Possible but it seems like the chases are not even a US problem but more a "certain places" problem. I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
> I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
Seriously? It's from people not wanting to be arrested and go to jail. If they get away, perfect. If they don't, well, they were going to jail anyways. Now they have a cool story to tell while in jail. These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign. These are people doing dirt, know it, and are willing to try something to avoid getting caught. It's really not complicated
> These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign.
Although if you watched "Last Week Tonight" recently (S12 E28, 2025-11-02), Mr Oliver's long segment is about police chases and IIRC he covered more than a couple of cases where people were, in fact, being pulled over / chased for trivial matters which then lead to crashes, deaths, etc.
Of course they're not optional, but you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit. Principle of proportionality should apply, you shouldn't be risking the lives of the public over anything but the most serious offences where them getting away poses a greater threat to the public than potentially killing a bystander.
It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem. At least I would hope that the penalties for running away are very serious.
The police officers don't know why you are running away and can reasonably expect that there is something wrong other than an unbuckled seat belt -> a kidnapped person, tons of drugs in the trunk, a wanted murderer driving, etc.
Well at least in my country where chases are rare. I understand in US it is difficult since people are more eager to run away.
> It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem
Right, people are dumb. You can't just throw your hands in the air and declare a problem unsolvable because people are dumb and keep acting against their best interest; you acknowledge that fact and change tact accordingly. If it turns out that trying to pull people over for minor infractions causes 1% of those incidents to turn into violent chases then you should stop pulling people over for minor infractions and figure out a safer way to ticket them. At the very least you shouldn't chase after them in your car and add another dangerous vehicle to the road. It reflects a mindset of "get and punish the bad guys" being prioritized over "improve safety of your community," which pretty much sums up the culture problem with American police and criminal justice in general.
"you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit"
That would indeed be dumb, but once somebody dumb has decided to do that they're guilty of something much more serious and the car chase is completely justified.
> you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit.
That's the thing: normal people don't. Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
What about depressed people? What about stressed people? What about people with autism who overreact when spooked? What about people on the edge who didn't care about the consequences because of the life situation?
What about people who are convinced that police may kill them for mild violation as they saw that multiple times on the news and social media? The reaction to flee may be justified at the moment as it is life or death anyway, even if only in their heads.
There are a lot of "normal" people around who will act abnormally in a high stress situation.
Driving on public roads carries a responsibility to respond reasonably in all kinds of stressful situations. People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.
> Driving on public roads carries a responsibility to respond reasonably in all kinds of stressful situations.
Yes.
> People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.
Also yes. But both of those points apply to the (US) cops and they frequently fail on both points (the first amply demonstrated by how many police chases end up in crashes and/or deaths; the second by any one of thousands of videos showing where the cops needlessly escalate traffic stops.)
No they're not, people have irrational reactions to things all the time, especially under stress. Getting startled, panicking, and fleeing is definitely one of those.
People will confess to crimes they didn't commit if the police are persuasive enough, that's why such evidence is illegal.
Thank you for speaking to reality of situations that the majority of internet commenters never talk about. I think dang needs to put the HN member lock back on.
> Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
I beg you to watch the John Oliver segment where he gives several counter-examples to this narrative.
The cause of the behavior (as phrased when asked) is not wanting to go to jail. Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
Stealing cars (often at gunpoint) and driving them recklessly is an entertainment activity for young men with poor impulse control and little regard for human life. This kind of person makes decisions of comparable quality elsewhere in life that are probably incompatible with being middle class.
Can happen, but being miserable is a not a prerequisite to wanting to get high.
I think it fits a narrative to explain addictions away as something that happens to someone as a victim of their circumstances, but personal choices are a real input.
"Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction."
Are you suggesting criminals in other cities and countries do want to go to jail? Like, the reason there aren't high speed chases in Amsterdam is because Amsterdesian criminals actually enjoy life in the clink?
I'm going to guess... because we can? Police here are willing to chase for almost anything in most jurisdictions. I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
> I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
UK has stuff like [0] which contains a whole bunch of "is it worth it?" considerations. Also if a chase causes a death, the officer(s) can be prosecuted[1] - I suspect the nonsense of "qualified immunity" means there's no risk to a US officer for initiating a chase that ends in death.
> so why do americans have more high speed chases?
Off the top of my head: 1) US cops are more likely to harass, maim, kill you than most other places (whether you've crimed or not); 2) US legal system seems a little hinky when it comes to certain people; 3) "three strikes" (not sure if that's countrywide or state-level? pretty sure it's still around tho'?) can mean life for three trivial crimes; 4) car-centric country - lots of them and everywhere is designed for cars[0].
[0] Imagine a car chase around London[1] or some other wackily streeted city.
[1] No, the godawful nonsense Hollywood comes up with does not count.
California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies. The list is pretty reasonable IMO. No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
It's basically a list of violent crimes, the only one that seems out of pocket is selling PCP, meth, or cocaine to childre, which is bad but could arguably be less bad than the others on the list
Raping an unconscious person is not on the list of violent felonies. Neither is domestic violence with traumatic injury, assault with a deadly weapon, or felony battery with serious bodily injury.
> California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies.
But not all states are California.
> No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
William James Rummel begs to differ[0] - fraudulent use of a credit card ($80), forged check ($28.36), failure to return payment for non-performed work ($120.75) and voila, life sentence (albeit later reduced to time served on procedural grounds.)
[0] also references "Graham v. West Virginia, a 1912 case which involved an individual convicted of three separate counts of horse thievery total[l]ing $235" which ended up in a life sentence.
In summary, some states may have sensible 3 strike laws, some may not.
LAPD helicopters rarely if ever leave California. IMO we shouldn't base our law enforcement on what Texas was doing 50 years ago (or West Virginia before helicopters were even invented)
> LAPD helicopters rarely if ever leave California.
The person I responded to said "so why do americans have more high speed chases?" Last I checked, "americans" covered more than just California.
> IMO we shouldn't base our law enforcement on what Texas was doing 50 years ago
Indeed not! California's Three Strikes law isn't all that great though[0].
"Project clients have been given life sentences for offenses including stealing one dollar in loose change from a parked car, possessing less than a gram of narcotics, and attempting to break into a soup kitchen."
I'd say two of those were even sillier than the Texas example.
But to its credit, California did vote to reform it in 2021 and people have been released since.
I would love to see more comprehensive stats to answer this question, rather than relying on cases studies you have to go back over one hundred years to find.
Look, I know I'm old and it feels like it but 1980 is absolutely not one hundred years ago.
> I would love to see more comprehensive stats to answer this question
Have some more recent California examples (between 1994 when they created the law and 2012 when it was loosened): "[...] given life sentences for offenses including stealing one dollar in loose change from a parked car, possessing less than a gram of narcotics, and attempting to break into a soup kitchen."[0]
1912 is over one hundred years ago, which is obviously what I was referring to.
My point is you're just pulling out a few incidents, and not even very many at that. I would like to see real stats on the subject, but it seems you're working under the "plural of anecdote is data" theory.
From my pseudo-ivory tower viewpoint it seems like the concept of 3 strikes has some validity but with totally the wrong response.
If someone is convicted three times of stealing in a year, even if it's like 1$, clearly something is not working here between this person and the system. It's a pipe dream but it would be nice if we could have some kind of board you could refer cases like that to with the mission statement of "figure out exactlt what is going on here" with powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.
> convicted three times of stealing in a year [...] clearly something is not working here between this person and the system.
Yep, it's definitely a "this person needs some kind of help" signifier.
I can see the logic of "three top-line serious felonies" -> much more severe punishment (even though, I believe, more severe punishment doesn't actually tend to reduce recidivism but I guess if you get life without parole, that's not a huge issue) - if someone commits three distinct murders[0], obviously there's a problem with letting them loose in polite society.
> powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.
I think various places have tried things like that and (IIRC) they tend to work out well - people get reintegrated into society, they don't reoffend, etc. - but all it takes is one agitator (right wing paper or politician looking for cheap points) to bring up the "soft on crime" angle and it all goes out the window.
[0] obvs. without justification - if they've killed in self-defence three times, that's different than three unprovoked straight out murders, but you'd still want some kind of "look, maybe don't go places where you end up in fights etc." conversation.
Down in SD at least, the sheriff's office helicopters serve many purposes. They'll use them for firefighting, hike rescues (often! according to their IG), first responder to an aviation accident, loudly shouting garbled messages through their loudspeaker, etc.
There's just enough high-speed/timely crime here that I prefer they use these over drones. There's some extra legal protections built into helicopters that drones don't get, like prison time if some idiot points a laser pointer.
I seriously doubt that physically rescuing hikers or delivering first-responders to plane crashes represent a large percentage of LAPD helicopter missions. I live in a nice suburb and there's one of them circling over it probably weekly.
I don't see why large drones can't do most of what these helicopters are doing. They're using needlessly expensive helicopters, too.
I work with CHP helicopters as part of our fire district's rescue team. We pull a half dozen people a year off of one of the local trails (sometimes as "recovery"). Most of these are via helicopter. There are two helos for a huge area - Yolo county down to Santa Cruz county. By acreage it's a lot bigger than LA.
My point is, two small helicopters are more than enough to do that job as a side-gig from all the other CHP work they do.
Also, Cal Fire has its own air wing. LAPD helicopters are not equipped for firefighting.
In SD, we have cal fire helicopters, sheriff helicopters with water tanks, SD City Fire Department has their own, and I just learned SDGE (electric utility) has their own firefighting helicopter.
It's absolutely worth looking at the ROI on these flights and weighing that against the intrusion on our privacy/freedom. No doubt they'll always need drones and helicopters but I'd be surprised if there was any real need for them to be in the air that often. I think that's a question that should be asked everywhere but the LAPD in particular are terrible enough that it makes this a great place to start.
I was in Santa Monica - the dense part with all the alleyways - during a foot pursuit involving a heli. Felt like I was in vietnam. It was at night, they were pretty low, and that light felt like the sun coming into the building.
That depends on the drone. There are drones/UAVs that fly so high in the air you can't even see them seeing you from the ground. Even low flying drones would be very hard to hit from a car involved in a high speed chase, and it's not as if people can't shoot at helicopters which are both larger/easier targets and much more dangerous if brought down.
You're talking about technology that's only become realistic in the last couple years. Even then, there's probably nothing off-the-shelf that would serve the current need.
LAPD has been patrolling with helicopters for decades. I have yet to see a drone follow a car in high speed pursuit down the 5 at 100+ MPH.
As far as I'm aware, high speed drones tend to have quite short flight durations due to battery limitations. Drones that have the range to follow a fleeing suspect for a long time would probably have to be big enough that they could cause a fatal accident if they crash, and in that case I'd rather have a pilot on board. Better reaction time, no risk from jamming, much better field of view/awareness, decades of testing, etc.
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area.
Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.
Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.
Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.
Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
> why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
AFAIK they've changed their tactics in recent years, but growing up around LA these we're like sporting events on TV. It's a guilty pleasure, but almost everyone I know tuned-in and watched the chase.
Their popularity for viewers (even more so now with YouTube, but they’re long been a staple of live news and late night tv) and the fact that police like any excuse to do “badass” things are big parts of why they still happen. They’re a pretty bad idea. Endangering lives (including bystanders) over mostly relatively-minor crimes.
But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)
Having built a ticketing system that sold some Oasis level concerts there's a few misconceptions here:
Selling an event out takes a long time to do frequently because tickets are VERY frequently not purchased--they're just reserved and then they fall back into open seating. This is done by true fans, but also frequently by bots run by professional brokers or amateur resellers. And Cloudflare and every other state of the art bot detection platform doesn't detect them. Hell, some of the bots are built on Cloudflare workers themselves in my experience...
So whatever velocity you achieve in the lab--in the real world you'll do a fraction of it when it comes to actual purchases. That depends upon the event really. Events that fly under the radar may get you a higher actual conversion rate.
Also, an act like Oasis is going to have a lot of reserved seating. Running through algorithms to find contiguous seats is going to be tougher than this example and it's difficult to parallelize if you're truly giving the next person in the queue the actual best seats remaining.
There are many other business rules that accrue after years of features to win Oasis like business unfortunately that will result in more DB calls and add contention.
> Selling an event out takes a long time to do frequently because tickets are VERY frequently not purchased--they're just reserved and then they fall back into open seating.
TigerBeetle actually includes native support for "two phase pending transfers" out of the box, to make it easy to coordinate with third party payment systems while users have inventory in their cart:
> Also, an act like Oasis is going to have a lot of reserved seating. Running through algorithms to find contiguous seats is going to be tougher than this example and it's difficult to parallelize if you're truly giving the next person in the queue the actual best seats remaining.
It's actually not that hard (and probably easier) to express this in TigerBeetle using transfers with deterministic IDs. For example, you could check (and reserve) up to 8K contiguous seats in a single query to TigerBeetle, with a P100 less than 100ms.
> There are many other business rules that accrue after years of features to win Oasis like business unfortunately that will result in more DB calls and add contention.
As you move "the data to the code" in interactive transactions with multiple queries, to process more and more business rules, you're holding row locks across the network. TigerBeetle's design inverts this, to move "the code to the data" in declarative queries, to let the DBMS enforce the transactional business rules directly in the database, with a rich set of debit/credit primitives and audit trail.
If only. But you also need to fix the internal concurrency control of the DBMS storage engine. TB here is very different to PG.
For example, if you have 8K transactions through 2 accounts, a naive system might read the 2 accounts, update their balances, then write the 2 accounts… for all 8K (!) transactions.
Whereas TB does vectorized concurrency control: read the 2 accounts, update them 8K times, write the 2 accounts.
This is why stored procedures only get you typically about a 10x win, you don’t see the same 1000x as with TB, especially at power law contention.
Huge fan of what tiger beatle promotes. Even in simple system/projects batching and reducing contention can be massive win. Batching + single application writer alone in something like sqlite can get you to pretty ridiculous inserts/updates per second (although transactions become at the batch level).
I sometimes wonder how many fewer servers we would need if the aproaches promoted by Tiger Style were more widespread.
What datasteucture does Tiger Beatle use for it's client? I'm assuming its multi writer single reader. I've always wondered what the best choice is there. A reverse LMAX disruptor (multiple producers single consumer).
Agree with the above, we built and run a ticketing platform, the actual transaction of purchasing the ticket at the final step in the funnel is not the bottleneck.
The shopping process and queuing process puts considerably more load on our systems than the final purchase transaction, which ultimately is constrained by the size of the venue, which we can control by managing the queue throughput.
Even with a queue system in place, you inevitably end up with the thundering heard problem when ticket sales open, as a large majority of users will refresh their browsers regardless of instructions to the contrary
You would use TigerBeetle for everything: not only the final purchase transaction, but the shopping cart process, inventory management and queuing/reserving.
In other words, to count not only the money changing hands, but also the corresponding goods/services being exchanged.
These are all transactions: goods/services and the corresponding money.
Does that mean that there is some smoke and mirrors when, eg Taylor Swift, says they sold out the concert in minutes? Or are the mega acts truly that high demand?
You can get the seats into "baskets" (reserved) in minutes. In my experience they will not sell out for some time as they usually keep dropping back into inventory. "Sold Out" is a matter of opinion. There are usually lots of single seats left sometimes for weeks or months. The promoter decides when to label the event as "sold out".
Huh, I got attacked from 170 countries last year (HTTP) and Cloudflare's autonomous detection (machine learning powered) rules did almost nothing. It was millions of the same requests over and over and the only thing that we could do to stop it was manually put in rules to block routes. Not only that, some of the attacking traffic came from within Cloudflare workers or it was at least going through their WARP client (those details are now fuzzy). Was a pretty miserable failure to perform on their part.
Similar experience last week. But tbh I'm using the free plan so I wasn't expecting too much from them. What it worked was to use nginx rate limiter aggressively, parse logs and deny top ips with nginx. Because all traffic comes through CF I wasn't able to use iptables for blocking
If you can thwart it with your own nginx, then it can’t be much of an attack. Cloudflare is one of your only hopes against a volumetric attack especially when paying $0.
This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%.
A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".
I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.
The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use.
The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services.
Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts.
I live in LA and my girlfriend worked for a long time in homeless services and in her experience you have the causality wrong. Often people either start drug habits or their existing drug habits become worse in response to homelessness. As an example, she's met half a dozen people who live on the street and smoke meth specifically to stay awake so their stuff doesn't get stolen. And I agree on your point about LAHSA being way over budgeted, much of what they're doing is a complete waste of money.
Meth can keep you up longer but you’ll still need to sleep eventually.
People like to justify “bad” behavior. We all do it all the time. I just ate some potato chips even though I knew I had enough food today because I have a long day tomorrow and told myself it’d help me sleep.
Who said all the time? Thats a strawman you construct just to knock down. Obviously that isnt practical. This is a bad faith assertion.
We could take a moment to think abiut how it starts and why. Lets suppose you get into an altercation or proximity of a known bad actor and have concerns. Someone offers you a small bump so you can take shifts. happens everyday to the homeless. Day to day problems are highly contextual (eg students taking adderall to cram similarly). Addictions evolve from innocent actions.
Homeless person. Coffee on the street at 3am every night, or hauling your...we'll say cart of stuff for simplicity; to some coffee shop, is not realistic.
Is the addiction much different from severe alcoholism? If not different, than my comment relatively accurately describes the logic. I've seen many hopeless alcoholics.
It's funny, because every homeless person I've seen carries a coffee pot with them.... but I've never once seen someone able to buy meth on a city street corner at night.
There's room for both your gf and the op to be right and wrong because the system isn't a one way path of causality, it's a repeated game with lots of feedback loops. I would say of course higher housing costs increase homelessness, of course a drug problem gets worse or gets started when one becomes homeless, of course drug addicted homeless go to where it's the easiest to be drug addicted homeless, of course increasing homeless spending will increase a certain subset of homeless,etc.
> A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".
It is true that a lot of people complaining about "homelessness" are actually complaining about personally seeing a homeless person. But homeless people are also people. Our society owes them dignity too. I believe that what you describe is not a problem with the discussion, but a problem of empathy among people who would just as happily have a homeless person die as house them, since both do the job of keeping that homeless person away from their walk to work equally well.
An entirely new account created to call homeless people "demon possessed zombies" is exactly what I'm talking about.
And it is possible to solve the underlying problem, which will also address people's disgust with seeing homeless people in public. It is just a little more expensive than shooting every homeless person in the head.
That would imply drug addiction rates have increased with unhoused rates, but AFAIK they haven’t.
The big difference is the loss of cheap SRO housing. It used to be easy to find a flop house to stay in for $50 a month. Very unglamorous but at least it’s off the street and even people with a serious habit could afford it.
There is a huge problem with conflating homeless and drug abuse problems, with the latter drawing empathy and funding away from the former. These are two very different problems with very different solutions. These former you just need housing, maybe job assistance, the latter you need millions of dollars in treatment and related assistance per case that has a very high chance of failing.
This seems to be a common belief on Hacker News but why? I don't claim to be an expert on these matters, but I've lived in downtown Dallas for about a decade now and spend a lot of time on the street, encountering many unsheltered, chronic homeless. I've also known a fair number of people with drug problems. My first wife was addicted to opioid pills. My brother-in-law has had serious heroin problems, OD'd twice, spent time in prison. My two best friends from high school include one guy who was addicted to speed and did a lot of ecstasy and hallucinogens on top of that, the other was a bad enough alcoholic that it killed her at 36. My wife is an alcoholic who has been hospitalized twice with acute liver failure and vitamin deficiencies.
Not a single one of these people was ever homeless. My wife is a 20+ year engineer with a top secret clearance.
The homeless people I meet, on the other hand, completely run the gamut. I met married couple in their early 20s a few weeks back that stopped to talk to me about skateboarding and showed me pictures of their dogs. I showed them pictures of my cats. They lost their jobs, had no family support, and didn't want to go to a shelter because they've have to give up the dogs, so they lived in a tent down by the cargo rail. Another guy I met the week before that was obviously completely insane. He emptied a bottle of hot sauce on me and threatened to stab me for making noise on a public bridge at 8 AM an hour past sunrise and waking him up. I had at least 8 inches and 80 pounds on him and he was trying to fight me anyway.
I don't think the reasons boil down to something as simple as they're all drug addicts and drug addiction is a guaranteed path to homelessness. Even for the openly crazy, antisocial people that are obviously who the San Francisco tech crowd are actually bothered by, I don't understand what the proposed solutions from the anti-housing crowd are. If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?
> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?
Morally we should house and treat them. That is a huge resource draw, since if you just throw them into low barrier housing, you just get a bunch of bad crap happening in whatever unfortunate neighborhood you choose for that. So we need millions of dollar in treatment per case, and maybe we can fix them? Like a 20% chance. Those are a high amount of resources for a low chance of success, ideally we should spend the money anyways but practically we can’t afford it. We could just house them with a social worker like Finland does, but 1 social worker per 4 residents is going to cost about the same and doesn’t even try to fix their problem.
So morally you are right. Maybe in the future when we achieve a post scarcity society we could do that. Today we could focus money instead on helping people before they become addicted to drugs, we would get much better bang for buck of limited resources. I think it is a bit dangerous to teach our kids that we can and will be able to save them even if they try fent (or something unknowingly laced with fent), because that likely isn’t true ATM.
You're downplaying a catastrophic loss of family. All of these people you're rattling off are connected to you and are part of your social graph, which is something humans thrive on. You disconnect people from a community (death loss of job) and you're likely to see homeless. It's one of the reasons people give up and succumb to living on the streets outside of mental illness (which is another major factor that goes into this). A clear means of treating this problem is to put people BACK into a community that has expectations and guidelines.
> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?
Making it someone else's problem is what most of the country has chosen. As this thread notes, SF's homeless population is increasingly from outside the city. Trying to resolve this at the city level is not sustainable.
And so we stigmatize wanting a solution for this problem, and as for the answer to "where?" just say "downtown!" For some reason those with positive contributions to society have to pay a lot of money to stay there, but the insane drug addicts can do whatever they want, and opposing this is somehow not OK.
Drug addicts on the street has become people's impression of homelessness, but it is a completely dishonest one. Yes, that's a problem, no, homes aren't going to help solve it. Low barrier housing (where drug addicts can live without curtailing their lifestyles) is a quick way to lose support for all homeless programs in your region (no one wants to live near low barrier housing), and that adversely effects the larger problem that is actually solvable (housing affordability for functioning people).
Yes, ideally we have infinite resources and we can solve the drug addiction problem without becoming China or Singapore and just stigmatizing the problem to death. But we don't, and dumping in 95% of our funds allocated to homelessness to what is really a drug addiction problem, and barely seeing any progress in either problem, is eventually going to wear the public out.
> A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody
Also homelessness is a fast track to addiction problems for many people. If you feel that bad you are prone to do anything to make it less bad even briefly.
I have always wondered about that, there was this phrase that floated around in the Bay Area of "it can happen to anyone" so I always thought about the steps it would take for me to become homeless. I would have to:
Lose my job
Lose the ability to get a new job
Burn all my savings and assets
Burn all my familial relationships
Burn all my friendships
Get rejected by all social welfare programs
It feels like barring mental illness or drug addiction it would be a real challenge to end up homeless if you are trying not to be. I definitely sympathize with drug addicts because we had doctors liberally prescribing one of the most addictive chemicals on earth to people for 25 years, but I am also suspicious of the narrative that you just stumble into homelessness despite your best efforts.
I think you aren't thinking about the cascade. So for one, losing the job, that depends on the job but let's say that it's a crappy low paid job where corporate has figured out how to make everyone replaceable. You're out, say your like many and you've spent most of your money on rent and have maybe like a grand in the bank, you go out looking for a job and can't get another one (any reason let's just assume it's not a "moral failing problem" which gives people peace of mind because "they're homeless because they're an addict and therefore they only have themselves to blame"). So now you can't pay rent (it's month to month because it's all you could get in El cerrito), you eventually get kicked out, the cascade starts, no money = no cell phone or email to apply to jobs, no place to live means no showering = hard to interview, spin up some trauma from seeing shit happen on the street that freaks you out, boom it just snowballs. (In this scenario I'm assuming that they don't just have a family to fall back on who can support their needs while they try and get another job)
I think you're significantly overplaying your hand here, and over-assuming the ability of others too.
I'm sure you're very successful and a hard worker with great skills, but plenty of people are pretty mediocre. And plenty of people don't have great high-paying corporate jobs, even if they are hardworking. Personally, my family's savings could sustain us for years without a job, but that wasn't true when we were (single and) young.
Losing a job is easy, even if you did nothing wrong and plenty of people really struggle to find a new job with a similar pay. I had a friend who was laid off from a Stanford medical researcher position (~80k/yr), and he worked retail for 12 months (~30k/yr) before finding a true replacement job. He could barely pay his (pre-existing) SF-bay-area rents on that salary. His groceries were paid out of savings or generous friends. If anything actually went wrong (medically, car accident, etc), he'd actually have run out of money to live. None of his family lived in the US (or had USD savings), so he'd have to uproot his life to live with them. He had friends, but living with a friend is a huge ask - you can only stay on a couch for so long. It's easy to say you'll help a friend, but when their budget is $1k/mo short, you'll burn through a friend or family's generosity fast.
I don't know if most people on HN have looked, but finding a place to rent in SF Bay Area for <2k/mo is hard. If you make minimum wage, it's really hard to find a place to live. If you go from a higher salary, where you can afford 2k/mo, to a lower one where you can't, you're really screwed, because moving is not cheap either, and selling all your stuff (to eventually re-buy later) or hiring movers will certainly deplete the savings of people who can least afford it.
Certainly drugs or mental illness speeds up this downward spiral, but it should be noted that "living with friends or family" usually qualifies as homeless for most of these statistics, not when you start living in a box under the freeway... so "it can happen to everyone" is more true even for you when you realize that you only need to pass 3/6 of your listed steps.
True for almost any average-to-well paid white collar work, but it's surprisingly easy to end up homeless for anyone already below the poverty level, or even just not making 6+ figures in a high cost of living area.
I've known several folks - generally minimum wage adjacent jobs, retail, food service, etc. Landlord decides not to renew their lease, rental housing availability is next to none in a lot of my locality, and family lives out of state. Never made enough money to even have a savings.
Suddenly they are without housing. Maybe they can crash at a friend's house, maybe not. If they can't, they're going to be spending time and effort trying to get assistance, maybe have to take a few days off work, because of the nature of those jobs, maybe they get fired. Now they are both homeless and unemployed.
I've also know people in similar situations that ended up on a downward drug spiral as well, but only after the fact. I think it's a chicken or the egg problem for some homeless folks. Were they addicts first, leading to a downward spiral that lead to chronic homelessness, or were they just someone living in poverty, trying to scrape by, screwed by the system and turned to drugs later on?
Add to it that public transportation sucks in most of the USA outside of urban areas (and even in some urban areas as well), so anyone already without a car has limited job prospects in the event of layoffs or an economic downturn in their local area.
So yeah, I don't necessarily abide by the "it can happen to anyone" but there is absolutely a significant subset of the USA's population that is essentially one unfortunate event away from homelessness.
> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem.
a) "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote." Your personal experience, as valid as it may be, does not define the totality of the problem.
b) Did you ever stop to think that maybe people who end up homeless for any of the countless reasons people do might turn to alcohol and other drugs to cope with the stress and hopelessness of, y'know, being homeless?
c) Even of those who became homeless because of a substance abuse problem, what makes them any less deserving of basic human rights and dignity?
d) Countless studies have now shown that giving unsheltered people, including those with substance abuse problems, unconditional housing not only keeps them off the street, in the vast majority of cases they're able to get clean and work normal jobs again.
I’m not sure why the statistic should be considered interesting.
Like what is the amount of housed population that come to sf from another California city or out of state?
SF is an economic driver of the USA. It will attract people from all over. Sometimes those people will become homeless.
In fact we should expect people in a poor economic situation to move to where the jobs are (ie, sf). That’s the system working. It would be weird that someone struggling with lack of work should stay put and just suffer.
This means that 60% did not come from another city or state and were SF residents. In other words, the majority of homeless in SF became homeless in SF.
SF has a huge homelessness problem and even after reducing it by 40% the problem would still be huge.
Now we can argue about why they became homeless but it seems pretty obvious that exorbitant housing costs mean that some people can’t afford it. City officials saying 40% come from other places shouldn’t distract us from the mismanagement that got us the 60%.
So you're saying I should mentally divide homeless people into two "camps", and that one of those camps will be full of guys wearing dirty Keds whom I should scorn?
I don't know if ranting at the people with the least amount of power will accomplish much. I'm also not stoked about the dehumanization that goes along with thinking about people in terms like this.
>A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".
This point is addressed in the article:
> The stories and data in this essay show the missing link between homelessness and housing costs: people without money who avoid becoming homeless do so mostly by staying with others, usually their own parents. This happens outside the formal housing market. But parents’ and others’ ability to offer space is limited by what they can afford in the market. Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
Anyway let’s say 10 kids are playing musical chairs. There are 9 chairs available. One of these kids had broken their leg a few days ago.
Let me ask you this, after the first round which one of the kids is likely going to be the kid without a chair?
So yeah, substance abuse is in fact a problem. However even if you remove all drugs from society, you’ll still have people left without chairs. Just the profile of those people will change.
> Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years.
Granted, that report is almost 5 years old and seems to be prior to Covid (which scrambled a hell of a lot). However, it does seem like the vast majority of homeless are local.
> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.
Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.
Something like 3/5 of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. Those people need a medical facility first and foremost.
Universal healthcare would go a long way to helping with the homeless problem. However, Americans aren't smart enough to see benefit. Shrug.
Those are self reported numbers, and the questions are often loaded. We did a similar survey here in Seattle and we had most of the unhoused community saying they were from the pioneer square area of Seattle, which is a bit ridiculous when you think about it. I’d take any of these surveys with a grain of salt, and it is more reliable to go by criminal records (but only works for people who are arrested a lot).
> Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.
Those deprived people of freedom simply for not being of the proper mindset to hold down a job. It completes the circuit "support corporations or get arrested". I'm not convinced about your TBI statistic either. I would guess schizophrenia would be the majority
I'm arguing against locking someone up because they aren't willing or fit to be a cog in a wheel (aka function in the confines of a job to pay rent and "stay off the streets"). Not-being-a-wage-slave isn't an illness.
Aren't unsheltered just the peak of the iceberg? Yes, that's the part you crash into, but it exists only because it's supported by much larger mass of homeless people who are one random spat away from becoming unsheltered.
> plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing
Well, it kind of is; almost any nonzero cost. If they had to come up with a hundred bucks rent, it would be a problem. At that level, it's unconnected to any housing crisis.
> quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".
Quality of life issues for others are not caused by "homelessness". They are caused by mental illness, or crime, or very aggressive lack of care for others. Being homeless is not what causes someone to spread garbage everywhere, to poop on the sidewalk, to break car windows.
Blaming homelessness is a political act. By someone who has a political axe to grind - and who doesn't give a crap about quality of life issues.
In the same line, see the fight against people living in RVs. Many of them cause no problem, others do.
In the same line, see San Francisco "street cleaning" parking hassles. Is it about street cleaning? What street cleaning?
What do you believe was incorrect? I asked Chat GPT 3.5 and 4 this question verbatim, seems they both gave the correct answer: it is taxable income. 4 was very thorough. 3.5 not so much.
This is the answer I got: “Interest earned in Canadian Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) accounts is generally not taxable income in California for state tax purposes. California does not typically tax income earned in foreign retirement accounts like RRSPs. However, it's always a good idea to consult with a tax professional or accountant for personalized advice based on your specific situation.”
I think there are a lot more potential buyers of $38M companies than $380M companies, particularly if the burn rate is low. There are a lot of exits in this range in the B2B software space to private equity types of co's that are rolling up companies in a particular vertical.
Very cool. Is there an easy way to easily toggle on/off various scenarios like "pay for private school for my children" to see how that affects wealth? I didn't see a way to do this without copying a whole plan.
My financial advisor does this with emaplan or blackmountain (or something) and I don't have access to this feature. It's very annoying and an incredibly important part of financial planning.
If you have that modeled as an expense, you can click that expense's icon in your plan to toggle it on and off. Same for other things like income items, real assets, accounts, and cash-flow priorities.
