There are only so many times you can step over a potentially dead person on a running trail. Only to have them get up and run away when you look closely even from a distance.
There's only so many times you can watch a huge person crawl out from the canals and start following people around the neighborhood before you consider moving your wife and kids away forever. Don't get me started on the actual assaults and threats that he's made.
Or how about the guy who was standing beside my car with a can of gas, just looking at it swaying back and forth when we were leaving the beach. Where do my kids go when I go confront him and try to retrieve our ride?
How many times can you shrug off a break in to the mail room where all the mail is just ransacked.
That's only a couple years.
You can have empathy in abstract. But when you're in the middle of it, the 99% sob stories don't matter, the lack of public safety does. And what's most infuriating is that it's not a 'place'. these problems drift like garbage on waves, collecting in random locations, esp 'safe' neighborhoods, until they are scattered away again, usually not by police because God forbid they risk actual protests from people who don't live in the affected area. (see echo Park protests).
I have never seen an emaciated homeless person. I do not excuse “stealing to eat” when soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps are available as alternatives to crime.
You are just stating the left-wing version of the common and tired right-wing "but protesters were spreading covid, despite caring about covid" trope.
Exact same type of a "i just observed an interesting contradiction" statement, just a different theme/reason used as a justification for the dismissal.
Both are rather pointless, as they bring nothing valuable to the discussion and just derail the conversation into a flamewar on those topics used in the "observations", rather than the actual topic at hand. Seen it way too many times in covid-related threads last year on HN.
Yeah, you're right. I think it's time for me to turn on "noprocrast" and get back to work.
I mean, I am double-vaxxed with a booster, and I never threw a hissy fit when establishments required masks, I wore them. So yeah, you are making a rather strong assumption about me there.
> never mind how many well-off pet owners leave their dog's poop on sidewalks
I would be extremely delighted if there was more enforcement regarding this one as well, so I don't know why you are saying this as if it was some "gotcha" moment.
Rather curious why you ended up hyperfocusing on the "biohazard" aspect of my comment, as opposed to the rest of the "aesthetic inconveniences" (which, to a lot of people, would be a bit more problematic than the "biohazard" one).
Whenever I see discussions of the unhoused brought up online poop is frequently mentioned (and often called a hazard or biohazard). I just find that this is ironic given the gnashing of teeth that happened over mask and vaccine mandates over the past 2 years. That's why I focused on the biohazard aspect - it seems as though we as a society have decided we're ok with endangering each other with airborne viruses, why the double standard for the unhoused?
I think your other points are, overall, stronger.
Stolen property, burglary/robbery, biohazard in the form of feces on sidewalks, and potential unprovoked violence are hardly just "an aesthetic inconvenience" in minds of most people.