Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/15/billionaire-tech-investors-bac.html
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I guess with so many supporting trump, those psychopaths are less afraid to reveal themselves.
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I think we need to take a serious look at what the true problem is here. George Carlin had it right - decades ago. The problem is not homelessness, it’s houselessness. There is not enough affordable housing. The solution? Tear down all the damn golf courses in this country, and use those millions of acres of land to build affordable housing.
Golf. I hate golf.
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A bus ticket to… that city over there that loves the homeless? I wonder where the city proposes to send them, absolutely free?
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To be sure, the municipal government of San Francisco has handled its homelessness problem very poorly over the years, resulting in levels of aggressive panhandling and al fresco pooping seen in few other cities in North America. But if the best solution that Silicon Valley’s “innovators” can support is “move them to a broken system we’re not interested in fixing and funding or make them someone else’s problem” then I have to wonder how wise their judgment is when they’re choosing to invest in tech solutions.
Perhaps the same mysterious realm that Giuliani disappeared NYC’s homeless to back in the 1990s. The whole business was disconcerting and a bit sinister.
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But why is the post headed by an image of Earthquake survivors in Haiti?
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This fallout is exactly the problem Austin, TX is dealing with. All the other major cities are passing anti-homeless legislation, so everyone winds up in Austin.
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London has a major population problem. The region formerly Surrey has rather poor land, not good for agriculture. More of Surrey is golf courses than housing.
Golf is immensely environmentally damaging - monoculture grass saturated in chemicals, irrigation in areas of low rainfall. Backyards can hold the only ecological diversity in many populated areas. I say zone the golf courses for optional housing and see what happens.
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Guys, those people living in tents are your employees.
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It’s going to be like those awful pigeon spikes everybody puts on their buildings now. They don’t solve the problem, they just relocate it- and soon any building that DOESN’T have spikes ends up covered in bird shit because they have to bear the entire burden instead of sharing it with their neighbors.
Except of course that homeless people are human beings so that makes it much much worse.
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Or wherever we sent Atlanta’s considerable homeless population in '96 for the Olympics.
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They do that in a number of cities in California - and in many cases, they’re hoping people will go to other states. Which actually makes a certain amount of sense, as if you’ve got minimal resources, any other state would be a better place to be, especially if, like many “Californians” you originally came from that other state.
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Maybe I’d back a ballot initiative to purge billionaires from San Francisco, if I lived there… Perhaps we should round 'em up in nighttime commando raids and socialize their properties and accounts. We could generously offer them a bus ticket out of town. Give the newly-socialized real estate assets to the homeless; after all, they need somewhere to sleep… Bottom line: screw these gilded age motherfuckers and their indefensible sociopathic misanthropy.
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Don’t worry. With the middle class shrinking you’ll soon have your chance to be purged as well.
And here I thought we were headed more toward Idiocracy and less toward the Hunger Games…
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I’m starting an organization for homeless veteran that provides them with a firearm and the home addresses of people who vote policy like this in.
I call it “Operation Bootystrappy Manifest Destiny”
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There’s nothing funny about this but…
“Smithers, where is George?”
“Sir, you gave him a bus ticket and 24 hours to leave town.”
“And the ungrateful peasant didn’t even make the coffee before he left?!”
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There’s a quote here, about pushing enemies into the sea, but I can’t quite recall who said it. Probably a caeser or something.
Capitalism, baby!
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Well, there’s this, where a bunch of Greeks, deprived of the person who hired them, fought their way back inland because they didn’t have a lot of options.
More recently there’s a quote unreliably attributed to the second president of modern Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, that he intended to push Israel into the sea, but this was as likely ethier invented or said by one of his military commanders.
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Mysteriously, there were recently free Manwiches available at the Facebook HQ.
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It is, perhaps, telling, that when confronted by a problem that actually bothers them and they actually want solved; they have resorted to the oh-so-retro tactic of ‘just ask the state to apply force’ rather than ‘disrupting homelessness’ with apps or drones or gamified social/mobile and big data; or whatever the buzzword of the day is.
It’s almost like they are pretty well aware that toy solutions are best left to a combination of toy problems and imaginary problems; and that sidestepping ‘burdensome regulation’ isn’t actually so cute in person(if ‘panhandling’ had Uber’s PR team; TechCrunch would be writing worshipful articles about how cool and innovative ‘targeted crowdfunding’ in the radically flexible gig economy is. They aren’t ‘homeless’, they’ve just taken infrastructure-as-a-service to its logical conclusion!)
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