Disclosure:
I lived in San Francisco (the Marina) from 1992 until 2006. Ex girlfriend's mother was one of the homeless. I knew one of the former mayors and was privy to some inside information on why the was such a terrible homeless problem in San Francisco.

Onwards

One important historical factor is that judges from states in counties far north of San Francisco would frequently hand problem repeat offenders who were habitual drug offenders one way bus tickets to San Francisco because of its tolerant care of the homeless.

Until Gavin Newsom stopped it, bi-weekly support checks would be cut by the city for many of the homeless. As a result of this reliable cash cow, many of these people directly took their checks to check cashing stores on Market St. and the heroin dealers would often stand in line by these stores to handle their customers who were these homeless.

Off of Haight Street is Golden Gate Park. Loads of homeless beg on Haight St. and then camp out in Golden Gate Park at night and shoot up. Under the bushes, you'll be hard pressed to not find years of dirty needles under bushes stinking of urine.

Years of dirty needles.

At the South of Market train station to Silicon Valley, there used to be several unoccupied buildings. These buildings were often occupied by several homeless drug addicts.

Several minutes after the trains would leave, it was common that these drug addicts (heroin/meth) would walk Townsend St. and break into cars to steal stereos that they would then fence to get a quick high.

One habitual drunk in the Mission district would occasionally become sober, but then drink so much that he was 1/2 naked, passed out and covered in his own urine and feces. After the police were regularly called, the fire department would be called to hose him off, then the ambulance would be called and he would be taken to San Francisco General. Of course he paid for none of this.

After he got out, he'd stay sober for a little while and start the process all over again. This one man cost the city of San Francisco $50,000 annually in police, ambulance and hospital fees.

Every year.

The problem is NOT the homeless.

The problem IS the drug addicted homeless. Heroin addicts, meth addicts and habitual/chronic street drunks. They have stopped being people and have started becoming problems. They have become addicts who have really lost all parts of their minds that do not pertain to getting the next score. Their high is so good, their habits so strong that they can't live life without being high or drunk and do anything they can for that next sweet score.

The problem is the tolerance of the dealers of heavily addicting drugs.

The problem is the counties who provide one way bus tickets to failure for their society's rejects.

After you see so many people on Van Ness St. who inject so much that their veins collapse and legs rot off, then wheel themselves out to beg another day, you see that these people will do nothing, can do nothing, to change their situation. They still will break into your car and cost you 2,500 dollars in damage. If you live on Haight St, they will still shit in your doorway every morning. They will still sit in a pool of their own urine to beg for enough money for their next score. They will not even recognize the face of their own daughter trying to give them food.

Empathy is the last thing you have for these people and for the reasons they have ended up in it.

Watching this for 14 years as you drive through the middle of it to battle the 101, 280, or East Bay traffic on your 1.5 hour commute you lose much more than all respect for them.

Empathy is the last thing you have for them.

It is a terrible situation they are in, but empathy is the last thing you have for them.

So, how do you fix this?

I've talked to an accountant about this and we're both convinced this was an RCMP sting. They announced there was a vulnerability on their website about six hours before they patched it. That's either totally stupid and insane, or it was a police sting and they were just waiting to see who would be stupid enough to try and break in through the open door. Please have a seat.

I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.

Clogging the passing lane is rude. Flashing your lights makes much more sense than indicating a turn you can't make. If I saw someone indicating a turn they couldn't make behind someone driving too slow I'd assume I was looking at a couple of assholes, not one good driver stuck behind one asshole, because assholes leave their signal on all the time.

I really have little idea how this idea is seen around the world, however. I know that flash to pass is acceptable in the UK and Canada, and it's the standard in most US states including California, where there are the most people, the most vehicles, and the most vehicle miles traveled.

I don't know how his systems work but my PC works like this. I have a big disk with Linux and virtual machines. I have a SSD and a 2.5 HDD of the same capacity for Windows, and I periodically back up the SSD to the HDD. The backup is bootable and if the SSD fails I just get the HDD. All the data gets backed up to a disk on a pogoplug running Debian which is supposed to be on a separate UPS but isn't right now, at least it's not in the same machine. I don't store any big data on the Windows side, so that's only 160GB. The nearby disk is 3TB. I only get 10-18 MB/sec peak to/from that, depending on the client, which is a little poky for USB3 and GigE but within the acceptable range for most purposes. I had another disk hooked up directly to my PC which I mirrored to that network volume, but it died.

There's definitely a lot of people in this thread with no fucking empathy, and this is a technology-related site. Checkmate, Obama! Or something.

Well, I use my rotating and rolling chair all the time. Besides the value to sysadmins, which I have found to be significant, it's pretty much mandatory for anyone who has a filing cabinet right next to their desk. I also sweat in plastic chairs, maybe because I am fat. Still, it's true. Actually, I found this to be true way back when I was a child, when I was not fat. That didn't really happen until Jr. high.

The only office chair I know of which is worth one tenth of one shit is the Aeron. It's still one of the most ergonomic chairs around in spite of not actually having been designed to be particularly ergonomic. The goal was to create "the office chair of the future" and obviously in the future, your chair should be fully adjustable. As it turns out, there's many different body types and sizes of human, so full adjustability is what's needed for ergonomics. I literally sit down in this chair when my back hurts. The combination of good posture and good lumbar support is unbeatable. And I bought my Aeron used, so I didn't get completely mauled on the price. And it doesn't have cushions to stink up or make you sweat, either.

If you spend a lot of time sitting in an office chair, you want an Aeron. I don't care how much markup they have. Of all the shit that startups wasted their money on back in the dot-com bubble, the chairs were the least senseless.

RAID doesn't improve first access time, but good RAID improves non-sequential seek times.

Yes, for some workloads it is very important. But for many of those, there's prefetching.

Because intel has never figured out ARM. They tried once, and failed. But x86 chips are running on less and less power all the time.

All of those people are down on their luck, even the scammers. They were emotionally and/or socially undernourished, and they can't see any better way to live than a lifestyle which will lead to a sad and pathetic retirement, if any. The druggies and drunks are addicts, they're caught in the grip of something they can't get away from. It's not enviable.

I hope your local shelters are actually good places. Often they are staffed with serious assholes. You wouldn't think that was possible. It is.

Well, in Santa Cruz, CA, most of the homeless kids came from homes where they had been actively abused, often sexually. I went to school with some kids who lived in squats. They didn't move out of their houses and onto the streets because of a good home life.

For thousands of years, people have been getting mad at the beggars instead of those who profit from and thus are motivated to maintain the status quo that creates them, and indeed, depends on economic conditions which produce them. After thousands of years of this and nothing working, those who learn the lessons of history are doomed to stand around and watch everyone else repeat it.

Unfunded mandates are never benevolent. If the idea is that people will get help, but no mechanism for that is in the act, then that idea was constructed to fool fools.

The old appeal to authority works every time. If your doctor is fifteen minutes late for your appointment, suck it up, buttercup. But if you're fifteen minutes late, they just might charge you for the visit and tell you to go home because the doc is seeing another patient right now. Or just banging an assistant. And if you overpay, the IRS might well keep it, but if you underpay your ass is theirs.

Or, you know, if they decide at any time that you might have underpaid once.