I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social.
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
Nobody ever does that, whatever a "categorical imperative" might be or represent. But not having benches because a victim of capitalism might, Heaven forbid, sleep on it, is the epitome of cultural and societal barbarism. Countries that do that are not part of civilized society, they might be wealthy, and many of them are (I've seen a similar philosophy in regards to benches in Switzerland), but they're not civilized.
>whatever a "categorical imperative" might be or represent
If you do not understand the concept of a categorical imperative, I would strongly suggest studying some ethical philosophy. There are folks that have spent lifetimes trying to figure out the best ways to see human flourishing, and they have some very, very good ideas.
Another categorical imperative is "everyone who is bullied by the city and only allowed to sleep in the transit system shall sleep in the transit system"
This one is fine. If the city doesn't like it, it should legalise sleeping on park benches.
Another one is "it costs society nothing if you occupy an empty seat on a nearly empty car". Most people don't sleep in the transit system when the transit system is busy, anyway, because why would you sleep in such a noisy place? They are there at quiet times because they don't have a better place. They don't like it any more than you do.
Another one is "everyone is equal". People here are complaining that a homeless person sleeping on park benches takes away their ability to sit on them. But why is sitting considered more valuable than sleeping? Or why should the benches be reserved for people who HN readers agree with?
Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.
You seem to think need trumps all duty to your fellow citizen. I do not. By suggesting need trumps everything, you are demonstrating why the benches have disappeared.
If we live in a would where we accept that we allow some folks to disrupt complicated social programs, then those aspects of the social programs will disappear or the programs themselves will disappear.
This is exactly what the essay describes as happening. When someone on a bench disrupts the service and we will not remove the person creating the disruption, then we will end up removing the bench.
We can clutch our pearls all we like here, but people will stop using a social service they are uncomfortable using. And when they don't want to use it, they will stop funding it. As long as we live in a democracy, this will be in issue.
Glad you can enjoy homeless people's "duty" not to lay on a bench. Do you have a duty to give them food? I'm sure you're able to justify why you don't have a categorical imperative to help them.
People neglect their duty all the time. That doesn't make it okay, and it doesn't mean we should find it acceptable.
Again, this is about creating a better society for everyone. If we operate a transportation system that is inefficient because many of the patrons do not want to use it because of quality of life issue, then all those gains from transportation efficiencies lost... they are lost and replaced with expenses instead.
This isn't a zero-sum game. When efficiencies are lost and instead become costs everyone becomes worse off, including the person sleeping on the bench. Efficiencies compound upon themselves. High-trust societies make people better of in almost every interaction, including folks who need assistance.
Man at the end of the day we're animals. When you deprive people in certain ways for long periods of time they act certain ways with high reliability. You can't blame them for that; it's like blaming the water for running down a stream. If you want to create a better society you need to give the water somewhere else to go. Duty and ethics are, frankly, useless ways to look at this problem, and all you'll achieve with this methodology is the brutalization of the already deprived. That's why I felt angry reading your comments. I figured that's what you really wanted.
>That's why I felt angry reading your comments. I figured that's what you really wanted.
I'm sitting here arguing for improving outcomes for everyone and you think I'm trying to make people angry??? What?
Yes, I think analysis like the authors and yours is naive... but that is because I actually give a shit. For every one of me, there are probably a dozen folks who don't care at all, and would happily literally criminalize homelessness. I'm merely proposing that we prioritize efficient functional systems while also providing other places for folks in need to rest their heads.
That a bench in a subway system should be for people using the subway does not mean that we can't also have a bench in another place that could be used to sleep on. In a place that does not do more harm than good.
Yes, it seems like you're only focused on the disruption they cause. To paraphrase you said something like
>They'll sleep on the benches and this will cause disruption, so the benches will be removed
Why? What if we just didn't remove the benches, or we installed more? The solution you immediately reached for was to kick the homeless person off the bench while saying it was their duty not to block the bench and that if they were allowed to sleep on the bench it would, to be a little hyperbolic, cripple the transit system. I don't hear any solutions being suggested other than "kicking them off the bench" and the logic you're advocating where you blame them for their situation immediately justifies basically throwing them in jail. They failed their fellow citizens, after all.
And to be clear I know you're saying we should install more benches, but it seems secondary to you man. With how you're thinking I don't see why you think we ought to do that.
> Why? What if we just didn't remove the benches, or we installed more? The solution you immediately reached for was to kick the homeless person off the bench while saying it was their duty not to block the bench and that if they were allowed to sleep on the bench it would, to be a little hyperbolic, cripple the transit system.
I live in San Francisco. Our transportation systems are on the verge of collapse. The #1 concern people have about using the system is anti-social behavior.
The transit systems have already had a $1.1 billion, and a second bailout coming this year. This is very large amounts of money wasted, that could be very easily used elsewhere. This is real money.
The system was effectively anarchy from 2020-2025, and anti-social actors made the system extremely unpleasant, even smoking on trains and platforms.
Enforcement of anti-social behavior began last year and there was an immediate burst in usage, and a non-trivial increase in revenues.
These are real, pressing issues where I live. The consequences of acquiescing to anti-social behavior is trivially demonstrated in the article. Private institutions are removing benches because anti-social behavior is affecting business, not because they’re just mean. They’re literally making their own services worse… that doesn’t happen without genuine concern.
Again, your mileage may vary. If you live in a place where anti-social behavior is tolerated, then by all means, do not remove the benches. The point of the article is that effectively universally, these behaviors do harm the level of service.
I'm aware of the problem. I live in Sacramento, up until recently I lived in LA, and I visit San Francisco often. The place we will disagree is solutions. Your language constantly implies stuff without saying it outright, and it makes me think the solutions you find attractive will differ, and it makes me think your motivation is the well-being of people who aren't homeless (for now) at the expense of those who are.
Let's take pooping in the street. I figure we can call this an anti-social behavior. I see two reasons someone would do this:
1. They need to shit and have no restroom. Presumably even then they'd still try to get some privacy, which leads me to
2. They're fucked in the head, completely calloused to it out of years of living like that, or off their ass on something (or choose multiple). Now the act is "anti-social" in technicality, but of course this person is just messed up and needs serious help. They aren't out to bother you or destroy society or whatever, and the solution isn't whacking them harder with a baton so they make the correct choice of not shitting there, it's not a choice.
Say we adopt the simplest policy that seems to directly follow from your outlook. "It is now a crime with a 1 year minimum or something to voluntarily shit on the street." By extension all you're doing is moving the crazy or drug addicted people into prisons. Prisons aren't built to help people, they're generally thought of as punishment and administered as such. So you're taking a bunch of people many of whom are not beyond help and happen to just be fucked up or addicted to something, and shunting them off into a torture cage because you don't want to see them shit on the street. What am I missing?
I'm not saying you should do nothing and let them shit on the street. The solution just needs to recognize that we're dealing, generally speaking, with people who need help. It would involve investment and well-designed systems built with the goal of helping those people, and most importantly an attempt to build more of a safety net to keep people from falling into that state. I'm inferring from how you talk about this that you would disagree. Word choice like "anti-social actor" (as though they just want to give people a hard time for the fun of it) or "asquiessing" (as though a large coordinated group just wanna shit on the street and do heroin because it's fun and everyone is just unwilling to do what needs to be done) and "enforcement of anti-social behavior" (as though policing the symptom is anything other than just criminalizing homelessness to shunt them off out of sight) makes me think you're approaching this from a counterproductive angle. There is a problem but what you're describing is a bandaid, and if I'm inferring correctly it's also cruel.
>By extension all you're doing is moving the crazy or drug addicted people into prisons.
Prisons? What, no. You don't got to prison for falling asleep in a bar. You just get asked to leave. That's all I'm suggesting for high-cost city services, that they actually enforce the rules, and ask people who are breaking the rules to leave the premises.
Obviously, the services must be valuable enough to enforce, but BART and Muni are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues every single day due to anti-social behavior (SF Muni loses about $750,000 every single day to fare non-payment alone), so it trivially justifies having folks out here issuing citations and asking people to leave the service.
Society would be better off without the homeless on average, objectively.
Why does society have an obligation to assist and protect people who don't contribute to society? If you feel some moral imperative to assist some druggie slobbering in his own shit then by all means you do do, but don't rope me into it. The only people with any obligation to assist are their families or those whose religions command them to do so. Neither involve me.
I believe in duty as much as the next guy. But duty goes both ways.
The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.
Why do some people litter when they are steps away from a garbage can? Why do some people play their phones at high volume on public transit? Anti-social behavior comes in all shapes and sizes.
There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly straight forward.
Not accommodating someone disrupting a service does not mean we need to be absolute pricks about it. This happens every day in public libraries, public parks, public toilets, and public transit systems. Simple because a need exists, doesn't mean the library or transit system does not also exist to meet needs.
If you think that socialism -- alone -- will end homelessness, I would ask you to check your history books. There was homelessness and vagrancy in the USSR. There are plenty of folks in San Francisco who refuse shelter when offered: https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1734350588899717423 ... we are currently experiencing a move in large parts of the west from high-trust to low-trust societies. Much of the issues around homelessness, lack of housing, and refusal to provide adequate shelter space stem from folks engaging in low-trust behaviors, treating property as a zero-sum good, and cities as places that should exist in a type of stasis... rather than as communities that must continuously grow and change to meet needs. These low-trust issues certainly can persist in low-trust socialist societies as well.
Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.
But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
I think this depends on the subject. Something like math or music is "learned, not taught": you spend a lot of time practicing by yourself, sometimes asking a teacher when you get stuck. But something like CPR or assembling a drum kit is "taught, not learned": the teacher guides you through the motions and you're done.
In my (small) experience, SSE is a bit finicky: 1) Firefox kills a webpage's SSE connection when you close and open the laptop lid, making you write code to reconnect, unlike other browsers; 2) there's no way to see the HTTP status code if something went wrong; 3) proxies can still mess things up sometimes: https://dev.to/miketalbot/server-sent-events-are-still-not-p...
If you have a constant stream of data, SSE does make sense. But if your goal is to have events arriving infrequently or a irregular times, then good old long polling will work in strictly more cases, at the cost of maybe 2x more resources.
Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
And this is why I hate log scale graphs. Even in the cases where it does have a useful effect, 90%+ of people are still going to interpret it in a linear way and therefore make it massively misleading.
This seems like nonsense at any angle? Like, if the agent hype comes true, then agents will be just as good at using any website as humans are, and there's no need to make any changes to your site. And if the hype doesn't come true, then who cares if your site is agent ready.
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
Yeah, plus it's a bit... single minded. A static single page site is _quite_ "agent ready". Scores 0 here. It's not like it'll need an MCP or whatever.
There was an old Soviet cartoon about a child who found a box containing two magical servants and immediately asked them for ice cream and sweets. Well, since the servants "do everything for you", the first servant fetched the sweets for him, and the second one ate them for him. I've often thought about this cartoon since the AI thing started.
I'm working on https://suggestionboard.io, a live polling/feedback/Q&A webapp that doesn't require an account. Just launched the first version, now looking at the market and making small improvements.
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