YouTube video "Rats, Public Defecation And Open Drug Use: Major Western Cities Are Becoming Uninhabitable Hellholes"

[Sarcelle]

Okay.

No offense intended.

Londoner said English accent but you said British accent. Britain consists of not only England but also Wales and Scotland, so I got confused.

 

[ATraveller]

Apparently the RP or Received Pronunciation, is considered the standard for BBC news announcers.

I don’t think it’s the standard anymore for the BBC.
1990:

Two days ago:

 

[ZMystiCat]

You need to show it proportionally or it is meaningless. NYC is by far the largest city in the country.

Well, based on that chart:

• NYC - about 1% homeless
• LA - 1.25% if we assume all are in LA, about 0.5% for the county.
• Seattle - About 1.7% if all in Seattle or 0.5% if looking at King County in general
• San Diego - About 0.6% for just San Diego or 0.2% for the county
• San Jose - 0.7% for San Jose or 0.3% for the county.
• D.C. - About 1%
• San Francisco - About 0.8%
• Phoenix - About 0.3% for Phoenix. Not doing county.
• Boston - About 0.9%
• Las Vegas - About 0.95% for the city or 0.3% for the county

I wasn’t able to really find a number on Detroit’s homeless. The closest I could get was this report, which mentioned about 1800, which would make up about 0.3% of the population. That makes it rather low by the above. With that said, the chart is a bit difficult, since some cities are viewed by themselves while others are viewed with the counties, and it doesn’t account for general distribution across the city or county, which can make some areas seem worse than others. It just seemed like it would be interesting to do the math.

First, out of curiosity, when an American sees the phrase ‘western cities’, do they immediately think ‘cities on the west coast of the USA’? I thought ‘cities of the western world’, i.e. New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Berlin, etc.

I was confused as well. When I hear “Western city”, I think any city in the “Western” world, but the video maker seems to be using it to refer to the large cities on the U.S.'s West Coast.

What amazes me is Silicon Valley wants and is waiting for higher taxes on everyone (except for themselves of course, which is why they lobby for preferential treatment) but they themselves do little to help relative to their enormous wealth.

I’m actually wonder what it is you mean by “Silicon Valley”, because this seems hilariously oversimplistic. Mountain View, home Google, last year voted for a “head tax”, which is little more than a “Google tax”. San Jose didn’t give Google tax incentives for their new campus there, and San Francisco recently passed legislation meant to tax business there, which had the support of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company is among the biggest employers in the city. (The Salesforce Tower is actually the tallest building in the city now.)

 

[ATraveller]

I’m actually wonder what it is you mean by “Silicon Valley”, because this seems hilariously oversimplistic.

Big tech. Yes, it’s a bit broad and I could be more specific.

San Francisco recently passed legislation meant to tax business there, which had the support of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company is among the biggest employers in the city.

What is said in public isn’t what is actually done. Maybe it will be different. Time will tell.

My criticism stems from big tech’s history of hypocrisy:

Yet Sacred Heart Community Service, a San Jose nonprofit that helps low-income families with food, clothing, heating bills, and other services, actually received less in individual donations from the community in 2017 than it did the previous year. “We’re still not sure what it could be attributed to,” Jill Mitsch, the funds development manager at Sacred Heart, told me. It’s not the only nonprofit trying to keep donations up—the United Way of Silicon Valley folded in 2016 amidst stagnant contributions.

Why Tech Philanthropy Doesn't Help Silicon Valley - The Atlantic

Without a fair tax on tech, it could be the end of the state as we know it | John Harris | The Guardian

Of course, that’s the economic side. There’s a social and cultural side but that’s not going to be fixed easily through policies nor would big tech be interested.

 

[ZMystiCat]

Big tech. Yes, it’s a bit broad and I could be more specific.

That still confuses me, though. As far as I’m aware, big tech companies don’t tend to call for taxes on others. Sure, Marc Benioff is an exemption, but as already noted, he is also willing to call for taxes of his own company. Otherwise, they just tend to not want to be taxed and tend to be self-beneficially charitable, which is standard practice for business, not just Silicon Valley based ones.

With that said, I’m not claiming that tech companies are completely without blame in this matter, and have already hinted at the problem in this thread. But of course the question remains: How do you solve that problem?

 

[Londoner]

British accent? You mean the RP accent? I got corrected by a British friend about the huge number of different accents in the UK.

Apparently the RP or Received Pronunciation, is considered the standard for BBC news announcers.

Yes, that’s received pronunciation, although there are better examples, e.g. veteran broadcasters David and Jonathan Dimbleby. In fairness to your belief that received pronunciation is the British accent, it is the default pronunciation for British English, despite the fact that it is said to be spoken by only something like 2 percent of British people. As @ATraveller points out, even the BBC now broadcasts accents other than the received pronunciation. The BBC continuity announcer and newsreader Neil Nunes, for example, is Jamaican, although contrary to what you will read in some places he only has a fairly slight accent and nobody has any difficulty understanding him.

Londoner said English accent but you said British accent. Britain consists of not only England but also Wales and Scotland, so I got confused.

To be pedantic, it is Great Britain, which consists of England, Wales, and Scotland. ‘Great Britain’ is the name of the island, and it’s called ‘Great’ simply because it’s larger than the place called Brittany that is in France, not because we think we’re great! If you just say ‘Britain’ it means the same thing as the UK, which also includes Northern Ireland. Even more confusingly, Great Britain was also the name of the state formed by uniting England and Wales with Scotland.

 

[PetraG]

If they’re literally uninhabitable because they’ve become such hellholes, why are the real estate prices so high and affordable housing so scarce? It would seem SOMEBODY is pretty anxious to live in these “hellholes.”

“That place, it’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore." --Yogi Berra

As for public defecation, providing more public restrooms isn’t a solution that’s tried very often. Public camping? The courts want to know where the destitute are supposed to exist without breaking the law. It isn’t as if they have a choice about their bodily functions continuing whether they have a home or not.

(Who was the villian in the story of Lazarus and the rich man, again? Was it the unsightly guy who made the front walk look like a “hellhole”?)

 

[ATraveller]

As far as I’m aware, big tech companies don’t tend to call for taxes on others.

Some of their executives have. Bill Gates is the first one that comes to mind and he was challenged. I believe Sundar Pichai from Google wants higher taxes while the firm moved billions into Bermuda.

But of course the question remains: How do you solve that problem?

Complex but it could start with the issue of firms avoiding taxes.
I understand that’s a different level of government but I believe Washington does provide assistance to lower levels of government like most countries in the world. I would be surprised if that didn’t happen.

 

[TheBard]

Rats, typhus outbreak in Los Angeles: Flea-borne disease in city hall

 

[Sarcelle]

Thanks for clearing it up.

 

[ZMystiCat]

Bill Gates is the first one that comes to mind and he was challenged.

Bill Gates isn’t even CEO of Microsoft anymore, and Microsoft isn’t a Silicon Valley company. They have offices in the area, but they’re fundamentally a Seattle company, hence the nickname “Redmond”, after the Eastside city they’re in.

Sundar Pichai from Google wants higher taxes while the firm moved billions into Bermuda.

As far as I’m aware, Sundar last made a comment on taxes over a year ago in response to the company exploiting tax loopholes. Even then, his comment wasn’t “tax others” but, “We are happy to pay a higher amount [of taxes], whatever the world agrees on as the right framework.” Granted, his response as a whole had a bit of a “you let us do this” excuse, but I also don’t expect a CEO to come out and say, “Yeah, if we don’t do that, our shareholders will complain and maybe sue us.”

However, I would hardly call any of this a trend, nor has his tendency been to call for taxes on others while seeking breaks for himself. It’s more correct to say that, when asked, he’ll give an answer that tries to not anger either side.

Complex but it could start with the issue of firms avoiding taxes.

I think most Americans would agree that the corporate tax structure needs to be rewritten. We’re in an odd place of having one of the highest in the world but, due to the various breaks and loopholes, companies often pay considerably less.

With that said, it isn’t as simple as going from tax to homelessness fixed. You actually need to provide a plan for what that money will do. When Seattle proposed its head tax last year, some people I knew there were wary of it less out of aversion to taxes and more out of lacking trust in the city’s ability to actually do anything with the money. While higher taxes might slow down the influx of employees to the region, allowing supply to catch up with demand a bit, even that isn’t guaranteed, especially given the stunt Amazon recently pulled.

But as already hinted at, you sort of need to fix the tax laws first. If options exist to avoid paying taxes, shareholders will get fussy over not taking advantage of it, and they have the ability to sue if they feel the company isn’t taking care of their money well enough. So even if a CEO like Tim Cook or Sundar thinks paying higher taxes is the right thing to do ethically, they also need to convince shareholders that it is the right thing to do fiscally.

 

[prayerrider]

Is that our standard for comparison now–developing nations like India?

 

[ZMystiCat]

Is that our standard for comparison now–developing nations like India?

I was more trying to keep things in perspective. Calling these places “slums” is a bit hyperbolic. It would definitely be best if they got cleaned up and the people in them got actual housing, though.

 

[CarolusMagnusRex]

I grew up there in the 70s-90s. You certainly would remember the tent city around Civic Center and the constant Tenderloin/SoMa issues. It’s hardly anything new.

 

[PetraG]

I was more trying to keep things in perspective. Calling these places “slums” is a bit hyperbolic. It would definitely be best if they got cleaned up and the people in them got actual housing, though.

They are different than slums because slums have houses with something like a wall and something like a roof.

Many of those living in tents and under tarps aren’t just homeless. They’re profoundly disaffected from society. Some are trying to opt out of the social contract entirely. Some are self-medicating serious psychological traumas or mental disorders with addictive substances. They aren’t just impoverished, but a danger to themselves and others. They have problems that money alone cannot fix.

 

[prayerrider]

I was so wishing California would secede after Trump was elected. Meaning LA, Silicon Valley and SF. And Sacramento too. Then those of us in the northeastern counties could form the new state we’ve been wanting. And we’d have plenty of water and farmland. It’d be a win-win!

 

[Theo520]

So they’re becoming more like Detroit?

But at least Detroit was dead broke and the business community had mostly left. SF has a crisis in spite of wealth.