Most of the homeless people I have encountered in San Francisco leave their sleeping spots in doorways before businesses open, and don’t defecate where they sleep.
There are old laws against blocking traffic, littering, and defecating in public. The only thing sit/lie laws do is give the police a shortcut so they don’t have to find evidence that people are doing the things they want to stop them from doing.
Laws that is unevenly enforced is not rule of law; it is rule of law enforcement.
This is something most seem to have missed.
This video shows that in New York stores at least, on the iPhone 6 launch the crushing majority of the overnight line was made out of people buying exactly the maximum two phones per customer and immediately handing them over to resellers (to sell at a huge profit to rich people in China and other countries, who paid any price to have the thing before it was available in stores).
And if you think the police didn’t harass these “Apple fans” for sleeping on the sidewalk do check out the bit of niceness starting at 2:20.
Golly. I don’t know what jurisdiction the rest of you live in, but where I live the homeless can and do live and sleep on the sidewalk by the authority of the judicial branch of our local government. The popo don’t like it, but have managed to adjust, sort of.
We don’t have an Apple store in our downtown either. I am not sure that is connected.
Hint; it is the second largest city in the USA.
Another F-35? Unfortunately we’re still paying cost overruns for the first one…and still don’t have it. (What we’d even do with it, i’ll never know) but buy an apartment and treatment for homeless people? Dear god, think of the poor taxpayer!!1!!
Well that’s easy then. I’ve got a purpose; I’m sleepy and I have no place to go, so I am sleeping here for the purpose of getting some rest.
Good point.
I should have them arrested.
Having them beaten costs taxpayers less.
Having faced public transit as a fan of that method of travel, at the very least I can sympathize with the difficulties of a complicated route, and I’ve witnessed a friend with PTSD try to navigate rush hour traffic through a major metro area and it wasn’t a good time for anyone involved. I’m sorry to hear of your difficulties.
Perhaps this is where domestic robots of a sort will come into the fore? Something cheap and small enough to have inside the house that can offer some sort of connection to treatment options beyond a telephone call or simple instructions.
We’re talking about homeless people being targeted for sleeping outside.
This is exactly the point and in a sense it isn’t even hypocritical. Most people regard the homeless as non-people and even poor people tend to behave as though those with money have a right to behave this way.
I know, right? Jesus would be totally appalled by that. That collection plate is for Jesus-Jets and stuff. Not helping people. Why should the government involved in that?
I have a solution, house the homeless in the F-35 airframes. Unfortunately, neither this suggestion nor the F-35 are likely to fly.
Nah, sidewalks are for people, and people do all sorts of things on them. Busking on the sidewalk is legit, and they could easily be there for a couple of hours. Just yesterday I was with my daughters in one location on the sidewalk for over two hours … selling girl guide biscuits. And we took over from others who’d been there in the same spot for the four previous hours.
Six hours! In one spot! Oh the huge manatee!
We have a collection of characters around here that appear to live on the street - ‘UN lady’ (where is she now? I haven’t seen her around for ages), ‘bucket guy’ (RIP), ‘blanket man’ (RIP), “Scuse me” guy outside the TAB always asking for busfare, etc. Personally I find the in-your-face-ness of some of them annoying, and I feel awkward and uncomfortable interacting with them (mind you, I feel that way about most people I don’t already know), but I don’t really want them arrested or moved on ‘just because’. That just seems like a waste of time money and effort - what’s the point? Where are they supposed to go? Before he died, Blanket Man racked up an extraordinary collection of arrests and convictions for various trivial - and some not so trivial - offences. That one guy consumed (literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of police time, legal aid, court fees, and prison expenses. For what? We’d have been better off just giving him a cash grant of a quarter or half a million dollars a couple of decades ago, along with some practical humane assistance in living the way he wanted to. But no.
My country has such a vicious, mean-spirited streak about it sometimes.
meh. …
So you support people staying in a public place for a month (or however long the fanatics do so) and moving on? They did tell you when they were leaving, after all…
The Apple line-waiters aren’t going to be taking a shit in the doorways of nearby businesses when they wake up or aggressively panhandling … … okay, unless it’s an Apple store in China. But the big difference is that everyone knows the Apple line-waiters are mostly harmless and not a civic shame that needs to be covered up except for other people who own Apple gear.
I “have” a large and extraordinarily beautiful house and garden.
I have also been homeless on several occasions.
Everybody should have both experiences. It’d be a better world.
“Interesting” German factoid: The language which has words for Fahrvergnügen, Zeitgeist, Schadenfreude and various near inconceivable concepts does not seem to have a word for loitering.
Er, no. Apple fans typically line up for about two or three days, max. I have no idea what you’re getting at.
Fucking scumbags.
