chain sits at an equilibrium that's under dampened. the population of opportunistic/scavenger will grow sharply going over capacity. that will cause harm to animals down the food chain (i.e. attack to bird nests) and will cause immigration of nearby predator population, which will again be underdampenend and will grow over capacity.
heck I even linked a paper explaining this, there's plenty references around too.
> Predator
now you're just being an hardass. it was autocorrect.
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
Nor is it clear what's the "prey" and "pest" in the case of house pets. What are you referring-to by those words? Similarly, when you say "this works the same everywhere they tried", what's "this"?
Yes, I'm being a "hardass", because your tone is one of "everybody knows these clear and simple things", but the actual details you've provided are grossly insufficient to know what you're talking about. Even when asked for exact details, you've moved on to other non-responsive digressions.
You are seriously overestimating the clarity of your communication, and overconfident about what anecdotes that others might "remember", and making unwarranted assumptions about what shared-interest/shared-history groups your readers might consider to be part of "we". You're expecting others to intuit lots of specific things in your mind you haven't described in sufficient detail for others to know.
Well, that one is pretty obvious. Landlords will charge the highest prices they can get away with.
The more interesting question is why landlords are supposedly entitled to all of the new wealth. After all they had no role in creating any of it.
At the root of the problem in your question is how does society determine who has a right to live where. Obviously, given the opportunity, most of the world would want to live with on the California coast or similar places.
Obviously, the most basic answer to the question I posed above is “might makes right”. But we have moved past a situation where fight someone to take their land, and instead have to buy it.
Yes, the current system is unfair for most people. Most people will never get a chance to live where they want, and most people are born without the chance in the first place. So why should society let those born to wealthy moms get the spoils?
There isn’t a good answer, other than a better alternative hasn’t been invented yet. But at least in the current scenario, a small percentage of people can move into the places they want, giving enough hope that people aren’t resorting to war. Or they are unable to.
I believe that certain cities have better ratios but I'm also inclined to think those places are just slightly earlier in the cycle.
I was responding to the claim that it's a state- or national-level problem. Perhaps you would argue that this meets some criteria for being a 'national-level' problem, but it's not obvious to me.
California state law is a big part of the problem: it gives individual cities way too much power to decide what gets built and what doesn't, severely restricting supply. For example, neighborhood associations can filibuster new development into nothingness, even for contradictory reasons like not having enough parking but also not being public-transport friendly enough. Additionally, California has wildly skewed tax law that disincentivizes people from moving or downsizing (look up Prop 13). Add in a lack of public transportation, zoning restrictions, and massive corporate subsidies and you've got a housing crisis brewing.
And this isn't just a California thing.
"Home prices are rising at twice the wage of growth." https://www.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing...
"Low-cost housing is disappearing from the market." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/housing-crisis-inequality-har...
You can find a lot of these articles around without much effort.
Lots of people would be really happy for SF to set aside some land in the city for new jails. Still, that seems less practical than just opening some public restrooms...
Give them free housing of a sort, so that it’s an improvement over living on the street, but not so that currently-housed people would feel tempted to downgrade their status to homeless in order to get the free house.
The ideal free housing camp is (a) away from major population centres, (b) fairly basic, and (c) compulsory for those who wind up homeless in major cities.
You can assess land rent (there are methods to do this that are quite reliable) and tax away, say, 80% of it, thus leaving in place enough of a market in land that its ordinary function in facilitating exchanges is not impaired. It's quite easy in fact, the main problem is really getting there from here.
However, California has decided that "housing as investment" supersedes all else. It's not that there's no viable alternatives: this is by design.
Also, Prop 13 inexplicably applies to commercial real estate, and inherited property.
Also the inherited property bit was a separate amendment. And there is no limit either.
It's not cheap even if you manage to get all your jails built in Sunset or some other backwater. Jail is expensive, and the homeless have no official salaries to garnish so you can't use the Ferguson method. Besides which, there's no way the state is going to take any convicted public poopers off your hands to house in their expensive prisons, so you're going to have to keep these criminals jailed for their entire sentence.
Wouldn't it be easier to open some public restrooms?